The Yards were big. Really fucking big. The moment Solomon sees them, the breath catches in his throat as he freezes. It was less of a ‘training ground’ and more of a landscape. He could see craggy cliffs, burning deserts, brackish marshes, and dense jungles just from the entryway. He gulps, sweating as he realizes the magnitude of the task before him.

“Harald, uh, how are we supposed to get across all that?”

The older man leads him down a trail, leading through a meadow. Up ahead, Solomon can see two warbands at each other’s throats, weapons clashing. Off to the sides, he could see people re-attaching severed limbs and even their own heads, laughing it off before they re-entered the fray. They’d have to go through that, Solomon realizes, and in response his grip tightens around his weapons.

“After Odin decided to open up Valhalla to a warrior o’ any culture that died in battle and choose this afterlife, our numbers got a bit crazy, and the new Einherjar weren’t just happy with the old fields either.”

The moment the Warband spots them, a general alarm ring out, a horn resounding in the vale. Solomon hears them calling out the appearance of “Fresh Blood”, and his blood chills. Some of the skirmishers turn to face the duo, launching a volley of projectiles, the whistle of their flight promising death. On instinct, Solomon lifts his shield, almost hiding behind it, before the steady thud-thud of arrows resounds on his defense. In the corner of his eye, he sees Harald batting the arrows aside with twirls of his axes, continuing to speak casually.

“So Odin expanded the old fields to the Yards, and set up Waystones. They’ll let us warp between connected ‘Stones, but it’ll take a few jumps before we get to the main halls. Odin didn’t want to make it too easy.”

Solomon grunts as a sling bullet slams into his shield, causing him to stumble from the sheer force of it. He takes a look at the shield and realizes the hit left a visible dent in the metal, and shudders. If that had hit his face, it wouldn’t be pretty. He looks to Harald for reassurance, and gawks as Harald casually cuts the head off of an archer with a single lazy throw of an axe. Harald traces a glowing rune into the air and the axe flies back to him, his hand catching the handle in a smooth, casual motion.

“I didn’t lose this eye in life, y’know. Gave it up like Odin did for Runes, though it was a good deal less dramatic than what he went through.”

The older man grins at him as he tilts his head, a barbed javelin sailing through where his face had been a moment before. He smiles and nods in a fatherly manner, clapping the young man on the back.

“Doing good for yer first time! We’re almost upon them, so just follow behind me and let ol’ Harald sort this out!” He says, turning his eye to the foes before him with a distinct sense of relish.

There’s a thicket of spears in front of them, a shield-wall of a dozen different warriors from a dozen different eras. Solomon recognizes the patterns of their armor, and he can’t help but think of how long these people must have been fighting here in Valhalla. There, a man whose skin is patterned in woad, bare-chested, with a feral snarl on his face. There, a woman in the armor of a Rajput, stone-faced as she levels her spear over her shield. Warriors from across history, forming a single unbreakable line.

Then Harald meets their line, and Solomon watches in awe as the spears shatter against his chest, and the enemy scatters before his fury like loose straw before the wind. His axes sweep out, severing limbs and heads from bodies, as the older man laughs and laughs and laughs.

“Come on, you veslingr! You’re outnumbered two to a hundred!”

The woman tosses aside her broken spear, the only remaining warrior standing of the shieldwall, and draws forth a mace. Recognition dawns in her eyes, and a name issues from her lips.

“Wartooth.”

She rushes at Harald, her furious swing cutting only empty air as Harald side-steps her blow. A kick sends the woman into Solomon, her body smashing into his shield with a crack. The young man pushes her back, and the warrior turns to face him, twirling her mace as she backs up, sizing her new opponent up with a hunter’s gaze. For a moment, he is at a loss for what to do. He’d never been a warrior, after all.

Then she charges him, and instincts take over.

The moments pass like molasses as Solomon takes her attack in, his body formulating an answer. A swing coming in from the left, her shield held low to protect her hand. His own shield comes up, stopping the mace in its tracks with a dong, and his iklwa thrusts out, impulsively. Solomon watches with shock as it just punches right through her throat, surprised that he… actually did that. He’d just killed someone.

The woman grunts, dropping her mace to clutch at her throat, nodding at him with begrudging approval, and only then does he remember. This was Valhalla. He pulls his spear free, flicking the blood off of it, before he nods back at her respectfully. She rolls her eyes, staggering off towards the treeline, and Solomon turns back to Harald only to stare in disbelief.

Breaking a battle-line of a dozen men? Incredible. Shattering spears against his chest? Ridiculous.

Battling thirty men all at once, laughing as you do so, while completely surrounded?

It left him without words.

