Chapter 202: Brutality
For as long as he was moving quickly, Simon stayed on the trail. After that, he made his way up the slope, sticking to the largest rocks he could. Despite the fact that they’d fired two volleys, and he’d made a big show of being hit once, they still waited an awful long time before they started to fan out and descend down the slope.
They definitely know they should be afraid of me, he said, repeating his earlier assertion now that he saw more evidence.
Once they were moving, he stopped moving and waited for the nearest man to come toward him. He’d planned to draw his blades immediately, but instead, he found himself studying the man’s armor. It was irregular enough to make him a mercenary, but there were enough pieces of leftover Ionian kit, including a well-blackened breastplate, to mark him as a former soldier.
His features, too, were Ionian rather than Murian, which he’d honestly expected. A bunch of army veterans? He wondered to himself as he waited for the man to pass by his nearly invisible shadowy form. I wonder which general it was I pissed off.
No sooner did the man move past him than Simon pulled his sword and swung it with both his hands at the back of the man’s neck. He had just enough time to turn at the sound of metal scraping on leather but not nearly time to dodge before Simon shattered his cervical vertebrae and dropped him like a sack of potatoes before he could make a sound.
The group’s line was diffuse and continued on without him, but for a moment, Simon ignored them. Instead, he pulled out his skull-marked dagger and embedded it in the man’s throat, just above his collarbone, seeking to drain the last few drops of his life. This was going to be ugly, and if there was ever a time when he needed to feel a little younger and more energetic again, it was this.
Simon held his blade there for the length of ten heartbeats until he felt the flow stop. That was enough for the rush to fill him. Though part of his mind said that he shouldn’t do this with everybody, another part of him hungered for it. Even with the metal as a filter of sorts, drinking in so much pure human life energy was far and away better than bleeding goats or slaughtering goat men.
It was a pleasure he’d denied himself for decades, and now he craved it. In the short term, though, the only way to push that craving away was bloodlust. He approached the second man more cautiously, but now there was a certain looseness in his steps that hadn’t been there in a long time, and Simon was slitting the second man’s throat before he knew he was in trouble.
As his dagger drank deep a second time, he regretted not doing this more often. He might have only drained six months of life from the first man and three months from the second, but at the moment, the intensity of it was enough to make him feel like a man of half his age, and with a burst of speed he no longer thought himself capable of, he raced toward the next target.