The Third Kingdom

He turned to the Shun-tuk, then, and unleashed his lethal rage, both his and his sword’s, against the chalky figures charging in at him with lips drawn back and teeth bared. They came at him from every direction.

His blade met the snarling faces, shattering the skulls of those diving toward him. Each swing splintered bone or severed heads. Bone, brains, and blood smacked the rocks all around Richard as he swung the sword without pause. Blood fell in a red rain.

The Shun-tuk were being cut down by the dozens. Headless bodies, or bodies with only the lower part of their head, toppled and tumbled across the ground.

Richard lost himself in the storm of anger raging through him. He gave himself over to it without reservation or restraint. All he wanted to do was kill these soulless monsters. The blade demanded ever more blood and he was only too happy to oblige. He needed the blood of these animals more than he needed to live himself.

He abandoned himself to the need to kill, to his rage at what they had done to Ben and so many others. Each body that fell only made him want to kill more of them. There was no way that he would ever be satisfied if even one of them still stood.

As he killed men and women to one side, half people on the other side thought they had an opening to get to him and take him down. Richard let them come, then spun, cutting two men in half with one swing. Legs without bodies folded and collapsed. Torsos trailing innards and blood hit the ground with heavy thuds. The severed, ashen heads of yet more half people thunked down on the rock, cracking as they hit from their violent, tumbling fall. Empty eyes set in darkly painted rings stared up at nothing from tangles of bloody limbs.

As he screamed in rage while swinging the sword, the chalky figures toppled to the ground around him, headless, armless, lifeless.

He didn’t try to run, to get away. There was no getting away. There was only the killing.

He stood his ground, slaughtering them as they came, until there were so many bodies that he needed to move out from the tangled mass of sprawling carcasses and severed body parts just in order to be able to fight. Gore from those cut in half spilled across the rocky ground. Blood covered everything. Where there had been the pale, ash-covered figures, there were now only bodies covered in a sheen of wet red.

Running recklessly, many of the Shun-tuk slipped on all the blood and gore and fell sprawling across the ground. Richard stabbed downward at forms wriggling through the blood and the dead to get at him.

Those who raced in toward him fell dead and dying around him as fast as they came, adding their numbers to those already piling up around him.

It was not skillful fighting, not a gruesomely elegant dance with death. There was no artful cut and thrust, no graceful evasion and counterstrike.

It was, instead, violent, mad, bloody butchery, nothing more, nothing less.

Not far from him, Cara, with a knife in each hand that she had gotten somewhere, fought with a wild ferocity that was frightening to witness. Richard understood her savage wrath.

He usually saw her fight with her Agiel, but her Agiel would not work because his gift did not work. His gift powered the bond, and without that bond her weapon was dead in her hand, so she had instead found knives. She was no less deadly with knives than an Agiel. If anything, at the moment it looked like she preferred them for the manifest, ripping damage they did, visible evidence of her rage.

Off to the sides behind him, the soldiers of the First File fought with the same kind of grim fury, wanting to avenge the death of their general, a leader they admired and loved. The First File were the elite of D’Haran troops, the deadliest of fighters, and they were more than proving it this day.

By the way they fought, though, Richard could see that they were not fighting to save themselves. This was purely for vengeance. The First File in want of retribution was a sight to behold.

Yet, even as hard as they fought, some of those soldiers were swamped by the flood of howling half people. He saw them go down, covered with dozens of the unholy half dead wildly tearing into them with bared teeth.

Beyond them, beyond the killing field immediately around Richard littered with hundreds of dead and dying Shun-tuk, Zedd and Nicci were unleashing their gift with deadly effectiveness.

Off in the distance, at the outer margin of the raging battle, Richard could hear the roaring wail of wizard’s fire racing though the murky air, lighting the stone spires with an intense yellowish orange radiance before splashing down among the Shun-tuk as they raced out of the rocks. They were incinerated by the hundreds before even having the chance to join the battle. Despite how many of the savages died, more yet poured out to replace them.