The Withered Land, The Empire Falls: ABYSSIUM

ABYSSIUM, Part Fifteen

All control and restraint was lost. Everything was happening far too quickly and most of the events following their arrival and deplaning into the transfer terminal, where they'd briefly met with officials of Abyssium's Immigration Security Disembarkment Authority, had devolved into a chaotic jumble of homicidal excess...

It had been decided that D'Spayr and the surviving members of Lord Hehlgrummyte's fallen Whyrligaegem multiplex compound were criminal insurgents, probably outlaw mercenaries on the payroll of the Gorgahnun Coalition.

It had been decided by Abyssium's Metropolitan Crisis Management Action Division that they were a threat to urban security and public safety. It had been further decided that they should either be captured and immediately jailed or killed on sight.

No one in authority showed any interest at all in Kazzime Jox's or D'Spayr's narrative explaining what had brought them to the darkly mystical city. No one cared to examine or validate the digital documentation D'Spayr supplied showing that he and Qrystatos, even though the elder brother Bluhd was in shackles, were duly-deputized and officially sanctioned Knights of Central Homefront Security assigned to Territorial Expanse Extrasolar SpecOps. All that mattered was that they were armed Offworld strangers entering Abyssium without prior direct clearance from the Mayoral Judiciary or from Nahztreme UnderMajor Uhxehara Zakudao during a time of terrorist attack and invasion...

Damn all paranoid, ethno-nationalistic, bigoted xenophobes to the darkest pits in Hell!

Surrender to Crisis Action Division forces to face imprisonment without benefit of trial or be subject to enhanced systematic physical interrogation or face death, those had been the choices.

D'Spayr and company felt strongly compelled to make a different choice...

A pair of incendiary projector beams slashed by, punching into the wall as Anthus Rhoggym's massive right leg shot forward in a stamping kick that caught the advancing, black-clad trooper in the solar plexus, slamming him two meters back to crash into three of his armed comrades, who had been charging up the stairwell. The staggering impact from the kick hit the armored soldier with force enough to knock both him and his unit-mates down the stairs to slam onto the gore-spattered floor of the landing below. Even as those men fell, Rhoggym had pivoted and thrown a high block with one gauntlet-encased forearm against a stabbing blow from a helmeted trooper attacking him from behind with a hastily swung electro-lance. The head of the lance crackled, arcing with barely contained lethal current. With the other arm, the heavily-tattooed Fae-Spawn giant stabbed forward to thrust his own bladed weapon deep into the trooper's throat, nearly decapitating him. Blood gushed everywhere. A shrug of his massively-muscled shoulders and Rhoggym hefted the soldier over his head and tossed him down the stairwell atop the group of men scrambling to get past the splayed corpse of the fallen trooper he'd kicked only a heartbeat ago...

The stairs were beginning to fill with a dynamic and animated mass of more black-armored, visor-helmeted troopers as they came to the aid of their fallen corps-members, charging recklessly towards the mutant meta-synth warrior, their blaster weapons extended and firing light-packet after light-packet of laser-pulse emissions.

In an explosive blur of motion, a tall figure leapt past Rhoggym's shoulder to sail down onto the well's landing amid the bulk of the troopers surging up after the motley band of survivors. Second-Rank Adeptan and former Inquisitor Knight-Marshal Qrystatos Fa'neel Mica Bluhd, his restraints now removed, unleashed his exo-armor's edged melee weapons. Qrystatos' hit the platform whirling, his arms extended as the serrated-edged, claw bayonets over the knuckles of his gloves extended, a phasic-anion charge running along the claws' diamond-bonded razored edges. He stabbed, hacked and sliced through his opponents' protective shielding with relative ease, his power-armor enhancing his own greater-than-average native muscular strength. His movements were deadly graceful and expressly aware of the spatial placements of all his opposition. The soldiers from the Abyssium defensive services were too closely packed in the linear stairwell space to effectively use their ion particle beam weapons. Rhoggym, who was predominantly passionless even when engaged in heated battle, was shocked and alarmed to hear Qrystatos' deep voice suddenly erupt into amused chortles as he carved through the bodies of his enemies. This was combat. Sadism was not appropriate. To Rhoggym's mind, a true warrior did not take pleasure in the disfigurement or maiming of an honorable foe. But this was Qrystatos, the Butcher,... the Fae-Spawn gladiator was unused to such displays of feral zeal. He looked away as Qrystatos impaled a trooper's skull through a fractured face visor, taking a moment to stare feverishly at the blood on his weapon as he withdrew its blade.