A self-derisive laugh escaped Claire’s throat as she watched the horde approach. There was nowhere to run. The monsters were coming from every which way, flooding every single street as they converged on the warrior’s corpse.
She had nothing for large-scale extermination. The army was like a death sentence; she would only be surrounded and overwhelmed, but she wasn’t without a plan. The halfbreed immediately sprinted to the fiery river’s edge and cast her most expensive spell.
“Finally.”
“Shut up.”
A strange sense of discomfort coursed through her arm as the once-phantom serpent slithered down its length. She experienced both sides of the interaction, feeling its scales against hers and hers against its. The snake’s body moved as she willed it. It turned itself upside down, wriggled back and forth, and stopped in place whenever she issued the corresponding command, moving so naturally it was like another limb.
It was, by all means, something that should have disturbed her. The skill felt so right that it was wrong. And oh so very wrong it was. The psychic link binding her to the psychopathic snake was overwhelming. It was seething with a powerful all-consuming wrath that threatened to flood her consciousness with nothing but thoughts of murder—an impulse she soon embraced. The bloodlust was far better than the burden that otherwise racked her mind.
The first enemies to arrive were the bats, if they could even be thought of as bats. Their antennae-bearing frames were adorned with disproportionate, insectoid limbs that far eclipsed their mammalian bodies. They were minutes ahead of the borroks, who were were less than half as fast.
Ramming was the bats’ primary means of attack; the winged rodents charged as soon as they spotted her, and in doing so, rushed straight to their deaths.
Claire grabbed them with her vectors as soon as they entered her range. The closest two were wrenched right out of the sky, reeled in like fish on a line. They struggled and fought back, desperately flapping their wings to fight the spell’s influence, but they were unable to overpower it. Once within reach of her fingers, they were seized by the wings and hurled into the lava.
Pained screeches filled her ears as the flying sacrifices were set ablaze. The flames clung to them like glue, spreading from hair to skin and skin to bone. Slowly but surely, they were reduced to ash. Their deaths were gruesome, horrifying even, but Claire paid them little mind. Her attention had already returned to the horde.
Still focusing on the flying rats, the halfbreed magically wrenched two fistfuls of lava out of the river and launched them through the air. Her victims performed evasive maneuvers, but she pulled them into the fiery globs and turned their wings to ash.
Repeating the simple but effective formula, Claire eliminated over a dozen bats before the borroks finally caught up. Like the winged rodents, the cat monkeys used their body weight as a primary means of attack. Their strikes and tackles were quick and sporadic, but they were unable to best her spirit guardian. Shouldersnake extended from its post, murdered them with its venom-filled fangs, and tossed their bloated corpses at the encroaching horde.
The explosives were less effective than she hoped. The corrupted watchers shrugged off the injuries and replaced their lost parts with insectoid limbs, the corrupted wolves swiftly leapt out of the way, and the borrok warriors were simply unaffected. Even hit dead centre, they only continued to advance.
Like their flying companions, the ground-based troops reached her in waves. The first to arrive was a warrior atop a wolf. They leapt at her fangs bared and mandibles mincing, but Shouldersnake was the first to strike. The phantom lashed out at the toothy grey dog, extending to its full, two-meter length as it sank its teeth into the pupper’s neck. An easy kill.
Though forced off his mount, the warrior lost neither his balance nor his momentum. He flew straight into a bare-fisted blow.
The halfbreed didn’t bother evading. The inverse-borrok struck her right in the gut, winding her and knocking her away. The attack was so heavy that she thought she would fly into the lava, but her feet unfortunately skid to a halt before she reached the river.
Shouldersnake lashed out again. The danger noodle wrapped its body around the warrior’s frame and bound its wrists like a pair of living shackles. In the meantime, Claire closed her fingers into a fist and magically pulled the borrok variant towards her. It tried to withdraw, but she halted its retreat with a kick to the shin and stunned it with a flurry of fists. Over and over, she struck its head. Her fingers were bloodied and broken by the repeated impacts. But so too was the creature’s face.
