A flash of steel.
A spray of blood.
A howl of pain.
The melee was finally over. Barry lay curled up on the floor clutching at the back of his left leg with his free hand. Kre held both of his blades again, though he had no idea how.
Barry tried to climb to his feet but collapsed again as his leg gave out, his hamstring cut cleanly. He opted to crawl towards the door instead, one hand clutching his leg and the other protectively holding his sword.
“I’ll kill you. You and Beleg both for this,” he snarled.
Kre didn’t bother to follow and chase him out. The poor man looked pathetic enough as it was, and he had nothing to fear from him any longer. Closer to the door, Barry managed to get to his feet and hobble-hop the remaining distance, dragging his blade behind him.
As the door closed and Kre heard the retreating rasp of the sword against the stone floor, he finally released the breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding. His legs nearly gave out as well, but he managed to stumble towards one of the few chairs still remaining upright.
He sat in the chair for a long while, slowly breathing and trying to figure out what happened in that last frantic moment of their melee. He recalled that his initial attempt to strike Barry had been blocked off-handedly by Cormordean, seemingly without input from Barry. The swordsman’s other hand was almost wrapped around the hilt of Kre’s fallen blade when the sword in question simply vanished.
If it hadn’t been for the fact that this flabbergasting feat was a bigger surprise to Barry than to Kre, who suddenly found the sword in his hand once again, Kre probably wouldn’t have been able to seize the advantage as he did. Rather, his sword wouldn’t have been able to seize the advantage that it did.
With Barry’s sword still on a return swing after the effortless parry, and with the large man stretched out reaching for a weapon that was no longer there, it would have been so easy for the blade to thrust itself into Barry’s side. It wouldn’t have been an instant killing blow, but it would have been fatal. Kre watched as his own hand seemed guided by the weapon to perform such a task, but he managed to overcome the involuntary impulse and instead guided the strike to cut deeply across the back of Barry’s muscular thigh, severing the hamstring cleanly and completely.
He looked hard at the two swords in his hands, one stained with fresh blood, and threw them to the ground. “How did I… they…?”
The door opened again, revealing a massive figure standing in the doorway. Kre immediately regretted throwing his only weapons away until he saw another smaller figure dart around and enter the room.
“Beleg!” he said happily.
The large man took a few steps in, “Hey ki… arggg!” In mid-greeting, Beleg tripped over the remnants of a chair and took out the last intact side table on his way down.
Virryn managed to light one of the lanterns and immediately shook her head at the state of the room. “What did you do?” she said in a tone that seemed a better fit when chastising little children that knew no better.
“We had a bit of trouble?” Kre said, although it sounded far more like a question than an answer, as he was still having trouble processing exactly what had transpired here.