Snippet #2538204

The camp was burning, and a wave of thugs came out. Some hesitant, others in a dead sprint. Bliston couldn't get an exact number through all the smoke, but he reckoned this wasn't all of them. That could be both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because it meant that they could be dealt with one wave at a time. Bad because it meant more people left that could spot the insertion team. This would have to be handled in a special manner, taking the first wave down quickly enough to draw a second out but not to quickly or they'd fright retreat back. Thankfully the Vasqueran brat was doing something to help alleviate the problem a bit by launching another blast where a few of the thugs were still clumped in the camp. That would help provoke things a bit.

Mean while down in the clearing itself, it seemed the horned man had succeeded in drawing the most of the attention on him. Well, that suited him just fine he figured. A few were trying to maneuver around to his flanks while others rushing him blindly. He smirked under his helm, hefted his great club in both hands, and swung.

Crunch

The first man to come in range suddenly felt his left side being obliterated as Hevnoraak smashed into his arm, destroying the wooden shield attached and pulverizing him on contact. His blood curtailing scream was the only warning the man next to him got as the stone club continued uninterrupted on its course and carried the ruined body of it's previous victim into the next, knocking him of his feet. Two bodies went flying, though one was clearly worse off in terms of injuries having taken the brunt of the initial impact, the other only badly bruised.

"YES!" Bliston barked loudly. "Come to me!" One of the bandit's trying to get around him leapt forward to try and stab him. The bandit was caught by surprise, however, when that huge stone club swung around over head and came down on his shoulders. "My warclub hungers!" Another thug tried the same tactic from the other side but was meet with similar results when Hevnoraak's spiked head looped around again, coming in low this time, and crushed the man's knee cap.

It was a difficult thin fighting with a blunt weapon like a warclub, much different than a sword. The weight was at the completely opposite end of the killing tool, which meant that making sudden stops and sharp turns incredibly more difficult and wasteful in terms of stamina. Weapons like this relied on continuing the momentum generated by the initial swing to keep it's speed up, making a circular motion to return it to a 'ready' position for the next strike and avoiding expending more energy trying to get that speed back. You had to be even more careful to avoid over extending yourself because of how easy it was to leave an opening for your opponent if you couldn't get back into the 'ready' position quick enough. Such a thing required a tight amount of control, of both your weapon and your body if you wanted to be effective at defending yourself with it.

And in that moment Bliston was an exemplar of control. Not a twitch of a muscle was with out purpose, not a movement wasted in effort. The bandits closest got a front seat lesson as to why Bliston had become as famed as he was, and quickly halted their frontal assault to back up when it became clear that wasn't going to work. Everyone that didn't learn that lesson found themselves broken and bleeding on the ground several feet away.

Bliston, however, was amusing himself. "Feed my hunger for violence mortals! He laughed. It was one of the very few perks of being what he was. He could make as much of a hammy performance about being some big scarey monster come to do horrible things to their spines, and no matter how over the top it was it could still work as an intimidation tactic. "Bleed for me!" He cried, taking a step. "SCREAM FOR ME!" He took a swing at the nearest group to drive them back. "DIE FOR MEEEEE!"

It was as he was making this ridiculous show of himself that Bliston noticed some thing clang off his armor. A blur of something moving rather fast shooting toward his left, trying to bypass him and get to the rest of the team. Not having any of that, he roared and swept his stone club overhead and down on whoever it was that was ignoring him.