The stranger at the head of the ring spoke first.
He was a broad man with a scarred jaw, and a heavy axe rested across his back, its edge lit with the dull grey sheen of Axiom Force worked into steel.
His eyes moved over the eleven the way a butcher's eyes move over a hanging carcass.
"Hand over whatever you pulled out of that hole," he said. "The lights, the cores, all of it. Do that, and maybe we only take half your teeth."
"Or," a woman beside him added, drawing a curved blade that hummed with a thin red edge, "we take it off your corpses and save ourselves the talking."
Erix did not bother answering. His armor-eyes had already counted them, weighed them, marked them.
They read deeper than stances. Every one of the fifteen carried an Axiom Art, of course, the same as any being that had lived this long in the Sanctuary, and each had shaped a Medium from it.
