Mane
With a sweep of his trusty sword, Mane shattered a wall of skeletons to the front of him, sending them back as a mess of crushed bones.
"Urah!" He bellowed with each swing of his sword. A sweat had worked its way upon his brow, but he did not falter, nor did he struggle. Even if there were a hundred of them, he'd put them in their place before they could get any ideas above their station.
They were reckless creatures, those skeletons. They fought with weapons in their hands, yet they were quite happy to dive forward headfirst and aim for the throat with their misshapen teeth. Those were the ones that caused the most problems.
Another one came at Mane in that fashion, a woman this time, the remnants of her blonde hair now a wisp of white against her skull. With an axe in hand, she claimed herself a warrior, but when she flung herself forward, jaws parted, she was revealed to be what she was – nothing but a monster.
Mane side-stepped her dive and brought his sword along the length of her body in the same motion, slicing her clean in half. Easily dealt with like that, the problem was the time. With so many of them, he could not afford to deal with them singularly. There were others vying for his attention, like five-hundred-year old children.
One managed to lock its teeth on Mane's arm, biting deep enough to reach bone. The first wound of the fight. Mane received it with nothing more than a grunt, before a gauntleted fist met the skeleton's skull and shattered it to pieces.
Slowly, he thinned those numbers down, with a feeling in his heart that was not too dissimilar to that of the battlefield, with the chaotic nature of the fight and with the innumerable men all rushing at him together. It was not the first time he'd had to fight over one hundred alone, only those men had been alive.
The 'alone' part was what irritated him. To his rear, there stood a man with a significant amount of strength, enough to turn the fight from a difficult endeavour into a certain easy victory. Yet, out of the corner of his eye, Mane spied him hardly contributing anything. He dealt with the skeletons one at a time, wielding a rusty axe with a childish clumsiness and a frown of dissatisfaction on his face all the while.
His apprentice was likely putting in more work. Well, perhaps not. It took him far too long to get through a single foe – but at least he was meeting it with an appropriate amount of zeal, at least he was using his full strength.
'No matter,' Mane thought to himself, his rage lending his sword more strength. He'd mow down the enemy without complaint and allow that man to see the difference between the two of them.
Only thirty or so skeletons remained by now, but they had wisened up a little. It was difficult to catch them all with a single sword swing. Then, past them, there were those five heavily armoured few who stood ominously like statues, not choosing yet to reveal their strength.
Mane wasn't keen on that, the way they stood there so grandly, as though they had some hidden cards to play. Their armour too – they must have been warriors of rank back before they died, seeing as though the metal had not even begun to decay. But, whether rank translated to strength was another matter.
Deftly, Mane loosened one of the throwing knives from the belt across his chest and he launched it with an accuracy straight through the skull of one of the skeletons, catching it first in the eye socket, just like he would with a living man.
As he'd hoped, that attack provoked the enemy. Eight more rushed forward, their bones clicking and an odd chirping noise coming from where there should have been a throat. Mane took them all down at once.
His breathing was a little laboured by now and his arms were tired, but those were sensations that he was used to – he felt he could fight forever in that state.
The last of them - some twenty-something skeletons - put it all into a single last attack, fanning out in a semi-circle, hoping to overwhelm him from all angles.
But two horizontal swings was all it took for Mane to deal with them. Their shattered bones collapsed to the floor.
One skeleton had managed to escape complete destruction. It still made noises by Mane's feet, its jaw moving frantically, trying to nibble on his ankle. A hard stomp from the heel of Mane's leather boot put an end to it.
And then, he leaned on his sword to catch his breath, eyeing those last five, daring them to make a move.
"I hate axes," he heard Ermos say in that irritatingly calm way that he had. Mane looked at him sharply, barely able to hold back the scolding that he was about to give him. Instead, he merely sighed, deciding that he wasn't worth it.
There must have been something wrong with him, Mane was convinced. There was nothing special about his body. He was of a very average build and a very average height, even his clothes were nothing special. His face was relatively plain, almost squirrel-like, with a lazy stubble hanging about his chin and a messy mop of long black hair falling from his top knot. In fact, from a single glance, Mane would have even described him as weak.
A movement from those last few armoured skeletons brought Mane back to a state of alertness. They moved themselves into a formation with an eerie robotism. To the front, there stood two extremely large men, one carrying a two-handed battle axe, the other with a simple curved chevalar's blade that was much too small for him.