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Chapter Text

- The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

-

It was a gray day in early spring when Nicholas the Punisher received his suicide mission.

The sky dripped thick, slow raindrops like a penitent nearly too exhausted to weep. No sun was out to shine through the stained glass windows that soared over the heads of the congregation in the cathedral. Even the candles that had been lit only emphasized the dimness. Shadows consumed the rafters and flickered in sinister shapes behind statues of tortured saints.

Along the nave, the innermost members of the God-Emperor’s sect stood arrayed in silence, their dark clothes flashing with the symbol of the Eye. Some wore simple broaches, some had it made into jewelry, and many wore it huge and proudly embroidered on their backs or chests - big enough for anyone to see from a distance, and to know and fear them instantly. The circle and vertical lines stood out shining white against a wall of black.

Nicholas stood before the altar, the sign of the Eye only newly sewn into the back of his tabard. He was going out into the world, after all, and he had to show his allegiance. The smaller patch he’d always worn over his heart had been deemed insufficient. He felt stiff and overburdened in his full gambeson, chain shirt and cowl, and tabard thick with fresh embroidery.

But he looked the part of his title. The hilt of his canvas-wrapped claymore rose over his shoulder. Sir Nicholas the Punisher of the Eye of Michael, sworn assassin-priest of the temple of the God-Emperor.

“You are to enter the forest and find the Beast Lord in whatever hide or hollow it calls home,” said the man standing before Nicholas: his mentor, Chapel. “You are to bring it forth, alive,” Chapel went on. “By whatever means necessary. You will bring this greatest of monsters, this hoarder of life and magic, to our Lord, so He may use its power to replenish the land and restore our people. You will perform this task before the harvest ends. If you fail, you will be committed to the roll of the dead at midwinter, and another sworn Eye will be chosen for the task. Do you understand?”

“I do,” Nicholas said. He breathed deep, his heart pounding in slow thuds. He kept himself steady, his face neutral.

“Then, Sir Nicholas the Punisher, go with God,” said Chapel, and touched Nicholas’ forehead with a fingertip dipped in blood mixed with oil. Chapel drew a circle, the small horizontal lines to the side, and then dragged the vertical stripes down with a firm touch. The central line on the bottom came down the length of Nicholas’ arched nose. When Chapel’s finger lifted, Nicholas looked up at him and met his eyes.

For a flickering moment, Nicholas couldn’t hide his hate. Chapel’s lips twitched beneath his gray beard, something like a smile. After today, Nicholas would be gone forever: Chapel’s chosen, his protege, his greatest mistake and worst failure.

Nicholas would go into the dark forest to hunt the snipe. Chapel expected him to die there, as everyone else had before him. Nicholas was only sorry he wouldn’t be able to take Chapel down into the dark, tangled wilderness with him.

After a beat, Nicholas turned his back on his mentor. During his years of training, that would have earned him a dagger in the back and a lecture on vigilance while he struggled not to bleed out. Today, Chapel didn’t need anything so crude as a blade to cut Nicholas deep.

Down the steps, first on Nicholas’ right, stood his fellow knight and brother, Livio the Double Fang. Livio’s long, pale hair was pulled back tight, and his expression was as gray and blank as the sky outside. The mask that covered half of his face hid the signs of his extensive modifications. More than Nicholas had ever been subjected to.

For his entire life, Nicholas had failed to keep Livio safe. From the priests who scouted the orphanage for strong children, from the beatings and the training, from becoming a killer and a pawn, from the master of alchemy and his substances - not once. Livio had been party to all of it and more. And now…

Now, if Nicholas failed, Livio would be next. It was the greatest motivation any member of the Eye had ever had for succeeding, and Chapel knew it. All that would come out of Chapel’s mouth was glory to the God-Emperor, savior of the land, but Nicholas knew what he really believed. No one in this damn organization could ever believe that Nicholas was committing to this mission out of the goodness of his heart, or belief in the cause, or loyalty to God.

Fuck you all, Nicholas thought. And fuck the land. Let it die.

But he would bring back the thrice-damned Beast Lord, alive and chained, and throw it at the God-Emperor’s feet. And when he was granted a boon after all that lifetime of slaving, he would only ask to be allowed to kill Chapel himself.

