Valdor+Vindicare

In the distance, perhaps a kilometre away, maybe more, the Custodian thought he saw something brief and bright. A glint off a metallic object atop a low butte…
“I will prove it to you.” Valdor raised his arm and pointed a finger at the gunner behind the multilaser.
“In the Emperor’s name,” he said, his tone calm and conversational, “death.”
A heartbeat later, the gunner’s upper torso exploded into chunks of meat on a blast of pink fluids.
The fear that the Emperor’s name had briefly conjured returned tenfold. Valdor pointed to the rifleman standing over Tariel. “And death,” he went on. The junkhunter’s body bifurcated at the spine with a wet chug, collapsing to the sand. “And death, and death, and death…” The Custodian let his arm fall, and stood still as three more of the gang were torn apart where they stood.
Tariel dived into the dirt and the rest of the junkhunters broke apart in a terrified scramble, some of them racing towards a vehicle, others desperately trying to find cover. Valdor saw one of them leap into a dunerider and gun the engine, the vehicle surging away. The windscreen shattered in a red blink of blood and the rover bounded into a shallow gulley, crashing to a halt. The others died as they ran.
A furious snarl drew Valdor’s attention back and he looked up as the gang leader came speeding towards him – too fast for a normal human, quite clearly nerve-jacked as he had first suspected…
Valdor did nothing, stood his ground. Then, like the work of an invisible trickster god, the gun was ripped from the gang leader’s hand and it spun away into the air, the mechanism torn open and spitting great licks of blue-white sparks.
Only then did Valdor step in and break the man’s neck with a short chopping motion to his throat. The last of the junkhunter band dropped and was still.
…”How did you know when to fire”?
“His weapon’s scope contains a lip-reading auspex,” Valdor answered for the sniper.

Chapter Three