Sword strikes rang out as the morning sun started to dawn over the trees once again. Matthew was somehow still standing despite two days without sleep at this point, but even now his sword arced out and back like a solid line of iron through the air. Dei, for her part, rigidly bobbed back between two uncertain feet as she met each attack with either a clumsy dodge or a jarring block of her own sword.
Matthew cut in from below with another upward slash at the girl as she spun on her heels to get inside his guard. She extended her own sword in a short thrust forward towards the mans gut, but he casually used his other hand to push the flat side of the sword just an inch away from his body before it landed, then raised his right leg into a tight kick. Caught by surprise by the sitatuion, Dei barely brought her left arm forward to block the kick when it caught her forearm and cleanly broke it in half. Half a second later, Matthew brought down his sword from the high position the uppercut had left him in downward in a clean cut that took off the girls other arm as well.
Perhaps seeing a moment of weakness for once, Dei pressed on even as Fei set to work recovering their arms at the same time. Left foot posted with the thrust, she brought her right foot forward in a sweeping arc to catch Matthew's own kicking leg just as he brought it back to the ground. A clean thump echoed as her thin bones colided with his leg right behind the knee, before the man suddenly found himself falling back for the first time since they had started sparring.
A little bit anticlimactically, the old man merely did a backward roll to regain his bearings, sword arm already extended at the ready again. But to Dei it didn't matter as she casually bounced up and down on her feet a couple of times, obviously doing some sort of happy dance. Based on the way her shoulders were up in the air, Matthew had a feeling she had intended to be raising her arms too, but it was a sight to behold as one of the arms merely attempted to crawl up her legs like a disturbing bug. When the arm finally did pop back into place the girl finally did settle down, and reached over to grab her sword once again. Her other arm settled into place a couple seconds later as the two of them returned to their fighting stances without another word.
—
Very few opportunties for celebration of any type came Dei’s way during the rest of that day, but still she fought on, spurred by a man she hardly knew. As for his part in things, the girls were equally impressed. Two straight days of fighting had left him soaked in sweat from every part of his body, yet the man barely stopped to eat or tend the fire in between bouts of fighting. A tuft of bread here, an apple there, and did the man never need to sleep? Sure, his eyes looked a bit puffy by this point, but Dei could hardly even imagine fighting for two days straight when she was still living, yet this man did it like it was a passing whim.
So when he eventually called for a stop to their sparring for the first time in days, Dei stopped suddenly to look at him with a cocked head. Matthew scratched at his head sheepishly as he quickly answered her look.
“I need to sleep for a bit.” he muttered. Looking down at the ground the man almost looked embarrassed about the fact, but Dei looked on as he merely turned around towards his bag and pulled out a rolled mat of reeds, then a thin cloth blanket.
Dei was uncertain what to do in the situation as she watched the man make his bed in the middle of the forest floor. Looking up at the night sky she could see it hardly looked like any rain was coming, but still she wished she could recommend sleeping in the crypt instead of outside. Regardless, the man placed a couple more logs on the fire, removed his boots, and crawled onto the reed mat set off to the side.
—
Free to do as she wished for perhaps the first time since she had ‘woken up’, Dei had no idea what to do. Confronted with a man that seemed to want to do nothing more than fight her every moment had been a weird situation to deal with, yet it had at least left her distracted from her own thoughts as she stared out at the strange forrest around them. Where was she exactly?
Matthew had said they were on the border between five different nations, but that didn't really mean much to her without a map or something. Who were the nations? What kind of people ran each of the countries, and which one was least likely to burn a skeleton at the stake for merely existing? It was all so frustrating to her as she realized that these powers likely didn't even require her to be dead in the first place. That was probably just a fluke of circumstance that she had woken up stuck in a coffin right? And to think about how much easier things might have been if she could tackle this new world as a flesh and blood human!
Still, she looked out upon the mysterious forest in the middle of nowhere, with no sense of direction as she listened to the birds, and the bugs, and the chatter, and the leaves turning.
‘Wait, did you say chatter?’ Fei finally piped up. ‘Like, other humans?’
Dei focused then as she realized she was in fact hearing a conversation, muffled as it was due to distance. Standing still as a tree, the gril tilted her head to make out a group of men casually walking through the forest maybe 200 meters to the left of her crypt. From this distance, she could hardly see them as anything other than slivers of color filtering through all the trees separating them, but even still she quickly walked over to Matthew and reached down a hand to try and shake the man, but he did nothing but roll in his sleep and start snoring.
Looking up, she could tell the group was moving even closer, so she jostled the man even more hoping against all hope he was merely a heavy sleeper, but even then she couldn't seem to wake him. All at once she started to recognize the voices coming towards them as one man called out to the others.
“Hey John, do you see a light over there in the forest?”
