The ground groaned under the weight of corpses.
Ethan's breath rattled like gravel in a broken chest. Every inch of him was drenched in blood, sweat, ichor. His skin was no longer skin but a coat of pain, ripped and laced with gashes. His left eye saw only red; his right barely focused.
One arm dangling uselessly at his side. Blood thick and unnatural, poured from the ruined poleaxe clenched in his hand. All around him were the remains of the monsters he killed, twitched, and sizzled. Their bodies bled acid, spores, ink, and strange fluids in colours that are not found in nature.
Monsters lay dead behind him. Their corpses formed a grotesque hill of limbs and torn muscle, steaming in the wind. Some still twitched. Some groaned. But a single one can stand.
Yet the horde was still advancing towards him.
A thunder of footsteps. A screeching of beast tongues. And a symphony of the unnatural.
Ethan cracked his neck sideways and lifted his head to the sky. Lightning arched between red clouds above. He narrowed his eyes and spat a mouthful of blood into the dust.
"Come then", Ethan rasped.
This wave surged – ten, twenty, thirty monsters moving in unison. They formed a wall of muscle, bone, talons, and shrieking mouths. Each was different, grotesque, and unholy:
One was a slug-like horror, forty feet wide, covered in twitching deer legs and lamprey mouths.Another flew, its wings ragged cloth and glass shards, its body a human torso fused with arachnid limbs.One rolled like a wheel, a centaur's body coiled within a rotating spine, flinging spears of its ribcage.
Ethan dodged despite his shattered body. Despite the screaming pain in every joint, he charged into the storm.
He snatched up a jagged bone from the ground and hurled it like a javelin. The bone glowed faintly and drove straight through the flying monster's chest. The monster wheeled wildly in the air before crashing down in a spray of molten blood and glass shards. Ethan rolled under the falling corpse, using it as cover as the other descended.
Slug beast tried to crush him with its bulk. But Ethan darted forward and rammed the broken haft of his poleaxe into its soft underbelly, and twisted it with all the strength that was left inside of him.
SHHHLT! The belly split like rotten cloth.
Intestine that writhed like a snake spilled over Ethan's body. He pushed through them, stabbing upward with a rusted dagger he had picked off a corpse.
The dagger pulsed once. The slug convulsed and exploded from within, coating everything around in bile.
Ethan stood up, gagging, blind in one eye from the acidic spray.
A horned hybrid with no mouth and ten eyes descended on him. It wielded a tail like a cleaver, edged with bone saws.
Ethan now knows there is no resting for him until he has killed every last of the monsters.
He stepped into this horned monster's swing, allowing the tail to graze his torn armour, ripping deep into his side, but giving him the angle he needed. He plunged his remaining axe into the monster's groin and roared: "AAAAAHHHHH".
The axe glowed red-hot, and the monster howled soundlessly as it collapsed in twitching spasms, its spine cut clean in half.
A beast came forward – larger, scaled in obsidian armour. It roared and brought both fists like twin meteors. Ethan didn't dodge it, but he ran straight through the shockwave, teeth clenched, and slid beneath its legs. As it turned out, he leapt, grabbing onto a loose flap of skin beneath its tail. Up he went – with only one hand, and one axe.
Blood came like rain when Ethan buried his axe into its lower back and climbed, the monster slammed its own back to crush him, but it was too slow. Ethan had already reached his shoulder.
And shoving a bone shard into its throat with a wet crunch. The creature stumbled, choking. He twisted the shard deeper, tearing it sideways. Hot breath blasted his face as the colossus vomited blood and fell.
He rode it down like a crumbling tower, landing hard, dislocating his shoulder again. He bit down on his tongue to stay conscious.
Pop. Snap. He fixed his shoulder and rose again.
They came in clusters now, three at once.
A claw swiped - he ducked it, rolled, and drove his broken sword into the monster's leg. This strike made the monster's balance unstable as it was falling, Ethan climbed its falling body like a collapsing building, and hurled himself into the next beast's face and dug out the monster's eye socket with his bare hands. ss
Monsters screamed, yet he tore the ripped flesh. The eyeball dangled on a nerve strand. He bit it and spat it out.
