The Storm
That Walks

The enemy commander had made one sensible decision. He had chosen the narrowest part of the road, anchored his shield wall against two ruined buildings, and placed his crossbowmen behind it. Forty soldiers occupied the passage, with another twenty waiting in the square beyond. A hulking armored brute stood at the center of the formation, its enormous shield resting on the cobblestones. Above them, on a ruined balcony, a battle mage was preparing something unpleasant.

Ulfnir studied the arrangement from the opposite end of the street. His eyepatch concealed one eye, but the other moved steadily across the formation, tracing the spaces between shields, the positions of the crossbowmen, and the routes available to the civilians fleeing through the alley behind him. His fingers interlocked. His index fingers rose together, thumbs touching beneath them.

Oattis stood beside him, Gatebreaker resting against his shoulder. "That's a lot of men."

"Mm."

"And they've got a mage."

"Noticed."

"And whatever the hell that is in the middle."

"Also noticed."

Oattis looked at him. "You've got a plan?"

Ulfnir lowered his hands and lifted Last Wisdom from his shoulder. Blue light stirred through the runes of the massive double-bearded axe. "I've got several. Let's see which one they make me use."

The enemy commander raised his sword.

"LOOSE!"

The crossbows snapped.

Ulfnir vanished into motion.

Thunder Step.

Blue-white lightning exploded from the cobbles beneath his boots. He crossed twenty-eight feet in a fraction of a moment, not disappearing and reappearing, but driving his entire body through the intervening space with such violent acceleration that the first volley passed through where he had stood.

He arrived inside the enemy's effective firing line.

Last Wisdom was already moving.

The first soldier attempted to turn his shield. Too late. The axe came around in a tremendous horizontal sweep, striking the man's exposed side and dropping him.

Ulfnir didn't stop.

Cleave.

His hips rotated. His rear foot drove forward. The axe's enormous head continued along its path as he stepped into the next soldier.

The second man fell.

Ulfnir accelerated.

The third tried to retreat, but Last Wisdom caught him before he could clear the weapon's reach. He went down, and Ulfnir's next step came faster still.

This was not a sequence of disconnected swings. The weapon, the body, and the footwork formed one increasingly rapid movement. Each fallen opponent gave Ulfnir another opportunity to carry his momentum forward rather than halt, recover, and begin again.

The shield wall began to fold inward.

And then the storm joined the fight.

Rolling Thunder.

The electricity gathered around Last Wisdom intensified as Ulfnir's cleaving sequence accelerated. What had begun as sharp blue sparks became writhing ribbons of lightning around the axe's twin bearded blades.

The fourth soldier fell.

A bolt snapped outward.

It struck a spearman standing seven feet to Ulfnir's right.

The man screamed as the current tore through his armor, then jumped to the soldier beside him, barely five feet away.

Ulfnir's axe was moving left.

The lightning was moving right.

Forked Current.

He registered the enemy spearman on his right without turning to face him. The man's weapon was already drawing back, aimed at Ulfnir's exposed flank.

Ulfnir sent the electrical discharge into the spearman's armor.

The weapon fell from the man's hand.

The current jumped again, catching the shield bearer beside him.

It was a tight, vicious sequence of short electrical arcs. No bolts flew across the street. Every jump had to find another enemy close enough to carry the discharge onward.

The commander realized what was happening.

"SPREAD OUT! GET AWAY FROM EACH OTHER!"

A little late.

Ulfnir brought down the fifth soldier, and the physical acceleration of Cleave climbed another notch.

But the next opponent was too far away.

Twenty-six feet separated him from the nearest intact section of the enemy line.

Ordinarily, that gap would have ended his offensive rhythm.

Ulfnir bent his knees.

Storm Pivot.

Another lightning burst cracked beneath his boots.

He crossed the twenty-six feet in a streak of blue-white electricity, carrying the movement of his successful cleaving sequence directly into the next attack.

Last Wisdom arrived with him.

The first soldier in the new formation fell.

Then the second.

Ulfnir was moving so quickly now that his opponents could barely complete one defensive action before he had already begun the next.

Behind the shield wall, the commander shouted something about holding their ground.

Ulfnir caught the words and nearly laughed.

They were about to discover precisely how difficult that was.

Then the armored brute stepped forward.

