Thread: The Day the Lights Went Out [Langschwert x Cal]

Sum Ferrum Dei! I am the sword of God. There arose from the back of the house a cry, a roar like the roar of a thousand lions, just as the eaters started to advance on the small family. There came from the other room a cry from the eaters, a bestial snarl of hatred. A crimson ribbon of blood flew from the other room, spattering the face of the eater that confronted her, causing it to turn just as a line of brilliant silver flashed into view, hardly pausing as it passed through the side of the eater's throat. Not far enough to completely sever the head. No, that would be risky...the blade might well stick in the spine, and that would leave the cutter defenseless. The eater had enough to deal with, though, as it's lifeblood washed over the floor from a cut jugular, falling to the ground still struggling just as her family's savior came into view. Quod sordidum munda, O Dei! Cleanse that which is unclean, O Lord, His voice cried, even as he charged into view. He was dressed in a modified Lorica Segmantata, the armor of the Roman Legions, with banded chest and high, banded shoulders. Those shoulders had been extended into arm guards of similar style, down past his elbows, where they were supplemented by greaves that protected his forearms and the back of his hand with only a single hinge at the wrist. Below, the chest guard was extended to form a skirt of metal plates, separated into four quadrants and joined by lengths of chain maille to allow him the requisite movement. Another length of metal protected his shins, with another hinged section falling down over the top of his stout leather boots. His helmet was reminisicent of a Samurai's helmet, with a solid top and falling, sliding metal plates that fell down to his shoulders to protect his neck from damage. All of the metal was enameled with a dark green spray paint, the exposed edges lined with black paint to display the individual plates of the armor. On the side of his helmet, there is a hand print surrounded by black spray paint, as if a man had laid his hand on the helmet and sprayed around it, which was exactly how it was made. His sword was a meter long, with a curved blade that was flatter than a katana's might be, with a deep fuller along either side to further lighten it. Silver quillions extended ahead at a forty five degree angle, topped with three pierced circles atop each like some Irish blades once carried. The handle was long enough for two hands in thick gloves, with perhaps an inch of space between the hands to give him extra leverage. The blade was capped with a silver pommel, shaped like the cap of an expensive bottle, that balanced the blade, and provided a weapon in it's own right. That was demonstrated when a back swing took his weapon too far out of line for a blade strike, and he was forced to punch forward into the face of a cannibal, the silvery steel of the pommel striking teeth from the man's head. The blade had been made for a rich man's plaything before the change, but it was far superior to anything he had found before or since. Already, among the people who followed him, it had the reputation of a holy blade, and one of great power. To the untrained, it seemed he danced amid the carnage, his blade cleaving left and right, yet to him he moved in an easy rhythm. He came out of pflug into langenort to pierce an eater's eye, then quickly retracted to nebenhut only to slash up into ochs to take off a hand reaching for him. The eaters were screaming as they attacked, wishing to be dead on some level in their madness caused by the strain of eating flesh, but they met the wall of steel that stood before them and were driven back. Another green-clad shape rushed into the light beside his leader, dressed in identical armor but carrying a large round shield and a short, thrusting sword clasped in his hand not holding the shield. Another joined on the other side of the first, armed identically to the second. Their fighting style was not so refined as the leader's, learned since the change instead of being practiced well before. A shrill edged cry came from the eaters as they flung themselves at the men, yet none slipped past. Indeed, an ululating wail came but a moment later as two more green-armored men burst in through the front door, the five men wading toward one another in the melee until at last they met, with close to fifteen eaters on the floor around them. They said nothing to the family, yet, as they began methodically going from eater to eater, silencing snarls with quick thrusts of their swords or the halberd one man carried, until at last a quiet fell over the house, the five men in green armor turning to face the back room where the family had taken refuge. Their path here had not been so easy as her family's. Michael, the leader, had been born the son of a farmer and a school teacher in a small town just outside of Athens, Georgia. The life he had lived before the change had been a harsh one...his mother was rarely at home, engaged in school work, but his father had filled in for his raising admirably when his mother hadn't been about. The time on the farm, with hard work and a tougher attitude, had strengthened his will and body admirably. He spent his summers camping and hunting, growing good with both a gun and a bow an arrow, taking his first deer by the time he was fifteen and doing it with primitive archery gear by the time he was sixteen. Indeed, save for one thing he was your average, american farm boy. That one thing was his love of the old. His father had scoffed at him in his attempts to use an old scythe when he was little more than ten years old. Why bother, the old man asked, when there was the combine that could cut the grain, thresh it, and deposit it directly into the truck. When he had bought the two horses, massive Belgian-Percheron crosses and begun to teach them how to draw a plow, his father had scratched his head. They did nothing that a tractor could not do better, and required keeping even when there was no work for them to do. He crafted bows out of saplings, foregoing the advantage of modern gear for the quiet competence of older technology. Still, his father had been indulgent...so long as his chores were done, his father allowed him to work more, as he saw it. It was, perhaps, inevitable that he picked up the sword soon after that. He trained with a group of fellow enthusiasts, men who studied the sword for fun and recreation, never guessing what a terrible purpose they might one day fulfill. He had even cleaned off the old forge deep in the woods, chasing off the squirrels that had made a nest in the rafters and pulling a hundred years of leaves out of the chimney. Days with a piece of sandpaper had saved the anvil, and several of the more useful hammers had been re-handled. In those days, the farm began to ring with a sound that had not been heard since the days of his great-grandfather, the sound of steel hammer hitting iron. He had made his first suit of armor out of automotive sheet steel, and had refined it over the years until he had it figured out to the best of his rather limited knowledge. A