He-Who-Mourns-Silently channels the wind through himself, generating a galeforce aura. He narrows his eyes and sprints towards his enemies, interjecting himself into the duel between the Staves and the subterranean crab-shark.

His speed is superhuman - a given, since he long transcended humanity when he became of Twisted Writ. He’s only fought so many opponents once before - during the attack on his village - so he must fight as savagely as he can to survive. He holds nothing back as he crashes into the Staves’ defensive line from the side.

He body slams into a spear-holding Stave, bowling him over, and then lunges for the next man in line, who is already reacting to his onslaught. He-Who-Mourns-Silently flits to the side as the man swings his shield at him, bringing his spear to bear with the other arm. Before he can attack again, though, HWMS grabs him by the spear arm with one hand and clacks his now-exposed shield arm with his mandibles. He twists his head, his mandibles a vice-like-grip, while he pushes down with his body weight. Resultantly, he hears a crackle in his opponent’s arm as he snaps the bone within, and the man goes down with a scream of agony.

The Staves are disciplined, though, and they weren’t totally unaware of the possibility of the strange manticore man attacking. So when he crashes into their ranks and downs two men in a smattering of seconds, the rest react with taciturn resolve to repel him. HWMS’ shoulder flares in pain as a thrust spear rips impacts him. He reacts instantly, wrenching himself out of the way so that the damage is minimal and mostly grazing, but the second attacker steps forward and forces him to back off further.

“Staves! Defend yourselves!” bellows the man in the back, the one assembling some sort of emplacement weapon. He finishes affixing a tube onto his weapon, then swivels it atop what seems to be some sort of tripod or stand towards the giant crab.

Before he can do whatever it is he plans to do, the crab unleashes another barrage of high-powered bubbles on the front line. Forced into disarray by He-Who-Mourns-Silently’s brazen charge, the defensive line of 5 men is mostly caught off-guard or even prone by the barrage. Only one braces himself properly, while two are knocked off balance, and the two HWMS knocked down are further punished. HWMS has to scramble away himself, avoiding crystal shrapnel. The subterranean crab-shark presses the attack, hefting a claw overhead.

Before it can finish off the fallen men, the man in the back with the emplacement weapon finishes his construction and opens fire. A lance of red energy arcs out of the things’ barrel and strikes the thing square in the armored, sandpapery face, causing it to immediately screech in pain and panic as that red light expands from the point of impact in crackling arcs. A trio of eyes are consumed, while several of its smaller grasping mouth-claws are sliced off or obliterated by the beam weapon’s rage. The attack lasts several seconds before winking out, at which point the Stave manning the weapon withdraws a new power supply from his pack and begins working to replace it.

Instead of bringing its claws smashing down onto the injured men like it had planned, then, the crab-shark brings them to its face and covers it as it writhes about and chitters in pain. There’s a series of crashes as it steps forwards blindly on dozens of legs towards the Staves, who shout and scramble to scatter. The man on the emplacement weapon unleashes another laser, raking a deep gouge into the thing’s leftward carapace, before it is upon him and he has to scramble out of the way to avoid being impaled by one of the crab-shark’s spike-tipped legs. One Stave is not so lucky, the man who HWMS initially bowled to the ground. His mangled corpse adorns one of the crab-sharks’ front legs, the remains jostling up and down as it gallops. Brutal.

The crab-shark begins to turn left, arcing back to the tunnel from whence it came. HWMS guesses it got more than it bargained for with the Staves’s freakish monster killing weaponry and is backing off. He assumes the beast had challenged them over the rights to the Vertibeast, assured in its own status as an apex predator. It is certainly one of the most powerful beasts He-Who-Mourns-Silently has ever encountered in the Crystal Peaks. Yet the Staves of Man exist, by HWMS’ understanding, to overpower natural might with sheer brutality and technological adaptations. He wonders how they had been tracking the massive subterranean monster. He has other problems now, though.

If it is now leaving the battlefield, and the Staves are viscerally aware of his presence, and maybe have made the deduction that they missed one in their first cleansing of the Men of Twisted Writ. He’s starting to rethink the decision to engage them. Now he has another choice - flee now, and risk letting them return to their brethren to tell of his existence, or take his chances against eight (one with a broken arm) trained monster-killers.

Maybe if his tribe had been more stringent in concealing their existence from civilized humanity - even through the spilling of blood - they’d be alive today. So He-Who-Mourns-Silently resolves to fight. As the Staves regroup, seemingly deliberating whether to chase the retreating crab-shark or not, he again calls upon the powers of the wind, feeling it flow through him on a physical and spiritual level simultaneously.

The Staves’ decision to deal with this new threat or pursue their first quarry is made for them when biting tongues of wind strike them from the side, scoring marks into their studded leather armor and cutting their skin where it is exposed. HWMS blasts them with his Hunting Hounds of Wind technique, which he customarily uses to induce bloodloss in a target he intends to tire out in an extended hunt, those he can’t engage in melee range to envenom with his tail. Though it tires him, he immediately follows it up with an untitled overpowering blast of wind, like those that precede a disastrous storm. The Staves are staggered, and HWMS sprints back into melee action.

The Staves remain disciplined in the face of his onslaught, and two of the crossbowmen are able to raise their weapons in time to attempt a shot before he closes the distance - but his Hunting Hounds had snapped their strings ahead of time. He winds a clawed hand back and whips it forward, scoring a series of bloody marks across the face of one crossbowman as the other realizes the problem and draws a short sword while he brings his metal buckler to bear.

