The cut came fast. The intruder's sword passed through the shoulder of one of the pair and out the hip of the other. The upper sections of their torsos, still linked by the arms, toppled forward together. Their lower bodies fell separately, and the impact on the ground jostled out a frothy stew of lungs, blood, and intestine.

  As the other girls shrieked in horror, the intruder—without pause, their path of carnage pre-determined—darted forward to the artist shapeshifted as a giant armadillo. A slash through her chest rent open her abdomen and perforated the armouring of her back as easily as wet toilet paper. When she slumped forward in a death groan, the princess doll balancing on her shoulders was yanked by her braids, kneed in the head with a crack, and slammed into the dirt. The figure then stamped on her repeatedly, each stomp making a sickening, bony crunch.

  "Pig!" Shouted a nearby girl, activating a spellshield and sprinting forward to help.

  The intruder scooped up the doll girl—limp and shell-shocked in their grip—and flung her at the would-be assistant. As the latter caught her friend, both were skewered up to the cross-guard of the sword, the spellshield ineffectual. The princess clung to the other like a frightened child to its mother’s breast as they were given a shove, dislodging them from the gore-slickened weapon.

  The intruder stepped on her face as they continued to rampage, slashing girls down, each falling in one stroke.

  A close study of their movements revealed an uncanny quality. In bursts, their speed was doubling that of the fastest girls, who were constantly being caught out in surprise, yet the intruder’s gait lacked the corresponding agility. Their stride was more befitting of an old man - a clunky, plodding, bounceless shuffle, the speed generated purely through an accelerated cadence.

  Who was this clumsy but fast psycho?

  Would the nearby ex-hero intervene in the sorority’s defence, or would he allow them to be massacred out of resentment for their parody dancing and circle jerk of insults? Had his commitment to the path of retirement truly extended that pettily far?

  Or would any of the girls, in the opportunity created by his moral dereliction, step up to fill his role, perhaps by employing their impressive dance skills?

  It was not to be a single individual but the whole group who rallied for the task.

  Ponytail, their leader, calmed them down and refocused them. Concluding from the instantaneous kills that they had a severe level disadvantage, she switched them to a containment routine designed for asymmetrical combat scenarios.

  Several girls whipped out man-catchers - lengthy polearms with a crescent headpiece lined with barbs. Approaching the intruder from multiple angles with these, they shot repeatedly to snag an arm or calf, anyone attacked retreating while the others seized the opening. Girls from behind these frontliners meanwhile tossed out disabling magic.

  The intruder once these efforts began switched to a more elusive assault, breaking free from their containments by parkouring around the caravans, returning periodically to strike a couple victims down. The extra speed made them exceptionally hard to track, the intruder leaping between roofs that the others couldn’t follow. They were sneaky in subtler ways, too, one girl chasing around a corner having the front of her face sheared off when they’d stopped and waited.

  A few girls had split off early to hunt for any potential allies that might be granting the attacker his speed through assistive acceleration magic. Although they didn’t find anyone, they did end up annoying the ex-hero, who—as it turned out—had been trying to exploit the chaos to once again gather teleportation charges undetected. Yes, apparently, he had abdicated from responsibility to this extent, falling so morally low as to allow some innocent girls to get massacred. Thankfully, karma was punishing his cowardice, and every spot he selected was soon sniffed out by one of these hunters in a variation of the earlier cat-and-mouse hijinks.

  Misfortune soon struck the other girls when the intruder managed to identify Ponytail as their leader. They turned on her suddenly, rushed her down, and zig-zagged past her guards. She tried to dodge but was just too slow. A swipe clipped her cleanly from brow to crotch, two bushes of hair springing out as the sword tore out the back of her head and severed her ponytail.

  The second-in-command was already dead, one of the earliest killed. With no leadership, the group collapsed, the intruder picking them off one by one.

  Half those remaining took flight, sprinting in the direction of the distant gathering. Horsemen had been circling in the two-kilometre stretch between them this whole time, but none of these were coming to assist, some rushing their herds away, others simply sitting in their saddles watching. To the appeals for help by the girls running to them, the riders shrugged as unwillingly as the ex-hero still searching for a hiding place.

  A dozen girls had remained to fight the intruder.

