NOVEL NEXT 92 – A Hallway of Dead Men
Zelsys chopped, cut, and kicked her way into the first floor’s main hallway, willfully burning a tenth of her lung capacity on every breath for Fulgur to be expelled. Not as an attack, but as a lightshow. A display of snapping, flashing lightning that crackled from her skin without direction, lightly scorching and searing anything she came near. Yet another tenth of her lung capacity was spent counteracting it, ensuring the wild current wouldn’t make a muscle spasm at an inopportune moment.
Working at eighty percent of her usual performance made no difference. If anything, this was one of the few instances where such investment for the sake of intimidation factor was entirely appropriate.
The terror was palpable in their hesitation to shoot, their shaking hands, their animalistic stares of fight-or-flight immediately succeeded by the breaking of ranks and a sprint anywhere away from her.
There were only a total of fourteen people in that hallway - all armed and dressed similarly to those on the upper floor - though the sound of distant footsteps and voices made it obvious that they were just the vanguard preceding the main force.
Of these fourteen, Zelsys felt a genuine fighting spirit from perhaps three. Eight more were just yet more broken dogs of war acting on lizard-brain instinct and hatred. Two more were entirely gripped with terror and adrenaline waiting to lash out, whilst a last single one had not an ounce of fight in him. A young boy - no older than perhaps sixteen - wearing a clean uniform that had clearly belonged to someone older and larger than him. He just stood there in the middle of the hallway near the door, holding a sparklock awkwardly in his right hand, pointing in her general direction… Just staring, without even having his finger on the trigger. The gun’s hammer wasn’t even pulled back.
Besides the youngster, there was one other soldier there by his side. A harrowed-looking man with a patchy beard and mustache, sunken-in empty eyes, and a narrow face that looked like it had once been the envy of many a man, many years ago. His skin was yellow with black splotches - not the vaguely yellowish-white of other Pateirians, but genuinely, truly yellow. Jaundiced and bruised. His lips had more cracks than continuous skin. On his belt were two pistols - a sparklock and a wheellock.
Between her and them, a hallway full of dead men. Three came at her at once, thinking to overwhelm her with numbers, even positioning themselves in a way that made it impossible to cut them down with one mighty swing without exposing herself for attack.
Thrusting her cleaver forwards she sawed the man on the right’s head clean off. Simultaneously she delivered a forward kick empowered with one-third of a lung in Fog and Fulgur both, sending the man in the middle flying backwards. He hit another and slumped down thrashing, wheezingly trying to catch his breath, his sternum collapsed. The man on the left, he stabbed at her from above, and she brought her heretofore limp left arm up to grab his wrist, letting out a growling chuckle at the pain in the join. A pain she knew was worse than that of a stab, perhaps even more damaging than if she had chosen to just direct the stab to a nonvital area, but that wasn’t how she fought.
She sent half a lung’s Fulgur surging through his arm, overpowering his impotently-twitching muscles to turn the knife and stab himself in the eye.
Another man died by a ball lightning spat into his forehead. Yet another cut down, and another still bludgeoned with the Butcher’s flat. Her Slayer’s Instinct
wasn’t even looking for weaknesses in particular at this point, but specifically ones that she thought would leave an impact on those observing if she exploited them.Man by man, she butchered her way through the first-floor, sending no less than half of those present fleeing, dispersing through the doors on the sides, mostly through one particular door to the right. That must have been the one they came through, she noted in her mind.
Those two soldiers that had stood out, the young boy and the jaundiced man - they ran from her too. Not deeper into the town hall or even back to whatever tunnel they had emerged from, but out the front door - breaking it down to be met by a crowd already beginning to gather around the front entrance, half of its constituents already brandishing weapons. They quickly closed in together and formed a wall of flesh at the sight of uniformed enemy soldiers, pointing their guns and blades alike.
Zelsys gave chase, only for a side door to come flying off its hinges and a bulky, albeit short man in rough-hewn full plate to bust through it, bearing a bullet-pitted tower shield in his left hand and a club as tall as himself in the other. He faced her down, took up a brave fighting stance, and she regretted knowing that she would have to put him down for the sake of the greater scheme. There just wasn’t enough time for her to have a genuine fight with him, and so, she put away her cleaver and came at him like a wild animal, zigzagging left to right.
The way he moved made it obvious that his suit was neither well-fitted nor mobile. She baited a swing of his club and stopped it dead with a Siphoning Pulse, wrapping her arm around it and yanking on it to throw him off-balance. He toppled over like a man-shaped trash can, panic visible in his eyes as he tipped forward. Before he could right himself she used his own club to vault over his head and onto his back, pushing him down for certain.
She knelt on his back, funneling Fog and Fulgur into the three center fingers of her right hand, held out straight. First she formed a coat around them, then thrust them towards the seam between his helmet and his chest-plate, turning those three fingers into a blade of lightning with a surge of Fulgur. It would only last a second or two - more than enough.
