The furious iron clad brute brandished his longsword at me. His obvious blood lust was oozing out of his pores and into the air. I made to back away and he closed the gap in an instant, using his mana to accelerate his movements. Thankfully my mana link from earlier was still mildly active inside of his core.
Being able to only just barely read his motions as he went to make them gave me a slight edge in avoiding the deadly intent he was applying to his sword. Beyond that there wasn’t much else I could accomplish while caught unarmed.
He hollered and swung down a mighty cleaving strike from over his head. This choice had widened his stance, giving me a chance to dive and then tuck and roll between his legs. The manoeuvre was clumsy and I scrapped my left side against the armour around his right leg but the timing was near perfectly precise.
The weight of his sword brought the top of his body forward while his mind struggled to react to an unexpected forward dodge. I twisted my body back to face him from behind. With a low sweep of my legs I dropped the great oaf onto the ground for the second time in a day.
And then I turned tail and took off running. Sprinting across the scattered alley debris.
It hadn’t taken him long to get back up the second time around. The heavy iron plates covering his body clanked loudly from increasingly close behind me. I doubted he cared how much mana it took. The bastard was determined to catch me. I could feel his raging desire to run me through with his blade before he would then smash my skull under his iron boot.
The only reason I was still outpacing him was because his bulky armour made it challenging to cut through the cramped alley. Once we hit the main street I’d lose that advantage. I wracked my brain, desperately trying to come up with anything that I could do in this situation.
Up ahead I could see the slum’s main street. There was a stack of warped old boards leaning against a wall just a couple of paces ahead. I threw them behind me while sprinting by. The sound of his sword slicing clean through each slab of wood driving in just how fucked I currently was.
It was one thing to return the damage from a heavy punch but I still needed to be in pain before I could pass that sensation along to anyone I was linked to. And somehow I didn’t feel like getting sliced in half to redirect that level of pain at my attacker was a winning scenario.
I catapulted myself from the alley and burst into the street. Nearly colliding with a little hunched beggar, draped in what looked to be a burlap sack they’d turned into a cloak, who’d been just out of my sight. Instead of running them flat I threw myself hard to the side, lest I give anyone else a reason to start chasing after me.
I began to lose my balance and started to fall but to my surprise the small figure shot out a hand to steady me. The scale covered digits extending from within their sleeve told me that, much like the mushroom man, this person had at some point dabbled in placing curses without much discretion.
My pursuer charged out from the alley, at first showing no signs of stopping. The kind little curseling was caught up between us. Thankfully even the raging swordsman had sense enough to understand what the sudden interloper was. He stopped in his tracks, just short of trampling the small figure. Halting his warpath to reach me. The curseling’s grey reptilian hand still holding my side lightly.
The unfortunate situation I’d been caught in taking a sharp turn toward the strange.
And then, through a second storey window from across the street, we all heard a woman’s sudden moan of deep satisfaction. A noise that started out loudly aching with overflowing pleasure that quieted at the end as she experienced a blissful release. The fighter and I both turned our heads in slow unison toward the impressively well maintained building standing across from us. The walls looked to have been recently plastered and red curtains hung draped across all of the windows. A brothel as obvious to anyone who’d ever seen one without even needing to read the painted sign.
The curseling released his grip and brought me back to what was happening. And then they simply wattled away. Off and toward the doors of the building.
“Well, I guess they decided that prostitutes are more interesting than us,” I said with a chuckle.
The big guy was looking at me intensely again. He was a lot less amused than I had hoped he’d be. It looked like the mana link was just about finished. We both seemed suddenly very painfully aware that my temporary barrier had left the stage.
He graciously let me take one step back and then charged forward. I ducked under his blade’s broad swipe. He pulled it up and then stabbed it down toward my head. I threw myself to the right, feeling the point of the blade catch the baggy left leg of my overalls. Only just barely missing my flesh.
Instead of following through with another slash, he twisted the blade into the loose denim he’d skewered. Ensnaring me from just above the calf. I slammed face first into the ground. Tiny pieces of gravel digging into my forehead. My cap was nearly knocked off but thankfully the snug band held. An iron boot slammed down on the centre of my spine, just under my pack.
