*Put down that toy and give your life to me freak!* The disgusting presence shouted in my mind.
Growling I turned and swept my sword up in a block, just in time to deflect the ugly weapon that the rogue had in his paw. He was in Were-Form and I could once again see the cunning insanity in his eyes.
"Mikel, you are as crazy as you were the last time I saw you." I replied out loud, "But this time I can actually make a fight of it. How's the ear anyways?" The last I shouted out of spite.
He was armed with two weapons, both were ugly brutal things that lacked any kind of finesse or beauty. The first was a sword, though to call it as such was almost a travesty since it looked like a piece of sheet steel that had been cut to form then sharpened. In a way, it reminded me of the uruk-hai sword for Lord of the Rings the aesthetics were similar though it didn't have the hook of that weapon. In his other hand was something even less appealing than his sword, it was a mace that looked like it had been made by dipping a piece of inch thick rebar into a bucket of concrete... a bucket that had been pierced with various short, jagged sections of rebar and sheet steel.
"Like them? I made them myself." He told me as he swung with the bucket-mace. "They've been blooded too."
I dodged the clumsy weapon and shook my head before deflecting his sword with mine and an image of training him when he was a young cub came to my mind from my cat. "You really have lost it Mikel, there was a time when such clumsy things would have sickened you." I felt my cat saying through my mouth as I slowly gave some ground to the mildly insane were-cat. Since I was limited to my human form I couldn't stand and match him power for power, instead I had to outwit him, out play him, and even out wait him.
"You have no right to say that, freak. You shouldn't have lived..." Mikel growled before I heard a heavy twang and an angry whistling noise before a heavy crossbow bolt thunked into a tree nearby, a few moments later.
I smiled as I remembered the heavy crossbow that Jack had brought with him, when I'd been staying at Wild Valley I'd watched him train with the weapon more than once and had come to respect his skills with the thing. It may be ungainly and slow to load, but if he managed to make a hit with one of his bolts I knew that I would make a definite impact. "Mikel, you may have once been a proud cat, but now you are little more than a shadow of what you used to be." I growled, the heavy snow was making visibility and traction an issue as we fought. My combat boots weren't well suited to snow, they were made for dry ground and sand.
"I am greater than any fucking turned cat like you will ever be." He growled. "I will return to that sick little Pride and return them to greatness, exterminating all of the... oof!" He exclaimed at the appearance of a set of feathers in his left shoulder, causing the ugly mace to drop from nerveless fingers. He looked up to where Jack was barely visible reloading his crossbow and gave voice to an ugly growl. "When I am done with you, I will finish that insect who interrupted me last time."
I tried to attack him with renewed vigor, he couldn't get to my friend, who was little more than a pup and I knew wasn't capable of stopping a monster like Mikel. However, the ugly truth was even though he was down to a single weapon Mikel was more than a match for both Anna and myself. Mikel's main focus seemed to be me, since I appeared to be the weaker of the two of us. He only defended against Anna's attacks while constantly attacking me, battering at my defenses like a force of nature. I was doing the best I could under the circumstances, drawing heavily on what I'd learned from Olaf as well as the knowledge that my own cat had passed down to me. "Mikel you're a disappointment to all of those who'd hoped you were model for the future for our kind." I felt my cat growl once more, looking for a chink in his mental armour. "We trained you to be the best of us, and instead you have proven yourself to be one of the worst. Oh, how you've disappointed the ones who trained you oh so many years ago,."
