Beam POV: Day 51

Current Wealth: 1 silver 47 copper

I hurried down the stairs, storming out into the main section of the building’s interior and watching as the doors shivered beneath unseen blows from the other side. They were big things, perhaps a dozen feet high and almost as wide, inches thick and consisting of hardwood. We’d barred them with a big length of timber that probably would’ve held even if Argar had taken an axe to it.

But it was straining now, and straining badly. Flexing and bending against the pressure applied from outside, groaning as its elasticity was pushed beyond the limit and its structure began to yield into fissures and splits.

Every new impact against it sent a shudder through the peasants assembled around us, bringing in fearful trembles as if it were their own bodies the enemy was smashing into. I found my own nerves fraying, for that matter, but a new sound soon took my focus. Xangô’s voice.

“Keep calm!” He roared, piercing through the sound as if his vocal chords were powering some coherent laser. “You’ve all faced these things before, and this time you’re shielded, barricaded and ready for them. Remember what we practised!”

I found myself hanging onto every word, along with the villagers. My spasming wits using Xangô’s voice as a lighthouse to guide themselves back from the seat of madness they’d drifted to. Amazingly, miraculously, his booming voice actually seemed to calm the room. Halting frantic, babbling movement and boxing people in shoulder-to-shoulder in tight, readied formation.

Just a fight. I told myself, as the door bar started schisming further, just another fight. You can win. You will win. You’ll live.

My thoughts were interrupted as a new something heavy smashed into the other side of the door, far more forceful than any other impact. The bar split fully, falling to the ground in two ruptured halves, and I had barely an instant to dwell on the fact before the door was flung wide.

Rotters poured in from behind it. We’d been told there were hundreds, but I swore we must have been facing thousands. Revolting piles of decay and necrotic animalism, snarling and scrambling over one another, all racing to be the first with human blood in their mouths. Their flesh was covered in lesions, scalps patchwork and tattered, eyes pale yellow like congealed milk. Black drool fell from their mouths and clung to jagged teeth, and what was left of their ragged clothing flapped behind them as they all sprinted for us.

There were so many, so fast, crammed into so small a place, that they came more as a tidal wave than a formation or flood. Actually moving in three dimensions as some were forced high over the heads of others as they smashed past each other. My heart sank at the sight of the chaos, and I forced my mind from it to touch the wood at my feet.

Wood. Yielding, but flexible, resilient and defensive. A protection as much as a weapon, if not moreso. This plank was bound by iron nails, though, and I felt their touch too. The rigidity of them, the jagged edges they demanded to hold. It was iron that had first made human warfare possible on a mass scale, outstripping bronze in abundance and function both, and this stretch yearned to continue that grim work.

I obliged it, standing with a new weapon in my hand. A simple weapon, one that men had been using to kill before we could even have been called men. I strode towards the barricades with my new spear in hand, magically-augmented muscles quivering beneath my skin, grip tightening about its luminous grip. I was just in time for the first of the rotters to slam into the other side.

The wood held before me, if barely. Inches thick and carefully shaped to Solitaire’s exact demands, I wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if an elephant had bounced off it. The creatures that first impacted it died to their allies’ force, rather than their own, crushed and ground to mangled mincemeat as a hundred tonnes of rancid muscle powered forth to pin them against the wood.

For a moment I stood, frozen. Everyone did. Then one of the fuckers- now just ten or twelve feet away- snarled at me, its eyes falling on mine through the gap in the wood. That threw me into action without another thought. My spear went high, ran clean through the barricade’s opening and into the rotter’s head. I felt skull surrender to ethereal iron, and twisted the weapon free to paint the wooden surfaces with sickly dark ichor. Already, though, I was turning the weapon back around in my grip, shoving it into another rotter, this time tearing an arm almost fully off at the shoulder. I adjusted my footing, moved back to give myself more room, then ran a third one through.

Everything, was what I saw. But not by seeing. I didn’t look to see Argar taking a head clean off with one swing of a sledgehammer, didn’t listen to hear a man’s flesh tear as he got too close to a barricade and felt rotting teeth sink into his arm, didn’t feel to notice the electric energy in the air as adrenaline dissolved fear into pure, animal violence. I just knew it all. My senses bounced around the entire room, then hit my wits as ricochets with all the relevant data.

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It was an incredible feeling, but likewise it worried me. Because I could experience the barricades breaking down almost as if my own nerves were threaded into them. I’d just started the process of estimating how long we had left when the logs came down.