  They were rallied for one last attempt at capture by the tall Jamaican, shouting that all would be fully compensated when they stripped this cocky loner of his equipment. Several man-catchers were regathered from the corpses of their sisters. The survivors, converging from all sides, rushed the intruder at once.

  Three girls teleporting in were instantly scythed down by a sweeping horizontal cut.

  As one of the girl’s torsos slid from her waist, it was pushed aside by Big Boobs, still in the fight, who—like a soviet soldier of ancient times continuing the struggle with an ally’s weapon—took up the man-catcher in the dead girl’s grip and, with a heroic thrust, clamped the weapon’s head around the intruder’s thigh.

  Another girl snagged the neck, and the pair both began to push in opposite directions, attempting to unbalance their captive.

  The intruder, arms escaping a third girl trying to seize them with her hands, slashed at Big Boobs. She dodged sideways, but only partially, the sword clipping the front of her chest, carving off the metal plate and giving her an instantaneous mastectomy, her anterior a grotesque dribble of blood and fat.

  At the same time, the Jamaican condensed from a puff of smoke behind the intruder, her arms wrenching under their shoulders, her legs wrapping around their waist, the full weight of her seven-foot avatar added to her sisters’ struggle.

  Thus, the intruder finally lost their balance.

  It might have been a moment of heroic celebration, these brave few souls amongst the sorority successfully overcoming a stronger opponent through the powers of persistence and sisterhood.

  Alas, the Jamaican girl, feeling beneath the clothes as the intruder fell into her, feeling the bones, looked at the others in alarm. A fledgling smile of triumph flopped into disappointment.

  “Oh…” she groaned. “It’s a Necro, mon. Run.”

  Her Jamaican skull popped in a shower of shards and jellified brain, exploded by a zipping arrow.

  Some of the other members, heads snapping, traced the sound of a bowstring. In the window of one caravan, the white features of a skeleton shone grimly in the moonlight as it notched the next shot.

  One girl, feeling a rapid thudding behind her, spun around. She rotated just in time to see, sprinting from out of the darkness, a giant armadillo bone-construct, raised from the corpse of their dead artist. Before her shriek of recognition could reach her throat, the creature swiped her with its fist, and her soul was ejected from her crumbling body.

  Another girl, afflicted by a mysterious illness, hunched forward and vomited a litre of blood. More poured out of her nose and ears, and the crotch of her leggings turned dark as if she’d urinated herself.

  The girl with the man-catcher fixed to the intruder’s neck gave a horrified cry as an arrow-shaped glob of blood pierced her shoulders. An obscene nightmare flooded her mind of mass death, of tens of millions of bodies stacked in a mutilated heap. Despite the number, she somehow comprehended each corpse individually, seeing amongst them every person she knew and every person she would ever know, all bound to the same fate of the mountain. As she recognised them, they recognised her back, and, awakening from their graves, they began to plead with her for mercy and release.

  The shock caused her to ease the grip on her man-catcher, and the freed intruder—a skeleton as well—punched her head with the pommel of its sword, the front of her helmet mushing into her nose and the hallucinations of her brain.

  There was no further resistance, no heroic effort to locate the necromancer coordinating the assault. The group broke in every direction, and the members continued to be picked off by the three skeletons.

  Big Boobs, abandoning the man-catcher, shook off the enemy by zipping around the caravans, rolling under the wheels of one, boosting off an empty clothes-trunk on the ground into the window of another.

  It was in the last caravan that some higher power with a wicked—or mischievous—sense of humour seemed to intervene.

  As she sprinted for an exit through another window, her shin snagged on the jutting handle of an axe hovering at ground level. This made her trip in one direction, towards the door and out, but then a cabinet in front tipped over, knocking her back the other way. When she tried to regain her footing, her ankle caught on the blade of a sword - multiple weapons were slotted around the caravan. Although the sword wasn't empowered to cut her, it did redirect her fall once again, and her pinballing body, bouncing from collision to collision, landed right in a corner of the caravan between a bed and a dresser, a spot that would’ve made an excellent hiding place if it weren’t already occupied.

  Coming to an unexpected stop mid-air, she stared into the face of the ex-hero.

  His hands, in a further comedy, had upon reaching out found contact with two curious holds, both regrown from her destroyed chest armour.

