Chapter 38

Either Kaze could read the battlefield as well as I could, or I was getting predictable. Whatever the case, we sprang into action at the same instant.

There was no point in going for the easy, obvious killshot. Fortune would bend whatever bullet I sent towards Plajin’s head, and at this range, it could just as easily deflect it into Kaze as it did the gatehouse. Fortune has its limits, though.

Long experience told me that the blessing only worked on attacks directed at the hero. It wasn’t some mystical aura of protection, so much as a divine construct that observed the world and acted upon it based on parameters it could understand.

Killing intent was one of those parameters. Firing an explosive round into the cobbles at the hero’s feet carried no killing intent. I wasn’t aiming at him, I was aiming at the ancient stones that paved the street. Stones that were ever so happy to burst into gravel and fly off in all directions when spurred on by a few grams of my spiciest blasting powder.

The hero howled as the insides of his legs were pelted by high velocity chips of stone. His armor stopped most of it. That’s what the armor was for, and even the hero needed it, whether he wanted to admit it or not. Armor couldn’t be everywhere, though, and it couldn’t cover everything, not if he wanted to walk or ride a horse.

I knew from our time in camp that he preferred not to wear the padded breeches that were common to men at arms. The stiff woolen garments were hot as hell, and they itched like nobody’s business in the summer. His fauld, the segmented skirt of plates that protected his groin and upper thigh, couldn’t do anything about threats coming from below.

In short, I just gave him the mother of all nutshots.

A lesser man would have been out of the fight right then and there. Plajin was many things, few of them a testament to his moral character, but he was tough. So, he howled and he danced, but he didn’t fall to his knees, and he didn’t drop his guard.

A score of knives clanged off his armor as Kaze struck an instant after I did. Her aim, I’m sure, was impeccable, but the hero leapt and twisted through the air as if guided by an unseen hand, and each one struck impervious plate. I fired again before he landed, this time aiming at the gap between fauld and the cuisses that enclosed his thighs. I missed too, striking him square in the ass.

The fauld stopped the bullet; I’d used a normal one rather than AP. That was by design. Rather than his blessing forcing the bullet to glance off and possibly strike Kaze, it realized that the plate would hold and stopped it square.

What it didn’t seem to realize was that energy had to go somewhere, and that somewhere was right into the tender flesh of Plajin’s backside.

The hero clutched at his bruised buttocks before he ever had a chance to land. Kaze struck again with her knives, this time aiming targeting points beyond him. Most still missed. Most, but not all. A bloody stripe appeared on the hero’s cheek, and a knife protruded from the palm of his right hand.

Now was our chance. I broke cover and sprinted across the intervening distance as he clumsily drew his sword with his left, fixing my bayonet as I charged.

Plajin was fast, faster than anyone in that armor had any right to be. Encased in steel and blessed by the gods, his speed and his blessing made up for his pitiful swordsmanship on the battlefield. No one could land more than a glancing blow so long as his blessing protected him. On the other hand, his blows always seemed to land true.

Now he was hobbled, deprived of his sword hand, and for the first time since he was plucked off his family’s farm and told that the gods chose him as their worldly servant, he knew fear. True fear, not the petty paranoia that led him to betray me, or the paranoia born of madness that led him to betray the rest of his party.

I feared a lot of things. Barely a moment went by on any given day when low level anxiety didn’t plague me in one shape or another. Fear was an old friend, if not a particularly welcome one. I knew how to work through it.

Plajin did not. He swung wildly at Kaze, and was rewarded by another flurry of knives. More stuck this time as the blessing overloaded. It was partially powered by his perception of the world, a perception that was clouded and hazy. A cut opened on his forehead, pouring blood into his eye. A knife slipped into the gap between pauldron and breastplate, protruding from his shoulder. Another lodged in the gap between the plates of his articulated sabatons.

He stumbled and swung again. Kaze darted back out of measure, and fired off another flurry.

His attention was fully on her now. He never saw me coming.

I am a big man. Two meters tall, the better part of a hundred kilograms, and armed with four centuries of experience, I know how best to use my mass. I aimed my bayonet like a spear and rammed it into the side of his head at a full sprint.

No one has ever accused me of being a stealthy runner. I’m too big, and I’m more flatfooted than I’d like to admit. The blessing tried to turn it aside at the last second as Plajin heard my footfalls. Tried, and failed. Some unseen hand returned my aim to true the instant before impact. It struck just behind his ear.

There was a sickening crunch of bone as the bayonet punched through both sides of his skull, the muzzle of my firelock socketing neatly into his ear. In one final act of defiance, Plajin proved he didn’t need his brain for much after all. He raised his arm to swing his sword at me, hoping to take me with him.

I pulled the trigger. Just a regular bullet this time, but at this range, that’s all I needed.

The hero’s head exploded in a fountain of blood, bone, and brain. His lifeless body collapsed to the cobbles, still at last.

I heard a satisfied sigh in the back of my mind, and the divine presence departed.

We won. The hero was dead.

Now we just had to deal with the rest of his army.