[color=goldenrod][i][h2][center]Gerard Segremors[/center][/h2][/i][/color]

[@Eisenhorn][@VitaVitaAR]

It was eating the light.

Yael was thankfully quick to pivot after he'd barked his "orders", and the combined efforts of her and Rolan had freed up Caulder andf his mighty axe in an instant— and an instant later, the burly knight put it to good use, bringing a fell-handed cleave down through the Gannek's soft underbelly— a ghastly wound on anything that drew breath. They had the advantage, they had the pressure, they were winning. As coordinated a fighting force as could be leveled on the fly against such a foe.

Unfortunately, the magical nature of their foe meant that even rending it open like this wouldn't be enough. His stomach churned, as though ready to howl. His eyes began to strain, as the relatively thin field of view afforded by his new helm was quickly growing dark. Unnaturally dark, as though the light itself were sucked out of the air. It sought to blind them. Desperate. Hurt. Feelings he knew well, with each remembered pang of hunger it foolishly forced into his brain. 

Where his light faded, his eyes, ears, and breath [i]sharpened[/i]. Where his stomach groaned, his heart hammered, buoyed by old, familiar war drums. It had made a crucial error in this effort. One that would spell its undoing. Many men would be enfeebled, distracted, or otherwise unsettled from their fighting for by this phantom of starvation. They would believe their bodies sapped of strength, the way hunger did.

Gerard, by contrast, came from a life where these feelings came with [i]war[/i]. He had fought to put food in his belly, day in, day out. A sufficiently starved wolf would even challenge a bear for the rights to a kill. A sufficiently starved fighting man—

In this moment, a realization alighted upon him. Barely even a thought, so much as an... understanding. That of something he was previously not fully aware, of knowledge and perspective he'd not yet needed. In the moments where their strengths checked one another, the teeth-grit deadlock between beast and man, he... had [i]more[/i] to give. There was still yet strength that he could bring to bear, still power he could use.

The knight breathed low, golden eyes glaring out the darkness of the visor as though coins catching the firelight of Rolan's torch. Beneath his plate, fur, gambeson, cloth, his muscular frame held sturdy, coiled like a spring. His moment was close. with a light in the darkness, there would surely be a moment of primal recognition that something new was— [color=goldenrod][i]THERE![/i][/color]

He remembered the broken end of the felled branch he was driving into this thing's maw as a primarily ragged thing, but all the same split wood— that first jagged, primordial point that the first men had waged war with. Not all that far from a stake. The Gannek's stomach wound was belaboring it, unable to properly close, but Rolan's bolts and the cuts made upon its limbs were still sealing quickly. Its regenerative ability was still very much alive—

So why not turn that [i]against[/i] it? While not quite the anathema that staking the heart of a vampire was said to be, the too-hungry soldier for hire that it had dragged up, so soon after he'd begun to properly tuck him away, still wanted to know what it would make of having its' skull [i]impaled[/i] upon this lance by any other name. Would it burn precious seconds and energy having to shove it back out the roof of its mouth? Would it simply close around the branch, like wood fibers around a nail? He'd find out. He'd find out, kill his enemy, and this damn facade of emptiness would release the vice it had his gut in. Heavens above, double wages upon them all.

He brought his sword arm to the length of old wood, bracing it on both, and drove forward with redoubled force— the instant the Gannek's beady eyes wavered, he was going to run it through. If Reon's lucky rays still pierced the unnatural gloom in some way, the timing might have even lined up with his peers truly tearing that initial wound open. An [i]immaculate[/i] opportunity for a one-man (and technically one fae) siege engine to pulp the brain right through the base of the skull.