Chapter 37: First Battle

At first I couldn't see it, but after a few seconds I felt a slight mental nudge from D'ar'Beth. The confusion of the fight clicked into focus and I started to see a pattern forming out of the chaos. The few seconds pause was sufficient, however, for the attackers of the column to charge us and while I was still processing the information, my Finger came into contact with a real enemy for the first time.

I found that while I fell instantly into the full gestalt of the Sword Dance, having D'ar'Beth joining in made me able to split my attention. I was multi-tasking on a level I had never thought possible, focusing on my own fight, managing the Finger in the fight as a group and also able to observe the broader battle and think critically about what was happening.

Our opponents were armed in almost the exact same manner as we were, with long swords, but their appearance otherwise was a little disturbing. They looked like men just like us, except that they seemed to be distorted somehow ... there was something just not quite right about them. I couldn't quite pinpoint the precise differences, I just knew that they were there.

We seemed to be very evenly matched in individual skill, but there were a lot more of them then there were of us. Within a few minutes, it became clear to me that our biggest advantage was in the fact that we were fighting as a true team, that the Sword Dance had added a qualitive advantage that was proving superior to their quantative one, and there were already a large number of our enemies who were clearly out of the fight while we had yet to sustain a single major injury.