hit by wood

An instant later, the bottom half of the door exploded into flying daggers of wood. My shield stopped anything heading toward Mac, but I couldn’t catch them all. One of them clipped my left cheekbone broadside—if it had tumbled for another fraction of a second, the sharp end would have driven right into my brain. As it was, it hit me like a baseball bat, stunning me and knocking me down.
The world did that slow-motion echo-chamber thing that happens sometimes with a head blow, and I saw our attacker come in.
At first, I couldn’t translate what I was seeing into something that made sense: It looked something like those giant spinning, whirling tubes covered in strips of soft cloth at an automated car wash, the ones that actually shampoo your car. Except it wasn’t a tube; it was a sphere, and it wasn’t at a car wash; it was rolling in through Mac’s doorway.
Mac’s shotgun went off, the sound of it slapping me in the back. Those things are loud in an enclosed space. Dust and bits of scrap cloth flew out of the attacker, but it didn’t slow down. The giant rag ball hurtled toward me, until Thomas dashed in from the side and smashed it with a roundhouse swing of one of Mac’s heavy oak tables.
Quick bar fighting tip for you—in real life, when you hit a guy with furniture, it doesn’t break into pieces the way it does in the movies. It breaks whoever you hit with it. There was a meaty sound of impact and the rolling shape’s forward momentum was instantly converted into a perpendicular line drive. It streaked across the room, trailing streamers of grey-brown cloth like a ragged comet, the cloth flapping and snapping with unnatural volume until it hit the wall with a solid thwack.
Another fighting tip for you: Don’t stay on the ground. If you don’t know exactly what you’re up against, if you aren’t sure that the guy you’re fighting doesn’t have a buddy coming along who might help, you can’t afford to be down and relatively motionless. My body was already moving, though I wasn’t sure how it was doing that, pushing me back to my feet.
Mac put a hand on the bar and vaulted up onto it like he did it all the time. The attacker bounced off the wall, rolled across a tabletop, and fell to the floor in a heap. Mac took a pair of quick steps to get a better line of fire, and boom went the shotgun again. Another cloud of scrap cloth and dust flew up from the attacker.
The room lurched back into normal speed. Dozens of strips of the dark sackcloth came flying off of the thing, twining in an instant around chairs and tables. A chair flew at Thomas, knocking the table out of his hands, and he was forced to dodge to one side instead of closing in. Mac’s shotgun bellowed three more times, and I hurled another lance of force at the thing. Mac’s shells did nothing but create puffs of debris, and my own arcane strike split and flowed around the thing, shattering a chair and smashing in a portion of the wall behind it.


Cold Days Chapter 22, Page 219-220