If you’d told me, a year ago, that I would end up scrambling in the dirt, screaming and punching a horrible magical monster’s face in while it tried to bite my arm off, I would’ve probably done nothing. Because I’d always done nothing back then. Unfortunately, that life had not at all prepared me for scrambling in the dirt, screaming and punching a horrible magical monster’s face in while it tried to bite my arm off.

  The shygarin kept snapping at me, and each attempted clamp of its jaws brought those edged teeth closer still to finding my flesh than the last. They were like steel, really. From this close, grappling for this long, I could see the sharpness of them, how they held an edge better than any natural bodily material ought to have been able. One bite might not take limbs clean off like its mother had, but I had no doubt I’d be losing a chunk of myself.

  Probably a big enough chunk to bleed out from.

  A particularly close snap had me leaning back, my grip slipping as we both fell. I just managed to flex my legs and send the monster tumbling over me before it could fall down with its inverted position and overpower me using the aid of gravity.

  It went over my head, landed hard. Landed on a big rock, lucky for me, and was stunned long enough that I could scramble up and reach for something to aid my violence.

  As far as weapons went, half a brick was not the finest one I’ve had the pleasure of swinging in anger. It worked well enough then though. Once, twice, four times I brought it down on the shygrain’s head, and by the final blow I had changed the shape of that head considerable. Its body still twitched, but it was the brainless spasming of a dead thing still waiting to catch up with its own life ending. I fell back, panted.

  Then something more attacked me.

  There wasn’t a single moment of peace across the entire fight, it was just too frantic for that. What was worse, most of the other men, despite Gruin’s rather helpful breakdown of how to fight these creatures, were doing far worse than I had. I saw some of them failing to even fight at all, just panicking and trying to run—they always died the fastest, as airborne creatures singled out weak prey and dove down to claim it without the fight everyone else was promising.

  We were not a mass of men, rather a great swarm of individuals. And we were dying for it.

  Not all of us though, one among the mass of screaming, flailing morons was even screamier, flailier and more moronic than the rest—Gruin. Except all of his uncontrolled madness was of a useful kind.

  I’d lost sight of him when the fighting started, but caught it again when I saw one of the creatures—a particularly large one—squawking and screaming as it flapped weakly into the air while he planted himself firmly on its back. Evidently social beasts, the other shygarin closed in to try and help their sibling.

  This was a mistake, because the beating of its own wings kept aid from stripping the meat off Gruin as they were all forced to hang back long beyond fang or talon range. But well within hammer distance.

  As far as ground went, a constantly-bobbing flying monster was evidently not the most stable that the Grynkori could have asked for. On the other hand his arms were as big as my legs, and his hammer was at least to proportion. Where the iron head landed, things broke, and there soon descended a wave of order around his killing where the creatures were beaten back and unable to fully terrorise men.

  I made straight for it of course, and this is where things get interesting. See I’m tall. I’ve said that enough, I know, but I really am very tall, six-four back then, which is big enough that my head stood clearly above the withered labourers around me and let all of them pick me out of the madness.

  People look for order amid madness, it’s just how we are. And when you see one uninjured head sticking up over all the others, moving somewhere with a purpose, I guess you follow it. It probably helped that, with my reflexive, idiot fear-grin, I probably looked as if I was enjoying myself.

  Soon enough I had, entirely without meaning to, rallied some score of the men around Gruin as his new unconsenting mount carried him higher.

  “You’re going up!” I screamed at him, meaning it as some sort of moronic warning. The first half of my words came out like a squeak, though, throat too dry from all the fighting, and I fear the sentence was misconstrued. Everyone around me must have only heard ‘up’, because instantly twenty spear were raised high.

  Quite coincidentally, this happened just as a mass of the shygari dive-bombed us and skewered themselves right on the lifted steel.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I got blood in my eye, everyone probably did. There was so fucking much of it, like it had suddenly started raining. Except the rain was hot, sticky, and tasted of salt and iron. I screamed, swung blindly and felt resistance right at the edge of my weapon as I frantically whirled around and cleared my eyes. When I finally managed it, I regained sight just in time to see a set of talons closing in. My steel came up in a futile blocking motion that sent some scraping off and others narrowly sidelong to gash my arm, I swore and punched the creature responsible, watched it tumble, watched it land. I chopped down before it could rise, then moved on to others.

