Chapter 112: Invincible? Not Really
Clang. Bang. Crack.
The Labrys and the Orc King's heavy axe met again and again in the cleared circle of mud and corpses. Sparks leaped from the blades and died in the wet ground. Each impact rang across the field like a hammer on an anvil, loud enough to make the nearest fighters flinch even while they killed each other.
Gabriella was obviously much stronger than her opponent. That much was plain to anyone with eyes. She turned Garkash's blows aside with almost casual power, forcing him to plant his feet wider and wider as the strength drained from his thick arms.
The Orc King grunted with every exchange, green blood already running from small cuts on his shoulders. Yet the angel still fought as if she were dealing with a lesser creature, something that could never truly threaten her. That small arrogance cost her.
Garkash saw the opening the way a hunting dog sees a weak hamstring. His axe flashed low and fast, a short, ugly stroke that had nothing of elegance in it. The notched edge bit deep into the thick muscle of her thigh, just above the knee.
Silver blood welled up around the iron and ran down her leg in a bright, unnatural stream.
Gabriella screamed.
The sound was raw and startled, the cry of someone who had forgotten what mortal pain felt like. Ordinary weapons had never been able to mark her before. In this weakened state, cut off from heaven's grace, she was flesh again—strong flesh, but flesh all the same.
The wound burned like open fire. Then, almost as quickly as it had opened, the flesh began to knit. The bleeding of silver slowed. The edges of the gash pulled together. Within a handful of heartbeats, only a pale line remained on the smooth skin.
Garkash licked his lips and grinned through the grinding pain in his own ribs. "Ah. So you can heal fast."
His small eyes dropped openly to the place between her legs, lingering there with naked hunger. "When I destroy the soft parts there, they will keep coming back. That will be fun for a long time. I will make it last."
Gabriella's face twisted into something almost feral. A wild, wordless growl tore from her throat. She poured everything she still possessed into the Labrys.
Once the golden axe had split open the head of a god on a mountain far from this world, in the hands of a true angel, it could have turned this entire field into steaming paste in a single sweep.
However, now it was only metal. The disconnection from heaven had reduced it to a weapon that depended entirely on the strength of the arm that swung it.
The two axes met one final time in a crash that shook the ground under their feet. A sharp, high crack followed an instant later. Garkash's weapon shattered into flying shards of iron that spun away into the mud.
The force of the blow threw him sideways. Gabriella's returning swing smashed into his right side with the wet sound of breaking bone. His ribs snapped like dry sticks.
The king of the Orcs was driven back three long strides, boots plowing deep furrows in the bloody earth. He did not fall. He planted his feet, blood running freely down his side, and roared with something that was almost delight.
"I like you even more!" Garkash bellowed, voice thick with pain and lust. "I came to fuck the human countess, but now I want you! You will be the one!"
"You will die with those wishes still rotting in your throat," Gabriella answered, her voice like cold iron scraped across stone. She raised the Labrys high, the golden edge catching the light, ready to take his head clean from his shoulders.
From the low rise behind the warband, Jibreel watched in pure horror. If the Orc king fell here, the tribes would fracture overnight. Soft queens like Luka Voltha would rise and breed soft Orcs who talked of treaties and peace instead of conquest and breeding rights. The race would wither into something weak and forgettable.
His dark magic was spent. The ancestral staff was little more than dead bone and teeth now, its power burned out in the earlier blasts.
Yet he had one card left, carefully saved.
When the strange human had been tortured in the settlement days earlier, Jibreel had mopped up every drop of blood that fell on the wooden pedestal. He had tested it in secret, mixed it with old reagents, whispered words over it that had not been spoken in a hundred years.
Something in that blood was wrong and powerful. Dark nymphs had moved at the human's command. That could not be a coincidence. For this battle he had charged the collected blood with the last scraps of his craft and coated a single black-fletched arrow.
He lifted a short, powerful bow, drew the string back to his ear, and loosed.
The arrow flew straight, a dark streak against the morning light. It punched through the white armor at Gabriella's upper arm and sank into the dense muscle beneath with a solid, meaty sound.
The angel looked down at it, more confused than hurt. Until now, Orc arrows had bounced from her skin like rain off stone. This one had bitten. The wound was shallow, but it burned with a cold that had nothing to do with ordinary metal or ordinary poison.
She dropped the Labrys into the mud, plucked the shaft free with two fingers, snapped it in two as if it were a twig, and flung the pieces aside. Pathetic green-skin toys. Nothing more.
She turned back to Garkash, who still knelt in the mud with his head raised, waiting for the killing blow like a beast that refused to crawl even when its legs were broken.
Even with shattered ribs, his enormous dick was hard, the thick, ugly length of him pushing obscenely against the front of his battle trousers. Disgust curled Gabriella's lip. She reached for the Labrys to finish the job.
Her hand closed on the familiar handle. She pulled.
Nothing happened.
She pulled again, harder, putting her back into it. The golden axe might as well have been rooted deep in the earth. Strength had left her arms as if someone had opened a hidden tap and let it all run out onto the ground.
Garkash's small eyes widened. Then understanding flickered across his crude features. The arrow. The last thing that had touched her. Jibreel had worked his black magic!
The Orc King growled through the grinding pain in his side, forced himself upright one vertebra at a time, and rose to his full height. Blood ran freely down his green hide and soaked into the furs at his waist.
He grinned, showing every yellow tusk. "Are you really invincible, angel? I don't think so. Not really. Not anymore."
"Die, you filthy—" Gabriella began, still reaching for the weapon that would not rise.
His open-handed slap caught her across the face with the force of a warhammer. Silver blood and spit flew in a wide arc. Her head snapped sideways hard enough that something in her neck cracked.
The world tilted and swam. How could a mere slap do this? Why would her body not obey the simplest commands?
Slap.
The second blow finished what the first had started. Gabriella's knees buckled as if the bones had turned to water. She hit the ground hard, armor ringing against stone and mud, wings folding awkwardly and painfully beneath her weight. The impact drove the breath from her lungs.
Orcs surged forward at once, howling with sudden, vicious joy. They bit, kicked, clawed at the straps of her armor, trying to tear the white plates away from the soft, powerful flesh beneath. One already had a hand on the edge of her breastplate, yanking hard.
"Stop!" Garkash's roar cut through the noise. The green-skins froze mid-motion. "This angel is mine. She will be my concubine. Carry her to the settlement. Any of you who touches her in the wrong way will be torn apart by my own hands and left for the crows. She belongs to me!"
A dozen of the larger Orcs scrambled forward, clumsy in their eagerness and fear of their king. They lifted Gabriella's limp form between them, silver blood dripping from her mouth and the shallow wound in her arm, and began the awkward, stumbling journey back toward the trees and the distant settlement.
Garkash turned toward the remaining elves and humans. They had been watching from the edges of the field with the quiet confidence of people who believed an angel on their side meant the day was already won.
That confidence died in their eyes as he raised a fallen ax, blood still running down his side, and bellowed the charge with a voice that carried across the entire battlefield.
The Orc warband poured forward in a green, roaring wave, axes and spears raised, voices raised in a single hungry howl.
The remaining elves and humans set their feet and raised their shields, but the numbers were no longer even, and the angel who had held the line was gone. The real massacre began.