Chapter 38: Robbing The Robbers
Within the thick shadows of the forest, twenty bandits crouched like vultures awaiting a wounded prey. The red, tattered cloths over their heads gave them a ghostly, ritualistic look, faces hidden except for sharp, focused eyes. Leather cuirasses covered their torsos, blackened and battered from years of conflict, with iron spikes adorning their pauldrons like savage thorns.
Their arms rippled with lean muscle, each man gripping a twin-bladed axe that had tasted both coin and blood.
These weren’t mere highway thugs. Every one of them had the posture of killers, Novice-ranked axemen at the very least, honed by years of bush skirmishes and town raids. They had watched Kaelor’s caravan for a full day, hidden like shadows among the trees, gauging the convoy, identifying strengths and weaknesses.
And all eyes had eventually locked on that, the massive, chained beast with three heads and molten fury in its eyes.
The bandits weren’t fools. That beast was the keystone. Remove it, and the rest would crumble.
Beneath a twisted old tree stood their leader, a bald brute wrapped in a red sash that covered the lower half of his face. Unlike the others, his torso was bare, revealing skin crisscrossed with scars. His right arm, from shoulder to fist, was no longer flesh, it had become rock, jagged and cracked like volcanic stone, with hardened spikes jutting from his shoulder. The massive saber slung over his back pulsed faintly, as though it hungered for battle.
Fennon. Skilled with the saber.
He glared at the lumbering Titan on the road below, his voice sharp as flint: "Now."
The command cracked through the air like a whip.
The bandit manning the ballista, hidden under a camouflaged tarp, pulled the lever with a grunt. The massive steel bolt shrieked through the air like thunder given form, its tip forged to pierce even the thickest of hides. It aimed straight for the face of the beast Kaelor rode upon.
THUNK!