Nicholas walked stiffly down the line of his brethren, this family he did not choose and did not want. It wasn’t his idea to consider them family, even; the language of the sect demanded that he call them all Brother or Sister. The only one who was actually his brother was Livio, who had once been a kicked-bloody scrap of worthless child-meat just like Nicholas had been, back at the orphanage, what felt like a hundred years ago. When Livio had been dragged into the orphanage grounds by the militia, tossed to the dirt with his face all purpled with bruises, Nicholas had been the one to offer him a hand up. To give him half his ration at dinner. To tell him to stop crying, and to give him a rag to clean his filthy nose.

Livio would have had a better life if Nicholas had left him lying in the dirt. If Livio had never gotten so close to Nicholas, the clergy would never have paid him any mind - 

No, it was useless to think like that. And self-centered. Nicholas didn’t think he was so special that the Eye would have picked up Livio just to use as leverage against him. Livio had always been strong, after all. Showed early aptitude for fighting. Reacted well to the drugs.

Near the door of the cathedral, at the end of the line, Nicholas drew close to Father William Conrad - the sect’s Master of Alchemy. Nicholas hated the man just as dearly as he hated Chapel, but Conrad scared him in a way Chapel never had. Chapel had the fervor of a true believer and the tactics of a bully. Conrad was something more cloaked, more dangerous, and more powerful. He was a master puppeteer of human bodies, a surgeon and alchemist beyond compare. No one knew his true age. No one knew what he truly desired. It was said he had the ear of the God-Emperor himself.

Conrad held out a wrinkled hand and Nicholas slowed to a halt by him. The Father held out a small, flat pouch that clinked gently. Nicholas eyed its size and weighed it in his hand as he took it: five vials, no more.

“Be judicious,” Father William told him.

Nicholas nodded and tucked the pouch into his belt. Five more opportunities to cheat death. He ought to be trained well enough not to need them, but there was no telling what he’d find in the depths of the woods.

He stepped past Conrad, past the last of the other Eyes, and finally out into what passed for spring sunshine. As gray as it was, he still breathed a little easier outside the cathedral. He flicked his gaze upward, grateful that at the very least, if he was going to die, he would die far away from here.

What had once been a lavish church garden was now raked dirt and a few withered, broken stumps of old shrubs. Nicholas walked past the gray-brown patches, the smell of wet dirt mixed with cold manure rising up to meet him as he approached the wrought iron fence and the road beyond. The snows had only recently thawed, and the roads were slick with mud. He kept his footing by long practice.

One of the hunched, ruined figures of Conrad’s less-successful alchemical subjects was waiting for him, holding the reins of Nicholas’ horse. She stood at a respectable sixteen hands, her black coat already sleek with raindrops. She was too well-trained to panic at the mutant’s presence, but it was clear that she didn’t like it from the amount of white showing in her eyes. Nicholas took the reins from the mutant’s hand without speaking to - him? Nicholas was pretty sure this one had been a him, once.

The mutant servant slouched back inside the bars of the fence, reached out with over-long, over-muscled arms, and started to haul on the gates. Nicholas turned just enough to look back. Arrayed on the steps of the church stood Chapel, Conrad, and all the others, watching him leave with stony faces. At the very back, Nicholas just glimpsed Livio’s white hair and half-mask.

Nicholas took a deep breath, checked that his pouch of vials was firmly secured, and hoisted himself up onto his mare’s back. She snorted and shuffle-stepped, displeased with the amount of weight she’d been burdened with. But he’d lighten the load for her as soon as he could; this exit was as much for show as the giant white symbol on Nicholas’ back.

He gathered her reins in one hand and scratched his fingers into her mane with the other. “Shh, Angelina,” he murmured. “Don’t react.”

The gates heaved closed with an enormous, deep clang.

Angelina only flared her nostrils. Nicholas didn’t blink.

“Good girl,” he whispered, turning his head away at last. They wouldn’t get the pleasure of making him flinch. Never again.

Overhead, the rain began to drip a little faster.

-

The city of December was dying, but that was nothing new. The entire world was dying. It had been for a lifetime.

Nicholas had the faintest memories of green places within the city - parks and fields, trees in the churchyards. Even as recently as ten years ago, there had been grain growing just outside the city walls. But it was all blighted now, and whatever new could be coaxed out of the ground every spring always came up malformed and stunted. The people still marked time by plantings and harvests, but the seeds they planted were dried-out grit, and the fields they harvested were mostly rotten. Most of the people who had once farmed now gambled and drank themselves to death as their professions.

