Sword fighting was never something that I was trained for. Swords are not weapons that mix well with ballistic combat in jungle and urban environments. Knives, on the other hand, are the backup weapon of choice for anyone who is unfortunate enough to be disarmed of both their main weapon and sidearm. Small and fast, knife fighting is a high-speed activity where the outcome of the conflict is determined in seconds or less, and escaping unscathed is near-impossible for anyone with baseline human reflexes. Knives can also be thrown as a last-ditch ranged attack or a silent way of taking down an unaware opponent. Unfortunately for me, the knife in my hand was neither balanced nor built for the kind of combat I was used to, so I was fighting with it as though it was a spiked baton instead.

Just after deflecting a near-lethal blow that would have cut apart half of my neck, I was forced to kick off of the ground and fall backwards to dodge another which came from overhead. As my back hit the ground, I shifted my weight up over my head to begin a flip and somersaulted upwards into a standing position. The guards yelled something to each other, but the awful thumping noise in my ears was too loud for me to hear it properly. A trail of blood followed my path along the ground, dripping from the severed neck of the merchant's head which was still in my hand.

After a moment's hesitation, the third guard who was furthest from me dashed at me from my left, clearly angling for a thrust that would be hard to parry. I underhanded the merchant's head at him from close range, breaking his nose with the impact and almost knocking him over. As he recovered I dashed in and struck him under his left arm, twisting and digging the knife on the way out to pull as much muscle tissue from his body as I could using its notch. I then stabbed again, this time aiming for the guard's eye, and buried the blade to the hilt in his brain. His body went limp and my left hand caught the sword dropping from his right hand.

My own right hand left the hilt of the knife and met with my left in a two-handed grip on the sword I was now wielding. Approximately ninety centimeters long in total, it was not quite a longsword but too large to be considered a shortsword. A simple cross hilt protected the hands, and the pommel had a downward-facing spike for bashing. The two other guards spared no time rushing in, with the one on my right swinging horizontally at my torso and the one on the left aiming for a largely vertical strike at my left shoulder. I just have to keep in mind that I can heal quickly, I thought to myself a split second before I acted.

Opting to move right, I blocked the horizontal strike and dodged in that direction, feeling the left guard's blade bite into my hip as I failed to fully dodge the downward strike. The right guard's strike was deflected by the entire moving force of my body, causing it to come to a standstill and make the sword recoil powerfully in their hands as they stepped back to a safer distance. Wielding my sword like a club, I turned so that my left side faced the guard while my right chambered the weapon. I shuffle-hopped forward to gain momentum, twisting my hips and putting the full force of my core behind a simple wide strike. The guard attempted to block, holding his sword up and bracing it with his off-hand, but the impact of my blow proved too strong for either weapon to withstand.

With an ear-splitting crack the guard's sword split in the middle where I struck it, flinging metal shards back into his face. My blade soon followed, cutting in just above the tip of the nose and sinking diagonally upwards until it stopped above the ears. Another crack sounded out and my own blade snapped, leaving me holding approximately thirty percent of its total length which was still attached to the hilt while the other seventy percent remained embedded in the guard's head. The man was flung back onto the ground, where he lay still, eyes open and looking at the sky. I, on the other hand, was put off balance by the reduction in weight from the weapon breaking and stumbled forwards.

Roaring like a beast, the other guard came at me once again, throwing out a reckless blow that seemed to be aimed at my torso. I tried to block the attack with my broken blade, using two hands to support the metal, but the guard's sword glanced off and slid down the outside edge of my arm, cutting and tearing skin as it went. The one advantage to the maneuver was that the guard's sword was now heading directly towards the ground. As it impacted the dirt, I did a half-turn and stomped the blade's flat as hard as I could, pulling the guard into a stumbling position as they struggled to keep their grip. I took advantage and ripped their helmet off with my still-bleeding left arm, then bashed them over the head with it, knocking them to the ground.

I had perhaps a second to pin the guard, and the fight went from dueling to pankration. Using my legs as a vice, I squeezed their hips to impede their movement and pinned their right arm with my left. My right brought my broken sword’s hilt spike down on them, cracking their skull with the first hit and spilling brain matter on the ground with the next two. Amazingly the guard was somehow still breathing despite the extreme brain trauma, but it appeared to be pre-death agonal breathing. My amazement at the dying guard’s durability was interrupted by a sword stabbing into my right shoulder from in front of me. I felt the blade pass all the way through, poking out of the skin on my back, and looked up to see a terrified face in a helmet looking back at me. Right, there were four guards, I remembered.

Somehow the attack had caused my right hand to lose its grip on the broken sword and it clattered to the ground, covered in gore. For a moment there was relief on the guard's face as he thought he had somehow defeated me. Unfortunately for him, my left arm was now healed. I reached out, gripping his tiny neck in my hand, and began to crush it. The panicking guard tried to pull his sword out to strike me again, but I flexed the muscles on my right side that I did still have good control over to pinch the blade in right between my bones, then pulled my body closer to him so there was no way he could escape.

