Steelforged Legacy 2 - Chapter 24

Last one for SFL2 - Next week we start Lost Bloodlines 2 Teasers!

Chapter 24

Following the crashing of the trio, Casey ended up passing through a well-constructed hideout inside of a small patch of bushes that had a good view down the length of the river.

“How the hell did these guys not see me?” Casey muttered as he looked over the hide and back along the route that he’d taken. He studied the carefully trimmed spaces between the bushes that functioned like viewing ports for anyone inside the little hideout.

Their view is aimed at the sky and the river specifically. I believe you were likely out of sight due to some convenient cover, Casey. Don’t question your good fortune, just make use of it! You heard what they were planning.

“Got it,” Casey growled, pulling Maude from his belt as he raced away through the brush.

Casey wasn’t sure why, but it felt like the greenery bent away from him as he charged towards the sound of combat. It wasn’t anything obvious, like a plant moving out of his way, a root shifting, or a tree swaying out of his way. No, it just felt as if every step that he took was instinctively guided to an open patch of ground that would then lead him to the next opening. All without anything ever actually getting in his way. 

After having spent the last week chasing Magnus through the forest and the elk making each movement look natural, Casey finally had a feeling for what it must have felt like for Magnus as the elk nimbly ducked between plants.

The only clue to what might be the cause was the faint shape of a woman leaning against a tree ahead of him, but when his eyes snapped that way to confirm what he’d seen, the elemental had already melted into the shadows, but he caught sight of her bright green eyes vanishing along with a feral smile.

Blessings of the forest! Maude snarled victoriously, having seen it as well. Clearly, the spirits of the land are unhappy with these people too!

Casey didn’t have a chance to respond, as the trees opened up a moment later to reveal the battlefield.

The large airship had crashed heavily into the trees, the thick keel shattering on impact and having sent boards, wings, canvas, and bodies flying. There were several billows of smoke rising from the ruined vehicle, and over a dozen men and women wearing a variety of different clan’s colors battled with a solid block of twenty dressed in the colors of the Bronze Fist. Casey spotted a pair of what looked like heavy ballista secured to massive stones with thick iron bolts that had chains running from their base to the underside of the broken airship.

That must have been how they brought the ship down, Casey thought in a rush as he surveyed the battlefield.

The survivors of the airship, though shaken, were doing their best to defend themselves. But their foes outnumbered them, and those same enemies were beginning to pick off the defenders. For every standing person in the group, there were easily two bodies lying on the ground, either injured or dead from the sudden crash.

Scanning the fight, Casey tried to figure out where he’d do the most good. Casey’s decision was made for him when he saw two of the Bronze Fist drengr towards the rear of the group start backing up while fighting with something. A moment later, he realized what it was.

The two men had found one of the unconscious folk that was still alive, and Casey growled as he watched one of them begin ripping the clothes off the form of a slender young woman.

Maude snarling a warcry in his mind was echoed by Casey roaring along with her as he charged out of the bushes.

He didn’t need to ask Maude to change. His partner was already within his mind and could read and feel everything that he was thinking. Her blade lengthened as he closed the ten feet to where the two grinning men were working to pin the struggling, injured woman to the ground while their fellows continued to hack at the defensive line.

Casey hit them with all the fury of a meteorite coming to earth.

Both men were not prepared, and Casey slammed shoulder first into the back of one, sending him flying over his victim as he had been leaning forward to pin the girl’s legs down while his companion fought with her shoulders. This sent his helmeted head into his companion’s face with a clang of metal-on-metal and a shout of pain. This resud in both men tumbling over each other.

Not pausing for a moment, Casey let the impact slow his momentum enough that he could turn and step through, thrusting forward to drive the keen tip of Maude’s sword into the back of the man he’d just hit. The blow sheared through the chainmail the man was wearing as if it didn’t exist, driving deep into his back and piercing a kidney.

Squealing like a stuck pig, the man thrashed and pulled himself free of the sword, sending blood gouting all over his friend, who was swearing and screaming at him about having broken his nose.

Casey didn’t hesitate, lifting his right foot up and stomping down hard on the knee of the man who wasn’t bleeding out yet. There was a loud crunch of breaking bone followed by a sharp scream of pain before Casey drove Maude into the man’s gut, again piercing the chainmail without an issue.

Idiots, why bother wearing mortal metal when you are hunting drengr. That or these men are opportunists of the worst kind, Maude growled in Casey’s mind. He didn’t respond, instead yanking the sword out to drive it into the back of the other man, as both were wounded now and would die eventually, but ‘eventually’ was not fast enough for Casey.