The known world and all its inhabitants would be long dead by now if they didn’t have the Plants, those inhuman creatures that the temple of the God-Emperor revered as angels. Plants were kept under heavy guard in their tanks of lightly glowing fluids, and they generated abundance out of nothing. Pipes attached to their tanks brought forth all sorts of needed materials - clean water, lumps of nutrient-rich protein-stuff similar to meat, oils, ores, wood pulp. It was a little disgusting, Nicholas had always thought, but he wouldn’t bite the… weird, lumpy, slimy hands that fed him.

He could not say that he found Plants angelic in any way. Suspended in their viscous fluids, they looked like eyeballs torn from sockets, their ripped ocular nerves dangling down. When they were active, they pulsed all over with bluish and pinkish markings like veins, which only enforced the resemblance.

Pink markings were bad, actually - the healthier a Plant was, the closer to a clear sky-blue its markings. But Nicholas had only ever seen a fully healthy Plant once, when he was a child. All the rest that he’d ever seen (and there hadn’t been many) were anywhere from lightly touched by pink lines, to shot through with angry red fissures that split like diseased skin and seeped like sores, staining the fluid in their tanks a dark crimson.

Whatever the blight was in the land, it affected the Plants, too. They were dying. Faster and faster every year. The God-Emperor took the ones that were on the verge of death - sent his personal vanguard out to collect the tanks and bring them back to the palace grounds, where no one ever saw them again. The Voice of the Emperor, a dead-eyed man named Bluesummers, decreed that it was to save people the agony of watching their Plants die. The Emperor took that terrible burden on himself.

The Emperor was good and generous in all things.

Nicholas wasn’t the only person around who thought that all of this was horse shit. It didn’t take a genius to see a starving, ruined landscape and think that the person who named themself Emperor of it, demanded to be worshipped as God, and killed anyone who objected, was probably fucking lying.

But. Still. Who could do anything to change it? Who, among the starving masses, could possibly change the way the world worked? The only thing Nicholas knew how to do was to protect those he could, to get strong for those who needed him to be strong. The caretaker of his orphanage-home, Miss Melanie; the kids he’d left behind there. Livio, his brother. And -

“Nicholas!”

He whipped his head to the side, finally registering the thud of hoofbeats approaching fast. He’d let himself sink too deep into glum reverie. The city walls were only a few hundred yards behind him, dead stubble of an old corn field lining both sides of the wet road. A figure on a mule came darting through the field on his left on an intercept course.

Nicholas’ heart thudded with abrupt speed, worried in a way he hadn’t been all day. He looked behind him, scanning the area with all the focus his enhanced ability and training could give him, but he didn’t spot any watchers.

Damn it, her voice had scared the shit out of him. As she drew closer, he hissed out, “Keep your voice down!”

She pulled her mule back to a trot and then a walk, catching up with him on the road at last. She was breathing hard, sweat streaking her brow, sticking her wheat-colored hair to her forehead.

“Milly…” Nicholas said despairingly.

Milly Thompson was from a massive farming family that had multiple generations living under one roof, every batch of siblings bigger than the last. It was the one major farm left in December that had never given up. They scrounged and saved and planted every seed they could find, and harvested every bit of grain that could claw its way out of the ground. For generations, the Thompsons had been known for their generosity. They would feed beggars and urchins whenever they could, which wasn’t always - less and less, nowadays, though they still tried to share what little they had.

Which was how Milly had met Nicholas, decades ago, when he was small and starving and she'd given him some bread. They’d known each other for so long, since before Nicholas had - well, it didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered anymore.

“You can’t go,” Milly said, still panting. “Please don’t go.”

Nicholas looked up the road and didn’t respond.

“Nicholas, look at me!”

He squeezed his eyes shut and then sighed and opened them. “Milly,” he said, “this isn’t a discussion.”

Her breath hitched; he could already tell from the look on her face that she’d been crying for a while. “Stop!” she said. “No, I don’t mean - I mean, just here, stop here, stop riding. Whoa, Angel, sweet girl.”