I was helpless but to scream out in pain. The next blow was a hard kick to my ribs, repeated several more times for good measure. Through the harsh din of agony I felt my bones cracking. The adventurer was cackling with glee.
“I donb’t know what you dib to me back dwhere,” he awkwardly grunted, “But now I’mb gonna make you pay, ash’ole!”
“P-pay? For what?” I choked out with my face still partially buried into the ground, “Your face was already an ugly mess before I broke your nose and I doubt there’s any proper way to fix it. You’re probably better off just letting it go.”
He kicked me again. This time much harder than before, using mana to accelerate the strike.
My muscles tensed and arched my body around where he’d kicked me on pure instinct. A spray of blood shot out from my mouth as I shrieked and writhed around in extreme pain. The motion caused my leg to rise up to the edge of the sword. Saved only by the bundle of denim it was twisted into.
When my body flopped back down he tore the blade up through the back of my overalls. The entire left leg was left ragged down the back from just below mid-thigh. He rolled me over with his foot. My eyes tried focusing on the sky.
With light on my face again I saw an endless sea of white dots dancing and whirling across my vision. In the depths of my head I felt like now would be a good time to sink into the deepest kind of sleep. All I tasted was blood. I looked up to see that he was standing with his head turned away from me and his sword hovering straight above my heart. If he’d figured out my trick then I supposed it meant I was probably going to die now. Quite painfully at that. Only, when I followed his gaze I noticed that there was some sort of commotion going on across the street.
There was shouting and the sound of things smashing from inside the brothel’s main floor. I took the chance to test the toughness of my new cursed gloves by grabbing the end of the longsword in both hands. Then I yanked it forward while rolling away from him with all of the strength I had left. His mana seemed to finally be failing. His reaction time too slow for him to make a save.
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The sword came loose and fell from his grip as he swung his head dumbly toward me. I swung it over top of myself before pushing my shoulder up off the ground. Leaning myself up to sit on my knees and dropping the sword beside me. It hurt to push myself up into a squat while spinning around but I forced my body through the motions regardless.
My ribs were screaming and my lungs felt like they had nothing left in them but fire. The nerves in my back fought against me as I forced my spine to stand tall.
Before I could pick the blade back up he took a stomping step toward me. For the first time I could feel small slivers of fear enter his aura. A teeny little part of him suddenly doubted that he could kill me. I tried to lock eyes with him but thanks to the glare of the moon and my low angle all I saw across his face were deep shadows.
The brothel doors burst open and a stout man that I recognized came flying out. His shirt was gone and his hands still worked to finish hauling up his pants. He had more hair on his back than his chest and it was all just as dark as the tuft growing atop his head and sprouting over his lips.
He’d been in a hurry up until he saw me, bloodied and about to be savagely beaten to death, and then he appeared to forget why he’d been running. The curseling stepped out beside him, brandishing a mop in both hands. The mop head held high and dripping brown water. It brushed against my troupe mate, Garris, on his exposed waist and he tilted his head down to look at the short fellow with renewed horror.
Garris jumped to the side before scuttling away back into the safety of the brothel and slamming the doors shut tight.
Thanks to the latest distraction I was able to get fully back up to standing. Readying myself before the big guy came at me with his fists. He swung from the right and I dodged back toward the brothel, giving him space to stoop down and pick his sword back up from the blood flecked ground. And then a wet mop was splashing down against the backs of my feet.
I risked a glance back to the curseling and saw that they were already walking away. Heading east, toward the gate.
I stepped over the mop, then kicked it up into my hands and snapped the head off over my knee. I readied my makeshift spear in my left hand and grasped the mop head in my right, using the remaining piece of handle as a grip. The adventurer took up a stance with his sword, refusing to meet my gaze.
Before I could seek out his eyes he was charging me.
I let him draw in close, deflecting his first strike off the knot of tightly bundled fibers on the mop head. He reared back, preparing to strike again. I threw the mop head toward his face. He let go of his sword with one hand to bat the filthy thing away, looking both shocked and disgusted.
