Chapter 10: Enter the Hunter: Part One
The squat creature howled in pain as I drove a spike of stone through it's eye, my power deliberately rotating the jagged shard as I did so, tearing the wound open even wider. It spasmed, then went silent as the twisting rock reached its brain and mulched a good chunk of it before going through the back of the skull. In the next moment, water reached up from the nearby docks, formed into a crude approximation of a hand, and came slamming down on another figure. The impact was enough to splatter the thin and bony form across the concrete as though it were made of toothpicks and water balloons.
I let out a snarl of frustration as another figure, taller and much more muscled, tried to get the jump on me with a massive inhuman leap, crude serrated daggers raised to strike. My halo hummed, and fire flared up in front of me, going from a spark to a tightly controlled spinning ball of death in only the blink of an eye. My attacker’s trajectory and momentum carried them into the flames, and only charcoal and ash came out.
I hadn’t started the fight going for the kill so viciously. I was fine going so hard against animals and monsters, but I’d been hesitant to use it against creatures clearly smart enough to use weapons. Sure, they were inhuman and monstrous, but that level of intelligence had to count for something, had to represent a line I shouldn’t cross so easily.
So, I’d started this fight trying to stick with non-lethal attacks. I’d wrapped them up in cocoons of stone to take them out of the fight. I’d tried to stun them with electric shocks. I’d even tried to use air control to choke them unconscious.
It hadn’t worked though. If I knocked them down then they just got right back up, if I restrained them then they broke free, either on their own or with help. Even when I escalated to crippling it didn’t stop them, they just crawled on regardless of broken or even severed limbs. It was only after the huge bear I was trying to help smashed a few more into paste that I finally got what I’d been missing.
The attackers that got killed weren’t staying dead.
I only understood when I saw the pulped remains of one of the figures light up with the sulphurous green fire. When the remains started to regenerate into fighting form right in front of my eyes, I finally realised what was going on. It only took a few moments, but as I kept glancing back, even as I kept fighting, I saw the crooked figure recover, stand, and then rejoin the fight.
Once I understood what I was up against my first thought was to get rid of them, rather than fighting. Since I had the ocean right behind me, I’d first tried to use telekinesis to pick them up and throw them out to sea. I’d read enough comics to know that getting in a drawn-out slugfest with an immortal regenerator was for suckers. It was smarter to just remove them from the equation, rather than keep bashing my head against a metaphorical brick wall.
The problem was that no matter what I tried I couldn’t get a grip on them. It was . . . the closest I could think of it was as though I was trying to grab a live fish, one that was covered in oil, and struggling like hell. As soon as I tried to use my arcana-based magic it just . . . slipped off. It could affect them, I could shove them if I tried hard enough, but I couldn’t get the grip I needed to lift them. In the end, all it did was distract me, and while I was trying to work it out one of the larger dog monsters slipped by me and latched onto the bear’s left hindleg, the bellow of pain that set off was more than enough to get my head back in the game.
That had been when I stopped holding back and went for anything I could think of. I didn’t really have a plan, I was just throwing everything I had at the wall and hoping something would stick. If the worst came to the worst I was hoping I could hold out long enough for Joan, Hadriel or one of the goddesses to turn up and hopefully know what to do. Going for the cruel and vicious options was just an attempt to slow them down, to maybe make them hesitate.
Too bad it wasn’t working.
They just kept on coming, it didn’t matter what I did to them, what agony I inflicted, they just kept on attacking. And what was worse, their numbers were growing, I was sure of it. At the start, it had just been the wolf and dog monsters and a few of the cloaked figures. Now, more figures were showing up, but these were different, though still mostly covered by hoods and cloaks.
These weren’t stooped or ugly, what glimpses I saw showed pale skin and fine features. They sported long silvery swords or spears ending in wickedly curved heads. Then there were the smaller ones, barely more than two feet tall. Even though they were slighter in body they were fast, flitting about in the shadows and flames like phantoms I could barely keep track of. There were even some larger figures, ones that hung back, obscured by the darkness. I couldn’t get a good look at them, but they had huge bows with arrows that were more like small spears that crashed into my shield and made it flicker.
