Sable in Action

An excert from a storyline which will take place at some point in Book Three of The Chronicles of Enoch but one which shows just how interesting Sable can be in combat, even in today's modern world of guns.

I chose this piece to share because it also contains so tasty little hints that fans might well appreciate...

Gilgamesh was looking down at the approaching nephilim; there were at least twenty of them now. They were schlepping their way across the rooftops towards he and Sable’s current position, trying to keep low and not present a decent outline. Clearly, they were more modern creatures as they were exercising the due caution of one who knows well how guns and bullets work.

They were using cover well and advancing in groups, a practise he approved of. Several, he could see, were armed with handguns though none carried a larger weapon. He’d known that they’d been spotted a good ten minutes ago but had focussed on trying to get his shot off. Or shots. He didn’t like the need to kill but with those two down there, wounding was not an option.

He had to find a way to get them close enough together so that he could take out Krampus and then hit Lucifer three seconds later without giving that monster time to react or escape.

There was no way that he would let Lucifer be President of the country he had so grown to love, one which had been very accepting of him until Krampus had started stirring the old hatreds up. He sucked his teeth and looked over at Sable, who appeared to be doing something with the sleeves of his long coat. It was almost like he was looking for something.

Sable was clearly unarmed and, his peerless combat skills aside, even he would be unable to take on their soon-to-be-guests barehanded.

Well that just about buggers it all up doesn’t it? He thought, considering whether to ghost just one of them and have done with it. Better to take Lucifer with us if this is it...

It struck him as rather odd that Sable appeared so unconcerned by their predicament. He was focussed on his coat-sleeves again, something which was both intriguing and annoying to big Sumerian. He was about to ask his friend what in the name of any gods he may or not may not believe in he thought he was doing when Sable made an ‘ah’ noise. He then proceeded to do something which caused a feeling of more than mild surprise – mixed with a fair measure of terror – in Gilgamesh’s heart.

Sable reached into the sleeves of his long coat and smiled. He took hold of something with each hand and pulled. To Gilgamesh's genuine awe and terror, Sable pulled his long silver swords out of his coat. Each sword was close to three and a half feet long and were curved like scimitars; there was no way Sable's arms were that long and the coat certainly was not large enough. Gilgamesh had been admiring it earlier; it was a nice brushed suede type thing in a variety of shades of grey which fit Sable rather well. It would not fit the much larger Gilgamesh, but he had been meaning to ask Atlantan where he had gotten it from.

He had not expected, however, for Sable to just whip his famous swords out from inside of it, magic coats were not something he wanted in his sparse wardrobe. He stared his friend, face a multitude of questions.

"A left over from whatever they did to me. Might be a small surprise gift from our new friend too." Sable explained in great depth. "I know where they are, I just have to tell them to be here." he settled his grip before spinning the swords in air-ripping circles and considered the approaching group. "Twenty?"

Gilgamesh nodded with a grim smile.

"Cover me from the shooters." Sable set his swords down and shrugged his coat off, letting it fall to the ground.

Underneath he wore sleeveless black t-shirt with a very faded rock band logo on it. He also had some weird tattoo on his right shoulder which Gilgamesh could not recall him having before, a swirl of angelic script covering shoulder and part of his arm. Unfortunately, the Sumerian was very new to those letters and had no idea where to begin. Sable was already moving towards the lip of their rooftop, assessing the distance to the roof down below. Their visitors were starting to gather bare metres away down below, looking for a way up to them. Sable crouched on the edge, swords back in his hands, reversed upward, and nodded. Gilgamesh nodded in reply and swung his rifle around.

He had a ten-shot custom magazine locked and loaded but there would be a 2-3 second reload time. Still, better than nothing. With a scream which would have made even the dead get up and run, Sable leaped, right into the centre of the crowd. Sable against twenty nephilim armed with knives, machetes and guns?

Gilgamesh almost felt sorry for them...

He shrugged and set his eye to his gunsight adjusted the focus all the way out, as far as it would go. Some of the figures were a little fuzzy, the sight wasn't designed for such close-up work, but he could aim.

He had never seen Sable in combat up close before, but he would never forget it. He saw Sable land in a crouch in the middle of the crowd and explode into motion. Gilgamesh had his own abilities; at the moment when he took his shot, he was able to slow time somehow, stretch out those vital seconds to be sure he placed his bullet right where it needed to go. He couldn't sustain this slowing effect for long, but he intended to push that ability now.

In slow motion he watched his friend dance...

Slowed down, Sable was more than incredible, his silver blades flashes and blurs of metal. He seemed to have the entire fight planned out in advance, so fluid and connected were his moves.

Instantly his left sword swept out and opened the throat of the man directly in front of him in a carmine spray. Sable did not stop though, pushing the sword along its path to carve open the face of another, his right-hand sword dipped and curved up into the stomach of a third man; dropping his guts onto the floor. Immediately Sable had some space as the third man got snagged in his own entrails and they uncoiled around his feet causing him to fall back into the group behind him, dropping several to the ground.

Sable breathed.

Swords always in motion, body never still, eyes and senses always active he became a whirlwind of death; blocking, cutting, deflecting and retaliating.