“Don’t -“ Nicholas grouched, as Angelina turned her nose and her front hooves towards Milly’s beckoning. Milly had spoiled this horse rotten every chance she’d gotten since the sect gave her to Nicholas six years ago, and for that reason Milly was the only other person Angelina would obey.

Milly dug in her satchel and leaned over her own mount’s neck to hold out a sad-looking carrot. “Hm, Angel?” she asked, making Angelina swerve even more.

“Stop that,” Nicholas said, finally digging his heels in and bringing his horse to a stop. Angelina grabbed the carrot and lipped at Milly’s hand to look for more before crunching down on it.

Milly pulled her mule - Tomas, Nicholas thought, that was old Tomas the mule - to a halt as well, and swung her leg over so she could drop to the ground. She was wearing her long, light brown skirts tied up to keep them out of the mud, and her dusty-green bodice and shawl were fixed in place with pins. She pushed damp hair out of her face, looked up at Nicholas with her wide hazel eyes, and said, “At least you have to say goodbye to me properly.”

He cracked. She was worth so much more than - than anything he could ever give her. He had loved her for so long it felt like another vital organ in his body, something that just functioned day-to-day and didn’t bear thinking about until something went terribly wrong. And right now, he’d been stabbed in it.

Nicholas had meant to go on a bit further before he dismounted and changed, but now was as good a time as any. He heaved himself off Angelina’s back and thumped down into the mud, splattering his newly-shined boots.

At once, Milly was in his arms. He hugged her back, gripping as tightly as she did. “I’m sorry, Mills,” he told her, “I’m sorry, I have to.”

“I know,” she said, wobbly-voiced and hoarse. “I know but I don’t have to want you to, I don’t have to be okay with it.”

“I’ll do it,” he said. “I promise, I’ll do it and I’ll come back. Summertime, watch for me. I’ll be back so soon you’ll never notice I left.”

“Don’t,” she hiccuped, “don’t promise anything, just -“ But she cut off with a choke, and let herself go. She sobbed into his tabard, her grip made awkward by his armored bulk. He hated that the last time she’d get to hug him, he was cold to the touch. He held her for a long time.

“Milly, you know I have to do this for -“

She finally raised her head, that old defiant fire in her eyes, and she sniffed and said, “Don’t tell me why. I know all the reasons why.”

He nodded.

She wiped her wrist under her nose and stepped back, looking down to pull her satchel in front of her. She coughed to clear her throat. “Here,” she said. “I made you sandwiches.” She pulled out a neatly wrapped bundle and pressed it towards him.

He’d sworn he wouldn’t cry. And he wasn’t going to, he just…

“Would you,” he said, hoarse, “stay and eat them with me?”

Milly closed her eyes and turned her face to the sky, her mouth twisting in misery. “No,” she said, finally. “They’re for the road. If I stay with you too long, I’ll - I’ll knock you out and hide you in the barn, and then we’d be in such trouble.”

Nicholas burst out a wet laugh at her. “We?” he asked. “I don’t think I’d be at fault for that.”

“Well, you’d have let me knock you out!” Milly said, nostrils flaring.

“I would have?”

“How else would I manage to knock you out if you didn’t let me?”

“You sell yourself short, big girl, I think you could take me,” Nicholas said.

Her face scrunched up in a smile she was clearly trying to resist. “Stop,” she said, pounding her fist onto his chest. “I’m mad at you. Stop it.”

“At me?” he asked, holding the package of food in one hand and raising the other to cover hers.

She looked at her tanned hand beneath his black glove, twisted her wrist and twined their fingers together. “No,” she said. “Not at you.” She looked up at his forehead. Then she tugged a handkerchief out of her skirt pocket with her free hand and raised it to wipe the bloody, ritual markings off of his face. 

He could feel the warmth of her hand through the cloth. He closed his eyes under her firm touch. “Milly,” Nicholas said, “watch out for Livio. Best you can. Please?”

He opened his eyes in time to see her nod. She met his gaze, her eyes burning with pure intent. “Nicholas D. Wolfwood,” she said, softly but firmly, “you have to promise me you will do everything in your power to stay alive.”

His stomach lurched at the sound of his real name. Those in the Eye forsook their family names and took the titles their mentors gifted them. Wolfwood was the name of a father and mother Nicholas had never known, a home he’d never lived in. He didn’t even know what the D was supposed to stand for - it was just part of a faded name written on a piece of paper he’d been left with, sometime in his forgotten past. He’d given that paper to Milly years ago and made her promise to burn it.

