MacKensie was in trouble. Her opponent could match her speed, outclassed her in skill and the high-pitched shrieking was spiking her senses at all the wrong moments. Every defensive move was suboptimal, doing nothing to swerve the momentum. Every attack was punished, resulting in torn leggings and a ripped tunic highlighting both light and heavy lacerations.
Due to the position of the defending army and the assaulting force, the fact that Saladin vastly outnumbered Valhiem was playing out as extremely heavy pressure on the endurance of the defenders. Valhiem's forces spent their energy dispatching the invaders, only to face fresh new enemies every time. But on the Right Wing, things were far, far worse. With his siege towers and ladders, Saladin was able to leverage his superior numbers by stretching out the assaulting line along the wall far beyond what the Right Wing was capable of defending. Once the fighting grew chaotic and everyone was occupied, additional ladders had Saladin's soldiers scaling the undefended walls further along, without resistance, and now the Right Wing was being crushed by the weight of envelopment.
The Rabbits, the Hornets and others nearby, all fought bravely but had begun to suffer casualties at an untenable rate. Things turned from bad to worse when MacKensie took grievous bodily harm. One of the Screamers' long daggers caught her flush, slicing deep into her forearm and travelling all the way down, past the elbow and through her tricep. The frenchwoman screamed in pain and dropped her dagger, narrowly managing to dodge an attempted finishing blow from the dark elven woman's second dagger. The enemy did not give up and chased down MacKensie with vicious strikes, one of which, MacKensie was forced to block with her crossbow, resulting in said-crossbow being destroyed completely. As she quickly ran out of moves to make, all looked lost until Sergeant First Class Gregory Grimes made a timely intervention.
"Grimes." The relief in her voice outshined the pain as Grimes fended off the Screamer, giving MacKensie a chance to retrieve her dagger from the ground. She had to do so with her left hand, for her right arm was completely non-functional. It hung limp and bloody from her shoulder - she couldn't even get her fingers on that hand to twitch. The only thing she could feel was the blood pulsing out of her tricep and the faintest sensation of soaking wetness all down her arm. She may as well have had it severed completely, for all the use it was.
The chaos of battle consumed the Rabbits and as she tried to return the favour and help Grimes with the Screamers who were now double-teaming him, she kept being attacked by goblins and corrupted tribesmen. Desperate parries were followed by her throwing herself into risky counters, diving upon her foes to sink her dagger into their skulls. Her one-armed balance was poor and she stumbled or fell with every attack. Her only desire was to get to Grimes before it was too...
"Grimes!"In managing to kill one, Grimes could not free his sword from the corpse fast enough and was felled by the other Screamer, being stabbed and slashed multiple times even as he fell to the floor. Her second in command was a superb fighter but the combined might of the Screamers was just too much. The surviving Screamer turned to see a furious MacKensie facing her down. The third Screamer joined the side of her sister and both stared at MacKensie like predators looking upon wounded prey. MacKensie was not skilled enough to beat these women one-on-one, with
two working arms. There was no one to help - everyone already had more than they could handle. The odds were stacked to a hopeless degree. But MacKensie
would not be beaten. She
would have her revenge for Grimes.
The Screamers restarted their high-pitched shrieks and then pounced. In a flash of inspiration, MacKensie activated her final
Deadly Flurry of the day - blue flames appeared along her arms - but instead of sheathing her dagger and reaching for her crossbow, she repurposed her Godspeed.
It was not supposed to work. Nowhere in her mind did the Source Code say that her ability could work with anything other than ranged weapons.
She
forced it to work.
As the two Screamers fell upon MacKensie with rapid dual-wield combos, MacKensie's left hand whirled her dagger in figure-of-eight motions at a speed barely-trackable by human eyes. She backed up one step to keep both Screamers in her field, metal on metal sounds ringing into the air as she parried every attack. But something else happened too. For those four to five seconds that MacKensie Deadly Flurry was active, she'd become a veritable food-blender, not only parrying all attacks away, but also counter-striking the hands, wrists and arms of the Screamers an innumerable amount of times. Suddenly the shrieks of the Screamers were not just warcries, but shrieks of pain as they were violently disarmed.
MacKensie's
Deadly Flurry ended with the dark elven women stumbling backwards and away. MacKensie launched her dagger at one. Before it had even sunk into the face of her foe, the frenchwoman was leaping at the other Screamer. Mid-air, she fired her grapplehook. The beam/wire latched onto the hilt of Grimes' sword. And in a sweep of poetic justice - of cosmic karma - the grapplehook reeled in the sword right to MacKensie's grip and she thrust it, with all her might and fury, into the heart of the last Screamer.