The guard kicked, flailed, and wrenched at me with increasing desperation as his air supply dwindled and blood failed to reach his brain. He tripped and fell backwards, and I fell on top of him deliberately. Forgetting he even had a weapon, his hands reached for my face and began to claw at it, trying to tear into my eyes and nose. I snapped at his fingers with my teeth, biting two of them off on his right hand and three fingertips off on his left while I increased the pressure on his neck. His windpipe had long since collapsed, but I needed to keep strangling him to ensure that he passed out because the lack of air alone didn't seem to be enough.

The flailing grew weaker, along with the guard's healing ability, as the lack of blood supply to his brain began to affect him. His fingers had scabbed over quickly and grown new skin over the stumps when I first bit them, but he tore a nail off some time later which bled far longer than expected. His eyes bulged and went bloodshot, and eventually he stopped flailing and went still. Not one to be tricked, I stood up, pulled the sword from my shoulder, and shoved it through his skull into the dirt below. I was panting, covered in gore, still wounded, and victorious.

The first thing I did after looking around to ensure that no other hostiles were within melee range was check my heads-up display. It was a mess. The red bar was at least ten percent empty, the blue was almost eighty percent empty somehow, the purple had barely ten percent left in it and the green was as it usually was. I also felt physically weak, as though my body was trying to restrain my actions to keep me from overheating or damaging it. I looked around me and noticed just how large of a pool of blood had formed on top of the last guard while I was strangling him, and felt my balance shift unpleasantly. I shouldn't make a habit of that, I thought as I wiped my face with my right hand, then looked at my sword wound. Grisly as it was when it was inflicted, all that remained of it was a scar.

“You,” I growled, pointing to the farmer who had been hiding behind one of the merchant's wagons the entire time. “My clothing and weapons. Get them. Now.” The farmer was frozen in a failure of fight or flight, a phenomenon I had seen before in lesser animals. The man was twenty paces or so away from me, so physically jostling him out of his stupor was not a good option. Inhaling sharply with annoyance, I turned back to the first dead guard and removed the merchant's knife from his head. Thankfully he stayed dead, and I managed to avoid stumbling too much from my balance system malfunction. I need to get out of here before someone else tries to stop me, I said to myself, I might have to just leave the gear.

Now back up straight, I wrestled my eyes back to where I wanted them to be pointing and saw the two village guards approaching with spears out. What kind of suicidal idiots are these people? I couldn't help but wonder. Both of them were shaking from nervousness, and each was just barely inching towards me as if trying not to get ahead of the other one. Fine, I thought, what's the consequence of killing two more humans really? Not much. I threw the merchant's knife and, by some miracle, it impacted blade-first and sunk halfway into one of the guard's chests. The struck guard screamed out and dropped his spear, and the other dropped his spear as well and dragged the injured one away. Idiots, I thought.

“Yuwniht?” a voice asked from behind me. I spun around, a poor choice considering my balance situation, and saw a boy looking at me from behind a building. Mihvay emerged from his hiding spot, to some protest from other people who were out of view, and slowly walked towards me. Watch for explosives, I thought to myself, poison too. It's almost funny they would try something this cliché. “Uhm, Yuwniht, you understand me right? Are you okay?”

“Bring me my clothing and weapons,” I instructed, “and stay back. Stop there, do not come any closer or I will assume you have hostile intent.” Mihvay froze in place fifteen paces from me. I searched him up and down with my eyes, looking for bulges in his clothing that could indicate hidden weapons. Wait, what if they- I spun around and looked behind me for guards with blowguns, stumbling as I struggled to keep standing. Looking back at Mihvay I saw something like pity in his eyes.

“The, um, you don't know this word yet,” Mihvay began, “the leaders of the village, the Nihmpaoawpt and Yihmpaoawpt, they said to tell you that they want to give you a reward.” Silence filled the air for a moment as the wind blew past us.

“I can understand if they think I'm stupid,” I replied, “but you should tell them that I'm not nearly dumb enough for a trick like that to work.” Mihvay frowned and looked at his feet.

“They were serious,” Mihvay said, “they told me to tell you they meant it.” He's a child, I thought, of course he would believe something like that. I keep forgetting that even though he's smart, his social maturity is quite low.

“Tell them to bring me the reward then,” I said. “Bring it here and drop it where you're standing. Also, bring me my clothing and weapons.” Mihvay pursed his lips and grinded one of his feet against the ground, looking uncomfortable. You're wasting time, the nagging voice of my rational mind whispered in my ear.

“Part of the reward cannot be brought to you,” he said quietly. “It is a jhkahvoydh, one that was no longer being used.” This is a ploy, I concluded, I have to get out of here now. Everything around me was getting weirdly bright all of a sudden. My body had begun to relax and all of my limbs felt even heavier than before. I was reminded of the purple bar in my heads-up display and realized that I was on the edge of being too exhausted to move. Movement crept up to my right, and I snapped towards it, raising my hands into a fighting stance. Two humans yipped and dropped a cloak on the ground, then dashed off.

“I don't want the reward,” I said to Mihvay as I walked to the location of the cloak. My legs were heavy and I stumbled twice. I bent down and grasped the material, then took a breath and began to stand back up to put it on. Mihvay yelled something and when I looked to him he was running towards me. Bomb? was all I had time to think before I noticed the dart in my chest. Looking past Mihvay, I saw an old-looking human man in ornate clothing holding a blowgun. I fell over backwards and smashed my head against the ground, ending my thoughts in an instant.