Have you ever seen someone mauled, then tossed out like an old rag?
I have. I’ve seen it more times than I can count, and I’ve done it to people with my own hands. I wasn’t on the giving side of it this time. Just now, the majestic Magic Armor had been torn into scrap metal, Rudeus tumbling from it like a ragdoll. He was face down at first, so I couldn’t see it, but he was at least ragged enough to make the scrappy regulars at your tavern laugh and say “Looking handsome, boy!”
Over the following ten seconds, the rest of our side fell to pieces.
Mother exploded. The attack left only her legs behind, and now she had to regenerate. Of course, she’d be back and cackling before too long. The Ogre God was beaten black and blue, and his arm was broken. Ogres are hard to kill, but going off the amount of blood coming out of his mouth, if he didn’t get a healing spell soon, he was going to die. With Rudeus down too, morale plummeted. Miss Eris ran to Rudeus’s side, calling out to him as she held her sword at the ready. Master Ruijerd wasn’t such a coward that he’d give up the fight just because his commander went down, but he was visibly shaken. Master Cliff had lost his nerve and Miss Elinalise’s shield was shattered, forcing her withdrawal. Moore would fight on to the death for my mother, but without her, it looked like he’d decided to retreat.
The time had come.
I reached down and picked up my mother’s fallen sword, the sword of Demon King Atoferatofe. One of the forty-eight magic swords crafted by the great demon swordsmith Julian Harisco. This was the magic sword Jawbreaker. That gruff old mule of a smith had made an offering of it to my mother in his father’s honor. Apparently, she’d shown a rare display of gravitas when she accepted it, and from that day forth, she’d kept it on her person at all times. She’d never let anyone else wield it.
Well. With this, I could let loose a little.
“Master Ruijerd! Master Moore!” The two of them glanced my way for just a second. They didn’t have their full attention to spare, but they were listening. “I’ll make an opening for you! Fall back!”
All heroic epics come to an end. Fairy tales close on a great finale after an evil demon king is vanquished, but reality isn’t so generous. Almost always, the end is quite tedious. You challenged an enemy greater than yourself, or you fell for someone’s plot, or else you were challenged by a new hero. You lost. You died. That’s how it was for my father, North God Kalman. No matter how incredible a hero might be, no matter how strong, so long as they engage in war, defeat and death are sure to catch up with them eventually. A hero, after all, is heroic. Even when they know the hero dies in the end, people light up at his glorious exploits. The heroes’ way imprints itself onto their hearts.
My death here wouldn’t be written down anywhere, though… Just like my father, North God Kalman. The death he went to was never written down.
Well, I looked up to my father. Why not go the same way? I’d go up against an enemy I had no hope of defeating and go down in a blaze of glory. It wasn’t the death I’d pictured for myself… But hell, whose death is?
“In my left hand, a sword.”
Been a while since I said this out loud. Hope I don’t choke or stammer…
“In my right hand, a sword.” I gripped the hilt with both hands. Power bubbled up from the pit of my stomach, flowing out to fill my body. I set my sights on the raging golden armor.
“With these, mine arms, countless lives shall I claim, and a hundred million deaths I deliver!”
The words I’d said countless times in my life when the crucial moment came. I’d told myself that once I’d spoken those words, defeat was out of the question. I hadn’t spoken them once since I gave up being a hero. Even after all this time, as I went to meet defeat, I was surprised at how they flowed off my tongue.
“I am North God Alex Rybak. Prepare yourself!”
This would be my final battle, so I’d make it count.
Rudeus
WHEN I CAME TO, I smelled something good. It was a little sweaty, but pleasant and familiar. In the corner of my eye, I saw rippling red hair, just as I felt a warmth on my cheek. Something was pressed against it.
“Are you awake?!” Whatever was touching my cheek spoke. That was Eris’s voice. Awareness rushed back. Eris was carrying me on her back.
“What’s going on?” Jerking upright, I looked about. A few others, looking like refugees, were walking with us. Cliff, Elinalise, and Ruijerd.
“We lost,” Eris said curtly. She sounded bitter.
