Chapter 39: Hunted

Perspective: Warnado


Warnado's feet pounded across the crimson earth to carry him away from his pursuer. As he ducked and dodged between corpses, weapons and combatants he had never been more conscious of the force of gravity upon him. He ran hunched through the battlefield and had long since lost track of Tyron, of Amanda. The Prophet's Hill was too small to see from the midst of the violent crowd.

He had the vague impression things weren't going well. Faint voices screamed 'Retreat!', nearer ones screamed 'Hold fast!' And the enemy had caught on and were yelling their own instructions, knowing their superior numbers and the Entity's arrival precluded any idea of they themselves retreating. The fighting around this point was brutal. Those rebels who partook in it knew they were giving themselves over to a tempest.

Warnado did not agree with their assessment - he really, really wanted to keep living and make sure Amanda followed his lead. If he could get to the crater's lip, he would at least be able to figure out which direction to run in.

Just as he reached this conclusion, he saw a pair of gargantuan, armoured hands pull apart the melee as though it were a cheap curtain. Glibby had found him.

Glibby swung his gauntlet down and Warnado rolled. The demon-child summoned his energy bow and readied an attack, but an obsidian boot caught him on the knuckles. A grey enderman had materialised and kicked him. The bow dissipated and blood ran between the demon-child's fingers. Through the pain, he summoned an axe and hacked at the enderman.

His assailant disappeared, however, and the axe didn't do much more than disturb the air. Unfortunately, air wasn't the only thing on the other side of the enderman. Glibby's fist sailed through the air and crunched into his head.

Warnado fell back and tore a trench through the blood-soaked earth. His eyes felt misaligned, and he couldn't quite sync up the two images they fed him. He didn't need particularly clear vision, however, to see the mountain of apish flesh and obsidian armaments leaping at him, intending to crush him under its weight.

He rolled and somehow stumbled his way into standing. Glibby, meanwhile, lounged in the bloody muck like a luxuriant pig, showing no hurry in getting up. Warnado profited from the opportunity to hurl a fireball at Glibby, but it simply glanced off his obsidian shell. The Ape lunged at him from a crouching position and Warnado barely staggered out of the way. He was still too disoriented to dodge the second.

The heavy gauntlet caught him in the ribs, and he lifted off his feet.

His ribs burned with pain, and he felt his entire body spasm into rigidity. Beneath him, he could see two battlefields, both identical and both blurry. He caught a glimpse of the Prophet's hill and its twin and thought he could see bursts of silver flame spurting around the base of both iterations. Two Sunbeam blasts struck the battlefields, and massacred two groups of enemies, or maybe friends.

He hit the dirt with a disconcerting squelch, and then an obsidian boot pressed him down further and made his ribs sing an encore of agony. His disjointed eyes resynchronised as he rubbed the mud from his eyes. A green-eyed enderman, not unlike Voidblade, collapsed into the dirt before him, its throat slit by razor-sharp talons. The silver scales glinting from beneath the purple-black armour indicated clearly that the enderman standing over him was the last of Glibby's original three Grey Ones. And limp from pain, Warnado did nothing as this survivor lifted him.

Warnado felt his hood be torn back, and his concealment charm dissipated. For the first time in years, he felt the breeze and light on his horns. And then, feeling more vulnerable than a snail without a shell, an obsidian gauntlet forced him to lock gazes with Glibby the Ape, Fristad's murderer.

"Thank you, Shaghran. And you, boy. You gave me a merry chase. Not many can," Glibby said. "What's your name?"

"Santa," answered Warnado with steely eyes and no hesitation.

Glibby punched him in the sore spot.

"Warnado."

Another blow. Warnado caught a brief glimpse of a toothy grin and smoke-like skin he faintly recalled from the Tower's negotiation room all those weeks ago.

"Your real name, not your circus-performer's epithet."

When Warnado finally recovered: "Helix. My name is Helix."

"Isn't that better?"

A giant crushed a Jackal beneath his foot in the background.

"I only ask because no one else will know what to call you after this," Glibby sneered. He began to cackle madly.

As the obsidian fingers clasped Warnado's chin, he struggled against it. An enderman tore the intestines out of an aging rebel in the background. Warnado gave into the grip to get away from the awful sight.

"You seriously can't come up with something better than that?" Warnado asked.

Glibby's grip slackened. A shadow passed over them, but Warnado couldn't make out what it was.

"Excuse me?"

"You're going to send me out with a 'they aren't even going to recognise you when I'm done with you'? Why not call me 'dead meat', try to take my lunch money, sneak in a 'we're not so different you and I' while you're at it."

Another shadow passed over them, and Warnado could have sworn he saw a toothy grin somewhere in it.

The toothy grin reappeared, and a bemused voice accompanied it.

"Keep him busy a second. I'm flagging our mutual friend down," Freak chuckled. "You don't even owe me for this, kiddo, this'll just be funny."

