Chapter III.


A/N: I hope everyone has enjoyed reading thus far. I'll be switching to a more weekly/biweekly update format from here on out (with maybe a few sooner or later, depending on many things).

As a hobby novelist of original work, criticisms of both structure and content are very much appreciated. If you like or hate or feel absolutely nothing toward the story, feel free to let me know in the reviews. Or don't - it's entirely up to you.


In the twinkled gloam of grisping candlelight which blossomed sparse from cheap tallow waxpillars stationed throughout the room, the comrades of Guts and Farnese stood in flummoxed semicircle audience around the advent pair. Expressions melting with terrible disquiet. The fire in the hearth had gone out, forgotten in that unrehearsed and anxious symposium. A fraught stillness strangled the private chamber – save the spectacle of one, who darted about the air like a wroth hornet unable to locate safe landing.

"If that shiny new arm belongs to the Godhand," squeaked Puck, tiny palms working into lather. "Wouldn't we all be, you know, fucked?"

"We were on the road five days, elf," said Guts, draping a pipesized ankle over his thigh. "They had plenty of time to take it back."

"He's right." Schierke stepped further into their congress. "If the Godhand has not acted by now, they likely aren't aware the instrument is missing. While it isn't exactly permanent solitude, we certainly have time to prepare."

"'Prepare'?" repeated Isidoro. He scratched the top of his orange head with trawling fingertips. "Am I missing something, here?"

Guts and the acolyte witch Farnese looked simultaneous to Schierke. The young magess rouged at the abrupt delegation of onus. Little hands curling about her staff, she set her chin with a severity regularly seen on clerics at homily, turquoise hair ruffling.

"In the course of our instruction, Farnese and I divined a stratagem forward while communicating with the garden of Od after Skellig." Schierke gestured toward history. "It became clear to us that the Hawk remains unaware that our consortium has endured – or, otherwise, believes us to be inconsequential. We will not face him anywhere in Midland without his army behind him. His campaign against the Kushans is not yet complete."

The former noblewoman nodded beside Guts like a pristine bird drinking from a bowl.

"It might seem less than optimal, but there is only one way we're going to catch Griffith in a vulnerable position," Farnese said, visiting each of the faces of her comrades with a slateblue glance. "We have to draw him out. And it's going to need to be blinding."

Pink and stately the elf Ivalera traipsed out from behind the crown of Schierke's hat to stand on the brim like some tiny fuchsia orator assuming a textile stage. "Whatever you should decide – you have my wings."

"Aw, I wanted to be first!" Isidoro whipped his molten dagger from its sheathe. Along its redhot blade a multitude of infinitesimal salamanders crawled. "And you've got these guys!"

Serpico bowed slightly in turn. "And the wind sylphs, should they so choose."

A minute squeal of defeat. "You don't even want to hear them out, first?" griped Puck, pebble fingers aflutter as he hovered near Guts. "Whatever. Count me in, too."

"I knew you were good for something," rumbled Guts, smirking. Puck hiccupped with disdain, showering the titan's hair with a thin cladding of multicolored dust. Isidoro snatched the elf out of the air at once to berate him, fuming like an old crone.

"A distraction," continued Farnese. "Close to Griffith's empty heart."

Schierke's head lowered a tinge. Almost ashamed. "We've selected two potential targets: Sonia – his oracle – and the pontiff of the Holy See. End one, capture the alternative. The former gives him pieces of the future, the latter legitimacy. Should we cut him off from both, he will misstep in his anger. As he has before."

The novice sorceresses allowed the plot to marinate in their comrades' skulls until Serpico piped up.

"How long have you known about this, Guts?"

The Black Swordsman shrugged. "About four days, give or take."

"Your thoughts?"

"Whatever is necessary to get Casca back. I lost her twice. Won't happen a third."

A black constriction annexed Farnese's chest. The ultimate objective could not be avoided forever, it seemed. She looked to the grimy floorboards as if searching there for some passing consolation.

"Guts," said Schierke after a moment of suspension. Troubled were her youthful eyes. "It may be more complicated than we originally assumed."

