Our chief raises both razor-clawed hands to block the downward strike. He catches the hammer at its upper shaft but the blow forces him to his knees. The yellow-white stone cracks under his armor. The lava troll chief rips the hammer backwards to try and break his hands, our chief pulls his claws apart, leans back out the way of a following strike, and rushes forward stabbing at the lava troll’s gray bulging stomach.
The titanium sinks in deep. Our chief rips the claws out at an angle for maximum damage. Loops of gore and masses of sticky orange pour out, yet the lava troll chief is even more immune to pain than the rest of his tribe. He strikes a terrible blow to our chief’s head, and a warped spike catches between two steel scales. A great tear is rent in the helmet.
The lava trolls cheer. Hammerchild laughs. I scowl.
One side has to be the first to join battle properly and it might as well be ours.
I lance Heartseeker at the great lava troll’s ankle. The tendon falls in half, shooting up through the flesh like a cut band of stretched leather, and the lava troll chief falls backwards. I strike with another jab, even faster, into his eye at the very extreme of Heartseeker’s range. He bellows in anger.
Our chief leaps forward to deliver a double-handed swipe that will sever our enemy’s head from his shoulders in multiple slices of neck. Five of the nearest lava trolls pile forward to stop him. Dwatrall and the last warrior stride forward with hammers swinging crossways to strike them down. Crossways, anti-crossways, then a slew of downward blows. Heads split apart like fruits, the bodies beneath them slump down. Yet the blood running from their skulls is already starting to solidify.
A lava troll is suddenly grabbing at my face with a plate-sized hand. I duck and cut around the back of its knee. It stumbles; I dodge back and cut the bone out the other knee with a precisely aimed and twisted strike. The troll clutches it and falls down. Hayhek severs one of the arteries in its neck with a brutal slash, but neither of us have time to cut the other. More trolls are upon us.
We know how to fight them now. We’ve adapted and slash only at major arteries and tendons: the only parts worth cutting. As for our defense—we know the rhythm of their attacks. Each dwarf has his or her own style, built up over many years of practice to perfectly suit body type, personality, weapon and armor. Each time you fight a dwarf you must adapt to a new rhythm. Yet the lava trolls all have the same style: lumber forward grasping and slashing. They do so quickly, yes, but to us they are now predictable.
I duck and dodge, weave through bodies that blunder into each other in their angry hurry to crush us to bloody tinned jam. Heartseeker lashes out as quickly as a snake. The lava trolls fall one by one, shouting in rage.
And one by one they rise again. So thick is the melee that even those that ought to bleed out become covered with the blood of their fellows, and it does not seem to matter whose blood covers whom. It blackens, crumbles and from it emerges a healed troll, ready to dive toward us once more.
My muscles are not tired yet. My armor is enhanced enough that I could do this for hours: I only have to exert myself fully on strikes requiring a special degree of brutality.
However I do not think the lava trolls’ blood will run out before my stamina does. We must strike for the head.
I scan intently as I duck and weave and strike through the melee. The runes enhancing my vision allow me to see sharply every detail, and I glimpse the deformed figure of the Hammerchild not twenty paces distant.
Target, in sight.
I duck between the legs of one lava troll, stab up and sever the arm tendons of one as it reaches down to grab me, thrust violently through the skull of a third, stunning it and sending it to the ground—and now I’m right in front of him.
The Hammerchild hisses. Two lava trolls flanking it, each as big as their chief, swipe at me. They are faster than their fellows, and more accurate too—I just barely dodge. Yet dodge I do and the Hammerchild’s eyes widen as Heartseeker darts at his neck.
It pierces deep, through the direct center to sever the spine.
At the same moment one of his guards picks me up in one hand. He lifts me high and slams me down onto the ground. It is the hardest impact I have felt in a long, long time. My breath bursts from me and black circles spin in front of my eyes. The pressure increases as the troll puts his full weight onto me. He wraps his other hand around my head and begins to twist. Armor is little protection against such an attack—I designed it to be mobile. My neck becomes ninety degrees, then one hundred.
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I cry out in pain.
The pressure releases and the troll guard is stumbling backward, half his head stove in by Dwatrall’s hammer. Dwatrall grabs me by the front and pulls me up.
“Good thinking!” he says. “Now let’s get the hammer!”
