The ground groaned under the weight of corpses. Ethan's breath rattled like gravel in a broken chest. Every inch of him was drenched in blood, sweat, ichor. His skin was no longer skin but a coat of pain, ripped and laced with gashes. His left eye saw only red; his right barely focused. One arm dangling uselessly at his side. Blood thick and unnatural, poured from the ruined poleaxe clenched in his hand. Still swinging, he thought, a dry, bloody chuckle escaping his lips. Still here.
All around him were the remains of the monsters he killed, twitched, and sizzled. Their bodies bled acid, spores, ink, and strange fluids in colours that are not found in nature. Monsters lay dead behind him. Their corpses formed a grotesque hill of limbs and torn muscle, steaming in the wind. Some still twitched. Some groaned. But a single one can stand.
Yet the horde was still advancing towards him. A thunder of footsteps. A screeching of beast tongues. And a symphony of the unnatural. This wave was different. They weren't just charging; they were trying to overwhelm him with sheer diversity of attack, hoping to find a weakness in his battered form.
Ethan cracked his neck sideways and lifted his head to the sky. Lightning arched between red clouds above. He narrowed his eyes and spat a mouthful of blood into the dust.
"Come then," Ethan rasped. His voice was a raw tearing sound, barely audible over the growing roar of the beasts.
This wave surged – ten, twenty, thirty monsters moving in unison. They formed a wall of muscle, bone, talons, and shrieking mouths. Each was different, grotesque, and unholy:
One was a slug-like horror, forty feet wide, covered in twitching deer legs and lamprey mouths. It oozed corrosive slime, leaving bubbling trails in its wake, clearly designed to simply crush and dissolve anything in its path. Another flew, its wings ragged cloth and glass shards, its body a human torso fused with arachnid limbs. It circled above, dropping sharp, crystalline projectiles. One rolled like a wheel, a centaur's body coiled within a rotating spine, flinging spears of its ribcage with surprising accuracy.
Ethan dodged despite his shattered body. Despite the screaming pain in every joint, he charged into the storm. No retreat. Only forward. He snatched up a jagged bone from the ground and hurled it like a javelin. The bone glowed faintly and drove straight through the flying monster's chest. The monster wheeled wildly in the air before crashing down in a spray of molten blood and glass shards, its crystalline projectiles scattering harmlessly.
Ethan rolled under the falling corpse, using it as cover as the other descended. The slug beast tried to crush him with its bulk, its lamprey mouths snapping. But Ethan darted forward and rammed the broken haft of his poleaxe into its soft underbelly, and twisted it with all the strength that was left inside of him. Not today, you filth.
SHHHLT! The belly split like rotten cloth. Intestine that writhed like a snake spilled over Ethan's body. He pushed through them, stabbing upward with a rusted dagger he had picked off a corpse. The dagger pulsed once. The slug convulsed and exploded from within, coating everything around in bile.
Ethan stood up, gagging, blind in one eye from the acidic spray. His face burned, but he barely registered it. Keep moving.
A horned hybrid with no mouth and ten eyes descended on him. It wielded a tail like a cleaver, edged with bone saws. This monster moved with deceptive grace, its multiple eyes tracking his every strained movement, its tail already winding up for a brutal, decapitating strike.
Ethan now knows there is no resting for him until he has killed every last of the monsters. He stepped into this horned monster's swing, allowing the tail to graze his torn armour, ripping deep into his side, but giving him the angle he needed. He plunged his remaining axe into the monster's groin and roared: "AAAAAHHHH". The axe glowed red-hot, and the monster howled soundlessly as it collapsed in twitching spasms, its spine cut clean in half.
A beast came forward – larger, scaled in obsidian armour. It roared and brought both fists like twin meteors, aiming to flatten him into the ash. This was a direct, brute-force attack, counting on his exhaustion.
Ethan didn't dodge it, but he ran straight through the shockwave, teeth clenched, and slid beneath its legs. As it turned out, he leapt, grabbing onto a loose flap of skin beneath its tail. Up he went – with only one hand, and one axe. Come on, come on!
Blood came like rain when Ethan buried his axe into its lower back and climbed, the monster slammed its own back to crush him, but it was too slow. Ethan had already reached his shoulder. And shoving a bone shard into its throat with a wet crunch. The creature stumbled, choking. He twisted the shard deeper, tearing it sideways. Hot breath blasted his face as the colossus vomited blood and fell. He rode it down like a crumbling tower, landing hard, dislocating his shoulder again.
He bit down on his tongue to stay conscious. Pain is just a feeling, he thought, a mantra, a lie he forced himself to believe. Pop. Snap. He fixed his shoulder and rose again.
They came in clusters now, three at once. A coordinated assault, trying to overwhelm him with multiple threats from different directions simultaneously. One with long, lashing tentacles, another with a chitinous shell and snapping jaws, and a third that emitted a disorienting shriek.