The titan merely observed her as she ploughed on. "I have tried many times to attune Casca's Od from the beyond. She's been elusive, but the traces I managed to pick up on are oddly composed. We must consider the possibility that the Hawk has poisoned her mind. There is a vulnerability inherent to every repatriating consciousness."

Immense shoulders tightening, Guts growled. "If that bastard thinks he can just kidnap Casca and brainwash her without consequences, he's a bigger fool than I remember."

"Leave your personal reservations aside," insisted Schierke, almost as if trying to convince herself. "As I said, Casca's mind will be temporarily suggestible. Conceivably, in her confusion, she may have accidentally summoned Griffith to Skellig after the ritual had been completed. Such a link would only strengthen her susceptibility to the Hawk's influence."

Farnese swallowed. In the dim she sought Guts's lone eye. "I don't want to believe it either, Guts. But it makes sense. How else would Griffith have known about our trip to Skellig? Even if she might believe herself against us – we must try. Casca cannot remain a prisoner of Falconia. It is nothing less than our duty to set her free."

The titan peered at his companion for a lengthy moment. Recondite. Almost grateful. "Aye. We ride for Falconia tomorrow. For now, we should all get some sleep."

Isidoro stamped his foot, sending a tiny reverberation across the ground. "Oh, come on! We don't even get to see that thing in action?"

The titanium prosthetic gleamed dazzlingly where it lay inert in the titan's lap. Perhaps preening at the general fascination of the room. Guts chuckled. "Hopefully, you won't have to anytime soon."

Like an ensemble of forlorn mummers the consortium exited the guesthall and dispersed throughout the shadowy inn, each carrying with them to their beds their own parallel quarrels with destiny, transpiring dizzy across the disparate parliaments of their inmost spirit. And in the room next door to Guts's own Farnese fell into a fitful slumber. Prophesying into recreant dreamborne visions many grim uncertainties to come.


"Schierke!"

The young witch curled fetal on the ground, clutching at a bloodsoaked slash on the sleeve of her witchly robe. Enclosing her like malignant wardens loomed a mob of villagers amidst a savage delirium, alive as coyotes in their panicked glee, alongside three attendant frockmen in colorless shrouds who brandished staves capped with sharpened roods. A member of the latter held an open book in his palm to sing riotous from the pages as the crowd either jittered or pirouetted about under the mandate of frenzy.

The distant midmorning sun condoned this vile carnival of the Holy See overhead, the street alive with its frail patronage.

Behind the shabby congregation stood a gargantuan figure enveloped in sophisticated armor which shimmered like the docile glass of a summer lake. The steelclad one moved not but rather appeared to oversee in taciturnity the unholy rite unfolding before it. An intricate helmet enclosed its face wholesale, fashioned in the image of a kite's head, a silver beak protruding like some sort of hieratic nasal tusk.

First onto the scene dashed Isidoro with an affect tactless and enraged. He made it a quarter of the distance to where Schierke lay before the two frockmen beside the tomebearer rapidly advanced toward him, their crucifix harpoons seeking the intermeddler. With a frustrated yap Isidoro punched to a halt as the huge supervisor at their stern laid a hand on the pommel of a greatsword attached to its hip and lent its strange metal birdhead in his direction.

"The crime of heresy is punishable by death!" cried the befrocked man who clutched the greasy scripture. His halfbald head swam with oleaginous sweat between the scant clumps of setaceous hair. "What say you, apostate witch?"

Shierke clambered in agony to her haunches.

"GUTS!"

Her shrill plea spread over the street like the scream of a cornered fox.

A menacing villager snorted, stepping forward. "Guts? You want us to see your guts? Well, how about it, then? Let's take a peek…" He raised a tarnished cleaver, oxidized where spots of blood had eaten away the crude metal.

CLANG.

Throttled gurgling concluded the villager's grotesque verdict as something titanic phased suddenly through his body, gliding the brisk air with such speed it was barely perceptible even as a smoking distortion. The object remained indeterminate until it punctured the wall of a chapel some yards away and went still.

A monstrous ingot of iron the size of a treetrunk – the megalithic blade.

Steamladen entrails burst from the villager's dichotomized corpse as it slid apart at the navel, mien twisted in malice for eternity as the head rebounded puppetlike off the cobblestones.

