James Axler – Keepers of the Sun

He felt the impact run up his arm as the point drove deep through the muscles, grating on the femur. He twisted the hilt as he withdrew it, causing a massive wound in the warrior’s thigh, though he just missed the big femoral artery, which would have made it into a killing blow.

The man cried out, choking off the yell, trying to back away from Ryan, stumbling clumsily, blood pouring down his leg onto the wooden floor.

He still held the sword at shoulder height, but it was suddenly a defensive weapon, as he tried to protect himself from the swift, remorseless advance of the one-eyed man.

Now the advantage lay with Ryan, up against a frightened cripple.

He moved from side to side, changing the panga from hand to hand, feinting with an empty fist, making the warrior try to parry the specious lunge.

Ryan taunted him in his distress and obvious stammering fear. “Not like chilling helpless women and children, is it, you murderin’ bastard?”

The man was sweating, the perspiration soaking through the dark scarf around his nose and mouth, trying to make his way down the empty corridor, anywhere to try to get away from Ryan. Blood puddled the floor at his feet, and the one-eyed man was careful not to step into it and slip.

“Goin’ to bleed to death, like a stuck pig, aren’t you?”

“This is not with honor!” his enemy panted. “This is not to be done.”

“Wrong, friend. It’s going to be done, right to the bitter end.”

Ryan saw his chance and feinted again, aiming toward the man’s knees. As the samurai dropped the sword edge to counter the attack, Ryan switched the panga to his left hand and cut high instead.

The blow aimed at the angle between the neck and the left shoulder, where he could see an exposed strip of flesh below the helmet and above the armored breastplate.

He turned his wrist to use the last few inches of the blade rather than the needled point, feeling it bite home. The keen steel sliced through skin, flesh and muscle, opening a deep gash that spouted more blood.

This time he didn’t step back from the attack. Now that he was in close, it was the moment to finish the job. He brought his knee up into the helpless man’s groin, moving to one side as the long sword clattered to the floor, the warrior doubling over like a loving courtier. The round helmet fell off and spun to join the sword, exposing the back of the head, with a ribboned topknot of black hair.

The final blow from the panga drove downward, the hilt clutched in both hands, the point hitting the doomed man at the top of the spine, where neck became skull.

Ryan winced at the crunching sound of splintered bone. The samurai jerked backward, eyes turned up to the ceiling, the neural reaction pinching the blade between the crushed vertebrae, so that Ryan lost his grip on it.

Without missing a beat, he dodged the staggering, flailing figure, darting in and picking up the SIG-Sauer, steadying it on the dying warrior.

The panga was jerked from side to side, as though it were some sort of bizarre addition to the armor. The man was moaning, a long, single keening note, held far beyond what seemed humanly possible. But it was amazingly quiet. Considering he had two devastating wounds in thigh and neck, as well as having been kicked in the balls and the coup de grace to the cervical vertebrae, it was astounding that he wasn’t screaming loud enough to bring down the paper-thin internal walls of the fortress.

Ryan watched him with an incurious gaze, knowing that death was only a matter of time.

The spinal cord was severed and crushed, and the messages from brain to limbs couldn’t go on much longer.

There was a long sigh of breath, then the samurai was down on the blood-slick floor, his arms and legs kicking out like a brain-shot horse.

Ryan holstered the blaster and waited his moment to retrieve the eighteen-inch panga.

He glanced behind him, wondering whether J.B., Jak or any of the others might have followed him. He was pleased to see that their good combat sense had prevailed, and they were all staying together where they were, in the slightly more secure defensive position of their rooms.