Chapter 336. Not Even a Lizard Escapes Whole
The neon glow of the main thoroughfares began to fade as Gilgamesh and Thena wound their way back toward their lodgings. For centuries, their world had been one of silence and shifting dunes, a monochromatic existence in the heart of the Australian wasteland.
While Gilgamesh had occasionally tasted the fringes of humanity during his supply runs, Thena had been a prisoner of her own fractured mind. For her, the world had been reduced to a sun-bleached horizon, her only company the looming shadow of Mahd Wy'ry. Tonight, however, the shackles were off. They had lingered in the vibrant pulse of the city until the small hours of the morning, watching as the last of the street stalls shuttered their windows and the laughter of the crowds thinned into a ghostly echo.
Now, as they turned into a narrow, dimly lit street, the atmosphere shifted. The air grew heavy, stagnant with the scent of damp stone and neglect.
A local would have known better. In this corner of the city, the shadows held teeth. The crime rate was a living, breathing monster, and even the street-hardened residents avoided these alleys once the sun vanished. It was said that in such places, even a common lizard scuttling across the pavement risked ending the night with a few extra holes in its hide—and the perpetrators cared little whether those holes were made by lead or cold steel.
But Gilgamesh and Thena walked with the casual indifference of gods. They were tourists in a world they had helped shape, and the idea of a mortal threat was as foreign to them as the Hindi tongue.
Yet, as they walked, the darkness began to stir. Several pairs of eyes, glittering with a mix of predatory greed and low-born malice, tracked their every step from the mouths of black-alley doorways.
The two Eternals felt the weight of those gazes instantly. Years of cosmic warfare had honed their instincts to a razor's edge, but they didn't break their stride. To them, these were merely insects—fragile, brief-lived creatures of flesh and bone. Gilgamesh merely hoped the coming encounter wouldn't sour the rare smile currently lighting up Thena's face.
His hopes were in vain. The local thugs, seeing the expensive cut of their clothes and the pale radiance of the blonde woman, saw only one thing: "fat sheep." To them, foreign tourists were walking treasure chests, ripe for the picking and unlikely to fight back.
As they laid eyes on Thena, a darker, more svinish hunger ignited in their expressions. In a land where the scales of gender were often weighted heavily against women, a lone foreigner was seen as fair game for the worst kind of depravity. These were men who lived in the gutter and sought to drag everything beautiful down into it with them.
The trap sprung with a rhythmic clicking of knives and the thud of wooden cudgels. Seven men, their skin darkened by the sun and grime of the slums, stepped from the murk to bar their path. They wore the ragged uniforms of the desperate, their faces twisted into jagged, confident sneers.
"What is it they want?" Thena asked. She didn't flinch as the circle closed around them. Instead, she looked at Gilgamesh with a playful tilt of her head, a dangerous spark of battle-lust beginning to dance in her eyes.
A mortal man would have been paralyzed, his heart hammering against his ribs as he looked for an escape. Gilgamesh simply scanned the ragged line of attackers and let out a short, mocking huff of laughter. He reached out and gently caught Thena's hand, a silent command for her to stay her blade—for now.
"It seems the locals have come to offer us a traditional welcome," he rumbled, his voice like grinding stones. "Let's see what their hospitality entails."
Thena nodded, her posture relaxing into a deceptive stillness. To her, these men were less than shadows, less than dust.
The thugs, emboldened by the couple's lack of resistance, began to bark orders in harsh, guttural Hindi. They gestured wildly with their weapons, demanding gold, phones, and every scrap of currency the foreigners possessed. Seeing Gilgamesh's massive frame, a few of them whispered nervously, pointing at his broad shoulders, but the presence of seven-to-one odds and the steel in their hands gave them a false sense of omnipotence.
"Since they've gone to all this trouble," Gilgamesh muttered, patting Thena's hand reassuringly, "I suppose I should teach them a lesson in manners."
He took a single, heavy step forward.
The thugs reacted with a chorus of mocking jeers. The leader, a man with a jagged scar running across his jaw, let out a war cry and swung a heavy wooden club with all his might, aiming to crush Gilgamesh's skull.
Crr-ack!
Gilgamesh didn't even flinch. He caught the descending wood in his bare palm. With a casual flick of his wrist, the seasoned timber snapped like a dry twig.
"I'm giving you one chance," Gilgamesh said, his voice dropping an octave into a terrifying growl. He reached out with lightning speed, snatching the leader by the throat and hoisting him three feet off the ground. "Walk away while you still have the use of your limbs."
The words meant nothing to the thugs, but the action was a universal language. Yet, instead of fleeing, their panic turned to a frantic, collective rage. They perceived it as a challenge to their territory. With a ragged shout, the remaining six charged, knives flashing in the dim lamplight.
Gilgamesh sighed. He didn't bother summoning the golden glow of his cosmic gauntlets; for such gnats, muscle and bone were more than enough. The leader was still squirming in his grip, so Gilgamesh simply used him as a projectile, hurling the eighty-kilogram man into the path of three oncoming attackers. They went down in a tangled heap of limbs and curses.
The remaining three were already upon him. Gilgamesh moved with a fluidity that defied his bulk.
Thwack! Slap! Crack!
He delivered a series of open-palmed strikes, each one landing with the force of a falling sledgehammer. The sound of the impacts echoed off the narrow walls like pistol shots. The thugs' eyes rolled back in their heads as their bodies were lifted off the ground, spinning through the air before collapsing into the dirt, twitching in silent, unconscious heaps.
Thena, watching from the center of the fray, couldn't contain herself. A silvery, melodic laugh broke from her lips, ringing out through the dark alley as she watched the "terrible" bandits fold like wet paper.
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