Beam POV: Day 41

Current Wealth: 0 silver 0 copper

Current Debt: 6 gold 44 silver 20 copper

I was fairly certain that, generally speaking, corpses didn’t actually have visible stink lines coming off of them, let alone dully glowing flies mere minutes after death. The one I was looking at did, though.

At first I thought maybe I’d just been hit harder than I thought, but they got clearer, not more faded, as my vision focused and my headache subsided. They were all tinged grey and just barely luminous, like if some deepwater animal had a stealth mode. And yet they jumped out to my vision. Something about them demanded my attention, registering as clear to me as my own heartbeat.

Groaning, I rolled onto my side and glanced up. Kratos was making his way to Xangô, at best I had about ten seconds before my friend was dead. I moved faster, kneeling up, shuffling towards the corpse, ignoring my body swearing at me with every inch cleared. I was beside it soon, forcing a foot underneath me, then standing with an exertive roar.

Something brushed against my hand, and I didn’t need to look to know what it was. The grey…Mystery. Whatever was emanating out of that corpse. I ran my fingers through it, then closed them into a fist, binding it into my grip and feeling it solidify.

It felt like death, decay. Like the corpse was resting in my hand, touching my mind, whispering at my thoughts. My fatigue started to bleed away, and in its place I felt something new. An emotion that wasn’t mine, an instinct that wasn’t human, an urge that wasn’t natural.

Yes, yes! Now tear him apart! Sunder him!

That voice, echoing around in my head, was definitely not my own. And I didn’t have the time to worry about whose it might be. I tightened my fist, finally glancing at what it held.

Grey, swirling energies. I might have guessed as much, but now they’d congealed into something solid. A long bar, cylindrical and thick, heavy like a chunk of wrought iron. I could feel the strength in it, and something more. An icy feeling leaking out of the material and up through my arm.

It made me want to move, to kill. I obliged it.

A roar escaped me, running out of my mouth on instinct alone, and it snapped the pale giant’s head around just in time for him to see me come flying across the alley at a sprint. He raised a guard, and I swung my new weapon for his head, missed, then twisted around to bring it back for his ribs. It was a motion I’d practised a thousand times- ten thousand- and it was all the easier for how light this weapon was compared to the swords I’d trained with.

Light, and viciously deadly. As if it weighed ten times more on the moment of impact. I felt ribs crack as it bounced off the bald man’s side, and the weapon fizzled out of existence before I could repeat the motion. My enemy was still stunned, hunched down and clutching his wounded torso, precious seconds bought for me to adjust to being without a weapon once more.

So I did, lashing out a kick for his head.

That same exact technique had staggered a troll, within our earliest days in Redacle. I was stronger, now, and this fucker was definitely no troll. He went down instantly, and I followed him, taking the mount position on sheer muscle memory as hours of grappling came back to me. I was slamming elbows and hammerfists down onto his head for what felt like a minute before he finally made his move.

It was a simple one, but effective. He just grabbed me, then hauled me off him like I was a little kid, sent me rolling and scraping along the jagged alley floor while he stumbled to his feet. I hurried up after, managing to stand just in time to leap back from a haymaker which might’ve cracked my skull open otherwise. Then my back hit the wall.

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He didn’t hesitate even an instant, another punch flying for me, this time forcing me to block. Easier to guard against a fucking baseball bat, the sheer size of his arm almost bowled me over, and an instant later his giant hands were closing around my throat, squeezing. I tried to pry the fingers off, to no avail. Tried to break his grip with all the techniques I’d learned, and none worked. It was like getting throttled by a fucking powerlifter, raw strength being applied in enough volume that skill and experience went entirely out the window.

And then I remembered his ribs.

I kneed them, hard, and he released me. Took a step back, even while I darted to one side, ignoring the urge to let myself recover and forcing my body to throw another strike. This one was far better in form, and the power it injected into his side was enough that I could feel the bones shifting place where my knuckles touched them. Kratos was kneeling again, this time coughing up blood, and I allowed myself a single instant to ready the finishing blow.

It was a kick, carefully aimed and perfectly thrown, heel catching his neck right at the base of it. That magic spot where the spine transitioned from torso to skull. Something cracked, and the man started spasming. I watched while he kicked and gibbered beneath me.

Solitaire was right, it really does take fucking ages for someone to die properly. But he did. I let a few stomps come down on his neck and skull, once he was finally still. Just to be sure. And then I was turning to my friends.

Xangô was absolutely fucked, but still conscious. He eyed me with a mix of confusion and awe as I helped him stand, turning sharply to where Solitaire had fallen. Even that motion made him wince- he was in bad, bad condition. We all were, I supposed, not least of all me. Whatever had come over me to let my body move the way it had, it was wearing off, I could feel all the aches and pains return. Worse, now, probably agitated by my adrenaline rush. I could only hope I had enough left in the tank to make it back to our side’s hideout.

Solitaire was groaning, but conscious, when we came to him. He’d gotten off the worst, apparently, having fought the giant about as much as me, without years of olympic training to help out. He mumbled something about the 1% and lizards while we slung him over our shoulders. Sounded like himself, at least.

That left the two of us confident enough in his recovery to spend a few minutes searching the alley for discarded weapons, retrieving a few knives, pocketing them posthaste and making our way out.

Xangô didn’t wait long to speak, once we’d started our limp back to homebase. His questions came rapidly, and pointedly.

“What the shit was that light you conjured?” He demanded, eying me like I was some specimen in front of a microscope.

It was disconcerting, but I wasn’t in any mood to be particularly bothered by such things. I answered him.

“I have no idea.” I said, honestly. “I just…I wanted a weapon, and then I saw this weird grey stuff floating around the corpse…So I grabbed it, and it became a club.”

Xangô didn’t look mollified by the information. I pressed on anyway.

“There was this voice egging me on as I used it, too, telling me to kill the guy.” He blanched, and I winced, sighing. “You think I’ve snapped.”

Xangô snorted.

“Of course not. Hearing voices, alone? Yeah, sure, odds are you’re crazy. Going nuts exactly as you start using some weird magic, though, is one coincidence more than I care to count. I’d guess there’s more to this than either of us know.”

And that was all we said on the topic. It wasn’t a long conversation, and I was grateful for the fact. More grateful, though, to have had it at all. It hadn’t registered to me how worried I was about the idea that I’d cracked, until I said it aloud. And Xangô’s dismissing the notion was exactly what I needed.

A bit convenient, that. Was he just saying what he said to keep me functional while weapons were still drawn?

Maybe. I didn’t imagine I had any way of knowing if he was. When someone like Xangô wanted to trick you, you’d be tricked. And yet he was my friend.

I’m not Solitaire, not even remotely. Trust always came easy to me. I took comfort in it while we shuffled our way back. As my body became heavier, more pained and slower with seemingly every step, that comfort grew ever more important.

But not as important as it was when we actually arrived.

The big, robust building the rest of our side was camped out in still held strong, we could see, but the enemy had clearly gotten to it before us. They were crowded around it, surrounding the place in some big ring, all however many dozen were left. They held cudgels, knives, all the same weapons as the bastards in the alleys. Swapping arrows with defenders propped behind windows. All of them seemed either lightly injured or in perfect condition, and the panic Solitaire’s bomb had spread through their numbers was nowhere to be seen.

We were cut off, outnumbered twenty or more to one. And we were a lot more beaten up now than before.