They came expecting a mewling lamb, incapable and overstated. They came with hate and envy, and they sought to blunt our sword before it could be drawn—before it could be wielded. I wonder what they thought when he disabused them of their presumptions, and the lamb they thought to slaughter was revealed to be a sleeping dragon. I still remember the crunch of bone, the smell of blood, the screams of the crowd. I still remember him, standing there, unfazed and imperious—and surrounded by the building blocks of what would become his legend. Gods of Olympus, he was beautiful, and I knew I was lost.

  Arthur stepped outside of the Lion’s Pride while waiting for Circe and the Kidemónes—both of whom had remained behind to ensure her safety after clarifying that he should remain near the restaurant entrance—and nodded companionably to the line of people queuing for access. The popular restaurant had been almost full when they had arrived, and its allure had only grown through the cycle. With Hellas’ particular timescale, the ‘night’ lasted far longer than many worlds, and that meant that nocturnal visitation was far more common than elsewhere.

  During his discourse with Circe, he had learned that Pallikári enjoyed a very lively post-dusk economy, and much of its money circulation occurred during its post-dusk time periods. Something about the cool air, the views, and the alluring ambiance of the town at night drew in far more crowds than even the beatific views during the day—and even the beaches saw an uptick in activity.

  Arthur could imagine why. There were few things more romantic than a midnight meal by the waterfront.

  “Hey there! You happen to have a lighter on you?”

  Arthur turned at the sound of a voice.

  Its owner was a friendly-looking brunette man dressed in a flowered shirt, and sporting some casual pants.

  Sadly, Arthur couldn’t help him, and shook his head in denial.

  “Sorry, I’m not much for tobacco or otherwise,” he said with an apologetic smile. “Maybe you could try inside?”

  “Damn,” the man responded with a sigh while reaching behind to scratch at his lower back. “Alright, thanks anyway!”

  Arthur nodded and turned away.

  His psions screamed before he had completed the rotation.

  Every inch of his gene-enhanced body tensed as he dropped into a combat crouch, and the barking discharge of a military-grade sidearm cracked into the night. Screams erupted from the crowd near the doors, and Arthur moved instinctively—not to get away, but to close distance.

  The gun in the flower-shirted man’s grip tried, and failed, to track him.

  Arthur, already aware he was disarmed, wasn’t solely going for the attacker.

  He was acquiring a shield his precognition warned he would shortly need.

  Arthur slammed into the gene-enhanced assassin with speed and force that clearly took him completely off-guard—and unlike the fight with Circe, there was no need to hold back. Arthur’s right knee rose in a viper-quick movement, and he slammed it into the left side of his flower-shirted assailant’s smaller body with enough force to break the man’s ribs.

  The would-be assassin gasped out air from the blow, and Arthur grabbed him by the shirt to spin him around—manhandling him to become the aforementioned shield just as two more cracks filled the air.

  The body of the man he was holding spasmed twice, and then Arthur felt him shaking in his grip and glanced out to where the shots had come from.

  More screams echoed from the waiting guests as he did, some of whom had barged into the restaurant and some of whom were sprinting for their lives, while others were pulling up recording software on their omni-comps.

  I hate the fucking ‘Net sometimes, Arthur groused in his mind.

  His psionic awareness identified a nebulous web of hostility and danger coming from the southern side of the street, and Arthur bent to collect the sidearm his assailant had been carrying—shoving the attacker’s dying body forward and then diving behind the car he and Circe had arrived in.

  Additional gunshots barked into the night to crash against the reinforced vehicle, and Arthur quickly checked his new weapon; ejecting the magazine to look it over while familiarizing his hand with the shape, trigger, and weight. The safety he kept off, and the muzzle he kept pointed straight at the asphalt.

  High caliber, twelve round magazine, armor piercing rounds, and is that a fucking penetrator muzzle?

  Arthur must have underestimated the durability of his now-dead first enemy if the shots hadn’t punched through the man and hit him.