They were like blacksmiths' hammers. Wielded by Zeus. On bull testosterone. I actually winced as I saw the half-tonne weights crunch down into the enemy mass, falling from high enough that they hit with the speed of a sprinting man. Even a sprinting me. The sound was gruesome, cracking bones and wet, sliding viscera as bodies burst apart on impact .The spray of blood was violent enough that it actually flitted into visibility for a second over the barricades.

And we felt the effect immediately. A second’s reprieve, then another, and finally, gloriously, a third. Just a few heartbeats spent watching the enemy mass thin and bounce harmlessly from our defence as the logs were dragged high towards the ceiling again. Then the rotters who’d been behind those killed finished scrambling over their bodies, and an entirely new wave hit.

The barricades were shuddering again, and everything disappeared beneath a blanket of frenzied violence. I stabbed, skewered, slashed, punched. Snarling, growling, grunting like an animal as I killed and killed and killed some more. Anything that moved before me, I skewered until it stopped. Anything that moved behind me, I screamed to back off and leave me more room to better attend my butchery. Time froze, broke, then melted to pool at my feet. A homogenous sludge, too hazy for me to gauge anything so fine as the passing of seconds.

For me, the world moved on only with each new dead rotter. Perhaps once I reached a thousand, an hour would have passed.

The logs fell, bodies burst apart, and there came another lull in the killing. Then the new wave reared up, and this time the outermost barricades were cracking openly, their substance beginning to yield before undead flesh.

Water could erode a mountain, and putrefaction could kill a tree. Our enemies had us cornered, I knew. They only needed the time to get at us.

“ABANDON THE OUTER BARRICADES!” I heard Xangô roar, and I was turning to obey before my conscious mind even registered his order. Me, Argar, the dozen or so others who’d been manning them scrambled back as the logs came down again, using the slight break to get behind the new set, then haul them upwards and lock them into place just in time for the rotters to break through the first layer.

Solitaire and Xangô had replicated the outer barriers no more than three times, and we’d now abandoned the first row for the second. By our third retreat, we’d need the enemy weakened. Because there wouldn’t be a fourth.

They came again, and we fought them back. Impaling, bludgeoning, hacking and smashing. The logs fell, bones broke, wood split and the air filled with screams of fear, rage, hate and helplessness.

One rotter actually managed to clear the barricade, falling no more than a foot before my magic spear whipped around to catch its head. With so much room, and such a clean line of sight, I could appreciate its devastating power firsthand. Watch as the bone yielded, the brains spilled out, the body slumped down, spasming and writhing. I didn’t watch for long, though, already having my focus called back to the still-active threats gnawing at our barricade.

We killed, killed, and killed some more. Before long the barricade failed again. We fell back.

Our last barrier felt like the jaws of some giant trap, closing around us, suffocating away the air. Not one of us failed to sprint into them, though. Because death itself was chasing after.

The wood broke. Fuck, it broke so quickly. Crumbling, collapsing, caving. I still couldn’t track the time, still had no way of gauging how fast or slow this brutality was progressing, but it was at its crescendo now. More rotters died trying to get at us, dozens maybe. I barely noticed, my eyes were affixed on the widening cracks against the wood. Heart seizing, I turned, sprinting for the stairs along with everyone else as the wood finally began to give in entirely.

We were on the second floor by the time the rotters got through, charging after us all at once, no delay at all in their barbarity, no pause in their assault. I took the moment to catch my breath, feeling my spear’s haft wet with blood and sweat as I gripped it, staring down as the enemy shrank its distance from the stairs. Twenty feet, fifteen. Closer.

Then Solitaire laughed, tearing a great cloth covering from the big thing hidden at the top of the stairs. I glanced his way to find…A bell.

No, not a bell. Something that had been a bell, clearly. But crudely reshaped. Its length heightened, its barrel thickened. I saw its base aimed upwards at the sky, and three sets of hands began stuffing things down, too fast for me to see. Then it was tipped back, held up by strength alone as it was aimed down into the mass of rotters, a torch held up at its base.

I had just enough time to see the length of string running around the metal where it was gripped by our side. Then it caught, flashing, burning. The flames ran along the length quickly, disappearing into the metal.

And then my teeth rattled, as the biggest explosion I’d yet felt rang out across the building’s insides. Belching out of the bell.

Right into the enemy horde.