Adjucanis: Desert
A plume of dust rose into the air, trailing Adjucanis as he rode into Sareste’s desert. After picking up the titan’s trail in Ephraa, he traveled northwest, following the massive prints set into the shifting sands. Even with the constant wind shaping and rearranging the dune’s peaks and valleys, the Guarphaord could still follow the beast’s path.
It was on the third day he saw a low-hanging cloud on the horizon. It was light brown, the color of sand whipping through the air. Ordinarily, Adjucanis would think he was following a large army on the march to lay siege to a city, but this day he knew he had found the Titan of Ephraa. According to his map, he was halfway to the Agoan city of Jeruder. Adjucanis hugged the speeder tighter and opened the throttle. Adrenaline sang along his nerves, reverberated down his spine, and pricked the fur across his body. He was on the hunt.
Swinging out into a wide arc, Adjucanis intended to cut the beast off. He made quick work of it, blasting across the desert and reaching the dust cloud’s ragged edge in no time. Sand scratched at his muzzle and eyes as he accelerated past the cloud’s main body, staying at least 100 yards away from the dust, looking for the monster’s head.
It was as hideous as he remembered.
The beast’s head, neck, and shoulders rose out of the dust cloud like the prow of a ship cutting through fog. Now, Adjucanis realized it had six thick, heavily scaled legs, and the front four churned up so much sand it blocked out the rest of its form. It was as though the titan crafted itself from the dirt and sand of Sareste, molding it all into a physical form as it traveled across the world, billowing evil behind it. Fangs, whole and broken, jutted out of its blunt snout, and three pairs of eyes swiveled to scan the landscape. When they alighted on Adjucanis for a moment, his throat clenched with fear, but the titan only looked back to the horizon. Its stride made the ground shudder, and for the first time Adjucanis truly grasped the scale of the challenge before him.
Avalroth’s question rang in his mind. Perhaps he really did have some sort of death wish. Yet, here he was, keeping pace with a creature that could easily annihilate Jeruder. He had an oath to keep.
The speeder howled as he leaned over, narrowing the gap but staying ahead of the titan. Pulling his point cannon from his vortex, Adjucanis aimed it overhead at the titan’s neck. His finger curled around the trigger as he muttered a prayer to Amigen.
“Let me extinguish this beast so the lights of others may burn for your glory.”
He fired, the explosions tracking along the beast’s neck as he swung under it. Scales blacked and blew apart, showering the desert floor.
The titan roared, cracking the air with its cry. Adjucanis resisted the urge to cover his ears as he circled around for another volley.
It was staring right at him. The six massive eyes were wide, their diamond-pupils thin slits in the bright orblight. Another roar issued from the beast’s maw, and the air pressure threatened to knock Adjucanis off the speeder. He hunkered down, aimed, and fired.
The blasts went high. He shot the beast square in the nose.
Shaking its head, the titan slashed at the sand with its front claws. Although it was a slow, ponderous attack Adjucanis easily dodged, he was unprepared for its scope. The massive claw ripped into the desert, tearing a small canyon into Sareste and throwing a solid wall of sand into the sky. Adjucanis twisted the throttle, aiming to get out from under the sand’s shadow, but it was too much. A mountain of hard sand crashed down upon him, plummeting him into coarse darkness. His arms churned as he tried to exhume himself from the shifting grit.
Daylight was a welcome thing to see. He erupted from the newborn dune, heaving, gasping, and coughing to get his breath back and the sand out of his mouth. He cast about, looking for the titan, and saw it had resumed its course for Jeruder.
“I am but a gnat flinging itself against its hardened scales,” Adjucanis said to himself, his voice hoarse. “I must find a better way.”
Crawling across the dune’s spine, Adjucanis began digging for the speeder. He uncovered the control yoke, and when he pulled on it the entire assembly came off in his hands. More digging revealed smashed stabilizers and missing inertia dampers. Avalroth’s speeder was dead.
