13

The snoring of a pig pulls him out of the darkness, followed by the sound of feet digging. Chester squirms as his corneas are pierced by the intense sunlight. He grunts. He notices a rough coating covering his body. He sits up, and the sand slides off him. He shakes his head to remove the remains of his hair, and shakes his glasses with his hand. Standing up, he notices the piglet squealing and circling around him. Chester asks what's going on, and for obvious reasons the animal doesn't answer, just continues to fidget. The Lancasterian scratches his temple and bets he forgot something. His eyes widen as he remembers....

"Quick, farm animal, take me to Nadjela!"

The little piglet gives a little jump of joy when Chester finally finds out, but soon returns to panic, and turns to run where the scent dictates. If I could say it, I would tell that the princess has a fresh, almondy scent.

The Lancasterian runs after the porcine creature, taking long strides, and sliding down the new dunes daughters of the storm. He spots a handful of figures in the distance. Five, one in the center, and four linked to it by dark lines. With each meter traveled, Chester became more convinced that the person in the center is the princess. The viewfinder allowed him to zoom in and fully recognize his petite companion. She was alone now, and she held her hands close together.

"Nadjela, here I am!" He calls out to her and shakes her hand.

For Nadjela, Chester is easy to identify. The girl's face is full of sadness and conflict. Such indecision leads her to cry out.

"Don't come closer!"

Chester stops, more out of bewilderment than following the order. The piglet continues on, so he too resumes his march.

"Go away, Chester! Save yourself, please!"

Chester accelerates after realizing that the black lines seen before are actually chains. Nadjela's wrists are bound by shackles, the links of which extend into different mounds of sand nearby. The piglet keeps a safe distance from these mounds. Chester ignores them directly, until a red triangle enclosing an exclamation mark, arrows, and numbers, assail his ocular field. The scope warns of unidentified human presences nearby.

The sand jumps and rains. Chester turns and covers his face with his arm. Four men appear, surrounding the swordsman. They wear full helmets, with transparent visors, and respirators that connect to oxygen tanks hidden under their dusty, tattered capes.

Incomprehensible sounds emanate from the men's respirators. Chester intuits that they are conspiring with each other using built-in intercoms.

"Nadjela, get down on the ground!" he orders. His hand closes over the hilt of the sword. The princess nods and drops to her knees, accompanied by the sow.

Links clink, a warning of movement, of crisis. Chester spins as the hooded man at his back fires from a cannon-gun, a chained shackle that darts like a snake at his neck. Chester draws. The metal-crown alloy gleams in the sun. It clashes against ignoble iron, and sounds like a mirror exploding.

Fragments of shackles and links, leap in all directions. A couple of pieces tear the Lancaster's arms. Blood spurts copiously, but he doesn't even tremble. With a furious grimace, he leaps at the man who fired.... But because of the sand he lacks the firmness to perform such feats. He falls on his face, and takes a bite out of that arid dust. He lifts his face, spits out what he can. The slaver laughs, and at the same time that he pulls out a machete to cut his sinews, Chester makes a thrust from where he is lying.

The point enters through the abdomen and sticks out half a centimeter through the back, severing the spine in two. The man falls with the embedded blade, knocking it out of Chester's hand. The Lancaster seeks to get to his feet and retrieve his weapon. No sooner does he pull his chest out of the sand than a metal claw strikes his right arm, squeezing with such pressure that it hurts his bulging muscles. A second of these throwing shackles hits his left arm, almost knocking him over. Two of the three slavers activate the mini-motors installed on their cannons. The shackles pull Chester's arms in opposite directions. The swordsman clenches his teeth. The veins in his arms swell as if about to burst. The third desert bandit approaches, and delivers a kick to his belly that forces him to his knees. Chester spits spittle. The bandit grabs his scalp, pulls, and tilts his face to his roots with heightened interest. He pulls off his mask to speak.

"Silky and shiny. Blue as the sky. All natural" he says with an opportunistic smile. Eyes under the visor move to his fallen companion. "A fucking nobleman at Larry's expense.... Sounds like a more than fair exchange"

His grimy face turns back to Chester, more specifically to the visor. He slides it up to take it from him and claim it as his own. But immediately the bandit regrets as he notices the swordsman's intense red eyes, and returns them to their place.

