Path of the Tiger, стр. 440
In an instant Ranomi was on Joao, and with a vicious hook of her head she smashed her horns into him, hitting him square in his torso and flinging him to the side with the speed of a stone ejected from a catapult. Despite the debilitating power of the blow, which packed the force of ten boxers’ uppercuts combined, Joao was as tough as soldiers get, with his natural strength and resilience potently enhanced by his beastwalker blood. While airborne he enacted the change that transformed his human form into that of a nine-hundred-kilogram Cape buffalo, and as he slipped into his animal form his instantaneous increase in size and mass destroyed his combat fatigues as well as the wall he hit, with a literal ton of force. For a second he disappeared through the demolished wall in a billowing cloud of masonry dust and tumbling, broken bricks … and then with a brazen bellow he regained his footing and charged out to meet Ranomi head-on.
Even as a Sumatran rhinoceros, Ranomi was greatly outweighed, and she could not hope to match Joao’s furious, testosterone-driven aggression. Still, she knew that she must have done some damage to him; no man, however tough, could have taken a hit like the one she had just delivered without breaking a few ribs at least. And the moment she got confirmation of the damage – an ever so brief glisten of dark blood dripping from Joao’s buffalo nose and mouth in the waxing and waning light – fresh confidence surged through her with the beautiful power of a breaking summer storm. She tensed her muscles, put her head down and exploded into a hurtling charge.
Further down the corridor, Njinga, still semi-paralysed, watched in helpless horror as Hrothgar advanced. Her combat suit was bulletproof, but it had already taken a severe beating, and after being blasted at virtually point-blank range by the twin barrels of Hrothgar’s sawed-off shotgun, the space-age material had started to crack. Two or three blows from the battle-axe, especially swung with Hrothgar’s gargantuan strength, would obliterate both the suit and Njinga’s body inside it.
Njinga stared, almost as if she were an outsider observing a sequence on flickering, colour-washed film, as the hulking Viking brought his axe down at speed. Instinctively she raised a forearm to block the blow, in spite of the fact that she understood that the axe would simply shear through her arm as if it were made of nothing but wet clay.
It did not.
The axe haft struck steel – steel that stopped the guillotine-like strike in its tracks, mere inches above Njinga’s chest: the blade of Zakaria’s two-handed sword. The parry was followed up by a darting throw; Zakaria picked up and hurled Hrothgar through the drywall to his right, and then jumped through the resulting hole and the cloud of dust into the large, empty conference room beyond. Inside the room Hrothgar had landed with an acrobatic roll and was already on his feet, so there was no time for a pause, no moment for insults or threats; both warriors swung their weapons, which clashed with a ringing clang as two immense opposing forces crashed into each other. The warriors pressed their sword and axe against one another for a few tense seconds, each channelling his ancient aggression into his weapon, each testing the resolve and brute strength of the other. When they found that they were equally matched, they disengaged their weapons and sprang simultaneously back, although Hrothgar was not able to move as fast as he would have liked; Zakaria, as he darted backward, turned his blade with a quick flick and cut upwards. The sharp tip whipped through the meat of Hrothgar’s jutting jaw and scored a deep cut all the way up his cheek, slicing his left eyebrow in half as it travelled in its vicious arc.
Hrothgar grunted with pain but moved with focused alacrity; the moment he sprang back he shifted into a defensive guard, keeping his axe aimed at Zakaria all the while. Zakaria, meanwhile, flipped up the visor of his helm. He was breathing hard, but his single eye was alive with a dangerous light, the storm-fire sparked by both the battle-fuelled adrenalin and the anticipation of this duel with his age-old nemesis. His lips curled into a wicked grin as he observed a trail of blood dribbling down Hrothgar’s face and trickling down his throat, the crimson liquid seeping from the freshly pared flesh.
‘I have waited for a long time for this, slaver,’ he growled. ‘First I will take your head, and then your vile friend’s, wherever that coward is hiding. How does it feel, eh? How does it feel, scum, to face an equal instead of the defenceless mortals you are so used to crushing?’
Hrothgar snarled wordlessly, spitting on the floor as he shifted on the balls of his feet and loosened up the muscles of his upper body in preparation for the duel.
‘You’re not my equal, crusader,’ he rumbled. ‘You never were and never will be, and like a true fool you still worship an invisible deity, not realising even after all these centuries that we are gods!’
‘We are not mortals, you viper, but neither are we gods, and you will find that out soon enough. Your soul will sleep in hell tonight!’
Zakaria shifted his stance and darted forward in a lunging attack, but Hrothgar danced with the speed and agility of an acrobat, turning Zakaria’s blade aside and attacking with a vicious hack of his axe directed at the knight’s leading arm. Zakaria, however, had been expecting this, and he crouched in the blink of an eye onto one knee, dropping his arm rapidly in the process and whipping the sword blade back and to the side so that it bit deeply into Hrothgar’s exposed right shoulder. Hrothgar roared with pain as the steel opened his flesh, but he swivelled the axe in his hands and swung it backhanded in a horizontal