OGNW 2

“By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask. You’ve not just been walking in a random direction previously, have you, brother?”

Kratos pushed through the snow, the sound of battle getting louder with each step, feet crushing undergrowth and snow.

“I’ve been following my connection to Faye’s gift.” He grunted out a response, and there was blessed silence from Mimir for all of three seconds before the horned man figured out his plan.

“You hope Atreus is close by, don’t you? That he somehow fell with the axe… That’s a fair assumption, I suppose.”

Kratos grunted a noncommittal answer in response as the trees finally began to grow sparse until he stepped out of the forest. The winter night was rapidly spreading, but you would not have figured that out with how much light came from the burning village before him.

A small ramshackle village placed close to the banks of a slowly flowing river.

Amber eyes scanned the valley he had entered. The clash of steel against steel was a familiar ding to him, but whatever fight there was to be had here was rapidly at an end.

There was the taste of blood in the air and the stench of shit in the wind. But above all were the screams. This was not a battlefield like he had been born into, grown, and made a man out of.

“Come on, brother, let me see what’s going on,” Mimir called from his harness, and Kratos obliged him, slipping him out of the belt and giving him a view of the carnage.

This was just pure slaughter. The defenders of the little village had been defeated, their gates were broken open and the village was in the process of being burnt, while heavy fur-clad men like the two he had killed roamed. A pair of them laughed as they dragged a woman kicking and screaming out of a house.

Young girls were tied up roughly and thrown over muscled shoulders, and they were carried towards the four longships that were docked along the river coast. The young boys were either cut down with no care by axe or spear, while the more subdued boys were roughly dragged along.

Some of the women were roughly dragged out as well, and the men laughed as they forcefully had their way with them, sometimes with the dead of their former partners close by, an axe in hand, and eyes wide, knowing what their inability to protect their family meant.

All these and more, Kratos looked upon from his vantage point. “They remind me of Odin’s get so much.” When Mimir spoke, his voice was subdued. “The ones that went Viking, raping and pillaging their way across the seas with the belief that their god watched them… and he did, after all. The worst of them became the Einherjar.”

“Hmmm,” Kratos said in reply as his amber gaze dispassionately roved the happenings, knowing he had seen worse. He had partaken in worse. That sin had cost him a wife and a daughter.

“Well, are you going to do something about it, brother?” Mimir asked, golden eyes spinning in their socket to focus on him.

“This is not our fight. Nor is this our land.”

There was a brief commotion as a man fell with a scream leaving his throat. Yet, in the canopy that was the violent orgy going on in the burning village, it was just one scream out of many. The only other who noticed, other than Kratos, was the man who stood beside the now dead man.

The burly man in furs turned at his partner’s scream, but his reflexes had dulled in the belief of victory. His steps were shaky as he tried to spin, clumsy meaty fingers reaching for the axe on his belt. However, his lack of coordination only resulted in one thing.

A blade to the throat from a low angle the moment he completed his fumbling whirl. A double-edged sword that dug its way under the soft chin and straight through the brain. The girl who had just killed two men in the space of a few seconds stumbled back. Then she dropped to her knees, trying to cut through the ropes that were wrapped around one of the captive women the fur-clad barbarians had been dragging along.

“Ho, look at her go, brother. A match for any Valkyrie, I’d say,” Mimir said with cheer, while Kratos looked on dispassionately.

“She is untrained and fighting against inebriated and confused men. Her rage can only take her so far.”

It didn’t take long for his declaration to prove true. The child had just killed another man, with her band of four she had rescued trailing behind her. One of them had picked up the child she had carried originally.

A strike to the back of his leg felled him, and a rough stab through his back and another man was dead but just as quickly, her luck ran out because another man entered the alleyway at that exact moment. This one was all too clear-eyed and aware, blue-green eyes glinting with malice.

“Yet, she keeps fighting, brother. Would you sit back and watch the girl you saved die to barbarians such as this?” Mimir spoke hurriedly, his glowing eyes seeing the same thing that Kratos did, but perhaps with even more clarity.

“Fate spared her by bringing us together once. Once is more than most get.” It was more than he had gotten.

Kratos said in return, his eyes drifting away, his interest in the raid and bloodshed fading until Mimir spoke once more.

“However, the law of cause and effect applies, brother. You have saved her once. Does her bravery not remind you of your youth?”

“I was arrogant, not foolhardy.”

“Yet what is bravery but arrogance, foolishness, and conviction wrapped in a fragile armor?”

Kratos grunted as he began to pivot. Sparing words with Mimir was never a good idea. Already, his hand twitched. His connection to the axe remained. Its siren song a melody he longed for - to hold its wooden grip in his calloused palms once more and be reminded of Faye.

“She is a local,” Mimir finally appealed once more. “She can help navigate these lands better than we ever could. Look at the lass, she is a child as young as Atreus yet without the guiding arm of a father like you. What would would the lad say, brother?”

Kratos came to a stop, a heavy furrow on his brows. Mimir knew how fine the line he called patience was. To summon Atreus’s name here, in this specific scenario…

A younger Kratos would’ve lashed out. The demigod who had twisted his grief into hate and anger would’ve spiked Mimir’s head into the ground so hard the ground would crack, then stomp the horned man’s skull to smitten at the audacity to invoke his child’s name in an attempt to push him to act.

An older Kratos instead took a breath and wondered why. Why would Mimir push so hard for this? Unfortunately, there was no time to contemplate the matter too much. His amber eyes picked up as the girl charged the much bigger man with a scream on her lips.

The man’s response was a swift kick to her midsection. His longer legs bypassed the range the sword gave her scrawny arms. The blow knocked whatever wind out of her that her scream didn’t and sent her rolling in the snow-speckled mud.

