Oak took a deep breath. It was time. Hesitation is death. He sprang from behind a bookshelf and charged straight into the square, falchion held high.

Yura never had a chance. The child barely had time to turn around on the box she was still sitting on, and look Oak in the eye, before he reached her and swung. She has Alasie’s eyes. If heartbreak could kill, he would have surely died on the spot as he cut off Yura’s head and stepped past her.

“Hahaa, how prettily the head tumbles!” Toklo laughed. The cross the fat dwarf had been nailed to wavered a bit as he bent downwards, chuckling. The light of the campfire revealed the newly made ruin of his right eye, oozing blood down his burned cheek.

Kallik picked up an axe and calmly turned to face Oak. His single eye glinted in the fire's light, and there was a demented smirk on his scarred face. While the dwarf focused on the threat in front of him, Geezer took him by surprise.

The hellhound came running from the darkness outside the firelight and tackled the dwarf down to the floor. Geezer closed his jaws around the hand holding the axe and started dragging the dwarf around, never giving him a chance to get back up.

Oak was running around the campfire in the middle of the square, towards the pair struggling on the ground, but he was not fast enough. Quick as a snake, Kallik pulled out a long knife and slashed Geezer in the snout. The dog yelped in pain and let go of the dwarf, who jumped to his feet and launched himself straight at Oak, axe ready to split his skull.

In the span of two heartbeats, Oak was on the back foot. Kallik was like a whirlwind of steel with his axe and knife. Everywhere Oak’s blade went, Kallik was there no longer, and death stalked Oak from every angle. He jumped backwards to get some space for himself. Kallik made it seem like he was going to follow. It turned out to be a feint.

“Geezer, no!” Oak shouted, but it was too late. The dog was already in the air, flying towards Kallik’s back. Instead of charging after Oak, Kallik turned and sank his knife between Geezer’s ribs as the hellhound flew past him. Kallik held on to the blade, and it ripped out of the wound, sending blood gushing from Geezer’s side.

The dog crashed onto the stone and slid across the floor, wheezing for breath.

“Ur-Namma, help him!” Oak roared and charged the dwarf.

Geezer is a hellhound, he is going to live, Oak thought, trying to hold the fear at bay. He had to keep Kallik busy or Geezer was finished. Since the ceiling above the square did not seem to care about fire, he tried to set the dwarf ablaze with a burst of flame.

Kallik was not fazed. The dwarf dodged like he had seen the attack coming from a mile away, and closed in, drool spilling from his open mouth full of rotting teeth. It was a disgusting sight. A short clash of steel later, Oak pressed Kallik back with all the fury he could summon, and there was no time to waste on thoughts of revulsion.

No matter how hard Oak tried to break through Kallik’s guard, he could not touch the dwarf with his blade. One moment Kallik was like a mountain, unyielding and beyond any attempt to chop him down. The next he was like wind, flowing around Oak’s strikes like he was not even there. Soon, it was not Kallik who was stepping backwards towards the edge of the square.

Oak could hear Ur-Namma’s uncertain gait enter the square and through the waves of sound bouncing around, he could see the elf kneel next to Geezer, and start helping the dog towards the crucified form of Toklo. Oak would have liked nothing more than being able to help Geezer by himself, but he trusted Ur-Namma to figure it out without him and focused on the fight.

The dwarf combined two of Oak’s least favorite traits in any combatant.

One, he was a dwarf. Oak had quickly learned to hate fighting dwarves, for good reason. They held nothing back. Kallik took tremendous risks every chance he could. Without fail, he would leave himself open, if it meant he could try to sink his axe into Oak’s chest. The dwarves were not trying to win. They fought to kill you, and they did not give a fuck if they died in the process.

Second, Kallik was better than Oak. The dwarf was a bit faster, sure, but not that much faster. Kallik also had way less reach, since he was short, and he was using a knife and a single-handed war axe, while Oak might have been the tallest man in all the North and he wielded a two-handed sword. Kallik just moved like no one Oak had ever fought. He either deflected every strike Oak attempted with his axe blade, which was devilishly difficult to do, or he simply was not there when Oak struck.

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Oak hated fighting people who were better than him. Oak hated fighting dwarves. He was fighting Kallik, and he was going to lose. He made some room with two quick swings and then held the point of his falchion towards Kallik to keep him at bay for a moment.

