Rain hammered the stone like handfuls of thrown nails.
The iron gate of the Royal Bank of Scotland gaped open, and Billy McNab lay at the two female crusaders' boots. Blood trickled from his bald head, but he wasn't truly unconscious—just smart enough to pretend.
The two red-haired sisters stood exactly where Sir Egg had ordered them.
Their light armour sets and faceless helmets with cross-slit visors made them look emotionless, inhuman—like something straight out of that new Terminator film from '84. And like machines, they stood with carbines welded tight to their chests, raised and ready. Rain hissed on their helmets and slid down their rifles in thin white trails.
Inside the bank, the gunfire had stopped.
The last echoes died against the marble and leaked out into the square like ghosts.
The alarm sirens, however, were still screaming full-force.
The sisters stood stiff, fingers trembling on their triggers, uncertain. Their bodies knew battle; they knew the sound of thunder, the crush of men in the Fourth Crusade. But everything here was wrong—the noises, the lights, the smooth stone, the shrieking box-voices—and in their heads unknown translated neatly to the work of the Devil.
They stared across the street.
At the bus stop, a small crowd huddled under umbrellas, frozen after seeing Billy go down and nine walking impossibilities march into the bank. The road itself was briefly quiet, but cars still rolled past: drivers staring out from dry cabins, faces pressed to glass. In nearby windows, people peered down from flats and offices, silhouettes framed against television glow.
Wide eyes. Hands over mouths.
Strange clothes. Strange hair.
Even one man whose dark skin and features reminded the sisters of the Muslims who had killed them in their first life in the Holy Land. All of them shaking, trying to understand.
To the crusaders, this crowd felt like a threat.
They were outnumbered ten to one already, and more would surely come—more wagons of iron and steel, more men-at-arms. As far as the sisters could tell, these people were already armed: not just with the hulking cars, but the black umbrellas, the camcorders and gadgets Braveheart had half-explained during the van ride.
In their eyes, it was all witchcraft.
One sister whispered through her comms, voice sharp with fear:
> "Enemies gather. I fear the crowd readies for an attack."
The other answered, breath trembling:
> "Strike first. God shields His chosen."
They lifted their rifles to their shoulders as Braveheart had shown them. There was no precision in it: they simply pointed the barrels at the thickest clump of bodies—the bus stop.
Then, panicking, they squeezed the triggers and held on.
Exactly how women who had never fired a gun in their lives would use one.
The first 7.62 mm burst ripped across the street and hit a passing black cab that happened to slide into their line of fire.
The driver's side window exploded inward, glass spraying like ice shrapnel.
The driver's face simply ceased to exist, reduced to red mist, bone splinters, and brain matter. His body slumped sideways into the passenger seat, twitching once before going still.
The cab rolled a little farther on momentum, bumped the curb on the bank's side of the pavement, and came to rest at an angle—its corpse of a driver giving the bus-stop crowd one last, small, accidental scrap of cover.
But before the cab had even come to a halt, the bullets were already reaching the people at the shelter.
Umbrellas burst open like paper flowers and disintegrated.
Glass shattered.
Bodies jerked as bullets struck them—legs taken out, arms shredded, torsos punched through, one unlucky head simply erased.
An office worker's shoulder disintegrated in a red flash as bone and meat tore apart; she spun backwards into the bench.
A man took three rounds in the chest and folded in less than a second, like wet laundry.
Two teenage girls screamed as shards of glass tore into their faces, blinding them.
Someone shouted, "RUN!"
Someone else screamed, "HOLY GOD!"
The two blinded girls got shoved to the ground and trampled in the panic.
Another teenager tried to sprint, slipped in someone else's blood, and crashed into a puddle; a stray round hit her in the side and she went still.
One office worker woman simply crouched, hands over her ears, screaming at nothing.
Two bullets punched through her coat; her hat spun away in the rain as she toppled and lay dead exactly where she'd been.
People pushed and scrambled over each other trying to escape.
Others froze and died where they stood.
The red-haired crusader sisters kept firing, vision tunnelling, hearts hammering, rifles drifting down toward their hips as any semblance of aim abandoned them. The noise of the carbines thrilled and terrified. This was power, raw and shocking, nothing like sword or spear—this was like holding thunder in their hands. They didn't understand recoil, didn't understand muzzle rise; they just swept the guns in wild arcs. And with fully loaded 100-round drum magazines, they had plenty of time before they had to think about reloading.
Bodies fell. Others crawled. Some lay bleeding until they didn't move at all.
Across St Andrew Square, beyond the garden, beyond the smoke and screaming, a single stray round sang through the rain.
It crossed the open green, snapped through wet leaves,
and stitched into a third-floor kitchen window.
Glass blew inward.
A blue ceramic dog bowl exploded into powder.
Bacon, a long-eared, pampered hound bred for comfort rather than hardship,
leapt backwards in outrage as kibble fountained across the linoleum.