Glancing between the shattered speeder and the titan’s retreating form, Adjucanis quickly hatched a plan. He sliced the still-glowing power unit assembly from the frame, ripped out a length of wiring, and fashioned a harness. Shouldering his new makeshift weapon, the Guarphaord sprinted across the sands.
Running in the beast’s wake only meant more sand filled his fur and tore at his eyes, but he didn’t feel the stinging pain anymore. When the titan’s tail whipped overhead, cutting a clear swath through the dust cloud, Adjucanis pulled his whip from his vortex. He prayed the tail would dip low enough to give him a solid target.
After numerous prayers, the tail dipped.
Adjucanis’ whip shot out, cracking the air and wrapping around a misshapen scale. He tugged, ensuring it was a tight hold, and began climbing up his whip. Drafts in the titan’s wake spun him around countless times, wrecking his equilibrium and threatening to upend his stomach, but still Adjucanis tenaciously climbed on. His arms and legs burned with effort, and he forced himself to regulate his breathing, seeing each upward heave as its own individual effort. When he finally reached the undulating, hard surface of the titan’s tail, Adjucanis found himself coughing a prayer of thanks. There was no time to pause, he thought, as the sand swirled around him. Jeruder was getting ever closer.
As he ran across the titan’s back, wind-driven sand tore through his fur, burying itself into his skin. As Adjucanis passed through the dark shadows beneath the titan’s twitching, useless wings, new aerial riptides threatened to throw him off the beast’s back. He broke through the awful dust cloud by squeezing between the cluster of short and blunt, long and sharp horns atop the titan’s head. Carefully holding the drive core, Adjucanis slid down the crackling scales between the monster’s eyes.
Scrambling across the wide snout, which pitched sideways as the titan twitched, Adjucanis pulled a length of golden wire from his vortex, secured it around a small horn and jumped.
Swinging through the air, Adjucanis aimed for one of the intact fangs glinting in the titan’s open maw. He gripped tightly on the wire, stopped his descent, and ran across the hard, wet fangs while forcing any thoughts about how they could tear him apart deep into the back of his mind.
There was a gap between the two teeth furthest back — a space large enough to hold the power supply. Carefully sliding the pack off his shoulders, Adjucanis wedged it between the fangs and gently stamped on it with his foot to secure it. Job done, he climbed back up the titan’s snout, ignoring the pain raging from his palms to his biceps. There would be time to meditate on his wounds later — the first spires of Jeruder were coming into view.
“I am out of time,” he said to the wind rustling his fur.
He burst out of his crouch, running back up the titan’s snout toward its left eyes. Whereas the beast had previously tolerated the thing crawling around on its scales, it now tried to refocus on the fuzzy shape moving toward its face.
Adjucanis’ claws glinted under the Orb’s glow. They reflected the orblight half a dozen times, leaving gold, gleaming trails behind him as he slashed at the Titan of Ephraa’s eyes.
All three popped, spewing sulfurous clay across Adjucanis. It overpowered his senses, filling his nose and mouth with the taste of something long since dead and rotted. He couldn’t stop himself now: he dropped to his knees and vomited.
Howling in pain, the titan shook its head violently. Whatever grasp Adjucanis had on the scales beneath him loosened, during his retching and when the titan threw its head back, the Warden went flying out into thin air.
The wind rushing around him brought Adjucanis back to the present. He somersaulted, fell back on a training lesson from ages before, and slashed at the air with his claws. Emerald hex strikes filled the air and Adjucanis leapt from one to the other at oblique angles, scrubbing off speed and forming a lattice that descended toward the sand below. By the time he tucked and rolled along the crest of a sand dune, the first Augmented hex strikes had begun to fade away.
Adjucanis leapt to his feet, ignoring the heavy sand plastered on him thanks to the beast’s blood. He let himself smile in satisfaction as the Titan of Ephraa tossed its head and carved the ground with its claws while bellowing in agony.
