Asgard Awakening 2

by Blaise Corvin

  Then he directed his thoughts at his harpy valkyrie. Yaakova, he sent over his link. I need you to tell Bravoosa and Hravalin to have everyone ready to mount up and retreat as soon as possible, hopefully when I get back. Tell them if the Pinions need to leave stuff behind, that’s fine.

  Then he began to wave around Hex like he was angry and had failed to hold his temper. In English, he growled, “You threaten to take what’s mine? What’s mine is mine, and will always be mine. I will never give you what’s mine, and you can’t take what’s mine by force. The harpies are mine, their weapons are mine, and my soldiers are mine.” After his tantrum was over, he sheathed Hex.

  Panting, out of breath, he paused as if he were thinking and getting his emotions in order. In reality, he was hoping his calculations had been correct. Then he switched languages, trying to sound conciliatory, and said, “The Guide is not with us, but I know where she is. I need to have a meeting with my other leaders. Can we meet again in about ten minutes?”

  “Of course.” The dark elf gave a predatory smile.

  Trav stiffly turned, trying not to feel the itch between his shoulder blades. Acting nervous as he returned to the harpies wasn’t exactly difficult. Bravoosa met him after he’d gotten back and Trav said, “Keep the front line in place with the Belchers until the last minute. They will move last. When can we go?”

  “Probably two minutes.”

  “Good, let’s move as soon as we are ready, but we have to go at once. Be ready to relay more orders. This will be tricky.” Instead of fear, Trav felt calm. If his plan worked, it would be great. If not, he had a backup plan. Hopefully it would work.

  Five minutes later, all the Pinions were mounted and following Trav, dashing away from the hill they’d been defending, leaving the Dokkalfar behind. Trav led the group to one side, and smiled grimly when he saw the Dokkalfar take the bait. They believed he was running away, and they’d all gotten on their lizard mounts to pursue.

  Trav waited a few more minutes until it was just the right time. He held Hex and intoned, “Explode.”

  All the ground underneath the Dokkalfar soldiers suddenly, violently erupted. Lizard mounts were torn apart. The dark elves screamed in terror...those who could still make noise at all. Chunks of blood and worse flew up into the sky, propelled by powerful explosions. Some of the Dokkalfar survived, but not many, and those Trav saw were heavily injured.

  He pointed Hex at his throat and said, “Amplify,” then shouted, “Halt! Reverse direction! Prepare for orders!”

  Bravoosa, Hravalin, and the valkyries were already nearby when the Pinions stopped. As the entire formation wheeled their horses around, Hravalin goggled at the destruction behind them. “What did you do?”

  Trav temporarily suspended his voice enhancement and said, “The Dokkalfar saw a small number of harpies with great weapons and a human. They were greedy. The entire reason they waited on me before was because the commander was hoping to scare us into giving them our weapons, and likely hand over Hravalin too. I’m guessing everyone would have become slaves then. Isn’t that how enemy Kin operate?” Trav looked at Narnaste.

  “Oftentimes, yes,” she conceded.

  “That doesn’t—” began Hravalin.

  “I used a command with Hex to temporarily conceal rune equations I made from the naked eye. Then while I pretended to lose my temper, I used a large amount of magic power on multiple rune equations that would explode when I triggered them. I said, ‘mine’ a lot in my native language, but because of a double meaning of the word, I was able to repeat it many times in a way that would not sound like I was talking about weapons to anyone who could understand the language. It also would not have set off any lie detection.

  “Then we all ran away, leading to the greedy dark elves to chase us without even checking for any changes with magical senses or tools. As soon as their main force was on top of my mines, I blew them up.”

  Hravalin shook her head. “Clever. Clever and ruthless.”

  “He can be,” said Yaakova with a proud grin. “Even I didn’t know the plan, I just knew he was up to something.”

  “Thank you for your help, Yaakova.”

  “Of course, Master.” The harpy inclined her head, and there was no irony in her voice.

