I saw the first body on the road long before the farmstead was even visible in the distance. It was a man who’d been stripped of his armour, and his dignity, before being impaled on crossed spikes through his legs, into the torso under his ribs and out through his shoulders, before ending in his splayed-out hands. Whoever had done this, had worked very meticulously to send a message and it worked better than any “Keep off my property” sign I'd ever seen. Without knowing how, I was absolutely sure this was one of the scouts the army had sent this way.
It was disturbing how, despite the gruesome nature of the sight, I felt utterly unfazed by it. After all, my first sight of a dead body should’ve had a strong impact, and yet I didn’t feel fear or apprehension, only a bubbling hatred seeping through my blood. These Red Runners were due some righteous punishment.
I continued down the road as it moved around many tall hills that, with every ten-or-so metres, became increasingly more deflated, until finally the landscape was nearly flat and I could see several large buildings dotting the area ahead of me. Most of the buildings were farmhouses and barns, but there were a few normal buildings too, which reminded me of the small houses in the Village.
As I came to what was ostensibly the ‘entrance’ to the farmstead, demarcated by a simple wooden gate and a ramshackle waist-high fence that was missing most of its horizontal planks, the music changed to the hard, penetrating tune of a violin, which sang a sorrowful melody that reverberated endlessly through the air.
Following immediately off the heels of this new sound in the air, came the Stage banner: “Now entering Stage ‘Red Runner Hideout’.”
Two naked men with stakes skewering them in an X sat on either side of the simple gate, as though mock statues, and, as I made to push open the gate, one of the bodies twitched at the sound of my feet on the crunchy gravel.
The man, despite his entire body perforated by the two stakes and his days’ old blood crusted on the grass underneath him, tried to gargle some warning to me. It was a noble thought, that even in the face of death, his mind was first on his duty.
He was still trying to formulate the words as I drew my sword from its sheath. When his mangled ears caught the sound of the blade, he stopped. A sigh left his lips, and I knew he had hoped for this mercy to come, his pain likely unbearable, though he endured it without a single cry. In a fluid motion, quick and soundless, I stabbed my blade through his heart and pulled it back out. Without being able to explain why, I performed a flourish before returning my sword to its scabbard, casting the blood from my blade and onto the earth.
I knew I should’ve felt something then, having just performed my first kill, but my feelings seemed very far away in that moment. Detached almost.
With my sword back in its sheath and my left hand resting on its pommel, I pushed aside the gate, which immediately broke off its rusted hinges. Some metres ahead of the entrance, a group of four men were laughing with bottles in their hands, a kneeling and bleeding figure in front of them.
They didn’t notice my approach on the grass, too occupied with their victim, whose right hand had lost every finger and whose left was already missing the thumb and index. The strangled whimper of this tortured soul triggered something in me, some animalistic impulse, and, just as their victim noticed me, the four men turned around at the sound of my furious yell. I speared the nearest man through his stomach, the one who’d seemingly been in charge of lopping off the poor man’s fingers, ramming my blade up to the hilt and wrenching it out sideways, immediately sealing his fate. I whirled to deflect a short dagger stabbed my way, before casually dragging my blade down its wielder. The third and fourth were too slow to grab their own weapons and I carved into their turned backs without a second thought.
As the blood of the four Red Runners[1] spilled to the grass and earth, I helped the mostly-fingerless man dislodge the cloth stuffed into his mouth and cut the rope that’d been wrapped around his legs and torso with enough force to burn into his skin.
I patted the mewling scout on his shoulder as the collective torture of the last few days finally broke him, the unexpected relief of being saved releasing the tide of emotions he’d no doubt kept guarded to not appear weak before his torturers.
“How many of you came here? You’re one of the scouts the army sent, right?”
“Yes… we… we were four…”
Shit.
“Alright listen, follow the road back to the Village and try to get in contact with the army there or seek out Captain Tabian, he sounds like someone who’d help.”
The guy nodded meekly, tears and snot streaming down his bruised-and-bloody face.
“What about you?” he asked after getting up and stretching his rope-burnt legs.
“I’m going to do a bit of clean-up.”
After watching the tortured scout slowly make his way out of the gate, I turned my attention back to the nearby buildings. The farmhouse next to me was empty and had been the victim of a vicious blaze. A family of charred bones lay scattered within. I highly doubted any original citizens of the farmstead remained alive, but, if they did, a swift stab through their hearts would no doubt be a mercy.
I walked towards a barn from within which came sounds of raptured merry and laughter, to such an exaggerated extent that it brought to mind cackling demons. The barn door opened when I was only a few metres away, one of the few sober bandits going out on patrol. I quickly moved to silence him, but despite lodging my blade in his Adam’s apple, it did little to quell his surprised shout and it wasn’t until I cleft his head from his shoulders that he fell silent, but, of course, at that point it was too late to matter.
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As the people within the barn emerged, I distantly remarked on the ease with which I could slay these people. Because, even if they were just fabricated Husks made to resemble people, they were as real as any person in this realm and looked as human as anyone else.
Perhaps I was simply bred to kill? Or is it a by-product of this twisted place?
The melancholic violin quickly changed its pace and became a frenetic melody of some unseen soloist going at it, each stroke of their bow rippling through the air with a potent force that washed over me and really set the mood for what was about to happen.
Eight bandits surged from the barn through the large doors, bringing with them a waft of warm, putrid air. As I took them in, I saw that a few of them were physically distinct, due to their slate-grey complexion and blackish-purple veins crisscrossing their skin, not to mention their bulging muscles. Additionally, these few individuals had an entirely different atmosphere to them and their eyes were wild and hungry.
