Gary rolled to one side as Rain undercut the two remaining teenagers that had attacked him with a single leg sweep. They fell to the ground, squawking in shock and pain.

Morgan and Annabel joined the free-for-all a few seconds after Rain stepped in.

By that point, it was almost impossible to tell who was fighting who. Fists were flying left and right. People were screaming, spitting and shouting. As Morgan and Annabel waded into the brawl, their weapons sheathed but their punches doing ample damage, the funeral goers turned en masse against them.

They were all looking for someone to vent their fear and anger on. The weirdos in the funny costumes were fair game.

“This is all their fault!” someone shouted. Despite this not making much sense, the sentiment was seized upon by the crowd.

“Please, everyone, calm down!” Jonathan shouted, but things had gone far past the point where a voice of reason would be listened to. The father of Chantelle swung a punch at the teacher, knocking him to the floor.

Gary stood up, and one of the funeral goers ran towards him. Her face a mask of pure rage and hatred. She snatched up the dropped screwdriver and made to stab Gary.

“Please, stop!” Gary shouted. He was more worried for the woman’s safety than this own. Rain was standing beside him and lashed out with a savage kick to the other woman’s stomach.

“This is madness,” Gary shouted as the brawl intensified.

Morgan had a twisted smile on his face, as if this was some kind of sport for him. He punched a couple who were trying to hit him, sending them reeling backwards.

“Move,” Rain commanded. She placed a palm on Gary’s shoulder and pulled him backwards with more strength than he would have imagined possible.

Gary’s head ached from the hammer blows, and he clutched at the bleeding wound in his chest. Even if he he’d known how to stop this mess, he was in no state to intervene.

Someone caught Annabel with a fist to her face.

“Oh, enough!” the cleric snarled.

She unsheathed her sword and ran the offender clean through with it.

“NO!” Gary shouted as the man fell to the ground, screaming. Blood gushed from his stomach.

“Oh, we’re doing it that way, are we?” Morgan said with a snicker. He produced a knife and slashed twice at his attackers.

Rather than causing the raging crowd to calm down and back away, the blood and weapons made them worse. Two of them leapt on Morgan’s back, attempting to grab at his arms and relieve him of the knife.

Morgan laughed, then yelped in pain as a screwdriver stabbed into the side of his neck.

“You little fuckers!” he swore.

He tossed one of his attackers off his back and, with a deft movement, stabbed the other in the face. His knife lodged into the woman’s eyeball. Blood and fluids spurted as the woman let go of Morgan and fell to the floor, screaming and clutching at the wound where her left eye had been.

Gary watched all of this with his hands on his face, his mouth a horrified ‘O’ shape.

How the hell had this gone so bad so quickly?

Rain observed the fight with no further intervention. The two teens that were in any shape to fight had forgotten about their attempts to kill Gary and were instead trying to get to Annabel, despite the glowing blade that she was wielding.

There were still over a dozen people people involved in the fight. Even though Morgan and Annabel were by far the superior warriors, numbers were against them.

Gary spotted Jonathan on the other side of the crowd. Like Gary, he was outside the melee, watching helplessly. His expression turned to one of pure horror as Annabel’s sword swept down on the arm of the teenager waving the hammer.

The sword chopped through his forearm with a clean cut. His hand and half of his arm bounced on the floor and the much prized hammer rolled away.

The teenager screamed in pain, clutching at his severed stump as the blood flowed, his eyes wide open.

“This has to stop,” Gary said to Rain, “They’re killing them!”

Rain shrugged, standing in his way.

“They attacked first.”

“What? You can’t mean that! They’re scared and confused. It’s not their fault!”

Rain stared at him with that same alien curiosity he’d seen earlier.

“Killing in self-defence is… not wrong,” she stated.

Gary wanted to scream in frustration. She sounded like she was repeating something she’d been told, like an equation or a fact someone had passed on to her.

She held out her hand and produced a metal vial the length and width of a forefinger. It had a small cork in it, which she popped off with her thumb.

“For your wounds. Drink.”

“I’m not...” Gary started, his eyes on the desperate and pointless fight that was taking place.