Its allies tried to save it. The bats and borroks tackled her and bit into her flesh, but they couldn’t get her off. She didn’t rise until it began to swell, but even then, she was unrelenting. A kick drove it into the crowd, where it was turned into an explosion of health and experience.
A group of wolves accosted her as she got to her feet, but a glare robbed them of their momentum. The only two outside her immediate field of view were addressed instead by a pair of vectors. Claire raised them further into the air, throwing off their leaps so they landed in the lava.
She continued pulling molten globs from the lake and throwing them into the crowd. But while effective, the process was hardly tenable. The constant use of her spells ate through her magical reserves; she couldn’t afford to fling so many objects willy-nilly. So she made up the difference by omitting a key step.
Rather than redirecting the molten rocks when they neared her hands, the halfbreed opted to grab them, to transform them into a set of unforged weapons that placed function over form. She smashed the fiery cobblestones straight into the monsters’ faces. Those whose mouths were open had their throats dammed shut, while those who did not found their faces broken and their brains splattered across the ice.
The reckless behaviour hurt the rogue nearly as much as it hurt her foes. Her hands burned in agony, barely responding to her commands. Her skin melted off. Her scales were blackened by the intense heat. But she didn’t care. She deserved the pain. And never did her injuries last for long.
She had no idea how long the killing spree lasted, but almost everything was dead by the time she finally stopped to catch her breath. The only enemies that remained were the last to arrive, a group made of three distinct units, each consisting of a warrior and three corrupted watchers.
They were more cautious than the others, choosing observation over blind aggression. Slowly, carefully, the group encircled her, one warrior to each of her sides and the last in her face. Their companions filled in the gaps and cut her off from everything but the river. Even with the formation complete, not a single one of its members advanced until the leader, the two-tailed warrior that met her head-on, gave the order.
The soldier on her left was the first to engage. It ran towards her with its fists raised and its gaze burning with bloodlust, bloodlust that was soon replaced with confusion. Shouldersnake grabbed it by the tail and flung it straight towards the lava. If not for its allies’ quick thinking, it would have fallen in and burned to death.
Second to move was the warrior on the right. It leapt at her feet first, a flying kick backed by the watcher it had used as a springboard. It was a laughably telegraphed attack. Claire retrieved a dagger from a nearby corpse as she moved to counter the gravity-powered strike with a blade between the legs, only for the third warrior to intercept the blow.
Buzzing angrily, the two-tailed freak dashed between them and punched her extended arm three times in the blink of an eye. He lacked the force to mutilate the limb outright, but he numbed it enough to knock her weapon out of her hands.
It was a good effort, but ultimately, an effort spent in vain. Shouldersnake performed the attack in Claire’s stead. It grabbed the warrior and dunked him straight into the lava, where it held him until his lungs were filled with fire.
The halfbreed lunged at the two-tailed commander in the meantime. She smashed with a bony mace and slashed with a chitin blade, but she couldn’t land a hit. The monkey used its superior speed and technique to sidestep her blows whilst throwing a disturbing number of counters straight into her ribs. Each individual strike was weak and inconsequential, but the commander compensated with its speed and accuracy. She couldn’t stop it from hammering her liver a dozen times over, nor could she do anything about the uppercuts that knocked her fangs loose from their sockets.
Its underling used the opportunity to attack her as well. She was caught between them, struggling to endure their constant, repeated blows.
A blast of fire and ash rocked the shoreline right as her health hit the one-third mark—Shouldersnake’s triumphant return. The serpent grabbed her bone dagger between its jaws and blinded the insect behind her with a quick two-pronged strike to the eyes. The corrupted watchers stepped forward, but not to take its place. They retrieved the blinded warrior instead, but Shouldersnake allowed no such rescue. It ripped the injured borrok out of their hands and snapped its legs as it chucked it into the river headfirst.
