Chapter 4 – Part 2 – The Moar Gault
Anrui saw the last of his students emerge. Among them was Sahren, barefooted and rosy cheeked, freshly plucked from the flowerbed of sleep. Lithe, wiry muscles bunching and contracting beneath the thick cotton of her nightgown, adrenaline surged as she sprinted to the call of her teachers, running headlong into fear.
Far from her usual plain homeliness, the farm girl had a wildness clinging to her features, a magnetism of lanky uncertainty and in the depths of summer sky eyes that held a startled, doe-like vulnerability. The first few weeks had been hard on the young woman, Anrui remembered in a disjointed moment of reverie between assaults. Shy and awkward still, slow to blossom into conversation, hiding at the back of each class, trying to disappear into the walls, now she was all action, her newly crafted kukri -the hematite blade gleaming like oil in the nightlight- gripped in a white-knuckle-tight hold. Two bands on each narrow wrist, one of moonstone and one of hematite, the stone foci clattering together as chimes with each of her coltish lopes. Nightclothes whipped behind her like a flag, a ghost, pale skinned, white gowned and ash haired, haunted rather than haunting. The Regulator’s words catching her attention, the girl fell in behind Anrui, visibly happy to be one in a group, still uncertain of herself enough to seek a place to hide in a crowd, moving with the rest as a scared child towards a parents bed during a storm.
With a sharp gesture, Anrui commanded her behind him, along with his other students, and took off toward the mass of invaders.
The assassins fall, as easily as men. More easily, in some cases. Yet still they come in scores, seeming to divide from the shadows, reaching out from the shore, streaming from a great black mass writhing against the sand.
Many students went down. Five Redcards had fallen in the first ten minutes, three Greens and only one Black. Anrui had done his job well it seems, focusing on innovation with his charges rather than rote and form. A lesson for the other Regulators; individuality breeds survivors.
A strange form rippled through the ranks of the Gault. This one, unlike the others, bore a golden dragon blazing on its mask, and deep mahogany armour. Anrui knows it too well.
“Moar Gault has come with them! I was right. Stay far away from that one!” He indicates the dragon crested assassin, which locks its steely blue eyes on his.
One of the upperclassmen makes a foolish choice.
“Emura, no!”
Anrui Frost’s call went unheeded, and the ranking Blackcard drove toward the Gault Chieftain, mists flaring around his body. A mass of greyish vapour ripped toward the indigo killer, sifting itself through water state, and crystallizing into stark grey ice. Even as the class man screamed, the ice flickered, and was shattered by the suddenly wheeling sword of the dragon-branded killer. With barely a visible move, the chieftain slammed his sword through Emura’s stomach, stopping the man dead. Literally. Sparing a glare for Anrui, the demon hauled Emura from his sword and dropped the boy to the ground with an undulating hiss – laughter.
“Use no magic against that one,” the Regulator hisses, his muscles bunching as he steps slowly forward to the silent, advancing form of Moar Gault. “He is mine. There are plenty for the rest of you.”