His vortex glowed again, and Adjucanis retrieved his backup point cannon. He adjusted the sight, aimed at the titan’s mouth, and fired.
The explosion charred part of the beast’s tongue. It turned, focusing its three remaining eyes on the cause of its wounds. Roaring again, it charged at the lone Guarphaord atop a sand dune.
Adjucanis took aim again, seeking out the power unit’s purple glow. It was a bright pool of light in the otherwise dark, endless tunnel charging at him.
Rivulets of sand ran down the dune as the titan thundered closer.
Adjucanis breathed in.
The titan’s graveyard breath filled his lungs.
Adjucanis breathed out, stopping halfway.
The titan’s fangs blotted out the Orb and cast shadow over the dune.
Adjucanis fired.
With a crack heard for miles around, the power unit exploded. The titan’s jaws disappeared into a purple supernova, and the shockwave knocked Adjucanis to the ground. Air pressure squeezed him into the demolished dune. Then Orb shone on him again, and with blinking eyes he searched for the Titan of Ephraa.
As purple blotches of light cleared from his vision, Adjucanis could see the beast resting just feet from him. The titan had collapsed, head plowing into the sand.
What was left of the head, Adjucanis corrected himself.
Half the monster’s snout was gone, leaving a blackened, twisted, oozing mass of putrid flesh behind. The remaining fangs were shattered, jagged stumps. Most of the titan’s head was gone, including its ruined eyes, and the claylike blood oozed from the fatal wound, forming slow rivers of gore inching across the sand.
As he stared at it, Adjucanis could see something pulsing within the titan’s skull. The blood seemed to flow from a cavity holding the mass.
Adjucanis launched himself through the air, claws at the ready for an Onslaught against the monster’s brain. The Guarphaord tore through the exposed orange matter, leaving great arcs of gelatinous clay behind him. Blotting out the odor, not caring if he reeked of it for the rest of his life, Adjucanis slashed deeper into the brain. The titan twitched mightily, thrashing at the sands with its tail and beating the air with its stunted wings. The sudden movement threw Adjucanis against something hard: the titan’s skull. A shiver ran through the bone. Sulfur flooded the Warden’s nose. Then fresh air filled his lungs.
What was once solid bone dissolved into sand. Overhead, pinpricks of light lanced through a heavy cloud of sand, which slowly sank to the desert floor or drifted off to the horizon on a gentle breeze. Adjucanis looked about him, absentmindedly running his claws through his fur — it was packed with sand. There wasn’t a drop of the liquid clay on him.
The titan, he realized, dissolved around him at its moment of death.
“Amigen, I give you thanks for allowing me to fulfill my oath,” Adjucanis said, kneeling down. “May your light one day return to Ephraa, which deserves such vengeance wrought in its name. May such an awful beast never again threaten Sareste. May I continue to serve you faithfully until I reach my end and my light … is … extinguished.”
The last words of his prayer slurred together as exhaustion rippled through Adjucanis’ body. Darkness poured from the ground itself as he fell forward.
Orblight, now dim with the red hue of twilight, leaked through Adjucanis’ fluttering eyelids. Long shadows stretched out before him, but they were too thin for dunes. He forced himself up on his elbows — it seemed to take every scrap of his strength.
An Agoan, its mane still shimmering in the last of the Orb’s gaze, crouched down.
“We witnessed your battle, brave Warden,” he said, extending a hand. “We owe you our deepest thanks and so much more besides. Come with us to Jeruder, the city you saved, so we may honor you.”
Adjucanis clasped the Agoan’s proffered hand and pulled himself up. Standing, he decided, was certainly his greatest challenge yet. All the same, he waved off the scout party’s offer of a stretcher to bear him into the city. He entered this battlefield of his own accord, and he would leave the same way. If he held his head at just the right angle, the Agoans might think it was the regal stride of a victor rather than that of a Warden whose muscles were begrudgingly obeying orders.