They all came at us, moving with eerie coordination and grace, even those that seemed malformed. It was like fighting a river, everywhere at once, with so much pressure, and not letting up for an instant. I focused as hard as I could on my shield, strengthening it, holding it, holding myself in place against the pressure! I’d been driven down to the ground by this point, the huge arrows forcing me from the air as I tried to evade them. On the ground, I managed more traction, could brace myself better and bolster my defences, for all the good it was doing.
Arrows, fangs, claws, fists, blades, they all hit my shield and tried to break through. Each impact was a chip, a pinprick, all adding up slowly to bleed me dry. For a moment I was reminded of a cliff, hit by the ocean year after year, century after century. Each time the cliff endured, but eventually it would fall, it would break. My attackers knew it too, I could see it in the gleam in their eyes, in the vicious smiles. They knew that I could hold, but I couldn’t hold out forever.
Then I heard a roar from beside me, and in my peripheral vision, I saw the bear struggling as well. It was putting up one hell of a fight, but it was getting overrun.
And I just snapped.
Maybe it was a case of that being the last straw. Maybe it was the smug smiles that seemed to find their way onto the faces of all the creatures attacking us, it didn’t matter. I stopped being overwhelmed and got angry instead.
As it turns out anger does more for me than fear. It certainly manages to spark more inspiration at least.
Letting out a furious shout I pushed energy into my shield, not to make it stronger, not to move it, but to make it bigger!
The act came on pure instinct, my halo humming loudly as I reached out with my magic, forcing more power into my defences and pushing them outwards. In an instant my shield ceased to be a defence and instead became a massive battering ram as it grew in size, spreading outwards from me with such force that the nearby buildings crumbled before it. I stood in a depression and watched as my attackers flew through the air, hurled by the impact. In the next moment, I gestured and some of the rubble around me shot off like cannonballs, hitting the attackers of the bear and giving it some respite.
What I’d done had bought some time, but it wouldn’t last long. Reflexively I reestablished my shield bubble around me and levitated a few feet off the ground, taking a moment to evaluate my situation. In the distance, I could see and hear other explosions of light and see lightning shooting up into the sky. I guessed that explained why I wasn’t getting reinforcements.
A snarl drew me back to my own enemies, who were starting to regroup. Even the archers, who’d previously been sticking to the shadows had come out, revealing themselves to be centaurs, each holding huge bows that I didn’t think a normal human could use. That didn’t seem to be a problem for these guys though, since they were muscled in a way that would make the most insane steroid-abusing gym junky keel over in envy. Seriously, those muscles looked like it they could be used as armour against anything less than a freaking cannon!
Too bad for them, magic trumps a cannon.
My little break had given me a moment to think, and a rather devious plan had percolated in my brain. I raised one hand, concentrated, and pulled! It was hard, I was pushing myself, but it wasn’t impossible. The sea answered my call and my magic drew out a waterspout as thick as an ancient Oaktree. The spire of seawater reached into the night sky then bent and came crashing down on my enemies.
The impact was tremendous, and the sudden flood swept many of them off their feet, but it wasn’t enough to kill them. That was fine though, it wasn’t what I was aiming for.
Even before the water hit I was drawing on another magic. The colour for seawater magic was a beautiful combination of blue and dark green, there were edgings of grey there as well, and a feeling of depth and vastness that seemed to go on without end. The colour I was drawing on now was different though. Rather than being colours combined, it was colours that were almost other colours by their nature. A blue so pale it was almost white, a white so cold it was almost blue. Ice, that was what I was drawing on, coldness, the chill of deepest winter, the frost that crept in and stole the last spark of warmth until there was nothing but the frozen finality of ice!
It wasn’t a colour that liked to act quickly, that wasn’t its nature. Ice was inexorable, not swift, but I didn’t let that stop me. Even as the seawater came crashing down I brutally forced ice into it, chasing out the heat, devouring the energy within it that let it be a liquid. Pain shot through my head, starting behind my left eye and shooting to the back of my skull, but I held on!
And it worked!
With a sound that was somewhere between the chime of glass wine glasses toasting and the crunch of icebergs grinding together, the water became ice right in front of me. I managed it so quickly that the water I’d brought down on my enemy’s heads hadn’t all had time to fall. The huge splash of what had to be thousands of gallons of water had been frozen in mid-motion, creating a huge flower of frosted white. It looked like some sort of art sculpture, beautiful and otherworldly.
