Install timer: 0:28.
His lungs started to sting. Not like before, not the brittle glass-breath he'd grown up with, not the pandemic of needles and smoke, but honest work. His shoulders burned the good burn of being asked to be what they were built to be.
The giant stumbled. Its heel slid in mud and it went to one knee, smashing a channel that taught the river a new course. Water leapt up like white birds; fish flashed; the world changed shape without asking permission. Halfdan planted and pulled and sent three arrows into the tender cleft just under the giant's jaw. The creature reeled. A spray of blood hit the river and turned to steam. The smell was metal and salt and some old, earthy bitterness, like coins in rain.
This… this is insane, he thought, and then, because he was himself: I fucking love it.
The giant's answer was a bellow that bent reeds and rattled stones and felt like a hand pushing on the air. The red aura tightened; the cracks flared; the wound under its jaw clotted in a blink. It came up out of its kneel like a sprung trap. It grabbed a chunk of the world, a hunched slab of earth studded with river rock, and swung it one-handed, sidearm, at the tiny thing that kept insulting its idea of dominance.
Halfdan saw two outcomes. In one, he ducked, the slab kissed his shoulder, and he'd be useless for a week if he lived. In the other, he climbed into the throw, used the momentum like a stair, and leapt.
He went up. The slab passed under him, tearing wind and leaves. For a breath, he was high enough to look the giant in the eyebrows and think, wildly, I'm going to run out of sky before I run out of stupid.
He loosed on the way down. The arrow went into the soft plate above the breastbone and buried to the fletching. The giant slammed backward under the force, then recovered and reached for him with a hand like a siege wall.
Clairvoyance offered nothing he liked. So he made an option. He twisted, let the gauntlet catch the edge of the giant's thumbnail, and used that awful hand like a ladder rung to pivot off, dropping hard to the churned ground instead of into the crushing palm.
His ankle bit at him. He ignored it. Pain could file a complaint later.
Install timer: 0:15.
He needed big. Stella echoed in his blood like a rumor of thunder. He didn't have the mana to sing the full song, nor did he want to die in a blast of glory, but maybe he could hum a bar. He planted his feet. He raised the bow. He drew until the string was all the way into the old muscles under his shoulder blade, the ones that had atrophied in his other life and now unfurled like banners.
"C'mon," he whispered. To himself. To Arash. To the part of the world that sometimes says yes.
The arrowhead brightened. The air in front of it went soft with heat haze, and he felt something at the edges of things take notice. Not a full anti-army miracle. But enough.
The giant lunged. He loosed.
The shot hit at the hinge where throat meets spine. It went in clean and came out dirty. The giant gagged, black-red blood belched in a sheet, and for a second the colossal body fell out of its own certainty. It staggered sideways, caught itself on both fists, and then swept one of those fists backhand through the space where Halfdan had been too slow.
He caught the edge of the strike, not bone, not even the heavy meat of it, just the wind and promise, and it threw him. The sky spun, the river became sky, the ground smacked him along the ribs hard enough to taste iron. He rolled until he found a low piece of the world that decided it would kindly stop him.
Everything rang. The gauntlet went from a choir to a single bell, insistent. MP critical.
"Yeah," he told it. His mouth felt weird, like he'd tried to drink lightning and only got the glass. "Me too."
The giant came on, not sprinting anymore, not needing to. It bled in a dozen places and each wound made it uglier, more determined. Its aura distorted the air, heat ripples, red throbs, and the wrong color of its eyes took up more of the face. It raised its arm, slow and sure, to mash him into the story of someone else's tragedy.
Halfdan got a knee under him. His legs were surprised to be asked for anything. He couldn't feel his left hand except for the gauntlet's cold. The bow felt suddenly very heavy.
Install timer: 0:06.
You can do a lot with six seconds. Breathe. Frame a shot. Decide not to die.
He planted, drew, felt every complaint the world could register, and sighted on the soft palate of the giant's open mouth because at least if you miss there you hit something important. The arrow left and he forgot to listen for its fate because the hand was already coming down and time finally remembered how to be fast.
Wind hit him like a wall.
