Dravakhar, the Last to Fall VS Dorin

The Last to Fall

The greatsword came down a third time, and Dravakhar felt the shock travel up his cybernetic forearms in a grinding whine of servos. He was already bleeding from a gash across his ribs, and the crimson veins in his blade pulsed like a second heartbeat, feeding on the pain.

Dorin was not where he had been a moment ago.

That was the problem. That had been the problem for the last several minutes, though Dravakhar had only begun to understand it halfway through the fight—when his first three killing strokes had all landed on empty air and stacked shelving instead.

The warehouse stretched around them, a cathedral of rusted beams and dead machinery under a skylight gone orange with dust. Dravakhar had entered expecting a slaughter. He had found a man in a grey fleece vest and a black baseball cap who moved like someone who had spent thirty years reading the terrain before ever swinging a fist.

Another length of pipe cracked against Dravakhar's knee. He grunted—low, like stones grinding—and pivoted, and the pipe skittered away as the barbarian's return sweep carved a bright red line through the air where Dorin's chest had been.

"You keep doing that," Dorin said, backing behind a steel support column, breathing hard but steady. His glasses had fogged. "The big one. You telegraph the big one."

"Then stop watching," Dravakhar rumbled.

"Then I'd be dead." Dorin hefted a wrench in his off hand, testing its weight. "Which seems against my interests."

Dravakhar's subvocal processors whirred, cataloguing: Dorin favored his left leg since the second exchange; Dorin's strikes aimed at joints, never at the torso; Dorin retreated toward exits, toward the loading bay doors, and every retreat put more steel between them. Not a warrior. A maintainer. Someone who repaired things—and who had decided that the correct repair for a monster in his warehouse was to take it apart, piece by piece, and stay alive long enough to finish the job.

Fine. Then Dravakhar would stop giving him pieces to take.

He charged, but slower than his muscles wanted—a lumbering, obvious line that let Dorin sidestep behind the column again. This time Dravakhar did not sweep through the column. He drove his shoulder into it instead, and the whole rack groaned and toppled, and a cascade of pallets and engine blocks came down across the aisle between them.

Dorin's exit route vanished under a wall of fallen steel.

For the first time, the man's calm cracked. He looked left, right, found only dead ends and Dravakhar's glowing red eyes advancing through the dust.

"Okay," Dorin said quietly. "That was clever."

Dravakhar's adaptation hummed through his plating, rerouting power, knitting the rib wound closed with a wet, mechanical click. The cost showed immediately: the glow in his arms dimmed, and his regeneration slowed to a crawl. He had traded resilience for position. It was a good trade. He intended to finish before the bill came due.

The wrench flew—not at Dravakhar's head, but at the greatsword's hilt. It struck the guard, and for half a heartbeat the crimson veins flickered. Dorin had noticed the blade pulsed in time with the plating. He had watched, and he had reasoned, and he had aimed at the one thing in the room that was more machine than monster.

Clever, Dravakhar thought. Too late.

He let go of the sword.

Dorin's eyes widened as the weapon clanged to the floor and the barbarian lunged past it—bare hands, scarred knuckles, a demonic strength that had nothing left to protect and nothing left to lose. The first blow caught Dorin in the shoulder and sent him spinning into a toppled shelving frame. The second never landed, because Dorin kicked the fallen greatsword into his path and scrambled sideways, gasping, one arm hanging wrong.

But there was nowhere to scramble to. The collapsed aisle was a cage of steel and the only door stood behind Dravakhar, and the barbarian was already turning, already reaching, slower now as the drained plating dragged at him—slow enough that Dorin got one last good swing in with a length of chain, catching Dravakhar across the face and splitting the skin above one glowing eye.

Dravakhar did not flinch. He caught the chain, wound it around his fist, and pulled.

Dorin came with it, off balance, and Dravakhar's other hand closed around the front of the grey fleece vest—right over the little truck logo, which seemed, absurdly, to be the last thing the man looked down at.

"You fixed the wrong machine," Dravakhar said.

"I was doing fine until you dropped the sword," Dorin managed.

"Aye," the barbarian agreed. "That was the trick."

He drove the man back against the fallen shelving and held him there until the struggling stopped—one long, patient moment, the way a siege engine holds a gate until it gives. Then he let go, and Dorin slid down the steel and did not rise.

Dravakhar stood in the settling dust, blood running from the cut above his eye, his cybernetic arms dark and silent, his greatsword lying where he had thrown it away. He bent, retrieved it, and the crimson veins woke sluggishly under his grip. He had won by giving up the one advantage his enemy had learned to read—and by paying for it with the strength he would need later.

He turned toward the loading bay, toward whatever war waited past the orange skylight. He had fallen last before. He had learned to fall less.

Behind him, the warehouse was quiet.