He threw his head back and howled—not in fear, but in devastating aristocratic grief.
His owners dove under the kitchen table shrieking.
Bacon slapped the tiles with his paws and howled again,
a ridiculous, heartbroken elegy for porcelain craftsmanship and breakfast routine.
Outside, gunfire and screaming went on without him.
Bacon, trembling beside the ruined bowl,
had no idea the world had gone insane—
only that breakfast had been destroyed by an act of cosmic malice.
Back at the bank, a double-decker bus doing its usual morning loop came rolling oblivious towards the sisters' line of fire, wipers squeaking, headlights yellow through the rain.
The sisters saw its size, its red colour, its sheer bulk—bigger than the shared house they'd once lived in back in their medieval life—and in their minds it became a beast of Hell, a siege engine on wheels coming to crush them.
They screamed into their comms:
> "BEAST! BEAST OF IRON!"
Then they fired at it, despite the fact that it was just calmly rolling along the road as it always did. The driver, in a mad act of courage, had actually sped up a little, trying to swing the bus between the sisters and the fleeing crowd to shield the people.
The bus's windscreen turned instantly white with cracks, then black with blood.
The driver's skull erupted across the controls.
His foot spasmed, then locked down on the gas pedal.
Passengers screamed in terror as the bus lurched forward.
Passengers on the upper deck were thrown back in their seats, then shrank into hysteria as they saw the dead driver slumped over the wheel, skull collapsed like a caved pumpkin.
Someone pounded the emergency stop.
It clacked uselessly.
Nothing happened.
The bus hopped the curb, ploughed through a line of metal bike racks, and clipped a lamppost hard enough to send sparks spitting across the wet pavement.
A granny carrying two bags of cat food had just fled the massacre at the bus stop.
She never even turned around.
The bus struck her square in the back.
Her frail body shot forward like a ragdoll, skidding across slick stone — and before she could even cry out, the bus rolled over her.
The left-side wheel climbed her torso, then her neck.
A wet, meaty crack echoed beneath the chassis.
Her skull flattened like overripe fruit.
The bus roared on.
It tore across the wet square, tyres shrieking, fishtailing once, then drove straight into the glass front of a small café where six early risers were drinking Boxing Day coffees.
Glass erupted inward like a storm of knives.
Tables flipped.
Chairs splintered.
Two people vanished under the bus completely — crushed into the mosaic of tile and steel.
The counter folded like tin.
The bus ploughed into the kitchen, metal shrieking in agony.
A gas line ruptured.
A spark found the fumes.
WHOOMPH—
The café blew outward in a brutal, concussive blast —
a bright orange fist smashing into the rain.
Windows shattered for half the block.
Fire rolled into the street, then curled back on itself in thick, choking smoke.
Inside the burning bus, passengers clawed at the windows —
pounding, screaming,
some already burning alive,
others trapped by twisted metal and melting plastic.
The sisters stopped firing as the blast rippled across the square.
They simply stared.
Their rifles sagged but did not fall.
Rain steamed on their armour.
Their breaths came in hot, foggy bursts behind their visors.
They trembled — stunned by the violence they'd unleashed,
stunned by the godlike obedience of the weapons in their hands.
Weapons that needed no strength, no training —
only a finger and fear.
One whispered:
"…My God… what fire have we wrought?"
The other whispered back:
"…Is this the wrath o' Heaven… or Hell?"
For a heartbeat — just one — they watched the burning bus.
Watched the passengers inside slam their fists weakly against molten glass,
watched the flames curl around bodies trapped between seats,
watched the rain hiss against fire and fail to put anything out.
Their fingers twitched on their triggers —
not to fire again,
but because their nerves were no longer their own.
Around them, people fled in blind panic.
Some limped, leaving red tracks in rainwater.
Some moaned, crawling toward shelter.
Some didn't move at all.
The square had become a battlefield —
manufactured entirely by ignorance, fear,
and the indiscriminate logic of 7.62 mm rounds.
Through the smoke, through the rain, through the pounding terror,
Braveheart came sprinting.
His boots hammered the pavement.
His breath came in white, furious bursts.
He saw the flames.
He saw the bodies.
He saw the crushed granny.
He saw the cab driver slumped sideways in his seat.
He saw the bus burning alive.
And he saw the two sisters — rifles lowered now, standing in trembling awe of the apocalypse they had summoned.
Braveheart's voice ripped through the storm:
"STOP! STOP! FOR FUCK'S SAKE — STOP!!"
The two crusader women snapped toward him immediately.
And they stopped.
Just like that.
Rifles lowered.
Heads bowed.
Shame — or confusion — flickered in the tilt of their shoulders.
Behind them the square burned.
Braveheart staggered to a halt, hunched, rain pouring off his hood, chest heaving.
His voice cracked into the wind:
"What have you DONE…?"