“Generally, unless you’re certain that you’ve crushed the enemy’s morale enough to make them yield, you should leave a way out for your enemies. Leave none whatsoever, and your opponents would become cornered beasts.
Cornered beasts would bite anything near them in their desperate struggle.” - Saying attributed to Xaliburnus the Conqueror, First Emperor of the Elmaiya Empire.
Erycea noticed right away when the weasely-looking man turned towards her. With Alycea and the other younger children behind her, there was no room for her to retreat, which left only one option for her, which was to fight. Although she had killed a man before, years ago in Fort Ascher, back then she also had surprise going for her, and she doubted that the man in front of her would let her fangs get close enough to his throat for her to repeat what she had done back then.
She couldn’t help but to look at the training “swords” she usually used. She knew all too well that the light wood, while sturdy, would barely leave a bruise if she struck the man with it. Unlike the mock-spears used by some of the others, the tips of her training weapon were not tapered either.
After some quick thinking, Erycea finally had an idea on how she could hurt the man who menacingly rushed at them with it, as she flipped her training weapons around, holding them by the tip rather than the handle. That placed the weights meant to simulate the heft and balance of a real weapon much further away from her grip, and those metal lumps would definitely cause more damage if she struck the man with them instead.
Sure enough, the man halted his rush and backed away a step when she swung the makeshift maces at him, the baton he held in one hand trembling as he blocked one of her blows. She had not expected the man to grab at her weapon and used it to yank her towards him, though, nor did she manage to block his baton, though she got her head out of its path so the stick only struck her left shoulder instead.
While the girl managed to mostly ignore the pain that flared on her shoulder, the hand that grasped at her face and pushed her down was harder to ignore. With the hand covering her sight, Erycea felt her back hit the ground as the man pushed her down, and her ears caught the worried scream of her little sister behind her.
Something snapped in her mind at that moment, a final thread of restraint that had been there without her knowing, a memory of how a man’s final struggle - caused by her fangs and claws - had gone, ones that had weighed on her mind subconsciously without her realizing it all the while. With that, things suddenly changed in a manner too rapid for many to perceive at all.
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The first change that manifested happened to the orb of glass that Erycea kept orbiting around her out of habit. Where before the orb had been composed of a multitude of rounded and concave chunks that fit into each other, those shards morphed into wedges with razor-sharp edges even as the orb unraveled in the blink of an eye. Those shards and wedges then flew straight towards the face of the unsuspecting weasely-looking man, and pierced through his face at many places, while a couple even embedded themselves into his eyeballs as he screamed in pain and surprise.
That scream of pain redoubled itself as Erycea bit down on the hand that covered her face. The man recoiled away from her, with one hand clutched over his injured face, where it covered his one good eye from the rain of glass shards. His other hand was missing the thumb and index fingers entirely, while his middle finger was severed past the first segment.
Erycea spat out the missing fingers and some blood even as she looked at the reeling man viciously. She ignored the throbbing pain on her shoulder as she pushed herself off the ground with her left hand, and struck at the outside of the man’s knee with the training weapon in her other hand. The metal lump that served as weight struck the joint with a satisfying thump and the weasely-looking man screamed in more pain as he fell to one knee.
By fortune or coincidence, Alycea thrust her training spear at the man right as he fell to a knee. Whereas the thrust might have just struck the man’s leg at worst before, when he fell to one knee, he inadvertently placed his nether regions right in the path of that thrust, and the tapered end of the training spear in the little girl’s hand struck right where it hurt most.
Even as the man’s scream took on a higher pitch, Erycea struck once more with the makeshift mace she used her training weapon as, and the metal weight struck the side of the man’s head hard. She watched as the man’s eyes rolled to show their whites, and how he toppled over listlessly to his side, his mangled hand still bleeding and his face lacerated all over by tiny glass shards.
Erycea took a glimpse around the hill, to get a view of the situation at hand, and saw that the rest of the fight was pretty much under control. The burly woman was pinned to the ground with a good chunk of her face and shoulders mauled by Varilya’s twins. The other woman had her arms pinned behind her back by Gustav’s even burlier hand, with one of her legs twisted the wrong way.
The other man, the dapper one with the mustache, was secured under Vlad’s bulk, with multiple deep claw marks on his figure, the fight clearly out of him. As for the other three, the scarred woman looked paralyzed and uncertain on what she ought to do, while the chubby one already curled up as the rest of the kids around Ery’s age beat him up.
When the last one, the twitchy, gangly man looked as what befell his comrades and turned to run, he had not made it more than five steps away before a slender javelin and an arrow sliced through the air from the canopy of the large tree atop the hill, the same tree that Ery often lounged on. The javelin struck the man’s leg from behind, as it pierced through his left calf and turned his run into a painful tumble which ended with him clutching his wounded leg. The arrow landed on his right butt cheek and just added insult to the injury.
When Erycea saw the three adults who had hidden themselves amongst the canopy of the tree all day just in case they needed some help begin their descent, and the last, scarred woman raised her hands in surrender, she knew that the incident was pretty much over.