Larry Correia: Monster Hunter Vendetta

But he was already gone. Giant hands wrapped around my biceps, jerked me to my feet and slung me into the wall. A brutal chill flowed up my arm as he yanked the gun from my hand, almost taking my trigger finger with it. I threw an elbow but touched nothing. He hit me again, low in my side, and it rocked me. The blow was cold as ice and hard as a hammer. I gasped in pain.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I am a mean son of a bitch when it comes to fighting. I can throw down against the best of them, and I had done it in the dark before. There was no time for thought, only action. I came back quick, lashing out at where my opponent should have been. I stumbled into the bed. There was a swish of air as he moved around me. I threw a back fist and missed, and was rewarded with a mighty blow to my shoulders. I kicked out, only to have something cold and impossibly big latch onto my leg. He pulled hard. Off balance, I fell, grunting on impact. This hotel had some solid floors.

He grabbed me by the front of my shirt and lifted me with ease. I tried to grasp his hands to apply a wristlock, but there was nothing there. He crushed me against the wall with brute force, pushing me through a layer of drywall.

"I'm taking you with me, Hunter, whether you like it or not." The Englishman's voice seemed to radiate from all around me. There was a frigid weight pushing against my chest as I swung my forearm through it in vain. The darkness swirled around my arm like smoke, and the pressure increased on my lungs, making it impossible to breathe. My back slid up the wall and I left the ground. I panicked, lashed out with my feet, my knees, my elbows, my fists, but it was like moving through water. Whatever had me trapped was incorporeal, and I was blacking out.

"It's useless," he chuckled through my futile strikes. "I can't believe you're the one. This is pathetic. I was at least expecting a fight. Can you truly be the one who defeated Lord Machado?"

That name. Not again. No, not again. The bad chemical taste of fear was suddenly in my mouth.

My body was hoisted effortlessly into the air, and tossed casually across the room. I slammed into the wall near the bathroom and crumpled to the carpet. My head was swimming but I immediately began to crawl toward my stash of weapons on the bed. Now that I was a few feet away, I could see the giant shadow shape moving across the room, almost as if it were pacing, agitated. My assailant continued to speak. "You must be important though. It took some time for the message to reach me. I was shocked to receive something from the other side. You have no idea how rare it is for the Old Ones to take the time to communicate with this world. Oh, the Dread Overlord is going to be happy when I deliver you. I don't know how you managed to get on his bad books, but you're bloody well fucked."

As the big shadow moved, it passed in front of the sliver of light emanating from the balcony curtains. The shape was gone, and it was just the man again, but as he left the light, his body seemed to drift into smoke and the shadow returned.

Light. I need light. Whatever he was, he only seemed to have a body in the light. "The Old Ones can kiss my ass… Stupid mollusks." I reached the bed, but the shadow was on me in an instant, freezing tendrils clamped around my wrist. He jerked me around and dragged me across the floor toward the exit.

"Time to go. The Overlord awaits."

I thrashed, fought, but only managed to give myself a nasty carpet burn.

There was a flicker of green light across the room. The black force around my wrist coalesced into normal human fingers. He was flesh again. The shadow man frowned.

Fireworks. They were setting off fireworks at the party.

My bare foot collided with his ribs. He stumbled back from the brutal kick, falling through the bathroom door. With no time to spare, I leapt up, reached the bed, and searched through the dark for a weapon. My hand closed around the leather-wrapped handle of my Ganga Ram, a Himalayan kukri. I jerked the massive knife from the scabbard.

A metallic screeching noise came from the shadows of the bathroom as something was torn free. The next firework blossomed red. The illumination was just enough for me to see the flash of a large white object hurtling at me. Flinging myself down, I could feel the wind as the toilet barely missed my head. It shattered the balcony door, tore through the curtains, and flew into the night.

More light from the party flooded into the room. The black shape glided out of the bathroom toward me, but it shrunk into the form of the Englishman as he left the shadows. He charged with a roar. "Oh, it's on now," I grunted as I got back to my feet and drove my knife forward. His face registered the shock as the curved blade of the Ganga Ram slammed through his ribs and out his back. He looked down in surprise. I twisted the blade with all my might, cutting upward through his torso.

I've managed to hack a few things to death with this knife over the last year. I should have been splattered with blood, but there was nothing, no liquid at all; it was like I was sawing through a bone-in ham. He glared back up, eyebrows creasing together in rage as more fireworks exploded outside, and clamped a brutal hand around my throat. The air to my brain was choked off as he hoisted me off the floor.

With a foot of steel driven through his guts, he shouted in my face. "I tried to be polite, and now you have to make me do this the hard way. I wanted to deliver you to the Old Ones with your mind in one piece, but nooo, you have to be difficult…" I continued to saw the blade back and forth, searching for his heart, but he didn't seem to notice. "Fine then. We'll just devour your brain and give the Old Ones a vegetable. They don't respect humans enough to know the difference anyway." He paused as his neck suddenly ballooned up like a puffer fish. "Snack time, little friend…" He opened his mouth wide, tilting his head back, and some thing came up his throat, black claws pushing past his lips, tiny red eyes blinking into existence over a circular mouth filled with fishhook teeth, crawling, struggling upward, heading right for my face, and strangely enough, I somehow could tell it was hungry.

Screw that!

I yanked the kukri out of his chest, lifted it high overhead, and swung down, chopping his hand off at the wrist. I fell to the floor, gasping for air as the pressure was released from my throat. His running shoe collided with my stomach as he punted me across the room. I rolled painfully to a stop by the balcony, realized that his severed hand was still clawing at my neck, and tore it away. The little shadow monster crawling out of the Englishman's mouth shrieked in an insanely high pitch as he seemed to choke it back down, and with a hard swallow, it was gone. He raised the stump of his ruined arm. Writhing shadow leapt from the end, instantly twisting and re-forming into a new hand. He balled the fresh hand into a fist, lowered his head, and started toward me.

A man has to know his limitations, and I was way out of my league on this one. Instantly back to my feet, I ran for the balcony, bare feet crunching on a piece of broken glass. "Ouch! Ouch!" Heedless of the danger, I vaulted over the railing and plummeted into the party below.

Landing brutally hard, lightning cascading up my legs, I crashed through a rosebush and onto the porcelain shards of the broken toilet. I lay there, gasping for a moment. As a very large man, gymnastic feats were not really my specialty. I struggled through the plants and tumbled onto the tile by the pool, — scattering college students like bowling pins. My left ankle throbbed from the impact, but I stood, hobbling, and raised my kukri, which I had somehow managed not to impale myself on.

I roared up at my room, "Come and get me!" The shadow man was leaning on the railing, glowering down at me, fireworks exploding overhead. There was enough light down here that I somehow knew he wasn't going to follow. Several partygoers shrieked, spilled their beers, and ran as I shook my kukri with one hand and extended my middle finger with the other. "Yeah, I thought so, you pansy!"