The two remaining Greenies drew their swords and came at Kren. Fighting alone against two, standard military doctrine is to run to one side and to dispatch the first one you come to as quickly as possible. If your enemies can get you between them, the one in front of you needs only to block your blows, while the one behind you can easily put a blade in your back.
They will undoubtedly kill you, no matter how good you are, or how inept their swordsmanship might be.
Kren followed doctrine.
He used the “spear” attack, a dangerous maneuver that involves holding your sword straight out in front of you while running at your opponent as fast as you can, while screaming at the top of your lungs in the hopes of startling her.
It worked.
The warrior in green could easily have blocked the blow, if she’d had a moment to think about it, but she lacked that moment, she missed the opportunity, and shortly thereafter, she lost her life.
The Mitchegai heart is located low, surrounded by the pelvic girdle, and is assisted by two smaller, single-chambered hearts below the knees that pump blood depleted of nutrients and oxygen upwards. Swollen ankles and varicose veins are unknown in this species.
At the last instant, Kren lowered his sword and sent it straight through her heart. He quickly pulled out his dripping blade, and used a horizontal blow to decapitate his opponent, since a Mitchegai can function for minutes without any heart at all.
The Greenie who was pinned to the wall was still struggling between a dead coworker and a valuable painting, so Kren turned to his last opponent. This one, he could take a bit of time with, and perhaps they would get into some interesting sword play.
As they squared off, two very loud explosions sounded from Bronki’s bedroom. This startled the last Greenie, who turned and looked to the bedroom doorway. Almost regretfully, Kren took advantage of this by cutting off the female’s right arm. As she stared stupidly down at her severed limb, Kren took her head off in disgust.
The girl had been no fun at all!
When Kren got into Bronki’s bedroom, she was standing with a complicated-looking metal object in her hand. It was smoking.
Lying on the floor were two more Greenies with large holes in their abdomens, bleeding on the lovely carpets.
“Well! It certainly took you long enough to get here! I had to do the job myself! Now, put that sword of yours to some use and dispatch these two! I didn’t have time to do anything but gut shots. These two have been knocked out cold by the hydrostatic shock, but I would just as soon that they don’t come around.”
“Yes, Bronki,” Kren said, decapitating the two unresisting Greenies. “I regret the delay, but there were four more of these . . . individuals in your living room.”
“Indeed?” Bronki stepped out to look. “I see. Please excuse my earlier remarks. You’ve served me well this day. You’d better kill this last one, too, but please be delicate about it. That’s a genuine Kado that this trash is stuck to, and there are only three other paintings by her still in existence.”
By the time that Kren had done the job without further damage to the painting, chopping the Greenie’s head in half from the top, and had retrieved his spear, a dozen servants were crowding in, and Bronki was giving orders.
“Well, you can all see that we’ve had a disturbance here. Strip these bodies, flush their clothes down a toilet, and put them on the party tables. Remove the brains, chop them up, and flush them down the toilets, too. We wouldn’t want any of this sort of trash to be resurrected. Put everything else they had with them in a pile somewhere. I’ll go over it later. If you find any identification or credit cards, bring them to me at once. Then clean this mess up. After that, we’ll all have a nice, family feast. Once we’re all completely through, you will remember that nothing unusual happened here today.”
“None of these Greenies knew anything worthwhile?” Kren asked Bronki while the servants scurried around.
“Greenies? That’s as good a name for them as any, I suppose. Do they know anything useful? I doubt it, since these were all low-ranking trash. I mean, look at their small heads! But one of those in my bedroom was the leader of this bunch, and considerably smarter than the rest. Quality trash, I suppose you could call her. Come with me.”
Bronki was soon sketching out another brain, showing Kren exactly what he should and should not eat.
“There. That should give you a considerable background into the underworld of this city, without taking up too much of your cranium. That’s if you want it, of course.”
“I think that it might be helpful, if today’s events prove to be common.”
“That remains to be seen, but by all means, help yourself.”
“Thank you. About that feast, tell them to save me an arm and a leg, would you? And could I have some of their weapons for souvenirs?” Kren asked.
“Okay, and yes, I have no use for them, so you may have them all, if you keep them hidden in your room. It wouldn’t be healthy to be seen with such things in the streets. Your sword and spear are legal, but that will not be so for everything that these Greenies were doubtless carrying.”
When Kren had eaten those eight small portions of the brain that Bronki had suggested, he collected up and cleaned all of the weapons that he could find, his own included. It was quite a collection.
Besides six belt knives and four ordinary swords, most of which had beautiful handles, hilts and sheaths, but blades of less than military quality, there were dozens of other strange weapons.
There was one straight sword with a handle that fit backward into its metal sheath, and locked there, converting it into a sort of spear.
The knife thrower had carried six oddly balanced blades in a harness that crossed her chest.
Another Greenie had carried a pouch with nine palm-sized eight-pointed stars in it. The sharp points were covered with some sort of green substance. Apparently, they were to be thrown, but at first glance, they didn’t seem to be a very practical weapon. Thinking that the green stuff was perhaps some sort of poison, he cleaned them and their pouch very carefully, washed his hands, and flushed the cleaning cloth down the toilet.
There was a dagger with a small trigger on it which, when pressed, released a spring that propelled the center of the blade across the room with considerable force. It imbedded itself deeply into the carved woodwork at the head of Kren’s ornate bed. The projectile had narrowly missed hitting him, and left him with a strange, but still serviceable, two-bladed knife in his hand.
The use of any form of stored energy was forbidden to the military, except that dropping things on an enemy was permitted. Before he had triggered the knife, Kren had assumed that it was a legal military weapon. He wondered if some of the senior officers had carried them.
There was an assortment of small blades intended to augment a Mitchegai’s natural claws, and four small clubs apparently intended for beating citizens without actually killing them, though why someone should want to do such a strange thing was beyond Kren’s imagination. It seemed insane to injure someone, and then leave them alive to seek vengeance on you.
There was a flat, heavy metal plate with many holes in it that mystified Kren, but which a human would have recognized as a set of brass knuckles.
Kren wiped all of his newfound toys off, put them away in a drawer, and resolved to puzzle all of them out at some future date. Perhaps when his new brain cells finally integrated.
He joined the others who were just sitting down to the feast. The blood and mess had been cleaned up, and many of the carpets were missing, but Bronki and her servants seemed to be in good spirits.
“Come join me, Kren,” Bronki said, sitting by a low party table. “This girl is old, and she won’t be the best tasting one of the bunch, but since she was the leader of the team that threatened us, I thought that I would enjoy eating her the most.”
She slit open a thigh, peeled back the skin, and helped herself to a large gobbet of fat and muscle. The tougher skin and harder bones of an adult generally weren’t worth the trouble of eating. Since the meat would be tougher than that of juvenals, and the dead bodies couldn’t scream pleasantly in any event, she had provided very sharp knives for this feast.
“Thank you, although since classes start the day after tomorrow, I can’t afford to eat a really big meal.”