  All around them, the Pinions that had heard the exchange looked at Trav with wonder and at least some fear. Hravalin slowly turned to look at the soldiers, then her gaze moved to the dust settling over the charnel house that Trav had created. She got off her horse, adjusted her clothing, gracefully took a knee, and declared, “I pledge allegiance to Travis Sterling, the new Allfather.”

  Trav suddenly felt the odd feeling he’d experienced back at Najila’s cabin, and when he’d done something with Tiffany’s lizardman retainer. Now he associated the feeling with his Restless mantle. He blinked at Hravalin, taken aback, especially when he saw some of the Dokkalfar in the distance stumbling to their feet, beginning to move again. A few of the Pinions had also begun to dismount and kneel, but Trav reactivated his voice enhancement and shouted, “Prepare to charge!”

  The Pinions got the message, and Trav reached down to help Hravalin up. On a whim, he tightened his grip and swung her up into the saddle behind him. The Pinions swelled with pride. Morale was important in any group. Like many of his life lessons, Trav had put this one to words in the mines.

  He would need to lead this charge, just in case the Dokkalfar leader was still alive.

  His voice thundered as he ordered, “Let’s mop up.” His eyes were hard. “Kill them all. Yaakova, take to the sky and chase down that runner and kill them. Narnaste, follow her just in case. We won’t want any of these fucks to report back to their friends.”

  Chapter 25

  “Master Trav, I don’t know how much more of this we can take.” Hravalin drooped in her saddle. “Maybe we should head back. The other Guides probably haven’t found anything, or they already went back.”

  “We don’t know that, we can’t really know anything for sure, but we’ve sort of already been heading back.” Trav mentally checked with Yaakova first then nodded. “Yes. We’ve been following a large circle back to where we entered the Veil-overlap. We should be back in a few hours. It’s a risk since we don’t really have anything to show for being in the Veil-overlap other than what I found before, but I have a plan to stretch that a little, and you’re right—I don’t think we can stay here much longer.”

  Trav and the Pinions had been in the Veil-overlap now for seven days. They’d run into Dokkalfar a couple more times, but Trav had prioritized avoidance and escape. His group was down to twenty-four now—they’d lost sixteen. He was exhausted. Escaping from the Dokkalfar had required him to use a lot of magic, doing things like creating landslides and kicking up huge amounts of dust. Unlike the Pinions, he was able to replenish his power, but it was slow, and his valkyries were even slower. On top of that, Trav was having to give more power just to keep the horses going.

  He was almost out of fuel. The reason the Pinions had lasted so long was probably because he was unconsciously sustaining them somehow on top of intentionally sustaining the horses.

  “The damn Dokkalfar,” groused Bravoosa. The captain tilted her head and turned to look at Trav. “Commander, if your mines hadn’t hit the Dokkalfar that first time we ran into them, what were you going to do?”

  “I thought about that,” admitted Trav. “If that happened, I was going to lead us around the hill so we could just wind up back where we started and hunker down again. It would have been a fight.”

  “Oh.” Bravoosa gave Trav a weird look. “I am glad we did not do that.”

  “Me too.”

  With a flutter and gust of wind, Yaakova landed. She quickly approached Trav and nodded. “New One, I have two things to tell you, about two things I saw on the way back.”

  “Oh?” That got Trav’s attention. Yaakova never wasted his time, so he knew it was likely important. “What is it?”

  “I think I saw a
structure in the distance. It might be occupied now, though. I saw some forces nearby, but they were too far away to identify.”

  “What is the second thing you saw?”

  Yaakova hesitated. “Bodies.”

  Trav waited. There had to be more to what she’d seen than that. Plenty of bodies were scattered around the Veil-overlap now. The Pinions had buried their dead before moving on, but they hadn’t buried the enemies they’d killed. Over the last few days, Yaakova and the Pinions had both come across evidence of other groups finding and killing each other as well. The day before, they’d even seen what looked like humans in strange clothing, probably the “cultists,” the cultivators that Trav had seen before he’d escaped the mine.

  He hadn’t seen the bodies himself to verify what they were, but if they had been cultivators, it probably meant that the Veil-overlap included Asgard and the cultivators’ veil where Jang-mi was from.

  Yaakova said, “The bodies were Dokkalfar. There was something weird, though.”