"Christ!" shouted one of the fallen's compatriots. "Edgar!"

And in a moment the commoner's sacrifice went forgotten. For a mortal terror seized the crowd in the form of a herculean man festooned wholly in black, galloping in their direction at a breakneck speed most inhuman. Advancing across the village boulevard like the overture of a rancorous cacodemon. He lifted the lustrous shaft of the titanium prosthesis as he bore imminent on that wretched gathering. As if affixed to some unseen tether the blade extracted itself from the masonry of the chapel and returned to his grasp in an instant. Leaping toward the vanguard of the ceremony the titan pivoted to swing the weapon with incredible might and rend a dozen mobmembers in half.

"I am here, commander."

Guts's primal voice echoed like the cry of some aberrant deity lost to the tides of oblivion.

The tomebearer's frock went translucent with urine as he dumped the scripture onto the cobblestones and bolted away at once in the opposite direction. His more stalwart companions flourished their polearms, spinning them elegantly. Villagefolk took their cues in turn, either renouncing their participation in that ghastly sacrament to scatter like flies or breaking into an erratic charge toward their fearsome adversary. The giant arced his megalithic blade aslant, the heap of bodies multiplying, before ducking into a roll to spring forth and sever the legs of the first priest just below the groin.

Farnese observed the hecatomb intervention of the Black Swordsman with unbidden awe as she entered the fray, Serpico at her heels. Guts lunged forward and lifted the blade where it reposed in a newformed crater to spear the remaining frockman like an errant morsel of rubbish upon its great length. Blood exuded from the priest's diaphragm in grievous spouts as the titan hoisted his wailing victim into the air – and jerked the weapon sidelong, the devastated corpse discarding upon the gorefilled cobblestones like a gobbet of butcher's trimmings.

"Holy fuck!" bellowed Isidoro, scimitar held high. "Send them to hell, Guts!"

Metallic groans abundant, the steelclad ecclesiastical steward galvanized. Perhaps previously dazed, astonished by the extraordinary speed of this intermeddler. Guts towered like a pillar of slaughter incarnate between the young witch and the last of her enemies. He had not encountered another member of the Holy Iron Chain Knights since the Tower of Conviction. Since Farnese. He was not aware they had reorganized. The holy warrior marched forward, drawing the iridescent greatsword from its scabbard with a stertorious skreich to position it afore him in an almost consecratory manner. There was no haste in his actions; it was as if it were readied nonchalant to perform an obligation preordained and unalterable.

Holy glaive and ironslab collided with a boom like the touchdown of a wailing meteorite. The Seeknight recoiled with a spasm but maintained the effulgent merger of their weapons admirably, resisting the reality that his strength was plain outmatched. Farnese's faith soared. Without warning she became privy to the thaumaturgic phenomenon that was Guts's Od. As if she were plucked from her own brain and dropped into that of the titan. Righteous and exhilarating it was more akin to the superphysical authority of the elemental gods, whose dictum could not be questioned by mere mortal beings.

"Guts," she said. Voice disembodied and garbled. "You may call upon me, should you require it."

A slim moment, and then he responded, bizarre vacuum of mindmeld resonant. "Farnese…? Is that you?"

The Seeknight whirled suddenly to free its smaller blade from stasis and hopped askance, swinging the steel in a meticulous camber to catch Guts along the knee. An aggrieved grunt, and then the Black Swordsman hurled his titanium prosthesis into the avian helmet of his foe so fiercely the pseudobeak crumpled to a jagged disc.

Isidoro whooped incoherent as the Seeknight staggered back several steps, gripping at the ruined headpiece with its free hand.

"Wretched knave," it rasped, reorienting the greatsword to a far more aggressive posture. "Have you no grasp of the situation? This is God's Will – how much could an apostate witch possibly mean to dare contravention of His Plan?"

Guts tread forward in solemn rectitude, a peremptory goliath come with total invariance on a mission of evolution. When he reached the scripture where it lay castoff on the cobblestones, he sent it sailing with an overlarge boot far out of sight. Farnese clutched tight to her staff.

"A lot more than you," thundered Guts. "Pious freak."

