They watched the pony blow cold as it teetered across the ice-slicked path, blood spewing in thick spurts from the arrow wound in its side. The creature veered sideways, stuttered awkwardly, then fell. Steam from the fresh wound climbed up the arrow shaft and dissipated above, as if the cold itself was consuming the animal’s very soul.
“Looks like we were a little late.”
A smiling girl crouched on top of the animal’s heaving rib cage. Her honey blonde hair hung low to her knees, and her two fiery blue eyes shone with determination hot enough to burn. A bundle of crude metal blades dangled from her waist, giving her a distinctive jingle as she shifted and curled her slim yet calloused fingers around the protruding arrow shaft. It was around three feet long, and she would’ve mistaken it for a spear if not for the frayed fletching that topped it. She then yanked the arrow out, tip and all, and the dying animal wheezed and kicked weakly. She held the arrow up to her face and watched the blood run down it in thick, dark globs. A brownish purple substance clung to the tip. A mix of toxic sap and feces. She clicked her tongue and snapped the arrow so it could not be used again.
“Little demons are poisoning the tips,” she hissed
Her companion, a boy, crouched down to the horse’s stomach. His exhausted dark eyes stared apprehensively at the animal. After a moment of hesitation, he cussed under his breath and pulled a knife from his belt with a gloved hand. He tossed his hooded fur cloak far away, took a deep breath, then deftly sliced a gap in the animal’s stomach. The quickly boy reached in and scooped up an armful of steaming intestines and draped himself in them. The girl jumped down and sliced a piece off and did the same.
“This is disgusting,” said the boy, “I don’t feel very heroic.”
The girl giggled and swiped away a piece of intestine hanging over face.
“At least it’s warm!”
They began to shuffle towards the looming pillars of smoke that bled from the burning village in the distance.
“I’m happy we didn’t have to do that to Silver,” said the boy.
The poor animal had fallen down a crevasse days earlier and could not be retrieved. The girl was silent for a moment before speaking.
“Yeah me too. Gutting our own pony is a bit much.”
Vaporous plumes of misty breath shot out her nose as she began to chuckle.
“Imagine what they would’ve said back home! Mother would’ve been like, ‘Juno and Fitch, you sliced open your own pony just to keep yourselves from dying of hypothermia!? You evil bastards! What’s next? Killing the enemy to save your lives!?’’”
Their chorus of exhausted laughter was flat against the barren tundra, and the steam that rose off their bodies made them look spectral in the harsh snowfall, like two cackling wisps. Fitch wiped the horse’s blood from his nose and grinned wryly.
“As shitty as this is, we’d probably have frozen if that pony didn’t show up.”
Juno punched him in the arm.
“You’re lucky! I would’ve had to gut you!” she said with a smile.
Fitch chuckled.
“Yeah that wouldn’t have been fun.”
They shambled over snow drifts and towards the village for the better half of an hour. The draped intestines swayed and steamed and dripped blood as they moved. When they got close they ditched their now cold intestinal garb and skirted the village edges slowly, weaving through the charred skeletons of buildings and people still smoldering. The place had been gutted, villagers dragged out their cottages and slaughtered in the streets. They lay rigid in the snow like broken toy soldiers, their pained expressions frosted on solid. The screams of the living along with the fetid stench of the dead carried over the fires and downwind.
They stopped.
In the center of the village a large mob of goblins carried their corpulent Overlord on a crude palanquin fashioned from an old fortress gate. The monster was twice as tall as Fitch, and had long spider-leg arms covered in shaggy ginger hair. His bulbous vomit colored eyes scanned the destroyed village with delight and authority. Behind this scene, visible through the bones of a razed cottage, was a group of children.
They had been corralled into a livestock pen, the previous denizens laying frozen among them. Goblins jerked and snarled at the edges of the enclosure, and the kids curled up and cried in the center. Occasionally one would jump in and yank at one of the kids legs, dragging them across the snow for a few feet before letting go and slipping back under the fence. This greatly excited the other goblins, who would guffaw and spit on the ground while stomping in the snow.
Fitch and Juno watched this and moved silently towards the village square. Juno had tightened the strap around the swords at her waist, and they did not make noise any longer. The first goblin they stumbled upon was sitting in the snow and staring off into the empty tundra mindlessly, spittle dripping from its mouth.
“Don’t bother using magic on this thing,” whispered Fitch, “Just kill it.”
“But we’re too far away. If we bum rush it it’ll scream for help!” she whispered back.
“What? Just throw a blade at it.”
Juno hesitated for a moment, and Fitch bit his tongue with regret.
“D-don’t worry I got it,” he stuttered as he reached for his knife.
She grabbed his hand.
“No, I got it.”
“Uh, are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
She grabbed the knife off his belt and held the weapon above her head, practicing the throwing motion.
