Ruthless V6Ch5-The Battle of Orlando Part 4

One moment, Claudius was a part of a charge, shoulder to shoulder with dozens of other men, about to clash with a loosely packed mob of possums.

The next moment, the furry creatures and the humans collided. Then Claudius was hacking and slashing at the monster nearest to him—and being slashed and bitten in turn by the possum-thing with its extra limbs and sword-like claws.

He managed to kill the first one with a stab through the throat—and a remarkable strength Claudius hadn’t ever possessed before—but the monsters just kept coming. A possum monster lunged at his throat, jaws gnashing, and Claudius fell backward but managed to keep hold of his weapon and stab it in the ribs. It stopped moving, and he thought he’d come out unscathed. Then he touched his elbow, and his hand came away red. There was blood trickling from a wound he hadn’t really noticed at first. Even as his hand touched it, he barely felt sore there.

Do the possums have some kind of numbing agent in their saliva? Or is this the Panther Queen’s power? Making me not notice injuries?

Claudius shivered slightly. He felt suddenly cold. He hoped he wasn’t losing too much blood. His elbow was very wet now. And he could feel the strength that surged through him ebbing slightly. Whatever power it was that the Panther Queen had shot the Army through with, he realized it wasn’t going to last.

But another monster came at him, and Claudius managed to continue performing his function. He parried a couple of claw thrusts with his sword. He held his own, despite feeling a bit weaker. It was life or death, after all. Then another Warrior stabbed the possum in the back. Claudius gave him a grateful look, but both men were attacked by backup possums before they could exchange any words.

Claudius was repeatedly forced to step back under the pressure of the constant attacks. He found himself ceding ground to one monster on his left, two monsters from the right, a creature that lunged, snapping at his head. He found the situation around him was beginning to spin out of control.

The power he had received was still inside him, still keeping him in this fight when he should probably be dead by now.

But the momentum felt like it was going the other way all of a sudden, at least in his little chunk of the battlefield.

He rarely managed to step back and take in his surroundings in the heat of the fighting. But when he did, he recognized that actually, the Fisher Kingdom’s troops seemed to be more than holding their own.

Claudius himself felt as if he was constantly surrounded, and the Army was objectively outnumbered, but for every soldier whose corpse he saw, there were at least a half dozen assorted monsters from the enemy sides.

As he was trying to assess the situation more objectively, another possum monster tried to take a chunk out of his ear. Claudius returned to focusing only on his own body for a few minutes until he scored a lucky blow in the center of the possum’s guts. Then he swiped his sword from side to side, trying to cut anything and everything important, and it seemed to work. The creature groaned and keeled over.

I couldn’t have done that yesterday, Claudius thought slightly giddily.

He engaged another possum, a slightly goofy smile twitching on his lips. It felt good to be useful, to be able to fight in this world where everyone seemed to constantly be at war. He was not defective. He was a killer.

When Claudius was able to look up again from the current bout of attempting not to die, he could see that on other fronts, the line of the Army was not just holding its own. It was actually advancing. Those pigeons and slugs were not putting up very stiff resistance, at least when compared with the possum monsters that had already left multiple claw marks along Claudius’s arms and legs.

But Claudius’s little group was dwindling. Out of thirty from the squad he had come with, at least fourteen were on the ground already, either dead, injured, or unconscious. They weren’t fighting, anyway. Those still on their feet were slowing. Casualties in the other squads didn’t seem to be nearly as bad.

There were occasional triumphant roars and war whoops from some of the heavier hitters and more successful squads on the Fisher Kingdom’s side—the Werewolf, the Panther Queen, the squad around Captain Matsumoto, and a few other individuals and groups.

Claudius swallowed.

We just need to hold out a little longer, and the others will come to our rescue, he told himself. The Panther Queen can probably feel which of those she’s given power to are on their last legs, even if no one else can tell we’re in trouble right now.

He knew he was grasping at straws, but he was veering wildly between a strange excitement and fatalistic desperation. He was going to be a great soldier after this; he was going to die today.

Then the sunlight above him seemed to fade. He looked up, and he saw a pair of monsters leaping right for him. Claudius was pulled back out of his head.

He lifted his sword. That alone seemed to take more strength than he remembered it ever requiring before, which told him that the Panther Queen’s boost might have run out.

He prepared to block, with little hope of success. There would be the body weight of two man-sized possum creatures behind those blades. And he had to intercept two sets of them at once.

A fireball struck the two possums and knocked them out of the air. They hit the ground in front of Claudius, fried to a blackened crisp probably before they’d even realized they were on fire.

Oh. Nice. Thank God. Yes! Yes!!!

Claudius looked up and saw one of the Mage Corps smile and nod down at him. He realized he was smiling back—and recognized that his own smile probably looked insanely happy for the situation. It was just that good to be alive still, when he should probably be bleeding out from a neck wound or a severed limb or something right now. The unfamiliar woman turned to face away and blasted another group of possums, this time getting five in one go.

