Once a hunter!
I leap from the tree. Wood and bark explode behind me. I land in time to see her catch her hammer.
I’m almost surprised when I find Whipsnap, at the ready, in my hands. Almost. I might have been kidnapped from my comfortable, normal life in the outside world, but since then I have been, and still am, a hunter. And now I’m insulted.
Without using my elemental powers, I lunge forward, sweeping the bladed tip out at her. It’s a dangerous strike, a killer blow to most, but this is Kainda. I have faith that she’ll avoid the blow, and if I hold back... Well, I’d rather face an army of Nephilim warriors than be on the receiving end of that verbal barrage.
She slaps the spear tip away and swings her hammer toward the side of my face. I quickly spin Whipsnap up, grip it with both hands and block the blow. But the staff of my weapon is flexible. It bends with the hammer’s impact, slowing the strike, so the hammer’s head gently kisses my cheek.
I glance at the hammer, resting against my cheek, then at Kainda. She frowns. “That was half strength.”
I flex Whipsnap in the opposite direction, letting the energy stored in the bent staff fling the hammer, and Kainda, away. I follow through by kicking her hard in the back. She slams into a tree, striking her face.
I cringe. Fighting my wife goes against all my instincts. In the outside world, I’d probably be arrested and put in jail. Luckily, the laws of the outside world don’t apply to hunters. Or Antarktos.
Kainda wipes some blood from her lip, and I can’t help remembering Bruce Lee doing something similar in his movie The Chinese Connection. I only saw it once, on one of the few Saturday mornings I didn’t watch Creature Double Feature, but I don’t really forget much...or anything.
“Better,” she says and points at me. “But I’m going to knock that cocky grin from your face.”
I didn’t realize I was smiling. Or enjoying this. But I am a hunter. Combat is as much a part of me as it is Kainda. It’s just a part I’ve been ignoring for a very long time.
I spin Whipsnap with a flourish, ending in a pose of readiness. “You can try.”
She charges.
I rush to meet her.
A scream stops us in our tracks, weapons raised.
“The girls,” I say.
“Hurry,” she says.
I summon a powerful wind that sweeps us up into the air and carries us toward the sound of the scream. Trees bend in our wake, creaking and swaying. My fear has summoned a wind so powerful that trees begin cracking. I reign in my powers, so I don’t accidentally summon a tornado.
We clear the forest and reach a river that empties into the ocean with a dramatic waterfall. My two girls are just ten feet from the continent’s end and a hundred-foot drop to the ocean. Normally, this would not frighten me—Kainda has trained them well—but the girls are not alone.
They’re surrounded.
By Nephilim.
At least, I think they’re Nephilim. I’ve actually never seen anything like the bevy of creatures below. But the red hair on their heads reveals their Nephilim corruption.
Several tactics for handling the situation flit through my mind, but I quickly dismiss them. The small creatures, each about three feet tall, wield an array of weapons. A taller pair, standing closer to four feet, hold blades against my daughters’ throats.
I place Kainda and myself down on the warm stones lining the river, just ten feet from the small horde. They eye us warily, their jet black eyes—like a feeder’s—are wide with surprise. We were not expected. The girls must have stumbled upon them.
Before speaking, I scan the group. Aside from height, the creatures are nearly identical to one another. They’re slender, almost malnourished in appearance, but twitching beneath their pale, nearly translucent skin, the sinewy muscles look strong. They wear the ragged skins of underworld animals covered with plates of giant-centipede carapace for armor. Their blood-red hair grows in gnarly patches. Their faces are nearly featureless—nubby noses, holes for ears. But their mouths are wide, stretching from one side of the head to the other, full of sharp triangular teeth. “They’re like feeders, with bodies.”
“Kill them,” Kainda whispers to me. The only thing holding both of us back are the knives at our daughters’ throats.
“I need to focus,” I reply. Finding a way to attack all of these things without injuring our girls is going to be hard, even for me. I decide that a distraction is in order. “I am Solomon, King of Antarktos and you are—”
“Solomon!” the largest of the bunch, holding my eldest, shouts. He narrows his eyes and hisses.
