Back in the late 1990s, Rare writer extraordinaire, Leigh Loveday, was working on an unreleased Killer Instinct novel to further deepen the knowledge behind the characters featured in the franchise. A couple of previews were provided exclusively to an age-old, now non-existent website titled fighters.simplenet. I’ve posted below one of the aforementioned previews, this one focused solely on the creation of Sabrewulf.
Pain.
An abrupt jolt rocked the brutish body spreadeagled on the operating table, and one eye, red as the sun’s last light, wrenched itself open.
Dirty white blurs swam across a vision that refused to focus, a mind that seemed to insist it was better that way, as needles of aching agony punctured the numbness that the dying beast wanted so badly to maintain. Peace, as ever, didn’t appear to be an option.
With a long, rasping sigh, the patient sank back into the spiderwebs of sleep.
…It was voices now that stirred him from his rest, bringing the creature into a reluctant semiconsciousness every bit as uncomfortable as it was before. Through a shroud that enveloped every sense, the patient could make out blunt, indecipherable murmurs that seemed to emanate from the off-white spectres still haunting his line of sight. He was vaguely aware of some black demon in the periphery of his mind attempting to force him into understanding, but that would entail rising further towards the world’s surface where the Pain lurked. It was bad enough down here, with an inexplicable cold heat knifing into every limb, patches of numbness that were somehow raw rather than soothing, and a general feeling of biological rebellion seething in every cell.
One of the greyish wraiths seemed to be repeating the same series of dull grunts – was it maybe trying to communicate? The patient instinctively made as if to draw breath, then thought better of it. Who was to say that these things weren’t the cause of his torture? And if they dragged him to the surface… no. Better to stay where he was, curled up tight within himself, within the darkness.
“Freak! Freak!”
They cluster around him like angry hornets, every bit as single-minded and infinitely more venomous. Their faces contorted with loathing, fuelled by a deep and disturbing excitement, they cut him and kick him and strike with anything they can lay hands on, becoming more and more intense in their punishment as his eyes roll back into his head and the entertainment threatens to reach its end.
He has neither the wish nor the strength to hurt these people or even defend himself against them, bearing already a number of severe wounds and bordering on unconsciousness from loss of blood. His arms, bound to the crude wooden cross by ropes that could never once have held him, are mercifully numb now – and though he suspects that the damage is permanent, he cannot summon any kind of concern.
For there is no fighting the despair, the heaviest, blackest depression he’s ever known, so debilitating he feels he would be left no choice but to lie down and surrender to the pain even if he were physically unharmed. By this stage he has no interest in the motives of his tormentors – death would in truth come as something of a relief, and he is tempted to accept its offer. But the Lady, with her destruction of his hopes and dreams, drives him on.
The Lady. Ah, yes. A memory he never would purge.
A harsh cry broken by passion and pain escapes his jaws and suddenly the creature is free, violently wrenching half the cross from its base and loping off across the mud with his burden, those villagers unfortunate enough to bar his way left scattered like broken stalks. Pain, humiliation and misery drag his footsteps, but fury stokes the furnace of revenge in his heart and will not let him falter until his grievances are satisfied… or his body beyond repair.
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He bursts out of remembrance with a lupine scream, straining against the straps that hold him down, finding himself sunk completely in the pain and anguish he sought to escape, both physical and emotional. Shaking his shaggy head and howling in an attempt to block out the demon memories, the agonised patient fails for long seconds to notice that the phantoms he’d watched previously have now obtained a certain quality of definition. It is only when the trauma slowly fades to bearable levels that he dares to let his senses coalesce.
And suddenly he realises that something is deeply, deeply wrong. He freezes, body paralysed with dread. All pain temporarily forgotten, he tries frantically to glean some understanding of the situation while the white-cloaked scientists squint and murmur urgently amongst themselves. But even a thorough dredging of the patient’s most recent and wretched memories brings nothing to light, and only then, in his panic, does he catch sight of the Ultratech logo on the scientists’ garb.
Ultratech. The tournament. The Lady. The cure…
Icy horror engulfs the creature’s already unstable mind as he stares down at his restrained body, simultaneously trying to register and deny the sight of the interlocked steel plates riveted where they have no right to be, the six-inch metal talons welded to his paws, the faint rasp of metal on metal as his body spasms in shock.
What…
What have they DONE to me?
He tries to scream his passion at the hesitant figures in white, but all that emerges is a harrowing metallic howl.
The pain vanishes. The terrible memories flare and burn away like scraps of paper. New anger fills him, new wrath, new savagery – and new madness.
The restraints tear free of the operating table and the creature once known as Sabrewulf surges up like a tsunami, consumed by mindless rage, shoved over the boundaries of sanity by this latest heart-rending revelation. Scientists shriek and scatter as the titanic metal-shod monster explodes through the locked double doors and out into the corridors of Ultratech HQ, roaring and wailing, racked by pain and despair but untroubled from this moment on by the bonds of human morality.
“Wait!” they cry after him. “We made you whole again…”
His claws glinting sharper than scalpels in the fluorescent light, the victim of this black renaissance lets out a low, rasping growl as he runs. Before, there was hope – now, there is only revenge. If he were capable of tears, they would be streaming down his face.
Really sounds more like his KI2 bio (cybernetic arms)… Which game was this story made for?
This is the story of Sabrewulf getting his cybernetic arms. Keep them coming.
Another KI story. Sweet!
Hey, when were these made? Because that’s KI2 material…