He believed she kept her promises, but clearly she’d never burned it from her mind. She took back her hand, reached into her satchel again, and pulled out the other thing he’d given her along with the paper - the only other thing he’d been left with as a child. It was a crude pewter casting of a wolf. He’d told her to sell it, but he hadn’t made her promise about it.

He gave her a despairing look. “Milly -“

She took his empty hand, pressed the figure into it and closed his fingers in a fist. “Don’t give me that look,” she said. “I don’t care. You aren’t what you think they turned you into. If you were, you wouldn’t still love me.”

Nicholas winced. That was very much part of the reason why Chapel considered him a failure.

“You’re going to be all right,” Milly told him. She mustered a smile, eyes shining. “Be safe. Come home.”

“Not going to tell me to save the world?” Nicholas asked.

She shook her head, still smiling. “I can’t ask that,” she said. “No one should ever ask one person to do that. It’s not fair.”

“No,” he agreed, clenching the figurine in his hand.

She sniffed hard, scrubbed her hands over her face, and made herself laugh. “Okay. Well! Little-Big Sister and Little-Little Brother need the mule this afternoon, so I should get back.”

“I know their names by now,” Nicholas said with a half-smile. “You don’t still have to call them that.”

She waved him off, turning to Tomas the mule and pulling herself onto his back. “I put some treats for Angel in with the sandwiches,” she said, rubbing Tomas’ ears.

“Her name’s Angelina,” he grouched, and she laughed at him.

“I’ll see you when you get back,” Milly told him, meeting his eyes again for a brief moment before turning and hupping on the reins to move up to a trot. In that glance, he saw her resolve wavering. He saw the very real possibility of her knocking him out and dragging him to her family barn. It made his stomach hurt.

Nicholas watched her go for too long, words stuck in his throat. He loved her. Like a sister, maybe, but also like he never wanted to live in a world without her, and like he wanted to keep her safe and feel her warmth every day for the rest of his life. It would be easier if it were lust, this feeling, but it wasn’t. It ran deeper than that. She was the best and sometimes only friend he’d ever had. If he had to die to save her life, he’d do it a million times over and ask for more.

So. Milly. Livio. Melanie and the orphanage.

They would have to be reasons enough to succeed at the impossible.

He finally let out a long, cleansing breath and turned back to his horse. He tucked the wolf figurine into the bundle of food, opened one of his saddlebags and pushed the bundle inside. Then he went to the other bag, tugged loose the straps, and hauled out his normal cloak. It had once been black, but was now charcoal gray with time and wear. He tossed it over Angelina’s back and spent the next ten minutes wrestling his way out of the top layer of his clothes.

He wished he could toss the chain shirt and cowl away entirely, but they were worth too much to just leave behind. He murmured apologies to Angelina while he stuffed the mail and flashy tabard into the saddlebag, weighing it down and filling it to bursting. He felt like he could breathe again in only his undershirt, white linen shirt, and black gambeson. On top of those he tossed the dark cloak around his shoulders, and fastened it with the clasp made from bent and twisted horseshoe nails that Milly’s Big-Big Brother (oldest of nine siblings, and an accomplished smith) had made for him. He re-slung his sword across his back, pulled his hood up, and kicked his clean boots into the mud again for good measure.

Once he was satisfied that he actually looked and felt like himself, he hoisted himself once more onto Angelina’s back. She was still displeased with the weight distribution, but he wouldn’t push her hard today. He knew that a normal walking speed would bring them alongside low cliffs to an overhang where they could spend the night somewhere dry and out of the wind. The edge of the forest was another week beyond that, five days if he rushed - but he had no reason to rush.

He had until harvest time. Seven months, generously speaking. The woods were known to be wide and deep and filled with dangers, but he was more than a match for monsters. Milly could never know what all Conrad and Chapel had done to him, the sort of predator they’d shaped him into. Just because the last several elite members of the Eye of Michael to be sent on this mission had never returned, that gave him no reason to worry. He knew he was better in combat than all of them combined.

Nicholas the Punisher clucked his tongue and thumped his heels. He didn’t look back until the walls of December were long, long out of sight.

