17

El Ahorcado was a famous Mexican soldier of the Earth Nations Alliance. His real name: Juan Ramos Escopetas. He was famous for launching himself in an exoskeleton and jetpack from Allied ships, with a long rope wrapped around his arm. He clung to enemy machines like a tick, and used the drills with which he was equipped to open the cockpits, proceeding to grapple and throw the rope around the necks of his adversaries, and then kick them into the void.

It was demoralizing for the nobles to see their fellows hanging like piñatas over the battlefield. 22 confirmed kills brought Juan glory, and he celebrated each return to his homeland with taco banquets, mariachi bands, and gallons of tequila. When the ANT requested him to fight in the Australian pacification campaigns, the dark-haired man with the bushy mustache was still drunk and thinking of Fabiola, Don Dominico's daughter, whom he remembered with love and longing for the softness of her tits like little peaches. Juan, blind with passion and beer, accepted the mission. He was just thinking about it when he was falling, and one end of the rope slipped off his arm, the length of which became entangled in the wing of a fighter that was flying overhead.

"Ay, no mames" said El Ahorcado before being pulled at ten times the speed of sound. His eyeballs popped out of their sockets, and his ribs popped. Panic and pain drove him to jerk, and in the jerk the rope was tied around his neck. The rope tightened, and after a cracking sound drowned out by the outbursts of battle, Juan lived up to his wartime nickname and hung. Two minutes later the fighter carrying him was shot down with a cannon shot. The burning wreckage hit the valley.

...

Nadjela discovers a blackened skeleton tucked into the rubble, a good portion of the rope surrounding the stiff still usable. The princess, hands clasped, asks permission to take the rope. John neither answers nor complains. Nadjela delicately uncoils the rope and runs back to Chester.

They sit the slayer down and tie her hand and foot, against the knees of an overturned titan. Nadjela still finds it hard to understand how this young woman, sweet-faced in her sleep, could be the same sinister killer who threatened them.

(The women in the sky are so peculiar...)

After comparing the blue lion to that woman with cloud-like skin and hair of fire, Nadjela suffers a twinge of envy. It is clear that these two share the same plane or the same world.

"She is wounded..."

"She is top" Chester says. "Help me remove that armor"

Nadjela contemplates the armor as a mystical treasure, and Chester sees it as a very big problem. Pulling it would not work, it is technology that clings to its owner, and to make it yield, you have to know where to cut. The nobleman stands next to the redhead and moves her hair. He notices the bruise on the back of her neck, but pays little attention to it, and slips the sword through the collar of her breastplate. He slides the blade without damaging the back, and applies a gentle levering motion to dislodge the spine of the machine from the girl's back. When the suit system does not recognize the wearer, the joints open and the claws retract.

The swordsman pulls out the pieces and, one by one, passes them to Nadjela to throw into a corner. Nadjela is amazed at how heavy they are, and more so when considering how fast the girl was moving. In the heavens do women keep the strength to fight against men? The questions went further, did the woman have a need to fight, instead of staying in the safety of the home caring for children and the elderly?

(Trying to understand is useless... She doesn't even look like me! She doesn't even look like I. Maybe she even has a tunnel snake!)

She abandons that last theory, because removing all the armor leaves only a tight-fitting black suit like a glove, too tight for a penis. The fabric must possess some special quality, because it helped seal the wound left by Chester's lunge.

The hunter is agitated and opens her eyes slowly. She shows a cloudy look of one who is slow to identify what surrounds her. Her eyes are ablaze with fire and panic. The fire is transported to her voice, transforming itself into a very pronounced, violent accent, which Nadjela hears for the first time.

"Son of a thousand...! What are you planning, you filthy man?!"

The nobleman and the mercenary woman confront each other's faces. Chester wants to speak, but the woman steps in front of him.

"You're going to rape me, eh, cocky?! I hope I hit you something! You're like a baboon's ass and smell twice as ugly!"

