BECMI Chapter 287 – Blood in the Snows
The winter wolves were the first to die.
The magical snow-hued horse-sized intelligent wolves were as susceptible as any creature to following established trails through the forest. If they noticed not as much snow had fallen here as it should have, they ignored it as they paced along a trail clearly broken by foraging deer or caribou. Trails would lead to game, game would lead to food and other targets of opportunity.
They died with remarkable speed and coordination.
Blades wrapped in Sound Bubbles. Precisely targeted volleys of arrows. Swords and spears lunging out of snowdrifts, or descending from motionless shadows in the pines above. The occasional crackle of magic, lost amid the endless trunks and drifting snow.
In less than two minutes of sharp and abrupt violence, two dozen winter wolves were dead, their carcasses hauled onto waiting Disks, and hustled away.
Their coats were worth five thousand gold each in more southern climes, and said coin went back to the slayers to improve their Gear. They definitely didn’t want to waste them!
It took the blue-skinned frost giants time to realize that the wolves were no longer calling out for one another. Horns blew, but there were no answers from the wolves.
Then the first of the white dragons fell down out of the sky.
The giants heard the roar of alarm as a large adult male came twisting and turning down out of the whiteness above, clawing at the sky with his wings, looking like the air just wouldn’t hold him up. The dragon crashed badly into the pines ahead of them, his roar of anger mixing nicely with the shattering of thick boughs and branches… and as the giants hurried to see what was going on, his furious calls suddenly went silent.
It was only a few hundred yards, but the trees made it impossible to see where he landed and what was going on there. By the time they found the area, the impact area was obvious, there was pale red blood on the snow… but the dragon’s body was missing.
Hackles rose as the frost giants, with long hair and beards of yellow, red, orange, or white looked around wildly in the clearing, cursing at the green branches in all directions that cut down their lines of sight, crouching and squinting and trying to find their enemies underneath the shadows of the towering pines.
There was nothing in sight.
More dragon screams arose. Those who could looked up and saw other dragons falling from the sky, again looking like they were too heavy for the winds to hold up anymore. One of them was an elder who was straining madly at the air, yet unable to keep himself aloft in the slightest!
Dragons crashed to the ground, screaming and roaring… and as giants bellowed and raced to those areas to see what had happened, one by one those roars of pain became death cries, and the dragons went silent.
Giants burst through the trees, sending branches and boughs flying, snow and ice falling from them and spraying in all directions.
Where dragons had died, there was blood and signs of fighting, but the corpses were already gone.
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Laird was quite ready. “Frost Giant Slayer!” the Mick murmured to his Blade as he came sweeping smoothly around the side of the tree.
Adamantine steel swirled and became solid adamantine flame. Solid cutting metal was replaced by pure flame, buttressed with Enmity against the Ancient and Giant Slayer. The Baneskull around the heavy pommel flared with the ancient fires of jotun blood, too.
Already quite vulnerable to flame, Laird cut through the muscle of the frost giant’s legs and hamstrung him instantly as the pale blue skin and fat beneath was sliced through instantly. The blow drew agonized cries from the giant as he thrashed and toppled, grabbing onto tree branches which just bent against his great weight as he fell… and two waiting spears were there, the heads also the solid flames of Firephasing. They tookthe frost giant right in the throat and stopping his cursing shouts instantly as they went in under his jaw and up into his brain under the force of his own fall.
The two barbarians only smiled fiercely for a second before spinning off and away in their white cloaks. They wove through the trees along the areas mostly devoid of snow in a practiced manner, before ducking into a tunnel in the snows and pulling dead branches laden with snow atop the entry, just another part of a snow drift there.
The Mick nodded as his hard-earned lightfoot carried him just above the snow, leaving no trails, the swaying, skating pace of the Waveskating Step seemingly perfectly made for moving over the snow and ice, and back and forth between the great trees here.
This was the light forest, the border forest, where the trees did not grow overly large, dying young and their seeds straining up to grow again. Miles further in, the trees began to increase, and soon enough their lower branches rose above the heads of even frost giants as they cut off the sunlight and grabbed for all the light they could above.
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Those areas were a different kind of fighting area, as the snows tended to mound in rings around and between the trees, heaping up in small hills with nigh-empty circles of needles around their bases, mostly devoid of the snow. The winds, already stopped by so many trunks and spread branches, found it hard to whip through all the hills of snow and actually they were moderately good shelter all on their own.
They were also run through with literally miles of tunnels now, things easily trampled through by the giants… but then they’d just collapse on themselves and be concealed as they did so.
They wouldn’t last forever, but they didn’t have to.
“Company four, five giants moving into the third area,” the rough voice of one of the savages reported from forty feet in the air, motionless as twenty-foot giants cursed and crashed through the branches below him.
