The sky was bleeding fire.
Red clouds churned over a dead land, Ash fell like snow upon the wasted plain, and the wind that blew across the cracked plateau carried the scent of rust, smoke, and rot. Bones jutted from the earth like broken spears. Once, this might have been a fertile valley—green with wheat, bright with riverlight. Now it was nothing but a war grave, and the ground itself was cracked from the sheer weight of war.
At the heart of this barren Plain. The man stood alone in a wasteland of broken stone and dried rivers, his breath ragged, steam rising from his body in the cold heat of doom.
And before him, across the cracked field of bones, a sea of flesh moved.
A tide of monsters, each a colossus a hundred feet tall, and each one was a grotesque abomination of nature—a fusion of predators from every corner of a long-dead world. Their bodies had mixed fur, scales, fangs, and metal. Their skin was scaled or armoured with bone, their teeth like jagged scimitars.
A thousand of them, blotting the horizon. Their steps were tectonic. Their roars were like a cataclysm. Their eyes gleamed with dim, unnatural light, like coals in a drowned forge. Each one of the monsters was able to create an unimaginable disaster.
And behind them all, five even greater shadows, stood in their place and were only watching. All five of them are two hundred feet tall, standing in silence, they look like monsters among monsters, they are the Commanders of this demonic region.
His body was already ruined. Blood soaked his robes, dried in thick black flakes across his arms and chest. One eye was swollen shut. Gashes split his shoulders. The armor he wore—stitched leather, hardened with resin, and plated with bone—was half-burned.
His sword, the once-beautiful Shivra, now a half-broken sword, hung in his grip, blade chipped, blackened, and jagged like a lightning bolt.
Across his back, two ruined axes quivered with each breath, both nicked and dull, hafts dark with gore.
And before him, his Poleaxe half buried in dirt, the shattered poleaxe, its shaft was split near the base, and waited like an old hound – loyal and dying.
The monsters marched, all thousand of them at the same time, and the world was shaking because of their marching.
The first monsters come at him like a landslide, each footfall kicking up boulders. The first one was maw opened wide, revealing a nest of spiralling teeth. It roared, spraying hot saliva in gouts that sizzled on the ground—shrieked a challenge that cracked the sky.
This man's breath came slowly. Shallow. He felt every broken rib inside him. His vision swam. But his heartbeat was steady.
He ran toward it.
He surged forward in a low sprint, he swung his broken sword, a silver arc through the air, into the monster's ankle joints, slicing across the exposed tendons. He climbed on the monster, ducking under the creature's lunging maw. Its breath smelled of fungus and bile. With a shout, he leapt, twisted in the air, and cut both of his eyes in a single strike.
The creature shrieked in pain, its momentum toppling it forward. The man dove, rolled under its falling bulk, and came up on the other side, grabbing his poleaxe from the dirt as the corpse slammed into the earth behind him.
The second and third on him as he picks his poleaxe.
The second beast—a lizard-hound with the tail of a whip-scorpion and ribs that opened like grasping fingers—lunged downward.
He sprinted beneath the second one's belly and tossed one of the two axes straight up. The spinning blade sang through the air and embedded itself deep into the soft underbelly between chitin plates. And with his poleaxe, biting into the kneecap, the bent blade peeling muscle like bark from a tree. A whip of a tail struck him in return—ribs crunched, blood sprayed from his mouth as he was hurled fifty feet across the field, skidding through gravel.
One of his legs was screaming, and one shoulder hung loose, torn at the joint, but he rose because he was still breathing.
As the monster reappeared in pain, he picked up his sword from the ground, leapt, and drove it into the wound, using the axe as a step to launch himself to the top.
He reached its back and started hacking—savagely, desperately—at the nape of the beast's neck. The axe pulsed red and cracked the skull-plate with a concussive blast. The creature shuddered and dropped like a collapsing tower, spine severed.
He fell on the ground along with the monster, with the dust exploded in all directions. He landed hard on land, skidding through rubble and gore. He was limping, something cracked in his leg, but he ignored it. Because.
The third—a brute with three heads, each snarling with different voices, one barking like a jackal, one whispering in a human tongue, one wailing like a baby.
He grabbed his poleaxe from the dirt—heavy, split, ruined—but he spun it anyway.
The monster charged head-on with him, with a low spin with high power, the poleaxe made a black arc of death and smashed into the front leg of the monster and cracking it sideways, then he cut across the monster's thick-scaled thigh. Then buried in his gut with a poleaxe, he drove the broken weapon upward, spilling entrails that splashed across him in steaming torrents. A claw like a siege weapon tore across his back, peeling armor and flesh alike.
He fell, but grabbed onto one of its tusks as the creature thrashed, climbed up its neck with fists, and drove the spike into the third head's skull until he heard the crunch of brain.
The monster collapsed on its side. And he landed in Gore.