The End of Eternity

The New Old Enemy

The truth was, king's forces had already had their hands full with other groups, which were flowing over the border like a flood. Two groups, not just one were in lord Fereg's domain.

Darius swung his sword, aiming at the neck of the mutant in front of him. He expected to cut the filthy beast's head off in one sweep of his sword, but a hideous hand emerged and blocked his blow with its claw, loosing a part of it in the process. The unexpected parry forced Darius one step back and he had to defend himself against the rain of blows, which came as a counterattack of the mutant.

He succumbed to the power of the blows and fell on one knee. He would have lost his life, if a fellow knight behind him had not blocked one of the mutant's most dangerous blows.

He could not believe it, he had been fighting mutants for some time, but he had never met a group like this. The mutants seemed more organized, like they had a purpose and some of them looked like they had been bred. Just the thought of someone breeding mutants made him sick.

The worst thing, that had happened was, he had underestimated the group 's strength and tried to annihilate them with just six hundred knights. That number would have been more than enough, if the mutants had behaved as usual.

As a result, the tide of monsters was pressing the thin line of knights, the loses of the knighs outnumbering the loses of the mutants. Darius had a quick look around the battlefield and guessed that about one third of the original force of knights had already been destroyed. He wanted to order retreat, but he knew mutants would not let them.

They were trapped.

The mutant which looked like a humanoid bull with many distorted horns growing out of his body attacked again and with luck, Darius managed to hit his vitals. Looking at the knights around him slowly falling under the pressure of the mutant horde, the small victory he had just achieved seemed meaningless.

They were all going to die.

Pulling back from the first lines, Darius inspected the field of battle, readying himself to make a tactical decision, when two figures sprinting in the distance caught his attention. The first one was definitely a mutant, the second one was a white-haired woman, but it was not their visage that had attracted his attention, but their speed.

Their speed was simply inhuman, they were approaching, clouds of dust and dirt lifting in their wake. Mutants noticed the duo too and staggered for a second, baffled, unable to determine the newcomers's allegiance.

* * * *

In that moment, Claw reached the group and made one of his best area attack moves, clearing any doubts about his and Davena's allegiance.

With a powerful push of his feet, he jumped into the air above the mutants and bristled the scales around his tail. Soaring above the heads of the dumbfounded mutants, he slashed with his tail towards the ground creating a volley of poisoned darts, which rained down in a wide cone onto the surprised mutants. Having no armor, nor shields to cover behind them, the effect of the attack was devastating and large groups of mutatns were dropping to the ground, overcome by the effect of Claw's potent poison.

Landing among the mutants, Claw did not stop his work and transformed into a whirlwind of death, cutting everything in his path. Only the best steel could withstand the full force of his tail blade, rendering any attempts of mutants to block his slashes useless.

Although Claw looked like a war god, Davena knew he had overdid it by jumping into the midst of the mutant horde. Claw could not sustain his extraordinary battle strength for long and the mutant's superiority in numbers was too great to reduce it during this short period of time.