The group tenses.
Kainda takes a step forward, but even she is not fast enough to save the girls.
I put my hand on her arm, holding her back, hoping to buy time while I pull the oxygen out of the air surrounding the group. The girls will fall unconscious, along with these monsters, but they won’t be harmed.
“Solomon!” the largest of them roars. “Destroyer! Thief! King of light! Enemy of the dark! Solomon! Ull!” His eyes go wide. His head turns down, focused on my daughter’s chest, as though only now realizing the significance of the prize he has captured. Whatever these things are, they’re not very bright. You think they would have realized who I was when I dropped out of the sky. The knife comes up in the beast’s hand.
“Norah! Aquila!” Kainda shouts our daughters’ names. “Defend yourselves!”
I’m surprised when I see all of the fear in my daughters’ eyes disappear at the sound of their mother’s commanding voice. I’m even more surprised by the swiftness of what comes next. As the knife plunges down toward Aquila’s chest, she lifts an arm and blocks the blow. While spinning to face her adversary, she flicks out her wrist and suddenly there’s a sword in her hand, glinting in the afternoon sun’s light. I quickly recognize the weapon. Strike. Her grandfather’s sword, dropped in our realm before he entered Tartarus. The blade is unlike any other, amazingly strong, yet so flexible it can wrap itself into a tight coil. Easy to conceal and uniquely deadly. The blade slips into the monster’s chest before the creature can react.
Both of my daughters have qualities of their mother. Aquila is passionate, about nearly everything. Norah, on the other hand, got her mother’s brute strength and ferocity. The seven year old leans forward and slams her head back into her captor’s face. If it had a nose, she would have broken it. But the blow is nothing compared to what comes next. Like her mother, Norah carries a hammer with a stone head the size of a brick. With a roar, she swings the weapon and clocks the shocked creature in the side of its head. The Nephilim drops to the ground. But Norah doesn’t stop there. Two more of the creatures quickly fall to her miniature might, before the girls stops to take stock of the situation.
By then, Kainda and I have joined the fray, kicking and slashing, pounding and pummeling. The enemy is disorganized and caught off guard. They lack skill. They fall quickly, under the combined might of my three girls. As the final monster falls, I feel a welling pride. I had no idea my daughters were such skilled warriors. But the Nephilim intruders have one more surprise for us.
A gurgling shriek emerges from the river. I spin to find what looks like a curtain of undulating pale flesh falling toward Kainda. I’ve never seen anything like it, but the moment I see its face, covered with dried out feathers and a clacking beak, I know what this is. More than that, I know who this is.
Gaia.
The breeder who birthed feeder upon feeder, breaking my spirit, turning me into a monster. The torture she oversaw began my horrible ordeal. I had hoped her dead, along with the rest. All of her bulbous fat, from millennia of gorging herself, has fallen away, leaving only loose flesh.
I send a burst of wind in her direction. Lifting the fifteen-foot-tall body of sail-like skin will be an easy thing, but it turns out to be unnecessary.
Twin hooked blades stab into the Nephilim’s shoulders, arresting her fall. Kainda leaps away as the loose skin sags toward the gro
und. Frozen in place for a moment, Gaia looks up and meets my gaze. To my surprise, she looks wounded. Almost sad. “My son,” she says, and reaches out for me.
I almost feel sorry for her.
Almost.
But her fate has already been decided by another. The chains attached to the hooked blades go taut. Gaia flails as she’s yanked backwards, into the river. There is a struggle beneath the flowing current, and then nothing. I glance at Kainda, who is knee deep in little Nephilim bodies. She shrugs.
The calm waters roil briefly and then give way to a rising form. A woman with dark skin and very little in the way of clothing—just some brown leathers—rises from the river. She shakes her head, sending spirals of water in every direction, while fluffing the only afro I’ve seen on a hunter. She gives the chains in her hands a tug, pulling the blades of her Kusarigama out of the water, catching both of them in the air. With a few quick and practiced moves, the chains are wrapped around her torso and the weapons stowed on her hips.
