Gruin made good use of the cramped conditions, exploding out from behind a corner and swinging his hammer around in a broad arc that bashed the first of the men clean off his feet and sent him landing hard with a crater deep in his chest. Blood spurted, the fight began.

  My own opening attack was not quite as spectacular, but no less effective. Twelve inches of steel disappeared into a man’s side as I lunged for him, driving all of my weight behind the blade and letting it sink deep. He went limp instantly, strength leaving his legs as he fell so fast it almost tore the sword from my grip.

  Only almost though, I wrenched it free and leapt back as several of his friends rounded on me while several more screamed and stumbled back from Gruin. I was already turning to head back around the corner, blood pounding, ears thumping. Three, three had turned to focus on me.

  Three too many.

  One of them stumbled as they rounded the corner, I lashed out and took one of his ears off, gashed half his face. Not a killing blow, so I still had three weapons coming my way. This time, at least, I could move around as far as I needed, and the one I’d cut was still reeling. I didn’t fight defensively, couldn’t. Threw myself forwards screaming and swinging, taking advantage of the widened space around me to get plenty of velocity behind every arc of the sword.

  It worked wonders, because my next swing took a man’s hand halfway off. Just a moment after that I felt the bite of a spear as it thudded right into my chest at heart-level.

  Not that much though, the chainmail—freshly repaired until this very moment—saved me. To be quite honest I’d genuinely forgotten about it in my last fight, not even felt its weight, and I spent a brief moment panicking, certain I’d just been run through and had seconds to live.

  I spent those seconds slashing deep into the neck of my ‘killer’.

  He died gurgling and spasming, not that I gave a shit of course—save that it meant I was now fighting against nicer odds. The first man had just about recovered, but now he and his ally were looking to back off from me. They must have figured out I was armoured, realised their chances weren’t quite as favourable as they seemed.

  Quite unfortunately for them, I’d made the opposite realisation at the exact same time. So their retreat was countered by my own attack coming more aggressively by far than any of the others. I was calming now, thinking things through. Gruin was fighting however many others, if I let these two swarm him as well he’d probably die.

  And I wouldn’t take long to follow suit after that.

  It wasn’t courage but self-preservation, my fate was tied to Gruin’s now, like it or not, and I was best served in keeping him alive given how devastating the Grynkori was in a fight. Oddly enough my sword felt lighter now as I sent it chasing after my fearful enemies, watching them stumble away, lunging to follow and, inevitably, catching one dead. Literally dead, as in he probably was before he hit the floor and didn’t move after.

  That inspired the final man to just turn tail and run, and I eagerly chased after him to put a sword through his back. Upon turning the corner, I was finally able to stop wondering about the state of Gruin’s own fight and see it for myself.

  Honestly, it was better than I might have thought.

  Four men lay dead at his feet, including, I thought, the one he’d slain in his surprise attack, while four others attacked him simultaneously. Gruin didn’t have the ability to do as I had, backing away and using distance to control the battle. Instead he was just leaving his back pressed against a wall and swinging his hammer out with enough force that the enemy had no choice but to stay clear if they wanted to avoid any broken bones.

  I definitely couldn’t have done that, with my weapon and strength, and it was another reminder to the prowess of the Grynkori.

  Four men is a lot though, every minor mistake Gruin made left one of them free to briefly step in and mark his body with a slash or impact. Bruises welled up ugly and broad across his skin, and I counted maybe ten weapon-cuts. After finishing off the last one I was fighting, before he could reach the Grynkori, I closed in to help out by hitting the remainders from behind.

  It wasn’t a long fight, after that, but it was an incredibly intense one. There’s just no ‘casual’ way to win against double your number. Even with the element of surprise on my side we were left to kill three men while they grew increasingly frenzied and desperate.

  But madness is no substitute for skill, not even close. By the end of it neither Gruin nor myself had even taken an additional wound, and twelve dead and dying men lay around us strewn about the place at all angles.

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  We didn’t say anything for a long while, just stood their drinking in more breaths of air to cool our burning lungs and restore our quivering muscles. At this point I didn’t find myself overcome by the same shock that had usually followed a near-death, I was too used to such things, but the feeling was still far from pleasant.

  “So the jig is up,” Gruin grinned, “now we can go and kill that bastard?”

  My first instinct, to contradict the violent lunatic, slowly died down as I actually thought about it. Honestly, what did we have to lose at this point? We were in an isolated village in the middle of nowhere, we’d hardly get a criminal record for whatever happened here and the bastard was already trying to kill us.

  “Yes,” I wheezed at last, “let’s go and kill the bastard.”