Wait, how—when did they get space to focus on us?

Last time Claudius had checked, he had seen the Mage Corps were engaging with a swarm of giant wasps. But now that he looked, he saw that the entire colony were making a bee line for some target far from them, on the ground. This freed the Mage Corps up to direct some of their fire elsewhere—though most of them concentrated on blasting the wasps in the back with lightning and giant balls of rock and ice as they streaked across the sky.

Claudius looked in the direction the wasps were traveling, and he was surprised to see the Fisher King himself at ground level. James had flown off to fight the Rulers and engaged the female wasp Ruler first.

It seemed they were still fighting.

James was trading blows with a female wasp that was visibly larger than her subjects, with a body that looked tough and built for combat. The Fisher King’s face was barely recognizable, hideously burnt and partially melted. Layers of skin appeared to be regrowing as Claudius watched. James’s mouth was stuck in a horrifying rictus grin that must have been mainly caused by his lips and cheek muscles having partially melted, but new pink and sensitive-looking flesh slowly sprouted, spread over more of his face, and began darkening to his normal skin tone.

Claudius could barely track the two fighters’ movements. Their limbs were literal blurs before his eyes. He did see that the wasp Ruler was slowing down. The sides of her back looked to be bleeding profusely—an ugly yellow liquid—from where he guessed her wings had been torn off. There was no other reason for a wasp to be fighting on the ground rather than in the air.

More fireballs blasted a handful of possums that were charging in to fill the gap left by the other possums who had been scorched, and a wall of flame formed separating Claudius’s group from the surviving possums. The hundred or so that remained alive, unable to attack the human squad further, seemed to come out of a sort of battle trance.

Claudius could see the changes in their body language, as if some form of switch had been flipped. They went from fearless, almost suicidal berserkers to keen observers. As they looked around, saw how badly their allies were doing, and got a sense of what the outcome of the battle was going to be, some of them held off from charging further in. A few of those at the back of the possum posse started slipping away.

But most of Claudius’s squad were looking toward James and his fight with the Wasp Queen.

The wasps were still jetting toward them, but obstacles kept popping into their way. Walls of fire like the one that protected Claudius’s group, the flock of pigeons trying to escape from 

Ten seconds passed, in which James took an obvious upper hand. He started sidestepping some blows and, rather than blocking her limbs with his own, taking shots directly at her body. Claudius had no way of being certain how much damage was being done, but getting hit was worse than not getting hit; he knew that much.

“Please,” a voice rasped loudly from the general area of the brawl. Claudius took a moment to realize it was the Wasp Queen.

“I already told you what would happen if you fought me,” James replied at the same volume. His voice was utterly pitiless, or perhaps that was just the way he sounded with his lips raw and only partially regenerated. He still had no eyes. Apparently he could fight by sheer instinct, or maybe he could smell the other Ruler. “Just stand still and die.”

The Wasp Queen lunged at him, a big desperate haymaker blow that even Claudius could track—though he could not have dodged it.

James smirked, sidestepped, drew back his right hand—something strange happened to it, though Claudius only glimpsed it for a split second; it was as if there was suddenly a visible sharpness to the flesh—and slashed his arm like it was a sword.

The Queen jerked back at the last second, but Claudius could see it must have been too late. Her neck split open, and her head tumbled back off of it—and stopped.

There was still a sort of thin thread of flesh, barely connecting the head to the body. James had not managed to sever the neck completely, thanks to the wasp’s jerky backward motion.

The Wasp Queen stumbled forward. James stepped back, giving her space, seemingly waiting for her to fall. But she didn’t.

The Queen shambled drunkenly after James, two of her limbs flailing blindly in his general direction, stabbing the air, while the other two limbs reached backward and tried to grab hold of her nearly severed head.

“P-please, please, make a d-deal…” Her voice continued to protest against her death even as it seemed to be a fait accompli.

As the first of the wasps trying to rescue their Queen circled around James, he seemed to somehow sense their presence—he was still fighting without any eyes—and recognize it was time to end things.

He lunged into close range with the Wasp Queen, moving too fast for Claudius to see him as anything other than a blur of color. James snatched the Queen’s head from out of her hands, where she had finally secured a grip on it.

And he crushed it between his palms.

Instantly, the rest of the wasp colony went mad.

Dozens of individuals began attacking each other, around half of them appeared to die instantly, dropping out of the sky en masse, and the rest backed off from the position of James and their deceased Ruler, keeping what felt like a strangely respectful distance from the man who had just been their mortal enemy.

In the midst of it all, James, his eyes rapidly regenerating into an unblinking—possibly lidless—glare at the Queen’s body, threw back his head and laughed.