Tyrant's Stars: Parts Three and Four by Hideyuki Kikuchi Page A

said, his voice rolling through the night air like a wild and heavy howl. “Your darling hubby has returned. You had some nerve letting me stay locked up in that hole all those years.”
    “I don’t wanna hear it,” Sue shot back. “They should’ve kept a savage like you in the Capital for the rest of your life. Don’t you get it? This here is my new fella. And unlike you, he’s really nice. Why’d you bother dragging your sorry ass back here? Why don’t you run back to prison?”
    “You little bitch!”
    Matthew saw the man’s right hand sweep out. There was easily thirty feet between them. Did he have a rifle?
    The wind whistled. Something long and thin uncoiled in the man’s hand—but Matthew only realized this when the flamethrower tucked in his belt had been knocked away.
    “Is that—a whip?”
    “It sure is,” the man snickered. “It’s made of a special steel that can pull the legs out from under a fire dragon or wrap around its neck to choke the life from it. It’ll rip your head right off your shoulders.”
    “Make a break for it, Sue!” the boy shouted as he wheeled his horse around to the right. The forest lay there dark and deep. He gave a frantic kick to his mount’s sides.
    Right by Matthew’s ear, a shot rang out. It was a heavy sound that numbed his eardrum—the blast of a shotgun.
    The man’s cyborg horse slumped forward.
    “Into the forest!” Sue cried out, wheeling her own steed around. Purplish smoke spilled from the shotgun in her right hand. The barrels had been sawed off so it could be used to deal with multiple opponents at close range. Each shell held twenty balls of shot.
    The dozens of yards between them and the forest would be hell.
    Looking back, the boy shouted, “He’s not chasing us!”
    “He’s coming, all right!”
    At the woman’s unexpected reply, Matthew followed her gaze. As Sue rode alongside him, her eyes were riveted to her left and below—trained on the ground that lay between the two of them. Matthew’s own eyes bulged in their sockets. Something like a snake was rushing through the grass. A whip. The steel whip had come after them.
    Suddenly it leaped up toward Sue. A blast from the shotgun struck the earth, snapping the whip off. The way it writhed on the ground, it seemed to be in pain as it fell further and further behind them.
    “You did it!”
    “Did what?”
    Matthew was about to tell her she’d snapped off the whip, but at that moment a black shape loomed over them on the right. The instant they passed beneath it, a thud followed after them. It was the trunk of a weir pine twice as big as a man could get his arms around.
    “How in the—”
    “There’ll be more—break right!”
    Jerking the reins, he found the world shaken by a titanic specimen of solitude oak.
    “What the hell is doing this?” Matthew asked, his tone nearly a scream.
    “My husband’s whip. He told you it could strangle a damn fire dragon! To keep him safely out of range, it can stretch three quarters of a mile.”
    “Holy—” Matthew screamed. A figure with red eyes leaped up from the ground in front of him. A second later, it was blown back with the sound of a gunshot and fell to earth.
    Without a second’s pause, another tree fell toward them. Running on and on, pursued relentlessly, the next thing the two of them knew, they were flying out of the forest.
    Abruptly, their horses pitched forward. The riders hit the ground head first—or they should have, but they narrowly managed to fall safely, since both were accomplished riders thanks to their lives on the Frontier. Still, they got banged around enough to leave even their brains numbed.
    “Damn!”
    “Ow!”
    When they looked up, a giant of an armored man stood before them.
    “This is—right back where we started!”
    As Matthew stared in amazement, the man replied with delight in a vulgar tone, “Right you are. My whip chased you in a big circle through the forest. You can’t get away.”
    The