What follows is the third installment of The Green Knight, written for the #SwordsofStValentine event. Please enjoy.

The Harvest

Mayhawk turned back to Hillman, whose eyes were still fixed on the spot his guard had been standing at only moments before. A look of horror transitioning to anger was on his face. His knuckles whitened as his hands former ever tighter fists.

“Not for three generations,” he growled, “has the Blight dared to reach out one of its fetid tendrils into the forests of the Freehold.”

“Would you accept the aid of a visitor in reminding them why that was a sound policy?” asked Mayhawk. His eyes carried a twinkle that the Freehold headman could not quite interpret. Almost it struck him as mirth, or eagerness. Possibly both. Hillman found that he didn’t much care what particular motivation drove the newcomer to offer help. He simply nodded, and then stalked off roaring orders to sound the alarm and organize the defense.

An old, hand-powered siren wailed to life somewhere back beyond the treeline that had been maintained within the walls. In what seemed an instant, teams of green-and-brown clad Freeholders emerged from beyond the narrow woods. Some carried ammunition boxes, others lugged bipod-mounted guns that danced with the boundary between firearm and artillery, while others still came with cases out of which emerged weapons whose design was born of unnumbered generations of necessity. Nearest to him, Mayhawk noted a boy with irregular facial hair making his final checks on what might have started life as a massive handgun, but which now sported a shoulder brace and some type of semi-automatic feeding system attached to a drum magazine of what he was pretty sure was the present-day equivalent of .50 BMG rounds.

Within less than a minute, the defenses of the settlement had reacted, holding the gate in a semicircle of pent-up death. The steel of the door screamed again in protest as it was dragged still further along its track toward opening. Time seemed to slow to a near standstill and the Freeholders waited for the first sign from the malice skittering on the other side of the wall.

He shook his head. He remembered the Brownings, and the flintlocks before them as well as the smart guns that came after; but he had never cared to use them in place of the thing at his hip. He considered the word "tool" for a moment. Then he relented and smiled to himself. The word was "friend".

"Though we don't often speak the same language," he murmured, feeling an answering warmth from the scabbard at his hip, concealed beneath his duster, "we get by well enough." The sound as he drew he blade out by its leather-wrapped handle was musical in pitch. The crossguards arched gently in the direction of the blade tip, which stood out at the end of three full feet of metal sharpened to twin edges and polished to a mirror's shine.

Time sped back up as the door made one final grating lurch, and the gate was open. There was a trumpeting bellow that half-deafened the waiting men. Moments later, a massive hooked horn shot through the gate and wrenched away a section of the concrete wall like a prybar used on old timbers. The Breacher had done its work.

In charged the mass of the Hunters, their own roars little more than chittering squeals compared to the beast beyond. They stopped roughly halfway between the wall and the Freeholders' line, rearing up on their two pairs of hind legs and unsheathing their foreclaws. The masses of tendrils at the top of their trunks drifted from side to side like some kind of anemone native to Hell. Hillman, who had taken position with a gun emplacement at the center of the line, held up his left arm in a wordless command to hold fire. The Hunters were not the chiefest of the dangers in this raiding party, and he knew it.

A few heartbeats later, and three additional Blightspawn the size of cement mixers lumbered into view. These were quite different in structure from the Hunters. The body started like a cross between a starfish and a spider, legs emerging from equidistant points along the segmented barrel of the main trunk. Higher up this flexible stalk were rows of specialized appendages for grabbing, restraining, and collecting. Bowing the body over to one side - nominally the "front" of the organism - was a large translucent sac of membranous tissue, with gill-like slits along the sides and a puckered sphincter toward the "top". At the terminal end of the body was, again, no head, but a mass of tendrils almost exactly like the Hunters. These were the Reapers, and they were the real threat.

Hillman's arm dropped and there was a nearly simultaneous discharge by the Freeholders against their attackers. Two of the Hunters fell completely apart, disintegrated by the hail of massive projectiles. Several others were maimed, if not outright incapacitated. What failed to happen, though, was for a single bullet to reach a Reaper. The Hunters did their job too well, interposing between the Freeholder positions and the Blight-born monstrosities. Despite the size and power of the rounds, the Hunters' tissue was resilient enough to slow the bullets significantly.

Then the carnage began.

Suddenly, two of the Reapers gathered themselves and leapt like springs in arcs that took them over the Hunters and the hail of bullets, and straight into the midst of the Freeholders' emplacements. Mantislike limbs batted away firearms while tentacles lolled down, wrapped around torsos, and lifted screaming men into the air. A few were skewered by chitinous spears, like meat chunks on a kebab. First one, then another disappeared as they were jammed through the sphincters of the Reapers' sacs. The disgusting tissues pulsated as the men inside struggled against the smothering walls of their horrific prisons.

Thirty seconds had passed.

Robert Mayhawk leapt into action. He ran toward the nearest Reaper. His sword hummed with a haunting resonance that was incongruous on the battlefield. Licks of white flame flickered along the edges of the steel as he ran.

Suddenly, a mostly-intact Hunter reared up, trying to intercept the human attacker. Mayhawk's body became a literal blur, and the Hunter's carapace was cloven by several bursts of intense light before falling apart into chunks. The human form came back into focus directly in front of the massive Reaper just as it drew a tentacle back from depositing another Freeholder into its vile sac.

The Blightspawn shifted away from the remains of the Freeholder emplacement toward this new threat. A mantis limb flew out at lightning speed, as the creature made to crush the brash human and neutralize him. It did not go according to plan.

"Oh, no you don't," Mayhawk called in a sing-song as he moved, faster even than his opponent. He side-stepped the heavy limb, then brought down his blade of searing fire and entirely severing the foremost segment. The Reaper lurched back and bellowed in rage as tentacles and claws shot out to destroy the source of its pain.

It was too late for such measures, though. Mayhawk's blurred form was already darting in toward the main body. First one flash, then another, and two of its segmented legs fell away. The Reaper staggered, struggling to regain its balance as it was attacked with a speed beyond anything within its experience. Mayhawk moved with an inhuman speed. He was everywhere at once, and the blade of blinding white that he swung tore gouges in the vast bulk as he worked his way toward his objective. In no time, he straddled the arched spine of the monstrosity. He came back into normal focus as he delivered his final two strokes - the first severed the collection sac from the beast's trunk, causing it to slide off its back and onto the forest floor; while the second blow severed the tendril mass completely, making the whole thing crumble and fold into a lifeless mass.

Mayhawk deftly leapt from the carcass as it fell, and with two precisely-delivered strokes cut an opening in the sac which freed the imprisoned men, who were coated in a foul-smelling mucus, but otherwise substantially unharmed. A little distance away, the second Reaper was being disassembled by the remaining Freeholders. It seemed that one of the men that beast had taken carried a robust knife on the order of a machete in size, and had succeeded in cutting his own way free. This liberated both himself and his fellows - those who had been captured without being speared - distracting the Reaper and enabling Hillman's surviving emplacements to deal enough damage to effectively kill it.

The survivors turned their attention to the final remaining Reaper just as two unexpected things happened, nearly simultaneously. The first was that the Reaper made what seemed a desperate and futile leap for the tree line beyond which lay the inner parts of the settlement. The second thing is that an even more massive, chitinous bulk blew through and over a twenty-foot length of the concrete wall centered on the ruptured gate. Covered in wicked horns and barbs, the size of five Reapers, and protected by segmented armor harder than steel, the Breacher entered the fray.

I hope you enjoyed this introduction so far. You may find links to all the installments of this story here as it unfolds.