Hangman, Chaos, Viking, and Alien crept through the undergrowth extra slowly so they wouldn’t make any noise.

  Hangman chose every footstep with exaggerated care and eased branches out of his way. He paused every few steps to listen and search the surrounding jungle, but he didn’t see anything.

  Renegades patrolled the area even though he couldn’t see them. The tracks of their footprints got thicker the deeper the Godless penetrated into Renegade territory.

  The Godless also found offal, bones, and skins lying around to indicate where the Renegades made their kills.

  The Renegades even left a few of their own dead comrades lying in plain view. The Renegades didn’t bother to carry their dead deeper inside their territory for burial.

  Hangman could have understood that if the Renegades had been waging war against someone. They weren’t. They captured this territory from the Godless long ago. No Godless had come back since then to challenge the Renegades for it.

  The bodies were too recent to have fallen in those early skirmishes. Hangman didn’t stop to check if these people fell to other human combatants or creatures attacking from the jungle. It could have been either.

  Hangman motioned for his cousins to widen their formation so they wouldn’t advance so closely together. He didn’t want the Renegades to ambush the party.

  The cousins advanced another fifty yards before Hangman heard voices ahead. He didn’t recognize them.

  He and his cousins slowed even more, stopped under a dense overhang of foliage, and peered through the leaves at a party of Renegade men standing around their makeshift camp.

  The Renegades cut their hair short. No one in the Godless Clan wore short hair. Cutting someone’s hair would have been something like torture to the Godless.

  The Renegades’ short hair gave them a ferocious look. Long hair had a way of softening and humanizing the Godless. It made them look more relatable—more like real people instead of enemies.

  The Renegades wore full suits of clothing that covered their bodies. The Renegades wore a kind of sewn trousers over their legs and sleeveless vests that covered their chests.

  Hangman never understood how the Renegades could stand to wear so many clothes in the jungle heat, but they all dressed the same way.

  Hangman couldn’t count the number of Renegades he’d killed in just the few years since he initiated as a man of the Godless Clan.

  The Godless always had to fight the Renegades for something. The Renegades would have taken every square inch of Godless territory if the Godless didn’t stop them.

  Hangman and his cousins huddled in the shadows watching the Renegades move through their camp. They built much more elaborate, more permanent structures even though these men were only patrolling the area.

  The Renegades built strong huts of straight tree branches lashed together into sturdy walls. The Renegades thatched their roofs with bundled grasses.

  The construction of even one of these huts must have taken hours or maybe even days. Hangman only counted fifteen men down there with fifteen huts between them. Such a small patrol didn’t justify that much work.

  A Godless patrol this small might not even build shelters or fires to camp each night. The men usually just squatted in the trees and slept there.

  Hangman waited until he saw Shadow, Cross, Feather, and Banjo advancing from the right. Butcher, Viking, and Vulture closed from the other side.

  Stolen story; please report.

  The Godless flanked the patrol on three sides. The Grey Ghost raised its foggy heights against the sky beyond this patrol’s camp.

  The Godless only had to take out this patrol. Then Hangman and his party would break through to the mountain with nothing and no one to stand in their way.

  Hangman glanced left and right. Butcher nodded from the party on the left. Shadow nodded back from the right.

  Hangman sprang out of his hiding place with his cousins right with him. The four men roared in fury, burst through the undergrowth making as much noise as possible, and charged down the hill raising their weapons to attack.

  Their appearance gave the Renegades all the time they needed to grab their weapons and rush out to meet the attack.

  Hangman didn’t charge right into the Renegade camp. He could have run faster and gotten to the Renegade camp sooner, but he slowed down and let them come out to meet him. He didn’t want to get caught between all those huts.

  His cousins stayed with him. None of them broke away to run farther forward and no one fell behind.

  The four cousins pretended to falter at the sight of so many Renegades responding to their assault. Hangman and his cousins drew to a halt outside the ring of huts.

  The Renegades slowed, too. They advanced with their weapons draw. The Renegades used metal weapons—not that it made any difference.

  Hangman tensed for the battle to close. He and his three cousins didn’t stand a chance against fifteen Renegades. Everyone here knew it.

  The Renegades grinned when they saw the odds in their favor. It made them overconfident.

  They rushed in to attack. Hangman found himself surrounded by four Renegades all stabbing, hacking, and slashing at him.

  He spun in all directions trying to deflect their strikes fast enough. He didn’t have to defeat the Renegades. He just had to distract them and hold them here.

  The minutes dragged by. Every second felt like an eternity.

  Those four Renegades struck at him again and again. One of them sliced him across the side while his back was turned. If his father and Butcher didn’t bring in the two flanks soon……

  The Renegades fought silently. They clamped their mouths shut and narrowed their eyes in grim determination.

  Hangman and his cousins yelled extra loudly to cover up their comrades’ approach. Hangman got so focused on defending himself that he didn’t see his relatives until it was already too late.

  Shadow’s group and Butcher’s group timed their maneuver to close at the same moment. They flanked the Renegades from behind and from both sides at once.

  The Renegades all spun around to face the new attack. That gave Hangman and his three cousins the chance they needed to strike back.

  Hangman lashed out and cut down a heavy-set man on his left. The others tried to turn around and confront him a second time only for Shadow, Butcher, and their men to move in.

  The situation disintegrated into a bloodbath with the Renegades trapped in the middle.

  Vulture and Alien flanked the Renegade who injured Hangman. He rushed up behind the guy, chopped his kukri into the guy’s skull, and took him down.

  The Godless worked their way through the patrol with meticulous precision. Only eight Renegades remained.

  They closed together into a huddle on the camp side of the battle. The Renegades backed together toward their huts.

  The Godless advanced. Hangman opened his mouth to suggest that he and his cousins circle the enemy from the sides and behind to stop the Renegades from escaping.

  They could have broken through the camp and run for it back to their own territory.

  They could have alerted more Renegades farther to the rear that the Godless were trying to break through and penetrate Renegade territory.

  He didn’t get a chance to say anything before another squad of Renegades swept in from behind the camp. Hangman didn’t see where these Renegades came from. They may have been out in the jungle doing something else until right this moment.

  Their silence unnerved him, but not as much as their numbers. Forty of them rushed between the huts and overwhelmed the Godless in an instant.

  Hangman couldn’t decide who to fight first. So many Renegades rushed all around him. They attacked everyone, but they fought more chaotically than the first group.

  Renegades attacked him only to run off as soon as he started fighting back. Renegades ran from Godless to Godless trying to fight everyone at once.

  He retreated toward the trees where he and his cousins scouted this camp. He overtook Alien, Chaos, Vulture, and finally Shadow, Viking, and Banjo.

  The Godless men closed together to defend themselves. Hangman searched everywhere for the rest of his relatives. He heard the sounds of combat in the distance, but he couldn’t see Butcher, Cross, Fang, Boxer, or Magnet.

  Two dozen Renegades followed the men out of the village to hunt the party down. None of Hangman’s group could get back in there to find out what happened to the others.

  Vulture tried to take a step forward to meet the enemy, but Shadow grabbed his arm and pulled him away.

  “Fall back!” Shadow ordered. “Meet back up under the overhang! Go!”

  Hangman turned away. He couldn’t do anything here—not now.

  His cousins backed off a few more feet, put some distance between themselves and the Renegades, and then broke and ran for it.

  End of Chapter 7.

  ? 2024 by Theo Mann

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