  Ah, so this was the mysterious intention of this episode, foreshadowed if not overtly set up through the mood of romance pervading the start of the ex-hero’s retirement travels.

  It was all coming to this, an awkward first encounter with a stranger of the opposite sex. This big-breasted dancer might not be the successor hero, unable as she’d been to win her battle with a necromancer, but she could have an even loftier position as a companion in the non-hero’s non-heroic non-adventures played in tandem with the saga proper.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  The rest on their end was far too obvious: some first evenings of acquaintance as they travelled, bonding through wild explorations and the mutual grieving over failed loves, a perhaps frustrating development as both took a little too long to recognise they’d found something even better in each other. It was cliché, but clichés existed for good reason, being ultimately more satisfying than anti-climax masquerading as innovation.

  The standard next move in the romcom sequence would of course be for her to shriek and slap him for the accidental molestation, the two beginning on a hostile note.

  Not doing that, as if distracted by a bigger matter, the girl raised a finger and just dumbly pointed at him, unable to believe she was seeing the celebrity in the flesh.

  The ex-hero’s response was likewise nonchalant, his adventures having blessed him with history’s most invincible poker face.

  “Your assessment was superb, comrade Reesa,” he whispered, referring to the eavesdropped conversation. “I’m just working within the confines of the forces of production. The humanist claims are only ironic to the degree that the rest of this planet isn’t ready to embrace the next phase of the historical struggle.”

  His hands reached up from her chest, one catching her as she fell further into him, the other pressing a finger of censorship to her lips. This gesture asked that she not inform the other comrades of his presence - the eternal revolution he’d been fighting as a sleeper agent hinged on his going unrecognised by both capital and her friends.

  The girl, naturally, nodded seriously with immediate acceptance.

  What a blessed moment for the ex-hero, uncaught, unslapped, unpunished also for his cowardice. However, right at this time another girl came rocketing through a window, ricocheting off one wall and rolling next to them.

  The girl's bottom half was mangled from the attack that’d sent her flying, one leg missing, her hips shattered. But the top remained intact enough for her to give a pleasant look of surprise upon seeing the two lying on each other.

  She, like her sister, raised an arm and pointed dumbly at the ex-hero. “Yo, it’s The Tyrant!”

  As her arm and head flopped to the floor in death, the caravan echoed with the ex-hero’s sigh of frustration.

  No, he was never going to escape his new celebrity…

  Some time later, the former hero emerged from the caravan, climbing out of a window and taking a seat on the roof beneath an open view of the night sky.

  His discretion abandoned, he summoned his glass shield, the item’s strobe advertising his position. Several riders on the plains instantly fixed their binoculars on him.

  The breasty girl, Reesa if her name was recalled correctly, followed behind, covered in a cloak.

  “What exactly is the progressive alternative here?” he complained to her, finishing a random conversation. “Caste systems and mindslave armies?”

  “Exactly! But it's been impossible to convince them that you’re the good guy. They're brainwashed, too.”

  “Hmm, good guy, I don’t know if I’d go that far...”

  “There’s no need for humbleness. Anyone without an agenda would admit this setting offers little room for moral action. All you can do is what you can, right, and pray for the rest.”

  She was also voluptuous in sympathy, the pair clicking on some instantaneous level. It might have been just what the former hero needed in his retirement, luck in the strangest of places threshing out for him a new, agreeable companion, if not girlfriend.

  Who knew that it would be on the plains that he would discover his next mountains? Plural. Two of them. Breasts – big ones.

  The site around them was littered with the bodies of the other girls. As their souls floated off, a flock of vultures landed and began to peck their carcasses. The skeletons still lurking about didn’t attack the two. Perhaps intimidated by the ex-hero’s presence, they’d shaped up their behaviour and started to clean the area apologetically. They shuffled about collecting the bodies and piling them into one of the caravans. His new female companion watched the disposal with mild discomfort.

  The ex-hero, distracting her by waving his hand like a magician, produced two teacups, and he filled these with a golden liquid from a flask.

  Reesa, upon her first sip, gave a small gasp. “That’s like love.” She sipped again, more greedily. “No, that is love.”

  “What little I know of it,” he said in a tone of quiet mourning, jumping straight into the sad guy post-rejection sympathy routine – a poor opener, but he was young and should learn.

  The girl, who’d followed some of the gossip, nodded without comment.

