Author's Note:
I am currently in a fantasy phase, most likely because of The Lord of the Rings book trilogy and certain shows like DOTA: Dragon's Blood, The Legend of Vox Machina, Dragon Age: Absolution, and The Mighty Nein.
However, there is also a bit of Star Wars, Space Cowboys, and a space-wandering Supergirl with a slight alcoholism problem buzzing around in my head.
P.S. A little notice to all scammers out there: I am cheap. It does not matter what kind of message or sweet words you use, I will not give money to anyone in exchange for a fanart or anything else. You are just wasting your time and effort.
XXX
Story Arc: The cavalry has arrived
Episode 1: The Errant Knight (II)
Chapter 2: Raven Vs Pegasus
Plot: A certain raven-haired woman will learn that horses are not cute, harmless creatures, and that those who know how to ride them properly are true monsters.
XXX
POV Narrator
Llamrei devoured the ground, charging at a breakneck speed that recalled the unstable roar of a motorcycle free-riding toward disaster. Anyone who managed to peek beneath the shadows of Arthur's hood, however, would have found no trace of panic there: the young man's gaze was calm, almost icy. His entire being had contracted and focused on the impending task, amputating every superfluous thought, every potential distraction or hesitation.
"Faster, Llamrei, every second can make a crucial difference," Arthur ordered. His voice remained steady as he spurred his steed, forcing it to tear more speed from the earth.
Despite his young age, his path as a Planeswalker and as a Rhodes Island Operator had already baptized him in fire; Arthur had seen the best and the worst of what the multiverse had to offer. The Knight of Light had understood a fundamental truth: as long as there is life, there will be universal constants from which it is impossible to escape. Love, friendship, loyalty, faith, hope, camaraderie, family, and community; noble feelings that Arthur cherished deeply and could not help but protect. On the other side of the coin, however, weighed hatred, discord, betrayal, heresy, and despair: the exact opposite of the principles he had sworn to defend.
It was because of this raw awareness that, faced with the spectacle of the settlement under siege — with flames devouring the buildings, mothers fleeing with infants pressed to their chests, and armed scavengers intent on brutalizing civilians —, Arthur did not allow himself the luxury of shock or tears.
His hand dropped like lightning onto Add, gripping its hilt. With a mechanical, fluid snap, the weapon configured itself directly into its bow form. The Knight of Light had already experienced this precise scenario countless times, and he knew perfectly well how it would end now that he was there.
"Time to do the knight's most fun and brutal job, killing bandits," Add hissed. The weapon knew its keeper well: it knew that, despite his heraldic appearance, Arthur was by no means the idealistic paladin of fairy tales.
Arthur raised the weapon and drew the string with controlled effort. He tapped into the surrounding mana, forcing it to condense instantly at the center of the sight into a tiny, incredibly dense sphere of yellow light. As soon as the knight's fingers released their grip, the pent-up energy snapped and hurled forward, turning into a luminous dart that broke the sound barrier with the speed of a bullet.
THWIP!
The bullet of light pierced the air cleanly, aiming at the chest of a bandit who was bringing his blade down upon a helpless victim on the ground.
SHLUCK!
The impact was devastating. The dart hit the attacker's heart dead center: his light armor shattered into a thousand pieces and his clothes instantly caught fire, exposing the underlying flesh which carbonized in a millisecond. A single shot from Arthur's bow had generated a devastating thermal burn, right between a fourth and fifth degree. At that level of severity, the heat bypasses the exposed skin layers and attacks the subcutaneous tissues, liquefying muscles, tendons, and ligaments. At the fifth degree, the energy even destroys the deep adipose tissue, damaging the muscle masses close to the skeleton. Only the sixth degree represents a more extreme stage, characterized by the total calcination and exposure of bare bone.
The bandit died instantly: if the outer tissues were reduced to that state, the heart muscle had been literally vaporized. The man collapsed heavily to the ground, disjointed like a puppet whose strings had been suddenly cut.
The knight did not utter a word, nor did he show pleasure or remorse for the execution. With cold efficiency, he notched a second arrow of pure energy.
THWIP!
Then a third.
THWIP!
A fourth.
THWIP!
Four lethal darts loosened within the span of a single second. Three marauders who were about to inflict harm on the innocent dropped to the ground lifeless; a fourth, intent on escaping a house clutching his loot, was hit in the forearm, suffering a disabling injury that would forever prevent him from using his dominant hand.