  More gunshots snapped out, but he ignored them.

  Two more targets, potentially more. High population area. Eleven rounds.

  Arthur took a breath, and closed his eyes.

  Instead of moving, he reached out with his senses.

  With his psion density, it was not hard to hone in on the emotions around him. It required creating a kind of ‘bubble of awareness’ that steadily expanded out from him in a radius. What it was difficult to do, without practice, was to isolate which people inside of that awareness were threats, and which were just caught up in what was happening. Had he been a normal Knight-Errant, that kind of information overload would have ruined his attempts there and then.

  But Arthur, for all his newly-crafted humility, was not a normal Knight-Errant.

  Spatial awareness melded with long-honed empathic outreach, and Arthur quickly filtered out the panic, the excitement, and the rising tension of the non-aggressive civilians around him. Some off-duty law enforcement and military pinged his senses, but he ignored those as well. They were of no help to him against professional assassins.

  More gunshots hit the car, and Arthur frowned in annoyance at the distraction.

  He picked up on Circe easily enough; she was inside being sheltered by Perseus and Endymion, and all three were furious. The trio wanted to be outside with him, but without the Lion Guard to properly cover Circe, and with the two that had come with them sent back to deliver the items they’d bought…

  Arthur took a breath, and his awareness expanded further until it brushed over the minds he sought.

  One, two, three, four, five targets. Two on the street, two more trying to flank from the opposite side without him noticing, and a patient sniper perched on the roof directly beside the restaurant. Arthur smiled grimly and glanced behind him, where his senses told him the other two were moving. They’d probably get a bead on him within seconds, thanks to their genetically enhanced minds and their ability to fire from a greater distance—and at that point, crouching behind the car was just asking to die.

  The flanking angle also explained the lack of movement of the two firing from the street: they were suppressing him.

  Against anyone else, it would’ve been a relatively solid tactic.

  Move, Arthur.

  Training, experience, and a low snarl of bloodlust came to the fore as Arthur exploded into motion with every iota of his gene-enhancement in play.

  Not toward the three nearest him, but instead toward the two encroaching opposite.

  His claimed sidearm was held in his right hand, and he blitzed across the intervening distance faster than any human in Graecia could think to move—launching himself over a parked car in a blur of motion.

  Crack-crack-cracks heralded pursuing gunshots, but Arthur was moving too chaotically for them to get a bead on him—guided by his psions and their prescient gifts.

  The pair attempting to flank him, and only then registering the danger, barely had time to look up in surprise before he was on them.

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  The first flanker tried to raise a gun as the assassin’s gene-enhanced mind processed a threat nearby, but it was too late. Arthur slammed his stolen gun into the man’s temple hard enough for bone to audibly crack, and then followed with a pivot off his right foot—smashing a spinning back-kick into the man’s torso with his left foot.

  He felt the leather of his shoe tear from the impact force, and the man died on impact with his chest caved in by Arthur’s strike.

  The entire encounter took barely two seconds, and then Arthur was dropping low to avoid the crack-crack of two responsive gunshots from the second flanker. To the credit of the assailant—a woman, he noticed distantly—she didn’t panic, but instead moved backward with military efficiency to try to build distance.

  He almost felt bad for her.

  Arthur launched himself forward faster than she could react, dodged left to avoid a third penetrator round, and then closed distance to slam a lightning roundhouse into her side with a crunch.

  The woman bravely tried to block with her own gene-enhanced arm.

  Arthur saw and felt the moment of terrified realization when her arm broke into pieces, her ribs shattered, and she was pulverized into the side of the car he’d originally vaulted over with enough force to fold the plasteel inwards.

  Arthur exhaled a breath, ducked so as to not expose his head, and approached the spasming and bleeding woman quickly.

  “You are going to die without medical attention,” he said to her calmly, and glanced down at the mangled remains of her arm. “I probably collapsed your lung, your heart will be compromised, and there’s fragments of bone all over your insides. You can still live, but you’ll probably never get full use of your arm back.”