The ground around us is an eviscerated mass of lava troll limbs and gore—our chief has gone berserk. Helmetless, eyes bulging crazily, he stomps on those that try to crawl up, deepening their just-healed wounds with maximum brutality. The morale of the lava trolls is broken: many are backing away from the onslaught now their leader is flat on his back convulsing. The wound in his spine is repairing slowly and irregularly.
Their chief lies against the wall too, coated in blackening gore. The hammer lies across his knees. Dwatrall shouts to our chief, currently rending the black coating of a downed lava troll to expose the smooth-skinned adult embryo within. He finishes off the foe, looks up, remembers the hammer. Walks toward the enemy chief—
Hammerchild hiss-burbles from behind. The lava troll chief roars. The cracked black coating him shatters to dust, and he springs to his feet, leaps with hammer suddenly wielded and driving in a downward blow—
Right toward me.
I step back, but he his too fast.
Dwatrall sidesteps between us and raises his hammer lengthways to guard. But his amateur craft cannot stand against the craft of eons. The haft bends and breaks, and the twisted bronze mass smashes his forehead.
He sprawls onto his back, steel helmet visibly dented.
“Bastard!” I shout.
The hammer swings up at me. I block with Heartseeker, angling my weapon so the force is directed away. Even so I am sent flying. I land on a semi-healed lava troll. Its arms wrap around to grab me and I hurriedly roll away.
“We’ll have you!” hisses the Hammerchild. “We will crush your spines and cripple you, and pull your knowledge out scar by scar! We will have you, dwarves!”
The lava trolls backing away cease their movement, then reverse it. The lava troll chief raises the hammer above his head and roars. The cavern shakes. One of our number is down, one by one the felled lava trolls are rising.
I curse. My neck is sore, and I can feel the first hints of fatigue creeping into my limbs. I do not see a way we can win.
Then, in the moment before the tribe charges us with renewed vigor, the moment before the trolls lying mangled raise their claws to us, the last of the river troll warriors roars and unleashes not a hammer blow, but something far worse for both us and them.
The very last of our water.
He had left the two leather skins of it just inside the tunnel, and in the chaos his chief caused, gone back for them. He saw we stood no chance in a prolonged battle and that water was our only hope. He has already untied them, and now swings them with mouths open in a wide horizontal arc.
A shimmering wave of coolness splashes the lava troll chief and a dozen more lava trolls either side of him. They scream and steam pours from them. Our chief shouts and slashes the fingers around the hammer’s shaft away. Orange spurts of blood mix with the water and turns into black rocks which fall and crumble on the ground. The lava troll chief falls screaming with the others, water sizzling his finger-stumps.
“Help me!” I shout to Hayhek, busy cleaving the face of a wailing lava troll. “Help me with Dwatrall!”
He puts his axe away. Under the cover of the steam and cries of extreme pain—a dual visual and auditory fog of absolute fear which keeps the lava trolls from advancing further—we drag Dwatrall back to the tunnel. The troll warrior takes his limp body from us and slings him over his shoulder.
I turn back to our chief. “Come on!” I shout, hoping the desperation in my voice will break down the language barrier.
He has taken up the hammer and is using it to batter the wailing lava trolls into paste. Some emerge from their cracked black cocoons and he smashes their heads with his feet, then spits on them, wasting precious water.
But he is in too much of a revenge-fury to care.
“Come on!” I scream again. “Before they recover.”
He snarls back at me, then points into the crowd. The Hammerchild is being borne away on the shoulders of a lava troll at the very rear of the cavern.
“Forget him! We have what we came for! Come on!”
Yet what hope do I have of my logic getting through? He is a troll. He does not think: he has Dwatrall to do that for him and Dwatrall is in no state for thought at the moment or maybe ever. He charges into the fog and lays about with the hammer. I chase after him, sprint through the steam and the screaming and the wake of falling lava trolls.
The Hammerchild screams as, for the second time in its life, the hammer comes for it. The scream turns to a hurried order and its carrier spits burning orange onto the forehead of our chief.
His rage allows him to ignore even burning. The Hammerchild screams once more. Our chief smites the deformed figure from its mount, then crushes it under a dozen terrible stomps.
The troll who was carrying the Hammerchild flees, as do the rest. They vanish into side-caves, or wade in panic through the pool of magma that fills the rear of the cavern. Our chief roars at their backs as he scrapes the remains of the Hammerchild off his steel-clad feet and spits on them for good measure. A look at the splattered mess tells me there will be no regenerating.
“We have to get back,” I say. “Quickly.”
I am soaked with sweat inside my armor, and my throat is beginning to feel dry.