Beam POV: Day 52

Current Wealth: 1 silver 47 copper

There was a sword in my hand, and the entire world suddenly made sense. I had everything I needed, really, to make sense of it. An enemy in front, friends behind, a problem to ignore and a co writer to help. The rotters had gotten through one barricade, they’d soon be on the others. That was fine. Xangô would handle that. And I’d handle the undead that was already behind them.

It was close to being handled already, backing away from me now, nervous. Did it know what was coming? Did it sense the danger in the air?

Good. Hopefully that would make it more alert, and I hadn’t had a half-decent practice bout in months. I closed in, coming in like an east wind, and the vampire tried to cut me off. It was lightning quick to react, and adjusted well to its mangled foot, but the sword was heavy as a whisper in my hand, and I managed it as easily as I might my own fingers. The arcane blade twisted lengthwise, rolling the vampire’s improvised weapon aside, then jerking down to cut across its wrist.

On a human I’d have lanced through the tendons and veins of that arm, had its weapon dropping from limp digits, racing a spray of blood to the ground. The vampire was made of sturdier stuff, and its canvas-tough skin and flesh got in the way of everything important. I still gave it a fright though. My enemy backed up, and I closed in even faster than before.

My first swing was a feint, and my second. My third never even came, and my fourth was pivoted about a perfectly angled elbow to send it high where I’d previously gone low. The vampire was still feeling its foot wound, terrified and cautious of taking another, and it bought the bait perfectly. My weapon’s magical edge caught it across the face, opening skin, splitting open a cheekbone and sending it against a wall. It was ducking to the side before I could impale it, but I just dragged the weapon free in such a way as to blind it with a buckshot of splinters. My shoulder caught its chest hard, giving it pause, and my next swing ate into the thigh.

My body wasn’t moving, not really, it was being moved. Being ordered around by the sword it held, carefully advised by the instincts sheltered in my gut, marching up and down, pivoting and saluting. A good soldier, trained and tested. And more than a match, by far, for the terrified undead it now faced. The vampire took one final look at me before turning, sprinting away and disappearing as it scaled a wall with all the grace of a frightened cat. I felt a grin sprouting, which vanished as I turned to the barricades.

They were under attack, now, of course. All the secondary defences we’d set up in the knowledge that our primary wall would crumble eventually. It was Xangô who gave me my most critical advice.

“The windows!” He roared. “Go and guard the windows, they’ll be trying to scale them!”

I blanked for a second, confused, unresponsive. Then realised what he meant. The rotters had shown us already they could close in through the higher floors yesterday. We’d barricaded them today, as well, but we didn’t have nearly as much weight around them as we did the main door. How could we? Our enemy would be past soon.

They could even be past now.

Without another instant’s pause I hurried up the stairs, throwing myself as fast as I could manage. Running in my armour felt strange. Its volume was present, millimetres less clearance on every side than I was used to, my effective volume increased by a barely-noticeable fraction. Such a change felt like it should be accompanied by an increase in mass, even if it’d all been tin I’d have felt something. But I didn’t. I wasn’t even certain whatever my weapons, and now armour, were made from even had mass at all.

I might as well have been wearing air.

It led to an actually quite interesting feeling of bulk and presence without substance, and tricked my body into clipping a corner or grazing a wall with every noticeable turn I made. I’d need to practise to get used to it, I decided. But that was for later. Now all I had the time for was agonising over the loss of precious milliseconds with each collision.

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The first room I checked was free entirely of rotters, and its barricades were fine. Remaining where they were, as inanimate objects tended to do, boards stuck nailed about the thin shutters below without a hint of strain, damage or impact. I took it all in within half a second before moving on to the next.

A similar story played out with the next two, and it was the fourth where things went wrong. Went urgent. The barricade was being assailed, and already it was starting to yield. It took a while to build anything particularly thick, with this village’s technology, Solitaire had been forced to cut corners in having our second-floor weak points sealed over. Despite the small size, I couldn’t imagine this point would last for much longer.

But it would last, which meant I had to turn my focus back to others. I carried on, finding two other barricades being beaten and broken down from beyond, and made my way out into the main hall, calling down to the others from atop the railing.

“We need men up here!” I roared. “Three barricades are falling, send me four men!”

I could manage one by myself, but I still recalled the struggle we’d had in keeping rotters back from the window in our last-refuge. Two villagers per window was the minimum ratio to be sure of keeping them at bay, as I saw it. And even that felt like it may be insufficient. Better three, better five. Better we all just huddle up in the office again-

But no. We needed to bleed the enemy as much as we could manage first, like we had the other day. They were coming from multiple paths, now, and the door that had kept our command centre secure had already been weakened the day before. Our hackneyed repair works were far from perfect, there was every chance it would fail. If it did, and the rotters were still counted in the hundreds, we would all be killed. I saw men making their way up the stairs to join me, and I hurried to one of the windows without waiting on them.

The barriers did break. They broke high, they broke low. Some went slowly, eroded like boulders being struck by the tides, and others perished all at once in a sudden, wrenching explosion of splinters and critical strain. But all went eventually, and we were all left to kill.

We did kill, too. We killed well.

I opened up heads with my sword, hacking, slashing away like I was making my way through jungle thicket. Putrid blood stained the floor and walls around me, spraying to cling against my armour and harden into rotten crust. I took off limbs, with some swings, split open skulls to expose ruined brain matter with others. And the rotters kept coming, My arms grew tired, so I changed posture and favoured different muscles. When those ones reached their limit, I switched back. There was no end to the enemy, and there felt like there was no end to my killing either. The world was made out of savage corpses, and I was standing alone among them. Fine. That just meant I didn’t need to worry about clipping any allies as I swung.

There was no telling how long it all took, or how many body parts I mangled to bits before it was over. All I knew was that one moment I was splitting something nearly in half, and the next my focus was being snatched back by a sudden, frantic cry.

“We’re on the last barricade, get ready to retreat!”

It was Xangô, and had it not been I might’ve ignored the voice entirely in my frenzy. Instead he was just about able to pierce the fog and snatch my attention. I noted the warning, then got back to killing until the second came.

Except it didn’t.

“They’re retreating, they’re all retreating now!”

For a moment I didn’t quite register the words, and then I saw their truth myself. Exploding into the main section, I saw our killbox was just as clogged with bodies as last time, and our defenders just as exhausted. But they weren’t pulling back this time. The rotters had their backs to us, turning and fleeing from the room, heading for the door with just as much haste as they had in battering towards us mere moments prior. I was stunned, immobile, just stood where I was and stared at it all.

Xangô, though, was a bit quicker-witted. It was his booming voice I heard cut through the air a third time.

“After them!” He roared. “Get them while they’re running, whittle their numbers away even more.”

I was moving physically before I did mentally, but the realisation came soon enough. This was our chance to cripple their numbers even more, and it would be stupid to give it up. I fell on them with my sword and armour both screaming at me to act.

It was a lot easier, I found, to kill the enemy when it was just trying to retreat.