“Like, 100% sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay but—”
“Shut up Fitch I got it!”
The knife whistled through the air and lodged straight into the sitting creature’s bent knee.
“WWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!”
Juno and Fitch jerked to their feet.
“S***!” she hissed as they ran forward.
Fitch flicked out another knife and it punctured the creature’s neck, flushing its infant-like wail with arterial blood. It fell onto its back and sputtered blood and died. The two stopped and looked up.
They were very visible from the town square. Every goblin staring directly at them, mouths agape.
“Uhhh…”
Suddenly Juno stood rigidly, pointing her blade forward heroically.
“I am Juno Albrecht, son of Otto von Albrecht and daughter of Helga von Albrecht..”
Fitch’s eyes widened in recognition and he shot up.
“And I am Fitch Albrecht, son of Otto von Albrecht.”
They screamed in unison.
“”As directed under the authority of the infallible Aesir creed, you will pay for your crimes!””
The wind howled awkwardly in the ensuing silence. The Goblin Overlord cackled. He had met people like this before, weirdos trying to play hero just because they were a little strong. People like that always ended up dying. Crushing them would be amusing.
A slow, hoarse, dumb voice leaked out the Overlords foul mouth.
“You are fools. You will die here…”
He outstretched a long finger
“Kill them,” he croaked.
The horde of goblins snarled and dashed, their weapons in their hands. A weak patter of arrows were lobbed in their direction. One particularly brave goblin led the pack and lunged at Juno ferociously.
“Woah. Slow down.”
Fitch leapt in front of the lead goblin and kicked its head clean off its shoulders. He looked indifferent, as if he was crushing an ant beneath his boot. No fear, no excitement. He just stared blankly at the goblins head with his dark, flat eyes as it rolled through the snow, a streak of red following it.
The others froze. The decapitated corpse twitched ever so slightly. Fitch looked up at them, scratching the back of his head as he spoke.
“You can still try and run, you know.”
Juno stepped past Fitch.
“Nope. I’m not letting them get away.”
Juno squatted down, pulling two steel swords from the group dangling from her waist. She took a deep breath, then shrieked.
“BLOOD AND THUNDER!!!”
She went flying through the crowd at super speed, blue lightning rolling off her body as she moved. She was like a storm of steel, blades twirling and grinding up the goblins. Blood and guts blossomed into the air and rained back down in heavy sheets: eyeballs, teeth, fingers, weapons, toes, ears. She was soaked in blood now, and her swords had been melted down to dull stubs.
She dropped them and pulled out two new swords, laughing hysterically as she held them out for the horde to see.
“Hahahaha!!!”
The Goblin Overlord stared shocked and pitched forward.
“Do not let them escape!”
They flooded out the houses like a swarm of death crazed rodents, teeth gnashing and eyes bulging. They would follow their Overlords word to the very letter, even if it meant putting their life on the line.
At least that was the way they were supposed to think.
But seeing your friends eviscerated by a lowly pair of humans put things into perspective.
And so the crowd began to ebb.
But Fitch moved with them. Some leapt forward in a desperate attempt to keep him away, but he simply kicked their heads open or smashed their shoulders in with a balled fist. Still, his eyes were like black holes, opaque and two dimensional. It was work for him. Like pounding a nail. Repetitive. One, two, three, four. A goblin streaked in front of him and he cracked it across the jaw, breaking it off its face. He looked down at his fist for a moment. His split knuckles were like gaping mouths, vomiting blood in pulses. Another goblin attempted to swing at him with a club. He caught it and booted its face in, teeth splintering outward and eyes popping from its skull. It fell to the floor, writhing and wheezing. He looked down at it just for a moment, a green crumpled body. But another goblin flew in front of his face, and he put it down with a heavy punch.
Then Juno rushed by. She could feel her blood moving, the nerve endings firing beneath her fingernails and in her skin. Like she had gone electric. Everything was pulsing. The heavy throb in her skull became the enemy’s heartbeat, a mocking throb begging to be silenced. She lunged and blasted through them. She came shooting out the explosion of blood and guts like some hellish specter, washed in crimson and smiling with pink stained teeth. She dove back into the crowd again and stopped only at the whistle of steel hitting air. There was nothing left to kill.
Fitch, who had just finished the last of the goblins, turned to face the Overlord in tangent with Juno.
But he was not in the place they last saw him. Both jerked around like startled cats, their eyes searching rapidly.
“I eat them!!!” roared the Overlord.
He was sat next to the pen of children, still atop his palanquin. He reached for the kids, the poor things shrieking as his elongated fingers curled. Fitch launched forward, weapons drawn. Juno shrieked after him.
“Wait! You’re being rash!”
But he would not listen. Finally, this was his chance to do something heroic.
Instead of picking up one of the kids the Goblin Overlord pitched forward in his palanquin slightly. The air in front of Fitch began to sparkle. It was too late to dodge.