Solomon could only watch in stunned silence as Harald battles them like a force of nature, a living storm of death and war. With each movement, he shows Solomon an impossible new way of defeating an opponent, from splattering a head into the ground with an axe kick, bisecting a man in a Landschneckt uniform cleanly with a single axe-swing, to catching a hammer’s wooden handle between his teeth to bite it in two. Harald spits out the splinters, before turning back to Solomon, smiling proudly.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“First victory, eh? You never forget it. Oh, watch out for-”

He turns, and his eyes catch something coming at him in a blur of motion. Solomon throws himself out of the way, but even so he feels the projectile graze the side of his body. His face slams into the ground and he tastes the dirt. What the fuck? What the fuck was that? A quick review of his memories tells Solomon that it was a sling-stone. It was that sniper who’d put the dent in his shield.

He attempts to rise, but the sharp pang of pain from the bruise on the side of his body tells him all he needs to know about how dangerous the slinger is, if a mere touch from their attacks could do this much. He rolls onto his back, bringing up his shield just in time to block another stone, the impact jarring their body.

His arm braces against the ground, his feet scrambling for stable footing under the bombardment. Solomon delivers a panicked glance towards the proud figure of Harald, currently breaking a man’s spine in half with a people’s elbow- Wait, what? No, nevermind that, he had bigger things to deal with.

“Harald! The slinger!”

“On it, lad! Watch my back!”

He watches as Harald flings his axes off into the distance, the sound of metal clashing with stone ringing off in the distance. Wait, metal on stone? No. No fucking way. Solomon gets to his feet in time to gawk as Harald and the unnamed slinger engage in a duel, sling-stones skipping off the ground only to be batted away by the flat of an axe-blade, the viking’s own steel retorts slamming into the stones shot to deflect them away.

There’s the fwip of weapons flourishing as new challengers emerge, and Solomon tears his attention away from the deadly duel as he scrambles into position to cover Harald’s back, facing off against a trio of warriors, all of them clad in hauberks, wielding long spears. They look at each other, exchanging glances, before one of them steps forward, nodding at the others.

“I’ll take the new brother first.”

They enter a stance, leveling the spear at Solomon’s face. Solomon replies by bringing up his shield, careful not to block his own vision of the enemy. He could hear the battle raging behind him, as Harald battled. All he had to do was stand his ground.

Then his enemy advances and Solomon curses his own foolish thoughts for jinxing himself. It’s like fighting a hurricane, he thinks, spear-thrusts weaving their way around the shield as he frantically maneuvers to block or dodge attacks. The iklwa in his grasps finds its own use as a tool to help block incoming strikes, the enemy using the blade of the spear to slash at Solomon’s exposed legs and face as often as he attempts to thrust into his chest.

To his credit, Solomon puts up quite the fight. Driven by a desperate fury, the shield flashes from position to position, the steady beat of the spear resounding as it strikes the metal shield echoing through the vale. But that is all it is, a defense that is slowly faltering. The ache in Solomon’s side is getting worse, the bruise smarting more and more as he exerts himself in holding off the spearman’s assault.

Then he realizes it. The way his opponent’s spear hesitates every time he pulls it back, giving him just enough of a chance to prepare for the next blow. The contemptuous ease with which his opponent is backing him into a corner.

He’s being toyed with.

Something feral and primal wells up in Solomon. An atavistic fury at the thought, welling up deep inside him. It doesn’t make sense, a distant part of him thinks. He shouldn’t be vain enough to think he could fight on an even level with someone who must have been fighting all their life.

But something in him disagrees. It speaks in an old tongue, a tongue of clashing swords and monsters slain, of ancient sagas written when the world was young. It tells him that he is an heir to divine glories and eternal splendor. How can he describe its words? It is asking him whether he is King or Peasant, and pressing upon him the choice. It is roiling hot in his blood, burning in his will, and he feels like if he ever lets it out fully it’ll burn away the world.

His heart is singing to him, in a melody older than the written word. Yes, that’s it. But what is it saying?

Solomon lets that strange feeling into his mind, his body surging forward to catch the spearman off guard. It comes naturally to him now, the rhythm, as he finally lets himself feel the song that can’t be heard. It’s a question, and Solomon closes his eyes to let himself understand it. The spearman finds the situation reversed, as Solomon finally goes on the attack. This bastard, this piece of shit wants to toy with him? The song tells hims him how to repay his opponent in kind, and he dances to the beat of its drum.

A stab there. A feint here. It’s halting at first, as he starts to become accustomed to the motions. Block your enemy’s panicked stab, use the chance to bash your shield into his face. It’s like the steps to a dance he’d learned so long ago, and he was only remembering them now. His opponent furrows their brow in confusion. This newcomer, this boy, really, just a few seconds ago, had been at his mercy. And now, suddenly he feels like he never had a chance of defeating the kid at all. And, he realizes, sweat beginning to bead his brow, the boy was doing this… with his eyes closed.

Solomon finally gets it. The song’s a question, and suddenly he knows the answer. His movements grow smoother until it’s like he’s been fighting all his life. He finally opens his eyes as he understands the truth that feeling has been trying to tell him all along.

Under Heaven and Earth, he alone is the honored one.

His body expresses that answer with a single decisive motion. Then there is an awed silence in the vale, interrupted only by the sound of a body hitting the ground.