The Vampire & Her Witch

Ollie hit the reformed line like a living battering ram.

The first shield went sideways when the cleaver bit into its upper rim and wrenched it out of the soldier’s grip. The man behind it tried to stab with his sword, but Ollie stepped inside the thrust, caught the blade on Frost Fang’s translucent edge, and drove his shoulder into the soldier’s chest. The armored man flew backward into the halberdier behind him, and both went down in a tangle of steel and limbs.

"Hold the line!" the sergeant shouted, desperately trying to keep his men from breaking under the furious assault of the strange, knife-wielding knight. "Don’t fall now! He’s just one man, kill him!"

"He’s just one man, but he’s not alone!" Devlin shouted as he came in from the right flank, working through a gap that Ollie’s charge had opened.

The sailor fought with the speed and viciousness of a man who had learned his trade in boarding actions where hesitation meant drowning, and his sword and fighting knife worked in concert the way a weaver worked shuttle and loom. A soldier lunged at him with a short sword, and Devlin caught the blade on his curved knife, twisted it aside, and drove his sword into the man’s thigh below the hem of his mail.

The soldier screamed and fell, clutching his leg, and Devlin was already turning to face the next threat when the halberd came for him.

He never saw it. The long haft swept in from behind the collapsing shield line, driven by a soldier who had stepped sideways to find an angle past the melee. The axe-blade caught Devlin across the back of his left shoulder, and even through the thickness of his padded gambeson, the impact drove the sailor forward onto his knees.

Devlin tried to rise. The halberdier planted a boot on his back and raised the weapon for a second strike, this time aimed at the base of his skull, and Devlin could only twist sideways, bringing his sword up in a desperate parry that deflected the killing blow but left the axe-blade to carve a furrow along the side of his ribs.

The gambeson split open. The blade was sharp enough that it didn’t catch on the quilted fabric the way a duller edge would have. It sliced through the padding and into the flesh beneath, and the sound Devlin made was unlike anything Morwen had heard from the weathered sailor. It was a short, sharp bark of agony that was cut off almost immediately as the breath was driven from his lungs.

Blood spread across the torn fabric, dark and fast, pooling on the stone floor beneath the sailor’s body as he collapsed onto his side. His sword clattered from fingers that had gone white and nerveless, and his fighting knife, the long, curved blade that had been in his family for three generations, fell from his other hand a moment later.

"Devlin!" Elgon shouted from the rear, one hand pressed against his own wound, his face going ashen as he watched his companion fall.

Ollie moved before the shout finished echoing.

Something inside him cracked. Not broken, but cracked, the way a dam cracks before the river tears through it, a fracture that ran from the surface down to the foundations and let the pressure that had been building behind it seep through in a torrent that was hotter and darker than anything the Blood Acorn had poured into him during the ritual.

The halberdier who had wounded Devlin was raising his weapon for a finishing blow when the darksteel cleaver struck the haft and sheared it in two. The axe-head spun away into the corridor, ringing off the stone wall, and the soldier stumbled backward with nothing but a shortened stick in his hands. Ollie’s armored fist caught him beneath the jaw, and the sound of the impact was wet and accompanied by a sickening -CRUNCH- of breaking bone as the man’s head snapped back. The soldier’s feet left the ground, and when he hit the floor, he let out a quiet groan and didn’t move again.

The next man came at Ollie with a sword. Frost Fang caught the blade and turned it, and the cleaver came in from the opposite side and struck the soldier’s helm with enough force to shear through steel, sinking into the flesh and bone beneath the steel like an ordinary knife cutting through the tough rind of a melon. Blood flowed down the man’s forehead, and he collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

In the brief moment that the cleaver was bound in one man’s skull and Ollie was working to pull the weapon free, a third man thrust with a short sword aimed at the gap between Ollie’s mail and his gambeson. The blade found its mark, parting the links of the chain and driving through the quilted padding beneath until the point pressed against the skin over Ollie’s ribs.

It stopped there.

The soldier felt the resistance, pushed harder, and watched in disbelief as the blade point dimpled Ollie’s skin without breaking it. It was like trying to drive a nail into the bark of an ancient tree. The flesh simply refused to yield.

Ollie looked down at the sword pressing against his side, then looked up at the soldier holding it. The man’s eyes went wide. He let go of the hilt and threw himself flat against the wall with his hands raised, and the sword clattered to the floor between them.

Behind the broken line, the remaining soldiers scrambled backward, their discipline finally shattered by the sight of a man who couldn’t be cut.

"Demon!" a frightened soldier cried, staring at Ollie in disbelief. "Witchcraft!"

As soon as the man spoke, two of his companions threw down their weapons. Three more turned and fled down the corridor. The rest simply stopped fighting, backing away from the battle with their weapons raised to defend themselves while their wide, panicked eyes searched for a way to escape.

But Ollie didn’t stop. He refused to let things come to an end that way...