His hair was a shock of bleached, cord-thin strands that whipped in the wind, and a cybernetic visor glowed with crimson light over his left eye.
His face, augmented with implants, was cruel, lined, and covered in hideous, spotted scars.
He carried a heavy-bore rifle slung over a shoulder guard scarred by a hundred firefights.
‘My name is Korsen Vane AKA ‘The Reaper’. I’ve been paid, quite well, might I add, to hunt you down, Sacran.’
‘Fokkoff,’ Idan managed.
Vane threw his head back and let out a harsh crow of triumph.
He glanced at the slumped form of the Sacran and then at Sheba, who peered at him in horror from the trunk she hid behind.
‘My payday isfokkin’ finally here.’
‘How?’ Idan rasped.
‘I’ve tracked your kind through the gutters of the rim-worlds for a decade,’ Vane snarled, his lips unfurling to reveal crimson-stained teeth. ‘I’ve met plenty of Sacran warriors in the wild. Some were even runaways fleeing the rigors of your military. I learned from them about the null nets. So I developed their technology, amping it up to dampen the spark. You call yourselvesfreakin’ gods, yet you cannot even withstand a simple potency-draining mesh. Tis absurd how simple it is to thwart a deity,nada?’
Idan didn’t answer, not wanting to give the braggart any satisfaction.
Naam, his absent divinity was like a missing limb, but beneath the suppressed power, the ancient muscle-memory of a thousand skirmishes remained.
The Sacran army had not forged him in light alone; they sculpted his resilience and grit in pain and gore.
With a sudden, explosive heave that defied the mechanical dampening, Idan surged forward, tearing apart the nets, enough for his hands and legs to shoot through.
Using the raw, unadulterated leverage of his physiology, he leaped and caught the front of Vane’s carbon-fiber chest plate.
The metal shrieked as Idan’s fingers dented the armor, finding purchase in the seams.
Idan leveraged his heft in a terrifying display of kinetic force, slamming Vane to his knees.
Before the hunter got the chance to raise his weapon, Idan’s fists clamped onto the Reaper’s shoulders.
He twisted with a guttural roar, the sound of snapping sinew and grinding vertebrae echoing off the valley walls.
He tore the cybernetic visor from Vane’s skull with a sickening crack of synth alloy and bone. He then delivered a palm strike to the center of the man’s chest that collapsed the entire ribcage inward, the bones piercing the heart.
The Reaper slumped over, his eyes glazed in shock, his lifeblood staining Idan’s front and the white snow a dark, steaming crimson.
The bounty hunter’s breath became a wet, shallow rattle as he stared up at the man he thought he’d neutralized.
‘You might have nullified me,’ Idan whispered to the stunned, dying chaser, in a menacing hiss. ‘But you forgot one thing: once a warrior, always a warrior. Sacran abilities or not, I still fight like a freakin’ avenging angel. Especially when it comes to protecting my woman from cockroaches like you.’
Idan stood over the wreckage of the terminal assassin, his chest heaving.
Even without the glow of his sigils, he was now more the celestial executioner than the now-dead hunter.
He reached down and tore the remaining leaden filaments of the net from his skin, as the golden light of hisSsignakhtbegan to throb afresh at the edge of his vision.
That’s when he caught sudden movement to his left.
Vane’s men; trying to sneak up on him.
With a smirk, he moved, becoming a localized supernova, a blur of silver-white wrath.
With a horizontal sweep of his arm, he unleashed a kinetic blade of pureSsignakhtenergy that decapitated two of Vane’s soldiers before they let out a shot from their pulse rifles.
