The "dumb" one

Looking down at the scene being played out below the top of the broken slope, Brenan shook his head and cursed his own stupidity as he realized that it was the things that Red had said about him the previous day that was now prompting him to slowly dismount his horse and lead it over to a nearby tree.

“And to top it all off, now I’m going to risk my life for some stupid fantasy,” Brenan muttered to himself as he tied the horse’s reins around the trunk of the three and returned to the edge of the rocky slope.

His position was good, Brenan decided, as the advantage in height and the broken character of the slope outweighed his disadvantage in numbers, particularly when he had a gun and the element of surprise.

“Idiot,” Brenan lambasted himself as he spotted how one of the six men was standing a few feet away from where his mates were mercilessly beating up their two victims, and even at that distance it was obvious to Brenan that that bastard was enjoying the show.

“That’s it! Show those freaks who…” The man’s goading turned into a deeply distressed scream in the wake of the sudden crack of a firearm being discharged, with one of his hands coming down to try and stop the blood from pouring out through the wound in his thigh where the bullet had hit him.

“Nobody move!” Brenan called out as he turned his pistol at the other five men, a stream of smoke rising from the barrel of his weapon as he held in a two-handed grip.

One of the men jerked as though he was about to run to his fallen comrade, but then he seemed to understand that that wouldn’t be a terribly bright idea and did like his four friends by freezing up.

“What’s going on here?” Brenan asked, as the possibility that he had intervened on the wrong side popped up in his head. He ignored it, and made sure to note where each man was standing.

“They’re Lantian mutts!” One of the men cried out, apparently referring to the two badly beaten men who were now slumped down next to each other.

“Is that all?” Brenan shouted out his next question.

“Well… yeah…” The man seemed to be somewhat confused by Brenan’s question, but then he forgot all about it as he too got shot in the leg.

Brenan knew now that he wouldn’t be able to make the thugs remain still a second time, but then the isolation of the spot which they had picked to **** the two Lantians on was now working against them as they would have to make due without any assistance.

Even as his combat experience kicked in and helped him to maintain his cool, Brenan could feel his blood boil at how the six thugs had attacked the two men merely because they were different, and therefore deciding to stop firing what he considered to be warning shots.

As the second man fell down onto the rocky beach, three of them broke off in a dash down the beach, obviously intending to flee, while the fourth and last one seemed to be blinded by rage as he began to charge up the slope.

The distance was a bit on the long side, and running targets were never easy to hit, but Brenan still managed to put a bullet through the back of one of the fleeing thugs, the man falling forwards with his arms flapping in the air right up to the moment where he landed face first on the shore.

Already having wasted way too much money with those first three shots, Brenan wasted a little more by firing off the last round which he had chambered, and watched how his fourth victim toppled over with blood pouring out of his left shoulder.

Calmly holstering his gun, since he wasn’t going to try and break it open and put the four empty cartridges into his pocket so that he could have them reloaded later on before pressing in four loaded ones into the chamber, Brenan drew his sword and waited for the last thug to finish his increasingly slow charge up the slope.

When he was about five paces away from Brenan, the man finally looked up and decided there and then that charging uphill towards an armed adversary wasn’t precisely a stroke of genius, a decision which drove him to around and begin to climb back down the way he’d come.

Smirking at the fleeing man, Brenan felt as though he had interfered enough and that he should best be on his way. Both of the beaten men were still lying on the ground though, and he could sense himself become more and more convinced that the right thing to do was to climb down to the beach and check to see that they were alright.