"Wait a minute... I have the advantage and control. Why did I dirty my suit...?" he asks himself.

He decides that the healthiest thing to do would be to kill the Lancaster on the spot, a good choice that takes too long. Chester lets out a roar.

"I can do it!"

With sheer brute force, he bends down, overcomes the traction of the mini-engines of the cannons, and delivers an accurate headbutt against the hooded man in front of him. The bandit's glasses burst, pushed inward. Both the outlaw and the swordsman fall. The former is left on his back on the dune, and the latter was pulled back by the chains.

Chester curses as he feels like a puppet held by heavy strings. Without a weapon and with subjugated arms, he understood that he was close to defeat.

"Chester!" But then the princess calls out his name. Her tearful eyes connect with his furious ones. Nadjela cries out. "Fight!"

A heat ignites in the warrior's chest. The princess's concern reminds him that he has two strong legs, and a damsel to save. He sinks his feet into the sand until the soles touch hard ground. Anchored there, he pushes his whole body forward. The muscles in his arms strain to the limit, competing against the drag of the chains. The links kept retracting towards the muzzle of the gun-barrels, slower and slower, until they stop and stop, only to start coming out in the next few seconds. Chester grunts and continues to pull. The mini-engines sob inside the gun casings. They spew sparks and smoke, with a noticeable stench of melted components. Finally they explode in the hands of the slavers, burning their palms.

The chains loosen and detach from his body. Chester leaps over Larry's corpse. He collides with Larry. He rolls in the sand with Larry. He grabs the sword wedged in Larry, lifts, and unsheathes the blood-soaked blade. In parallel one of the bandits releases a hose connected to his oxygen tanks. He removes the safety lever, opens the valve to the maximum, and as soon as he hears the whistle running, he points the hose at Chester and pulls the trigger.

A flame precedes a tongue of flame. Chester drops down. The fire passes over him, then retracts in anticipation of another ejection. Chester, after planting a knee, does the first thing instinct dictates, raises the sword above his head and, before the slaver fired again, throws it in a long movement of both arms. The katana swings and strikes the offender. The point is thrust into the sternum, and the spine turns the subject's face in two, mask included.

The penultimate slaver alive, gawking after witnessing his companion with the flamethrower fall, comes to when he feels the teeth of an animal in his leg. He looks down and discovers the piglet. A second away from sending it flying with a kick, Nadjela whips him over the head with the shackles. The bandit ends up in the sand, recovering only long enough to pantomime with his hands in search of mercy, which Chester, standing a couple of steps away, answers by skewering his skull like a skewer.

Lancaster and Princess turn their faces to Larry's last friend, the shitter. But he took the opportunity to vanish during the hustle and bustle.

"Coward" says Chester.

The rattling of the chains reminds him of the priority. He faces the girl, and waves the metalcorona blade in her direction.

Nadjela shrieks reflexively, but it was such a clean cut that it doesn't even move her. The shackles fall off her arms. With tears streaming down her face, the princess throws herself against her hero's massive chest and embraces him as if her life were at stake.

"You fool! You were almost killed!" she cries. Gratitude, fright, anger, worry. His galloping heart becomes a melting pot of emotions. "You bet your life on me!"

Chester takes a deep breath to quench his desire to chase the bandit who ran away, even to the end of the world. Even with his body and spirit on fire, he reciprocates Nadjela's embrace.

"I promised you that I would take you to your people, and I will keep it, even if I have to slice every last beast or thug in this desert. A man's word is worth its weight in gold. Or what? You wanted me to leave you to your fate? I don't do that, precious"

Nadjela doesn't answer. She remains sheltered in the warrior's chest and lulled by the beating of that strong heart. She remembers her own desperate cries, the desire of not wanting to see Chester hurt, which clashes head on with that burning hot desire for him to save her as he did. She would never admit it, but she was pleased and happy, longing for that embrace to last forever.

And the little pig? With utmost discretion and even elegance, she lets the princess and the swordsman have their moment, and goes off to nibble on the corpse of one of the fallen slavers.