**Janus**
My body felt like lead.
In all my life, I have never been this tired.
We have been fighting nonstop for the last 18 days, maybe? I myself haven’t slept for at least three whole days. Or at least I think it was three or four…
I can’t remember. I’m so stressed and occupied with fighting that my hands have calloused, scabbed over, and reopened again. My sword has gotten so blunt that it couldn’t even cleanly cut butter. Even Joel had to drop the bow in favor of his sword because we ran out of arrows faster than we could make new ones.
Everyone was tired and dirty, and we all lacked so much sleep that some of us collapsed mid-sword swing, only to be overrun and devoured by the undead hordes.
We lost the wall 10 days ago. Their bodies had piled up around the wall so much despite us burning them multiple times that they could just climb over the corpses and wall with ease. We had to resort to makeshift barricades made from whatever we could find on the streets.
We have lost about half of our initial manpower. At least I hope we only lost this much. I haven’t had the time to do a head count in ages. So we had to fill this gap by “conscripting” others.
Now, every man, woman, and many children were fighting for their lives with whatever they had. We retreated to the city center. This would be our last stand against the undead horde.
Our makeshift group of Soldiers, Housewives, farmers, and children was fighting along our makeshift walls with swords, spears, pans, hoes, sticks, and stones, respectively. In our midst were the non-combatants, the elderly, toddlers, and the crippled, as well as everyone who had been wounded during the undead onslaught. Among them was even the woman we had saved from the farm. She didn’t want to fight because she didn’t want to endanger her unborn child. She fervently believed the baby was her husband’s, though many believed differently. And despite the priests best effort the death toll and the amount of injured just kept rising.
If this keeps going, we won’t see the next morning, and the sun was already hanging low.
Something has to change, or we will all die.
I swing my sword down on a lumbering corpse, and two more step in its place.
My arm feels like it’s falling off, but instead of letting go, I grip my sword even harder.
I take a step forward, crushing a skeleton’s head under my boot. And stab one of the two undead straight through its eye socket. I pull out, smashing the other one’s head on my return swing, and ready myself for the next undead. This time, I’m greeted by the corpse of a five-foot-tall toad pushing its way through the groaning crowd. I perform an overhead swing, crushing its broad head like an overripe watermelon.
My legs are about to give out under me, but I force myself to stand.
The undead that had been pushed to the sides by the giant toad began to assault me from all sides. I take a step back and prepare my sword at my right side for a wide swing. A moment later, my sword destroys their brittle bones and flesh, severing my attackers in half. But before I can take care of their toppled upper halves by smashing their heads in, I even more push in, trampling their fallen comrades underneath.
My lungs are burning to the point of collapse, but I still keep breathing raspy breaths.
In the distance, I hear a warhorn being blown. But to me, it hardly registered. I begin to stop caring for the people fighting by my side or the people I’m protecting. I can only think about fighting and killing the enemies right in front of me. I forgot about Collin, Trudy, Joel, and even about Ruby, whom I hadn’t been able to get out of my head for the whole month. Right now, there is only me and my enemy.
Again and again, my sword falls, cleansing another abomination. With every swing, I ascend another poor soul to the heavens. More and more of them fall to my blade, and slowly but surely, my burnt-out body goes faster and faster. My muscles stop aching with every swing and stab, and even my breathing becomes steadier after every breath. Somehow, my body starts moving again with renewed energy.
I feel a power rising within myself that I have never felt before.
It feels like I’m on the threshold of something greater, something I need to survive, something grand that will let me defeat… everyone.
But right before I feel like I could already touch it, there are no more enemies in front of me. I look around only to find everyone staring at me. Around me, the whole ground is covered in banished undead. And for the first time in weeks, there was no noise except for the rhythmic sound of Horseshoes hitting the dirty cobblestone streets, slowly approaching our position.