The creature's bellow rattled the air. Ethan dropped from its face, grabbing a jutting tusk from its jaw, swung himself beneath its chin, and slashed its throat with a shattered metal edge he'd scavenged mid-fall.
Blood sprayed in thick arcs, coating him from head to toe.
Other monsters hesitated. While Ethan glared at it, drenched in gore and blood.
Monster takes a step back, and Ethan lunged anyway, slamming the poleaxe's broken shaft into the monster's shin, leaping up, and planting his boots into its chest. The monster stumbled backward, and he scrambled up its stomach, finding a jagged bone protrusion near its ribs, pulled it out, and stabbed it into the monster's heart, again and again, until the beast collapsed and took him with it.
Another monster leapt toward him—a serpentine dragon with gorilla arms and metal blades for teeth. Ethan waited for a second, then threw his broken sword like a spear. Leave remains pierced the monster's open maw and the back of its skull.
Monster collapsed mid—lunge. Ethan jumped on the monster's falling body and leapt again, using it as a platform.
He landed atop a six-legged horror with a lion's body and the face of a weeping woman, its back sprouted living crows instead of wings.
Ethan dug both his fingers into its eye sockets and twisted them, and pulled out.
The monster screamed as blood gushed, and Ethan leapt off, dragging its eyeballs in his fists like trophies.
Ethan laughed with full madness that crept in.
The battlefield now looked like a painting of a nightmare that had come to life. Smoke and blood colored the horizon. Torn limbs of monsters litter the field, and the land itself groans with the weight of death.
Ethan slowed his steps toward the monster and picked up a heavy chain from a fallen monster, wrapped it around his forearm, and used it like a whip.
A monster, looking like a hybrid of a centipede and a bear, rushed towards him, fifty feet tall, breathing fire through its gills.
Ethan flung the chain and wrapped it around the beast's neck, and yanked sideways, to leap onto its flank, and began climbing it, hand over hand, as the monster roared and thrashed. He reached the top and grabbed a chunk of broken fang from the monster's mouth, and drove it downward into its spine.
Monster toppled, and Ethan rolled off the carcass, hit the ground in a mess of blood and bones.
Ethan rose without any delaying the time, he knew he couldn't stop here. He was coughing up teeth. But his lips were moving. "One more…then one more… then one more". The more monsters that come, the more he kills.
Ethan was enraged now; he was moving like a monster among these monsters- he stabbed into the armpits, joints, and stomach of the monsters like crazy.
He drowned in blood.
One monster crushed him beneath its fist—until the monster realized Ethan crawled inside the monster's wrist, tore open the tendons, and burst out from the forearm like a dying phoenix.
Another monster tried to eat him as Ethan slid down the monster's throat. He cut his way out from the inside, erupting from its belly in a fountain of gore and boiling stomach acid.
His back flayed, his face unrecognizable.
To see this horrifying scene, a dozen monsters turned and fled, but Ethan chased them, not because he wanted to because he had to.
He caught one by the ankle with a thrown axe while the monster was falling, and Ethan climbed it and smashed its spine with a scavenged jawbone from another monster.
Used that monster's ribs as a ladder to get to the next one. Bit one in the throat and tore skin free with his teeth.
To fight monsters, he used their claws as knives, bones as clubs, and his one rage as fire.
By now, hundreds of monsters lie dead.
Then eight hundred
Then nine hundred.
He stopped counting after he killed more than four hundred.
He can hardly see more than fifty monsters remaining.
The whole field was a sea of steaming flesh, cracked bones, and gory rivers.
Ethan moved through it like a dying god, dragging the broken sword behind him. One leg refused to bend. His spine was warped from blunt trauma. His breathing was wet. Rattling. Each exhale a death knell.
And still the monsters came. Not all at once, but only a few at once. The rest circled him and watched in fear.