The Tamoio — King Of Triumph #1

This is the story of the night he crossed hell itself, stole iron from death, and claimed a crown no one else dared to wear.
The Tamoio — King of Triumph.



Tamoio accelerated his motorcycle against sandstorm.

The heart beating in the same wild rhythm as the engine, knowing that on the other side of that wall was the man he swore to kill.

He glimpsed, for a second between the curtains of sand, the metallic shine of a figure mounted on an iron horse stopped at the top of the highest dune.

Tamoio gripped the handlebars harder, teeth clenched. The iron horse let out a deep, almost organic roar, and began to descend the dune in a straight line toward him.
The distance shrank too fast.
Tamoio saw the red eyes of the Iron Knight fixed on him through the sand.

Tamoio machine-gunned the Iron Knight. Detonated an internal reactor. The armor opened like a flower of fire: a deafening explosion blew the Knight into a flash, and Tamoio passed right through the middle of that explosion.

The eardrums bled. Tamoio came out the other side of the explosion covered in embers, with the motorcycle on fire, alive, more alive and deafening then ever.
Unstoppable.
Flames rose up his arms like living sleeves. The handlebars were too hot to hold, but Tamoio held them.
Behind him, incandescent pieces of the Iron Knight fell like dead stars, and he did not look back even once.

And he shot straight ahead into the heart of the storm that had not yet ended.
Lights flashed on the horizon — they were not headlights. They were eyes. Multiple, yellow, green, red. Machines, men, things that were neither one nor the other. They saw him come out of the storm like a demon in flames and began to move toward him, weapons raised, engines roaring, hatred.
The red motorcycle, still spitting fire through the seams, advanced in a straight line as if those eyes did not exist.
He could not take them all alone.

But the rearview mirror showed lights behind him: allies. They were the renegades, the exiles, those who lost everything. Fluttering cloaks. Warriors standing in truck beds. Accelerating without hesitation, cutting through the dust, overtaking, helping Tamoio.

A man standing in the bed of a truck turned back, looked straight at Tamoio and struck his chest with his fist — ancient gesture of respect.
He raised his closed fist, body swaying with the truck, and shouted as if speaking to the entire desert:
“Soldiers! We are this man! We are the man who bleeds! Who rises again and again! We know the triumph of conquest and the pride of defeat! And we know that everything else is only a test of persistence to measure the size of our impulse to fight!”

Shouts. Rotating machine guns. Explosions and the enemy ever closer to colliding.

Contact. Shock. Detonation.

Tamoio flew upward like a human projectile, arms open, body spinning wildly — he tumbled in the air one, two, three… twelve times before hitting the slope of a dune with his shoulder, sliding backward for meters and stopping face down, half buried in hot sand and shrapnel.

Tamoio tried to support himself with his hands to rise. The entire body trembled with adrenaline. The right arm gave way with a wet snap. He fell again face-first into the sand, spat blood and a broken tooth.
He closed his eyes for an instant. When he opened them, he saw a boot walking a few meters away — someone alive, staggering. It was impossible to see who it was. Only the silhouette against the fire. Coming toward him.
Above the boot, slender body, almost human, but wrong. Synthetic rubber skin torn in several places, revealing fiber mesh and cables. Long arms ending in retractable blades. Drove one of them straight toward Tamoio’s good shoulder.

The blade came out with a wet suction sound, taking pieces of tissue with it.
Tamoio rolled using the weight of his torso and legs to escape the second blade that was already descending.
The unit missed by centimeters. The blade sank into the sand where his head had been half a second earlier

And Tamoio’s teeth clamped down hard on something stuck in the sand: the handle of a broken sword, black, still hot from the explosion. He bit the handle with force, holding it between his teeth like a starving wolf bites a bone. Blood mixing with the taste of burnt metal.

Tamoio spun his neck and torso in a wild movement. The blade in his mouth struck the front leg of the unit, sinking deep into the joint.

Metal screeched. The machine lost balance, falling forward.
He did not stop — rolled over it, and drove the tip into the space between the plates of the chest.

The unit convulsed. Mechanical arms thrashing. The mechanical shoulder and arm falling beside him with a heavy thud. Without hesitating, he turned his broken torso and began to fit the strange shoulder into his own wounded shoulder. Blood ran, but he twisted, cables tore, fibers mixed with flesh.

A dry click.
The new arm trembled, then responded. The blade came out entire, clean, pointing to the sky.
Tamoio closed the mechanical fist once. The sound of living metal: his new shoulders, his new arms.

He looked down, at what remained of the unit: an empty torso, cables hanging like entrails.
With the new arm, he grabbed it like a trophy, the hot metal against the organic palm. And he raised it above his head.
— I AM TAMOIO, KING OF KINGS, WITNESS MY TRIUMPH AND DESPAIR!

A lightning bolt tore through the dark sky behind him — white-blue, dry, without immediate thunder. The raw light illuminated the battlefield for an eternal instant: smoking wreckage, motionless bodies, vitrified sand shining like broken glass.
The ground shook. Sand rose in waves.


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End of chapter.
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