  Sipping away, they admired the scene of the distant gathering. All the dark shapes speckling the plains seemed to hint at the great miracle of life that'd somehow blossomed in a setting so inhospitable.

  “How many of them are going to die?” Reesa asked quite randomly, the tea perhaps inducing a mood of philosophic contemplation.

  To the odd question, the ex-hero gave an odder answer. “I’m a little older than this Cycle, and I’ve already witnessed how it ends, how all our works and everyone cherishable must disintegrate. Even if one abstains from action, not one of these arranged here on the flats will have a lasting future, nor will the gods imagining they rule above - nor will I. Therefore, knowing that only desert waits for us beyond, why shouldn’t we just enjoy this moment of excitement? Why should we refuse the summons of the other, as eager as ourselves? Why shouldn’t we recall the ecstasies of entanglement and taste, for one last round, the ambrosia of the summit before it also spoils? The Cycle has already obliterated all of us. An individual can, at worst, become its agent of acceleration.”

  It must've been a circuitous way of refocusing her from philosophical abstractions to the immediate entanglements of youth and love. A satirical component of his message was missed by the college girl, older than himself but still far too young to have read a stuffy text like the Mahabharata and to recognise that he'd plagiarised his answer from a conversation between Arjuna and Krishna that'd preceded the epic's main battle. A knowledgeable laugh did seem to reply, however, from above them, from one of the circling vultures.

  “Where will you begin?” The girl Reesa asked.

  He smiled. “Where will we begin?”

  Something was nudged in the plural, a probe perhaps to whether she’d be joining his luxury travel itinerary. It was an uncharacteristically slick move from the renunciate hero, and some might say it far too brazen given the context of her friends, whose corpses monitored their flirtations with glassy eyes. But, then, again, second base had already been slid past without punishment.

  Would this move work as well? Was this love?

  The girl seemed to mull it over. Her features began to warm, like she was basking in the first rays of the dawn.

  But then, at some shifting of the wind, she gave a wince of withdrawal. The offer was perhaps too brightly intense, too fast.

  The ex-hero, who’d been studying her face, turned away with a stoic nod. “That’s really how it’s always been beyond the juvenile fixation on ideology. God, comrades, humanity – these are subordinate considerations to be mused on only after you prevail through the more basic facts of loyalty and soil. Well, no hard feelings.”

  The meaning of this gibberish was indecipherable, but it was likely a very abstract, petulant way of handling his rejection, the ex-hero flubbing everything despite the many of efforts of destiny to alley-oop him into a romance.

  The girl looked back at him in pain, her eyeballs beginning to redden, his words apparently stabbing at some private spot.

  Then—for reasons also mysterious, perhaps a delayed curse from the necromancer—she vomited a load of blood.

  The ex-hero narrowly dodged it by teleporting behind her, his former spot being drenched with spray.

  As she continued to exsanguinate, he tried to give her a comforting pat on the back, but, patting a bit too hard, he accidentally tipped her from her seat. Her body fell from the roof and landed in the dirt below with a dead thump.

  The vulture above redoubled its laugh.

  The riders on the plain with their binoculars concentrated on him all made a sudden movement, although not towards him for autographs but in retreat, as if given an order by their superiors not to disturb the ex-hero while he grieved over another flopped romance.

  A noise then sounded in the distance, travelling from the centre of the gathering. A horn trumpeted six quick low notes, followed by a sustained seventh that wailed on high and desolate, the musician pushing it out of tune as they exhausted the full depths of their lungs. As soon as it was done, it restarted, and would continue to do so for some minutes.

  For those acquainted with the steppes of Kanaru, the sound was instantly recognisable. Such alarm calls warned of a colossus roaming in a migration’s direction, giving time to organise a defence or move out of the monster’s path.

  Pandemonium usually followed, but, today, the response was impressively controlled. Other horns around the gathering responded to the call with their own, first three, then dozens, then hundreds, the noise propagating camp to camp. These were soon joined by the chest-resonating thump of drums. Lights began to flicker on around the gathering, and people came into view spilling from the caravans where they’d been sleeping. The whole collective was rising at once like some titan whose body, although composed of tiny parts, could when all was added equal the most towering of beasts. The gaps between this titan’s limbs were quickly filling out, as more and more poured forth. Its cells ran the full gamut of humanity, some pasty-white, some brown as ochre, some naked and tattooed, some clad in steel, some wrapped in toughened silks, some skinny, some fat, some tall, some squat, some men, some women, and some children, yet all were united in their purpose. All had responded to the threat with arms—even the infants carrying half-height wooden spears—and all were prepared to shake off the blanket of the earth and wrestle as a single force against whatever size of enemy approached.

