Chapter 30: The Battle of Houses II
Chapter 30: The Battle of Houses II
Alex moved.
The stolen gladius felt heavier than his old blade, better balanced, and it sang through the rain as he closed the distance to the Irectus flank. They saw him coming—a pale figure with white hair plastered to his skull, blood still washing off his knuckles—and they didn’t understand what they were seeing. He was supposed to be dead. They’d all watched his sword shatter like the rest. They’d watched him stumble back with nothing but a broken hilt.
Now he was sprinting at them with a blade that gleamed even in the grey light.
The first Irectus fighter raised his shield. Too slow. Alex’s body flowed sideways, his feet finding purchase in the wet sand without slipping, and the gladius came around in a low arc that bit into the man’s knee from the side. Not a cut, a full severing. The blade sliced through the patellar tendon with a sound like wet rope snapping under tension, and the man’s leg folded sideways like chopped tree trunks. He screamed. Alex was already past him.
The second fighter lunged. Alex ducked under the thrust, stepped inside the man’s reach, and drove the gladius upward through his stomach. The blade punched through the abdominal wall, tore through the stomach sac, and scraped against the bottom of the ribcage before Alex ripped it sideways. The wound opened like a mouth. A flood of dark blood and yellow bile, maybe, spilled down the man’s front. He clutched at his own intestines as they began to bulge through the gap, his fingers slick and useless, his scream reduced to a wet, choking sob.
Alex put a sandal on his chest and shoved him backward into the sand.
The Irectus line, already loose, began to fracture. They hadn’t expected resistance. They’d expected a slaughter. Now their left flank had two men down in as many seconds, and the white-haired thing that had killed them was already moving toward the third.
The third fighter was younger than the others. His eyes were wide, the anger that had been there moments ago replaced by something rawer. He swung his sword in a desperate, horizontal arc; no technique, just panic. Alex ducked under it, and the blade whistled over his head. He didn’t even slow down. His gladius came up and across, opening the young fighter’s throat from ear to ear. The cut was clean, surgically precise, and for a heartbeat nothing happened. Then the wound yawned open, and blood sprayed outward in a fine red mist that mixed with the rain and painted Alex’s face in warm, wet streaks.
The fighter dropped his sword. Both hands went to his throat, trying to hold the wound closed, trying to keep the air, the blood and the life from leaking out between his fingers. He took two steps, then the third. Before his knees buckled, and he collapsed into the mud with a splash.
The fourth and fifth Irectus fighters were already backing away, but Alex didn’t chase them. He turned, rain spinning off his shoulders, and looked for his next target.
Behind him, the remnants of Ludus Ignatius were rising from the slaughter.
They had seen it. Their brother; the pale one, the one they called Ghost Feet, had just carved through half a flank in the time it took to draw three breaths. His white hair was streaked with red now, and his face was a mask of blood and rain, and his eyes were colder than anything they’d seen outside of the veteran pits.
One of them, a Gaul named Brennus, his left arm hanging broken at his side, bent down and picked up a fallen Palacius sword. The grip was still warm from its previous owner’s hand. He tested the weight, nodded to himself, and fell in behind Alex.
Another followed. Then another.
Oseka appeared at Alex’s left shoulder. He was bleeding from a gash above his eye, and his tunic was torn, and he was holding a sword he’d taken from a dead Magnimus fighter.
"Isn’t that too big for you?" Alex joked, flashing a quick glance.
Oseka stared at him, not knowing if he should laugh or not.
Alex was already moving, again.
The Magnimus line was the next threat. The giant’s brothers had pushed deep into the Ignatius formation during the initial rout, and now they were overextended, their flanks exposed, their heavy weapons too slow to recover from each swing. The largest of them; a bald, scarred brute with a warhammer as long as Alex’s whole body, had just caved in an Ignatius fighter’s chest. The man’s sternum had collapsed inward with a sound like a clay pot being crushed, and his body was still twitching in the sand as the giant wrenched his hammer free.
Alex moved toward him.
The giant saw him coming, and laughed. A deep, rumbling sound that vibrated through the rain. "You white little shit," he boomed. "I saw you kill Gannicus. He was slow, but I am not."
The giant swung the hammer in a wide, horizontal arc. Alex dropped to one knee, and the hammer passed over his head with inches to spare. The wind of its passing ruffled his hair. Before the giant could recover, Alex was already rising, the stolen gladius cutting upward at an angle that caught the giant’s leading wrist.
The blade sliced through skin and fat and the thin sheath of muscle over the bone. It didn’t sever the hand—the angle was wrong, the edge not quite sharp enough—but it opened the wrist from side to side, and the wound gaped like a second mouth. Blood came out in pulses, bright arterial red, spraying across the wet sand in rhythmic spurts that matched the giant’s heartbeat.
The hammer fell from the giant’s grip. His fingers wouldn’t close anymore.
He stared at his wrist, at the blood, at the white cords of severed tendon visible through the gash. The laugh was gone. In its place was something closer to confusion, the dawning horror of a man who had never been hurt like this before and didn’t know what to do with the pain.
Alex didn’t give him time to figure it out.
He stepped onto the giant’s dropped hammer, using it as a platform, and launched himself upward. The gladius came down in a two-handed thrust that entered the giant’s chest just below the collarbone and continued downward, through the pectoral muscle, through the ribs, into the chest cavity. Alex felt the blade punch through the lung—a wet, elastic resistance that gave way all at once—and then the heart.
The giant’s whole body jerked. His mouth opened. A single, wet cough escaped him, and with it came a spray of blood that hit Alex full in the face. It was hot... hotter than the rain. It tasted like iron and salt and something else.
"I guess you had beef stew for breakfast." Alex said. "At least, you’ll be dying in a full stomach."
Alex yanked the sword free. The giant collapsed backward, hit the sand with a crash that sent up a spray of wet grit, and didn’t move again.
Alex stood over him. Chest heaving, rain cutting clean trails through the blood on his face. The stolen sword still smoking with the heat of the giant’s body in the cold rain.
Around him, the battle had changed.
The Palacius front rank, already overextended, was now hesitating. They had watched the white-haired demon dismantle half the Irectus flank and kill the Magnimus hammer-bearer in the space of a minute. They had watched him take a broken sword and a man, and then take that dead man’s sword and slay four more. The fury that had driven them forward after Olaf’s humiliation was cooling into something else. Something that looked a lot like fear.
The Ignatius survivors—fewer than a dozen now—had formed a ragged shield wall behind Alex. They were battered, bleeding, half of them holding stolen weapons, half of them barely standing. But they were standing.
Oseka was at Alex’s right. Brennus was at his left. The others filled in behind them, shoulders touching, shields overlapping, a formation that had been dead minutes ago was now, impossibly, alive.
"Ghost," someone whispered. One of the Palacius fighters. "The White Ghost."
It spread through the line. Through the Ignatius lines too. Alex heard it in the way the Palacius front rank hesitated, in the way the Irectus survivors were still backing away, in the way the Magnimus fighters were looking at their fallen hammer-bearer in utter mesmerism.
The rain kept falling. The sand was a swamp of blood, water and the bodies of the dead. And Alex stood at the center of it, white hair streaked red, a stolen sword in his hand, waiting for the next wave.
It didn’t come.
The three houses, banded together minutes before, were now eyeing each other as much as they were eyeing him. The alliance had been built on the assumption of an easy kill. That assumption was bleeding out in the sand at Alex’s feet.
Oseka let out a breath. "What now?"
Alex didn’t answer. His eyes were still tracking the gaps.
"We kill them all."
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