sword, though, was beyond him. The self-taught blacksmith had tried and tried to make a proper one for himself to replace the wooden sword that he had first trained with, but every one came out unsuitable. It wasn't until his eighteenth birthday, little more than a year before the change, that his father finally gave him one. A short, thrusting blade with a diamond cross section, starting narrow and widening till it was perhaps six inches from the tip, before narrowing to a wicked point. In another age, it would have been called a Gladius, and was the most fearsome weapon for one man to kill another ever invented, until Hiram Maxim invented his water-cooled machine gun and made every other weapon insignificant. It had been that day that he left for college in the big city of Atlanta, and left the quiet rural life behind. When the change hit, he had never wished to be home more than he did then. Within a week, the thugs that already infested the city saw it as a change to riot en-masse, and the city had alighted in flame. The police were helpless to stop it, overwhelmed by sheer numbers, and without their normal firepower to help them. Women were raped in the streets, stores were looted, and as the food supply rapidly dwindled more horrible acts were taken. Indeed, no one was quite sure which gang took the first taste of human flesh...but before long, the gangs were conducting raids solely to capture fresh meat, with those who were not in the gangs the easiest meat of all. Michael was gone long before then. He strapped his armor on his form two days after the change, slung his sword over his left hip, and gathered up what camping supplies he had in a backpack. What food he had in the house, not much, had went into the pack and a small set of saddlebags in a bike he stole, with his bow and a full quiver of arrows sticking up behind him in a makeshift holder against the seat of the bike. He reached his one time home two months after the change hit, forced to hide from roving bands of outlaws and cannibals. When he had arrived, it had been to a scene of horror. The house was burnt to the ground, as was the blacksmith's shop that he had so lovingly restored. Indeed, when his mother had staggered from the barn he thought there was a ray of light in the darkness...until he had seen the bone clutched in her hand. It was a femur. A human femur. A moment later a half dozen of his friends and neighbors had come, screaming from the barn There was a moment of frantic fighting as he scrabbled for his sword, striking the snath from his scythe when he was still on the farm, he struck the head from the polearm and buried the wicked point of that sword into his neighbor's throat. He screamed, then, be it for the horror or to remind himself he was alive as his skills were put to use, dancing among the eaters that he had once known. His mother had been the last one he had killed, the blade slashing out frantically to strike her head off even as she came at him with a knife from his home kitchen, no glimmer of recognition in her eyes. He could only guess his father was among the scattered bones within the barn, and so for his memory, and the memory of what his mother had been, he dragged the eaters inside and fired the barn, standing out well away, watching the last of his old life burn. When he moved away, at last, he fled north into the mountains. A half dozen men had joined him as he walked, men whose homes had met a fate similar to his. One was a computer engineer, another a former police officer, another was an architect, with experience in engineering, and there was even a martial arts instructor among them.. What they shared was a common desire to survive and thrive in this new world, in spite of their fates up till now. Their families accompanied them, brave explorers in this new old world. He taught them what he knew. How to use the sword, how to make armor, how to make a bow and use them to harvest deer and squirrels and the lives of men. He taught them how to glean sustenance from the wilderness and from farmer's fields, how to harvest livestock and preserve their meat. He was taught other things in turn. The blacksmith of the group taught him how to forge hot metal, not just bang about like he had been. The wife of one of the men, a herbalist, had taught him how to heal with herbs after her husband took a rusty knife into his arm. He found his sword in an abandoned house, an elderly couple sitting at the table, long dead as their medicine gave out. Through a series of lucky turns and skill they stayed alive, and gradually began to increase in number. Food was scarce as they went north, but people were even more so, and he used that to his advantage as they went, travelling the rough North Georgia Mountains, subsisting largely off of rabbit and deer and wild caught trout, until they came upon the little patch of green deep in the woods just in time to see the band of eaters disappear into the house. Memories of his mother's fate caused his blood to flash to steam, and without remembering aught else he had burst into the house, his sword cleaving a path before him. His men had been slower to catch up. Yet in that silence after the attack was over, he only then turned and found the family. He had expected them dead, and it showed in a widening of his eyes when they fell upon her with the gun. Carefully, his hands came up to either side of the helmet, releasing the strap that held it on his head and removing the plain mask that covered his face to just below his eyes, before lifting the helmet up and off. He was still a young man, only two years older than his full majority, still too young to buy alcohol in the pre-change world. His brown hair had been clipped short, close to his head, and he was clean shaven otherwise. Excessive hair bred lice, and few of his men had more than he. Most of them were older, she and her family would note as they removed their helmets, more than one showing touches of gray in their hair, but none were as old as her father. Little more could be told of them beneath the armor, but they all seemed to share a certain ruddiness that spoke of time out in the sun, no matter their former occupation, and broad shoulders that spoke of native strength, honed through a year of hard training. One of the ones that removed a helmet was different from the others, though...a woman, with blonde hair cut in a bob to her shoulders. He did not discriminate based on what was between a person's legs, but there was no secret that she had to work twice as hard as a man to keep up with them...without testerone, a natural steroid, a woman's upper body was just not as strong as a man's, and that was largely what was required for the current methods of fighting. He was hesitant to break the silence that had descended, but eventually, he did. His voice raised as he flicked his sword to one side, shedding it of blood. I suppose I ought to introduce myself. I am Michael Caudell, and I must say that it is a good thing we got here when we did. Carefully, he sheathed the sword, turning fully to face them as he spoke. Are any of you injured? We have a doctor with us, and some medicine, if you are.