Restart Again: Volume 1 by Adam Scott (pocket ebook reader TXT) 📕

When I went to stand, I found myself face to face with a horrified Lia. That bolt would have taken her between the eyes. A new layer of fury took hold of me, and I let out a roar of pain and anger.

The second twin was scrambling to his feet on my right, and Porks was hastily reloading the crossbow behind the table on my left. Instinctually, I regained my footing and pointed the bastard sword at the twin. “FIRE!” The fierce bellow left my lips as I poured the full force of my mana through my right arm. The blade erupted with a swirling column of flame, jetting across the room to engulf the approaching foe. Shadows lengthened and danced frantically in the deadly crimson light.

A horrible scream came from the flaming figure as he flailed desperately against the licking fire. Without a second thought, I turned my sights to Porks, still fumbling with the crossbow. Behind him, Jack had paled to a ghostly white, and was kicking benches and chairs down to fill the space between us. He was shouting incoherently at Porks, which only seemed to confuse the fat little man even further.

I crossed the length of the room in three steps, a product of my Windstep and my driving anger. Porks looked up at me, his face contorted in frustration over the difficulty he was having with the crossbow. By the time he realized he was under attack, he was already dead; a deadly quick slash lopped his head from his neck without resistance. It bounced off the corner of the table next to his decapitated body and rolled up to Jack’s feet. He looked down at it in horror.

“What the fuck ARE you?” he shouted, trying to retreat further into the room. His progress was quickly blocked by an overturned table, trapping him in a corner with the bed frame.

Silently, I stalked forward. Blood was running down my left arm, dripping onto the floor to mark my progress across the room, but I hardly felt the wound. The pain would come later, after the adrenaline and the bloodlust had subsided. Right now, my singular reason for being was to destroy the man named Jack standing before me.

He held out a dagger before him in one hand and wielded a longsword in the other. I observed from his stance that he had more combat training than the others, but I was unconcerned. “Just stop. STOP!” Jack was screaming now, any sort of confidence or composure he had moments before long lost to him.

For some reason beyond me, I stopped walking. I was only ten feet from him, easily within range of a deathblow, but some dark part of me needed to know more about him. Standing in silence, I slowly raised my blade to point at his face. “Why are you doing this, you maniac?” He shouted at me, clearly unnerved. Without a word, I pointed my sword to Lia, still standing by the door, and then to the bed.

“What, are you some kind of hero? Is that it?” Jack sneered at me. “If you’re so heroic, you aren’t going to kill me, right? I’ll be taken in for justice?” Somehow, the man had convinced himself that even though there were four fresh corpses before him, he was somehow special. Unfortunately for him, he was right.

Through my clenched jaw, I managed to choke out a few words. “You...don’t deserve...death.”

Jack’s face shifted, first to fear, but quickly to a false facade of confidence. “Oh, I see. She your little girlfriend or something? Trying to save her from the bad men so she’ll love you better?” He pointed his longsword towards her. “I’m going to kill you, bastard, and then I’m going to tie her to this fucking bed, and I’m going—”

I couldn’t understand why he said what he did, and I was long past the point of caring about conversation. A man like Jack probably lived his life getting under people’s skin until they made a mistake he could exploit. In our situation, though, Jack failed to realize that I wasn’t operating with any form of reason or planning that could be abandoned.

The blood along the face of my sword began to bubble and hiss violently as my vision narrowed with the pulsing red light from before. An ominous black energy swirled around the blade, shimmering like a nearly invisible flame. It came completely unbidden, drawing heavily on my energy reserves, but I could feel an overwhelming power in the unknown effect, and I allowed it to continue. With a cold, menacing look, I stared Jack down and hissed, “Suffer.”

My blade snapped up quickly, an arcing upward slash sent towards his dagger side. A small grin curled Jack’s lip, most likely believing he had goaded me into an unwise attack. He moved, so incredibly slowly, to flick away the attack with his dagger. At this point I was running on pure combat instinct, and his actions seemed so obvious. He would attempt to redirect my strike outwards, and then follow up with a slice to my unguarded side.

As soon as my sword connected with his parrying dagger, I gripped the pommel with my empty hand and wrenched the strike inward. The redirect caught him by surprise, catching his dagger at an awkward angle as he struggled to repel the blow. The attack had less power behind it due to the change in direction, but it was enough to draw the tip of my sword across his chest.

The instant the blade made contact, Jack shrieked with pain. He stumbled backwards, dropping his weapons as he scrabbled at his jerkin in panic. The creeping black energy from my sword was seeping from the cut in his armor now with a faint hissing sound, increasing in volume by the second. Jack collapsed to his knees and convulsed as thick, dark lines began to work their way up his neck. They curled and wound around the base of his jaw, sending black