All-out Brawl

Have you ever been in a fight between four hundred highly-trained individuals, in a cave, with most people brandishing wooden weapons or razors or knives or knuckledusters? It’s chaos. It's definitely not just a big mass of bodies swamped together. And it's most certainly not easy. After a few seconds of clashing as one unit, you kind of spread out across a large are into a series of smaller fights and duels. I barely knew what was going on. I just saw an unfriendly arm (allied forces had a red ribbon on their arm) and starting swinging. One time it was Artee was next to slamming someone's face into his knee, then it was Krim, dueling two people at once and still winning, and then he turned into Ronin, fending the enemies off with his dual wielding style. A guy who's build is literally the exact same as mine come rushing at me with his wooden blade, but I parry him, disarm him and then hit him between the eyes with the hilt of my weapon, and he crumples like paper in a fire. I turn around to face my next enemy, and I see Zak. He's breathing hard, and murder's in his eyes.

"Clown," I tell him, and then he charges me.

I swing my sword straight at his head, determined to score a glancing blow to his temple and make him drop like a fly. But suddenly he isn’t there anymore and a burning pain erupts in my ankle. I glance down and I realize that Zak has sharpened the edges of his wooden blade into a deadly weapon. A deadly weapon that is now in my ankle.

He glances up at me looking down on him, and then I drive an elbow in his nose and blood spurts from his nose as he collapses. The pain in my leg is bugging me, but it's nothing compared to injuries from training, and I grip his sword tightly in my other hand, before wrenching it out of my leg with a squelch. Zak pushes himself off the floor and tackles me at the same second and we slam against a random boulder in the middle of the ground, with fighting and screaming and clashing of weapons all around us. He's trying to smash my head against the rock, so I go for his wrist with his own sharpened blade. Big mistake. He dodges my strike, somehow, and slugs me across the jaw. I realize that his left side is open so I shove my foot into his side and he stumbles backwards.

"Sharpening your sword like that is cowardly," I say.

"Your sword is literally sharper than mine!" he bites back, and I can't even argue because he's not actually wrong.

We fight for about five minutes, parrying, slashing, stabbing and grappling, until I finally hit him on the side of the face with the flat of my weapon and send him sprawling, blood spattering across the ground. I'm breathing raggedly, and I can't put weight on the ankle which Zak has stabbed me, but otherwise I feel like I can take on a hundred more people. Someone yells and charges me down from the side, but I swing my blade and cut his weapon clean in half, before slashing him in the face and he falls too. To my right, Neo hit someone else in the face with a flying kick, sending them flying, and we meet up.

"You good?" he asks.

"I got Zak," I tell him. "The clown. He might get back up, though."

Then more enemies came at us and we were split up again.

The next hour of my life passed faster than Chris insulting someone. I met an enemy, beat them up, then moved straight on to the next, with no time to rest in between. I’d lost sight of most of my friends, but occasionally I'd catch sight of one of them from the corner of my eye. I only realized how fatigued I was when I knocked down my thirty-second victim, and my vision suddenly began to swim. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Zak, and it was already too late. His knee slammed into my temple and I was spilled across the ground. My head struck something hard and then my vision went dark. I saw his feet walk across the ground towards me, slightly limping, and then the world dims even more. Then a searing, screaming pain exploded in my left leg, followed by a loud cracking noise, as he brings his foot down on my shin. I can hear him panting as he lifts his foot back up, and then brings it back down on the same place. My bone completely snaps and streaks of pain course through me, and I almost faint.

"Die," he whispers in my ear.

And he sinks a shard from a broken knife into my stomach.

He strikes me a couple more times in the head, and I can feel my blood go flying and splatter on the rocks. He stands up and raises his foot above my head. Then there's a thump and a yell and I catch a glimpse of Elemental's black hair as he launches a devastating side kick to Zak's head, and dislocated his jaw with the impact, and he does a sort of spinn I tried to stand up or lever myself off the ground, but my limbs felt like they were being tied down by metal balls, and I could barely see. The world was going wavy.