The Lancasterian shows his palms.

"Hey, relax! Nobody's raping here! I just need answers"

The huntress rolls her eyes.

"My mother didn't raise a fool and my father didn't raise me at all! After I tell you what I know, you'll throw your hands around my neck, or who knows? Maybe first you'll get your little whore to perform some obscenity on me. Go ahead, faggot, I dare you to do it if you've got the balls!"

The princess moves back a couple of steps without stopping hugging the little pig, intimidated by the intense attention that the slayer throws at her, feeling devoured, because in her eyes she recognizes the lust of mens.

"Hey, you! Look at me" Chester snaps his fingers in the mercenary's face to regain her attention. He gets it, but her face, though pretty, is in the mood of a dog. "I'm not going to kill you. Hurting women and children is against my values as a warrior"

"You really hit me hard in the head, what happened to your values there?"

"You wouldn't stop, you had crazy eyes"

The predator nods a couple of times, agreeing with him, but also snorts.

"Forgive my life for having a vagina.... What an idiotic mentality"

"I'm Chester Lancaster, the biggest idiot you've ever met!" He points to himself with his thumb so there's no doubt. "Now speak"

She sighs, looks up at the cloudy sky, meditates for several seconds, decides, takes a breath, lets it out, and begins to relate.

"I already said it, I am the death.... Or rather, I am the hunter who chases death"

She explains that several years ago, in the Soviet Union, she met a blind fortune-teller who prophesied the end of her life.

"Come on, a communist doll" Chester interrupts.

"Your grandmother is a communist, you filthy dog. I was born, raised, and bred in the Reich. Always ready to give death and receive it"

"The country of the funny mustache?"

"You mess with my führer again, and I swear I'll cut you!" A vein bulged in his forehead, and for a moment his face was as red as oozing blood. Nadjela, with a torn piece of her dress, kneels beside the German and gently wipes the blood from her. The hunter observes her in silence, the agitation in her breathing and the aggressiveness in her gaze diminish as she understands that the tribal does not seek to harm her.

"We don't want to offend... Just answer our questions, please"

"It's a sensitive subject, I get it, sorry" Chester says. "But what were you up to in the north?"

The Germanic woman returns her attention to the lion.

"What else is there to do in the ass end of the world? The fact is that the fortune-teller predicted that I would die under the buttocks of a beautiful woman. Since then I go from battlefield to battlefield, fighting without fear of losing my life because I know that there is no man on Earth capable of killing me. My heart only gets excited and beats at maximum speed when I am under a delicious female"

In the course of those words he rolls his eyes at Nadjela, specifically at her thighs, hips, and ass. The princess endures the urge to hide, and continues to treat her.

"That's my story. Enemies are only there to be defeated one after the other and, while we're at it, earn cash with labor"

"Gold?"

"Copper, aluminum, platinum, metalcorona, any metal worth anything. And yes, in this particular case I was paid in gold"

"So someone hired you to hunt me, Chester Lancaster, the blue lion, the rider of the north star, the man without fear" he says with a smirk. "It just backfired on you, and badly!"

The huntress bursts out laughing.

"Another nobleman with a sun complex.... No idiot, you're not my prey, she is"

She points her head at the princess. Chester and Nadjela exchange glances, both equally confused.

Why would anyone want to kill her, how could a girl, just out in the world, keep enemies? They think of the slaver who escaped them. The Lancasterian asks the huntress for details, and she assures him that her client was not a chainswain, but a tribal. From which village?

"I don't know, all savages look the same to me. Although..." She looks up at the sky, where she glimpses a hawk fleeing from the incipient storm clouds. Two raindrops fall on his face, he doesn't blink. "The guy was wearing a ridiculous disguise.... A cape and a helmet adorned by brown feathers, with a beak on the forehead like bone"

"What do you say, Nadjela? Do you know any tribesmen with bird-like looks?" Chester asks, and when he turns around discovers the princess looking very pale.