It was taller than Oattis, built like a siege tower, and wore a reinforced breastplate beneath overlapping slabs of enchanted iron. Its enormous shield was almost as wide as Ulfnir was tall.

Ulfnir's axe came around.

The brute planted its feet.

Last Wisdom struck the shield with an impact that shook dust from the surrounding buildings.

The shield held.

The brute survived.

And Ulfnir's accumulating cleaving momentum ended.

His next step was slower. The flowing sequence had been interrupted.

The brute grinned behind its helmet.

"Stopped you."

Ulfnir's expression remained perfectly level.

"Yes."

A blue spark crawled across the shield.

"But you haven't stopped that."

The electricity still moving through the soldiers to the brute's left snapped between two nearby targets. Ulfnir directed a branch into the brute's armored leg.

Thunder Lock.

The brute's knee spasmed.

Its stance faltered for an instant—not enough to paralyze it, and certainly not enough to guarantee victory against something so heavily armored, but enough to compromise the careful positioning that had allowed it to withstand the original strike.

Ulfnir abandoned the cleaving sequence entirely.

He planted his feet, shifted his grip along Last Wisdom's reinforced haft, and drew the weapon back over his shoulder.

Breaker's Answer.

There was nothing flowing or economical about this attack.

It was the kind of blow a blacksmith delivers when the material on his anvil refuses to yield.

His thick shoulders and back tightened. Storm mana gathered along the axe's edges. He drove forward with the full weight of his body, accelerating the weapon from a deliberate reset rather than borrowing anything from his broken Cleave chain.

Last Wisdom struck.

The brute's shield split from rim to boss.

Its left arm folded beneath the impact.

The creature staggered backward and crashed into the soldiers behind it.

The commander stared.

Ulfnir looked over the broken shield.

"There's your problem."

He turned the axe in his hands.

"You thought I only knew one way to swing it."

A scream cut through the street.

Ulfnir's head snapped toward the alley.

Three enemy soldiers had broken away from the main formation and were chasing the civilians. A woman had fallen beside an overturned cart. A small boy was trying to drag her to her feet.

One soldier raised his sword.

Ulfnir was twenty-nine feet away.

Stormward Interception.

Thunder cracked.

He crossed the street in a single physical burst, threading through the open passage between the cart and the ruined wall.

The enemy's sword came down.

Last Wisdom met it.

Steel screamed against steel.

Ulfnir shoved the attacker backward, turned his body, and placed himself between the soldiers and the civilians.

"Behind me."

The woman pulled the child toward the alley.

Another soldier rushed forward.

Ulfnir struck him with the butt of the axe.

The third hesitated.

That was enough.

"Run," Ulfnir told the civilians.

They ran.

Behind him, the battle mage on the balcony finally completed his spell.

The air filled with light.

A concentrated mass of magical force appeared above the square, surrounded by rings of violent electrical energy. The mage directed it toward the alley, apparently deciding that if he couldn't kill Ulfnir, he could kill the people Ulfnir had just saved.

Ulfnir saw the spell forming.

He also saw Oattis advancing through the enemy's shattered line.

"OATTIS! KEEP THEM MOVING!"

The big bullfolk raised his shields and thundered toward the fleeing civilians.

Ulfnir brought Last Wisdom across his body.

The magical attack descended.

His Bastion expanded into the passage behind him.

The first impact struck its outer boundary with enough force to pulverize the stone beneath his boots. The shield held, but the force did not simply disappear. It pressed against Ulfnir, Last Wisdom, his armor, and the mana maintaining the protective boundary.

His knees bent.

The axe's constraint runes blazed.

He accepted the burden.

Another discharge came from the enemy mage.

This time, the electricity began branching unpredictably toward the narrow alley where the civilians were fleeing.

Ulfnir recognized the danger immediately.

He could not allow his own storm to compound it.

Grounding.

He drove the butt of Last Wisdom against the shattered cobblestones and deliberately suppressed the unwanted electrical branching from his weapon. Blue current raced down the haft and discharged through the prepared path into the earth.

Stone cracked around his boots.

The civilians kept running.

Ulfnir's lightning did not follow them.

The mage sent another blast.

It struck the Bastion.

Ulfnir grunted.

His forearm runes flared. His hands shook beneath the burden, and the constraint engine in Last Wisdom began to hum at an increasingly dangerous pitch.

He could not hold this indefinitely.

He didn't intend to.