“Delay it!” cries the Stave who manned the beam weapon, seemingly the captain of sorts. He scrambles over to the destroyed weapon and begins to reassemble it, withdrawing more parts to replace those that were demolished entirely. The crossbowmen draw melee weapons, and the spearmen close in with their spears and swords.

He-Who-Mourns-Silently knows he cannot hope to survive if they are allowed to group into a formation and dice him to pieces as one, so he channels wind along the length of his fist and thrusts forward into a cluster of Staves to bowl them over. HWMS brings his other arm up to knock a thrusting spear aside, then twists his torso downward to allow his barbed tail to lance out and strike into the side of the attacker’s neck, in the groove between his studded leather collar and his jaw. Venom begins to flow into the Stave’s bloodstream from the barbed tip, and HWMS withdraws it an instant later to strike at the next foe. The Stave whose face he slashed before lunges at him with a short sword, but the Man of Twisted Writ summons a gust of wind to slam him to the side, right into his uppercutting arm. The impact knocks the man out clean, and HWMS moves on to his next foe.

A spear whistles through the air, swung sideways, and HWMS ducks beneath it. Another Stave jerks up from the floor of crushed crystal, lunging with his longsword. He-Who-Mourns knocks it aside with his tail and jabs him in the chest with the same limb a moment later. The barb can’t pierce his studded leather gambeson, but it does knock the wind out of him with the impact. HWMS allows the spearman’s follow-up stab to lightly penetrate a plate of chitin that covers his chest, then grabs the weapon’s haft with one hand. He brings his other elbow up and forward, then drops it down on the wooden implement, cracking it in two. Then, he yanks the spear tip and remaining shaft-piece out of his chitin, then brings it into a downwards arc towards his attacker’s shoulder, perforating the man’s armor and his flesh.

3 Staves have been incapacitated. The Stave whose arm HWMS broke earlier seems to have gotten over it and is holding his sword in one hand and his spear in the other as he stalks towards his animalistic foe, but before he’ll get here the other 3 Staves press the attack on HWMS, all to protect their captain preparing the beam weapon.

Calling on the wind does drain He-Who-Mourns-Silently of some stamina, but he is an endurance hunter. There’s a roaring of wind behind and around him, as currents rush through the holes that perforate his forearms, calves, back, and neck, channelling it and endowing it with his will. His attackers raise their shields or bucklers, but He-Who-Mourns-Silently doesn’t plan to be bothered by such defenses. He twists his arm as he thrusts it forward, holding his palm as if he planned to smash it into their shields - but it is not his flesh that strikes them. The roaring wind rushes forwards, focused into a laser-point by his will. The enemy’s shield shatters and the attack continues past it, drilling into his torso and penetrating that too. The aura of wind that comes with it throws the men adjacent to his unfortunate target aside, and he rushes forward to pass the gap between them.

He-Who-Mourns-Silently tramples the convulsing body of the man he just disemboweled with his Windburn Rapier, and shoves the other two aside. He has spent too much time now dealing with the lesser Staves - if the captain is allowed to finish his weapon, HWMS could be totally erased in a single attack, given what it did to the crab-shark. He’ll overpower him and dash his creation against the crystal before he can -

The Stave with the healed broken arm, wielding his spear and sword each, sprints to intercept. He twists and hurls his spear in a deadly accurate arc, and though the winds around HWMS ambiently make him more difficult to strike with projectiles, the man seems to have predicted this. A spear that would have missed any other target is pulled towards He-Who-Mourns-Silently by his own defenses, and in an instant he’s blinded with pain. He takes another step forward and then stumbles, sinking to his knees as his leg screams at him. The spear has sunk nearly half its length into his thigh, coming out bloody on the other side. He-Who-Mourns-Silently considers the injury for a moment.

No matter. He stands up straight again, sinking into his power’s reserves to blast the enduring Stave with a gale of wind, knocking him on his back. With luck, the impact of his head on crushed crystal will knock him out of the fight for good this time. He-Who-Mourns-Silently takes several slowed steps forwards before he is interrupted again - tackled from behind by the Stave he dosed with venom moments earlier.

You… shouldn’t be able to move… he thinks at his opponent as he is brought to his knees once more, bringing his tail up to stab the man in the back over and over as he tries to trudge onward with the added weight. But it’s too late already. The captain has his weapon ready, and is hauling it with both arms to face He-Who-Mourns-Silently. His face is smoldering with killing intent, but colored with something else, too.

“You’re in the shot, Vennes. Let him go. I won’t miss,” he calls, addressing the man still grappling HWMS.

“I’m-” begins the man, interrupted by another thump into his back from HWMS’ tail. He definitely scored flesh that time. “I’m dead already. He’s too fast. Take the shot,” he says. The captain nods.

He-Who-Mourns-Silently supposes he’d appreciate the man’s bravery in another situation besides this. But his primal instincts are screaming at him to move. He summons the last vestiges of his draining strength and leaps down and to the side, but the man keeps his arms wrapped around his waist from behind. There’s a flash of light.

The last Man of Twisted Writ’s ears are filled with a keening buzz as a red lance of energy emerges from the Staves’ superweapon, destroying it in the process. He tries to twist out of the way, but he’s a sitting duck with this dead weight tied around him. The attack strikes his right side, and most of his body goes dead to his senses a moment later. He dreams of his childhood.