Her feet unsteady, Claire balled her hands into fists and took half a step towards the final threat. To an outside observer, her exhaustion was a product of the damage she had taken, but that was hardly the case. It was maintaining the serpent that tasked her.
Their shared senses were overwhelming. She could see everything it saw, hear everything it heard, and feel everything it felt. A blessing and a curse. Its speedy, erratic movements made for a series of vomit-inducing acrobatics and the associated processing only taxed her already burdened brain. It was only the renewal that came with leveling up that kept her sane.
And level up she did.
Her second warrior kill flooded her mind with equal parts dopamine and adrenaline. In a matter of moments, she went from having blurred vision to seeing perfectly, from woozy to clear-minded, and from worn down to fully refreshed.
The two-tailed warrior buzzed as it watched her body heal. It barked another order, for the others to retreat, before stepping forward and engaging her in a duel, but it was disadvantaged. In a strict one-on-one, Claire’s phantom danger noodle forced it on the defensive. When it did retaliate, it did so cautiously. It never committed to its attacks.
Claire started landing more hits as the exchange dragged on. Her blows grew sharper, faster, and more accurate. The monkey’s footwork was used as an example to improve her own. She started twisting her hips with each strike and angling her fists to deliver precise attacks on the monkey’s joints and vitals.
Before long, the borrok was the one with its back to the river. She pressured it with its own techniques, quick jabs, masked by powerful kicks and deadly hooks. Both its arms were soon broken by her relentless assault.
She grabbed her mace after collapsing one of its knees and took a deep breath. Raising it overhead, she prepared to bury the warrior’s face between his ribs.
Only to be stopped by a bolt from the blue.
A dagger-sized shard of ice flew past her and embedded itself into the wall opposite the river while another mangled one of her wrists. Glancing towards the source of the attack, she spotted a second group of borroks atop a set of nearby buildings, a dozen or so individuals with the left halves of their bodies as bugs and the right halves as monkeys. Their ears and tails sat on the sides of their waists, still incorrectly placed, but less so than the warriors’.
Standing around the casters was a score of guards, warriors and wolves to stop her from getting in melee range—an entirely unnecessary precaution. The spells alone were more than enough to keep her at bay. She couldn’t deal with them. It didn’t matter if she advanced, backed off, or even stood still. Her surroundings were being bombarded by icicles. Damage was guaranteed.
The two-tail chittered as her panic set in. Its body relaxed, in spite of its broken bones, and it even spun its tails, as if to flaunt its victory.
With an irritated hiss, the halfbreed kicked the cocky warrior into the lava, magically retrieved the rest of her weaponry, and dashed through the corrupted watchers’ legs. Some of them had already died where they stood, pierced by their own allies’ attacks.
She tried sprinting into the suburb to use the buildings as cover, but the projectiles cleaved right through them. The walls served no purpose as cover. Any spell that passed through a structure was only accelerated, hastened to the point that not even Shouldersnake was able to react. One nailed Claire right in the side and broke several ribs, while another got her in the shoulder and disabled an arm. They embedded themselves into her body and froze in place, welding themselves to her flesh.
The halfbreed grimaced, but bore with the pain. Her destination was already in sight. She just needed to push a tiny bit further.
“I would advise against this behaviour, Claire. It is unbecoming.”
A malformed, palm-sized pony appeared on Claire’s shoulder as she rounded the final corner. The ghastly creature, who had at some point acquired an equally gastly tophat, was scowling in displeasure.
“Please, Claire, listen to me. I do not even wish to begin imagining how filthy it is. It is hardly worth your pride, our pride.”
“Shut up!” She screamed as another pair of spells pierced one of her legs.
“Consider the danger! We haven’t the slightest clue as to what you might find. It may very well be just as unsafe. They could even continue their pursuit.”
“Then we’ll just have to find out the hard way.
Ignoring the horse’s hesitation, Claire dashed into an oddly-shaped purple building and leapt straight down its sulphur-scented pit.