  “Weird?”

  “Shadows.” Yaakova’s eyes moved strangely and she swallowed. “Moving shadows.”

  Trav’s breath caught and his stomach dropped. “What did you say?”

  “Moving shadows. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but then I saw what looked like some Dokkalfar holed up inside a cave, fighting against the shadows.”

  Trav dreaded the answer to his question even as he asked, “And both the dead Dokkalfar and the structure, are they both on the way to our exit from this play.”

  “Yes.”

  “Fuck.”

  ***

  They found the bodies in a valley at the edge of a cliff. All the moisture disappeared from Trav’s mouth when he took in the scene, and he made a quick decision. “Forward! Charge! Destroy the shadows!”

  Shit shit shit shit shit, he thought. He’d been afraid of this. The Veil-Wraiths had come. His decision to see the “shadows” and verify the new threat had been correct, but he’d really been hoping he’d been wrong.

  Harpies screamed war cries as they jumped up, gliding off their horses and savagely slashed the Veil-Wraiths. The shadowy enemies varied in size, as small as muskrats, to as big as wolves, and didn’t seem very smart. The things were not happy about being interrupted from their meal, though. There were corpses everywhere, and most of them had been gnawed on now. Two different groups of Dokkalfar had both suffered terrible losses in a deadly skirmish—the ground was wet with blood. Trav had a feeling he knew what had happened.

  Despite their fatigue, the Pinions slammed into the Veil-Wraiths with savage energy. They were well trained, and Trav was willing to admit they were likely all zealots by now—they believed in him. After the first few deaths when Trav had…”chosen” the dead, the remaining Pinions had been whispering among themselves and seemed to believe they would live forever. The whole thing had made Trav feel guilty for days, but now all he felt was fear.

  He grabbed a bow and nailed a Veil-Wraith with a lucky shot. The thing made a wheezing, pained sound, but took far less damage than a flesh and blood creature of its size would. “What is going on?” yelled Hravalin.

  Trav’s valkyries were all arranged around him. Usually, they would be leading groups of Pinions, but the company had exhausted their magical weapons, and too many had died. He’d been using the valkyries as backup the last two days. Now was not the time to hold anything in reserve, though. “Yaakova, stay with me. Narnaste, transform. Do whatever you have to—kill these things. Ysintrill, ride on Narnaste’s back where it’s relatively safe and snipe the shit out of everything. Go go go!”

  His two valkyries nodded grimly. Narnaste shimmered, grew huge, and they took off. A few of the Pinions were using the last of their inborn power to manifest their gifts or magic, generating magical attacks or bolstering mundane weapons. The Veil-Wraiths had been caught completely by surprise, but the damn things were resistant to damage, and there were a lot of them.

  Trav turned and saw only Yaakova and Hravalin were still with him. Bravoosa was fighting with the soldiers. “These things are Veil-Wraiths,” he said. “Specifically, these are Feeder-Wraiths, one of the lowest class of their kind. If these are here, they’ll draw more of their kind...like mice. But in this case, the new ones to show up will be bigger and more dangerous. We need to get the hell out of here.”

  Hravalin frowned. “You mean, we can’t look for more items for the trial—”

  “No,” Trav said, making a slashing gesture with his hand. “This world was dead before, but now it’s doomed. There is no way we can stay. These fucking things are ravenous. The world was dead before, but with Veil-Wraiths showing up, it won’t even exist much longer. The only reason we have any chance of escaping at all is because they’ll probably pop up randomly. They can’t control their entry.”

  Just then, Trav felt something, a tickle between his shoulder blades. He used his magical sight to scan the horizon and sighed, a sound of frustration and exhaustion. “Fuck,” he whispered. He didn’t have much magic power left, not after keeping the horses alive and giving them energy that morning, but he still lobbed a magic ball of ice at a Veil-Wraith that hit squarely, temporarily freezing the nasty thing. This one looked sort of like a shadowy panther, and had been about to tear off a Pinion’s leg. The harpy turned, saluted Trav in gratitude, and killed the beast.

  “What is it, New One?” asked Yaakova. “I thought I felt something at the same time you made a face.”