Not the sloppy wind of something giant displacing air. A decision made of pressure. A gale that arrived with a sound like the sky sharpening.
The giant's arm didn't so much stop as find out what it was to be separate. The limb, elbow to wrist, took an optional vacation from the rest of the body, tumbling away in a red arc that painted the river in a brief, ghastly rainbow. The stump geysered steam and blood. The bellow that followed carved strips from the air.
A figure landed between Halfdan and the thing that wanted him finished. Not heavy. Not like the giant. Like a line drawn with perfect confidence.
Armor white as cloudlight, cloak snapping in the wind she herself seemed to command, hair whipping in the gale, a soft, molten gold. Her eyes were the cool indigo of evening before a storm.
She was beautiful, not the fragile kind, but the kind that belonged to old songs and battlefields. Beauty forged in fire and oath. She carried herself like a valkyrie descended from the wind: strength and grace woven so seamlessly together they couldn't be told apart. Her presence didn't demand attention; it commanded it.
Sword in hand, its white blade caught the light, runes along the steel glowing the green of deep, inland wind.
"Stand back," she said, her voice calm, almost musical.
Halfdan obeyed, swallowing hard. Her voice wasn't deep, nor loud, but it carried a weight that no amount of shouting or flashing titles could fake.
He'd known people who wore authority like a mantle, Lysandro Di Luca, for one, and the hag of a Grand Duchess, Rhea Cadeguardia. But their authority was cold, heavy, built on fear and rank.
Hers was different. Gentle, yet unyielding. She didn't command; you simply wanted to obey.
Charisma, he guessed, a lot of it.
That, and the fact that she'd just ripped a giant's arm clean off with a single… whatever that had been. Spell? Technique? Attack? He didn't know what to call that gale of wind. Maybe he'd ask later.
For now, he was just grateful to take a deep breath and not worry about being squashed by a fricking giant.
She lifted her blade in a smooth, vertical motion. The air responded, swirling around her like ribbons drawn by invisible hands. The wind sharpened, concentrated, listened.
Then she was gone.
He barely tracked her movement, one instant she was there, the next, ten meters up, gliding on currents of air as if gravity were just a rumor. The giant swung at her, but she wasn't there either; she moved along the strike, a blur of white and gold. Her sword flashed once, twice, thin lines appeared across the creature's hide, and blood geysered out a moment later.
Halfdan's mouth went dry.
That's… how a real warrior fights.
"Wind obeys," she said, and the world did.
Air condensed along the line of her swing. It sang. Invisible edges bit the giant three times in places Halfdan's arrows had only promised, across the tendons at the front of the knee, the thick strap of muscle under the ribs, the angry knot of flesh at the base of the neck. Flesh parted with the crisp, almost offended sound of silk ripped wrong.
Somewhere behind the new stillness of the river smoke breathed, and a second heat arrived, drier, older, he heat of forges, of iron in tongues of flame.
Halfdan blinked sweat out of his eyes and laughed once, helpless and hoarse and grateful in a way that had nothing to do with pride.
"About fucking time," he said, to the sky, to fortune, to whoever had decided not everything in this world owed him a debt of pain.
The air shimmered and then roared; the scent of burning oil and metal swept across the river. Through the haze strode a man wreathed in heat. His hair was a spill of copper flame, his eyes the same molten color, and the massive claymore resting across his shoulder leaked heat like a forge left open. He looked, Halfdan thought, like someone who never apologized and rarely needed to.
"You couldn't wait for me?" he said flatly over the sound of the dying giant.
"You were busy with the civilians, Lukka," the woman replied. Her tone was calm, almost polite, but the air itself seemed to bend around her, wary of getting too close.
"Excuses, Brynhild," he muttered, glaring at her. She only chuckled, as if he were a child throwing a tantrum.
"Brynhild." His voice sharpened, low and dangerous.
"Yes, Lukka?" she answered sweetly.
He just rolled his eyes.
Halfdan, slumped on one knee, tried to laugh. It came out as a cough and a half-hearted wheeze. Of course they're a duo. One angelic, one pissed off.