"Grimes!" MacKensie fell to her knees beside her second in command. His eyes were open - he was alive - but all at once MacKensie realised he was not long for this world and there was nothing she could do. Tears welled up in her eyes and fell rolled down her cheeks with her very next blink.
"Grimes, stay with me. We're going to get you help." She looked both ways, then tried to scoop her left arm under him to lift him so she could begin to get him off the wall. He resisted her and pulled her closer.
"
Focus, ma'am." His dying whispers were the last of his strength. One final lecture. "You have a duty to the Rabbits. There's no time for this... flailing." It was over for him. He knew it. She knew it. Her tears fell on him. "Save them. Save as many as you can. I have faith in you."
And he was gone.
It hurt. It hurt so bad.
“INITIATE THE FIRST WAVE OF RETREAT!
But there would be no time to grieve.
RIGHT WING! MOLES, HORNETS, SCYTHES!”
The Rabbits would remain, she realised. They had to hold off the enemy to protect the retreat. She gritted her teeth and got to her feet, right arm dangling useless, fighting all around her, the clash of steel against steel and shouting not enough to silence her.
"Fight! Rabbits! Fight with all your strength! Fight like it all depends on you!"Her grapplehook once more shot out and latched onto her dagger, pulling it free from the face of the dead Screamer. It flew into her grasp and she found a way into the front line and rejoined the fight. With her adrenaline raging, she did not realise that she had lost a dangerous amount of blood. Each time her vision began swimming, her anger forced the shapes back into sharp focus. Her heart thundered. And she lost more blood.
“RIGHT WING! COLLAPSE INTO THE CENTRE LINE POSITION!”
MacKensie backed up and out of the fighting, then moved through the ranks and hopped up onto the battlements to get her bearings. Once she could see properly;
"Rabbits!" She pointed the way.
"We fight our way to the Centre Line!" She shuffled along in that direction.
"Come on! Fight!"As she made to get down, she had a lapse in consciousness and fell. Luckily she was caught by one of her soldiers and she awoke immediately, disoriented but determined. The soldier, a woman named Helga, was shocked to see how ghostly-grey her Captain was. Then she realised that MacKensie was losing a frightening amount of blood from her arm, which was soaked red and dripping. Helga was about to shout for help, "The Capta-!" But MacKensie, with her working left arm, clasped her hand over the mouth of Helga to silence her.
"Not yet." MacKensie used Helga to help herself up properly and shook her head at the other woman.
"We need to move. Now." MacKensie spotted Corporal Maviel nearby, his thick, curled Tiefling horns making him easy to pick out in the crowd.
“Maviel!” He disengaged from the fighting and came to her.
“Go to the head and keep everyone moving towards the Center.” He nodded and left, starting to shout commands. MacKensie moved to the rear to help protect their back. Helga, worried for her captain, went with her. The rear was intense, with enemies staying on their tails and giving the Rabbits no rest, and too corrupted tribesmen appearing on the battlements and jumping down onto them.
“Stay together!” MacKensie shouted as she shuffled backwards with the back rank, focusing on defensive fighting only.
“Do not fall behind!”They covered the distance successfully, but the Rabbits had lost a lot of soldiers since the tipping point of the battle. Covering the tactical retreat had cost them dearly.
MacKensie stumbled for the umpteenth time, Helga keeping her upright once again. The frenchwoman’s dagger was bouncing off enemy swords dangerously. Her strength was waning. “Captain, you can barely stand. Next time you fall, I fear you will not get up. Please… go and get healed before it’s too late.”
MacKensie had to blink away the black spots in her vision and constantly refocus her vision. Her only working arm was jelly. She couldn’t even feel the dagger in her hand. She had to give in to the concerns of her comrade.
“I’ll be back,” she promised.
“Just as soon as I’m patched.”They exchanged a nod and Helga helped MacKensie to the closest stairs. MacKensie however, turned her sights up to the mage platforms and squinted as she scanned the tops. And she saw the face she was looking for.
Immediately she pointed her gauntlet and fired the beam/wire of blue light up high. It was a scuffed ascent to the top of the platforms, not nearly as graceful as what she was known for, but she managed to reduce the swinging and absorb the worst of the bumps with her feet and ended up making it.
“James!” She hung on to the platform with one hand, using her feet to struggle up and get her elbow and forearm on, then she got help from some mages who pulled her up.
“James. Can you fix my arm?” Perhaps she would have joked and asked for a few pints of blood too, but she was struggling to keep conscious now that she was out of immediate danger.
“Please hurry, my friend." She was panicking, aware that she was fading quickly and might be forced to retreat without the Rabbits.
"I need to get back down there.”No. She would go back to the Rabbits, no matter what. Even if it meant death, she would not abandon them.
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