  Which was, of course, easier said than done. For more than one reason. On the one hand, we already knew we’d have to kill more than a few extra men to reach our target—and Gruin had gotten badly wounded in the last fight. I could see even his movements were slower and clumsier with the gashes littering him.

  Putting aside the fact that we were hardly at our best (as a pair, that is, I’d gotten out of that scrape without a single injury, of course), there was also another obstacle that reared its head up only when we actually made our way to do Arig in. He’d hidden himself away in the blackmist shelter.

  I was well familiar with the security on offer from this shelter of course, having taken refuge in it myself. And now I got to appreciate just how extensive it was from the outside.

  Because sure enough, a wall of solid stone made to keep out hordes of darkthings was far more than either myself or Gruin could get through. A couple of angry hammer-blows to the rocky shell, both leaving tiny scratches on its surface, made that much abundantly clear. We wouldn’t have smashed our way in with ten more Gruins and a full day to work.

  Which brought us onto our second problem, our much bigger problem. There were only a few hours until the blackmists came again…and we were trapped outside of the shelter.

  Gruin and I got to work quickly of course, wasting no time as our priorities were rearranged instantaneously. It was life or death now, and we didn’t get to be the aggressors anymore.

  After an initial bout of panic, which Gruin helped me stave off by slapping me hard enough to kill a small child, we got to work on a more practical solution to our problem. Even as we did, though, it was with heavy hearts. I could see even Gruin lacked his usual killer’s enthusiasm, and my own despair was swelling by the moment.

  We had to focus on our chance for survival. This chance probably didn’t exist, mind, but focusing on the inevitability of death was a lot more depressing, so we got to work holing up in one of the sturdier-looking buildings and smashing up wooden furniture from across the various parts of the town.

  This was not a fit of mindless, berserk rage. We had a very particular use in mind for the kindling, and with such a wealth of furniture to be found in Arig’s house—the only use we were willing to make of it, on account of the fucking murder-demon chained up inside— we took only an hour to build a pile bigger than both of us combined in the building we’d chosen to take shelter in.

  Through a careful and measured application of further vandalism, mostly done by Gruin who both owned a hammer and seemed to have an intuitive knowledge of exactly how to not collapse the building around us, we left enough ‘ventilation holes’ in the ceiling that we wouldn’t need to worry about choking to death…much. From there we just waited, reinforcing whatever we could by moving around other pieces of wood and propping them against walls, eating to ensure our energy remained up, then, finally, starting the fire.

  For light.

  Light, the bane of darkthings. Our weapon against them. Didn’t feel like much of a weapon now though, and my confidence in it didn’t grow one bit as the night finally fell and I heard the entities approaching from outside.

  The blackmists were here. I just about shit myself as they came.

  Wisps of pitch black, truly pitch. Like stones of pure onyx had taken the form of fog. They crept towards us in lazy tendrils, billowing over to every gap in our walls and hissing through only to disintegrate and dissipate as the firelight hit them. Gruin and I threw more wood on the blaze.

  That worked fine enough to keep the mists at bay, but it wasn’t those dessicating miasmas that were the real concern. It was what lived in them, and sure enough darkthings started to crawl their way out, coming slowly at first, hesitating as if they couldn’t believe we’d be stupid enough to get ourselves stranded outside the shelter.

  Soon, though, they came fast.

  A creature with too many limbs and not enough skin smashed halfway-into the house, ripping chunks from the edges of a window as it tried to cram its body through. Tried, and did rather well in the effort. I was quick in lunging, burying inches of steel into its chest and twisting the sword out. A killing blow, but it didn’t kill now.

  I saw black blood foam out of the wound, noticed how tiny and shallow the gash was for the amount of force I’d put into it. These creatures had skin like boiled leather, muscles like woven wool. And they didn’t seem to feel pain like humans did. I noticed that last fact when the one I’d stabbed kept coming without even slowing down.

  Gruin’s hammer came down when it was mere feet from me like a boulder dropped from the heavens, and I actually felt the wind of it passing by my head before impacting the darkthing and almost halting its momentum on that one swing alone. I sidestepped the creature, tripping it and stabbing again as it fell in a heap. Gruin swung again, too, and that was all she wrote.

  For the first darkthing.

  More were swelling forwards now, snarling and ripping their way in. I screamed out, hurled an oil lantern I’d nicked from one of the houses we went through and watched it explode in flames across one surface of the house. The light seemed to bother them more than the heat, but neither did much. Steel was better.

  Steel was better, but numbers were better still. And it was our two against an uncountable sum of attackers. Fear ate me as I fought.

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