  He reached out, collected her dropped sidearm, ejected the magazine, and then ejected the loaded round before dismantling it smoothly.

  “Wh-what are you?” she gurgled through a jaw that didn’t seem to work quite right.

  “House Leos’ new Hetairoi,” he answered with a little shrug, and ejected his own magazine to load the liberated round into it, before slapping it back into place and tucking her magazine back into his belt. “Is saving your life worthwhile?”

  A moment passed, and then she smiled brokenly at him.

  “No,” she answered with sincerity.

  “Thanks,” Arthur said simply and reached out to snap her neck with a sickening crack.

  Her body slumped the moment he did, and he turned toward the first man that he had struck and killed.

  A few moments later, with a second gun dismantled and another magazine in his belt, Arthur turned away from the man’s corpse and extended his senses again. The other two ground assailants seemed to be aware something had gone wrong, but they weren’t taking chances. One was trying to cross the street to get a view of him, and the other was sheltering inside the alley between the restaurant and the building beside it, under the cover of the ‘hidden’ sniper.

  Arthur clicked his tongue in annoyance, glanced at the autocannon hidden atop Circe’s family car, and then immediately dismissed it. The chances of collateral damage were too high, and besides, it would be overkill for three mid-Rim assassins.

  He’d faced far worse on Albion.

  Old instincts and buried training were flooding back to him every heartbeat, and Arthur quickly assessed the tactical situation: three targets, one split, one elevated in a position of advantage, one sheltering—and no immediate available reinforcements for his use. The entire engagement had lasted barely more than a minute thus far, but he knew he couldn’t let them escape. He had to try to capture at least one alive.

  An exhale left his lips, and Arthur burst into motion.

  Another staccato pattern of gunfire lit up the night.

  Asphalt and pavement exploded as penetrator rounds slammed into them, shadowing his pounding feet as he ran.

  It was a futile effort thanks to his battle precognition, but they didn’t know that. Shouts echoed from the other side of the street, but Arthur paid them no mind and bore down on where his psionic awareness told him one of the assassins had separated to pursue him.

  A hoverbike was parked just ahead and Arthur grinned to himself, transferring his gun to his left hand and mentally locating the hiding assassin behind a vehicle parked ahead of the next car.

  Arthur lifted his gun, sighted, and fired two rounds through the car toward where the assassin was hiding.

  His right arm hooked the hoverbike, and Arthur flexed every iota of his gene-enhanced physical strength. The bike lifted from the ground, and he flung it toward the car the assassin was sheltering behind.

  The bike crashed down a second later, and Arthur felt the man’s mind—he had been sheltering from what he expected to be another wave of gunshots—flash with shocked surprise at the impact of the vehicle. Arthur used the sudden distraction to come around the now-bullet-holed car, and slammed his split shoe into the man’s head—hard enough to knock him out instantly.

  “Stay right there,” he quipped while already moving.

  More gunfire tracked him as he sprinted, serpentine and unpredictable, across the street to vault over a parked van and charge the alley.

  “Who the fuck is this guy?!” the alley assassin shouted to no answer.

  Arthur dodged left when his psions roared at him, and dodged a double crack-crack of gunfire while ducking smoothly to avoid a third crack from the sniper above. Arthur laughed at the question and the hilarity of them only sending six to kill him.

  He was a Knight of the Round Table. He’d faced down Core Assassins naked.

  Arthur crossed the intervening distance between him and the second-last assassin in an eyeblink and didn’t waste time with fancy movements. Gun raised, Arthur put a round straight through the man’s chest, and another into the would-be killer’s skull when the assassin’s body rocked backward.

  He didn’t even stop to watch the back of the assassin’s skull explode outward after the front turned concave. Arthur had another target to handle. His thundering feet carried him toward the left wall of the alley, and Arthur put on a burst of speed before running up the masonry. Gravity and physics wept in disbelief as he ascended, kicked off the wall upwards to slam into the Lion’s Pride diagonally, and then kicked off the restaurant’s wall before gravity could reassert itself—zigzagging vertically upward to snag the lip of the sniper’s roof, and haul himself over.