"Sword, Sword get up!"

Elemental's harsh voice jars me back to reality, and he grabs my shoulder and shakes me. I feel like my brain is rattling back and forth in my skull.

"E…Elemental…" I mumble.

"Get your sh*t together!" he yells, slapping me in the face.

My vision dissolves into bubbles again and I slump against him. He shakes me even more, and my vision comes back for a bit. He's got blood all over him, though it probably isn’t even his.

"Sword, can you hear me!?" he demands. "The fight's going downhill, Swifty's out, Kake, Chris, Swono and several others are severely injured."

I try and form words in my mouth, but nothing comes out. I can feel something warm trickling down my head where Zak had struck me with his knee. A second pair of hands grips my back, supporting me, and leans me against the boulder. I look up hazily and make out Artee's figure. He's got cuts and gashes everywhere, but he's already set to work splinting my broken leg.

"Protect us," he tells Elemental.

Elemental stands, his almost broken wooden sword swinging at his side. I didn’t even realize that about thirty enemies, bruised and battered and bloody, but every much upright, had surrounded us. Among them was another of Woodsy's lackeys, 092 'Stroma'. And leading them all was Vedix.

"You should surrender now, 002," Vedix tells him. "Let's not keep fighting each other. Woodsy says he'll give you a high position."

"Are you being serious?" Elemental asks him incredulously. "Do you even have a brain? You want me to serve some loser weaker than me who got together a bunch of low-life small-fry squirts together and is going around acting like they're tough?"

"He's channeling his inner Chris," Artee mumbles.

"We gave you a chance," Vedix says.

And with that, they begin to advance on Elemental. I remember thinking that it was all over then. But I instead witnessed a Demon descend from hell itself.

They push forwards, armed with razors and swords and knives. Elemental stands his ground, unmoving, with his back to me and Artee, and I'm sure his eyeballs are darting around his eye sockets right now, figuring out how to take down his next victim. Then the first guy enters his range and in less than a millisecond Elemental makes his move. The top half of the guy's head lands with a splat next to me. And the rest of him collapses on the ground with a thud. Elemental wipes the blood off his sword with his elbow pit.

"Come on," he says, cooly. "I'm ready."

The enemies have stopped advancing. They glance at each other uncertainly then at the corpse on the ground. Stroma gulps, and Vedix jabs him in the ribs.

"Advance," he says, his voice steely.

It included himself. They all closed in as one.

They rush at him, and Elemental, with his lightning quick strike, swings his weapon in a wide arc and the heads of the three nearest thugs fly off. The next one behind them gets speared through the chest, and the others try and take 002 down whilst his sword is occupied. But Elemental simply lets go of his weapon, grabs the nearest enemy, drives an elbow into his eye and then twists his head, snapping his neck cleanly. More come at him from all sides, and he retrieves his weapon. He cuts down four more, but the fifth gets past him and drives a razor deep into his back.

"Elemental!" Artee yells.

Elemental locks eyes with him and exchanges a silent message to keep healing me. I want to tell Artee to leave me and help Elemental, who’s fighting a one-sided battle alone, exhausted, injured and losing blood by the second. But I'm on the edge of consciousness and my body won’t listen to me. Airo. Krim. Framed. Neo. Anyone. Please help us.

Elemental whisk around in a spinning kick smashes the head of the guy who stabbed him clean of his shoulders, and another headless corpse crumples to the ground. The others back up a little, regrouping, surrounding the fatigued 002, and then they come at him again. Razors and knives pierce and slash his flesh. Swords and punches and kicks clobber him all over. But he refuses to fall. He's broken his sword on someone's face, and begins tearing them apart, one by one, with his bare hands, with the enemies slashing and stabbing. He was like a demon. A demon, a ravenous beast hungry for blood. He was a demon straight from the deepest pits of hell. And then there's a flash of blue. The blue light from the roof catches the surface of the razor blade flying through the air. And then Elemental's head jerks backwards and blood splatters onto the rocks.