They both ended up diving into the Russian helicopter on the helipad, since it had been tied down to studs on the pad earlier and was still affixed to it.

Alby didn’t see what happened to Jaeger Eins but everybody else on the helipad—or on any exposed deck of the oil rig—was thrown off the falling vessel.

And then, as the rig freefell into the city-maze, WHACK!, its fall halted instantly and shockingly.

From his position inside the chopper, Alby didn’t know what had caused the sudden stop.

Then he looked up and saw that the oil rig’s anchor cable was reaching back up to the top of the wall and was now stretched taut.

The anchor cable must have caught on the wall and now the rig—turned sideways, almost perfectly ninety degrees—hung off the colossal ancient wall with seawater gushing down on either side of it.

Something flashed in Alby’s peripheral vision and he ducked as Jaeger Eins came rushing out of the rear cabin of the chopper, leading with a knife.

Alby dodged the blow and, on a reflex, swiped at Eins’s face with the filament weapon.

It happened so fast that at first Alby didn’t realise what he’d done.

The lower half of Jaeger Eins’s face slid gruesomely off the bottom of his head.

All of it—jaw, teeth and nostrils—one second they were there, the next they were gone.

A whole chunk of his face below the nose had been instantly excised, leaving only exposed flesh and a clear view into his throat in its place. He’d been turned into a living Picasso painting.

Above the grotesque mess that was his lower face, Jaeger Eins’s eyes bulged in pure disbelieving shock.

He howled a mouthless cry of pain that was inhuman in its agony.

Alby didn’t give a fuck. He pressed his advantage.

Slash, slash.

The first slash cut off the grip of Eins’s knife plus his whole knife hand, causing the knife to fall away.

The second slash cut off his other hand.

And suddenly Jaeger Eins, the cruel leader of a cruel gang of assassins who had never been accountable to anyone, was a broken and disfigured wretch.

Alby clenched his teeth as he leaned in close to Eins’s ruined face.

‘This is for my friend, Julius,’ he said grimly.

He kicked Eins out of the chopper and the Golden Knight fell away into the roiling waters at the base of the mighty waterfall, doomed to drown in fear and agony as water rushed unimpeded into his exposed throat, and Jaeger Eins was never heard from again.

Alby and Aloysius now found themselves stranded on the oil rig hanging sideways from the western rim of the ring-wall, with all its decks turned vertical.