Extra Five: an excerpt from a story I wrote.

The beast shuffled forward. leaning down to sniff the body of the fallen beast. Suddenly, his head jerked upward, and he let out a sharp hiss. Then he suddenly jolted forward, faster than anything the beasts had done before. Crow sidestepped, barely avoiding an outreaching claw, then swung his sword, lopping off an arm before swiftly spinning around to decapitate the thing. It’s body fell, and there was silence from the group. 

Behind him, Crow could still hear the sounds of the battle between the steel man and the people-beasts. Then, the crowd of beasts all rushed forward, hissing and clawing and mashing their teeth. 

For a split second, Crow hesitated. He couldn’t back up further, or he would get dangerously close to the group behind him. The only thing to do was push forward. So forward he pushed, furiously beginning to hack at the beasts around him. 

He faltered at first, quailing at so much bloodshed. But then something inside him took over. The same thing that had told him his name, or the name of his sword. He moved with deftness and grace, hacking away at the crowd of slavering monsters before him, trying to cut himself a path through and escape. He could feel the power of whatever lay inside him, letting him guide his blade strokes easily through the sea of bleeding, writhing limbs, sometimes cutting off the heads of multiple beasts at a time. 

But, whatever power he held was unrefined, for he soon began to take injuries. First a slash on his arm, which he ignored, then a stab in the shoulder, which made him falter. He slashed off the tail of one beast, then planted a foot on it’s back and shoved it forward, making a path through the crowd. He sprinted through, taking more cuts and slashing at everything that moved. With one final shove, he burst forth from the mass, only to stumble on the twitching corpse of a beast he had just downed. He landed heavily, then turned over, slashing with his blade to fend the writhing creatures off. 

Desperation filled him, as one of them slashed his left leg, and he cried out, knowing now that escape was unlikely. Just as he was about to give up, just as he realized that this was the end, he heard another sound. A sound that cut through the air, that pierced the hissing and screeching of the creatures. A voice. A human voice.

It was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.