And it held more than two-thirds of my enemies, frozen and trapped in the sudden ice.
Of course, I knew they were strong enough to break free. I’d buried them in concrete and they’d been able to struggle out after all. Ice was tough stuff, and they’d been frozen along with it, which should slow them down a bit more, but even so if they could come back from death then I wasn’t sure how long it would hold them. The thing was, I didn’t need it to hold them all that long.
I reached out again, this time not with the colourless strength of Arcana. I couldn’t get a grip on my enemies, but that ice was made with my magic, my signature was all over it, and I had no problem finding a grip there. The whole thing rose, creaking and groaning, my magic working almost as hard to keep it in one piece, as it did to lift it. It was heavy, probably the heaviest thing I’d managed to lift so far, but I could handle it. I was stronger now, Etienne and Kali had both pushed me, and I’d grown stronger for it. With a final heave, I sent the almost house-sized iceberg flying through the air, sailing out into the ocean. As it hit the water the residual ice magic in the giant winter sculpture discharged, forming a second starburst of ice, this time with the original frozen hulk as a nucleus.
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Right, that probably wouldn’t stop them permanently, but between thawing themselves, getting out of the first pretty iceberg, fighting through the second and then swimming back to the docks . . . that should at least buy me some time. It was tiring, but even if it had taken a fair bit out of me it looked to have been worth it.
Off to the side, I saw that the bear had taken full advantage of the lull my sudden ice age had created to thoroughly pulp the enemies closest to it. For the first time since the fight began, we had some breathing room and drew closer together.
“Hell of an evening, huh?”
For some reason, I said it in English rather than French, and to my surprise, the bear let out a huffing sound and nodded its head. I noted the understanding but kept my eyes on the remaining monsters as they kept prowling around.
My stunt with the ice had swept up most of the bigger attackers, the smaller ones being agile enough to back away before being caught. Those who were left were mostly either the smaller dog creatures or the goblin things, neither of which seemed too eager to attack now that they’d lost most of their backup. Still, they weren’t retreating.
“Okay,” I said to the bear, pointing towards where I could see I positive barrage of lightning being drawn down from the clear sky. “I’ve got some strong friends over there. Let’s try and break through to them while we’ve got the chance, okay?”
I got a nod in return as the bear shook itself, then shuffled to stand beside me. Once again I was forced to remember just how big the thing was, maybe not as large as Etienne had been, but even so, it was like standing next to an elephant. More than that though, I could feel the heat radiating off the bear as though it was some sort of mobile forge. The magic in me kept it from burning me, but I swear I could see the concrete under its paws starting to melt.
I drew together more magic, this time getting ready to condense it into a wave of fire. I knew it wouldn’t do much damage to the enemies, but it would blind them for a bit, and the bear could move through flames without being burnt. I hoped that enough would give us the window to break through. I started to condense the raw energies and was just about to reach for the burning red and orange of fire when-
“ENOUGH!”
The single word was a roar, cutting through all other sounds like some tyrant battle lord crushing unarmed peasants. There was a sense of power and domination behind it, as though the speaker could not even conceive of his one word being overridden or ignored.
I was pretty sure that some of that was justified, because as soon as it was heard all action ceased. The creatures that remained and had been braced to fight seemed to recoil as though struck with a whip. These things hadn’t flinched when struck by lightning, burnt to ashes or torn apart by claws, but they cowered at the sound of that voice.
“This has gone on long enough!”
It wasn’t as loud this time, but it was as though the volume was unneeded. I could have heard it perfectly even in the middle of a thunderstorm, all other sounds were simply subordinate to the domineering tone. The voice sounded like the rustle of leaves in a high wind, the groan of branches in a storm, it was like nature had somehow managed to speak, understandable, but inhuman. At the sound of it the monsters we’d been fighting paused, then slunk back into the shadows before turning to watch us. Looking around I tried to find the source of the voice, a simple task, given that the speaker was making no effort to hide.
“Such resistance is . . . impressive though. Take pride in being such noteworthy prey.”