Some of the surviving settlers interrupted their desperate flight, struck by the unforgettable spectacle unfolding before their eyes: a majestic armored horse ridden by a warrior in pure white armor, his face hidden by the shadows of a midnight blue hood, and in his hands a conspicuous techno-magical bow with blue, gray, and yellow hues that spat lethal lightning bolts.
"An Huntsman has arrived!" voices shouted in the village, though with diametrically opposite intentions.
For the inhabitants, that cry contained a mixture of hope and sudden euphoria, the relief of those who see salvation materialize out of nowhere. For the bandits who were putting the settlement to fire and sword, the exact same term was uttered with fear, anxiety, and a violent rush of adrenaline, even though total resignation was not yet in their eyes.
The knight continued to let darts of light flash from the bow, methodically bringing down every target in his field of vision, while Llamrei's hooves drastically reduced the distance separating them from the fulcrum of chaos.
"We should change strategy," Add suggested, noting that the bow's range would soon become a disadvantage due to the imminent close-quarters combat.
Arthur did not waste time replying; he preferred to act. With an instinctive reflex, he commanded Add to change configuration: the bow's structure folded and extended, transforming into a heavy and lethal war scythe. The knight adjusted his posture in the saddle, tightening the reins with his left hand and locking the firm grip of the weapon with his right.
One of the marauders, noticing the knight's impact trajectory, turned on his heels and attempted a desperate escape on foot, but no man can compete with the charge of a war steed. Arthur calculated the overtaking time and executed a single slash: swift, geometric, ruthless.
SWISH!
The bandit's head was cleanly severed from the neck, flying high in a bloody parabola before falling heavily to the ground.
PLOP!
Panic began to spread violently through the ranks of the looters. It was no common sight to see a hooded figure reaping lives with that ease from atop an armored steed.
"The Death Knight has come for us!" one of the criminals screamed, turning to flee with terror painted on his face.
"You cannot escape!" the knight solemnly declared.
Llamrei was upon the runaway in the blink of an eye. Arthur raised the large curved blade and ended the man's run with a single, fluid downward motion.
SWISH!
PLOP!
One less bandit to trample this earth.
XXX
On top of the sloping roof of a building, the leader of the marauders watched from above the methodical slaughter that a single individual was inflicting upon her ranks.
"This is a bad surprise; at least there will be fewer mouths to feed and fewer incompetents to keep in line," Raven murmured, without harboring the slightest hint of affection or pity toward the fallen.
Raven Branwen was a woman of extraordinary beauty, with a fair complexion. She was about 39 years old, with a slender height of 178 centimeters and statuesque, harmonious physical proportions, definable in her ninety-centimeter bust, sixty-two-centimeter waist, and ninety-six-centimeter hips. Her hair was as black as a raven's feathers, long, thick, and cut into a constantly messy fringe that framed two eyes of an intense, magnetic red. Raven's attire consisted of a black and red kimono with a plunging neckline, paired with a pleated black skirt supported by tight dark shorts, and completed by a series of red beaded necklaces. Around her waist she tightened a scarlet obi sash, flanked by a matching fabric tassel from which hung the heavy sheath of her weapon; attached to the latter was a long black ornament of feathers or fur, accompanied by a bandana decorated with red and white motifs hanging behind her. Her forearms were protected by conspicuous, outward-flaring red armored gauntlets layered over black fingerless gloves, while on her feet she wore dark thigh-high boots reinforced with metal plates decorated with crimson splashes.
Raven watched the knight continue to decimate her subordinates with surgical precision, progressively clearing the entire central square of the settlement. The raven-haired woman granted no attention to the pathetic end of her men, preferring to study the biomechanics of their executioner.
'A fighter trained on horseback is not often seen, and no one of such talent and prowess since the invention of engines,' Raven thought. She recalled the old stories passed down by her great-great-grandfather, the tales of when the Branwen Tribe still moved exclusively on majestic black steeds to conduct their raids. That tradition had faded with the appearance of the first cars, motorcycles, and motorized vehicles—means that had rendered the study of mounted combat obsolete and anachronistic. Nowadays, riding was an activity relegated to farmers on isolated homesteads, to the poor who could not afford an engine, or to high-society nobles who wasted time and money on ridiculous riding lessons and competitions. To find a warrior capable of loosening multiple darts in a fraction of a second while maintaining perfect stability on the back of an animal swift as the wind and against moving targets was a more than rare event.
'Let us see what you are capable of,' Raven thought, intrigued by the hooded figure.
