Arvel was not a stranger to fighting. His father taught him from the time he could lift a stick, how to swing it in his defense. He didn’t stumble once in his adopted duty, teaching the militia how to fight. But Arvel was not a legendary knight or general. No, fighting was no stranger to him, but war was another matter completely.

The militia ‘held the line’ to the best of their ability, even though their line was more like a cluster, keeping together in a pack with their backs to one another to make it difficult for demons to single them out. But it wasn’t perfect. Bodies were snatched up from the ground, flung into the air and thrown against rooftops or onto the road. Some of them were ripped apart while they were still in the air. Arvel stumbled as backed up against the group to try to tighten the cluster, and when he regained his footing, he glanced down to see that he had tripped over an arm. It was a human arm. He even recognized that rust-red sleeve.

‘I can’t focus on that now,’ he told himself, ‘Mourn later so we got less to mourn.’

Arvel thrust his shovel upward, ramming into the ribs of one of the swooping demons, and it let out a gravelly squawk as it coughed purple blood up onto his weapon. But then, he felt a sharp pain as another set of claws wrapped around his outstretched arm. One claw gripped his bicep and the other sunk into his shoulder, lifting him up off the ground and away from the defensive cluster.

“Let go!” he howled, dangling by his right arm, but keeping a death grip on his shovel with his left hand. He looked down at the ground rapidly moving away from him. In a matter of seconds, he was higher off the ground than he felt he could safely land. Arvel clenched his teeth, and looked up at the demon above him, before he lifted his shovel in his off-hand and swung it upward, smashing the flat of it against the demon’s chest and making it yelp.

The cadence of its flapping wings faltered, and they dropped a few feet, before it began to make its climb again, sinking its claws deeper into Arvel’s shoulder.

“You ain’t takin’ me back to her! Not today!” Arvel shouted, slamming his shovel against the creature’s shoulder, “But if you make it outta here you can tell Melodia I’m comin’ fer her head when I’m good ‘n ready!”

The demon screeched at him, lurching in the air as Arvel clipped its wing with the shovel, and another strike ripped into the thin leathery skin that stretched out between its fingers. The demon began to careen off to one side as it desperately flapped to keep itself aloft, flying lower and lower over the tops of the thatch roofs.

“No no no NO!” Arvel shouted, his eyes widening as he saw them sailing toward the rooftops. He’d seen the kinds of nasty surprises that Fidget and her crew were hiding underneath the straw. He let go of his trusty shovel at the last moment, reaching up to grab hold of the demon’s ankle with his left hand, and use it to pull himself up, lifting his legs up over the ridge of the roof, missing it by mere inches. But as they came down the far side, Arvel felt a sharpened stick snag his back pocket, yanking it off the seat of his trousers.

“Let go!” Arvel shouted, pounding his fist on the demon’s ankle, to no avail. The demon’s flight path sank lower, and Arvel was helpless to redirect it before the two of them slammed into the wall of a small hut still under construction. The wattle wall, not yet daubed, caved in underneath the force of their landing, though the sturdy frame still beat them up terribly as they crashed into the hovel’s interior.

Finally free of the demon’s claws, Arvel now found himself sprawled on the floor with a panicking, flailing, flapping demon that couldn’t figure out how to get out of its new enclosure.

“Calm down!” Arvel shouted, “Calm the hells down!”

The demon’s wings battered Arvel as he scrambled across the ground, looking for anything to use as a weapon. His hand landed on the head of a mallet, and he turned around, not even bothering to shift his grip to the handle before he started clubbing the demon across the face with it. The first strike stunned it, and the second cracked and shifted its beak. A third strike bounced its head off the floor, and with the fourth, it went limp.

Arvel sat up over the demon, panting to catch his breath, looking down at his bloodied knuckles gripping the head of the mallet in his left hand. He lifted his right hand to try to move the mallet, but grimaced as he felt the pain surge throughout his shoulder. Even with his adrenaline surging high, the pain was still distracting.

“Damn,” he muttered, gripping the mallet by the handle in his left hand, “Fine mess I got myself in, all the way over here.”

He pushed himself up to his feet, and tucked his forearm inside the torn side of his sleeveless shirt, and his wrist out between the laces at the front. It wasn’t a sling, but it immobilized his shoulder better than anything else he could manage one-handed. He climbed out of the wreckage of the hut, and looked around.

The sky was dark, and angry. A streak of lightning ripped through the clouds, lighting up the silhouettes of a hundred more demons waiting high up above. But as a crack of thunder rolled across the sky, Arvel saw maybe a dozen of their limp bodies falling from the clouds, leaving trails of smoke behind them as they fell.

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“Thank you, Fidget,” he whispered with a grin, before the thought sank in deeper. He looked up the road toward the fighting militia, before tilting his head to listen for sounds of combat elsewhere. Instead of rejoining the militia, he took off toward the western side of town, shouting, “FIDGE! RAIN!”

When he rounded a corner, he could see several demons swarming over top of a single hut, while three others were gathered around the body of a woman on the ground, picking and clawing like vultures fighting over a piece of carrion. One of them lifted its head to look toward Arvel and let out a screech, only moments before its forehead was caved in under the impact of a flying mallet.

