Richard’s heart-seizing ability might not have killed the Hobgoblins outright, but it definitely slowed them down, distracting them with pain long enough for Aerion and I to move in and wipe them out.
The same could not be said for the commander, who was the same type as the Uruk-hai/Predator hybrid who’d ambushed us. As big as a hob, but leaner, with more compact musculature. He was armored, competent, and had dreadlocks that made him look like a total badass.
Or an absolute nightmare if you happened to be his enemy. Worse—he was on the barge, which forced us to climb up to his position, putting us in grave danger.
The one thing we had was the element of surprise.
We rushed the barge before it skidded to a stop. It rode on four skis, which were connected to the barge via something like a leaf-spring suspension that would look right at home on a pickup truck back on Earth.
The commander, being not just stronger and faster than the Hobs, but smarter as well, threw a lever the moment he saw us, causing the barge to lurch and pick up speed, nearly knocking us off.
Aerion and I held on mostly thanks to our Dominion stat, and Richard… Well, Richard fell off, but I managed to grab his arm before he hit the ground. His legs dragged on the ground, and he screamed.
I couldn’t blame the guy—we were going almost thirty miles an hour doing a wide circle in the enclosed garage bay.
Doing a bicep curl that would impress any bodybuilder back on Earth, I wrenched Richard up until he was high enough to crawl over me and onto the barge.
Luckily, Aerion had gotten there first, and was currently Reaving at the commander. I was a little worried about her Essence, but if there was ever a time to be in Reave mode, it was now.
The ferocity of her slashes kept the commander occupied, but it also caused wood to go flying whenever Light of the Fearless sliced through, and the frenzied flurry of strikes prevented either I or Richard from engaging.
It was a testament to the commander’s skill that he was able to put up a fight at all, considering he had to keep an eye on the barge to prevent it from crashing, fight Aerion with just a small dagger, and watch out for our attacks.
Despite his prodigious capability, it was only a matter of time until Aerion got through his defenses and skewered him with Light of the Fearless, activating its twin abilities.
That instant was my moment, and I followed up with a flurry of slashes from Aurora.
The commander’s body seized, then slowly fell overboard, where it was trampled by the skis. The result was… not pretty.
“So, Aerion,” I said. “You can pilot this, right?”
Instead of a reply, we got a thump. Aerion couldn’t answer, because she’d passed out.
“Fuck,” Richard and I said in unison.
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“More!” I yelled, panic mounting. “Yank it more!”
“That’s as far as it goes!” Richard shouted back as our barge hurtled toward a wall at expressway speeds.
I had, oh, about five seconds to decide whether to grab Richard and the unconscious Aerion and bail, or to try and wrangle control of this thing.
I looked at the dozen levers again, trying to make some sense of it all. Why everything in this world insisted on using levers, I would never understand, but I cursed whatever god decided this was a good idea.
They were unmarked. Because of course they were. Richard had tried almost all of them in the seconds that had passed. Some did something with the mast. One nearly made us topple over, and the other seemed to do nothing noticeable at all.
The problem was we were on skis. But we weren’t on snow. The garage bay floor was made of stone, or something like it. Suffice it to say, I didn’t know how this thing was moving or turning at all, but its controls responded sluggishly.
Hoping for the best, I grabbed a lever and nudged it, careful not to accidentally flip our barge over, in case I found the right lever.
I had… and I hadn’t.
I’d found the brakes.
“Bloody brilliant! That buys us, what? Another five seconds?” Richard shouted.
Yep, about five more seconds to repeat my feat. Because there was no way this thing was stopping before it hit that wall.
In desperation, I grabbed two more levers, prayed to Cosmo, and pulled.
The barge jerked… and the nose turned. But something felt off. It wasn’t the front skis that had moved—they were already pointed as far left as possible.
Then it dawned on me. I glanced at the rear skis, and sure enough, they’d turned too. Just, in the wrong direction.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I cursed. Four wheel steering? Why?
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With barely a handful of seconds to spare, I threw the lever in the opposite direction, and despite our speed and lack of control, the barge turned away from the wall. Ever so slowly, protesting the whole way, it turned.
And we avoided the wall. By about a foot.
About twenty feet later, the barge finally came to a halt.
Richard and I let out a breath we’d unconsciously been holding.
“Right,” Richard said. “So! How about we figure out how this thing actually works? Y’know, before we take it out?”
“That… sounds like the best idea I’ve heard all day.”
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Richard and I had just gotten the gist of controlling this strange craft and were maneuvering it out of the garage when Aerion woke up, and despite her grogginess and grumbling, managed to learn the controls in about a quarter of the time it’d taken both of us, working together.
From then on, we just let Aerion have the controls. She was clearly better at this stuff than we’d ever be, and all of us knew it.