  The ex-hero swept the horizon with binoculars, but he found no outline of the beast.

  Unconcerned, with no apparent intention of assisting with that challenge either—that also perhaps being a task for his successor—he finished off his tea and jumped down from the roof.

  The armadillo bone construct on the ground was scooping up the big-breasted corpse. He and it walked in step to the caravan where the other girls were piled, and the creature jammed her inside with her friends.

  The former hero tossed his cup in with her. A couple other objects went in, too, flashing out of his fingers – some clothes, a stack of loose-leaf paper, some books, including a worthless romance he’d penned the previous week about a love quadrilateral. He took his time weighing each of these before casting them in.

  His disembodied Legendary arm meanwhile had been gathering a spell. A torrent of flame gushed out of its palm to torch the caravan. All the bodies inside crackled, and they briefly emitted a sweet fragrance of barbecue before charring beyond savourability. The surface of the mural on the caravan’s side, that of the child on a driftwood raft, bubbled as the fire inside licked towards it.

  He stood near enough to feel the heat, his eyes closed in a solemn posture of prayer, although what he might be praying for or to whom was impossible to tell. Perhaps he was requesting from whatever higher powers existed for better fortunes in his journey or for a girlfriend prospect that didn’t randomly succumb to haemorrhaging.

  Most of the vultures had taken flight after the last of the bodies were packed away. One had remained, however, circling in the sky, the same bird that’d been laughing through his fumbles.

  As it began to descend towards the ex-hero, the moonlight flashed in its feathers. They were coloured a brilliant azure.

  The blue vulture came in fast, landing on his shoulder like a trained falcon. His eyes still closed in prayer, he reached a hand up to shove it off, but its carcass-gripping talons had dug in tight, and the bird, tipping for a moment, snapped back into its original place with the whip of a slingshot, even making a rubbery twonging sound.

  Four more shoves were just as comedically futile – twong, twong, twong, twong.

  When the ex-hero gave up, the vulture squawked mischievously, and then it began to speak into his ear.

  “O Bagavad of Cripples, Invincible Beneath The Heavens,” it said, “hobble me out to stand closer to these mortals, that I may behold them as the mountain’s latest offerings. I would smell the freshness of their millions before the climb, and I would pick their brains of the ambitions hijacked by an old master returning unto his glory.”

  The ex-hero gave no response to the talking bird, such creatures possibly commonplace in the world of Saana.

  With his ears tuned to the distant horns and drums, perhaps inspired by the girls crackling in the fire, he began to shuffle side-to-side in a lazy-paced dance.

  His head swayed increasingly loose upon the neck like someone working out a kink. The animation, first concentrated in his legs, rippled upwards through his thrusting hips into the slow, fanning twirl of his arms. Even if he had no girl, that latest prospect cooking, he did not dance entirely alone. His weapons—those more gorgeous belongings that would never criticise or betray him—floated from his straps and swirled about him in a fraternal constellation. Some extra friends pulsed rhythmically in and out of his fingers, and the vulture on his shoulder joined their little party with a wing-flapping, beak-swaying mambo.

  His dance resembled that parodied by the sorority, except he failed to recreate the most distinguishing feature. His face, in a wonderful change, was soft, innocent, and quietly beaming as a child’s. Might this be the benefit of retirement, of discarding all the burdens once weighing down his features? Witnessing the transformation, one could hardly fault him for the dereliction that’d forced a hunt for his replacement.

  As ever and ever more joy flowed through his carefree limbs—his smile widening and brightening, the new vulture buddy likewise jiving—he stopped suddenly. The dancing weapons retracted back to his person like the claws of a nocturnal prowler, and he vanished, teleporting onto the next leg of his luxury retirement travels.

  Unrelated to this, the sounds coming from the direction of the gathering shifted. Over the music of alarm could be faintly heard some horses screaming, that monster of the steppes arriving.