Last Ride of the Day

[Eralam]

"SON OF A-"

The curse was cut off by an explosion that swept Eralam, along with twenty or so of the men who were trying to kill him, off their feet. The hapless fellow who broke the Shard's fall was little more than a bag of shattered bones at this point, a side effect of the a couple of hundred kilograms of durasteel smashing into him at speeds that would have earned a ticket in a residential neighborhood.

The Shard picked himself up off his wheezing, barely alive but somehow still conscious cushion. Judging by the sound, his heart and lungs were still intact, even if everything below was crushed. It'd probably take him some time to die like that.

"Good."

Eralam was not a cruel being. He didn't particularly enjoy causing suffering. But then again, he didn't enjoy people trying to kill him, either. The little bastard had it coming.

They all had it coming.

He faced down the crowd in front of him and adjusted his grip on the silver-bladed lightsaber in his right hand. His Colt, long emptied, was held by the barrel in his left hand. The brass and walnut grips were bent all to hell from cracking one too many skulls.

The mob was armed mostly with whatever they had on hand. Axes. Pitchforks. Shovels. Improvised clubs. A very few had knives and even short swords, taken from who knows where. A few enterprising individuals had cooked up homemade bombs from fertilizer and fuel oil, and there was a smattering of Molotov cocktails as well.

If it was just five or ten or even fifty of them, the Shard wouldn't have been worried. Instead, there were closer to 500, and those were just the ones he could count. This was going to get ugly.

 

[Rusty]

"Ow. Kark me."

Rusty extricated himself from the pile of broken bodies somewhat less gracefully than the Iron Knight. His mechanical body was in poor condition before the local yokels got all riled up, and the beating he'd taken hadn't done it any favors. This Shard was best at long range, where the enemy only heard the shot if he missed.

He jacked his last five shells into the RF-12 and worked the pump, forcing a round into the chamber. The action was a little gritty, probably from the bloody mud that they'd churned up over the last few minutes of combat.

"Who the hell pissed in their cornflakes?" he asked the Iron Knight, trying his best to keep an eye on the whole crowd at once. For the moment, they were keeping their distance. The piles of corpses around the two Shards were a warning to the rest. They might overcome the robotic warriors with numbers in the end, but they'd pay dearly for the privilege. They'd work up the courage to charge again before too long, but for the moment, everyone was taking a breather.