Valhalla Virus by Nick Harrow (best management books of all time TXT) 📕

be interpreted as vision, or revelation. That made sense for a mystical eye. The power flowed into his wounds and stitched them closed, leaving only angry red welts.

Gunnar cycled the weapon again and drew a bead on the next jötunn headed down the hall. The hulking gorilla-like creature had dagger-like tusks curving up from its lower jaw, and a single horn curved forward from the right side of its misshapen skull. Dull eyes glowed orange under the red emergency lights, and its breath gusted out of its gaping nostrils in steaming clouds.

With a bellowing roar, the creature closed with Gunnar. Its left fist, a knotted mass of bone and callused muscle the size of a bowling ball, crashed across Gunnar’s jaw. The jötunn was much faster than the bodyguard had given it credit for, and its right cross caught him behind the ear. The beast plunged its head forward behind the punch in an attempt to skewer him with its horn.

The Valknut had to burn away the last of the life energy Gunnar had harvested from the dead jötunn to clear the savage concussion he’d just received. The fog lifted from his thoughts, and the world snapped back into focus. The bodyguard rammed the shotgun’s business end under the lower edge of his opponent’s barrel-like rib cage and fired. The jötunn’s body muffled the Mossberg’s roar, and it jerked up onto its toes when the buckshot obliterated half its internal organs.

But even that shot wasn’t enough to take the thing down. It responded with a savage backhand that would’ve taken Gunnar’s head off his shoulders if he hadn’t ducked beneath its arc. The jötunn kept coming, the blood that rained from its wound hardly slowing it. It swung its fists in a flurry of blows that forced Gunnar to step back out of the hideous monster’s reach. It roared a challenge that echoed from the walls, blasting scalding breath and rancid saliva into Gunnar’s face.

“Down!” Mimi shouted.

Gunnar reacted without thinking. He threw himself backward, cycling the shotgun’s action when he crashed onto the floor. Mimi’s slug ripped through the air above the bodyguard and hammered into the jötunn’s wounded side. Tattered flesh and shattered bone exploded away from the jötunn and splattered the painted wall next to it. Gunnar raised the barrel of his shotgun and fired, splaying open the creature’s rib cage and revealing the pulped mass of its blackened heart.

The beast fell backward, its arms curled into its chest, legs buckled.

The victory was fleeting, though, as another jötunn leapt over the body of its fallen cousin, screaming with unholy rage. Hooves the size of dinner plates stomped toward Gunnar, tearing holes in the fake grass and chipping the concrete floor beneath it. The monstrosity’s tongue slung saliva in every direction as it lashed the air like a third arm, its bulbous tip a deadly mass of muscle studded with jagged teeth.

Gunnar rolled to the side and used the edge of the house for cover as he scrambled back to his feet and pumped the shotgun to chamber another shell. Mimi had slipped around the house to get a better angle on their attackers, and her weapon’s explosive roar shook the air. He heard the sharper pops of small-arms fire and wondered whether that was Ray or Bridget shooting a pistol.

The bodyguard backed up farther from the house’s corner, his weapon trained just beyond its edge. He held steady until the jötunn emerged from behind the house, then fired at its head.

The blast caught the thing full in the mouth, shattering teeth and severing the grotesque, flailing tongue. Blood sprayed from the pulverized muscle. The jötunn had lost an eye and most of its nose in the bargain. While the creature was far from dead, its injuries had taken a lot of the fight out of it. The jötunn screeched and clasped its hands to its face, leaving it momentarily defenseless.

A point-blank blast to the bridge of its nose from Gunnar’s weapon dropped the jötunn. Its brain sloshed out across the floor in a sticky, black mass. Gunnar wasn’t taking any chances, though. He blasted its head again, then snatched shells from the bandolier and fed them into the weapon’s loading port.

It only took a handful of seconds to reload the weapon, and he heard Mimi’s shotgun discharge twice more in that time.

“The lodge needs you,” Bridget said from behind Gunnar’s shoulder, her voice frosty, eyes gone wintry white. She held a pistol awkwardly in one hand and a bandolier of shotgun shells slung over her shoulder. “And we need it. There are too many jötnar for mere weapons to repel.”

A skinny jötunn with spikes for feet and hands skittered around the corner of the house, and Gunnar blasted its chest into a fine red mist. “I can’t leave Mimi and Ray out here alone with these freaks.”

Bridget grabbed his arm with one white-nailed hand. “You need the lodge to save them.”

Her clear, confident words were accompanied by a vision of the model he’d seen earlier behind the wooden door. He hated to leave Mimi alone with the beasts, but Bridget was right. The jötnar were too tough to kill in a straight-up fight. The home team needed any edge they could find. He took off, Bridget racing along beside him, his bare feet skidding across the fake grass. He reached the door and caught himself on its frame, then wrenched it open and plunged into the narrow room. He remembered to duck his head just in time to avoid knocking himself senseless on the low support beams that ran across the ceiling.

The model was where he’d last seen it, floating above the table. The Valknut symbol that hovered above the miniature lodge glowed with golden power waiting to be put to use. Gunnar considered his options. The armory would be nice, but it wouldn’t save them from the immediate threat breathing down their necks. The feasting hall would be great down the road, but it didn’t do shit