Breathing Fire

I shook myself, drawing my axe. It wasn’t like me to get distracted so easily when there were things to kill. My familiar axe was heavy but well balanced in my hands. The double edged metal of the blade was shinning in the moonlight. It sang in my hands as I swung it at the fence. Christian was using his sword to carefully cut the links on the fence, but I hacked at it with gusto. It was just how I fought. I was controlled, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at me. I had cleaved the fence in front of me nearly to the ground with the force of my blow. I swung again, loving the feel of the axe even when it was still only a fence that I attacked. I couldn’t wait to kill things that bled.

Christian’s line of fence fell just moments after mine. We had cut it from top to bottom, so it fell forward with nothing left to support it. Druids around us were trying similar techniques to reach the action faster, but ours had been the most effective. Several druids saw our success, rushing in directly behind us. You might have thought we were leading a group of them, if you didn’t know a thing about druids and their disdain for other races. Oh, yeah, and that every last one of them hated my ass with an enduring passion.

I saw that we were maybe forty yards from where Dom was fighting, but it was close enough to get instant attention from the writhing mass of necros. A section of them broke off, rushing right at us like the rabid flesh-eaters they were. Christian got into a familiar stance, readying to fight at my back. We both needed space to fight, using such long handled weapons, but we had fought side by side too many times to count, so we positioned ourselves naturally. We waited for a wave of them to hit us, the druids behind us passing us with a few scathing comments about getting our asses into the fight. They were on us in seconds either way.

My battle-axe sang as I swung it high, bringing it down on the first unlucky undead to get within my reach. It’s skin was graying, it’s eyes blood red. It looked like a walking corpse that had been through hell. And that about summed up the life of a necro. They were dead humans who just refused to recognize the fact, feeding on other humans just to buy themselves a little time. It’s head went splat, and I sliced him in half in an almost smooth motion, the noise wet and loud even amidst the loud sounds of battle. Necros were squishy. They were diseased and decaying, rotting from the inside out. They had to feast constantly on human flesh to keep from rotting until they had fallen to pieces. This group seemed particularly squishy, I noted, as I swung hard, decapitating a second monster in a flash.

The trick to fighting with a big-ass weapon in the crowded battleground was to turn every strike into the next attack. I didn’t draw back to hack at the enemy, but just kept pushing, hacking through one undead body, and into the next. It was an effective tactic, considering my strength and my huge weapon, though the technique wouldn’t have worked for many.

Something bit my back, and I screamed, more in anger than pain. I turned, blade sweeping at everything in reach, but the necro was already down, Christian’s sword being drawn from it’s body.

I gave him a nod, then turned back to the chaos. In a blurringly fast movement, I raised the axe above my head, cleaving it down into the thick swarm of Necros. I began to turn my body with the motion, chopping into flesh as I spun. I had never been swarmed by so many before. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. We would take heavy losses in this crush of a battle, but on the other hand, I didn’t need to hold back. I could just let go, becoming the dangerous thing that I was born to be. I let my body and mind go into the trancelike state that lived for battle. I was a berserker, and this was my rage. Things would bleed, and I would glory in it.

Some of the necros held weapons, knives and machetes, or something similar, mostly. But they were a largely untrained fighting force, teeth snapping and arms swinging wildly as I cut down one after another, or even several at a time. A few held guns, but that was uncommon. Guns were just harder to come by, and Necro’s didn’t have a long lifespan, thanks to the druids.

I wasn’t a dancer, except for in battle. Here, I danced, spinning and lunging, swinging and slashing. I even had a song in my head, and I moved to the beat as I killed, and killed.

We had cleared a break in the mob when I paused to take a breath. “Fuck, you’re scary,” Christian said behind me, his voice quiet. “Let’s stay friends, k?”

It broke me a little out of my trance, and I laughed, a rich sound.

I saw Dom maybe thirty yards away. He too, had cleared the first wave, and paused to appraise the carnage. I caught his glance for one endless moment. The look he gave me was…enigmatic. It was hard to say what he meant to tell me with his intense regard. I did learn one thing with that shared look. He still loved to watch me fight.

We moved towards the compound’s spartan buildings, taking the fight into smaller spaces. The force had to split up to accommodate the change.

Christian and I found ourselves leading a small group of non-druid Others. I’m not sure how it happened, but we took the new company in stride, breaking away from the main wave of druid fighters. Druids were an extremely exclusive group, so it wasn’t really a surprise that the leftover Others had banded together.

Christian had a small arsenal of explosives that he was way too excited to use, so our first order of business was to scout from house to house, basically blowing shit up. It was a simple plan. Christian threw the explosive in the door, and I lit it midair. The rest of our group helped us finish off whatever ran screaming out of the building. As far as demo-ing the whole necro settlement went, our plan worked well. We were doing more than our share of destruction. Oh, and as another plus, it gave Christian his blow-up-shit fix for awhile. Win, win.