Out of Light, Into the Dark

[Proto Man]

The Village of Durnhill was a desolate and forgotten place.

It was clear that it had once been a pretty little village, as there were still the remnants of garden plots and formerly maintained walkways adorned with what may have once been lampposts. Most of the plain wooden houses and huts were decaying and collapsing in on themselves—a testament to a few years’ worth of rain damage and neglect. If the village had only been the old walkways and derelict houses, Proto Man and company may have had a somewhat pleasant yet morose meander through Durnhill.

Instead of that, they quickly noticed two things that were ‘off’ about the place as they approached it. From his research, Proto Man knew that the village had made a living off of blacksmithing due to its proximity to the more heavily contested regions during the war with Diablo. Amidst the collapsing homes, more than a dozen smokestacks of various sizes jutted up, but it wasn’t the smokestacks and little foundries that were unsettling to the trio.

What was unsettling was the fact that each and every stack was belching smoke into the sky. As they drew closer, they also saw the local graveyard had been unearthed. Each and every grave had been torn up and emptied, although none of it looked as if it had been done recently.

“This doesn’t look welcoming,” Snake Man muttered as they approached the edge of the village.

“Stay on your toes,” Mireya whispered as her eyes began to dart to her peripherals. “This is a prime spot for an am—”

Just like that, the two nearest huts exploded outward as a half dozen darkspawn fell upon the trio. Before they were diced apart, the triumvirate split apart, but unlike the last time, they’d practiced this protocol before and weren’t about to be completely separated by the enemy. As Proto Man fell back along the walkway, his color palate switched over to off-white and dark green. Over his right forearm, a Leaf Shield materialized as his left hand became a Proto Sword. When the first darkspawn came swinging at him, the youth parried away the oncoming weapon and plunged his energy sword into the creature’s gut, burning through armor, flesh, and bone.

Proto Man continued to fall back as three more fel monsters swarmed around him. He managed to repeat the same maneuver only one more time before a mace found the side of his head and knocked him off balance. As he stumbled, Proto instinctively kicked off the ground. The extra boost in his pneumatically-enhanced shins launched him away the weapons of his opponents tore into the earth beneath his former location.

Landing on his knees in a less than graceful fashion, Proto Man twisted his torso, deactivated his sword, and started to fire indiscriminately at the four darkspawn vying to overwhelm him. One of them took a pellet of plasma to the face and fell into a screaming heap, but most of the shots were either off mark or smashed against armor that refused to yield. As the darkspawn approached, Proto Man was able to take a moment to verify that they weren’t equipped like the others he’d fought. Their arms and armor were not only freshly made, but they were also augmented and seemed to glisten in the poor natural lighting of the Pale Moors.

Enchantments? Such magically-enhanced equipment had been common when the Kingdom was at war with Diablo, and it wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination that such operations had been done at Durnhill during the Terror War. But the darkspawn were wearing new armor with fresh enchantments, which meant something in their ranks had access to the powerful magic needed to magically enhance equipment en masse. If he didn’t know better, it looked as if the darkspawn were trying to build an army much like the one that had once terrorized the Pale Moors.

With a grunt, Proto Man righted himself and popped up to a standing position just in time to fire a shotgun burst straight up into the chest and face of the nearest darkspawn. There was the first syllable of a guttural roar before the monster’s face was reduced to ash and cinders.

Twisting to avoid the now inertia-propelled corpse, Proto Man vented the Buster and was trying to bring it to bear on his next foe when a shadow fell over him. The next instant, he was face-first on the ground and someone was clawing at the back of his helmet. Offffffffff! Planting his palms into the dirt, the android shoved up with all his might and managed to dislodge his attacker. Pulling his legs out from under the darkspawn, Proto Man planted them in the ground and jumped, using his heightened leaps to give him a little breathing room.

He hit the ground a few yards away from Mireya, who was fighting with far more grace and poise than the red robot. Each of her movements with her bladed polearm was fluid and smooth, despite the speed and veracity with which she struck down her foes. A few yards away, Snake Man grinned from the roof of a hut as a few dozen robotic snakes swarmed a collection of about eight darkspawn. When one of the blighted warriors tried to get close to the reptilian Robot Master, he would just fire a blast of energy into its face, ending that threat there and then. From the pile of corpses, it seemed like Snake Man’s strategy worked rather well.

As he turned back to his own problems, Proto Man took another blow to the side of the skull. This time he absorbed the blow and used it as an opportunity to put a hole through the gut of his attacker. From point-blank range, the shotgun-like burst of energy ate through the darkspawn and erupted out the other end with enough remaining force to knock over the next creature in line. Proto Man rolled around the first darkspawn and felled the injured one with a sword jab through the forehead. He then pulled up both his arms in an X as an improvised way to avoid the oncoming sword. The weapon screamed as it screeched across the barrel of the Proto Buster, leaving a nasty scrape but failing to find purchase on the sheen metal surface.

Another shotgun blast flashed in the dead village, and just as before, the sound was followed seconds later by the loud crash of a heavily armored body hitting the unyielding earth.