The matriarch of the Branwen tribe took a short running start, dashed past the ledge, and leapt down from the roof, unsheathing her iconic weapon in mid-air. Raven's preferred tool was Omen: a technologically advanced sheath equipped with a rotary chamber that housed several interchangeable blades forged from Dust. Once locked onto the main hilt, the blades assumed the slender, single-edged silhouette of a gigantic ōdachi. Raven calculated the falling time to the millimeter: the knight would pass directly beneath her vertical line within a few seconds to pursue the last marauders. If that opponent turned out to be a one-trick pony, he would lose his head instantly; if instead he proved to be up to the task... things would get interesting.
CLASH!
Raven's heavy blade intercepted Arthur's scythe in a frightening explosion of sparks. The metallic reverberation of the impact echoed between the walls of the surrounding buildings due to the immense kinetic force released. Utilizing the moment of deadlock, the woman delivered a lightning-fast kick against the armored flank of the horse, using it as a fulcrum to push herself away; she performed a backward leap of several meters and landed flexed on her legs, keeping her sword raised in guard.
'Bandits are weak within the limits of ordinary humanoids, but this woman, in terms of strength, speed, and agility, finds herself among the elite, beyond the ordinary, though not in the realm of heroes and myths,' Arthur thought, analyzing the muscle density and reactivity of his female adversary from the weapon-block feedback alone.
"It seems to me we have found an opponent who will not fall to a single blow," Add whispered. Its metallic voice propagated at a very low volume, audible only to its keeper, who was uncertain whether talking objects were a common technology or an unnatural aberration in that unknown world.
"We will soon see how good she is," Arthur murmured back. With a mental impulse, he forced Add into a new geometric transition, preferring the range and penetration of a halberd over the curvature of the scythe.
'A bow, a scythe, and now a halberd—a triple-form weapon is another rarity,' Raven thought, narrowing her eyes. She knew from experience that transformable weapons with multiple modes tended to suffer from severe structural weaknesses, required constant and exorbitant maintenance, and carried prohibitive production costs.
"Woman, you seem to be the leader of these bandits," Arthur declared, settling himself better in the saddle to compensate for the halberd's center of gravity. The Planeswalker's goal was to frame the enemy's psychology, attempting, if possible, to urge her to surrender to avoid further shedding of innocent blood.
"My name is not 'woman,' but Raven, and yes, I am the leader. So, Huntsman, have you grown tired of fighting and want to chat?" Raven replied, injecting a heavy dose of derision into her voice to needle her rival's pride, hoping to bait him into an angry attack devoid of strategy.
"I am not a Hunter, I am a Knight!" Arthur exclaimed aloud. At his command, Llamrei reared up majestically on her hind legs, then brought her front hooves down upon the ground with such violence that it generated a small shockwave, causing the soil to shudder.
'Someone took the trouble to unlock an animal's Aura; I thought only Tai had the time and madness to train his little pet,' Raven thought for a brief instant, the memory of her ex-husband and his bizarre dog flashing through her mind.
"You certainly dress like a fairy-tale knight," Raven taunted with a sarcastic tone, accustomed to meeting eccentrics with the most diverse obsessions.
"This is my first and final warning. Order your subordinates to surrender, throw down their weapons, and let them pay for their crimes, or they will be judged by the gods and not by their fellow men," Arthur enunciated with absolute gravity, offering Raven one last formal way out.
"You are either naive or insane if you believe we will surrender just because you say so," Raven shot back, her lips curling into an amused smile at the idealism of that speech.
'Perhaps a bit of both,' Arthur admitted to himself, fully aware of his own nature as an incorrigible optimist and of possessing a mind not entirely aligned with common logic.
Llamrei, demonstrating an intelligence far superior to that of an ordinary beast, stared at Raven with cold, calculating eyes, scraping her front hoof against the packed earth, ready to charge.
"My conscience will be clear. I gave you the chance to surrender, but you refused my mercy," Arthur declared, lowering the tip of the halberd in a straight line toward Raven's chest.
"I prefer to settle matters with the sword instead of words," Raven decreed, tired of the preamble.
In a millisecond, Llamrei surged forward with the progression of lightning. Raven, relying more on her primal muscular reflexes than on conscious thought, performed a lightning-fast side twist, narrowly avoiding being crushed under the weight of the armored hooves. However, the steed was not the only threat: the trajectory of Arthur's halberd was already in motion.
CRUNCH!