Having hurled his weapon at the first demon, Arvel had no option but to run and leap on the second’s back, kicking at its lower back with both feet while his hand reached to grab it by the face, clawing desperately with everything he had. The third demon alighted in a panic, flapping back away from the human who fought like a madman. When Arvel was done beating down the demon beneath him, he looked up to see that the third demon in retreat was covered in stab wounds.

“Please be alright,” Arvel muttered under his breath as he grabbed his bloodied mallet from the ground and ran toward the curtain-shaded door of the hovel, “Please, please be alright...”

When Arvel threw the curtain back, he heard a chorus of women shriek in fear. A broom handle smacked across his lifted forearm, narrowly blocked from cracking his head open.

“Ow!” Arvel shouted, “It’s me, it’s me!”

“Arvel!” Rain shouted as she shot to her feet, pushing past the woman who struck him; “Are you okay?”

“Alive,” he replied, “Where’s Fidget?”

Rain looked up, and Arvel followed her gaze.

While several of the women were thrusting up at the hole in the roof with broom handles and garden implements, Fidget had climbed up into the rafters and was stabbing at the demons with her thatching needle. Every time one of them would risk getting close enough to reach inside the roof, she would scramble to another section of the rafters and keep taking pokes at them.

“Fidge!” Arvel cried out.

Fidget looked down at him, her eyes wide. Her clenched teeth turned into a broad grin, but there was still something almost feral looking in her smile.

“Poked lots of holes in them!” she said, stabbing up at another demon and making it screech as it backed off, “Killed two or three!”

“You don’t even know how many,” Arvel replied with a smirk. He looked down at Rain and asked, “How are you holding up?”

“A-Alive,” she replied, mirroring his answer with a weak smile, “Frederik tried to hold them off but he’s badly hurt. Y-Your shoulder...”

“Frederik did?” Arvel asked, surprised. He looked past the group of women and saw Frederik sitting up in the corner, gripping the makeshift bandages wrapped around his bleeding shoulder.

“In the future,” Frederik said, wincing, “I do believe... proper pauldrons would be in order.”

Arvel hissed in pain when he felt Rain push a bundle of cloth over the gashes in his shoulder, before she began to wrap them tightly, paying no heed to his pain.

“I gotta get back out there,” Arvel said.

“You’re hurt,” said Rain.

“But I’m still standin’, ain’t I?” he replied, “And if we all wanna stay that way, I gotta help the other men. But first... ah... I gotta take your protector.”

“What?” Rain asked, surprised.

“I know it’s leavin’ ya in a lurch,” Arvel said, “But I need Fidget right now. Fidge! Climb down here for a second!”

“Huh?” Fidget asked as she hopped down from the rafters, landing beside Arvel. Her green skin was splattered with purple demon’s blood, but it didn’t seem to be burning her the same way it stung the humans, or if it did, she didn’t seem to take notice of it.

“I need you to come with me, alright?” he asked, turning to step back outside.

Fidget whimpered slightly, looking back at the women, then up at Rain.

“He wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important,” Rain said, trying her best to hide her worry, “Go with him. We’ll be alright until you get back.”

Fidget chewed her lip a moment, before turning to run outside and follow after Arvel.

Arvel broke into a run as soon as he was outside with Fidget. He ran past bodies of demons, and the mangled woman who laid in the road near the hut. When he looked back, he saw Fidget staring at the body as she passed, before setting her jaw and running to catch up alongside him.

“You’re doin’ a real good job,” Arvel said, “You’re takin’ good care of folk and you’re keepin’ a level head. I’m real proud of you.”

Fidget looked up at him, eyes wide. Her cheeks warmed with a blush that spread all the way to the tips of her long, pointed ears.

“I mean it,” Arvel said, before giving her a weak smile, “Those demons are somethin’ real awful. I know neither of us asked for this village to be here but... well, they’re here now, and I think you and I are startin’ to like these folk.”

“A lot!” Fidget said, “Like them a lot...”

Arvel nodded, and looked ahead as he ran, saying, “I’m real proud of the fight everyone’s putin’ up but I’m afraid it ain’t gonna be enough. There are a whole lot of those demons and they’re already rippin’ up everything we’ve been workin’ so hard to build here. I’m afraid that even if we live, there won’t be enough here to bother puttin’ the pieces back together.”

“What?!” Fidget shrieked, her eyes wide, “But they work so hard! We’ve worked so hard!”

“I know,” Arvel said, “But life ain’t fair...”

Arvel slowed down when he realized that Fidget wasn’t beside him anymore. He looked back, to see her standing in the middle of the road. A rumble of thunder ripped across the sky as the wind began to pick up more harshly. Arvel’s breath caught in his throat, before he asked quietly, hopefully, “Fidge...?”

Fidget looked up from beneath the shade of her bangs, tears in the corner of her eyes. A bolt of lightning struck the ground behind her as she screamed, “IT’S NOT FAIR!”