The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Fifty-Six

His shoulders were getting stiff, aching from where the creature's rock-hard hands had clamped down on him as it had attacked. There had been only a pair of them blocking his escape from the sub-city's underground chamber, but their physical dimensions and elephantine body mass had presented a hostile barrier that even his fierce steed had found to be discouragingly formidable. In a half dozen heartbeats, three more of the creatures had materialized, growing up as though they were vengeful elementals from out the gritty, dry soil. The dual-bladed shatter-sword was only marginally useful against them. The destructive sonic vibratory frequencies it harnessed only served to make their steel-hard body surfaces slightly less dense and invulnerable to harm. They were highly resistant to projected sonic frequency beams emitted by the sword, but, nonetheless, the beams did manage to slow their progress as they'd advanced on him. Astonishingly, the tide of battle was turned by the power of the heavy, spiked bone-mace at the end of the Halodean's segmented tail. When the mighty reptile thrashed, whip-snapped and lashed out with the muscular appendage, the horny dermal plates and bulky bone club splintered and shattered the hard, crystalline exteriors of the golems birthed by the Machineries of Witchery.

They then put that arena of battle behind them as quickly as they could manage.

Motion, sound, fury, sensation and overload, strategize and then re-assess, react, move, react again... he was feared he was losing focus, getting sloppy, his psyche becoming numb and distracted. Too much was happening and he was depending too much on the animal within him to lead him out from one dangerous moment to the next. Measured reason was tasking a back seat to survival. He could not afford that to happen. Events were governing his actions instead of the opposite... His concentration had become divided between fighting in the Here-And-Now and plotting what his next immediate move should be -- and where that move should take him. A soldier, a good soldier, did not win battles through virtue of repetitive, remorseless butchery. Combat for combat's sakes' was useless, and would eventually culminate in failure -- and death. Combat was a tool to be used in pursuit of a goal when all other methods of achieving that goal had been eliminated. An experienced, thinking soldier won battles through identifying and staying true to their ultimate objective until that objective was obtained and secured. One fought in service to a master plan. Swords and firearms were indeed vitally useful on the battle field, but a focused mind was the deadliest weapon of all. When the mind was right, the sword was right.

That mantra was a very, very difficult motto to follow when a soldier found themselves surrounded by enemies. Nonetheless, D'Spayr compelled himself to keep his priorities paramount and at the fore of his mind as he savagely made his way through a horde of converging foes. Luckily, the general chaos dominating the streets and boulevards of The City had begun to work in his favor.

His proximity sense alarm went off, directionally unspecific, the alarm feeling like a soft tingling occurring at his temple... He peered through his helmet's dusty visor into the smoggy air. A shadow, there, to the right, just above eye level... D'Spayr raised his right arm in time to block the oncoming blow from an neuro-javelin wielded by an armored figure abruptly lunging from the dimly-lit interior of a machine shop-utility hangar. The javelin was heavy and the man wielding it was strong, very strong, and he moved with an athleticism to be found only in hardened soldiers and battle-trained mercenaries accustomed to close-quarters combat. The tall metal staff, thick around as a tall man's thigh, bounced a glancing blow from off D'Spayr's gauntleted forearm and traveled downwards to ricochet off the scaled flank of the startled Halodean. The beast sidestepped gingerly, hissing in barely contained fury. The force of the strike rocked the Knight precariously to one side of the wide saddle crossing the lizard-steed's back and the electrical discharge from the javelin spat a shower of orange sparks cascading onto the pavement.