War God for Hire- Gladiator by David Burke (books under 200 pages .TXT) 📕

limestone were spread, the force of his swings having sent them flying. But when he looked at his hands, there was none of the fine white powder that clung so thoroughly to the others. He looked himself up and down as best he could, and even his feet were free of the dust. It was as though his body simply refused to be sullied by something like dirt.

Then he noticed the pick in his hands. It had grown to be at least five feet long. The shaft was as thick as a small tree trunk, and there were strange markings carved into it. Whereas the pick he had been handed was a small thing near to splintering, this shaft was made of a darky ebony wood and had the look of just having been freshly oiled.

Taking care of his bats had always been an issue of pride for Kyle. The clubhouse offered to do it for him, but he had no respect for a ball player who didn’t take care of his own equipment. The joke from the other players had always been about how much Kyle liked to oil up and rub down his shaft, but he didn’t care. They weren’t the five-time player of the year.

The head of the pick had changed too. The original one had been a dull gray metal, battered to the point it barely had a tip. It had been shaped on one side only, with a twelve-inch spike for splitting rock in one piece of metal, formed around a ring through which someone had jammed a wooden haft.

Now, it had a spiked tip that narrowed to a fine point and was a good eighteen or twenty inches long. The back side of the metal ring had a wider head that looked more like the head of a war hammer than anything else. It extended out about eight inches from the shaft and was equally thick with a rounded flat head. More than that, the metal was a glistening silver that looked like it had come straight out of a smithy. The same strange rune-like markings were marked into the metal, but not so much as a hint of limestone dust could be found anywhere on the head.

As he looked at it, he felt a certain pride in it. He was always a man who took joy in working with quality tools. This was a tool he could certainly be proud of. Seeing it only drove home how right it felt in his hands. Not for breaking rock, but just sitting there in his hands.

“You have summoned your sword, Sjaelkamp.” Ild’engel’s voice was almost reverent in his mind. He heard her musing slip through, even if he had not been intended to. “How has he achieved this so quickly? Did I misjudge?”

“Maybe you’re the crazy one. This looks nothing like a sword,” Kyle replied.

“I know what I see,” she snapped back. “Who is the guide here? But if you don’t believe me, hit the wall with all your strength. I wager that Sjaelkamp can handle it. It is what you would call a magical weapon, one which is soul bound to you.”

Kyle knew it was a bad idea, but he couldn’t stop himself.

He wanted to cut loose, needed to in the worst way possible. Since that first leap that had him falling through a roof, he had been trying to move so carefully. Hell, he wasn’t even sure if this was real or not, but sometimes you just had to swing for the fences.

With that thought in mind, he pulled back the pickaxe, rotated his hips and drove the tip forward with all his power. What was the worst that could happen, after all? The spike was only eighteen inches long. Everything lined up just right, and he contacted the wall more squarely than any fastball he had ever turned on.

What followed was beyond any expectation he’d had. The wall split. No, not just the wall. The entire side of the mining pit split. Men who were working on higher levels up above fell, some of them more than fifty feet before striking the ground. The crack went all the way up the wall and into the ground at his feet.

The onlookers around him leapt back, screaming in terror as the very ground shook. A rockslide came rushing down and Kyle had to leap quickly to catch Lucas up in his free arm and jump far enough away to prevent them from being crushed by tons of stone.

When the dust settled, an entire section of the wall had caved in and there was more broken rock ready to be hauled away than the rest of the men had created all day long. He saw the foreman running towards him and wondered if he had screwed up big time.

Maybe he should just make a run for it, but no. He needed a job. He needed some income.

Chapter 5 - The Essence of the Matter

“It is critical that you say the words I tell you to say. We need them to think you are just a down on his luck warrior who was fortunate enough to have a soul bound weapon. That is going to be a hard enough sell. We can’t let them get an inkling of who you are,” Ild’engel said in his mind.

Kyle didn’t bother to answer. His mind was too busy spinning this. It was all about pointing out the good. The foreman was likely mad, and why wouldn’t he be? Kyle wasn’t too sure that some of the men who fell weren’t dead, and even those who weren’t, had to be badly injured. On the other hand, he had just broken up a huge quantity of limestone, so that had to be worth something.

When the foreman got there, he started talking to Kyle, who once again couldn’t make heads or tails of what he had to say. Annoyed, he thought at the voice in his head, “Can’t you