by James Somers
The metamen skulked down the well trodden dirt road running parallel with the Waron Sea. Their raids of the coastal fishing villages had been fairly successful. Not so much in booty taken as in fear instilled. Their leader, Hannibal, wanted a clear message sent to the fleshies: “Be afraid, very afraid!”
They rarely obtained any real money in these poor villages since most only managed to sustain themselves. This fact alone had been enough of a reason to keep the metamen out of them before. But the positions of power in the land had been in flux recently and the metamen desired a piece of the pie.
A few of the villages had grown into vibrant communities and even well fortified merchant towns like Gennedy. This city had become one of the main seaports on the Waron. And they owned a formidable militia. Hannibal had never been able to take it before. King Turin, who ruled the city of Gennedy, had been a mighty warrior in his younger days. He had soundly thrashed more than a few metamen leaders on the battlefield.
And he had wisely built his city in such a way so that tunneling metamen could not get beneath it in order to invade. Every attempt had failed. The sea water flooded the tunnels burying whole regiments of cyborgs beneath tons of sand. The city had been built with foundation pillars set far into the earth beyond the moist sea sands near the surface. These pillars had been set into rock where the metamen could not tunnel and so they had simply given up the effort. But Hannibal was a new leader and he did not give up.
The cyborgs lumbered along at a slower pace than usual. Today, they had managed to capture a great prize. A young panthera had been caught, but this was no ordinary great cat. This one happened to be Jale, the son of Bon, a great leader among the pantheran prides of the northeast. This panthera was exactly the kind of trophy Hannibal would be pleased to have, and Lieutenant Argle intended to hand-deliver him.
Argle had been defeated when it came time to appoint a new leader for their nomadic people. Today, he hoped to gain even more favor with his leader by bringing him this prize. Someday, he would make a challenge again for leadership and he would win it.
Gears whined on their prosthetic limbs as they marched. The metamen cyborgs carried a foul stench with them. The flesh around the implants and prosthetic limbs had become putrid. And metamen had a poor reputation for their personal hygiene.
The great cat swung slightly on the pole between four cyborgs: two in the front and two in the rear. The pole itself bowed in the middle due to the weight of the cat, looking as though it might snap at any moment. The panthera was so large in comparison to the cyborgs that his head nearly scraped the ground.
The metamen passed under the large boughs of a tree hanging over the path. Lieutenant Argle heard a sloshing and looked up to find a gray wil sitting about twenty five feet above them on one of the overhanging tree branches. He ate a piece of fruit in the most obnoxious manner imaginable: sloshing the pulp in his wide-open mouth as though he meant for all to hear it. This looked like the same foul little wil they had taken shots at earlier.
“Aye, ugly, are you the bunch of half-men-half-stew-pots what was shooting at me awhile ago?” Meineke shouted. He sloshed a bit of the fruity pulp over his bottom lip, dribbling it onto the metamen below. “Just who do you think you are Tin-man?” Meineke lobbed the fruit core down at the lieutenant, planting it right on his matted head.
“You’re dead, wil!” Lieutenant Argle threatened. A prosthetic limb resided on his left arm, containing three weapons. A gun barrel rotated over, clicking into place as he raised it and took aim at Meineke’s position on the tree limb. Other cyborgs followed suit—a few of them having gunpowder weapons while others used pneumatic spike guns.
Meineke hurled his nimble body away into the dense branches, seeking cover as the deadly metal projectiles clattered into the tree with him. Chips of wood rained down on the metamen as they pounded the boughs with their weapons. Meineke launched himself out the back of the tree, changing his form to that of the bird before swooping down low along the ground and through the ranks of cyborgs still searching the branches for their target.
Metamen absently fired on the wil, hitting a few of their own comrades in the process. One of the cyborgs holding Jale took a hit to the chest from a pneumatic spike gun. He slumped to the ground, leaving his companion straining under the panthera’s weight. The ranks of metamen quickly broke into chaos as they tried to pinpoint the wil in the confusion.
Meineke soared upward again and made haste for the large trees ahead where the seaside road entered a patch of forest. “Come and get me you tin-plated goons!”
Argle sneered at the wil as he flew out of their range, then he turned back to his men. “Stop it, you oafs! I want that wil’s head!” Argle’s prosthetic arm rotated weapons again, locking a three foot double edged blade into position. One of his men had been wounded in both legs and another, assigned to help carry the panthera, lay dead at his post.
“You, Bartle, help them hold the cat!” he ordered. The rest of you come with me after that little wind-bag!”
Fourteen metamen ran down the dirt road, clattering and clicking gears the whole way as they went. The gray bird flew ahead of them and entered the tall trees flanking the road below the rocky outlying hills of Mt. Balor. Lieutenant Argle and his cyborgs followed—guns and blades at the ready.