-

Three days along the East Road, Nicholas entered the largest of December’s outlying settlements. Inepril had once been a thriving place of vast fields and thousand-head herds of well-fed livestock. Now it wallowed in its own filth and misery, its fields cracked and muddy. The animals that remained looked ill.

Still, it was the only opportunity Nicholas was going to get to trade, and he’d been taking stock of his belongings and making his mental list for days. He hadn’t been allowed to pack his own bags for the mission - the sect had done it for him. Probably directed by Chapel, whose personal asceticism and religious fervor were not Nicholas’s style.

It took a grueling day of haggling, sweet-talking, and well-placed moments of intimidation, but after eight solid hours in Inepril’s sorry marketplaces, Nicholas had managed to resupply himself to his own satisfaction. The chain shirt and cowl, metal bracers and greaves, and unsalted blocks of hard tack were all gone. The leather bracers and gloves he traded for were old and broken in, which made them far preferable to the stiff new things he’d been sent off with. The armorer was so pleased with the trade that she threw in an extra belt, some scrap leather for boot repairs, and a bottle of leather oil.

More important than the gear, however, were the rations. He’d be damned if Chapel could force him to engage in self-flagellation in the form of flavorless, barely digestible hard tack for the next several months. What were the Eye going to do to him for rejecting their supplies, anyway, punish him? Hah. The rock-hard biscuits traded decently for a few pounds of waybread that at least had salt in it. After a fair amount of arguing, he came away with a saddlebag stuffed with waybread, jerky, dried fruits, some hard cheese, and even a sack of boiled-sugar candies flavored with herbs.

By far the most precious thing he managed to get hold of was the one vice that Chapel had never even tried to beat out of him: tobacco. The rest of his supplies mostly came from Inepril’s still-functional Plants, but no Plant had ever produced tobacco or alcohol. It was like the angels disapproved of human vices. Nicholas used the only real money he had on him to haggle for a pound and a half of dried, packed leaves, probably from two or more harvests ago at this point but beggars couldn’t be choosers. He’d have to be stingy to make it last.

The very last of his coin went to a hamper of hay that he strapped to Angelina’s back, leaving no room for himself. This was another part of the sect’s petty cruelty: no pack animal, only his mount. Which, realistically, meant that she had to be the pack-bearer and he had to walk. Plus they’d provisioned him lightly on the assumption that he could hunt to feed himself, and that his horse could forage, with no proof that either would be possible. Bastards.

The sky was dark purple and the sun nearly down when Nicholas finished checking over his new supplies and securing them for travel. Considering how many hackles he’d raised with his bartering, he had no intention of staying in Inepril overnight. That was asking for trouble. Besides, he had no money left to rent a room. He knew the road here fairly well, and there was a campground for caravans some four miles east - he could make that easily, even in twilight.

“C’mon, girl,” he murmured to Angelina, clucked in his cheek and held her lead over his shoulder as he turned to leave town.

The chill of lingering winter bit down with the falling darkness like a jaw slowly closing around him. Nicholas pulled his new gloves on and his hood up, but the chill was damp and creeping. He trudged, eyes peeled for trouble, as the sun finally slipped out of sight and the purpled bruise of the sky went completely black. There were just enough clouds to make a glimpse of stars or moon a rarity. The night air felt close and muffled.

Nicholas heard the thuds of approaching footsteps long before the men making them came into view. He had plenty of time to flex his joints to make sure he had easy range of motion, and to crack his knuckles quietly. He murmured, “Alert,” to Angelina, and her ears went wide to the sides to listen. She would either attack or fall back on his next command. She snorted, her breath steaming softly in the dark.

Eight men bristling with apparent weaponry stepped out into the road from behind a rise on his right. Half of them were burly with muscle, a head or more taller than Nicholas; three of the others held crossbows. The last one stepped to the front - an average man with a mild demeanor, a pitchfork held in one hand but pointed downward as though he didn’t want to use it. This one smiled at Nicholas and said, “‘Lo there, traveler.”

Nicholas’ hand was already raised to his shoulder, holding Angelina’s lead. In the dark, none of the men noticed that he let it go. Looped up into a loose knot, it didn’t fall all the way to the ground, just swung by her chest. Angelina let out another short breath, staying put. Good girl. Nicholas kept his hand where it was, knuckles touching the hilt of his sword.

