Hive Knight: A Dark Fantasy LitRPG (Trinity of the Hive Book 1) by Grayson Sinclair (black authors fiction txt) 📕

raining down to fill the cracks in the flagstone floor. The glass shredded half of Darren’s face, but I was just getting started. The magic inside me oozed out of my heart to stain my fury while my vision filled with swirling shadows.

Letting go of Darren’s arm, I kneed him in the groin hard enough that he doubled over. Taking his bloodstained face in my hands, I slammed it onto the corner of the heavy wooden table, cracking the wood and sending the table to the ground.

Darren slid off the table onto the floor, his face leaving a trail of blood on the wood. He hit the stone with a soft thud and groaned.

His three cohorts decided to stand up from their table and join in the fight. Their eyes glared daggers at me, staring in disbelief that I had taken out their boss so quickly. They moved as one to intercept me.

Perfect.

As soon as they moved from their chairs, I kicked the table at them hard enough that the thick wood splintered in two. The shattered pieces hit them like a freight train, taking their legs out from under them.

With them out of the fight for a second, I turned my attention back to Darren, who was still lying in a slowly growing pool of his own blood. The wounds I’d dealt were painful and very messy, but he wasn’t out of commission yet.

I reached down, taking hold of his right arm, his sword arm, and twisted. His bones cracked and shattered under my fingers, and I savored the sound his bones made as I broke them into little pieces. Broken and jagged edges tore through his thin skin to reveal bone and yellowed marrow. Blood streamed down his arm to join the pool on the floor.

Good thing he’s unconscious. Otherwise, he’d be screaming bloody murder right now.

With Darren out of the fight, and the threat of a sword in the back removed. I focused on the others. Who were just now painfully picking themselves off the floor. They stared in horror at what I’d done. Darren’s hand twisted at an impossible angle and spurting blood like a fountain.

“You monster!” Mikhail shouted and rushed me.

“Fool.”

In the close confines of the bar, the three of them could have surrounded me easily. Mikhail had obviously never been in a bar fight before as he unstrapped his halberd from his back. In such confined space, his weapon would be a hindrance at best and fatal at worst.

Mikhail crouched into his fighting stance, which because of the length of his weapon, cut Wolf and Slip off from reaching me. I didn’t want to fight the halberd emptyhanded, and my sword was in my inventory, so I cast my eyes around the room and quickly settled on my prize.

Stepping back, my heel connected with the lip of the fireplace and ignoring the heat, I grabbed the iron poker Ruff had left in the center of the fire.

It seared into my palm, but I bit down on the pain and yanked it free amid a shower of smoke and embers. The sharp tip glowed cherry red, and waves of heat rose off it as I shifted into a fencing stance. Damn, I’m awful with a rapier, and the poker is a poor facsimile, but it’ll have to do.

Though, since the poker wasn’t considered a martial weapon, it wouldn’t affect my battle fatigue. And since I was unarmed facing an armed opponent, I was at a significant advantage.

Mikhail opened with a straight thrust, aimed at my heart. I sidestepped and parried with the poker, charring a line down the length of his wooden shaft. A quick lunge forward, and I stabbed the searing tip of the poker into Mikhail’s right hand.

The acrid tinge of sizzling flesh filled my nose, and I fought down the urge to gag. Mikhail howled in pain and let go of his weapon on reflex. I took hold of it as soon as he released it and jabbed the butt of the halberd into his gut, taking the wind out of him.

He doubled over in pain and I tossed the halberd aside. It slid across the floor to rest under the table of a couple of farmers too busy watching the show to notice.

Disarmed and in pain, Mikhail stood up, only to have a red-hot poker whip across his face. He stumbled back and fell on his ass, at which point Slip tried to intervene, but I saw him go for his dagger and changed my grip on the poker and threw it like a spear. My aim was off, and instead of hitting his hand, I nailed him in the thigh.

It cut through his flesh with ease and stuck in the bone. He screamed in pain as the burning metal cauterized the wound with the poker still entrenched inside him. Slip dropped to the floor and clutched at his leg while trying to go for a health potion.

“Wait your fucking turn,” I growled.

Mikhail wasn’t looking so hot. I’d seared a deep groove across his face with the poker and taken out one of his eyes in the process. One of his hands clutched at his ruined face while the other came up and swung at me. I slipped his punch and caught him on the chin with an uppercut, slamming him back to crash into a table.

The couple who were eating dinner at the time, shrieked and stood up quickly before running away, shouting their heads off.

Mikhail cursed in Old Russian as he stood up, the translator in my interface flashing what he said across my vision. Well, fuck you, too.

He was bloody and enraged and snarled as he charged me, disregarding any kind of form or technique. His wild swings went wide of me as I ducked and stepped back before snapping a low