“Huh, yeah. Who would be stupid enough to set up camp out here?”
Running out of time Dei gave Matthew a quick kick to the stomach that didn't seem to do much other than make him groan in his sleep. Resigned to her fate, she walked back over to the crypt thinking about possibly hiding in the-
“Hey there, you!. Stop!” A man called out from the group approaching her.
Dei froze in place.
‘Didn't take you for the fawning doe type of fight or flight.’ Fei chided her, but Dei just held her breath as she tried to think out her options.
This did not look good in any circumstance. A barren skeleton walking towards a crypt after standing over a randomly sleeping man in the middle of a war torn forrest. Great. This was gonna go great.
—
As the group of five men finally approached a couple of mutters escaped from them as they took in the strange sight. A lone skeleton with half the face of a young girl stared at them as they unsheathed their weapons in the cool night air. A bright moon lit night illuminated the situation as it shone down on her blinding white bones held together with flashes of purple and blue at the joints.
‘Platoon Sergeant, I think we just ran into a problem.’ The man in charge of the group thought to himself, pinging his leader through their mental link. Still, it was around the typical dinner time right now so he wasn't entirely surprised when his sergeant didn't respond. ‘Will investigate then send an update Sergeant’, he thought to himself.
With a small hand gesture the team leader John had his group spread out with their upraised weapons. He had certainly never seen an undead, although he had heard stories in legends of a type of magic that hadn't been seen in decades related to the subject. As he and the men approached the creature from a hesitant horseshoe formation, the group were caught off guard by the fact it simply waited for them, silently.
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Approaching the creature slowly, John caught sight of a sleeping man by the fire, practically just as out of place as the skeleton. The man was a giant, even huddled under a thin blanket as he was, but his thin shirt and pants that poked out from the edges of his covering seemed particularly out of place in the brisk fall night. Perhaps he was a necromancer like they talked about in the legends, John thought to himself.
“Gerard, go check out that man over there and wake him up.”
Gerard noded at the instructions and split off from the group as the skeleton moved for the first time since they had first seen her. The unsettling gaze of dead eyes fell on Gerard as he walked over towards the sleeping man, rattling the weapons of the men that now surrounded the skeleton.
“I said don't move!” John yelled, to which the skeleton merely cocked its head at him. It could have been described as comical if it weren't for the dried out eyes that stared straight through him, unnerving the team leader even further.
Gerard had reached the sleeping man by now and started shaking him progressively harder and harder without any response. John was just not having good luck at this point as he started to decide the man looked like he was already dead. No one can sleep through that much jostling, surely! But that must mean the skeleton killed him in his sleep, making her a rogue monster at this point.
A certain steel flashed in the man's eyes as he finally made his decision on how to handle the strange events, and with a flick of his wrist, the horseshoe started to close in on the monster.
—
‘Oh, they are so not friendly.’
‘Shush, we can still save this!’ Dei thought as she started to bend her legs to reach for the ground, intending on writing a message out for them. But it was too little too late. The armed men must have taken her crouched stance to be a fighting position because they all started to charge at once as she bent down.
Cursing internally, Dei decided to sprint back in the direction of Matthew where she had left her sword laying on the ground earlier. A single man with a sword and shield stood in her way as he seemed to set himself behind his shield at her approach. Shoulder raised, shield pitched, and sword laying across it in a thrusting position the man awaited her response until she casually ran past the man towards the fireplace.
“Stop it!” the man in charge of the group yelled, but she had already made a few thudding steps to finally snatch up the sword and scabbard she had left behind. She could hear several barreling steps behind her as she turned around to meet the charge of a shielded man that was barreling in from her left side.
Head ducked, shield up and sword sticking out like a small barb to the side of the shield charge, it was fairly evident to Dei that the man couldn't see a thing ahead of him charging like he was. She slipped to the left of his charge and casually allowed her sword to slice through his leg as he ran past only for his leg to buckle a couple steps later. Looking back at him, it was evident that she hadn't sliced straight through his leg like Matthew tended to do with her, but even still her attack had left a gaping wound on the unguarded legs as he lowered his shield to protect the wound with a grimace.
Dei looked up at the other men who had now set their faces in determination at the sight. This time, they approached slowly and evenly as four matching pairs of sword and shield surrounded the girl once again. She took the time to look between them as she noticed the symbol of a clean green lightning bolt was painted on the front of each of the shields. Likewise, their shoulder padding was painted a dark green hue under the thin layer of chainmail each of the men wore. Their legs were largely vulnerable as they seemed to wear matching leather boots with metal plates strapped to the sides of them, but otherwise only wore a thin cloth pair of pants. And finally, their apparent leader, John, wore a thin leather helmet with a green stripe running down the center of his head. It was as she was looking at him that she noticed the man click his tongue and the men started to move in tandem.