A claw swiped - he ducked it, rolled, and drove his broken sword into the tentacled monster's leg. This strike made the monster's balance unstable as it was falling, Ethan climbed its falling body like a collapsing building, and hurled himself into the next beast's face, the chitinous one, and dug out the monster's eye socket with his bare hands.
Monsters screamed, yet he tore the ripped flesh. The eyeball dangled on a nerve strand. He bit it and spat it out. Disgusting. But effective.
The creature's bellow rattled the air. Ethan dropped from its face, grabbing a jutting tusk from its jaw, swung himself beneath its chin, and slashed its throat with a shattered metal edge he'd scavenged mid-fall. Blood sprayed in thick arcs, coating him from head to toe.
Other monsters hesitated. While Ethan glared at it, drenched in gore and blood. The screaming monster was silenced, and the third, the shrieking one, recoiled from the sudden, brutal efficiency.
Monster takes a step back, and Ethan lunged anyway, slamming the poleaxe's broken shaft into the monster's shin, leaping up, and planting his boots into its chest. The monster stumbled backward, and he scrambled up its stomach, finding a jagged bone protrusion near its ribs, pulled it out, and stabbed it into the monster's heart, again and again, until the beast collapsed and took him with it.
Another monster leapt toward him—a serpentine dragon with gorilla arms and metal blades for teeth. It lunged with incredible speed, aiming for his head with its metallic fangs.
Ethan waited for a second, then threw his broken sword like a spear. The gleaming remains pierced the monster's open maw and the back of its skull. Monster collapsed mid—lunge. Ethan jumped on the monster's falling body and leapt again, using it as a platform.
He landed atop a six-legged horror with a lion's body and the face of a weeping woman, its back sprouted living crows instead of wings. Its mournful cries were disorienting, designed to instill sorrow and fear, but Ethan was beyond that now. He dug both his fingers into its eye sockets and twisted them, and pulled out.
The monster screamed as blood gushed, and Ethan leapt off, dragging its eyeballs in his fists like trophies.
Ethan laughed with full madness that crept in. His laughter was a raw, broken sound, more animalistic than human. This is all that's left.
The battlefield now looked like a painting of a nightmare that had come to life. Smoke and blood colored the horizon. Torn limbs of monsters litter the field, and the land itself groans with the weight of death.
Ethan slowed his steps toward the monster and picked up a heavy chain from a fallen monster, wrapped it around his forearm, and used it like a whip.
A monster, looking like a hybrid of a centipede and a bear, rushed towards him, fifty feet tall, breathing fire through its gills. This was a formidable foe, combining immense bulk with a dangerous ranged attack.
Ethan flung the chain and wrapped it around the beast's neck, and yanked sideways, to leap onto its flank, and began climbing it, hand over hand, as the monster roared and thrashed, trying to shake him off with violent spasms. He reached the top and grabbed a chunk of broken fang from the monster's mouth, and drove it downward into its spine. Monster toppled, and Ethan rolled off the carcass, hit the ground in a mess of blood and bones.
Ethan rose without any delaying the time, he knew he couldn't stop here. He was coughing up teeth. But his lips were moving. "One more…then one more… then one more." His voice was a guttural whisper, a prayer of endless, grim resolve.
The more monsters that come, the more he kills. Ethan was enraged now; he was moving like a monster among these monsters- he stabbed into the armpits, joints, and stomach of the monsters like crazy. He drowned in blood.
One monster crushed him beneath its fist—a direct, overpowering strike—until the monster realized Ethan crawled inside the monster's wrist, tore open the tendons, and burst out from the forearm like a dying phoenix. They can't even touch me properly anymore.
Another monster tried to eat him as Ethan slid down the monster's throat. He cut his way out from the inside, erupting from its belly in a fountain of gore and boiling stomach acid. His back flayed, his face unrecognizable.
To see this horrifying scene, a dozen monsters turned and fled, their instinct for survival finally overriding the commanders' distant will. But Ethan chased them, not because he wanted to because he had to. No escape. Not for any of you.
He caught one by the ankle with a thrown axe while the monster was falling, and Ethan climbed it and smashed its spine with a scavenged jawbone from another monster. Used that monster's ribs as a ladder to get to the next one. Bit one in the throat and tore skin free with his teeth.
To fight monsters, he used their claws as knives, bones as clubs, and his one rage as fire.
By now, hundreds of monsters lie dead. Then eight hundred. Then nine hundred. He stopped counting after he killed more than four hundred. He can hardly see more than fifty monsters remaining.
The whole field was a sea of steaming flesh, cracked bones, and gory rivers. Ethan moved through it like a dying god, dragging the broken sword behind him. One leg refused to bend. His spine was warped from blunt trauma. His breathing was wet. Rattling. Each exhale a death knell. Almost there.
And still the monsters came. Not all at once, but only a few at once, cautiously, circling him and watched in fear. They were testing him, trying to wear him down, rather than launching a full assault. This was calculated, a desperate tactic.