"Ser, someone would like to meet you. We hope you won't make things difficult for us," the patrol captain in the lead said, putting on a show of politeness.
"Then things are definitely going to be difficult for you today." Titus nodded and replied with a smile.
Setting aside the refusal in his words, his manner was even more polite than the other man's.
Titus did not care who the person was, nor was he interested in being made to meet them in a city still so unfamiliar to him.
Hearing his refusal, the guard captain looked around and saw that no one was passing through.
With a vicious grin, he immediately advanced, clearly intending to use force.
"Get him! Seize him!"
There was nothing more to say.
Believing that the man had chosen a path to his death, Titus advanced rather than retreated. As his steps gradually quickened, his right hand settled unhurriedly on the hilt of the Orphan-Maker.
Even facing ten men alone, he felt not the slightest fear.
Wenda and Bowen naturally would not leave him on his own. Their swords rang twice as they drew them and followed him forward.
The Gold Cloak captain in the lead gave a low shout and lunged first, swinging his sword.
Titus took a rapid breath, made a probing step, and feinted right, drawing the tall man's center of gravity off balance. Then he ducked and lowered his shoulder, charging fiercely into the man's chest with his right shoulder forward, still in the posture of drawing his sword.
The man grunted but did not fall. Instead, Titus's sudden burst of strength drove him straight backward, disrupting the formation of several men behind him.
The alley was narrow. The Gold Cloaks had numbers on their side, but they could not all attack at once.
Titus took advantage of the terrain to turn the place into a stage for one-on-one slaughter.
The Gold Cloak he drove backward could not bring his strength to bear in that position, much less recover the sword he had swung wide. As he retreated onto a stretch of brick paving riddled with gaps, he stumbled and lost his footing.
The young earl, using the man's body as a shield, seemed to have foreseen this. The longsword he had quietly drawn flicked lightly upward from below, piercing a gap in the man's helmet with precision.
The Gold Cloak screamed and tried to grab the blade. Titus exerted his strength and ripped the sword free. Blood sprayed out, falling with several severed finger fragments to bloom in dark red flowers on the ground.
The first.
The young earl killed without blinking, letting the man topple stiffly into the filthy water by the wall with a thud, sending up a dirty splash and blocking one side of the passage in the process.
Turning to block another Gold Cloak's sword strike, Titus let the crisp clash of blades echo clearly through the alley. He used the force to slide a step, executing a high horizontal cut from German Swordsmanship, also known as the "Helicopter Slash." The black edge swept swiftly across the unsuspecting Gold Cloak's face, leaving a horrifying bloody hole.
The man's face was gone.
The second!
Titus counted silently, as agile as a black panther weaving about. He easily evaded a pursuing slash from the other side and swept his sword back upward, severing the sword hand that had overcommitted to the strike.
Shrieks and hot blood flew together.
The Orphan-Maker was truly a keen blade, far too sharp.
The severed hand still gripped its sword as it spun through the air and sliced across another unlucky man's carotid artery.
A long, artful stroke of blood instantly sprayed across the alley wall.
Titus swept past the howling man with the severed arm and finished him with another thrust, killing one more.
The third, the fourth.
A Gold Cloak who had charged forward intending to overwhelm him with numbers caught a faceful of blood. Titus was just about to dispatch him as well when he suddenly sensed someone approaching from behind.
The blade raised high behind him was just about to fall when Titus, as though he had eyes in his back, drove off both feet first and pressed himself against the front of his ambusher's body.
They were now too close for the man to hurt him immediately. He was about to bring his arms together to restrain this frighteningly fast-moving target when a tremendous force drove him backward. The scene before his eyes swayed and receded, and with a bang, his back struck one wall of the alley.
The back of his head struck the wall, leaving his whole head ringing. A sudden, intense pain erupted in his upper right abdomen, and his body reflexively bent forward and curled up like a large shrimp.
Titus had used the metal armor over his elbow to strike hard backward, severely injuring the Gold Cloak's liver. He did not stop there. Turning his shoulder and raising his elbow backward, he delivered a second elbow strike, hitting precisely upward into the chin the man had just lowered.
Under the opposing forces, before the pain in the back of the Gold Cloak's head had even subsided, he suffered still more severe soft-tissue contusions, a dislocated temporomandibular joint, a concussion, and intracranial injury.
A smooth little combo of backing in, elbow strikes, pain, and dizziness.
Something cut through the air on the left.
Titus swept his left hand across his waist and darted away from the sword, leaving a dagger lodged beneath the armpit of the Gold Cloak against the wall.
In just a single breath, the Gold Cloak had sustained several severe injuries. Clutching his wound, he slowly slid down the wall.
Scalding blood flowed freely along the gaps between the bricks and stones, mingling with the filthy water and giving off a pungent smell.
The fifth...
Blades clashed, and fragments flew.
The next Gold Cloak to deliver himself to Titus's doorstep pursued him as he dodged in advance, exchanging several blows. Titus parried them steadily, while the man's own blade was hacked full of notches. During their next clash, Titus seized the opportunity to catch the index finger wrapped around the sword hilt with his free left hand.
One simple application of "Bone Technique" accomplished a disarm without his having to catch the blade barehanded.
His opponent's sword came loose and bounced twice on the ground.
The Orphan-Maker had already pierced its owner from chest to back. Titus felt only a silky smoothness as it slid in, with almost no resistance against his hand.
He pushed with his left hand.
The man's body slipped naturally off the black blade and fell to the ground with a thump.
The sixth.
After that bout of strenuous exertion, Titus finally straightened, panting slightly.
The alley was so quiet that only his faint panting and the drip-drip of falling blood remained.
Several corpses lay sprawled through the alley. Blood stained the ground, gleaming an eerie dark red beneath the setting sun.
Taking off his left glove, Titus used it to wipe a few streaks of blood from his face. With some of the chill of combat still lingering about him, he turned his gaze toward Wenda and Bowen.
They, too, had claimed kills of their own in this deserted, narrow alley.
Wenda was left-handed. Wielding her sword in her left hand, she had swiftly killed two Gold Cloaks unfamiliar with her fighting patterns. Now she stood there spotless, her white soft armor free of even a speck of dust.
Bowen had stayed true to his usual style, relying on the dangerous techniques of "Ankle Breaker" to attack low and kill one man. His tally was one and a half-he had deliberately left one guard alive with his Achilles tendon severed, to serve as a prisoner for questioning.
Never mind taking on ten. I was one short of even taking on seven.
My physical capabilities haven't reached their peak yet. I still need to keep growing...
The still-young Titus was somewhat speechless, though he could hardly blame his subordinates for being too capable and stealing his kills.
He retrieved his dagger from the corpse sitting against the wall, wiped both sides clean of blood on the dead man's clothes, and slipped it back into the belt behind his waist.
Dissatisfied with the speed of his killing, Titus said nothing. Under the bewildered gazes of the other two, he simply turned and walked out of the alley.
A real man never looked back at corpses.
If asked, it was because he was kindhearted and could not bear such bloody scenes.
The Earl of Starpike-Titus Peake:
Before you continue