The man advanced while Kratos slowly came to a decision. He returned Mimir’s head back on his hips, then he flexed his wrist as he widened his right palm. This time he didn’t call for the song of ice, wood, and steel that the Signi and Brok had crafted for Faye.

This time he called for blood, gold, and wind, crafted by hands that had created some of the most powerful weapons. Fish-scaled limbs that had known no life outside the depths of the sea. Draupnir answered. The ring around his finger changed as it manifested into a spear.

Kratos lifted the spear, and his stance shifted from solid to light as he aimed down the valley. His target was clear. His amber eyes had seen all that they needed to. He took a step forward, then he hurled the spear. The gold-formed spear somehow caught the fading sunlight in a way that made it look even more beautiful in flight.

The red tassel that hung beneath the spearhead was like a trail of blood, pursuing a golden comet. Then the spear began to drift down. Its unearthly sharp spearhead didn’t cut its way through the air; It rode it.

Then it hit the barbarian leering over the child, pants low on his waist. Draupnir was a weapon forged to pierce more than mortal flesh and blood, and now it had found something drastically weaker.

A weapon crafted by immortal hands to kill a god somehow found itself lodged into an all too mortal Midguardian. There was always only going to be one result.

The spear didn’t simply pierce the man. It annihilated him.

There was no time to let out a scream, no death rattle, no curse, no roars of pain or challenge, just a wet crack as Draupnir met flesh and shattered it like glass. Bone, sinew, and muscle vaporized on contact, the sheer force of the throw obliterating the upper half of the barbarian, with the lower half flying back into the burning house behind him.

The spear embedded itself in the far wall behind the corpse’s ruin, humming faintly with residual force.

The girl scrambled away on her elbows, confusion etched deep into the grime and blood splattered on her face. She turned blue eyes and trailed the path the spear had taken and saw him, and once again, her eyes widened as she beheld his ash-clad form.

The village was silent for all of a second before the reavers recovered from the catastrophic boom they had heard. Like ants that had their anthill kicked over, they swarmed out. Eyes searching, weapons glinting in the firelight, and ears tuned as they rushed to where the explosion had come from.

Kratos stepped forward, walking until he stepped fully into the firelight as if he belonged to it. Each stride he made was deliberate and heavy, a god made flesh.

His muscles were at ease even though he knew the violence that he was about to partake in. The Draupnir spear vanished in a shimmer of gold before another one blinked into his hand.

Mimir, now hanging back from Kratos’s belt, gave a quiet, satisfied hum. “You always did have a flair for timing, brother.”

More of the fur-clad raiders got to where his spear had killed one of theirs, and what they saw must have left them confused. A truly ridiculous amount of blood with no body to be seen. A blood splattered girl with a sword in hand and broken and women behind her.

At first, they laughed. They laughed at the scene, pointing fingers and letting out words that were no doubt demeaning. That laughter died quickly the moment they heard the crunch of heavy feet on snow. One of them barked something in their guttural tongue and raised a round shield and pointed, just as Kratos broke into a run meters away from them.

He had been all but invisible earlier, his ashen skin camouflaging too well with the snow-covered landscape, with only his faded red tattoos for color.

The first spear throw came as a declaration of intent. The shield was split in two, its wielder flung back as the golden weapon exploded into fragments on impact the moment Kratos slammed the butt of the copy on the snow-covered ground.

Shards of Draupnir sprayed into those near the barbarian, catching throats, slicing cheeks, dropping one man to his knees, screaming as blood ran down his chest. Before those shards could even hit the ground, Kratos was among them.

He started with a technique that had been imparted into him, trained, and beaten into his weary form as a child in the Agoge. He let loose with a Spartan kick that pulverized the chest of the first man in his path and sent him flying.

Someone let out a roar at his side, and he turned. He caught a descending axe on his forearm, the blow unable to draw blood, and then he drove his elbow into the attacker’s jaw, in response, a crack rang out as teeth and blood sprayed into the firelit air.

The man crumpled, and Kratos snatched his axe mid-air before the body fell, slamming it into the knee of another onrushing raider. The blow took off his leg and sent the man flying up with a scream of pain. The axe shaft broke in his hand, unable to bear his strength, so he released it.

A spear formed in Kratos’s hands once again, and he didn’t hesitate. He stabbed it through a man’s chest, and as he turned to the next enemy, he swung the spear with the man still impaled and slammed its length into two other men, sending the three men broken and flying away.

Then there was a brief calm. All his foes were beaten and broken around him, while his amber eyes remained calm, his breath steady, as he had simply taken a walk instead of slaughtering half a dozen men.

There was a rallying cry. The girl was on her feet once more, her bruised eye bright as she shouted something in that guttural Norse once more.

“Mimir?”

“I’m coming, brother. She’s saying something about rising up and killing the raiders. I’m still getting used to the linguistic drift, don’t hurry me.”

Kratos grunted in reply as the villagers, or what remained of them, began to shout from behind doors and alleyways. Kratos didn't need to know the language to recognize as the cries of despair shifted to one of anger and rage.

A few even picked up abandoned weapons as they stepped out of their houses. Mostly women, children, and the all too familiar old men and women.

“You’ve rallied them, brother. Given them hope. Now are you going to leave them to fight alone?”

Kratos didn’t respond at first. His focus was the girl. She had picked up her sword again. Her weary arms struggled to lift the implement of murder, yet her bruised eyes had not lost that spark. More villagers came out, more rose up in revolt.

Only then did Kratos reply. Turning to face where the new raiders were coming from. This group was probing more cautiously, a shield wall in front as they slowly moved forward with something more deadly than their sum in between them growling. Yet it would not save them. A shimmer, a flash of gold, and once more Draupnir appeared in his arms.

“I shall not.”