I dropped down low, feeling the fractured bones in my ribs as they ground against each other, and switched my grip on the weaponized mop handle to both hands. His armour covered most of his body but I’d noticed something when he had me dead to rights with my back against the ground. There were gaps under his armpits.
As the mop head fell to the ground I tried copying his mana acceleration. Power that I normally poured into my eyes coursing through my forearms and hands instead. And then I stabbed upward, at an angle, aiming for the pit on his right.
For a second there was slight resistance, followed by a pop, scream and several wet sounds. The end of my makeshift spear forced its way up through his muscle, nerves and arteries. It devastated the surrounding tissue as I plunged my weapon as deep into him as it would go.
I came to some new resistance and felt the spear’s tip get wedged into the joint between bones where it splintered off a large chunk of dirty wood into the wound. The new point sliding underneath the joint as it happened which carried my thrust further through. A ragged point emerging outside the flesh on the back of his shoulder before it came to rest against the inside of his armour.
My hands trembled around the mop’s ruined shaft. The wounded man hollered incoherently and went to reach for me with his left arm.
I yanked the spear out, leaving several large splinters buried deep inside his flesh. Blood spilled from him in an unrelenting river, pulsing out in great spurts. His arm hung limply above a discarded sword.
My makeshift spear was filthy with blood yet my gloves had remained perfectly clean. I didn’t have time to consider what that meant.
He reached for me again on legs that looked weak and our eyes finally met. What had once been a stormy ocean’s bluish grey were now sad little puddles with as much fury as a gentle wind. Bloodshot and on the verge of breaking.
I hit him with twice as much mana as I did before and let him experience all of this fresh new pain that he’d given me. His entire body spasmed, eyes rolled back under wide open lids. He fell over sideways, practically foaming at the mouth, and rolled himself onto his back while wheezing and crying. His skin growing pale. Both his blood and his time suddenly running out quite rapidly.
I didn’t care that his injury was already going to kill him. I wanted him to truly hurt before the end. After all, it was the same thing he had wished for me. And the law of the slums declared that you always return in kind whatever treatment you’d been given. His eyes looked at me with nothing left but true fear.
I stood over a dying man who had to face his grave knowing that his death had come brandishing a mop. If I wasn’t in so much agony I’d have probably found something morbidly entertaining in that thought. Instead I just readied myself to do the deed and end this grudge for good.
A sudden crackling of mana in the air made me drop my head down low.
A bolt of sizzling blue light had come flying from far off down the street. It spiraled into the ground not four spits behind me and exploded into sparks. From under me a hand grabbed at my spear and tried to weakly pull it away. I yanked it free and kicked out his left arm, stabbing the spear into the pit before giving it a rough twist. Through his screams I could here several people rushing toward me from the gated end of the street.
For some reason an assembly of gate guards had come to put a stop to our brawl and here I was, caught with my hands figuratively red, about to murder someone.
For a third time the brothel doors shot open. Garris burst out with a tall bean pole of a man that had a mess of red hair blooming off his head that hung down over his eyes like some sort of wild shrub.
“Oy, Sorrel!” cried the stout man who was now properly dressed, “Don’t worry me’n’Charlie are here to-”
He looked at the state of things, another blue mana bolt bursting against the wall beside his head. The plaster it hit crumbled to dust and a small crater was left in the exposed brick.
“Say, Garry,” Charlie began thoughtfully, “I think maybe it’s probably the running time and not the fighting time no more isn’t it?”
“You know, pal, I can’t argue with you when I know you’re right,” replied Garris.
I’d already thrown down my spear and taken off running, squeezing my right arm around my chest and clutching my ribs.
If I stopped I was sure the pain would drag me down into darkness and spell my end. Noticing they’d been left behind those two sorted themselves out and decided to follow me. A few seconds later the pair of them were sprinting hard to catch up, despite not actually being implicated in my actions until now. Of course they likely didn’t realize running away with me was the very thing that made them look guilty. All the same, I did kind of appreciate their company in the moment.
Not that I’d ever tell them that.