章 10: Mysterious Doors and Mysterious Men
Henri kept to the rear as she and Walder fought their way into the depths of a Nabrokian apartment complex. Fighting from the rear didn't mean that was out of danger or out of the action. It just meant that when she fired those precise bursts of gunfire into a twisted trog face or sunken trog chest, she wasn't in range of the blood splatter.
Walder on the other hand didn't seem to mind being covered in the creatures' dark, oily, blood. He fought up close and personal with the beasts. Simply throwing them off whenever one managed to leap, or climb, onto his broad shoulders.
He'd gone from using his fists to using various other weapons he'd pulled from his storage devices.
He seemed to prefer cold weapons which wasn't unusual. In a time where it wasn't unnatural for men to either outrun or stoically resist hails of gunfire, there were many who kept the old ways fighting hand-to-hand and with melee weaponry.
Henri had watched Walder switch from using his fists, to using daggers, to using knives, to using several types of long and short swords, clubs, and polearms. At the moment he now faced off against the most recent crowd of trogs with a trident in hand.
He used the trident like a club to crush two trogs, and then used it like a pole to sweep away to more. The remainder of the former-group of ten were all gouged to death, their chests filled with holes, by the man's fierce and vigorous thrusts.
A very inappropriate, line of thought, stealthily watched Walder fighting and quipped, "Mhm….speaking of fierce and vigorous thrusts…"
Henrika quickly quashed that thought, feeling mortified as a warmth filled her cheeks.
She funnelled all her attention to the task at hand, firing at the trogs that were still mindless running at them from the many branching hallways and open apartment doors of complex.
Unfortunately, at this point the creatures' onslaught had begun to wane, they were reaching the point where they'd finally wake up from their battle feud and begin to break away and flee. At such a stage, even a normal soldier from the galactic common fleet would be able to fight them off, nevermind a hyper-intelligent power user from the heroes academy.
Afraid that her thoughts would start drifting to places she'd rather not go, Henri decided to tackle the problem from another angle.
"So...uh, you're not just a savant, after all." said Henri.
"Mhm? Savant?" said Walder turning Henri's way as he used to butt of his trident to crack one trogs skull while using its pointed end to impale another trog.
"I mean...I figured from the ship and all your gear you were one of those tinker types...a mechanically inclined savant, but from those moves….it looks like you've got a little more than that going on."
Savant powers were generally only applied in one direction. Even multi-discipline savants would still only be able to apply that knowledge for a particular use, such as creation and invention. What Walder had displayed today went against this common sense.
Before she figuratively (and later literally) got into bed with the man, Henrika had looked into his background as due diligence. She knew as an absolute fact that Grimwald Cerveny had never gone through any training beyond the basic middle-school self-defense training one would expect from a clan child.
He'd never taken an extra serums beyond the basic serums one would expect, for someone whose parents held the Cerveny clan's level of wealth, to take. As such, technically speaking, his physique should inferior to hers, yet after spending half the day chasing him, it was Henri who'd been the one to make them stop and catch her breath.
Accepting that in the current age the galactic standard for strength and the ability to handle oneself was much higher than the standard for people on more undeveloped worlds that had yet to join the community within the stars, Walder Cerveny was supposed to have been an average person. With average and average ability to protect himself.
The killing machine that Henri had spent the day following into the depths of Nabrok, put lie to those assumptions. Which could only mean that Walder had hid himself even deeper than Henrika had thought.
This wasn't the wild imagination of some pampered clan princess….Henri knew what she was seeing. Even though she'd ended up dropping out in the end, the curriculum she'd followed during her time at the heroes academy was a comprehensive one.
Math, science, literature, philosophy, physiology, microbiology, forensic science, enough medical courses to technically qualify her to count as a trained EMT, normal and criminal psychology... Seven different languages, military history and strategy, a whole slew of spaceborn combat courses, power user history and mechanics courses, the entire curriculum of the Msaran Interstellar Police Force, and twelve different martial arts.
It took a lot to be qualified to join the heroes league, and despite not graduating, a hyper intelligent little Henrika had learned enough during her time at the academy to know a little more than the average person.
"Mn...Men of mystery are no good, after all…" mused Henri. Only half-joking because even as a child there was nothing that got under her skin more than a puzzle she couldn't complete.
"Huh?" said a clueless Walder. Still preoccupied with cleaning up the few trogs that had been too stupid to run away.
"I...I was just wondering what else you've been hiding, Grimwald." said Henri.
Walder smiled, his look boyish and mischievous, a certain fascinating affectation seeping into every movement.
"Heh...Well, that's an arranged marriage for you...We get the rest of our lives to get to really know each other." said Walder.
They shared a laugh, and then it was back to work. The two made their way through the apartment complex, shooting and impaling anything that charged in their direction. Nearer to the end of their journey through the complex, mutated animals started accompanying the trogs. They were creatures with moist skin, three eyes and two stout, powerful, legs. The beasts hopped like kangaroos and kicked like mules. They looked like a cross between a frog and a juvenile trogs and they were appropriately named trogfrogs.
Walder stored away his trident and replaced it with a barbed whip. Each blow he landed with a whip would tear the flesh of the bones of anything that lay in front of him. Deciding that the weapon was too sadistic and that sounds of pain that he was eliciting were too plaintive.
Then he replaced the whip with a chainsaw-sword, a sawtooth. The whirring blade whipping about and stifling any cries of pain and fear with the roar of its engine.
Henri watched from behind as her husband reduced a mob of monsters into so many bloody chunks and shivered as she came to the realization that the man she was married to, just might not be alright in the head. He killed decisively and didn't seem to consciously work to prolong the suffering of his prey, yet when he killed he was clearly enjoying it.
After a moment of concern, Henri was only slightly surprised to find that this "wasn't" a problem for her. She could be married to a killer, so long as he wasn't a mad dog barking and biting at everything, it wouldn't be an issue. The age was prosperous but the peace regular folk enjoyed was naught but an illusion.
The two youths reached their destination which was an energy signature that Walder's drone swarm had picked up after the first run in with the trogs. The signature seemed to be coming from a door within the apartment complex.
Walder kicked open the door and saw that it led to a long flight of stairs that led to landing and yet more stairs.
One didn't need to a genius to know that there was more than just an ordinary basement level at the bottom of all those stairs.
"Should we perhaps, note these stairs, tell your buddies at guild and go do something safer?" said Henri.
"....." Walder. Rolled his eyes at his wife's poor attempt at humor and then began to trudge down into the darkness.
He pulled up his hood, which morphed into a helmet, covering his head and neck and granting his eyes infrared vision to see in the dark. Henrika followed suit, putting away her glasses, and pulling out a pair of goggles to put in their place.
After assuring that they'd be able to see, the two adventurous guildsmen climbed down into the darkness.
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