  Psionic prescience sent him rolling to avoid a burst-pattern crack-crack of gunfire, and Arthur heard someone shriek as glass shattered in the restaurant behind and below him. That wasn’t his immediate concern, though, and he couldn’t afford it to be. Power and fury roared through him, and an old bloodlust he hadn’t enjoyed in what seemed like a long time snarled to life in his heart.

  Arthur approached the final assassin in the center of the roof with a grim smile, and when the man drew a sidearm, Arthur dodged another two shots. Bullets whined past his ears, and Arthur reached the man fast enough to kick the gun from the sniper’s right hand—breaking the fingers in the process.

  The assassin gave a strangled cry, turned, and sprinted toward the edge of the roof.

  Arthur lifted his gun, paused, and then lowered it and watched the man launch himself over the edge of the building. The twang of a wire caught his attention, and Arthur walked to the edge to witness the assassin rapid-sliding down a pre-placed descension wire.

  “Now that’s just annoying,” he muttered in a bored tone.

  Arthur turned then to look at the Lion’s Pride, made note of the distance, and then looked back to the fleeing man—who had reached the pavement and started running.

  “Wrong way, buddy.”

  Arthur smiled and moved back three steps.

  His eyes tracked the fleeing assailant sprinting for the crowds and the cover they represented from Arthur’s theoretical bullets—a smart move, since he in fact would not fire at the Duchy’s own citizens—like a bat out of hell.

  It was a good plan and might have worked, if not for the fact that the assassin was not facing a fellow Graecian.

  Arthur sprinted forward, launched himself off the rooftop toward the Lion’s Pride, landed on its roof, and darted to the right toward its lip—where he vaulted over without hesitation. His downward descent allowed him to catch one of the banners hanging down against the building, and Arthur used it to truncate his drop just enough that his enhanced bones and muscles could absorb the oncoming impact without issue.

  “Look out below!” he bellowed.

  The banner was released, and Arthur crashed down as the crowd scrambled out of the way.

  The assassin’s eyes widened in shock, but it was already too late to react.

  The panicked sniper tried to slow himself and change direction, but Arthur was already moving. The crowd staggered backward when he intercepted the assassin by the chest with his right hand, dug his fingers into him, raised him high, and then promptly smashed the man into the pavement hard enough to break the duracrete.

  Screams and gasps radiated through the onlookers, and Arthur stood up from the remnants of what had been an assassin—the man’s limbs splayed at improper angles, and blood already pooling out from under his genetically engineered body.

  Arthur’s eyes rose when the doors to the Lion’s Pride burst open to show Endymion, Perseus, and Circe piling out—the Kidemónes with blades in hand, while the heiress wielded a large pistol in her grip, and a look of fury on her beautiful features.

  The crowd looked between the trio and Arthur at the same time as the three spotted him, and Arthur blew out an amused breath.

  “Hey, guys,” he said wryly. “You missed all the fun.”

  “The enemy?” Endymion demanded.

  “Handled,” Arthur assured him confidently. “TFour KIA, one unconscious across the street, and this one is—” he glanced down for a second “—messed up, but alive. I didn’t crush his ribcage, unfortunately. I think the angle was off.”

  Silence greeted his words, and Arthur looked up just in time to catch a blur of motion.

  His psions screamed at him, but he registered the warning and ignored it in the same instant as Circe slammed home into his arms.

  “You idiot,” she hissed. “You should have come back inside.”

  “Sorry, Princess,” Arthur said while flashes of light marked the output of multiple pictures being taken simultaneously, and his heart thundered with excitement against his ribs. “I needed the exercise.”

  Circe laughed and buried her head against his chest.

  Nothing short of another attack could have made him let her go.