“My King,” Zuh says, with a nod in my direction. She has become a fierce hunter of Nephilim, spending more time in the underground than above. She has even earned Kainda’s respect and friendship, something I never thought would happen, because the pair had once been adversaries. I sometimes think Kainda is jealous of Zuh’s subterranean exploits, though she’d never admit it.
Zuh smiles and drops to one knee, reaching out for my girls.
“Aunty Zuh!” Aquila shouts, throwing herself into Zuh’s strong arms.
Norah tries to hide her happiness, fighting against the smile forming on her face, but she leans in for a hug nevertheless. Zuh stands and greets Kainda. They clasp their hands over each other’s wrists.
“That was Gaia,” I say.
Zuh nods. “I apologize for her reaching the surface, my King. Had I known you were—”
I wave her apology off and motion to the small dead Nephilim. “What are they?”
“Nephilim,” Zuh says. “Given time to grow, warriors.”
This news staggers me. “Warriors?”
“Without a warrior’s blood, the surviving breeders are lost to failed attempts,” she says. “But they are trying.”
“How many are left?” I ask.
Zuh shrugs. “Less than fifty.”
“Fifty is not an insignificant number,” Kainda says. Breeders can birth Nephilim fairly frequently, and they have the capability of producing any class, though apparently not without a sample of blood.
“They are starving,” Zuh says. “Hiding deep.”
I point to Gaia’s body, now floating beside a sand bar. “She was not deep.”
“She…” Zuh says, “could run faster than you’d think. Used the rivers to mask her scent.”
That Gaia would risk traveling in a river said a lot. Drowning is one of the few sure ways to kill a Nephilim.
“But,” Zuh says, “If one of these breeders manages to find some warrior blood, or comes up with some kind of new class taller than my waist, they could be dangerous. Not a threat. But dangerous.”
I hear the question in her statement. “You’ve been underground for more than a year.”
“A year?” She looks a little surprised. “I thought...”
“You were deep,” I say. I spent two years in the deep, only to discover that twenty had passed on the surface. “If you spend too much time there, you may find Samuel on the throne.”
She smiles. “How is your eldest prodigy?”
“Wiser than his father,” Kainda answers. “And stronger.”
I don’t argue. It’s true.
Zuh thinks for a moment, but then sets her jaw and turns to Kainda. “Your father taught us that sacrifice is sometimes necessary. This will be mine. I will cleanse the underworld.”
“We can help!” Aquila says. She pounds Strike against her chest twice and raises the blade above her head. Norah follows suit, pounding her chest and raising her hammer.
Thankfully, Kainda defuses this bomb for me. “You are not yet old enough to hunt the underworld by yourselves.”
“Someday,” Zuh says, rubbing her hand through Aquila’s hair. “But I believe my place, for now, is in the underground.” She takes a step back, and I realize she’s prepared to return, right this second. Could the danger posed by these rogue breeders be that great?
“I will send help,” I say.
“If you must,” Zuh says with a grin. “But I would be pleased to kill them all myself.” She continues to back away, slipping into the trees. “Goodbye girls. Kainda.” She bows slightly. “My King.”
I bow in return, thankful for loyal, brave and honorable hunters like Zuh. There was a time when she would have killed Kainda to claim me as her own, but the old ways are done, and she has accepted that. Though, I fear, she has yet to embrace a life in the sun.
“Girls,” I say. “Gather close.” As I’m hugged from all sides by the three women I love most in the world, a cyclone of wind lifts the scattering of small Nephilim bodies up from the river bed before scooping up Gaia as well. The gale moves out to sea and deposits the lot in the ocean, far away from Antarktos. The act gives me a small measure of peace. Knowing, without doubt, that Gaia is dead, lifts a weight from my shoulders I didn’t realize I’d been holding. When the deed is done, I look down to find Aquila and Norah whispering conspiratorially. I can’t hear them, but I don’t need to. I know them. “Don’t even think about it.”
