The Shrouded Blade

A Cybernetic Slasher...

They never saw me.

I stood but three-hundred-and-eighty-nine nanometers to their right, and yet they never saw me. Was good to know the cloak worked at the time.

I walked behind them, stride effortless and steady. They were white and gray, man and woman, dressed just as I saw them. Just as I always see them, night after night. Suits of silk, ties of black. Smiling. Laughing. All the usual emotional responses.

In their invisible prints I stepped, every tile of glossy black sidewalk bringing me closer and closer to them. I calculated the precise trajectory to take into their hearts. My blade was ready, but I knew it wouldn’t be drawn. That’d be too easy. Too messy. No, tsk tsk tsk, this one hadda be good and clean.

I dialed the code into my right arm panel. An electric chill rolled up my body, and in time, rolled up his. The implant surrendered to my signals so fast you’d figure it was a French model. She was awfully frightened then.

I dialed the code into my left arm panel, and soon, she was rolling with us. Within my cozy shroud, I could see it all. Tremors of bodies, twisting of limbs, shedding of blood-caked fur, the eyes as they roll back and back and back, through the ages and round the planet! They were mere bodies caught in eternity’s churn.

The chill was warm within my aura, and it felt tremendous. ‘Twas the best damn high I had in millennia.

I left them to quake on the sidewalk, my neck-cams eyeing up the shuddering figures. The quivering gave me pause, if only for a spell. I snapped out of it and looked down to the blade, that beautiful slice of silver, where my hand once sat all those years ago.

Oh, what the hell, why shouldn’t I have had a little fun? Couldn’t let a good toy go to waste, now could we? Besides, I always looked good in red.

Don’t I now?