The knight's weapon intercepted Raven's shoulder with a perfect descending arc; Arthur had anticipated the woman's escape point with exact precision. If the inhabitants of Remnant did not possess the natural protection of Aura, the blow would have cleanly severed her collarbone, penetrating vital organs. Instead, the impact produced a violent energetic reverberation: Raven was hurled back several meters, forced to drive the tip of Omen into the ground to brake her momentum and avoid losing her balance.
'I struck her but I did not penetrate her body—it was not because of armor, her entire being is surrounded by a sort of defensive barrier,' Arthur noted mentally, assimilating the rules of engagement of this world from every single exchange.
'That horse must have been born in an Atlas laboratory, or it's the first animal with a Semblance. No, the knight must have a speed Semblance that works on his little pet,' Raven hypothesized, surprised by the effectiveness of the combined attack, yet instantly recovering her martial coldness. The woman noticed that one of her men was in the immediate vicinity, paralyzed as he watched the clash.
"Don't just stand there watching! Announce to the rest that we must retreat: an elite Huntsman has appeared! I'll handle him, but I don't want you all getting in my way!" Raven roared with anger.
Arthur caught every word of the order.
'I will allow the message to be transmitted; the bandits will leave the settlement so no more innocents will be harmed. I will deal with Raven, and then I will hunt them down,' Arthur calculated, repositioning his center of gravity in the saddle. The subordinate received the command, nodded in terror, and dashed away to communicate the general retreat to the other scavengers.
Llamrei made another instantaneous dash. Raven could not follow the visual movement due to the sheer speed, but her senses as a trained fighter already knew from which direction death would arrive.
Raven shifted sideways a fraction of a second in advance, dodging the devastating trajectory of the horse's charge, then raised her great sword with both hands to intercept the knight's descending slash.
CLASH!
For the second time within a few moments, Add and Omen clashed in a violent explosion of sparks and vibrations.
'He has monstrous strength,' Raven thought, feeling her knees give way by a millimeter and tremble under the incredible pressure of the blow delivered from above.
'She is a veteran with great capabilities in assessing the enemy and controlling herself,' Arthur noted mentally, tightening his leg muscles to communicate stability to his steed through the stirrups.
Llamrei executed a lightning-fast side step, moving with perfect timing as if to deliver a violent blow with her armored flank to overwhelm Raven; the matriarch, sensing the danger of being crushed, made an agile leap backward to escape the impact.
CRUNCH!
Arthur did not grant her time to breathe: he instantly modified his grip on his polearm and thrust it forward with a sharp, geometric lunging motion, aiming straight at Raven's exposed throat. At the last millisecond, the woman rotated her wrist and used the flat of her ōdachi to deflect the lethal tip's trajectory; the halberd slid along the steel, grazing her left shoulder and cutting only the air.
'This will be an arduous fight,' Raven thought, now entirely certain that against this individual she would have to draw upon every single one of her resources. The leader of the Branwen Tribe had never been more right in her life than at that precise moment.
Llamrei moved once again, her legs clawing the ground to accumulate kinetic energy. Raven chose to radically change her strategy: instead of merely dodging blows and enduring the initiative, she decided to attack by leveraging tactical cunning. She sheathed Omen into the rotary scabbard with a fluid movement, quickly selected the cartridge loaded with Fire Dust, and unsheathed the blade again in a single instant, executing a lethal quick-draw technique aimed straight ahead, fully intending to decapitate the steed to erase her opponent's saddle advantage once and for all.
Raven's sword emitted a violent, incandescent red glow, unleashing a suffocating wave of heat; even if the direct thrust missed the biological target, the immense amount of elemental Dust consumed would literally reduce the entire surrounding area to ashes. Raven delivered the blow with all her might: a gigantic blade of fire and a roaring storm of flames engulfed the exact space the horse was about to traverse.
"Invisible Air!" Arthur exclaimed aloud, decisively thrusting the halberd forward and invoking a barrier of highly compressed wind directly from the tip of the weapon.
'Wind Dust,' Raven thought, gritting her teeth and internally cursing that devastating astral coincidence.
The frightening current of compressed air evoked by Arthur slammed into the wall of fire, deflecting the flames sideways and dispersing them into a blanket of smoke, while the millimeter-perfect positioning of the halberd locked perfectly against Omen's trajectory. The result of that titanic clash was catastrophic.
CRASH!
The impact was so violent and destructive that it generated a visible shockwave. Raven was literally lifted off the ground and hurled backward like a projectile, crashing against the wall of one of the nearby buildings, which cracked conspicuously under the weight of the blow. If the woman had not possessed the protective shield of her Aura—which in that single clash had just been abruptly halved—her bones would have shattered under the hooves and momentum of Llamrei.