A deep, animal bleat of fury was Magnus’ only warning as he joined Casey and Maude in their offensive. The elk dove from the cover of the forest with a mighty scooping motion of his antlers. The sharp tips of Magnus’ headgear drove into several drengr from behind, eliciting howls of pain and surprise, before the elk ripped his muscled neck upwards. That gesture tore open one man’s back and sent two others flipping into the air.

“Allies! Roaring Mountain, we do not fight alone!” bellowed an older male voice, and there came a ragged cheer from the beleaguered group.

A sound behind Casey had him whirling about, weapon raised, only to find that it was the injured woman, grimacing as she fought to get to her feet with a limp. He took a moment to give her a once-over, ensuring that she didn’t bear any visible injuries.

The woman was tall and athletic, with a lean figure and compact breasts restrained by a simple cotton chest-wrap, leaving most of their curves on display as her tunic was torn open at the neck almost to her waist. Close-fitting pants hugged her muscular legs and tucked into a pair of worn boots that had an armored, metal toe on them. Her blonde hair was a mass of ringlets that clung tight to an angular face that was pinched in pain currently, while her dark green eyes glinted while she scowled at Casey.

“Who are—” she began to demand, but Casey saw her eyes widen and features shift, so he whirled around again, this time not hesitating to lead with Maude’s sharp tip.

The blade drove between the flared nose-guard and the rim of the helmet, spearing through the left eye of the drengr who had been about to knife Casey in the back.

Growling, Casey yanked the weapon back, feeling the flare of qi enter his body as the other man expired. It’d been the one he’d gotten in the kidney, as the other one was pale and shaking from his gut wound, clearly having gone into shock.

Casey ended the man’s suffering with a blow to the throat that separated his head from the rest of his body. Bending, he snatched up the man’s fallen sword and turned to offer it to the pale woman, who just stared at the weapon.

“Take it!” Casey barked, startling her out of her distraction and she clumsily took the sword from him.

“If you see a spear, send it my way,” the woman grunted, limping forward to stand next to Casey as he turned to attack the rear of the group of Bronze Fist drengr.

While Casey had been distracted, Magnus had made leaps and bounds into dealing as much damage as possible to the Bronze Fist. The canny elk had feinted and thrust with his antlers, fading back to bait enemies to turn, before lunging in and taking another man through the throat, face, or shoulder with the proud rack.

Those Magnus threw through the air landed hard and awkwardly, and any that landed near Magnus felt the stomp of his hooves as the elk sought to stave in chests or crush heads.

As Casey dove in, he saw the moment that the battle turned. The Roaring Mountain drengr had been fighting defensively, doing their best to pull wounded from the wreckage and protect the injured while holding off the Bronze Fist. But with Magnus at first, and then Casey and his new ally hitting the enemy from behind, it divided the attention of the Bronze Fist too far, and the Roaring Mountain took vicious advantage of it.

Casey faced off against a scarred woman with a shield and a hammer as her weapons. She feinted with the hammer and then lashed out with her shield to try to club him with the flat surface. Casey quick-stepped back to avoid the blow and the woman screamed at him.

“Fight me like a man, you mewling, milk-fed cretin!” The woman screeched, following after Casey with an easy step, though the woman’s eyes rolled crazily in her head and a bit of foam decorated her mouth.

Berserker. Be careful, Casey, Maude warned, and he grunted his understanding to his partner.

Maude had told him about the berserker, those who had a battle-madness that they lost themselves in. It made them powerful, unpredictable, and harder to put down, as they could ignore critical wounds for a time because of the madness.

The woman lunged forward, swinging her square-headed hammer at Casey in a powerful chop that transitioned into a thrust with the pointed head, screaming in fury as her messy brown hair flew around her head. Casey sidestepped the chop, stepped back again to avoid the thrust, and then swung Maude upwards to hack at the woman’s wrist. But she was too fast.

Her shield came forward in another punching motion, this time allowing Maude’s blade to sink into the edge of the shield and catch there when the woman twisted the wooden circle to trap his blade.

“Got you!” shrieked the woman, her lips pulling back from teeth stained pink with blood. Whether it was hers or someone else’s, Casey wasn’t sure.

Pull and throat strike, Maude ordered and Casey obeyed his partner without hesitation.

The woman’s hammer swung out wide to Casey’s left, but he yanked back with the hand holding Maude. The blade, formerly trapped in the shield, came free as Maude resumed her shorter seax form and the blade shrank.

Casey thrust forward, aiming for the surprised woman’s face and his weapon exploded in length even as she opened her mouth to shout more profanities at him.

The tip of Maude’s blade erupted from the back of her neck. Casey snapped his weapon to one side, cutting free from where it had buried itself in her throat and punched out the back of her head as the empowered blade clove through bone without issue.