The megalithic blade crashed recurrent into the Seeknight's armament in a barbarous flurry of blows, the Godlimb seeming to command the combat dance of the titan. His knee buckled at several intervals, but the onslaught did not fail. With a cunning parry Guts divested the holy warrior of its greatsword, clattering to the streetstones some length out of reach. A boom ensued as the apex of the giant's blade missed the Seeknight by the narrowest margin, agile footwork its savior. Guts struggled to dislodge the weapon from the stones. Exhaustion gnawed at his extremities. The Seeknight yanked a footlong dagger from its belt and lunged.

"No!"

By the clemency of some unconscious impulse Farnese raised her staff and fired from its peak a bolt of indigo lightning at the titan's foe. It zigzagged like a crackling interdimensional serpent and then struck the Seeknight at the hip, sending the holy warrior to the ground in a sprawl. Guts presented his huge teeth in animal snarl, reinvigorated at the intercession of his companion, and ripped the megalithic blade from roadway snare to flick it inexorable onto the chest of his prostrate adversary.

Perhaps remorseful of its involvement in the conflict the midmorning sun slipped behind a throng of stormclouds in the aftermath. Bleak and sickly grey a curtain of shadow covered the village. And even the idealist soul of Puck wavered at the dawning prefiguration of the scope of horrors this omen guaranteed.

Guts plunged to his undamaged knee, cloaked torso heaving. In ruptured dreck the corpse of the Seeknight lay abolished upon the street and the wings of a dissonant calm orphaned to that postcalamitous scene a confounding spectre purgatorial. Farnese dashed to the Black Swordsman's side, the byproducts of massacre which stuck to her shoes disregarded like tacky swampbottom detritus.

The ponderous bulk of the titan swayed. Farnese impounded his fleshen arm betwixt her own, laboring with her whole body to steady him. Even stooped his shoulder rose to the height of her chin.

"Guts, how bad?" she implored.

He released a long and harrowed breath. "Just a scratch. I'll be fine."

"Lady Farnese!" came Serpico's dutiful hail as he approached fast. And then he saw the state of her complement. "Mother of God. Guts, can you walk?"

Guts gave him the benefit of a failed attempt to stand. The blood pooling around his massive black foot rippled. He carped in ragged muffle, sinking back to a knee.

"You'll ride Epephros," announced Farnese, baronial countenance drawn tight. "And I'll brook no complaint. We don't have any other options."

"Schierke," murmured the titan. "She's hurt."

Alleviation curried Serpico's voice. "Taken care of. The cut wasn't deep."

Guts nodded. He made to thank the towheaded man but the interjection of a wild snort nearby stole their attention.

"Hey! Quit pulling! We gotta go this way!"

Isidoro the scrawny warrior-to-be tugged at Epephros's reins with all his strength, the behemoth of a horse languidly placing one hoof in front of the other as if in utter ignorance of the young man's efforts. Schierke followed in their wake, patting the animal's flank. Like an overlarge cerulean beetle Puck buzzed about in tandem, hysterical with laughter. The triumvirate watched boy and steed in their peculiar contentious ballet until Farnese stepped forth to retrieve the reins. Isidoro emptied of a long groan and dropped in a heap to the cobblestones, spent.

Serpico assisted the giant Guts into the saddle as Farnese hovered at the horse's side. "We aren't going anywhere until that wound is treated."

"This place isn't safe," rumbled Guts tightly. "That coward priest will be halfway to the nearest outpost of the Holy See by now." He retrieved a long strip of fabric from a saddlebag and began to bind his knee. "After he's changed his breeches that is."

Farnese could not resist a slight grin as Schierke cleared her throat. "There's an old forest ten miles north of here, I believe. We can more effectively formulate the way forward from the safety of the trees."

No objections surfaced. But each dreaded another stay in the wilderness, memories of gruesome nights shared unspoken.

"It's settled then," said Guts. "We head for the woods." Looking over each of his compatriots he added, "Next thing we're gonna need is a carriage."

A moment of levity stretched. And then they were off, a ragtag troupe surrounding a hunched titan atop a monumental mustang, the dilapidated village falling away behind them like some antioasis purged from the face of the earth by the hand of a celestial reckoning as lasting and wondrous as the gods themselves.