The standoff became a war of nerves. Outside the alley, the horde was learning. Blind fury had shattered itself against the barricade of bodies and the lethality of Artur's axe. Now, instead of snarls and reckless charges, there was a contemplative silence, broken only by guttural clicks and the unsettling scrape of claws dragging slowly across asphalt. They were communicating. Rethinking. Shaping a new strategy.
Artur remained inside his fortress, back pressed to the brick wall, the axe held in a loose but ready grip. The adrenaline that had sustained him was beginning to ebb, leaving behind a deep, grinding exhaustion in muscle and bone. His shoulders throbbed. His legs trembled under restrained strain. He knew he could not hold that defense forever. A siege was a battle of attrition—and he was one man against an army.
He focused on his breathing, forcing his heartbeat to slow, conserving every fragment of strength. His attention stayed fixed on the mouth of the alley, on the heap of corpses that formed his defense. He expected another frontal push. Perhaps a larger creature trying to force its way through.
That was why he didn't look up.
The sound, when it came, was subtle—almost lost beneath the low hum of the world. A scraping noise, not from the alley's entrance, but from above. The faint drag of claws finding purchase on the concrete wall of the building to his left.
His head snapped upward too late, eyes widening.
One of the smaller arachnid creatures—more agile than the first he had wounded—was climbing the side of the building ten meters above him. It moved with nightmare fluidity, body parallel to the wall, legs finding hold in cracks and microscopic edges. Its silhouette against the purple sky was that of a spider from hell. It wasn't trying to force the choke point.
It was going over it.
Time shrank to a single heartbeat. The creature reached the top of the wall directly above him—and let go.
It wasn't a leap. It was a drop. A controlled fall. A blur of black chitin and hooked limbs crashing down upon him.
Artur shouted—a sound of shock and fury—and threw himself sideways, away from the wall. There was no time to swing. He just moved, body slamming into the opposite brick surface as the creature landed exactly where he had stood a second before. The impact cracked against the concrete floor, and it wheeled toward him at once, multiple eyes burning in the narrow dark.
It was close. Too close. The alley that had been his fortress was now a trap—no room to maneuver, no distance to unleash the full force of his axe.
The creature attacked—not with a leap, but with a thrust. Two of its forward limbs shot out, thin and pointed like ice picks, aimed straight at his chest.
Artur twisted, raising the haft of the axe horizontally to block. Solid walnut met chitin tips with a sharp, resounding CLACK. The impact jarred his teeth; the creature's strength was startling. He used the force of the collision to shove it back, carving out a precious inch of space.
But it was fast. While two limbs were locked against his block, a third scythed upward from below. He tried to recoil—but his back was already against the wall.
A sharp, searing pain tore through his left forearm.
It felt like the kiss of a heated razor. A line of fire slicing through skin and muscle. For a fraction of a second, he looked down. A long, ugly gash opened along his forearm, from the inside of his elbow to his wrist.
And the blood that welled from it was not purple.
It was red. Bright, vivid, shockingly ordinary. His blood.
The sight—and the pain—struck like lightning, cleaving through exhaustion and fury. The illusion of invincibility he had felt, the sense of being the only predator in this world, evaporated. The pain was real. The wound was real. That red on his arm was irrefutable proof of his mortality. He was not a demon with an axe.
He was a man.
A man who could bleed. A man who could die.
The realization did not paralyze him. It sharpened him. Fear returned—not blind panic, but the cold, precise fear of survival, the kind that whispers that every second matters, that every movement is life or death.
The creature, sensing blood, readied another thrust—to finish the wounded prey.
This time, Artur moved first.
Driven by a fresh surge of adrenaline born from fear, he stepped forward into the creature's guard. With one hand, he seized one of the attacking limbs, rough chitin hot and alien in his grip. With the other, he drove the head of the axe—not the blade, but the flat, brutal weight of it—straight into the cluster of its eyes.
The blow was short. Ugly. Savage. A crushing sound, like walnuts cracking under a hammer. The creature emitted a strangled screech, its assault faltering. Artur gave it no chance to recover. He shoved with everything he had, hurling the disoriented monster backward—toward the barricade of bodies.
It stumbled, toppled over the corpses of its kin, and tangled there among the dead.
Artur did not press the attack. He retreated to his place against the wall, chest heaving, left arm throbbing with deep, pulsing pain. Blood ran between his fingers and dripped onto the alley floor, dark red pooling into the alien purple already staining the ground.
He looked at the wound. Not deep enough to cripple him—but a reminder.
A reminder that his one advantage, his axe, did not make him untouchable. He was fragile. His flesh was fragile. Every victory extracted a price, and his endurance was finite.
Outside, the silence returned.
The new tactic had failed—but not without success. They had wounded him. They had tasted his blood. And now they knew he, too, could be broken.
Artur tore a strip from his sleeve with his teeth and right hand, binding it tightly around the cut to slow the bleeding. The sharp pain kept him alert. Kept him grounded.
And deep in his mind, a new truth settled in, cold and unyielding: he would not leave that place unscarred. The question was no longer if he would be wounded again—
but how many wounds he could endure before he fell.