"You dare critique me? Now, when I'm about to murder you?" Glibby asked in genuine exasperation.

Emboldened by Freak's unsolicited and surprising encouragement, Warnado pressed on:

"Sorry, Ape-guy, you're just cliché."

"I'm cliché?" Glibby repeated dully. Then, with more gusto: "I'm cliché?!"

The Ape sprinted back and punched a nearby corpse before loping back on his mighty knuckles, as evocative of his namesake as Warnado had ever seen him.

"Oh, was it 'cliché' when my father cloistered me away? Did he stop the world from gazing upon his son because he just looked too bloody banal! Was I just too normal-looking when he disinherited me?"

Warnado fought the urge to laugh as he realised how much of a nerve he'd hit. His spirits only increased as he saw a Tower merc dispatched by a falling rock that looked suspiciously like a wing.

"Maybe that's my problem! I'm just too boring for you all. If only the Divines had cast me in a more exotic mold than a gorilla - made me look like a real freakshow. A panda, or a bee or an axolotl, perhaps? Maybe all of them combined? Huh? If they had, maybe I'd be in my father's chateau, drinking fine wines and going into town for the theatre, rather than ambling around this grimy butcher's yard in search of something interesting to kill so I don't go mad with boredom! Or perhaps I'd just wind up on the Shore of Oddities like everyone else who can't pass as human!"

Finally, Warnado caught a glimpse of a battered set of diamond armour gliding down toward him on one wing. Inside, he saw an unmistakable mass of green fur.

"DUCK!" squeaked Kir.

Glibby, at first confused, then saw a reflection in a jewel crowning Shaghran's helmet and unknowingly followed Kir's command. Unfortunately for the last of the three original Grey Ones, this only left him a split-second to react before a wing-like blade of ice decapitated him. Warnado and the headless enderman fell in a heap and the demon-child scrambled to pull his hood back up.

Tyron landed a few moments later and wasted no time before shaking the ice from his right arm, drawing Kir and rushing at Glibby. The Silhouette's enforcer, snarling with a mixture of indignity at Warnado's insults and irritation at the loss of his last best manservant, also charged almost instantaneously.

Tyron dodged Glibby's first blow and parried the second with his left arm, which was still shielded by a stone wing. With the Ape's guard broken, he willed the stones to lift, and the tip of the wing shattered against Glibby's head. As Glibby retreated, Tyron swiped at him with Kir and raked the Bluestone sword across his breastplate. A shower of sparks went flying and Glibby staggered further.

Warnado hauled himself up, wiping the purple blood of the End off him as best he could. It had soaked his robes. He looked at the ape-like warrior with a distant hatred.

Glibby parried Kir and struck Tyron in the flank. The hero lurched away in pain as the diamond of his breastplate warped from the force of the blow. A second blow caught him on the jaw with force that would have taken Warnado's head clean off. Tyron, however, spat out the blood and grinned in challenge.

Warnado took a step forward, but the pain in his ribs stopped him from intervening. He held himself tightly in the hopes of getting some sense of control over the pain.

Tyron hurled the remains of the stone wing at Glibby, and the Ape's advance halted as he had to stop and block the incoming heap of rocks. It bounced harmlessly off the impermeable armour covering his forearms, but it bought Tyron the time he needed to recover.

Warnado laced the fingers of his free hand and the fingers of his demon gauntlet into the shape of a gun.

Now recovered, the Ape and the Dragoknight glared at each other. One glared with purpose, the other because he didn't know what else to do in the face of irritation. Glibby rushed forward and lashed out at Tyron's head. Tyron, a calm smile settling on his face in the place of the grin, sidestepped the Ape. There were two flashes of deep blue as Tyron swung Kir twice in rapid succession. Wounds opened on the back of Glibby's leg and on the side of his hip. He slid forward on his knees, groaning in pain. A wounded enderman lay dying nearby.

With Tyron safely out of the line of fire, Warnado took his opportunity.

"Hey Glibby!" He yelled angrily. "They're not going to recognise you after I'm done with you!"

A jet of purple fire burst out.

Glibby's eyes widened in terror. He snatched the leg of the dying enderman and squeezed tightly.

"Teleport!" Warnado heard him hiss.

And when the jet of fire cleared, there was no charred, hulking mass before him. The annoyance of losing out onf vengeance faded pretty quickly though, as Warnado doubled over in pants of pain and exhaustion.

"Thanks for coming to get me, Tyron," he said. "All things considered, you're not the worst babysitter ever."

"Well, if I didn't show up with both my wards under my arms, Kay would never have let me live."

"Don't you mean live it down?"

"I know what I said."

Warnado laughed, but just as it occurred to him how serious Tyron sounded, he was quickly distracted by the relief and exhilaration of a flight back to friendly lines.