Have you ever tried to parry a speeding wagon? A falling boulder? Something like that. I don’t suppose most of you have, which is a shame because it’d work very well to give you an idea of how my elbow and shoulder felt trying to halt that darkthing’s swing. I actually went sliding back along the ground with the sheer force of it.

  The darkthing wasn’t content to just watch me struggling for balance. It moved after me on its impossibly gaunt legs and swung again. This time I opted to dodge, feeling the wind as its blade passed an inch from my head and whipped off to one side. I countered, stabbing my own weapon right into the thing’s belly, feeling the resilience of its flesh. I felt like I was stabbing wood rather than meat, but it was hurt.

  Slightly.

  I twisted around and barely avoided another blow, then avoided another more barely still. I was hacking away at the darkthing’s wrist and arm between swings, enjoying a fractional edge of speed but not much else. Each time I hit it, I felt the shock run through me like I was trying to kill the floor.

  Now, had I been fighting this thing alone I would certainly have been in trouble. My luck or stamina would eventually have run out and I’d have died as it caught me. Cedwin delayed that by shooting it again, this time in the head, and Vara thought fast before sending a jet of Thaumaturgical flames into the wound.

  It certainly didn’t like that.

  While the darkthing did whatever they did instead of registering pain, I saw my chance and promptly started backing away from it, throwing another blast of fire out for good measure. The air reeked of cooking, a burning of substances I couldn’t name, but still it lived, and yet more of its familiars were flooding in after it.

  That was where the villagers came into play. Most of them had balked and started stumbling away once the killing started, but a rare few were getting stuck in along with the rest of us. One in four or five men, I’ve found, finds their spine at times like this. One in twenty finds a murderous streak along with it, and those are by far the most useful to have alongside you in battle.

  It does help to train them first, though. These ones just went a bit mental and started tangling everything up in limbs and mad thrusts as their pitchforks and scythes went one way and the other, taking notches out of the floor as often as the darkthings. Nonetheless, they made a nuisance of themselves and bought the rest of us some breathing room. It helped that there were, for some fucking reason, a few gunmen mixed into the melee.

  But my concern remained with the giant. Despite its wounds, I couldn’t see any hint that it was slowing down or reconsidering its attack. If anything it just redoubled all efforts to kill me, bounding towards me and swinging in frantic arcs that saw a bystander dead each time the tip of its blade clipped them.

  It won’t surprise you to read that I didn’t feel particularly bad about that, far too concerned with my own skin and making sure it remained attached. Try as I might, though, this thing just wasn’t going down. I could see all the minor wounds where it’d been cut or burned, but nothing went deep enough to slow it. To hurt it.

  Only Vara had done that, when she unleashed white-hot flames right inside the flesh. And that was what gave me my stupidest idea yet. I coaxed the darkthing into another attack, then lunged forwards and thrust the tip of my blade right into an already-open wound in its side. What I tried next wasn’t something I’d done before, and was more guesswork than training.

  So it was a good thing that I actually am one of the greatest Thaumaturgical prodigies to ever live, wasn’t it?

  I snatched the heat out of the air, my body, the ground, everywhere I could find it, and threw it all right down to explode out the tip of my blade, already inches inside the darkthing. Finally, I heard it scream.

  And I had to look away, because the light of my own power was so much I feared it might have blinded me otherwise. Apparently the darkthings agreed. I saw them shying away from the corner of my eye, fleeing the magical light more than they had any mundane shine. It bought me the moments needed to tear my weapon free and roll back from the giant’s reach, then watch it.

  Smoke was billowing out of the wound I’d left, definitely a good sign. A better one was the stumble I saw the giant take, its legs seeming to weaken beneath it. Gruin came up behind the thing and swung his hammer right into the smoldering wound, hitting hard enough that I heard the impact like it was a gong being beaten. The darkthing went down onto a knee.

  That brought its head down to my swinging height, and I watched the Thaumaturgical steel Morlo had given me scrape right along its face. Vara blasted it again, so did Cedwin. Then, so did some of the other gunners. I gave it another burst of flames just for the hell of it and kept chopping away.

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  A tree would’ve fallen down sooner than the giant darkthing did, but in the end it still fell down. Fell down and had the fortunate effect of pinning a few of its own kin beneath its body, though you’d hardly have noticed with the amount pouring in.

  We kept fighting. Used finite violence to try and stem a seemingly infinite tide, and experienced the Blackmists as few ever would. My fellowship was, despite remaining right in the thick of it all, the best surviving group present. The townspeople who kept finding their courage died in enthusiastic but not-too-glorious deaths, cut down by the creatures they so heroically threw themselves at, buying a few moments if lucky and no time at all if not.

