Agonising minutes passed, and you could sure as hell bet they felt like hours. It's strange what goes through folks' heads at times like that. More often than not, it's bad things. See, it wasn't enough to fall and die. Your mind had to play it out before it happened. In that way, your mind became an accomplice of your fate.
But even in the Wild North, miracles happen. Sometimes folk do good. Sometimes, just sometimes, you don't fall.
The people below finished their placement, hammered some buttons, pulled some levers, and then a force field formed between their erected barrier. That was something to see, if you could see it, as it was only in the periodic glimmer that you could, but it was no help lying on the ground. It was lucky, then, that there were pneumatic pistons in the pieces the guards had placed. They slowly pushed the force field higher, until it was just about within reach of all those dangling feet. It was good timing, because that was when Porridge's grasp faltered. It was a short drop, but that didn't stop the scavenger from shrieking.
“Oh! I'm done for!” He rolled about on the force field as if he was still in mid fall. It took a while for him to fully fathom that he'd already landed, and that he'd landed sooner than he expected. The force field shimmered as he moved.
With Porridge safe, Nox was able to let himself and the guard down—but he kept his guard up. He let the grapnel hook back into place, then waited with Porridge as the pneumatic pistons lowered the energy platform.
“How is it you keep fallin'?” Nox asked.
“How is it you keep catching me?” Porridge replied with a smile.
“Well, this time, I didn't.”
“In a roundabout way, you did, dearie. Oh! It's not like they would catch a little old dandy like me of their own accord.” He cast a dirty look at the guard Nox freed. That man kept himself as far away from them as he could.
“You never know,” Nox said. “For all that standin' out you do, you sure have a way of fittin' in.”
“Maybe it's the collar,” Porridge suggested. “Though I do wonder how we'll fit in now.”
They reached ground level, where they were greeted by several dozen armed guards. Those guards wore collars too. It seemed that the Man with the Silver Mane didn't have many people on his side that weren't slaves. No wonder he wanted to leave.
“Hands in the air,” a female guard, wearing similar armour to the others, said. They only knew she was female because she had her helmet under her arm. Her black hair was cut tight, but she had a soft face to parry her hard eyes.
Porridge flung his arms up like he was praising God. Nox raised his slowly, perhaps because he didn't feel like praising. A lot slower than the guard wanted if that glare was anything to go by. When the Coilhunter did things slow, you watched every aching moment of it, because normally he did things so fast you didn't catch it 'til he caught you. So you watched the slow motion, because it was like seeing how the magic tricks were done. Yeah, Nox could be his own kind of magician.
“What shall we call you this time?” the woman asked. “Hookdangler? Wirewalker?”
Nox shrugged his shoulders, and he made a show of it too. “How's about you call me the Man Who Killed the Man with the Silver Mane.”
“How droll. Shall we carve it on your grave?”
Nox smirked. “So long as you carve it on his first.”
“Don't worry,” she said, and she smiled back. “That'll be a long day off. We're gonna make you two work 'til you drop. You're part of the machine now. His Eminence will be glad to have a few more cogs.”
The guards crowded in now. Nox could've tried to fight them, but there were a few too many, and the Coilhunter was saving his mojo for the Magus upstairs. Nox'd have to wait for a more opportune moment. Besides, if they were to be cogs, then they'd be the cogs that jammed the machine.
39 – EXPERIMENT NOX
The female guard, whom Nox overheard was called Yilda, led them through many corridors and up many stairs, with a long trail of guards behind them. Nox spotted periodic opportunities to escape or attack, but so long as Yilda was leading them upwards—to where he could feel that mounting presence—he decided he'd hold off for now. You see, the best gunslingers waited for the perfect moment. They didn't draw too early or too late. Death wasn't the only perfectionist.
And that perfect moment arrived now.