“S***.”
“BROKEN WINGS!!!”
The overlord had trap type magic. Fitch froze and looked down at his hands. Two massive, flat crystalline shards had bisected them horizontally, blood oozing down the edge and into the snow. Then, slowly, the top halves of his hands slid down into the snow, still curled like freshly sliced monkey paws. Suddenly a shard appeared in his right leg, then the other. He slid down off the stumps of his shins and onto his side.
“Hey wait a second—”
The Overlord seized Fitch’s head and grabbed it whole with a single hand, muffling his mouth with his hairy palm. The pointy elbows on his spindly arms flared out grotesquely as he grabbed Fitch’s torso with his other hand and wrenched it ferociously. His neck began to stretch then tear, blood blossoming out onto the slush below in a splatter of red. A quick twist of his wrist and a dull crunch was enough to pop his head clean off in a sickly explosion of viscera. The Overlord held up his unholy trophies triumphantly, blood shooting out the neckhole of Fitch’s limp torso in thick squirts.
§
Dying was different this time. Usually it was just darkness…
But he found himself suspended upside down in the dark, floating above a thrashing sea. It looked like a dark writhing mass more so than a body of water, like a giant colony of insects crawling over each other. He looked at the horizon. There was a greenish yellow star eclipsed by a pitch black moon, like some sickly burning eyeball set low in its socket. Luminous streaks of deep yellow and green bled across the night sky like the fingers of a celestial god, melting away at the edge of the universe and bending out of sight.
“You are a loveless creature whom none love. Soulless and calloused. What’s wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.”
He turned to see a skeleton in a black cloak floating upright next to him. The bone was pure white, almost iridescent under the sickly moon. A scythe was clenched between his boney fingers.
“I hate you, Fitch Albrecht.”
Fitch stared wide-eyed, feral.
“What the hell are you?”
“Death.”
He rapped on his dome with his boney knuckles.
“Well, I don’t actually look like this. I had to stitch together this three dimensional form so I wouldn’t scramble your already frayed consciousness! Although I would have greatly enjoyed leaving you brain dead.”
Fitch just stared in horror.
“Ugh, even looking at your stupid mug is pissing me off so… let’s just get this done quickly, shall we?”
Death floated backwards through the void. After getting a decent distance away, he curled the scythe over his head. The curved blade glinted under the moonlight, perfectly cradling around the green star behind him. But he did not move. After a moment he sighed.
“I will say just one thing: Half assed attempts at playing hero will not save your soul. You are already in the midst of a death spiral into the darkest pit of human degeneracy. Continue as you are, and you will see the rancid and unreckonable bottom.”
He swung the scythe and it passed through Fitch. He shrieked as he felt his soul collapse in on itself and condense into a point.
§
“SOUL SACRIFICE!!!”
His body began to levitate upward, steam spewing out his neck stump. A skull began to form, two black eye sockets glaring through the whiteness. As the smoke dissipated, strands of muscle began to strap themselves to the bone in patches. The skin wrapped back around the flesh and the levitation ceased. He was drooling, his eyes pulsing heavy in his sockets. Rage.
Juno whistled.
“Look at that, he’s back~!” she said with a sing-songy laugh.
Spit flowed from the mouth of the Goblin Overlord in stretchy globs as he began to weep. He stared teary eyed at his long arms, which lay detached at either side of him surrounded by crimson slush. The kids watched with tear glistened eyes from the other side of the fence.
“Please!!! Please!!! Spare me!!! I won’t attack human village! I live in a cave for the rest of my life! I’ll never attack human again!”
Juno raised an eyebrow.
“What? No! You looted one of my family’s merchant caravans headed to the capital with valuable raw material!”
He blinked.
“What!?”
Her gaze narrowed.
“Let me drill it into your ape brain before I kill you!” with each consecutive word she smashed his face in with her boot. “Do! Not! Screw! With! The! Albrechts!”
He shrieked pitifully as his teeth fell into the back of his throat.
“And now you will experience—!”
“DEATH!!!”
“Oh s***!!!”
Fitch leapt forward so fast that the snow spat up under him. Juno escaped pulverization by a fraction of a second, moving just as he planted a thunderous kick into the Goblin Overlord’s face, blasting the flesh off his skull. His brains sprayed out the back of his head as it lost its structural integrity and flopped to the side, hanging to his neck by a few frayed muscles. The body twitched and bubbled as it seeped blood into the snow.
The kids sat staring with wide eyes, their round little faces motionless and taut. Fitch rose up from the pile of viscera and turned to face them. His face was ethereal and lead sketched, like some ghostly visage half drifting into the cursed realm of the dead. Half human half monster.
“Don’t worry, it’s okay now—”
The kids burst into tears, their terrified wails echoing through the snowy tundra.
Monster. Monster. Monster.