  My armour was most of the reason I survived, soaking up hits as I was. Darkthing claws are terribly sharp and the surface of my protection was marred by the time the killing was done, but it held enough that my soft flesh below didn’t end up being opened like so many others’ were. Gruin used his typical strategy of being torn to ribbons but just not caring about his wounds, while the trainees stuck together with Devyne and managed to keep each other in one piece. Il’vanja alone seemed to escape unmarked, of the ones who fought up close.

  We were all tiring though. Darkthings don’t experience fatigue as living creatures do, and they don’t stop coming. Now that the shelter was open they would only be turned away from slaughtering us by the rising sun, and that was hours away still. We kept fighting on all the same. We didn’t have a choice.

  This time there wasn’t a stroke of luck at the last moment. The fight just continued wearing on, eroding our will and strength as all of us put all of ourselves into beating back death and widening the distance between it and us by a precious few moments more. Even Gruin stopped looking so enthusiastic after a while. My armour was drenched in blood, or at least stuff that leaked out of darkthings when they were cut. It stank of empty nights and long pain, and it was the least of my concerns as exhaustion continued to bite its way into me. Had to keep fighting though. I just had to keep fighting.

  Day didn’t break all at once, like it would in some action story. It came slowly. At first only the weakest darkthings were forced off, leaving us to keep fighting against the stronger, more intelligent beasts who’d been using their inferiors as cannon fodder to whittle us down.

  It had worked, too. I was struggling just to survive against enemies I’d have made short work of even an hour before, feeling the weight of my armour like it was made from lead and grunting in effort just to swing my sword. The darkthings seemed to sense it, redoubling their efforts at my struggle.

  Minute by minute the bodies piled up, the sun rose, the light increased. More of the darkthings were forced to retreat, then more still. Those that remained seemed weaker by far than when things had started out. Cedwin had long since exhausted his ammunition and was reduced to just clubbing things with his arquebus, while even Gruin seemed to be slowing down.

  But the darkthings were peeling away from the shelter and leaving those who remained inside it untouched. Once the last of them had cleared out, we were able to pause, breathe, and survey the damage. There was a great deal to be surveyed.

  Perhaps a hundred people had died, in all. More were wounded, many still conscious. I saw blood coating the floor like a new carpet and smelled the iron tang of it in the air. Everywhere I looked there was more carnage. It finally sunk into me that I was responsible, I was the reason this shitstorm had rolled over the town.

  Looking back on it, I think that might have been the first time I actually felt bad for something I’d done. Don’t get too used to reading about it, I still had a long way before I stopped being even half the cunt I was at the time. Partly because of the great many problems at my feet that were somewhat more pressing than bettering myself.

  “T…They’re gone,” George croaked. He was kneeling in blood, clutching a gash in his side that I couldn’t get a clear enough look at to assess the lethality of. It looked survivable, but then lots of deadly things did. “We won?”

  I didn’t say anything, didn’t know what I possibly would have replied with if I had.

  “I’m alive,” Vara mumbled, staring at me, staring at the devastation, “I’m still alive.”

  My own response was somewhat less hysterical, another reminder of how big the gulf in experience was between her and me. At least when it came to almost being killed by monsters, that was.

  I just wandered around the town outside for a while after that, oddly enough feeling less tired once I was out of the shelter. When I’d done a full circuit and returned, I found my fellowship staring down the remaining townsfolk. Things weren’t looking good at all, of course.

  The problem with the darkthings finally retreating was it meant that nobody had any bigger problems than us, anymore. That, and there were a lot of corpses left by the attack. Corpses I couldn’t fully claim to not be responsible for. Angry groups are unstable and dangerous, more so than any single creature. We were all very impressive people, my fellowship, but I didn’t like our chances of fighting off several hundred vengeance-fuelled peasants even if it weren’t for the handful of guns among them. Not on our best day, and certainly not as we were then.

  I took a step forward, watching all eyes fall on me and steeling myself as I tried to think of what combination of words would have the highest odds of keeping me from being hanged.

  “We survived because of each other,” I began. “Let’s not die because of each other now.”

  It was quite a nice thing to say, I thought. All sentimental and heroic-sounding. Of course the words bounced right off everyone I aimed them at, seeming only to make the crowd angrier and closer to violence. I started panicking then, realising how in-control I wasn’t.

  Things degenerated further from there.

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