The Coilhunter heard the buzz of electricity ahead and to the left. It was another generator. By anyone's guess, that fortress must've had dozens of them. And who knew what the Man with the Silver Mane was doing with harnessed lightning at the peak.
Nox flicked a butterfly capsule from his belt, which rolled ahead of Yilda. It was empty, one of the ones that needed a refill, but it caused a panic all the same. Simultaneously, he hit a switch on the steel-plated guitar on his back, which unleashed a thick smog into the corridor. They say in situations like that, all hell breaks loose—but if you're already in Hell, well, then where does it break loose from?
With all the commotion, Nox slipped into the generator room and sealed the door. Sure, he could've tried to pull Porridge in, but that scavenger'd have to be a pawn in the game for now. So long as they had one of them, they thought they had both. And that'd be true if they had the Coilhunter. Right now, they had nothing.
“Beat the door down!” Yilda yelled.
And they tried.
They hammered their fists against it. They bashed their boots against it. They slammed their shoulders against it. The beat increased, from a pitter-patter percussion to a rumbling, roaring, rolling barrage.
And still the door held.
They should've known it would hold, because they'd made it. They made it to last. They made it to survive the Coilhunter. It was the common, cruel irony of the Wild North that what you made would unmake you.
“He better not destroy that generator,” Yilda warned Porridge, “or we'll be forced to destroy you.”
She said it loud enough for all to hear—for the Coilhunter to hear. That told him well enough that it was an idle threat. The thing is, when left alone for long enough, such threats have a way of becoming not so idle.
“Oh! Don't panic me, sweetie! Oh, I'm seeing stars! Oh!”
Porridge promptly fainted on the spot, though he made sure to hobble over to some guards so that he could conveniently slump into their arms, and thereby rend them armless in a battle. It was one hell of a defence mechanism, and the fact that he'd survived the Wild North to date showed just how well it worked. They say you should feign death. Well, fainting worked too.
“Bring in the Lightning Ram,” Yilda ordered.
It took them a while, but when they brought it, Porridge couldn't help but pry one eye open just a little. The battering ram was about the size of a man, rectangular in shape, with a large copper prong down the centre, and a capstone of silver formed into the shape of a ram's head. It even had little lightning bolts for ears. Yeah, who said you couldn't break down doors with style? Porridge might've even applauded them, if he weren't too busy applauding his own performance.
“Knock it down,” Yilda said.
They struck the door with the ram, and it didn't just shake—it crackled. Each strike released a blast of electricity, which expanded outwards across the entire door. Just like everything in the Man with the Silver Mane's arsenal, he had to augment it with lightning.
So, working frantically inside the room to the beats and the booms, so did Nox.
With a few more heaves, the door finally blasted open. The smoke and dust hung in the air for a moment, and everyone outside held their breaths. There was a lot of nervous fidgeting with weapons, a lot of sharp and swift glances at shadows, a lot of racing minds playing out every grim scenario.
Well, none of them played out this.
When Nox appeared in the haze, there was something different about him. He had a new arsenal of his own. He still had his grapnels, but he'd
augmented them with power rods, so that he could electrify the wire at the flick of a switch. He now wore a pair of arm-length rubber gloves he'd taken from the generator room's supply, which helped protect him from any inadvertent shock of his own.
He fired the right grapnel, and the guards thought he'd missed, and unwisely tugged on the wire. When he gave them a jolt, and they fell to the ground, sizzling, a new kind of panic swept through the others like a current.
“He's charged his grapnels!” one of the guards shouted.
But that wasn't all he'd done.
He marched out into the corridor, casting metal orbs across the floor in either direction. They exploded, releasing a new kind of shrapnel the guards'd never seen before. They were a kind of electrified throwing star, which shocked their target on impact. They each had little power rods of their own. Nox'd wrapped them in metal sheeting and bashed them into the shape of a five-pointed star, the signature emblem of a sheriff.
