It was as if I had ceased to exist in one place, and had reappeared in another, five feet to the left of where I had just been. Where I had been standing a moment before, there was a cloud of white mist, humanoid for a moment, but insubstantial as smoke. The Tengu’s hammer stroke smashed through the cloud of mist and thudded into the ground. As the Tengu tried to pull the hammer out of the ground, I leapt at him and cut his throat with a sidestroke of my Tanto blade.
I charged forward, swinging again and again, back and forth with my blade, parrying and dodging blows. I found to my delight that I could move with lightning quickness; it almost seemed as if they couldn't see me, as if I moved too quickly for their eyes. Time and time again I used the remarkable ability to shift myself through space. I would lunge to the right, shift, and appear five feet away, behind the enemies who had been about to attack me.
I had no compunction about attacking them from behind. Back in Saxe a warrior was expected to face his enemy head on. It was not just the fact that these were not honorable men, but some kind of nasty woodland monster; it was also the fact that the stealthy assassin Persona gave me permission to use fighting techniques which otherwise I would have thought were too dishonorable to use.
Cara and I had fought off fully half of the horde of Tengu when the troll finally managed to get free from his entanglement in the shrine building. He didn't exactly free himself; rather, he stopped trying to pull himself loose and instead just hauled the whole remainder of the building’s frame up off the ground. The wooden timbers were smoldering, and floorboards and bits of tiling dangled and fell from him as he rose up with the wrecked building around his neck. He seemed half blinded, and was covered in terrible burns. The whole wooden framing of what had once been the fox spirit’s shrine hung around his neck like some bizarre battle harness.
I almost laughed at the sight, but that was when the Festering began to take hold. The Tengu were fleeing, screeching and backing away from Cara’s fierce face and bloody blades as she and I stood together surrounded by a mound of the enemy dead.
Without warning, the troll transformed. He had been ugly enough to begin with, but now he sprouted tentacles from around his head and shoulders. Spikes burst through the skin of his arms, back, and shoulders, and out from his chest. His head expanded, the jaw lengthening and his few blunt teeth multiplying and becoming razor sharp.
“There must be some kind of lingering influence of the Festering within this glade,” I shouted to Cara. “It’s taken the troll!”
The remaining Tengu turned and fled screaming into the woods as the troll gave a horrible howl of pain and doubled over, dropping his club. His head exploded into a mass of writhing tentacles and he dropped onto all fours. Then, with the tentacles outstretched, he began charging toward us like some huge, deformed dog.
Cara aimed an exploding arrow and fired right into the writhing mass of tentacles where the head had been. Sudden fire engulfed the creature’s tentacles and shoulders, but it did not stop charging. The monster had doubled in size, and now bore almost no resemblance to a troll; instead, it was a mess of spikes and wriggling tentacles, dripping black slime and pouring flame. I did not fancy Cara’s chances against it if it got too close, and it was lumbering forward, closing distance every second.
There was only one thing for it. “Get back,” I shouted to Cara. “I'm going to try something creative.”
“This better work,” I muttered to myself as Cara obeyed my command and got out of the way.
I crouched onto one knee and sprinted toward the charging monster. The fox spirit Persona gave me incredible speed, and I sprinted forward faster than I would ever have thought possible. Right at the last moment, as the tentacles reached out to grab me, I leapt into the air with as much force as I could muster. It was no ordinary jump. I blasted fifteen feet into the air. Time seemed to slow down. From behind me, I heard Cara’s amazed shout as I flew up into the air. As I felt my jump hit its apex, I pulled out my last trick.
I reached for the Persona of Ironside.
Heat flooded me as the massive suit of armor slammed into place around me. I felt my heart racing as the speed of my descent increased with the extra weight. My huge two-handed axe was in my grip and I raised it for a killing blow as I fell. I landed on the creature’s back with incredible momentum, whirling my axe over my head and into the monster’s spine with all the force of my swing and all the weight of the huge armor. The bladed head of the axe slammed into the flesh. The tentacles battered at me, thumping on my armor, and the huge spikes which had burst from the creature’s skin smashed against the chest plate and my gauntlets, but the spikes broke and snapped off as I landed on them. They were no match for the armor of Ironside.
The force of my axe blow was so powerful that it nearly cut the