They’d gone in again against the Fighting God only to be beaten to a pulp. Eris had blacked out after one hit, and Elinalise’s shield was shattered. Atofe and the Ogre God had put up a valiant fight, but the Fighting God had thrown them off again and again. Because I was down for the count, Moore had ordered our retreat. Ruijerd had retrieved Eris and me. With Atofe, her personal guard, the Ogre God, and Sandor covering our retreat, we’d gotten away.
“Right.” I was reeling. We’d lost, just like that. I didn’t think of myself as the toughest guy around or anything like that. The first time I took the Version One out against Orsted, I’d lost then too. I knew I wasn’t invincible. Still, my confidence had been bolstered by a run of recent victories. I’d beaten Atofe and Alec. I hadn’t beaten Alec alone, but a win was a win. I’d still always tried to consider the possibility I might lose. This was my first one-punch knockout. This was the first time I’d been blown to smithereens and knocked out cold in a single hit.
Had I underestimated Badigadi? Had I thought, Fighting God or not, the demon king would still pull his punches?
“What’s our next move?” Eris asked.
I thought about it. Next…what should we do? I wouldn’t have said we were all out of options, but there was no way any smart-ass plan I came up with would beat the Fighting God. I didn’t have much faith in our firepower. A glance around told me Sandor, the Ogre God, Atofe, and her personal guard weren’t with us. They could be dead. That left me, Eris, Ruijerd, Cliff, Elinalise…and the Superd warriors, if they counted. I definitely didn’t count as reliable firepower; without the Magic Armor, I was more of a liability. All I could do was make a river, or a mountain, or set the mountain on fire. You know, like in that folktale, The Three Lucky Charms. After drinking up the river, leaping over the mountain, and putting out the fire with the river water, the Fighting God would come chasing after me, just like the witch in that story. We couldn’t win with our current lineup.
“We have no choice but to flee,” Ruijerd said, looking me in the eye.
“Ruijerd…”
“He’s one of the Seven Great Powers. The real thing. We can’t win against him even with all our strength combined.”
So we’d run away. We’d run back to the Superd village, then…and then what? In The Three Lucky Charms, the boy ran to a temple, where the priest used his wiles to beat the witch. We did have Priest Orsted back in the Superd Village. And yet… The Fighting God and Geese wanted to kill me and use up Orsted’s power. If Orsted fought the Fighting God, he’d have to expend mana on an order of magnitude greater than he would have in a fight with the likes of the North God and the Sword God. No question, if that happened, we’d lose the war. And those two would chase us to the ends of the world to achieve their goal. There was nowhere we could go and be safe.
“Even if we run, we can’t win,” I said.
“Then all we can hope for is to fight and die with honor,” Ruijerd said.
When you fought and died with honor and lost, you still lost. You didn’t get to call that a win. When you die, that’s it.
“Rudeus, pull yourself together.” Eris’s hand squeezed mine. Her grip was warm and firm. She’d saved me more times than I could remember with those hands. She’d held our child with those hands.
“Right.” Calm down and think, Rudy. How can we win?
We needed information before anything else. If the Fighting God Armor had a weak point, for example, that’d do nicely. Unfortunately, as the story told it, that armor was the strongest in existence, crafted by Laplace himself. He’d gone down trying to beat his own creation! Finding a weak point probably wasn’t happening. Even if it didn’t have any, though, there were still other strategies, ways to fight it. I might be able to find something about that. Now, who knew about the armor? Atofe…wasn’t here. Which left Orsted. I’d have to ask him. If it turned out he didn’t know anything…
I pondered in silence for a moment. Whether Orsted knew anything or not, I’d still have to fight this enemy, here and now. We’d lost Atofe, the Ogre God, and Sandor. There had to be a way to win.
That said, I wanted to keep our casualties to a minimum. I didn’t want the Superd Village to get caught in the crossfire. Norn was there, too. I couldn’t let her fight.
There had to be a chance. There had to be. Even if it was only a fraction of a percent.
Then it came to me. That’s it!
I still had one trump card in my hand, didn’t I? I had figured I’d use it much earlier.
At last, I said, “We’ll fall back to the forest to buy some time.”
I was going to stake everything on this.
“Got it.” The others all nodded.