The flames . . . bent, opening up a corridor. In a way, it was as though they were shying away from the form making its slow way through them, but in another way, it was almost as though they were bowing in supplication. The figure they revealed was large, their advance accompanied by the clop of hooves on the broken concrete, and for a moment I thought it was another centaur. Then the fire flickered again and I got a better look, seeing that it was a rider upon a steed, rather than a half man half horse.
The horse was a huge black thing, the sort bred to pull things like carts loaded with rocks. It was sleeker though, obviously muscled, a creature bred for war rather than farm work. Oh, and instead of eyes it had two pits filled with that yellowish-green fire I was getting all too familiar with.
Still, impressive as the mount was it was the rider that overshadowed everything. And given that the rest of the monsters I’d been fighting were still around that was saying something. He was tall, that was clear even if he was on horseback. His shoulders were broad, his muscled arms bare, and he wore little more than a rough green tunic smock that hung over his thighs except for long chains that hung from his shoulders and dangled down to his ankles. He was barefooted, his feet on either side of his mount, and black lines formed strange patterns decorating his skin. His head and face were obscured by the animal skull he wore over them, a skull I guessed came from a horse or a deer. Huge antler horns rose from his temples and for a moment I thought they were part of the skull.
Then he turned his head and I saw that the horns seemed to be growing through holes that had been punched through the bone. The horns came straight out of the man’s head, natural to him. As though to further highlight his strangeness the same flames that filled his mount’s eyes played across his skin, making it look as though he’d soaked himself in oil and then set himself alight. The flames were oddly transparent though, still tinged with their unique colour, but not as thick as they were upon the others.
The only weapon he carried was a crude spear, little more than a long branch that had been mainly stripped and then had an end sharpened into a point. Fresh leaves still grew from it in places, but the veins in them were darker than they should have been. Given the dancing light of the flames, I couldn’t make it out as clearly as I would have liked, but I was pretty sure they were red, as in blood red. All in all, it should have been little more than a toy, a dangerous toy that a foolish child might make, but still just a toy.
Instead, there was a sense of bloodlust emanating from it, as sense thick as the smoke that was forming around the docks. This was no imitation weapon, this was something that had taken lives before, many, many lives. Every instinct I had was screaming it at me.
Yeah, I knew who this was, and the worry that had been growing in me had blossomed into cold fear.
Herne the Hunter, one of the ‘Trump Cards’ the USA used to keep civilisation over there from collapsing!
The funny thing was, before the Black Sun Herne had been a relatively minor figure in myth and legend. His main claim to fame was that he’d been mentioned in one of Shakespeare’s plays, and even then, he was depicted as a ghost that haunted one oak tree in Windsor Forest. Sure, he’d become somewhat well known in certain fantasy settings in fiction, but that didn’t put him on the same level as gods that had been worshipped by thousands. However, when he had faced Artemis in a dispute over a shared prey, his power had in no way been inferior to hers. She was an Olympian, a daughter of Zeus, one of the most famed deities of the ancient world, yet he, an old ghost without a legend of his own, had matched her.
The fight, though relatively brief, had still been caught on camera, and inevitably found its way onto the net, where it joined the other videos that became international hits. Herne’s power had been clear, and after he agreed to act as a bounty hunter for the US government everyone had wanted to know more about him. There’d been lots of amateur research posted on the internet, everything from carefully studied historical documents to crazy conspiracy theories about hidden gods. In the end, a paper had been published, one with a lot of backing and confirmed sources, that had proposed what had become the official theory.
They figured that Herne wasn’t just a ghost, he was the ghost of a god, an old and powerful one.
The ‘horned god’ was a powerful image found among the old gods that were worshipped in ancient Europe during the Roman era. One such god had been Cernunnos, a Gaulish god that was thought to have been Shakespeare’s inspiration for Herne, but the published paper proposed another possibility. It was proposed that both were remnants of an older deity, one that had died and fragmented during the earliest days of human development. However, the death of a powerful god was not like that of a mortal, and part, shards of the greater whole, had survived on their own. Some had grown into gods in their own right, others . . .
The Horned Huntsman, Herne the Hunter, he was an anomaly, as far as we mere mortals could tell. Even the more talkative gods were surprisingly tight-lipped when it came to him. It was enough to spawn loads of speculation threads on the net, all of them giving their own ideas about just who and what he was.