Despite her frightened expression, Nadjela shakes her head, rejecting the idea, even if it fits the appearance of Zell in his champion's mantle. Such a hypothesis, besides being horrible, must be false. Either the mercenary is lying, or she is referring to another tribe.

(That must be it... Zell is my father's most loyal warrior, and my sister's favorite lover. For him to want me dead would be madness, a fantasy)

Nadjela tells Chester that she doesn't know who the huntress is referring to, and that she is sure that when they return to the village, her father will help them solve such a mystery.

"Now that I know there's a crazy bird chasing you, I won't be at ease if I leave without fixing that first"

The princess's heart is comforted by such words, but with little chance to enjoy the comfort, raindrops hit her head.

The water bounces off the battered metal, and slides away transformed into thousands of streams that soften and fill the earth. Chester already had the swampy red water above his ankles, and the huntress complains loudly about getting her ass wet.

"Get up there!" Chester shouts, but between the pounding of the rain and the thunder, Nadjela hears little. Nor did she need to hear him to understand the urgency, she goes after him and climbs up with the pig under her arm. They climb up the side of the same ship where Chester and the huntress fought earlier.

"My jager!" The German woman's whimper is lost in the din. From the shoulder that carries her like a sack of potatoes, she sees the water swallowing the pieces of their armor, promising to engulf them as well. The skulls of the fallen float in the mud, showing sardonic grimaces.

Nadjela is the first to reach the deck, she extends her hand to Chester and assists him in the final stretch. The group advances across the deck being careful not to slip and fall into the holes left by the projectiles. The firmament flickers as if exploding. They reach a rusty door that Chester kicks down.

They take cover in a corridor as icy as any other tomb in the valley. A curtain of water prevents them from knowing what is happening to the world on the other side. Wet and shivering, they probe the dark interior. On the floor the remnants of old uniforms lie in a decomposing slab, almost a carpet. Metal groans far below and scatters echoes.

"There are ghosts here..." says the hunter with great seriousness. Chester drops her on her ass as punishment for scaring him, though he would never admit his fear.

The princess takes her necklace, closes her eyes, and asks the sky for clarity and warmth. The stone illuminates giving just that, light, warmth, a white projection that scares away the shivers and gazes of the specters. The mercenary is right, there, and in any similar slough of death, there are ghosts.

They sit on the floor with their backs to the wall, huddled in the white bubble projected by the necklace. The nobleman, the tribal, the little pig, and even the mercenary who, even when tied up, did not miss the chance to crawl like a caterpillar until she was stuck to the swordsman. The heat of the grudges did not protect her from the weather as effectively as Nadjela's necklace.

"Where do I buy one of those?" She asks the girl on the other side of the Lancaster.

"A mysterious hermit gave it to my mother. And she gave it to me..."

"Ah, okay... But it feels weird too, doesn't it?"

"Weird how?"

"Weird... Like a kiss on the forehead. It's, uh... Innocent? Naive?"

"Pure. Cozy. Sure"

"That's right"

The hunter can't think of anything else to say, she's exhausted, she ran after those two all day just to bite dust. Chester's values still seem to her to be the height of stupidity, but can she, who believes in the prophecy of an old witch, speak ill of them?

If he has to kill himself again, she decides it will be dawn's problem. Settles the body as best she can and uses the Lancaster's shoulder as a pillow. Chester is already asleep, as is the piggy. The mercenary seeing him with his eyes closed, in total placidity even having a potential murderer nearby, shakes her head, labeling him as quite a character.

She can't blame him either, under that whitish light she feels any concern or fear melt away, hence she gave in to reveal her name.

"I'm Erika"

"Nadjela"

"Good night, Nadjela. I'm sorry for hunting you down. I know the phrase is trite, but it wasn't personal, just business"

"Good night to you too... And... Apology accepted"