  You might be noticing a change in how I fought here. I didn’t, at the time, but it was definitely there—a refinement to my unrefined savagery. I’d been in enough mindless fights by now to start getting the rhythm of them, internalising the logic of illogical violence, and I felt my mind start to drift as my body took over.

  I wasn’t distracted, far from it. I was more focused than ever before. Focused enough that everything cognitive about me went to sleep, so as to free up more of my faculties for sheer, animal killing. All the old fencing reflexes were there, and I used them as I needed to, but they were now guided by both instinct and a familiarity with the fundamental differences of wide, chaotic melees that left me without the usual openings my past of singular duelling had created.

  Everything that came close to me died. The sole exception to this were the tall, lanky things with no fangs or talons that turned away from me instead of towards. My brain retained just enough complexity of thought for such recognition as that, everything else was directed to killing.

  And I killed.

  There’s a depth of stamina in every man that starts burning once he’s pushed far enough through his initial exhaustion, and fearing for your life makes it far easier to find. I was gorging myself on those reserves of strength now, feeling them pump volcanically through the veins of my musculature and power stronger swings than I’d ever made in my life. I’d never killed creatures this deadly, not in these numbers, and it felt like I was somehow drinking in their lives as I reaped them.

  Somewhere along the way, we killed enough of the shygarin for however many still lived to fuck off. Smart and unusually aggressive as these creatures were, they evidently knew a losing fight when they spent long enough losing it, and were no more eager to stick around until one ended than any natural creature. I barely even noticed their departure at first, just wavered on my feet and realised the flapping I’d grown used to—the constant, militant beat of wings buffeting air—had suddenly started to grow rapidly farther from us.

  I looked up, saw the shapes slinking off into dark skies, and exhaled.

  Everything had been so intense that it took me a long few moments to realise that the enemy had gone, left us behind. Retreated and abandoned all efforts to claim my life.

  I grinned as it finally sunk in, of course. Grinned more widely than any fear had ever inspired, like a maniac probably. Maybe not just like one. There is a certain mania to finding out the remainder of your life won’t be measured in minutes, and I felt it washing through me then.

  What followed was a blur, and I barely managed to track it even in my head.

  People gathered up as the last few hours still remaining of the night started slipping away. There was, we were told, much to do. Rebuilding, reorganising, readying a new defence for another round of attacking.

  That was about as popular an order as you might imagine, and it was quickly pointed out that all the men giving it—the proper mercenaries armoured in steel breastplates and chainmail—were the ones who had taken the fewest casualties obeying our first round of orders. Complaints came loudly and angrily, and it all amused me quite well until I was mentioned.

  It started all at once, some idiot bringing me up with a clumsy pointing gesture.

  “We should be listening to him!” the moron growled, “he actually did something, at least. He actually bled.”

  At the mention of that bleeding, my wounds flared up again. I’d already examined them by this point, and had Gruin offer a second, actually useful, opinion. He promised me my arm would neither fall off, or keep bleeding until I died. I did believe him, barely, but every new throb of pain sent another spasm of fear through my wits that cannibalised such rationality and made me ever more convinced he was lying.

  That pain came as a great comfort now, because it meant I had something to focus on other than the fifty or so eyeballs that all came to rest right on me. I froze like an animal sighting its hunter, somehow certain that any movement or sound I make would bring about…whatever followed.

  What followed did, in fact, follow, and quickly. It was worse than I could have feared.

  “Aye! I saw that lad fighting his way to the oreling, they must have killed fifty of the things between the two of them!”

  “And it was his order to raise our spears that kept us all alive when the monsters dived down on us from above all at once!” another chimed in.

  Good God. I realised all too slowly that this situation was rapidly spiralling well out of my control. I opened my mouth to correct some of the idiots, but they were so enthusiastic in praising me that they didn’t hear me trying to tell them that I’d done less than half of what they were claiming.

  But then Gruin spoke, and I knew I was okay. His lungs were not the petty, shrivelled kind we humans make do with—not at all. They’d adapted for deep cave toxins and whisper-thin atmospheres. A more powerful pair could not have been found if you scoured the hundred miles around us, unless there happened to be another Grynkori among them, and he put them to fine use in shouting over the crowd.

  “If you want to do my companion proud, and keep living, then you’ll accompany him and me when we head down into the caves after those things to kill them while daytime ebbs their strength and leaves them vulnerable!

  I actually thought about stabbing the stupid fuck.

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