High above the ruined street, storm clouds rolled across the open sky.

Ulfnir drew a breath.

Storm Draw.

Ambient storm mana answered.

Electricity threaded through the air toward Last Wisdom. The runes along its haft brightened as he gathered usable charge, but the strain on the constraint engine remained. The force pressing against his Bastion was still real. It still had to be endured.

The mage laughed from the balcony.

"YOU CAN'T STAND THERE FOREVER!"

Ulfnir looked up.

"No."

His fingers tightened around the haft.

"I can't."

The force he had accepted, the energy Last Wisdom had constrained, and the storm mana he had gathered began compressing into a concentrated burden within the weapon.

The blue light around its blades became almost painfully bright.

The mage stopped laughing.

Ulfnir lowered the Bastion only when the last civilian had cleared the alley.

He stepped into the open street.

One step.

Then another.

His entire body trembled with the strain of holding the gathered force in check.

The armored brute had pulled itself upright. It stood between Ulfnir and the mage, broken shield discarded, enormous hammer raised.

The commander shouted, "KILL HIM!"

The remaining soldiers began to advance.

Ulfnir surveyed them.

The brute in front. Soldiers closing on both sides. The mage above. Oattis and the civilians safely beyond the square.

Every position. Every distance. Every opening.

He understood the battlefield now.

Storm Circuit.

There was no new burst of supernatural speed, no sudden increase in range, and no mysterious explosion of power.

There was simply mastery.

Ulfnir knew exactly where he needed to stand.

He Thunder Stepped twenty feet to the brute's exposed flank.

The hammer smashed into empty cobblestones.

A second Thunder Step carried him another fifteen feet through an opening between two soldiers. Their weapons crossed uselessly behind him.

He swung Last Wisdom just far enough to force the closest soldier backward, then redirected a short electrical arc into the adjacent attacker.

The lightning jumped six feet.

The soldier fell.

Ulfnir used the opening to clear the last few steps into the square.

He had not extended Thunder Step beyond thirty feet.

He had not turned his lightning into a ranged attack.

And he had not resumed the Cleave momentum that the brute had broken.

He had simply assembled the right techniques in the right order.

The brute turned.

The mage raised both hands.

Ulfnir planted his feet.

At last, he let the stored burden move.

He drew Last Wisdom back, the massive axe trembling beneath the concentrated storm.

His voice rolled across the square.

"STORMR BRJÓTA HÖGG!"

The axe came down.

The strike was not a lightning bolt launched from a distance.

It was a deliberate, devastating blow delivered by a man wielding a two-handed axe that had become the vessel for everything he had endured and gathered.

Last Wisdom struck the brute's raised hammer.

The hammer shattered.

The compressed storm erupted through the impact.

Blue-white light swallowed the brute and tore through the stone beneath it. The force of the strike blasted the creature backward into the support of the ruined balcony.

Masonry exploded.

The mage's concentration broke as the balcony collapsed beneath him.

He disappeared into the wreckage amid a shower of stone, timber, and dissipating magic.

The sound of thunder rolled through the empty square.

Then silence.

Ulfnir remained standing at the center of the destruction, Last Wisdom planted in the ground.

The runes along his forearms flickered.

His shoulders rose and fell.

He had spent mana freely throughout the battle, and the final strike had demanded far more of him than the little bursts that had carried him through the enemy line. The strain of containing the magical assault had not vanished merely because he had returned it.

His hands were shaking.

He flexed them.

Once.

Twice.

Behind him came the heavy sound of Oattis's footsteps.

"Everybody's clear," the bullfolk said.

"Good."

Oattis surveyed the ruined square, the collapsed balcony, and the shattered hammer lying several yards away.

"Well. That was subtle."

Ulfnir pulled Last Wisdom from the cobblestones.

"Wasn't trying to be."

"Could've fooled me."

Ulfnir rested the axe on his shoulder and began walking toward the alley.

Oattis followed.

After a few steps, the big bullfolk glanced at him.

"What's next?"

Ulfnir looked toward the smoke rising over the rooftops.

"Find the ones who ordered this."

"And then?"

A faint smile touched Ulfnir's face.

"If they want the smoke..."

Oattis immediately closed his eyes.

"Don't."

"...I've got wet wood."

"Gods damn it, Ulfnir."

Ulfnir chuckled.

Then he kept walking.

Forward.