“No,” Nicholas said flatly.

The leader of the men raised an eyebrow. The moon decided to peek out from behind the clouds just long enough to show a clearer image of the gang. Gang was a generous word, really: they were malnourished townsfolk puffed up on hot air and the threatening image painted by sharp metal flashing in moonlight. They’d been audible in the brush for half a mile. Most of them had growling stomachs and bad lungs; one had a limp. Every one of them was holding at least three things they might use as weapons, but were guaranteed to trip themselves up trying to use any given one of them. Two of the ones holding crossbows were absolutely going to fall over from the recoil, standing the way they were.

“I suppose we don’t even need to have this conversation, really,” said the leader. “But I do find it curious. Yet another man of the cloth headin’ out east into the meat grinder without even pausing to ask what happened to the last ones.”

Nicholas didn’t say anything. His fingers slid silently around the hilt of his sword, elbow never wavering. He looked like he was still just holding his horse’s lead.

“Curious?” the leader prodded.

“Not really,” Nicholas told him. “And I’m not wearing any sign.”

The leader shrugged. “I don’t need to see that thing you call an eye to know who you are,” he said. “It’s how y’all hold yourselves, really. And no one else rides around on four hundred pounds of healthy stew meat like that.” He nodded at Angelina, and the other men hefted their weapons and took half-steps forward.

Nicholas let out a small sigh. “You’re still standing, which means you were smart enough not to challenge the others who came through,” he said.

The leader laughed and shook his head. He reached into his leather jerkin and pulled out a small cloth object that caught the moonlight. It was a stiff oblong on a string, black, painted with the Eye of Michael. Nicholas’ eyes widened as he recognized that it was an eyepatch.

“Was she here two years ago or three?” the leader asked the rest of the men, showing off.

“Three,” said one of the big guys.

“Right. Last year it was that scrawny guy with all the spikes.”

Nicholas narrowed his eyes. “You didn’t kill Cyclops or Mine.”

“Didn’t we?” the leader said, twirling the eyepatch on its string.

Nicholas gave a little half-shrug, relaxing his shoulders, and his grip on his hilt solidified. The Punisher was too big for a sheath; he kept it wrapped in thick canvas bound with leather straps. The straps all connected via a central line to a tension spring mechanism that was currently resting under his thumb. “No,” he said. “You scavenge any bodies you find at the edge of the woods, I assume.”

The leader’s expression didn’t change, but one of the crossbows was re-gripped in angrier hands, and one of the big guys scowled. Nicholas was right. But they’d gotten cocky. They couldn’t scavenge every traveler; some probably got too far into the forest for them to follow. So why wait? Saved them time and effort to just take out their prey right on their doorstep.

Nicholas let out an annoyed breath. Why him? Why couldn’t they have tried to stop Dominique instead? At least she’d have enjoyed what was about to happen, whereas to him it felt like a chore and a waste.

“Only going to say this once,” Nicholas told them. “Get out of the road. You want to try to find my corpse out east in a month or so, knock yourselves out.”

“Naw,” said the leader, taking a step backwards. “By then that stew meat won’t be so tasty, I think.”

“Angelina, hie,” Nicholas said, voice sharp, and she whinnied, spun, and took off back down the road towards Inepril. At the same moment, Nicholas’ thumb squeezed, a spring depressed, and a flurry of taut snaps popped loose. Canvas blew clear and Punisher was swinging in a wide arc around Nicholas’ right side while his left foot slid behind him to counterbalance the weight.

Three bolts clanged off his sword’s broadside, and two voices yelped as their owners fell on their asses in the mud. The third guy was a hunter, maybe, or a guardsman, because his footing was good and he was already fumblingly fitting another bolt into the lath. Nicholas decided to leave him for last, because he might have the sense to run away.

The thing was, no one expected someone Nicholas’ size - which wasn’t small, but wasn’t outstanding - to be not only able to wield a claymore, but to wield it with such speed and accuracy. Punisher whipped through the air so hard and fast that the wind let out a faint shriek as it was sliced apart. The sheer weight and cutting force of the weapon went through leather and flesh like butter, and even chain or plate only slowed it for a moment.

None of these guys had chain or plate.

