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Of Arms and Arcane: Chapter 23
🕑 Added 2023-11-09 06:45:01 +0000 UTCThrowing knives came flying at Luke with men sprinting toward him behind said throwing knives.
Thankfully, the constant low burning aura allows my body to react in time and drop to the ground as 2 throwing knives embed themselves into the door behind me.
At this point, my heart was going crazy as adrenaline started pumping through my veins.
As I was recovering to my feet, I noticed one of the men was about to be on top of me with a dagger primed to stab forward and take my life. When the dagger lunged forward, I abandoned the idea of getting to my feet and rolled to the side and using the momentum of the roll to get back to my feet, right next to the tall accent table beside my room door with a flower vase on it.
I grabbed the vase and chucked it at the man who just tried to shank me while shouting “INTRUDER! ASSASSIN!” at the top of my voice, but with the body of a child, it was not very loud.
The man to whom I threw the vase at brought his arms up and it shattered when it hit his guard, but there was another problem, another assassin came from my side and tried to stab me.
I grabbed the tall accent table and brought it in front of myself to block the incoming stab, which I managed to block, but regardless of my successful block and my strength on par with a fully grown man, the difference in weight class was too great.
The assassin’s dagger stabbed into the tall accent table, lifting both me and the accent table off the ground and slamming me into the wall behind me.
When I hit the wall, the air was knocked out of my lungs as I was pinned to the wall by the tall accent table with the assassin holding it in position with a dagger sticking into said table.
And as I was pinned to the wall, I saw that the situation was not good. The guy I threw a vase at was coming to finish off my pinned ass and the other 3 assassins were now disregarding stealth and quickly moving toward my mum and sister’s rooms.
This was not good. I need to move and protect my family!
I may be as strong as the average grown man, but these assassins were trained and definitely stronger than me, I tried to push off the table pinning me by grabbing the legs and pushing but I was not strong enough.
I tried using my legs to push off the table, but my legs were too short and found nothing to push off of. This only left me with one avenue of attack.
I raise my right hand in a knifehand strike position, then gather and compress the mana for a wind blade I have been practicing until just moments ago.
As the mana for my strike quickly gathered, the eyes of the 2 assassins facing me opened wide in shock as they both stared at their own gauntlet in surprise and then at me. So I used their distraction to launch my attack.
I performed a swift horizontal knifehand strike in an arc that covered the 2 assassins facing me, sending a wide blade of compressed wind that caught the assassin who was keeping me pinned to the wall in his neck, opening a nasty gash and pushing him away at the same time.
As for the other assassin, he managed to react in time, he switched his dagger to a reverse grip, and brought it up to guard his head along with his other arm. When the wind blade hit him, it left scratches on the flat side of the long dagger, shredded his leather gauntlet while leaving a bloody grove, and because he was taller than the assassin that got hit in the neck, the wind blade also ripped into his shoulders and pushed him back a few steps.
“The boy’s a caster!” the assassin that managed to protect his vitals shouted, making the other 3 assassins who were about to reach their target’s door stop and turn around. There in the pale moonlight shining through the corridor window, they saw one of their fellow assassins on the floor clutching his throat to staunch the bleeding that already made a small puddle of blood and the other man still standing but his arms hanging low with blood dripping from them.
The final part of this scene is a child holding a tall accent table by its legs ready to strike.
The moment the 3 assassins noticed this and processed their comrade's warning, training took over and they rushed full speed at Luke because the worst thing anyone could do in a fight was to have their backs to an enemy caster, so now Luke had their undivided attention.
As the 3 men were closing in on him, Luke decided he very much needed a weapon, and as much as he wanted to use the dagger embedded in the accent table he was holding as an improvised weapon, he knew it would take too much time, but as he looked at the table legs, he had an idea.
‘I may not be able to get my hands on the dagger in time, but the legs on this table should be around the relatively the length of a long sword for my current body’ Luke thought to himself as he raised the table over his head and smashed it down on the floor.
What he was left with was a sturdy wooden table leg in each hand, Luke then let go of the table leg in his left hand and readied his stance as he now had both his hands on the table leg he still had. ‘I was never that proficient at dual wielding, better stick to what I know.’
Before the first of the 3 charging assassins reached me, the door behind me burst open, and out came my Grandpa in his pajamas wielding a staff and shouting “Assassin?! Where?!”, after a short look around, he locked eyes on the 3 assassins who stopped to assess the new threat.
A split second after that, a second door burst open revealing Mum in a nightgown with lightning arcing between her hands.
The last person to show up was Grandma wielding a wand with an orb of lightning at its tip. When my attention went back to the assassins, I noticed they all had throwing knives in their off-hands and were all pulled back and ready to launch.
So there we were, in the first Mexican standoff of both my lives. We may not have guns pointed at each other but there was magic and cool assassin throwing weapons, so I say it about evens out in terms of the coolness factor.
