The Tower Between by Mark Kramarzewski

Author:Mark Kramarzewski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shawline Publishing Group Pty Ltd
Published: 2023-01-19T00:07:43+00:00

Chapter 16

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Erik readied his axe. “Okay, weapons up. How many?”

“I’m not sure, heaps,” Art pulled his sword from its scabbard. “Maybe forty? Or more? Coming at us from the other side of the rocks.”

“Forty?” Erik asked. “There’s no way they’d group up in those numbers. Your senses are probably confused here.”

“Maybe?” Art said, “but either way, there’s a lot of hungry coming at us.”

“Okay,” Erik took charge, pointing at Tabitha and Kimmy, “you two girls stand either side of me. Not too close now, I’ve got a wide swing with this axe. You two with the swords, one on either side of the girls, protect their flanks. Our Lifer and you, little one, behind me. And you, archer, fire at groups of them when you can, and otherwise keep them from circling around us. Understood?”

The youths murmured their confirmation. Zack wiped his hands down his jeans, but they remained clammy.

“There’s one,” Tabitha said, pointing at an ugly little face, its red scales almost camouflaged against the dull orange of the rocks. That face was joined by another, then another, until the rock formation looked like a strange shrub bursting with angry, squinting fruit.

“Imps it is then,” Erik said. “I’ll be damned if I know why there’s so many, but we can take them if we stand firm.”

Erik waved his hands over the ground in front of him as he spoke and a ripple of cold washed back over the group. “Don’t step in front of me! I’ve iced up the ground.”

To his right, Bast also wove a spell, speeding up his body, ready for the attack.

There was an eerie moment of silence, punctured only by the sound of sneakers and boots shifting on the rocky ground. Then, one of the imps screeched in a high-pitched voice followed by all the others and, as the eight humans stood against the barrage of sound, the creatures leapt to attack.

Charlie fired into the centre group of the imps. One fell with an arrow in its chest and was soon trampled by those that came after. That group faltered on the rocky ground in front of Erik, slipping on the conjured ice and the imps on either side strayed wider to avoid being tripped over by those that fell.

The wave of imps, easily the forty or so Art had divined, crept around the front row of their prey. Art and Bast stepped out, slashing with their blades. Art’s target ducked under a blow that would otherwise have severed its head, but Bast skewered his own through its chest.

Tabitha and Kimmy also edged away from Erik and towards their own attackers. The chained head of Tabitha’s flail whirred through the air before crashing into an imp’s skull, sending it to the ground. Kimmy dashed towards two imps who were clumped together as one avoided the icy ground. She swung her axe hard and cleaved through one and into the other, dropping both with a spray of black blood.

Erik was also making swift, if gruesome, work on the imps that had fallen in front of him and slid within range of his own axe.

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