Another pulse of qi flared into Casey’s center and he immediately funneled it into his Soulforge, the flare of spiritual flame refining the incoming qi before pouring it out into his body to race along the channels there and empower him.

Nearby, Casey saw the blonde woman hacking at another of the Bronze Fist, her opponent skillfully parrying her sword-swings with the metal-plated haft of a spear before thrusting at her face. She threw herself to one side, rolling heavily and yelping in pain as her left leg caught and struggled to support her. 

Not hesitating, Casey knelt, scooped up the dead woman’s hammer from the ground, and threw it heavily with his left hand at the man. Casey didn’t need to kill the man with the spear, just distract him long enough.

Reacting automatically, the man tried to parry the thrown weapon with his spear, but the spinning hammer hit haft-first on the spear and the weight of the head actually spun it around, allowing the metallic cap on the bottom of the handle to club him in the face.

Leaping forward, Casey drove his sword down into the man’s chest, roughly where he believed the other drengr’s heart to be. The man stiffened, hands releasing the spear to try to scrabble at the blade in his chest, cutting his fingers off in the process.

Yanking his blade free, Casey hooked the spear with his foot and tossed it clumsily to the blonde woman.

“A spear, as you asked,” Casey barked before wading back into the fight.

The battle continued, and with a weapon that she was clearly more suited to, the blonde woman fought alongside Casey with a will.

She thrust around the edge of his battles, either keeping others from aiding his opponent or forcing guards out to allow him to close. During the fighting, Casey was able to claim a shield in a lull that he hoped would help keep him from getting injured again.

Thankfully, the shield was one of the round wooden shields that had a grip in the center protected by a metallic boss, so he just had to grip the handle and it helped to guard that entire flank for him. If it’d had straps to secure it, he wouldn’t have risked the distraction.

The first blow on that shield nearly tore it from his hand, as he hadn’t quite gotten the hang of how to block with it yet and had been just holding it out in front of him. A bit of coaching from Maude had it properly aligned after he’d fended off that attacker and Casey was quickly sweeping away attacks with it.

Casey took a number of small wounds during the fight, a slight cut to his right forearm when he misjudged a parry, and a bruise on his thigh from an opponent’s shield hammering down onto the limb to try to distract him. After the cut, he tried to push qi into his Skin of the Iron Bear technique to armor himself and it worked, but not perfectly. The bruise hurt but only slightly, as the technique didn’t protect him perfectly from bludgeoning attacks.

Then, just as quickly as the fight had begun, it ended.

Casey slammed his shield forward, mirroring the attempt the berserker had used to try to club him with it. The blow caught his opponent on the chin and sent the man sprawling. Then Casey had to dance backwards as the thick head of the Roaring Mountain drengr’s axe whizzed by only inches from his nose in a horizontal swipe that would have hacked in half the man Casey had just knocked down, if he had missed the shield-slam.

“Sorry, drengr!” the older man barked, his blue eyes snapping with suppressed anger as he arrested the momentum of the heavy weapon and brought it around and up over his head, before slamming down onto the chest of the prone man with bone-crunching force. “Roaring Mountain and aspirants, sound off!” the man bellowed, yanking his weapon free and turning to scan his fellows.

Casey nodded in acceptance of the man’s apology, but he didn’t drop his shield or sheath Maude as those remaining alive sounded off as fine or injured. The entire field was full of bodies, some twitching and groaning, most of them still and dead.

“Drengr, thank you,” the softer feminine voice behind him made Casey start slightly, but when he turned to look, it was the blonde woman leaning heavily on her spear. The thigh of her left leg was marked with blood, but it wasn’t soaked through, so he guessed her injury was minor at the moment.

“No problem, miss.”

“Vibeke,” the woman said.

“Vibka?” Casey asked in confusion, blushing when Maude sniggered inside his head.

“Vee-becca,” the woman corrected, rolling her bright green eyes at him and smirking slightly. “My name. I feel it is the least I owe to the savior of my virtue and my life.”

“Ah, yeah…” Casey stuttered, shaking away his embarrassment despite Maude’s continued giggles. “Uh, you can call me Casey. How is your leg doing? Do you need a bandage?”

“Bleeding, but I will not be dying today,” Vibeke sighed, glancing around her with sad eyes as the remaining defenders started moving amongst the injured and administering justice or first aid to those they found.

“Hopefully not. What happened here, anyway?” Casey asked, finally letting the shield slide free of his hand and dropping it to lean against his legs while he caught his breath. Inside his mind, Maude sent him gentle, wordless sounds of encouragement and pride.

“That is a good question, lad.” The gruff male with the axe said, turning back from checking on his fighters. “While I’m not one to complain about help when it is needed, do you have any idea why this lot was lying in wait to ambush passing ships?”