The Angkhora Warriors

Part 12: Tanamera

The Mongoose guards charged forward and Uma threw a smoke bomb, quickly drawing out her double daggers. Oja brandished her double axes. Both charged forward, slashing through the Mongoose guards, blood splattering on the walls of the narrow corridor. Oja swung her axes, chopping into the guards' shoulders and slashing across their chests. Uma jumped and ran on the wall, swinging her double daggers, slashing the guards' necks and faces. She leaped off the wall, tumbled across, slashed at a guard's knee, and jabbed at him multiple times, once in the stomach, twice in the chest, and three times in his throat.

A guard gave a flying kick to Oja's head but she managed to grab his leg, locked it over her shoulder, and threw him onto the floor. Then she chopped him with her axes.

Before long, bodies piled up and a trail of blood snaked through the corridor. Uma looked back over her shoulder, she could hear the others fighting around the corner.

She then turned to Oja and the girls ran forward, looking for Arakk's chamber. It was a very long corridor. More guards charged at them with parangs. Uma jumped and bounced off the wall, giving a guard a spinning back kick. The guard's head twisted around, snapping his neck, and he crashed onto the floor. Oja jumped into the air, locked a leg around another guard's neck, swung her body around the soldier's head, choking his neck with both legs, and crashed the soldier head-first to the ground with a scissor-leg takedown. Then she chopped him on the chest with her double axes.

They turned the corner, arriving at a foyer where a bigger group of guards waited for them. This time double the size of the first one. Oja looked at the guards. They locked eyes for a moment, her axes dripping with blood. Then she screamed and charged forward.

The guards trembled.

Uma threw two smoke bombs and disappeared into the cloud. The front guards charged forward but they were slashing at empty smoke. Then suddenly some of them were thrown into the wall. The guards paused as they heard the guards at the front scream, being chopped into pieces. Then out of nowhere, their foreheads were slashed from the top. Uma had summersaulted and was running across the ceiling upside down. More guards screamed in pain and dropped onto the floor. The last crashed and burst open the doors into Arakk's chamber.

There were more guards in the chamber but this time, they looked different—bigger and more dangerous. At the front stood a large brown mongoose with red eyes, armed with iron claws in his stretched hands. Arakk, now dressed in a fur coat chuckled from the back. The fox girl shivered with fear, hiding behind him. He locked eyes with Uma, laughing through the smoke from his spice cigar, then turned around, dragged the fox girl to his side, and left through the back door.

What the fuck.... Oja felt something wasn't right. She looked back at the corridor but Kael and the rest of the team was still not in sight. But she could hear sound of fierce fighting.

The brown mongoose mumbled something to himself, saliva dribbling down his lower jaw. Then he gave out a loud roar that shook the room. The guards charged forward. Uma leaped on the ceiling, avoided the guards, bounced off, and lunged at Brown's jugular. Brown blocked Uma's thrust and swung his iron claw at her, tearing some flesh off her shoulder. Uma landed back on the ground, bloody and fighting the intense pain that lit through her like a bolt of lightning. Brown made a wild swing but missed, shattering a vase into pieces. Brown continued to charge forward with more wild swings, like a mad beast, and Uma blocked his claws with her daggers. Parts of her daggers splintered as their weapons clashed. Uma recognized the madness. The kind of madness that came from hallucination. The kind of hallucination that some warriors inhaled so they would fight more valiantly in the battlefield. Brown had smoked spice.

All the guards in the chamber had smoked spice. They fought like possessed souls. Insane. Violent. They lunged at Oja like creatures that had lost their minds. Oja slashed one of the guards in mid-air, spilling his intestines onto the floor. She blocked the another with her crossed axes, dropped on one knee, and slashed both of his legs, amputating them. Another guard lunged at Oja. She moved aside, sliced his throat, and he crashed onto Uma's back. Uma was flung onto the side table and dropped onto the floor.