The raven-haired woman, despite the damage sustained and the sharp pain radiating through her back, promptly stood back up, shaking her head to banish the ringing of the impact.
'Now I understand why in the past, invaders feared the phrase: The cavalry has arrived,' Raven thought to herself, forced to thank her reserve of spiritual energy for not ending up with hoofprints stamped across her entire chest.
"Let us see how good you are, Knight," Raven demanded, dashing forward again at full speed toward her opponent, aware that in such a situation, a frontal and aggressive attack was the only sensible approach to survive.
"The same goes for me, queen of the bandits," Arthur commented with icy coldness, locking both hands around the grip of his halberd and bracing himself to receive the impact.
XXX
Ten minutes. The knight and the queen of the bandits had been facing each other for a full ten minutes in the middle of the settlement's central square, locked in a stalemate of pure intensity. The people remaining in the town had quickly realized that the bulk of the marauders had fled; a small core of settlers, however, drawn by the metallic din of combat, had stationed themselves behind street corners or behind window panes to observe the clash. The younger ones had even pulled out their Scrolls to record the progression of the event: that video file would soon become some of the most viral content on the entire global network, the CCTS.
Llamrei continued to move slowly in a circle around Raven, who kept her sword raised high, never losing sight of the combined movements of the steed and her rider. Raven was still on her feet, rigid and ready to fight, but her Aura was almost entirely depleted; her elegant clothes showed clear impact tears, and her hands and knees shook slightly due to cumulative fatigue and the devastating blows she had been forced to parry. Conversely, Arthur was completely uninjured, while Llamrei showed only a few superficial scratches on the polished plates of her war armor.
'If I weren't surrounded by this pack of idiots recording me, I would have pulled out my Spring Maiden powers and put an end to all this,' Raven thought with deep bitterness, forced to suppress her true elemental nature to avoid turning into the most wanted woman on the entire planet.
"I admit that you are a highly talented swordswoman, but it is all wasted in being a bandit. If you like living and fighting only for yourself, you could have become a mercenary," Arthur broke the silence, adopting the exact same psychological strategy that Raven had tried to use against him shortly before.
The matriarch maintained a seraphic calm, having suffered far worse and more irritating provocations from her brother Qrow in the past.
'This guy is less of a knight on a trained horse and more of a centaur,' Raven thought. She had never measured herself against a warrior specialized in mounted combat before this day, but she was more than certain that no human being should move that way, as if the animal's body were a perfect biological extension of his own muscles.
CLOP CLOP CLOP!
Llamrei intensified the rhythm of her hooves on the ground, continuing to circle but progressively accelerating the progression of her thrust.
'He is preparing for one final charge,' Raven thought. The woman blinked for a single millisecond, yet when she reopened her eyes...
The real silhouette of the knight and his steed was suddenly replaced by the crisp vision of a gigantic centaur in full, pure white armor, armed with an unparalleled lance and enveloped in a shining, golden aura, with large feathered wings spread behind his back.
'What the hell...' Raven thought, violently shaking her head in an attempt to banish that absurd mythical hallucination.
In that precise moment of hesitation, Llamrei surged forward at impact speed. Arthur raised his halberd, ready to deliver a potentially fatal slash.
'Better to run to fight another day,' Raven decided, anticipating the fatal outcome of a direct clash under those conditions.
The raven-haired woman sheathed Omen into the scabbard with inhuman rapidity, selecting a lethal mixture of Wind Dust and Ice Dust. Raven unsheathed the blade again, not to strike her male adversary, but to drive it directly into the ground beneath her. The elemental energy unleashed an immediate combined explosion of snow and freezing wind, which expanded into a thick, cold, impenetrable mist: it was not an offensive maneuver, but a pure visual diversion.
Llamrei braked abruptly, digging her hooves in so as not to risk charging blindly into the white blanket, especially with the knowledge that innocent civilians were nearby.
'Good move,' Arthur thought. He closed his eyes beneath his hood, relinquishing his sight and relying entirely on his large horse ears, sharpening his hearing to compensate for the fog.
Raven, taking advantage of her opponent's temporary blindness, immediately activated her Semblance, the Kindred Link, which allowed her to generate instantaneous dimensional portals to travel to people with whom she possessed a strong emotional bond, covering intercontinental distances in a single step. The matriarch chose to open a spatial rift toward Vernal, who had remained at the tribe's camp to keep the other scavengers in line.