—
Gerard and Philip pincered the skeleton as they had practiced a hundred times before at the command from John. They were taught that fighting as a group only held an advantage if you could attack simultaneously, so the men were paired off to fight as teams in situations like this, making it easier to manage.
Gerard seemed to get her attention first as he came in just a fraction early with a sideward swing that the skeleton parried then turned into her own downward blow on his raised shield. Philip took the chance to dart in from behind to bury his sword straight through the shoulder meat on the skeleton where her heart should be, but isntead his sword seemed to glance off some strange black object that was suspended between her ribcage. The beast turned away from Gerard to send a sweeping strike towards Philip until it rebounded off of the shield he had already placed in position.
“Sweeping strikes, not piercing! We need to break it apart piece by piece!” John yelled into the melee.
Cue taken, both Gerard and Philip backed up as John and Morgan entered the fray. The skeleton obviously was trained on Philip now as she continued her assault on the mans shield, throwing blow after blow at the man's left side even as he backed up. Still, she was forced to respond as John and Morgan took simultaneous swings at her from either side. The monster managed to block Morgans blow along her right side with her sword, but John was able to make a clean cut through her left arm with a small whoop. Philip took the chance to re-enter the fight from her back and cut a nice upper cut straight into the pelvis of the skeleton where the sword embedded itself in the bone.
The men smiled at the turn of events until the skeleton turned away Morgan's sword in a circular pattern, then used the momentum to swipe backwards into the outstretched arm of Philip as his sword remained stuck in her pelvis. The blow put a gnarly dent in the man's chainmail as he yelped in pain and dropped the sword from his hand as he clutched it back to his chest. With that, the skeleton now twisted in place and rose her sword up for a one armed strike down at the man before casually throwing a kick instead that ignored his upturned shield and dropped the man with a sickening crack as his knee bent backwards.
John attempted to follow up on his first blow at the creature, but instead felt his eyes drawn to the remnants of the arm her had cut off of the girl as it grew pincers and started to march back towards the skeleton and up her legs.
“Sergeant! Calling for immediate back up at the two mile mark in our patrol route! there's some sort of Necromancy monster out her-’ The man was cut off as the skeleton rounded back on him after dealing with Philip, and she sent a low sweep of her sword at his legs.
John posted his right leg in order to catch her sword with the plated part of his boot which almost worked except for the burst of pain that ran up his leg as the metal pieces slamed into each other. For his part, Morgan stepped in to take the heat off of him, and the skeleton backed up a step as she avoided his blows and pulled the sword back into a ready position.
“Gerard! Kill the sleeping man! He must be a bone mage!” John yelled at the man closest to the fire and the sleeping figure, but the team leader's heart fell when he saw the skeleton look up at his orders like she had heard his command. 'Can this creature understand us?' The man thought to himself. Uncertain as he was, the skeleton spun away from an exchange with Morgan to run in a dead charge after Gerard.
The older soldier was weighed down by his sword, shield and armor as he spun around at his team leaders command and rushed towards the sleeping figure, already raising his sword for a downward slash at the man. Almost reaching the sleeping body he started to slow his pace just a bit when a blinding pain like a hundred bee stings erupted from his core and he came to an immediate stop. Looking down, a thin blade had erupted from the center of his chest, clearly cutting through even his chainmail shirt as the tip broke through the smaller chain circles. With a jolt the blade withdrew back through his chest, and then a new pain came a moment later as a lancing heat drew across his neck. Nothing was left to support the man as he fell to his knees, then sidewards into the camp fire, knocking aside the carefully errected teepee as his head rolled away in the dirt.
—
John looked on in horror as the skeleton withdrew her sword from Gerard's spine, then neatly split him apart at the neck with a fluid motion. Philip was screaming on the ground clutching at his broken leg and arm, while Tray, the first man she had taken out of the fight, looked like he was about to pass out from blood loss as he merely crouched on the ground like he couldn't even stand up anymore. John shared a quick look at Morgan that was supposed to impart a decision to fight to their end, but Morgan had obviously had enough and dropped both of his weapons only to run in the direction they had come from.
Shocked at the turn of events, John merely stared back at the running form of his second in command as his own sword slowly dropped to the ground. The soft sound of approaching feet shook him from his moment as he looked up to meet eyes with the beast that had just fought her way through his entire team, and he stared down at the bloody sword that she dragged along the forest floor as she approached him. Was…was that for dramatic effect?
John dropped to his knees as he tried to come up with a plan, “Please, oh great herald of undeath. Please spare me, i'll do anything if you just let me live!” he cried at the skeleton, bringing just about everyone short in that moment. A spasm of pain obviously washed through the man like an electric jolt and his eyes rolled into the back of his head as he fell face first into the dirt. It only took another moment before the wounded men around him remembered to start screaming again.