The Cursed Extra

Chapter 166: [3.39] Beautiful Idiocy

"A Blackwood fights with whatever tools are available until there are no tools left at all. Then he fights with his hands."

***

But he wouldn’t die on his knees.

That single, stubborn thought burned in his chest like an ember refusing to be extinguished.

The world had taken everything from him. His status. His dignity. His place among people who would never see him as anything more than a border peasant with pretensions above his station.

But this one thing, this final choice about how he met his end, belonged to him and him alone.

Rhys lunged for his spear.

His fingers closed around the familiar ashwood shaft just as the shaman brought its staff down.

The creature was aiming not for his body, but for the weapon itself.

It understood, in whatever twisted way its kind could understand anything, that destroying the spear would break something in him far more thoroughly than any wound to flesh.

The last symbol of his resistance.

The last piece of his father he still carried.

The impact was tremendous.

The staff, reinforced with dark magic and weighted with bone, struck the spear’s shaft with the force of a falling tree. The collision sent vibrations racing up through Rhys’s arms. Numbed his fingers. Rattled his teeth.

The sound that followed wasn’t the sharp crack of breaking wood.

It was something far worse.

A high, keening wail that seemed to come from the spear itself. As if the weapon were screaming in pain. As if three generations of Blackwood blood and sweat and sacrifice were crying out in their final moments.

The ashwood held for a heartbeat.

His grandfather had chosen that particular branch himself. Cut it during the harvest moon when the wood was supposed to be strongest. His father had spent weeks treating it with oils and resins. Singing the old border songs that the common folk believed could bless a weapon.

All of that history. All of that love.

Compressed into a single heartbeat of resistance.

Then it snapped.

The break wasn’t clean. The shaft splintered along its length. Sharp fragments of wood flew through the air like shrapnel. One piece caught Rhys across the cheek. Opened a line of blood from his ear to the corner of his mouth.

The pain was distant. Almost irrelevant compared to the hollow ache that bloomed in his chest.

The spearhead clattered across the stone floor and came to rest against the tunnel wall. It lay there in the flickering torchlight. Still gleaming with the care Rhys had always given it.

Now orphaned and useless.

Rhys found himself holding a jagged stub of wood barely two feet long. The break had left the end sharp and splintered.

It was no longer a weapon.

Just a piece of broken furniture.

The shaman stepped back. Its yellow eyes gleamed with satisfaction that bordered on ecstasy. It said something in its alien tongue. Probably commenting on the futility of mortal resistance.

Then it raised its staff again. Preparing to finish what it had started.

The bone fetishes tied to its length clattered against each other. A sound like dead men applauding.

Rhys looked at the broken remains of his father’s spear.

Three generations of Blackwoods had carried that weapon.

His grandfather had used it to defend the village from a pack of dire wolves during the winter when Rhys’s father was still a child. The old man had stood alone at the village gate for six hours. The snow piling around his boots. Refusing to give ground even when the beasts had torn the flesh from his arms.

His father had wielded it in a dozen goblin raids. Always returning home safe because the spear had never failed him.

Every nick in the wood told a story of survival against impossible odds.

Now it was gone.

Destroyed.

Just like everything else in his life seemed to be.

The shaman’s chanting resumed. Softer now but no less menacing. The creature was taking its time. Savoring his despair the way a nobleman might savor a fine wine.

It wanted him to understand exactly how helpless he was before it delivered the killing blow.

Rhys thought about Elara.

Waiting in their cottage for medicine that would never come. She would be sitting by the window right now, probably. Watching the road for the courier who sometimes brought letters from her brother.

Her breath would come in those shallow, rattling gasps that had first sent him running to the village healer. Her skin would be pale. Too pale. And her eyes would hold that tired acceptance that made him want to scream and break things.

He thought about his father.

Who would never know what had happened to his son or his cherished spear. The old man would wait at the cottage door each evening. Watching the sunset and wondering when word would come.

Eventually he would have to accept that no word would ever come.

He thought about all the promises he’d made and would never be able to keep.

The medicine. The better cottage. The chance to see Elara smile again.

The anger that rose in him then wasn’t the hot, blazing fury of battle.

It was something colder. More focused.

The kind of rage that comes from having everything you care about stripped away piece by piece while the universe watches with indifference.

It was the anger of a man who had played by the rules. Who had worked harder than anyone around him. Who had earned his place through blood and sweat. Only to watch the nobles laugh and the system grind him down regardless.

He looked at the broken shaft in his hands.

Then at the grinning shaman.

The creature expected him to beg. Or cry. Or simply give up and wait for death to take him.

That’s what its kind fed on.

The despair of the defeated.

The surrender of the strong.

He reversed his grip on the splintered shaft. Held it like a club. The broken end was sharp enough to punch through flesh if he could get close enough to use it.

It wasn’t much of a weapon. It was barely a weapon at all.

But it was what he had.

And a Blackwood fought with whatever tools were available until there were no tools left at all.

The shaman saw his stance and laughed.

A sound like grinding bones. Like the death rattle of something that had never truly lived. It gestured dismissively with its staff. As if to say that his defiance was pointless. That his resistance was merely prolonging the inevitable.

Pointless, maybe.

Probably.

Almost certainly.

The creature was faster. Stronger. Armed with magic that Rhys could barely comprehend. Any rational assessment of the situation would conclude that he was already dead and simply hadn’t stopped moving yet.

But Rhys had never been one to do the practical thing when the right thing was available.

His father had called it the Blackwood stubbornness.

His mother had called it beautiful idiocy.

Right now, he called it the only option that let him look at himself in whatever mirror the afterlife provided.

He charged.