Patreon or PayPal Me keeps this site and its author alive. Thank you. |
Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 70: Slade 274
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Cooper 95
Darting between the calf-high stones, Slade bolted past the giant hyena’s head. He slashed his blade along the side, but the fur turned the blade. Lorenzo, the hyena, spun in place, but Slade anticipated this, and turned to wallop him across the nose with a two-handed strike. This went in, and the hyena whooped in anger, and charged right at Slade.
Bouncing off the monster’s shoulder, Slade got back to his feet among small stones. Lorenzo turned around slowly a short distance away, and laughed in a loud mocking call that echoed through the wasteland. Slade reached up and touched his own nose, and then pointed at Lorenzo.
“First blood is mine, Larry. You can still turn back.”
Lorenzo’s lower hindquarters dug in, and his spiky mane waved as he worked his muscles. Suddenly he charged, but slower than Slade thought he could so Slade was ready when the giant hyena tried to flank him to the right. A quick stab at the right eye, and a cross of the legs, and a charge up the opposing side threw Lorenzo’s grasp of the battle into disarray. Slade came up, and with both hands brought down the blade in a smashing oberhaus even as he screamed. “By the power of Thor I smite thee!”
The huge beast shuddered at the impact, and the blade, aided by the power of Thor, tore through the front shoulder muscles of its right front leg. Lorenzo staggered back, and Slade paused again even as he saw blood shower down on the white stones of the land. A green fog began to rise into the air.
A thready voice spoke in the air. “I’m so afraid, so--” The fog was gone, and so was the voice. Slade tried to understand what he had seen.
“Shella?” He yelled to his distant wife.
“I think he is formed of fear.”
Hmm. Slade decided to give the poor man another chance. He would cut him apart, and see if the madman could be rescued. If not, then a clean death with a sword. That said, he had yet to see what the bone blade in the beast man’s mouth did. It was not going to be easy, but at the same time, he thought he had the measure of the hyena. It was huge, strong, could turn well (but not great), and its fur was very tough, but the man himself was not a good fighter. He had poor instincts, probably little experience fighting as a giant beast, and almost certainly none fighting someone of Slade’s caliber.
Lorenzo looked at him and laughed. That was disquieting. Suddenly the giant hyena ran away toward the granite hillock and the grove of shivering trees. Noting that he ran around the hill counter-clockwise, laughing all the way, spraying blood from his mouth, Slade found himself not hugely surprised when one by one each of the shivering trees on the hillock pulled its roots from the ground. As about two dozen full-grown trees and four dozen small ones approached him in a mass, he decided that this just was not his day. Worse, the full-grown trees were nearly thirty feet tall, and thicker in their body than the other shivering trees he had seen.
He heard footsteps to his right, and turned, not at all surprised to see Shella.
“Ranged attacks, m’lord?” He nodded. All he had in that department was his blaster, which they had already determined did not work in this universe, and his dagger, which was a single-use weapon, but she had often demonstrated abilities of which he had not been fully aware.
As they came in range she began casting her spell creating an invisible striking force. It knocked back a tree, and cracked a limb, but the tree kept on. Another, and this did less. It struck Slade that trying to bury them probably wouldn’t work, given that they had just rather effortlessly pulled themselves from the dirt.
“Focus on the small ones, Shella.” She did, and destroyed one with a single strike. As she struck another, Slade charged into battle. He had the job of taking on the heavy ones--the full-grown trees--and the hyena, but also the job of keeping them off Shella. If he could give her enough time to take down a lot of the small ones, then maybe they could somehow win.
Screaming his prayer to Thor, he chopped through one of the roots upholding a tree, and it tilted so that he was able to grab an upper branch, and whip it off its roots. But the branch twisted in his fingers, and began to wrap around his wrist so that he was forced to let go, parry another branch coming at him, shout his prayer again, and keep on fighting. He dared not become berserk, because despite the additional strength it would give him, it would take his mind, in part. He needed to stay focused and quick-witted to dodge, to parry, to use one tree to block another tree, to move around, always moving, and to chip away mostly, and chop when he could.
Lorenzo charged him, and Slade slashed away one of the snakes in the beast-man’s left eye even as he jumped into the branch of a tree that was trying to slaughter him. Leaping back down on the back of the giant hyena, he began to hammer blows into its skull. One, two, three, four, and fears flew away, and the hyena visibly shrank, until a branch grabbed him and flung him skyward. For a second he thought the fight won. Flipping, he dropped, and another branch hit him. Feeling like a ping pong ball above a paddle, he turned around with his sword ready to chop the next branch that came at him--which is why three branches came at him. He blocked two, and the third knocked him tumbling into one pointing straight at him. It pierced through his lungs and he slid down it to chop the tree holding him to flinders, but in that time other trees pierced him. Even as Shella frantically dodged the badly damaged and now three-legged hyena and cast spells at the same time, he felt his life fading. He hung in the trees, rather like Odin, he thought woozily, but before the giant hyena could stumble back and drink his blood, he was gone.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #529: Characters in Action. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