  “Someone or something in one of the veils outside this overlap has figured out that more powerful beings can come here without penalty. A huge power, maybe more than one, has entered the Veil-overlap. Even without the Veil-Wraiths, this would be bad news.”

  “How powerful?” asked Hravalin.

  “At least as powerful as my friend who died—Rakshasa royalty. I’m not completely sure, because when I saw her fight, she was already poisoned, exhausted, and wounded.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, we need to get the fuck out of here. For now, we all need to help the Pinions, then leave as soon as possible. If we kill all these Veil-Wraiths, it will help give us a little more time, or at least a head start.”

  The two harpies nodded and dashed forward with Trav. Hravalin was not weak. In fact, she’d been saving most of her power during the entire time she’d been in the Veil-overlap, so she hit two Veil-wraiths like a truck. She didn’t even draw her weapon, just clad her hands and taloned feet with magical fire, chopping and kicking with obvious skill.

  Yaakova hardened her feathers, using them like giant razor blades to sever Veil-Wraith limbs and heads.

  Trav skewered an enemy, dodging back to avoid being disemboweled, and mentally patted himself on the back for all of his permanent upgrades. He had less than two bars of power left now, but he wasn’t defenseless by a long shot even without magic.

  “Good job!” he shouted at the Pinions. “Kill them all so we can get the hell out of here!” Trav darted through the melee, heading toward the cave. The majority of Veil-Wraiths there, at least two dozen of them, blocked the entire opening and hadn’t even turned around yet. Trav grinned savagely, pointed Hex, and used one of his favorite rune spells. “Chain lightning.”

  The Veil-Wraiths were probably half the size of a Dacith at their largest, but Trav had some memories of them from Odin. He didn’t underestimate them, and didn’t let up. “Chain lightning. Chain lightning!” Even if his magic didn’t kill them, the way the electricity superheated the air around them would...he hoped.

  Even though the Veil-Wraiths seemed down, for good measure, Trav yelled, “Chain lightning!” and hit them one more time. Their bodies smoked, but Trav still felt nervous as he stepped among them to call into the cave, “Anyone or anything alive?”

  A light appeared, and a group of Dokkalfar walked forward cautiously. There were around twenty of them, by Trav’s count, and about half were wounded. “Who are you?” asked one of them, a female holding a curved sword with a green-
glowing blade.

  “Someone who is helping. Now before any of you says something stupid that pisses me off enough to make you look like these guys,” he said, pointing down at the charred Veil-Wraiths, “you should come with me.”

  A wounded dark elf stumbled forward with a knife in his hand and snarled, “Why would we even listen to a human? This is outrageous. Why should—”

  Trav pointed Hex and said, “Taser.” A line of magic shot out from the shiv, hitting the Dokkalfar in the forehead and knocking him on his ass where he twitched for a few seconds. As the aggressor gasped for breath on the ground, some of the other Dokkalfar took a step forward or raised hands, but Trav pointed Hex and said, “Stop. I don’t have the patience for this shit. My people are out there fighting and bleeding so I could talk to you.”

  The Dokkalfar woman asked, “Why?”

  “Simple. Survival. The Veil-Wraiths have come. My company is down in strength. If you come with us, we are still a small enough group that we can move quickly and avoid notice, but we will have a better chance of survival together. Plus, I know of an exit from the Veil-overlap that is only a couple hours away, give or take. I’m guessing you don’t know of any this close.”

  The angry man started to talk again from where he knelt on the ground, but the Dokkalfar woman made a gesture and he stopped. She looked Trav in the eyes and said, “I sense great power in you...something new. You truly killed these,” she asked, pointing at the dead Veil-Wraiths.

  “Yes.”

  “And you truly lead these harpies?”

  “Yes. Now are you coming or not?”

  The Dokkalfar woman stared at Trav without blinking, even past the point that the sounds of fighting outside ceased. Trav turned briefly to see all of the Pinions standing in formation outside. A few were wounded, and other harpies were already efficiently tending to their wounds. All the Pinions who weren’t otherwise occupied were obviously waiting on Trav.