Excerpt from "The Man From Empire"

Just then he moved. And I don't mean lazily like he'd done with the gangbangers last night. I think this was really the best he was capable of. "Ahhh!" I started, frightened, but bit down on my tongue. I actually did poop my panties a little, it was so sudden and so fast. I wasn't even certain of the direction he'd moved, but my guess was correct. The sword I'd seen last night was in his hand. I saw a blue swirl start to form over the dining table, three dimensional, the dirty ugly dark greyish blue you sometimes see between small gaps in storm clouds when it's getting to be really late in the afternoon. By the way ScOsh reacted, I could tell the gangbangers were a day at Disneyland.by comparison. A body started to coalesce, a body like nothing seen on Earth except maybe drawings from some demented horror artist somewhere. It stood mostly upright, and it was kind of symmetrical but that was where any semblance to anything Earthly ended. It had five arms, three on its right side and two on its left, and they were offset by apparently random small amounts from the line you'd think of as the appropriate 'side' - as if a man had an arm sprouting from near his nipple, and another from back near the shoulder blade. It had four legs, but the arrangement wasn't anything like square or rectangular pattern of Earth animals. It was more like a trapezoid, large side to the creature's right. Each arm had a different arrangement or implement or both on the end, and most of them were large nasty-looking claws. As far as I could see, the legs were solid and club-like, no toes or hooves or even feet. There was no neck and the head was weighted heavily to the creature's left. The ugly blue that had marked the swirl was its primary color, shading to a sandstone reddish color at the end of the limbs, with ridiculous bright green fluorescent tufts of something that looked like a cross between feathers and hair here and there based upon no scheme I want to figure out. I'm pretty sure I screamed somewhere in there and finished the job I'd started in my panties, and I'm not at all ashamed of it. You think you can do better in equivalent circumstances, be my guest, but don't get me involved. Then it opened its mouth - a gaping maw that hadn't been visible before then at the bottom edge of its head - and I saw a nightmare of teeth and I'm not sure what. It stood a bit taller the ScOsh and about five times his mass, by which I mean it crushed my dining room table without me even having a chance to hope it would trip over the pieces. It made the start of a noise that can only be called a scream crossed with a roar at about 160 decibels. ScOsh stood waiting behind it until it started moving, then calmly and without wind-up cut it into two from side to side just above mid-"torso", then reversed his cut and cut through the head in a downwards motion, pulling out when he met his first cut. As I have said, he was fast when he wanted to be. The thing just about had time to realize it was dead as it crumpled, bleeding two colors, the ugly blue and an equally ugly color that reminded me of a dull forest green.

I was standing there mesmerized by the spectacle trying to process what had just happened and ScOsh said, "The rules of the game just changed"