There was nothing like violence, Nathan reflected, to make a man regret the decisions that brought him to his present state of affairs.

This was, of course, an absurdity. Sickness and the ravages of old age are just as capable of producing that unblessed state, whether it be from mourning the roads not taken or the paths one took—could not the personal revelation have been had a decade earlier, or perhaps two? Could one not have spent more time in kindness, or donated less money to shyster organizations promising immortality and more money to researchers studying the arcane workings of the colon?

But Nathan was, in the moment, rather more focused on the onset of exertion-burning in his muscles and the ache he suspected would be somewhat unpleasant a short while after the fighting ended—and which, alas, was going to be rather more than somewhat unpleasant in the near future.

Another shock traveled up his arm as he stabbed down with his spear, scoring a thick line into his opponent’s pauldron as the man stepped forwards and into the strike, fouling it by taking it on the shoulder instead of in the chest. Wincing, the swordsman stepped to the side, rolling his shoulder back as the woman behind him crowded in to strike with her spear. Nathan raised his arm in turn to bring Saucer to bear and relaxed into the moment as it wrapped itself around the spear, drawing something from and through it.

The woman crumbled into dust, which was… new. That hadn’t happened in the third wave, but things were changing and becoming more complicated, more coherent, more real with every set of opponents. The man in front of him was a perfect example of that—his chest rose and fell, he scowled as he shifted his weight, and he visibly settled himself into battle once more as he exchanged glances with the next man coming up. Forming an unspoken accord, they spread out just enough to not crowd each other and stepped forwards together, weapons at the ready.

The man on Nathan’s left—also referenceable as the man on the right, if one is to adopt the perspective of the side which opposed our not-precisely-dauntless protagonist, which there is no purpose in doing—died the moment he did so.

Tanya was, to all appearances, lazing about. She rested casually on the pommel of her sword, point resting on the now-real-seeming dirt of the floor. On the third wave, the floor had looked like dirt, but now the point dug into the ground in a perfect tactile facsimile, and Tanya looked to be idly studying the indentation she was slowly widening while relaxing.

She didn’t bother looking up as opponents approached her. Whether they did so carelessly or warily, whether their path took them to her obliquely or directly, whether they had a shield out or were protected by coruscating magics—none of those things mattered. They died with a single, near-instantaneous stroke of the sword, one clean strike that bisected them the instant they entered her striking range.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

And before they even realized they’d been hit—or rather, before a human in their position would have realized the strike had landed; these were not, of course, humans, no matter that they had begun to resemble people; these were, rather, constructs, and did not so much engage in the act of realization as have discrete feedback from a centralized guiding system, which in its own right may or may not have been aware enough to have that experience—she, which is to say, Tanya, in case you, dear Reader, have been led down the garden path by this sentence; yes, she would return to her idle state and pretend not to notice the severed halves of her opponent falling to the ground.

She raised no strike to kill anyone whom—or, it might be more accurate to say, anything which—she considered to be Nathan’s responsibility, his frontage of slightly more than one person’s worth of combat space. That was his tribulation to suffer, as far as she was concerned; a winnowing, a thresher, and a tempering all in one.

(The metaphor was not particularly strong. Tanya, for all of her myriad combat masteries, had never worked in agriculture or metalwork. What she knew about tempering or threshers was limited to their dictionary definitions.)

Still, that left Nathan with only one person to face at a time. When two of them approached at the same time and spread out enough to fight effectively, the second enemy inevitably encroached upon Tanya’s zone of death; doing so was followed by an ending delivered so swiftly as to be indistinguishable from instantaneous.

Nathan was, grudgingly, grateful. As soon as the third wave had started, heralded by a sudden mist coalescing into twenty-four armed and armored humanoids, everything had started to have a degree of weight that had been missing previously. Even Saucer, which generally managed to weigh anything only when it was convenient or useful for it to do so, was unable to avoid weighing three and a half pounds, which Nathan understood to be a reasonable weight for a shield. His lack of armor meant that there was little weighing his core down, but the spear he’d been holding high for some time rapidly began to make the sudden reification of its material properties known. And despite each of those factors, he’d been able to hold his own for kill after kill, for death after death; but he was well aware that, had he been facing two people at a time, he would have been very rapidly killed.

Saucer was, within the bounds of the encounter, not immune to the basic laws of force. Every strike resounded through it, no matter how perfectly blocked or how well the attacks slid off its slightly convex surface; every strike reverberated down Nathan’s arm, and when those strikes came in from the side they pushed Saucer to the side enough that a second enemy would have found it trivial to get through the opening thus created.

Nevertheless, muscles beginning to burn, he persisted.