He didn't have time to paint on the five colours he'd assigned to the various groups he deemed as threats: red for the tribesfolk, blue for the bikers, green for the criminals, yellow for the Clockwork Commune, and black for the so-called demons of the Regime. At first there were no colours. Then the colours meant something else. For a while, it was just four points, before Nox recognised that it was only a matter of time before the Regime moved in on the Wild North. They'd earned their colour. Black would oppose them. He wondered when he'd have to make it six.
Some guards fought, but most of them just scattered, and they left behind the ram. It was one thing to fight the Coilhunter, but to fight an augmented Coilhunter was something else. It was like facing the Man with a Thousand Names and the Man with the Silver Mane all at once.
Guards toppled like dominoes. Nox was able to take them out in twos and threes, then half a dozen at a time. And it was the way he wanted to do it. He got to save his bullets for those who deserved it. For now, all he had to do was send these guards off to a shock-filled sleep. He marched through the corridors, firing grapnels and releasing them, and rolling more star-filled orbs into the fleeing crowd. He followed them into a large room, where he swung a cast grapnel hook around like a lasso, then a flail. He took them down by the dozen then, until all he faced was Yilda herself.
If Yilda'd had a pistol, she would've unloaded it now until she clicked empty. But you see, before now there was no need for pistols. The slaves came willingly, and the guards kept everyone alive as part of the machine. Everyone feared the Man with the Silver Mane. Everyone but Nox.
Yilda stumbled over the bodies of her guards as she stepped backwards.
“You'll pay a heavy price!” she shouted. “You'll—”
But Nox cast a grapnel her way, and gave her a jolt that silenced her.
“You've got it wrong, girl,” Nox rasped. “Folk pay me.”
With the echoes of the screams and zaps now faded, Porridge pushed a few bodies off him and dusted himself off. He skipped after the Coilhunter, hopping between the snoozing guards.
“Phew!” Porridge cried. “We're safe. Oh!”
Nox instinctively grumbled. If there was anything he'd learned in the Wild North, it was that there was no such thing as safe. The land wouldn't let you. The sun wouldn't let you. The animals and people wouldn't let you. Even in the grave you weren't safe. No wonder the Man with the Silver Mane wanted to escape.
Then, just on cue, they heard a clatter of iron chains. Large metal doors screeched open. Behind them came a kind of flood. Not of water, that ever-so-rare and ever-so-costly liquid. No, this was a flood of flesh. This was a crowding, crushing cluster of slaves. They all wore collars. Some of them wore chains. All of them had a look of grim determination to stop the Coilhunter.
40 – FLOOD
A flood wasn't something you saw in the Wild North. The rivers ran dry. The parched earth cracked. The rain came seldom, and more often than not came at the behest of certain tribes—or so they said. The Dew Distributors'd staked claims to every patch of water they could find, and if you found a patch yourself, well, they'd claim you.
So, when the Coilhunter thought of those slaves as pouring in like a flood, it was an image that carried a lot of weight. It was the image of three hundred slaves let loose from the dam of their prison doors. It was the image of a madman's hold on the minds of many, used like a weapon against the minds of the few.
“Out of the frying pan,” Porridge said, “and into the—”
“Not fire,” Nox said. No. This was water. He remembered the feeling at the campfire, when the fire drowned out the presence of the Man with the Silver Mane. That Magus chose electricity for his weapon, and, sure enough, that was its own kind of fire—the so-called “astral fire” of the tribes. But it wasn't the same. Real fire had a different burn. Nox, of all people, knew that well.
But if this was to be a flood, then there was one thing the Coilhunter knew well about water. You kept it far away from electricity.
Nox hammered the buttons that electrified his grapnels. Both of them sizzled and sparked. He held out his arms and circled on the spot, making sure each and every one of those slaves knew what he had. They feared that all-too-familiar shock. Nox knew that too. But if both their master and their enemy wielded it, what would they do?
“Back off,” Nox growled.