“Open the pit on the third one,” the Mick murmured into coms. “I’ll be behind them in thirty seconds.” He swung onto their backtrail, the giants being both large and strong enough to wade through the massive drifts while scarcely slowing, not really registering the tunnels inside that permitted the scouts and forces here to conceal themselves and their movements. “Needlers, throat shots to the lead giant,” he instructed the elven hunters with that group. “Hundulfs, axes to the back of the knees of number two and see if you can go for the back of the neck when he drops. If you’re not fast, he’ll start fighting on your knees and the elves will have to bail you out.” That comment meant they’d put some fighting energy into not having to be rescued by the archers, even if one blow from a giant’s axe could effortlessly split a normal human open. “I’ve got the rearmost one… crap, be warned they’ve got a polar bear serving as a hound with them, he’s with number four.
“Braun, Chek, take out the bear. Nudgils, number four is yours, I’ll be coming up behind in reserve. Copy your assignments.”
“Copy.” “Copy.” “Copy,” rang back, sometimes a bit reluctantly, but Commander Briggs had been totally willing to beat into the recalcitrant the importance of acknowledging orders… often by simply having people disobey orders the givers hadn’t bothered to get confirmed, resulting in them doing their own thing, not coordinating, and often ‘dying’ in the games and drills as people were out of position and formation or any of another hundred amusing ways they could mess up.
Coordinating, following directions, trusting the other person to do the same: these things had immense power when done right, and allowed disciplined warriors to punch far above their weight in fights like these.
Fights like these that they survived helped them Level damn fast, too, because they didn’t die or almost die, they had to be Healed less, they didn’t expend as much effort, and they spared the spellcasters from having to intervene.
Commander Briggs had pointed out the difference in speed of Leveling between those who used personal weapons and old tech, and those who used the modern killing tech that could have mowed these giants down like the big blue targets that they were. Archers advanced nearly twice as fast as snipers and gunfighters, because their skill had to overcome the disadvantage of an inferior weapon, placing more demand on the warrior and getting results. Likewise, those who used cold steel weapons did better than those with plasma cutters and pulse-blades, even if the things were fantastically showy and actually extremely deadly.
He actually had one of the plasma-cutters for a back-up weapon, the super-hot blade of energy bearing the pale purple hue reserved only for full Forsaken, identifying his unique status if he chose to light it.
Silent as a ghost, his feet whispering over the snows and needles instead of on them, he skated towards the sound of giant voices and footsteps, no attempt at stealth for the savages from the north, Laird held before him and his point guiding the Mick’s course.
There they were, mountains of flesh in motion, striding through one of the circles of snow, crashing through and toppling it behind them, obscuring the tunnel they blasted right through with their own strength and power dropping more snow atop the openings that were only knee-high to them and below their lines of sight.
The polar bear noticed the smell, and would have stopped to sniff and dig if the last giant hadn’t been coming on, plainly going to kick him out of the way if he didn’t follow his master, and so the bear kept on his course.
Unlike the Hounds helping track the equally sapient winter wolves and other beasts, the bears weren’t Awakened and were just animals, unable to communicate effectively with their masters and scarcely trained as proper hunters, especially in this unfamiliar terrain. The giants carried a lot of seal and whale blubber to feed themselves and their pets, too, the high-fat stuff carrying more energy than any other type of food in the North here.
Salted and cured a bit, it wasn’t bad tasting, either, although definitely not something the Mick wanted as a staple of his diet, especially with a Sustaining Ring taking care of all his energy needs.
He swayed between two trees, Laird rose up as he came up on legs wrapped in tanned caribou furs, his Sword ignited into Firephasing, and he cut again, whispering “Now!” into his coms, and violence erupted in the northern forest again.
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Hrafnar held his axe before him, his teeth gnashing as he looked around into the darkness under the boughs, the many trunks, the heaped drifts, all places an enemy could be concealed.
The others were all dead, hacked down by blades that had erupted out of the very snowdrifts, small humans in white cloaks painted to blend into the landscape attacking with ferocity and skill. Axes and swords to the hamstrings and tendons, hammers and maces to the kneecaps and arches of the feet, all designed to first bring a giant down and in range of killing strokes, although a rare slash or stabbing into the leg or groin could also result in a lethal injury bleeding out at speed as pale and cold blood jetted out, glistening as it lay in and among the snow in liquid form, refusing to freeze, only to clot like jelly!
“Come on!” he roared, stamping his feet. “No more shadow games! See if you can fight me in the open! I am Hrafnar, of the Frusbrokur of Joklhjem! Let us see if you are cowards, or warriors!” he bellowed out in as much bravado as he could muster.
He could hear cries in the distance, some acknowledging his calls, but they did not promise any aid. Most were simply battle cries and bellows of pain that were trailing off one-by-one as, surrounded in the trees, cut off both ahead and behind if they tried to flee, the invading frost giants were taken down.