I need to figure something out, or I am dead. The sweat running down his back was turning cold.

More by instinct than any well thought out plan, Oak circled into Kallik’s new blind-spot. The destroyed and burned eye socket turned into a lighthouse, guiding Oak’s every step as he circled left.

“Ooh, an elf has joined the party! How’s it hanging, you pointy eared–,” Toklo said before his words were cut short and Oak could only hear wet gurgling. Ur-Namma was not wasting time.

If Oak was good at something, he was good at picking his moment. He kept circling Kallik, forcing the dwarf to step into his blind-spot over and over again, waiting for the mistake. Vaguely, Oak could hear heavy steps approaching the square, but he could not afford to look away from the dwarf.

Those sounds were future Oak’s problem.

After another exchange of blows, which almost ended with Kallik’s knife being buried in Oak’s stomach, the dwarf finally slipped up. Kallik could not see the ground on his right from his peripheral vision. The dwarf stepped on top of a broken piece of bookshelf and it rolled under his foot, causing him to lose his balance.

Oak capitalized and took off Kallik's right arm above the elbow joint. Blood spurted from the stump and Kallik let out a little sigh, like he was a kettle losing steam. For the first time since the fight began, Kallik spoke.

“You got me good, human. You really did,” Kallik said. His working eye was still twinkling, like there was a joke being said that only he could understand.

“You think so?” Oak asked and pointed his sword at the dwarf.

“I know so,” Kallik said and charged forward, impaling himself on Oak’s blade and stabbing his knife through Oak’s left forearm. The dwarf grinned at Oak’s dumbfounded face as he finally realized those heavy steps were almost on top of them.

“You absolute rat-bastard,” Oak said, as the giant mushroom man burst through the bookshelf on their left and struck the pair of them like an angry bull-moose.

Oak was not quite sure what happened in the next few moments, but they involved a lot of flying and crashing against things. He came to, lying on the stone floor of the square, and tried to desperately draw in all the breath he had lost from his lungs.

Feeling like he had just lost a boxing match against an ogre, Oak sat up and looked around. Kallik was laying a couple feet to his left. The dwarf had Oak’s falchion sticking out from his chest, and his body was bent strangely. It looked like his spine had broken. Good riddance.

Sadly, there was no time to rest on one’s laurels. The mushroom man announced his continued presence by wailing like a banshee, and reaching for Oak with his long, thick arms. Since he had no intention of letting the thing smear him across the square, he cast a cone of bright red flames at the mushroom’s face and crawled backwards as fast as he was able.

The mushroom man shrieked and started slapping its own face, trying to smother the flames.

With the monster occupied for the moment, Oak felt safe enough to try standing up. He had mixed success. Getting to his feet went mostly alright, but once he was standing, all talk of balance was out the window. He stumbled around like a drunken man, desperately trying to stay on his feet.

When his world stopped spinning, Oak pulled out his meat cleaver and short sword and took stock of the situation.

Yura was dead, and her headless corpse lay on the other side of the square. Kallik's broken body rested on the stone floor. Ur-Namma had slit Toklo’s throat and leaned against the cross while Geezer was currently eating the dwarf’s feet.

The hellhound looked like he was not about to keel over and die, which meant the elf had gotten some meat inside Geezer’s stomach in time. The mushroom man, on the other hand, looked ready to throw down.

“Right,” Oak said, and tried not to throw up. “Come here, you dickless fuck.”

Oak could not tell if the monster understood him or if it was just reading the tone of his voice, but whatever it was, it seemed to get the message. With its arms spread wide, the mushroom man charged. He wobbled forward to meet it.

At the last possible moment, Oak threw himself out of the stomping monster's way and called for the fire inside his soul. It answered and spewed forth from his hands, covering the mushroom man’s right side in bright flame. This time, the fire took hold.

The monster screeched and rolled on the ground, desperate to put out the flames eating its spongy flesh.

In a stroke of luck for Oak and his companions, the mushroom man accidentally rolled into the campfire, which sealed its fate. Soon the twitching monster laid still and the only sounds in the square were the crackling of the fire and the crunching sound of Geezer gnawing on Toklo’s left leg.

His engine chimed with a notification.

+ 3 Souls

+ 3 Fuel

Distractedly, Oak noticed that Kallik’s knife was still sticking out of his forearm. He pulled it free and promptly passed out.