Boresight

@grimmwald:

"You hate me don't you?"

Hatred did not begin to cover it.

On Grimmwalds command the Orochi struck and Boresight was buried in a swarm of red bodies. Staffs and fists and blades flashed. Boresight vanished under the crimson tide.

But then he burst forth, blood streaming from a dozen wounds, silver knives flashing in the frosty air as he carved his way to freedom, swaying and stumbling forth from the group and putting his back to the stone wall. Three bodies lay in his wake, blood running down the crevices of the cobblestone.

Again they charged. They drove him to a knee, his back to the wall. They crippled one hand and he fought like a wolf, eyes savage, driven by the desperate power of the biological drive to survive.

Two more died at his hand before they brought him low a final time and dragged him away to execute Grimmwalds final and most terrible command.

The Blackdaggers were his.

@grimmwald:

Normally losing a fight was tiring. Especially a fight held in the swirling mountaintop snow and buffeted by sub-zero temperatures. But Boresight never tired and never slowed. Despite being badly rocked he kept his wind. His hands were just as quick, his strikes just as fast.

The Horned Saint taunted him from the shadows and Boresight spun this way and that, slashing at phantasms and parrying strikes he was certain would come. But Grimmwald refused to close and Boresight struck at a ghost, blades cleaving the white mist of the snow in a silvery pattern of death.

His hands were laserlike in their precision, tireless machines of muscle and blood that never missed. Never wavered. But his knees were week and his feet uncertain upon the slippery cobblestone and as Grimmwald teleported through the shadows one final time Boresight spun to parry-

-a fraction of a second too slow. Grimmwald's first attack was aimed at his feet, which his knives did not have the reach to guard and which were already unsteady. The Horned Saints inhuman strength snapped his ankle and ripped his feet from under him.

The world spun around him and agonizing pain ripped through his leg. His situation was impossible. But Boresight had once been a Strigidae and though he was but a mortal man he was not just a man. The je ne sais quois of the Strigidae was with him still and his knives came up in mid air, cross-parrying Grimmwald's strike while still falling.

But though he had the skill he did not have the strength and Grimmwald's strike broke through his block and smashed into his skull. He landed hard, head cracking against the cobblestones a second time.

Boresight lay there. Ankle broken. Blood pouring from his shattered goggle and pooling amid the snow covered cobblestone.

Then he set up.

"**** you traitor."

@grimmwald:

A mocking comment on his lips Boresight begin to laugh as Grimmwald hid in the shadows but the laugh was cut short as Kellan's hand snagged his angle and dragged him down, down into the pit of shadows where Grimmwald's kick came racing in.

He had barely a second to react, only enough time to duck. But not quite fast enough-- Grimmwald's leg clipped him in the top of the head and smashed his face into the rim of the shadow pit, shattering one of his goggles.

Boresight rolled out of the pit, pistols abandoned and drew his knives. "Face me, coward." He said, waving Grimmwald on as he rose.. but he wobbled as he took up his fighting stance, blood running down his mask from where shards of broken glass drove into his face and upon unsteady legs, rocked by the powerful kick to the skull.

@grimmwald:

Was it.. His eyes narrowed under his goggles. It couldn't be. It couldn't. "Kellan." He whispered.

The traitor. The Strigidae had hunted Kellan for months and he had eluded them, slipping through their fingers like a wraith, avoiding all electronics and blending into the civilian population of large cities with a proficiency that had left several Strigidae hunters baffled.

"It's you." He said, laughing. "It is really you. You know, I have dreamed of killing your brother but this will be even sweeter. He will know the pain of your death before I send him across the river Styx."And when it is done the Strigidae will accept me among their number once more.

He did not hesitate and he struck without qualm, warning or mercy. Hands flashed as he drew his twin Berettas and sent nine millimeter rounds screaming across the cobblestone, unleashing a dozen rounds toward Grimmwald in the blink of an eye, targeting his legs, his feet and his hips. He didn't want Kellan to die. Not yet. Not until he had suffered.

@grimmwald:

There were no Strigidae here.

Only a man who once stood proud among their number. A man who dedicated his life to the mutant cause. A man who fought his way into their ranks and whose eyes pooled with tears of pride when he knelt to make his sacred oaths.

A man who fell before a young challenger. A man who died. A man whose failure ripped his dream away from him and stripped him of the bonds of brotherhood that he held so dear.

But his story did not end there. He was useful so he was re-animated and bound to the service of the Seven Secret Masters. Those sinister seven held him at the end of a simple leash; they alone supplied the drug that kept him alive. Without daily injections his re-animated body would return to the grave from which it had been plucked.

Obedience was life. Disobedience was death.

Such were the ways of the Strigidae. Even the cold hand of death did not separate a Strigidae from his oaths. From his duty.

Years ago he had been commanded to return to the abandoned Nest 629 and take command of the Blackdaggers. The Blackdaggers were a group of former Strigidae, those who had abandoned their oaths, turned their back upon binding utterances written in blood.

Traitors. Filth. Scum.

Boresight hated them. But the Secret Masters held their reigns just as they held his. Neural reprogramming, deep-level cognitive conditioning and psychoactive drug cocktails had been used to give the Secret Masters a backdoor into their very thoughts. They were no longer in control. The Secret Masters were, and through them, Boresight.

Secret even to the Strigidae at large the Blackdaggers were a deniable asset in the hands of the Secret Masters, a blade in the night to be wielded against their enemies, controlled by a man whose life depended upon his obedience for Boresight had been given the control words to the Blackdaggers.

With them he fought a secret war against the enemies of the Seven Secret Masters. Even the Strigidae were unaware that those who betrayed or failed them in life often served their masters after death.. or after the death of even the freedom of thought for such was the power of the brainwashing techniques used by the Secret Masters that the Blackdaggers could not betray them even if they wished to.

Boresight had been alerted to Grimmwald's approach and he stood in the center of the court yard, his hands clasped behind his back. The ex-Strigidae watched the Orochi and the Horned Saint through the lenses in his mask, his pistols holstered at his hips and his knives sheathed across his back.

The Blackdaggers swept the courtyard behind them. They were traitors. Boresight hated them and forced them to do manual labor when they were not on a mission.

He did not recognize Grimmwald. Not at first.

"Whoever you are, make peace with your gods and devils. I shall give you five minutes to pray and then I will send you to meet them."