All at once, time around Jack seemed to slow, like everything around him was moving through paste. He knew this was just an illusion and that it was actually him that was moving faster, but he couldn"t change how his brain perceived it.Casting this spell, he"d functionally cut his remaining Prowess boost in half. He had maybe 10 seconds before he crashed. He had to make it count.
Jack rushed at the gnoll, and with a roaring leap jumped off the ground and brought his axe all the way back behind his head to split the dogman from skull to pelvis. The blade fell like a guillotine, collided with a parry from the gnoll, who had correctly predicted the blow, but hadn"t been quite fast enough to get his blade fully in the way to intercept the strike. The blow deflected to the side, and the axehead instead bit deeply into the gnoll"s shoulder, sinking far enough to strike the creature"s ribcage and stick fast in the dogman"s bones.
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The creature let out a gurgling howl, and snarled at Jack, before reaching down to its belt, and pulling a small blade from its sheath and moving to strike at him.
Jack planted a foot on the gnoll"s chest and jerked, tearing the axe blade free with a spurt of blood and loose fur. As he pulled the weapon out, he felt a sudden searing pain in his thigh as the gnoll buried a dagger into the side of it. The creature reeled back, the look on its face shifting from one of pain and anger to one wooziness and fear and blood pouring from its wound in great rolling gushes, staining the fur across a large part of its body a dirty brown crimson.
Jack cursed and stumbled backwards, struggling to keep his feet under him. He looked down at his leg. The blade in the inside of his thigh sat buried clean to the hilt, and had pierced through to the other side. Worse still, the amount of blood flooding out around the blade, and the fact that his lower leg was already going cold and numb told him it"d probably nicked his femoral artery. There was already blood puddling up and overflowing from the inside of his right boot.
Gritting his teeth through the agony, Jack gathered the absolute last of his willpower, and threw every ounce of weight in his body into a round swing at the staggering dogman.
The axe blade sang through the air and bit into the gnoll, severing its left arm and sinking halfway through its ribcage. Unable to hold onto the weapon any longer, Jack let go, staggering and reeling a step or two away before collapsing onto the blood-soaked gra.s.s beneath him.
He didn"t need to know much about medicine to know that gnoll had done enough to kill him.
And that... that prompted a primal fear that he"d never felt before. A sense of existential terror that drove logic or reason clean out of his head. He was going to die. No, no he wasn"t. He wasn"t. He couldn"t. Heroes didn"t die. They beat the monsters and saved the girl and lived happily every after. They didn"t bleed out from knife wounds inflicted by nameless n.o.bodies in the middle of f.u.c.king nowhere.
But he wasn"t a hero. He was a loser. He was a fat n.o.body cosplaying somebody brave and powerful. A fat shut-in virgin who"d died in a stupid car accident and decided to bleed out in some G.o.d-forsaken forest clearing instead of going to heaven.
He felt the life pouring out of his limbs as his senses began to get fuzzy, and his hands and arms began to grow cold and numb.
This was it. He felt his vision tunneling and growing dark.
So long, new world. It was nice knowing you.