Spoiler:
Lawrence, lost in the fog that hid him, heard the shouts and the rushing dead, the night alive with action and distorted. For all the safety the distortion of appearance offered, it offered it’s offered its own dangers; it tore away the illusions, made the man shed his skin to reveal the nothing within.
The zombies fingers flexed and grasped at the air, the arm it was attached to still spinning, falling. The owner raised his head, a mask of slack-jawed, empty anguish. Nature, birds, beasts, and bacteria, had turned the hollows of the eyes into meat caverns. When it looked to the source of its misfortune, it saw with something more than eyes to see the ever present darkness unchanged. Yet the blows continued, the stroke of a blade glinting and dancing before its ruined eyes. It fell to pieces before something not unlike the wind, and in passing there was only the sound of boots, and the spray of warm mud.
The scenes repeated in blurs, bodies cast against a black expanse as something moved past them, cold blue light shimmered in the air, and bodies fell where they stood or slid to the ground in whatever motion they were in.
Herobrine ran on, hardly aware of his condition, breathing in an air that fouled his skin. The old man’s breath issued in heavy gasps, the environment sapping his energy. Everywhere he looked, under the light of the moon, his vision seized to sickening clarity, then dwindling to nearly nothing, the scraping of needles the only sure sign of which way not to go.
All the good it did him.
‘They just keep coming; they won’t die fast enough…’ Herobrine thought to himself, running…stumbling through hell. The next horrors came sprinting, four of them in the direction Herobrine was determined not to go—that place with its blinking lights, and fatally attractive voices—but between there and there, there was Herobrine square in their path. They unaware, him unable to slow once he was, the five of them collided into a body of groans and outstretched limbs as they tumbled to the fertile earth, Pardolaes falling away.
“Gara…ha…aaaah…”
The only sound coming from the old moustache was the silent gasp of dry heaving. He rested on his hands and knees, and between them was a woman. She was wet, sticky in ways unimaginable to Herobrine as he stared down at her skinless form. The others were in forms of extreme undress, clothes torn open to reveal once beautiful flesh that had gone to waste, and they clutched him curiously, but she lay smiling with a mouth empty of teeth, and a head surrounded by a halo of filthy, golden hair. In the depths of her eyes a purple glow shone, seething within her, the light of Orox’s stone.
The skinless horror, all black and red and green, a terrible and freshly festering thing, bucked her hips, and wrapped her thighs about Herobrine’s waist, legs slipping against one another freeing dirt and dried blood as her ankles attempt to lock. Hands reached for the shocked elder’s neck, fingers digging in as they sought to hold and choke. She held him so that the others might settle.
Herobrine never moved as a child, hugged Herobrine leg. He never moved at the curious touch of a young girl raked his side, and her heavy head came to rest against his arm. He never moved as the weight of a man settled on his back. He never moved because the world he inhabited was growing increasingly dark and full of terrible things, all space filled with stink and clutching hands, and things that appealed to remnants of his humanity for tears, and from it all he gained panic and confusion. There was no more time for acting.
The hidden giant on Lawrence’s back dug its teeth into his shoulder; all of them tore into his body.
“HAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!”
Lawrence neck snapped back, the weight of the four unable to hold him down as his. The zombie beneath could make no expression as she was lifted from the ground, starring glassily he brought the broad hammer of his forehead down, crushing her skull inches into the earth with a final, and permanently fatal “crunch.”
They hung from Lawrence as he rose to his feet—leeches! His hand came, hateful and grabbing at the pale, fat slug resting on his back. He gouged the man’s eye to grip his head, and turning, ripped the undead over and down onto the earth. Lawrence’s first step formed the image of a boot stomping down on a dead man’s face.
The girl, blonde and dead before her time, stood with Lawrence, holding his even as her teeth chewed deeper into his bicep. There was innocence about it, a gesture almost human if not cloth bunching at the edge of her jaws and the blood fresh on her lips. He shook her off as though she were still a child, she returned instantly only to have her head turned backward upon her shoulders as the back of his hand met her cheek. She fell limp, though not finished, her spine broken, but the source of her life ever present. What should have been lethal was only crippling; she her limbs still trying to raise her.
The child came next, pulling free by its leg its teeth choosing to remain. Holing it aloft, Lawrence took from his belt his knife, Virtue, and plunged the blade into skull, repeatedly, until the brains had been addled and stirred to the point where even magic failed.
Unaware of it, Lawrence had ceased to breathe, though the ones that had assaulted him were well beyond moving, he could hear more coming, footsteps without stealth coming in his direction. Finding his sword, seeing the dead approach, he knew two things. ”So stupid, I have been so stupid.” The old man’s rasp was gone, just the labored hiss of something that rarely used its own voice. “I could have done this alone.”
“Then why don’t you try?” The reply was sneering, a cockney twang at the end to mark a questions Radasanthian’s question.
Through the gresdah, unimpeded by nettles, came three more of the dead, each armed with rusting sabers and hefty clubs of wood. They were war weary, the battle they had fought, the battle they had lost, evident in the shreds of skin that hung free, and the entrails that would have trailed along the ground had they not been purposefully shorn off. They were goons in life, and so they remained.
“Sorry, son,” the largest of them said, stepping forward with weapons and smile ready, “but you’re on our turf; in Alerar they do as Alerarian’s do;” the man turned his head, the gaping hollow of his throat offering no explanation to the voice with which he spoke, and thinking himself clever, he finished, “we learned our lesson, and so will you.” The words spoken were punctuated by the blade of virtue flying into the zombie’s eye through it to the brain.
“Shut up!” It was frantic scream, followed by hurtling body as Lawrence rushed the two remaining, his body airborne and the mythril blue of his sword a flashing arch.
“Shit!” Lanky, sword at the ready, the ex-mercenary to the right saved himself and cursed, his hand shaking violently, and his balance thrown to send him skittering backwards, his friends soon to follow as Lawrence sword was indiscriminate, attacking the nearest with the all the finesse of a hammer. Lawrence at best knew how to fence, but with his over bearing height, and powerful limbs, it did not matter whether he struck them with the blade or flat of his sword.
Crack, chaa, ping.
Broad strokes met defending swords, chips of inferior steel flying, each sword threatening to break or fall back, crushing into their wielders already shaking bodies. All the while, Herobrine’s face wore a true expression—wide, crazed eyes, teeth bared as weapons, ready to be used at any point—trails of saliva hung in the air as he chased the dead and reminded them of something they had almost forgotten: pain and fear.
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