And now he was staring at me, and not looking happy at all.
“This is your final opportunity. Accept your fate, surrender gracefully. You have led a good chase, you have fought well when brought to bay, but there is only one outcome, even with your allies.”
That hit me like a punch to the guts! He’d said ‘allies’, not ‘ally’, ‘allies’, meaning that he knew about the others and that he’d done something about them. And the fact that he could ‘do something’ about the likes of Athena or Kali did not fill me with confidence.
“You, Nephilim!” The old god’s voice cracked like a whip, the dark empty sockets of the skull upon his head hid the eyes beneath them, but I could still feel them focus on me with a terrifying weight. “You are not our prey, but you would make a fine prize nonetheless. I shall give you a final chance to leave, to not interfere in our hunt. You have fought well, you have been a firm stone upon which the young ones have honed themselves, but do not think that you can defeat us. Leave, or share the fate of our prey!”
Well, at least he wasn’t being vague. I could see the bear tensing up, shifting like it wanted to turn to look at me, but unwilling to take its eyes off the enemies in front of us. It didn’t take a genius to guess what had it worried. This was a god that was threatening us, as in one of the genuine big guns of the world. Cutting and running would have been the smart choice.
Did that mean I was an idiot for not taking it?
“Yeah, not going to happen, sorry.”
It wasn’t the smart choice. I’d felt the power of a god before, and I was was far from confident about going against it. Still, the bear felt . . . brave, for want of a better word, and it was fighting monstrous creatures with sulpurous flames for eyes. Maybe I was making a snap judgement, but I was pretty sure who the bad guys were here. If I wanted to be able to look at myself in the mirror the same way tomorrow then I wasn’t going to throw the bear to the wolves to save my own hide. Especially with literal wolves.
With that thought in mind, I started to gather as much arcana force between my hands as I could, because I was pretty sure I was going to need it soon.
“Brave,” There was just a hint of acknowledgement to the inhuman voice as it spoke. “Brave, but foolish.”
The point of the spear faced the night sky, and the butt was rapped almost gently upon the concrete. I barely had time to register what was happening before the concrete around me and my ally, concrete already pretty torn up by the battle, exploded upwards in an eruption of wood and roots.
The bear roared in pain as dozens of spears-lie branches and roots, each ending in a wicked point, stabbed out at it like the weapons of a frenzied Roman legion. Most were turned aside, unable to break its hide, but several broke through and dug into its flesh. They didn’t seem to be going in too deep, but it looked like they hurt all the same. I didn’t really have time to check, not as I was suddenly forced to focus my attention on my shield as it came under ferocious attack.
It was like a tree had decided to take mortal offence at my mere existence and had launched a sneak attack on me! A hundred wooden gnarled limbs, each ending in thorn-like spikes, drove at me, almost as though I was facing a plant version of Etienne. My shield held, the bubble around me holding back dozens of attacks from all sorts of angles, but the strength of the impacts was enough to force me back, away from the dock and out over the water.
For a moment I just hovered there, momentarily stunned by the effort needed to hold my shield together. That . . . that had hit even harder than Etienne at his best. Sure, I was stronger than I’d been when I fought him, but even so . . . I was getting an all too clear picture of how I stood up in comparison to the Hunter. I could manipulate plants and nature, but there was no way I could grow something that strong, that big and that fast. No way!
As I managed to get my focus back, I looked down just in time to see a mass of branches and roots the size of a small train ramming into the bear’s body as though it were an overgrown battering ram. The attack came from the side, curving in like a snake striking at the back of an unaware prey. Before the huge beast had time to set itself to take the blow it was sent flying, crashing into a nearby warehouse with so much force that it went all the way through, smashed out the other side, and then smashed into the next warehouse along.
The mounted figure started to turn, moving to follow the bear he’d just sent flying, and I acted without thought. Maybe it was because even if the fight so far had been short, it had been intense. I’d covered for the massive bear several times, and it had become sort of reflexive. So, when Herne turned, I reacted and sent a bolt of TK at him. It hit him and then splashed off like a water balloon hitting the side of an armoured tank.
It did get his attention though.
As dozens of ghostly hounds started to form around him and the monsters in the shadows started to edge forward, I started to get the impression that this was not a good thing.