The wet-meat sounds of blade in flesh were drowned out immediately by the screams. Usually Nicholas used a lot of rebound momentum when he fought, keeping his body tight and low behind the bulk of his weapon while he let it pull him into faster and faster motion. But that was when he was training against opponents who could actually challenge him. With these guys, there was no rebound because there were no parries, there were no return blows. None of them had a fucking chance in hell, and anyone who hadn’t been half-starved and crazed with desperation would have known it.

The encounter was short and brutal. The last of the screams cut into abrupt, bubbling silence as Nicholas planted the Punisher’s point down into a muscled neck. He jerked it back up, leaving the head attached by no more than a few tendons.

Two men remained: the leader, and the one who knew his way around a crossbow. To them, Nicholas said, “Now you got six less mouths to feed. You’re welcome.”

The leader staggered backwards and dropped his pitchfork. Nicholas smelled hot piss mixed in with the blood and sewer-smell of split intestines. “What kinda fucking church men are you monsters,” the leader croaked out.

“Merciful ones,” Nicholas said. He whipped Punisher down through the air hard enough to fling most of the blood and viscera off of it, then held his fingers to the sides of his mouth and let out an ear-splitting whistle. In the distance, he heard Angelina neigh.

He walked back to find the wrappings for his sword. When he turned again, canvas and leather tossed in a bundle over his shoulder, it was to the sight of the crossbow aimed - remarkably steadily - right at his head.

Nicholas sighed. “I thought you had sense,” he said.

“Sense enough to know there’s an effective range for that thing,” the crossbowman said. His voice was shaking but his hands weren’t. “And I’m outside it. But you’re well within mine.” His finger moved to the trigger.

Nicholas said, “Go home.”

“I’ll just starve,” the man said, thin and dry.

Nicholas’s mouth twisted. Turned out the crossbowman had too much sense. He was a realist, and Nicholas could almost respect that.

The crossbowman turned his aim slightly to the side, looking over Nicholas’ shoulder, to where hoofbeats were approaching.

He’d been right that he was outside the range of Punisher, but surely he wasn’t fool enough to think that a claymore was the only weapon Nicholas had on his person. The crossbowman’s hands twitched when Nicholas’ throwing knife thunked through his eye, and the trigger released, but the bolt went high and wide.

Off to the other side of the road, the leader of the gang had been trying to get further away. At the crossbowman’s abrupt demise, he yowled in terror, tripped, and fell to one knee, struggling immediately to get back up and run. Nicholas had plenty of time to walk to the crossbowman and pull his knife out before the leader got on his feet again.

“Please,” the leader said, “please, please -“

Nicholas pointed his knife down at the crossbowman, said, “The only one who probably deserved better was this guy,” and threw the knife again.

The night settled once more into muffled stillness. Nicholas let out a long breath, feeling heavy and sick about the entire encounter. There was no other way it could have gone, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. It was just how the world worked.

He collected his knife, the most well-kept of the crossbows and every last bolt he could find. Then he stuck his hands into blood-filled pockets to see if there was anything else worth taking. Nothing. One guy had what appeared to be a hand-whittled carving of a… duck? Rabbit? It was pretty bad to start with, and now it was all smeared with red. Nicholas shoved it back in his pocket, hoping it would help someone identify his body once anyone came down this road looking. If they ever did.

Nicholas wiped his hands off as best he could on his pants, went over to Angelina and murmured praise to her flickering ears. She was scenting the air hard, whites showing in her eyes, aware of the presence of violent death. “You’re fine, girl, you’re fine,” he told her, rubbing her neck in long strokes until she settled. “Let’s get going.”

Cleaning and re-wrapping Punisher would have to wait for dawn. The best he could hope for tonight was to press on for another couple of miles, get Angelina fed, find a slightly softer patch of dirt to sit down, and try to doze with one eye open in the event of a followup mob. Maybe treat himself to a smoke.

Honestly, he was ready for the forest. For monsters, not people. To leave this cursed, bloody world behind, and be able to focus on his mission.

That was all that mattered now, the mission. If it was real… if by some God-forsaken stretch of the imagination, he really was going into hell to try to bring out the key to saving the world from starvation, then that was the only worthwhile thing he could offer guys like the crossbowman.

But he didn’t really believe it. And until he did, the most worthwhile thing he could offer was a quick, painless end.

He trudged on, blood drying thick and stiff on his hands.

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