'The next time we meet, knight, the battle will end differently, and I will make sure there are no witnesses to hold me back,' Raven thought. She resheathed her sword with annoyance and stepped through the dimensional fissure.
Unfortunately for her, the metallic gesture of putting her long ōdachi back into its scabbard produced a sharp, characteristic click—a unique noise that Arthur's developed hearing intercepted instantly. The knight slid two heavy throwing knives from his belt; guided solely by auricular perception, he hurled the first dagger straight toward the source of the sound.
SWOOSH!
The knife, thrown with a kinetic force that went far beyond that of a simple metal trinket, cut through the fog, pursuing Raven's trajectory and striking her in the back right in the middle of her crossing, shattering her residual Aura an instant before she entered the portal. Immediately after...
SWOOSH!
Arthur hurled his second throwing knife. The weapon described the exact same millimeter-perfect trajectory, disappearing inside the dimensional rip a few moments before it closed entirely behind the fugitive, leaving it an absolute mystery whether the blow had also violated Raven's flesh.
The artificial fog created by the elemental Dust began to clear rapidly under the buffeting wind, revealing to the audience of settlers that only the warrior in pure white armor and his majestic steed remained in the square.
"Strange, normally girls run to put their hands all over Pony-Boy instead of running away at full speed. Are you losing your touch, or is that woman just shy?" Add joked with its usual metallic irony, using Raven's strategic retreat as a pretext for a bad-taste joke.
'Apparently magic or a form of magic exists in this world. I also see that there are peoples similar to mine—a relief,' Arthur thought to himself, noticing that among the civilians emerging from the shelters were individuals exhibiting clear animal biological traits, such as canine ears or feline tails.
"I see a Dog-Girl and a Cat-Girl with shining eyes approaching you; your charisma still works," Add insisted, continuing its monologue even in the face of its keeper's silence.
'Now I must take care of the innocents; some of them will need medical care or other help,' Arthur thought. He gathered the reins and leapt down from Llamrei's saddle with a fluid movement.
Before him came two graceful-looking young girls, approximately twelve and fifteen years old respectively, both characterized by a single animal Faunus trait—unlike Arthur, whose biology presented both equine ears and an equine tail.
'Once the night arrives, I will hunt down the bandits who attacked this place,' Arthur calculated mentally, not being the kind of person inclined to leave matters unresolved or criminals unpunished.
Putting aside his more bellicose thoughts, Arthur Nearl returned to playing the role of the perfect fairy-tale knight, moving immediately to provide aid to those in need.
"You were amazing, Mr. Huntsman!" exclaimed the younger girl, a cat Faunus, her eyes wide with admiration.
"You saved our home, how can we repay you?" asked the older one, a dog Faunus, joining the request.
"I have done nothing yet. There are many wounded and missing people; take me to the leader of this place. We must organize the care and treat the critically injured immediately," Arthur declared. His tone was firm, calm, and imbued with a natural, regal authority.
"Right away, Mr. Huntsman!" the two girls replied in unison and out loud, suddenly feeling as though they were in the presence of a high-ranking personality of immense importance.
"I am not a Huntsman, but an Errant Knight, with the skills and knowledge of a skilled healer," Arthur pointed out courteously, preferring to be addressed by his true title; after all, he had not invested years of his youth in the knighthood and academic studies to be confused with a local mercenary.
"I told you knights exist," the cat Faunus whispered to her friend, flashing a victorious smile for having won their old private discussion.
"We have no time to waste," Arthur roused them, not intending to waste a single second precious to the lives of the settlers.
"I will take you to the village chief right away!" the cat Faunus exclaimed, enthusiastically grabbing the warrior's left hand.
"No, we should take him to Fabio's clinic. People will definitely go to him if they are injured," the dog Faunus objected, taking the knight by the hand from the other side.
"Ponies are always loved by young girls," Add muttered in a low voice, sincerely amazed by how quickly Arthur managed to gain popularity wherever he set foot.
'And I haven't even pulled down my hood,' Arthur thought with a hint of bitter irony, well aware of his own attractive appearance and the fact that his presence always enjoyed a certain success among female audiences. The life of an errant knight was never simple, especially regarding everything that followed a battle.
To be continued...
XXX
Author's Note:
Honestly, this is not one of my best works; I lacked a bit of inspiration. Battle scenes are harder to write, but I have planted a seed for a future rivalry/enmity between Arthur and Raven.