Killing.

Whipping his swords left and right, up and down he wove a cage of silver death around him. Where his swords struck, men fell, and blood sprayed out. Even slowed down as Gilgamesh's perceptions were, Sable was almost too fast to follow.

One of the nephilim with a pistol took aim at Sable's head and fired as a sword was extracted from a bleeding neck. Gilgamesh felt his stomach tighten to a knot; he could take down the shooter but not stop the bullet. There was no way he could warn his friend or prevent the danger in time. Somehow Sable knew. Faster than Gilgamesh could imagine, Sable arched back at the waist and got his head out of the way of the bullet fractions of a second before it was due to hit, catching the speeding projective with the silver edge of one sword and helping it safely out of the way with an explosion of sparks. He straightened and knifed a blade into the juncture of neck and shoulder of each of the men before him. He twisted the blades out and blocked a desperate machete swipe at his unprotected torso with his left, killing the wielder with his right.

Gilgamesh breathed and time returned to normal.

There were nine nephilim, aside from he and Sable left; four shooters hiding behind air conditioning units and five standing before Sable. The four shooters appeared to be quite undecided on what to do, two were looking for reloads. They had emptied their magazines without Gilgamesh even being aware of it or actually hitting anyone.

Such a waste of ammo offended him for some reason.

His friend had killed ten men in less than a minute! The five men with knives and machetes in front of him were well aware of this fact and were sharing wary glances, looking over shoulder for as long as they dared to see what the shooters were doing. Sable had stood still for nowhere near long enough for anyone to get a decent shot at him after the first. He was not even scratched, and Gilgamesh was sure none of the blood upon him was his own.

He could not believe his own eyes; no- one dared to move and Sable just stood there, waiting, chest moving slowly.

Sable appeared relaxed and his chest moved regularly and slowly. He rolled his shoulders and grinned at the men in front of him, looking like a demon of war covered in blood and gore; smiling like a maniac as blood dripped from his loosely held swords.

Lucifer was on the stage below so none of remaining men dared to be the one to return without Sable's head, failure could be much worse than death. I’d be more afraid of my best friend than his Dad! Gilgamesh decided. No-one should be able to fight like that…

Clearly, he did not know enough about Lucifer though, he must be terrifying indeed to give a man a reason to fight Sabl. Especially after that spectacle...

In the end, it seemed that numbers gave the balls unto the man.

They shared a glance and attacked at once, thinking this would be to their advantage.

Sable kept his swords in close and tight, each hand appearing to communicate with the other. He casually batted a machete aside to pierce the chest of its wielder and used the falling man's weight to pivot around and almost shear the face off of another.

Keeping his momentum up, he took one knife fighter's arm off at the elbow causing the man to scream and spray blood into the face of the man next to him. Sable finished the disarmed man off with a quick stab to the throat and took down his colleague in the same manner as that one tried to clean blood from his eyes. His right-hand sword was in the chest of the last man before Gilgamesh could even figure out how it had gotten there. The Sumerian's finger was poised numbly over the trigger unable to neither aim nor fire.

"I know you're all out of ammo." Sable told the four crouched men with pistols. "I was counting as the bullets whined past my ears like hot mosquitoes. You can reload and make me come over there and get you or you can drop them, and we talk. You decide." He let that hang in the silence for a long time.

No-one spoke nor made a single move. Gilgamesh found that he was holding his breath again.

"The first man who fires a shot at me dies." Sable added. There was silence for the longest moment before the first pistol clattered to the ground, the metallic skittering noise followed quickly by three similar sounds.

"Good." Sable clapped his swords together, blood dripping from their blades onto the hot asphalt. "Because I was getting tired and thought I will probably never get these clothes clean anyway, more blood would just make washing them a lot harder!"

Gilgamesh's mouth hung wide open as the four nephilim came out of hiding, their hands held empty and high. They were actually laughing nervously at the joke, as terrible as it had been. Gallows humour; men who are scared enough will laugh at anything...anything but face inescapable reality.

"Wise, wise choice boys." Sable reached down and cleaned his swords on a dead man's hoodie before sheathing them at his belt; a belt that Gilgamesh could have sworn he had not been wearing earlier and held his empty hands out to the four nervous nephilim. His arms were bent slightly at the elbows, palms upward and fingers slightly bent; inviting. "You know who I am. You know what I am, but you only heard half of the story." He said. "Here's the other half. Scram. Now. All of you. Go!" He gestured to the empty rooftops behind them. "Do not force me to kill you because I would rather not."

To Gilgamesh's amazement, all four backed off slowly, their hands still held up in front of them, in complete silence. Sable watched them leave and cracked his neck with a sound like breaking light bulbs.

"I think you can focus back on Krampus and my father now, Gil." Sable called up as he set to searching the dead men and collecting their weapons. "They won't be coming back."

He found, most curiously, a small hand towel in the pocket of one man and set to cleaning his arms and face with it.

Gilgamesh found no words to respond with, so he simply swung his rifle around on its tripod to face back at the stage with a nod of his head. If he had not seen it, he would never believe it. In fact, he had seen it and he still wasn't sure that he believed it!