The slaves considered this. In the eyes of some, who had spent far longer in the grasp of the Man with the Silver Mane, they looked at the Coilhunter now as a new kind of master. After all, he had mastered that chaotic energy. That must've made him special. In the eyes of most, though, was the reflection of the eyes of their true master. They saw nothing but the object of their orders.
They stepped in a little. Nox saw it as the waters rising.
“Oh! What are we to do, cabbage?” Porridge whimpered. “We'll never fight them all!”
Nox knew that well. For every slave he could count, there were a dozen more huddled behind. Even with his gadgets, he couldn't take them all down. Pretty soon they were all going to drown.
Then they heard a roar from the rafters, and all eyes turned to see the colossal form of Experiment X on one of the iron platforms there. No, not just Experiment X. Oakley too.
They got 'im was Nox's first thought, until he saw Oakley cling onto X's back as it climbed down to join them. That wasn't just a monster. That wasn't just a slave.
It was backup.
“Nice of you to finally join us,” Nox said.
“I was a little … caught up,” Oakley replied.
They tried not to stare at X, but that beast must've been used to stares. That was just another emotional pain to add to the physical torment. But you see, Oakley was different. Oakley did what no one else'd do. He gave that beast a chance.
“This one wants to be free,” Oakley said.
“That's good,” Nox said, “but those ones don't.”
It seemed Oakley hadn't quite taken in just how many slaves had leaked into the room, because he did a double-take when he saw them. The flood had virtually surrounded them.
“Well, drifter,” Oakley said. “There's worse ways to die.”
Porridge mouthed the word die and almost keeled over.
Nox turned on the spot, taking in as much of his surroundings as possible. “We ain't dyin' yet.”
The first wave of slaves was close enough to almost crash upon their shore. Fists formed. Fingers hovered over weapons. Eyes settled like arrows on their prey. This would be a battle of slave against slave. All of them ran a nervous finger inside their collars.
But, like many battles, you could count on things not going the way you expected. You could count on outside influences. You could count on late arrivals.
They heard a bang from the giant door across the way. All eyes turned. The pre-battle eye-squinting and finger-fidgeting froze for a moment. Everyone waited to see who it was knocking loudl
y on the door. No, it couldn't be Experiment X. That beast was inside. Whatever this was, it wasn't a slave.
Then the door burst open, and they saw a horse rearing. The sunlight gleamed off its iron legs. The sunlight also revealed the horse's companions: a clockwork construct and a toy duck.
41 – BACKUP
When Duck waddled into the room, the Coilhunter knew one thing for certain. Things were going to get bright.
“Here,” Nox said, hurriedly pulling out some spare goggles. “You'll need these.”
“I've got my own, thank you, peach.” Porridge unearthed goggles with a bright floral pattern. They didn't go with anything else he was wearing, but when nothing matches, everything matches.
Oakley took a pair from Nox and put them on. “Never did like goggles,” he grumbled as he fought with the strap. “Sometimes you get stuck in your ways.”
Nox twisted a dial on the side of his own goggles, which put a black shutter down behind the glass. “Yeah,” he said. “And sometimes you adapt.”
It was then that Duck halted, glanced around the room, and gave that familiar, ominous little “Quack.”
Everything went a brilliant, burning white for those who weren't wearing blackout goggles. The boom was like thunder. People fell or fled, thinking a bomb'd just gone off. It had, but this one wasn't packed with shrapnel. It was packed with light.
“Now,” Nox said. “This is where the fun begins.”
The slaves might've been blinded, but with the eyes of the Man with the Silver Mane behind them, they could still kind of see. They charged in, swinging chains and brandishing daggers and cleavers. Nox fired his electrified grappling hooks and spun them wildly. Almost simultaneously, he cast capsules and orbs this way and that, releasing butterflies on one side and electrified sheriff stars on the other. Folk fell by the dozen, you could bet the animals they were dreaming of weren't sheep.
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