I took a step back as one of these slate-grey bandits leapt for me with two steak knives held aloft like raptor claws. He missed and landed before me, but didn’t spare a second for me to exploit this opening as he surged towards me again. His second leap was met with a well-placed Quick Draw that, combined with his momentum, sent him flying apart in two separate chunks, spilling his foul black blood all over the place.
The murder of their comrade seemed to only entice the others more, and they came forward in a pack of three this time, forcing me to backpedal under an onslaught of shortswords, knives, and daggers. Eventually, another of the slate-grey corrupted ones pushed the three aside and swung a chipped-and-rusted sword at me. He managed to clip my cuirass, creating a tiny scar in its otherwise flawless surface.[2]On his second swing, I sent a Quick Draw through his sword and into his lower jaw, severing both in the process. I dragged the sword, and the corrupted bandit attached to it, into one of the three from before, killing them simultaneously.
With a downwards chop that pushed aside the ill-fated guard of a short dagger and drove my obsidian edge into his neck and through his upper torso, I killed another, before kicking the dead body off my blade and leaping at one of the people hanging back, jabbing my blade downward through his clavicle and into his lungs and heart.
Just as it seemed I was about to rout the remaining four, five more figures emerged from within the barn. Four of them flanked a central figure, and each of them had that grey skin and those disturbing black veins. The figure in front was unlike any of the others though, despite his similar complexion, since he had a wild mane of red hair and a nasty infected scar pinching the skin below his ruined left eye and upper lip together, giving him a disturbing lopsided grin.
As he spoke, black treacle-thick blood oozed from the scar that was possibly quite old but which had never healed properly: “Wot a feisty one we ‘ave ‘ere.” The laugh that followed was hollow and deep, as though belonging to some entity living in his stomach and not originating from his own vocal cords. Normally, his cockney accent would’ve been charming, but here it was just adding to the creepy psycho factor.[3]
“I’ll finish the prey and you boys clean the bones!”
I instinctively knew that this was Red Rian, since this realm seemed to obey the sort of contrived logic that only really made important characters visually distinct.
Just like the first of the slate-grey monsters, he leapt for me with his two weapons aloft, but, instead of the pitiful steak knives I’d seen on the first of the corrupted bandits, these were hefty butcher’s-knife-looking daggers that were already coated in a layer of blood, presumably from whatever they’d been doing inside the barn.
I moved around his downward dual jabs and made to slash him across his stomach, where only the leather of his armless jacket protected his skin. But he was quicker than his fellows, and spun around my slash, while jabbing his right-handed weapon at my face and the other at my flank. As though we were performing a dance together, I moved away from his strikes and he dutifully followed, performing a cross-slash of his daggers that I evaded and responded to with a Quick Draw at his neck.
He stepped just out of reach, a finger’s breadth being all that separated my obsidian edge from his windpipe, then surged forward with a diagonal slash of his right dagger, which I caught in a clumsy deflection of my sword that nearly cost me the fingers on my dominant hand. In that instant however, I completely neglected the other dagger.
I gasped, suddenly bereft of air. A burning, yet chilling, flame entered me, as his dagger bit into my side. My blood fell on the grass and exposed earth, and I stumbled back, suddenly only a metre-or-two from the partially-open barn door, while uselessly clutching my wound with my left hand. Blood spilled eagerly between my fingers though I put as much pressure on it as I could. The pain, although dulled from the adrenaline coursing through me, brought stinging tears to my eyes.
Wouldn’t it be a shitty way to go… like this? I thought to myself. Dead and reset on the first challenging fight I faced. Perhaps Kerebor was right.
Time seemed to slow, or maybe my thought process sped up due to the sudden life-threatening situation, and a tranquillity overcame me, as I figured out what to do.
I knew that if I didn’t quickly heal myself, I would die. This fact sat in the forefront of my mind, as the first tendrils of darkness made a questing foray into the corners of my vision.
I took up a proper stance and breathed in carefully, though it was a shuddering breath that left my lips. Breathing was already becoming difficult, and the tendrils turned to long fingers, as the darkness spread with every pulse of my blood escaping my body.
Shit.
I’d wanted to save the potion Kerebor had given me, but what was the point of reserving it if I was going to die anyway?
Another glob of blood pulsed out of my body, and I immediately felt a disturbing sensation in my mind as the darkness spread further, now occupying nearly twenty percent of my vision. The sensation was like a zap of electricity, followed by a nauseatingly-sharp pain akin to that of a papercut and a tendon snapping combined into one.
I’d just lost part of myself: a memory of something. Of course, since I’d forgotten, I had no clue what I’d lost. But now was not the time to probe my mind to figure that out.
Time seemed to return to its normal pace again, and Red Rian was preparing to leap for me once more. My hand left my side and fell onto my scabbard, gripping it as hard as I could, while my blood ran down my newly-purchased armour. I gritted my teeth and sheathed my blade, my hand never leaving its hilt. I let my remaining power flood into me, and let the tension rise in my muscles, like a spring ready to explode.
Red Rian leapt.
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[1] Marked as such by their various odd bits of blood-soaked clothing, such as handkerchief, wrist bandage, or bandana.
[2] Granted, it was spattered with blood and bits of errant flesh, but underneath that it was flawless. Probably…
[3] I might add that it didn’t help that his teeth seemed to have been given a treatment with a pencil sharpener and that bloody drool clung to his chin like a liquid crimson beard.