The ice-cold hit us the moment we were out, but Richard had thankfully had the presence of mind to grab the thick fur coat off the commander we’d killed.
Given its previous owner’s size, it actually wrapped around all three of us, so long as we huddled together.
So there we were, boldly rushing out onto the snowfield, Richard to Aerion’s left, while I stood to her right. All bundled up. All slowly turning into popsicles.
Luckily, the barge had a wooden lip that deflected the air above us. It wasn’t quite as good as an actual windshield, but it got rid of most of the worst of it. Now our faces would only be slightly frozen when we arrived.
From there, it was just smooth sailing all the way to where our warrior friend was fighting, and nothing even remotely bad happened to us.
Or so I wished. Reality, of course, always found a way to fuck us over.
“Over there!” Richard said, pointing into the distance behind us. Then he turned around and pointed in front of us. “And there, too!”
I don’t know where they’d come from, but we now had not just one, but three other barges chasing us. Two from behind, and one ahead.
“No, they aren’t after us,” Aerion said, pointing to the one that seemed to be on a collision course. “I believe they are heading for the garage bay.”
“And the moment they pass us and see the others chasing us, they’ll turn around,” I said.
“What d’you reckon we do?” Richard said. “I can stop their hearts if they get close enough. Or at least, give them enough chest pain they abandon the chase.”
“Good backup plan,” I said. “Too dangerous to rely on as our only plan.”
Allowing those Hobgoblins to get close would put all of us in grave danger.
“If something happens to the barge, we’re fucked,” I said.
“Got any ranged weapons on you, then?” Richard asked.
“Not exactly. But I figure I’ve got about thirty seconds to think of something.”
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My thirty seconds got me just about the simplest of plans. Since those tended to be the most reliable plans, I supposed it was for the better.
Basically, Richard’s ability took no time to activate—it was instant, so long as he was in range.
The problem was being in range meant putting ourselves in danger. The solution?
Minimize our exposure. But first, we needed to take out the barge that was headed our way.
It was just like those action movies where the hero and the villain drive towards one another at max speed, knowing the other guy would cave in first.
Well, when that happens in real life, it’s terrifying as hell, and I nearly shit my pants when the other barge didn’t pull away.
Aerion, however, was crazier than all of us, and not once did she flinch. The other guy, apparently understanding that if he didn’t move, we really were going to crash, turned at the last second.
The problem was that by then, he was so close that to avoid a collision, he had to careen away. At the speed he was going, that meant his barge toppled over instead, slamming into the snow and throwing up a cloud thirty feet high.
That wasn’t the only thing that flew—Hobgoblin bodies and wooden shrapnel rained through the air like someone had thrown a frag grenade.
Some hit our barge, crashing into the wood and embedding themselves in our mast. Other pieces landed harmlessly in the snow, while yet others turned into obstacles for the ones chasing us, forcing them to divert.
This would normally have widened our lead over them, but that would’ve only delayed the inevitable.
Instead, Aerion pulled the brake lever, and our barge lurched and slowed, causing the other two barges to rocket right past us.
Large and ungainly as they were, turning around was no easy feat for these things, and we’d just seen firsthand what happened to anyone who tried to turn too fast.
Ordinarily, that would have bought us quite a lot of time to speed back up and lose them. Except, we had something better. We had Richard.
“Well?” I said.
“Think I got ‘em!” Richard replied, flashing me a thumbs up. “Might not’ve killed ‘em outright, but I do believe it did the job.”
I watched as the barges that had started to turn continued… and continued… and kept turning, putting themselves in circles as Aerion mashed the speed lever, leaving the crippled barges in the dust.
“Not bad,” I said, feeling more than a little pride at our showing. “Not bad at all.”
We’d only just met, and we were already meshing well. Rather than dread this horde of beasts we had to fight… I was actually starting to look forward to wiping the floor with them.
That was, of course, until we got close enough to the fight to identify the one warrior who was still holding his own against them all.
Surrounding him was a wide ring of at least a hundred corpses, and just one look at the way this guy fought showed us why.
The man wielded an enormous battleax, and cleaved through the stomachs of two Hobgoblins with a single blow. The force was so great that the Hobs were sent stumbling back, where they joined their brethren in the slowly growing mountain of bodies.
The bearded blonde giant of a man set down his ax and pointed at the rest of the monsters, who hesitated to approach.
“Who dares challenge me?” He bellowed.
Not one creature replied. Their fear was palpable, even to us.
“No? Well then. At least put up a good fight. For Odin! For Valhalla!”
“Oh no…” I muttered.
A chill ran down my spine, and it wasn’t because of the cold.
“Why?” Richard asked. “What’s the matter?”
Aerion and I exchanged a glance and shook our heads.
“Fuck.”