“Drink,” Rain insisted.

The battle had come to a temporary pause as the remaining funeral goers circled Morgan and Annabel.

All around them, the wounded were whimpering or screaming. Jonathan had dragged the teenager with the chopped arm away and was trying to apply a tourniquet from pieces of his shirt that he’s ripped up. The woman with the missing eye had crawled away to lean against a pillar, her hand still over the wound. Chantelle was leaning against a pillar, staring at her broken wrist.

Rain and Gary had been forgotten for the moment as the focus had shifted to Morgan and Annabel.

Gary took the proffered vial and sniffed. The coppery smell of blood hit his nostrils.

He downed the liquid in one before he realised what he was doing, as compelled to drink it.

Potion: Essence of the Living. Hit points restored.

Gary gasped as he felt his wounds heal and his hit points were restored to their full total. He felt stronger and more able than he could recall ever having felt, as if the Essence had restored him to his peak condition. His exhaustion and the aches in his muscles were gone in seconds, the throbbing at his forehead vanished. The wound he had received to his stomach closed up.

And the hunger for living flesh had stopped.

“What... what was that?” he gasped, as his tired senses were restored.

“From those I killed,” Rain said.

She tapped at the knives by her side, then unsheathed one. She held out her hand for the metal vial, and Gary handed it back to her. Rain unscrewed the pommel from the hilt and dropped the tube into the hollow hilt. She had turned it upside down, so that the opening of the vial faced the black blades. Then she screwed the pommel back on.

“Dark magic,” she stated. Her voice was neutral, neither approving nor disapproving of the concept of dark magic. Despite the drama of what was going on around them, Gary stared as she lifted the blade and showed him the edges. About halfway down the blade, he could see a string of tiny holes began on the edges of the blade.

“It drains the lost life,” she said, “and stores it in the vial.”

“You mean, if you kill someone, it turns them into a healing potion?” Gary said.

“Yes.”

Gary’s temporary distraction by Rain’s vicious, life draining blades was cut short.

The remaining brawlers had decided to attack en masse.

“Fuck,” Gary said.

People not acting rationally, he thought, recognising the pattern. In the last few hours, all rationality had flown out of the window for many people. They were being driven by fear, acting on impulse and frayed emotions.

The attackers were interrupted before they could reach Morgan and Annabel, though.

Forge, who had been watching the fight, stepped in. Running up behind the group, he grabbed two of them by the scruffs of their necks and flung them backwards.

They flew through the air, too high and too fast. They both hit the church’s wall with sickening cracking sounds, then fell to the floor, dead.

“No, stop!” Gary shouted.

Forge placed his oversized fist on the head of another of the funeral goers. And squeezed.

Gary screamed in horror as the woman’s head exploded like a blood orange in Forge’s hand. Her body dropped to the floor, her head a mangled horror of brain and bone.

The remaining attackers came to their senses, backing away from the warrior and indicating surrender, but it was far too late. Forge roared as he slung his fist wide, cracking four of them across their faces with one backhand. They fell to the stone floor, screaming in agony.

The remaining half a dozen men and women that were still standing lost whatever nerve they had left and tried to run.

Morgan and Annabel, however, hemmed them in.

“No running, now,” Morgan said, with a sick grin on his face. “Everyone on your knees, right now.”

Forge shoved one man to the floor, punctuating Morgan’s orders. One by one, those that weren’t already on the floor went down on their knees.

“What are they doing?” Gary whispered.

Rain narrowed her eyes as she watched her three companions as they gathered the funeral-goers together and forced them to their knees.

She glanced at Gary, then back at Morgan, Forge and Annabel.

For a second, she looked as if she was about to say something to Gary. Then she shook her head, dismissing whatever she had been thinking.

But it was enough of a signal for Gary to pick up on.

She’s not okay with this either, Gary thought.

As improbable as it sounded, given that what he’d observed of Rain had made him classify her as a cold-blooded assassin, he knew he was right. There was something going on here that he didn’t understand at all.

But his instinct was telling him that Rain might not be as heartless as she appeared to be.