“Think about what?” Aquila says, fighting her mischievous smile.
“The underground is off limits,” I say, and I realize I sound like my father. “And don’t even try to argue.”
The pair kick stones and wander upstream, but not too far. They’d never admit it, but the attack has made them wary. They have yet to sheath their weapons, and they’re keeping a close watch on their surroundings.
“They’re not going to listen,” Kainda says, standing beside me.
“How can you be sure?”
“I wouldn’t have.”
“Then what do you suggest?” I ask.
“There is only one way to prepare a hunter for the underground.”
I sigh, but I know she’s right. “You can train them in the underground, but only in the tunnels beneath the citadel. They can’t go any further until I’m convinced they’re ready. Agreed?”
Kainda kisses my cheek. “Agreed. Now...defend yourself!”
ANTARKTOS RISING (Origins Edition) by JEREMY ROBINSON
Click Here to Purchase
DESCRIPTION:
THE WORLD RACES TO CLAIM A NEW CONTINENT…
A phenomenon known as crustal displacement shifts the Earth’s crust, repositioning continents and causing countless deaths. In the wake of the global catastrophe, the world struggles to take care of its displaced billions. But Antarctica, freshly thawed and blooming, has emerged as a new hope. Rather than wage a world war no nation can endure, the leading nations devise a competition, a race to the center of Antarctica, with the three victors dividing the continent.
It is within this race that Mirabelle Whitney, one of the few surviving experts on the continent, grouped with an American special forces unit, finds herself. But the dangers awaiting the team are far worse than feared; beyond the sour history of a torn family, beyond the nefarious intentions of their human enemies, beyond the ancient creatures reborn through anhydrobiosis--there are the Nephilim.
…ONLY TO FIND IT ALREADY TAKEN.
ORIGINS EDITION: Re-edited and repackaged, this new edition of Antarktos Rising is superior to all that came before. Be sure to look for Robinson’s other Origins Editions, which include re-releases of his first five novels.
SAMPLE:
Chapter 1
Anguta grew more terrified as each paddle stroke carried his bone-and-sealskin kayak across the unusually placid Arctic Ocean and closer to the whale. His knotted muscles shuddered in spasms, not from the cold but from the realization that his lifelong goal might finally come to fruition. At age fifty-seven, the
idea of single-handedly killing a sixty-foot humpback and towing its carcass back to the village seemed a ridiculous task. And while this rite of passage had been a long time coming, his aging body didn’t feel up to the job.
Grasping a bone-tipped spear in his gloved hand, Anguta did his best to ignore the throb of arthritis attacking his knuckles and waited…patiently…for the leviathan to return to the surface. Three days of tracking and sustaining himself on cured salmon had taken him this far. If he didn’t take the beast this year, he would return to the arctic waters off the coast of Alaska to try again—and he refused to consider that option. This was the year. He knew it.
“Come to me, whale,” Anguta mumbled through his thickly scarfed mouth. “Come to me and I will honor you with a quick death.” Anguta knew the death would only be quick if he were lucky enough to pierce the whale’s eye and penetrate its brain on the first blow. Otherwise, his first strike would tether his kayak to the whale’s body and a day-long struggle between man and beast would begin. The tradition belonged to his tribe alone, and Anguta was the only man who had yet to achieve the task. He had tried every year since he was nineteen.
Anguta cursed himself for finding the largest humpback in the entire ocean. He had hoped to find a young calf, newly weaned from its protective mother, but instead he had encountered a large bull, perhaps close in age to Anguta himself.
The old man’s only consolation was that he was not cold. After years of fruitless arctic hunting trips, he had learned that technology could be useful. His outer layers were traditional Inuit—furs of caribou, bear, and seal hide. This covered him from head to toe, leaving only his eyes exposed. Underneath the furs was a combination of moisture-wicking fabrics and a military-grade thermal bodysuit. His eyes were sealed behind a face mask that not only warmed his skin, but by virtue of its tinted surface also dulled the harsh glow of bright sun on white ice.
The Last Hunter - Collected Edition Page 101