Prompt had something to do with being a great warrior wielding a very strange weapon.
A Very Strange Weapon Indeed
“Help! Help me, please! Someone!”
Dress torn and covered in mud, missing one shoe – having lost it in the foot chase – hair wild and eyes wide with fear, the young damsel cried into the empty night.
“Anyone! Please!”
But the doors of the shoppes remained shut, the windows in the tenements blacked out or barred, their occupants either asleep or quietly sneaking a look beyond cracked curtains.
In the street behind her heavy footfalls echoed in the dark, stomping through puddles and excrement, the muck of the medieval city. Four men, four shadows, chasing her like prey, their foul intentions streaming off them like fetid vapors.
As her hope that she might receive help faded, the damsel devoted all her energies to running. She raced forward, looking back only once over her shoulder, determined that she should survive this night. The men were large and hulking. All but one of them, the ringleader she thought. But, as she turned the corner down an alleyway, she noted that she had not seen him in nearly a mile . . .
The blow took her completely by surprise, the small but solid fist hitting her hard in the belly, using her momentum as she turned the corner against her. It knocked all the air from her lungs and she fell to her knees, huffing ineffectually, not even able to cough properly. Above her, the thin, small man hovered like a lich, his face veiled beneath a hood in obscuring darkness.
“A good chase, little one,” he whispered, turning to his four approaching men, “quite a good chase, indeed.”
Her body finally caught up with the impact and she coughed heroically, taking a deep, desperate breath.
“That’s right,” the thin man said, looking back down at her, “breath, little one. If you don’t breath,” he said, removing a thin stiletto from a small sheath at his waist, “how will you scream?”
She recoiled from the glint of sharp steel, crawling on hands and feet backwards, until her back was flush with the brick wall of the alley. Her breath came in hoarse waves as the thin man approached, his four thugs arriving just in time to see the terrible action they so longed for. She prepared herself for one final, likely futile defense.
“Tell me, what sort of coward stalks about at night,” a voice echoed down the alleyway, as loud and sure as if it were broad daylight in an open field, “looking for 5 to 1 fights with defenseless young ladies?”
The thin man startled at the sound of the voice, swinging his gaze up from the woman and down the alleyway. The clarion call of the man’s confident insult had an effect on the five men similar to a bright torch held aloft by a constable.
Again, the voice echoed out of the shadows. “Or perhaps you roam the streets, raising chaos in order to goad the stronger men from their rest. If this is the case, then allow me to assure you – you have succeeded.”
With a quick look and a jerk of his jaw, the thin man sent a couple of his larger men down into the shadows of the alleyway. The two thugs eyed each other nervously for a moment, and then drew their swords and stalked into the darkness.
The woman watched as the two men disappeared, fading out of the light and into the black entirely, taking slow, wary steps, swords raised in front of them. Then there was a yell from farther down the alley, the clang of metal on stone, then metal on metal, then another yell, followed by the heavy thud of something large falling to the ground. A stomping sound grew in volume until one of the two thugs emerged from the alley, racing as fast as he could, swordless and looking back in panic over his shoulder.
He raced right past the woman and his boss and his two compatriots, not paying them any heed. As he passed, the whiff of an intense, almost rotten odor caught in the woman’s nostrils and she squeezed her nose shut with the fingers of her right hand.
The thin man and the other two thugs were all turned to watch their ally run away when her hero stepped into the light for the first time.
He was shorter than she’d anticipated, not particularly musclebound, with long, blond hair and pale Nordic skin. He wore simple, homespun clothes and a gray cape with the hood down.
“Quite the warrior you had there. He withstood three blows and remained capable of running away.” He pursed his lips and nodded lightly, then gestured behind him with his thumb, “I cannot say the same for his friend.”
A combination of anger and intrigue mixed upon the thin man’s face. He looked at the small man appraisingly and smiled.
“You caught my men off guard, in the darkness,” the thin man said, as he raised his stiletto, and his remaining two thugs unsheathed their steel swords, “but I see you have no sword, friend. And, out here, in a fair fight, I think you’ll find much heartier competition.”
The strange man in gray peered at the thin man and made a show of counting with an extended finger, “I count three of you, and one of me. Hardly seems fair at all.”
A cackle as thin as the thin man’s frame echoed through the alley. “I suppose it isn’t, but that’s what happens to meddlers!”
Upon saying the final word, the thin man gestured with his free hand and the two thugs tromped forward, charging right at the gray man, the thin man close behind, as the woman watched from her vantage on the ground.
The man in gray stood his ground until the last moment and the woman thought she even saw a smile on his face. The first thug arrived, sword raised high over his head, and he swung down with a blow that would have cleaved a tree trunk in twain. At the last possible moment, the man in gray simply stepped quickly to his left, and the blow impacted the stony ground. Almost simultaneously, the man in gray unsheathed the strangest “weapon” the woman had ever seen from a fairly short, oddly shaped looking sheath at his waste. The weapon came out, soft and pliable, less than a foot in length, and the man whipped it about, spinning 360 degrees and slamming it into the back of the thug’s head.
With two wet splunks, the thug’s eyeballs popped out the front of his face, dangling in front of his nose on two horrible pink threads, blood gushing from the holes where they once resided. The woman screamed in horror and surprise. A moment later the same somewhat rotten, fishy odor wafted down toward her.
At the sight of the devastating blow, watching his friend writhing uselessly on the ground, cupping his broken eyes in two hands, the other big thug hesitated to attack. The thin man screamed behind him, and the thug, overcome with fear and blood lust, charged forward, swinging his sword in a wide arc, parallel to the ground, intending to slice the man in gray clean in half.
Unfazed, the man in gray leaped gracefully into the air, rising easily over the terrible blow, and following the leap with what looked like a gently flick of his bizarre, floppy weapon. It impacted at the thug’s shoulder, and there was an audible crack as the joint there dislocated. The thug’s pained yell filled the alleyway, and overcome by rage, the thug went with the momentum of the blow, spun around and brought his sword down at a diagonal.
The man in gray fell into a forward roll, passing right between the larger man’s legs, and ending up behind him as the sword clattered into the ground. Before the thug could even turn around the man in gray slapped him with his a plop of his weapon straight downwards on the left shoulder. The thug crumpled under the blow and fell to the ground, useless.
Alone, the thin man stopped in his tracks, gaped for a moment at his defeated hooligans, sheathed his stiletto, turned and ran.
The man in gray watched him go for a moment, then flipped his weapon in the air, catching it by the tail. He lifted it up, aimed, and threw it hard at the thin man.
It impacted right as the thin man was passing by where the woman sat, amazed. The thin man fell to his knees in front of her, a fish head sticking ridiculously out of the center of his chest, blood seeping out around the edges of the wound. The thin man lingered on his knees for a moment with a surprised look, took one final breath, and fell flat, face down.
In the stillness which followed, the woman stared at the thin man and heard only the gentle steps of the man in gray approaching. He arrived at the corpse, bent down, grabbed the fins protruding from the thin man’s back, and pulled. The herring came out of the wound with a wet noise, and the woman cringed at the sound and sight of it. The fishy odor was nearly overwhelming.
In a highly practiced way, the man in gray took the herring and wiped the gore from its smooth scales onto the thin man’s hood. Once it was cleaned to his satisfaction, he sheathed the small, soft, pickled fish and turned to the woman on the floor.
“Madam,” he said, with a small two fingered salute. Then he lifted his gray hood onto his head, shot her a final smile, and was off, racing back down the alleyway, into the darkness from whence he came.
The damsel watched him go and then sat there for a long while longer before eventually mumbling to herself in amazement and disbelief.
“Was that a herring?”
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