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

Like that was gonna make anything better. Kyle couldn’t help but laugh. Somehow people always thought that speaking more slowly in a language you didn’t know was gonna make it easier to understand.

Kyle turned his palms up towards the ceiling and then shrugged his shoulders to imply that he had no clue what they were saying.

It seemed to work, because the two of them started talking back and forth. Kyle might not have been able to understand what they were saying, but the body language was easy enough to pick up. The woman was trying to get her man to take care of him, and he didn’t want to have any part of it.

The voice in his head said, “He is asking you if you are a messenger from the gods and she thinks you are a fiend here to drag off their children for some evil ritual.”

“Are you even real?” Jay thought back to the voice but then added, “No, don’t answer that, I’m not talking to the voice in my head.”

As Kyle tried to calm his racing thoughts, he figured it made sense in a weird, twisted way. These people must be really small. In fact, everything around here must be small. His head brushed the ceiling, and that was with him stooping over. The guy looked sturdy enough, not in the fighter or athlete sorta way, but more like a guy who swung a shovel for a living. With the size of this body that he found himself in, Kyle assumed that he must appear like a giant to them.

That was when he got the brilliant idea to try that thing from every first contact movie he had ever seen. He made an exaggerated gesture and pointed to his chest as he said, “Kyle.” He repeated the process three more times, trying very hard to enunciate clearly.

They finally seemed to get the hang of it.

They both looked at each other before the woman finally repeated the pointing process that he had just performed and said, “Freja.” Then she pointed at the man, who Kyle took to be her husband, and said, “Lucas.”

Kyle repeated the names as he pointed at each of them in turn and they did the same with his name. The tension started to ease in the room, but he realized that this was still a long way from making heads or tails out of what they were saying. This was so gonna be a long night. That caused him to look up through the hole he had made in their roof. He felt bad about it, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that.

Kyle realized, in that moment, that he didn’t have any clue about whether this pace had a day and night cycle like he was used to. That might be a faulty Earth assumption. Or maybe he was just going crazy.

That same sultry voice chose now to make itself known again. “Don’t jump. Don’t look around. I’m inside your head.”

“Great, I really am crazy now,” Kyle said out loud. Of course, neither Lucas nor Freja had any idea what he was saying.

“You aren’t crazy; you are just adapting to reincarnation.” Before he could say anything more the voice said, “Repeat after me.”

Then it rattled off a strange sentence. If Kyle’s ear for languages was serving him well, it was likely the same one these people were speaking, he mused. Wondering what he had to lose, he repeated it.

From the reaction on their faces, Kyle initially assumed he was butchering the phrase. But the longer he looked at them, the more he realized it was fear, not confusion, coming over their faces.

That was really saying something. It appeared that whatever phrase he had repeated, had caused more fear than having a strange man, one who towered over you, fall through your roof. That was confirmed when Lucas tossed the knife down at his feet.

Whatever the voice was telling him seemed to be working, so Kyle followed its instructions and repeated several more phrases. Before he knew it, they were directing him to sit down next to the fire. Moments later, a bowl of the stew was held out to him. Freja’s hands trembled as she held the bowl, but she seemed insistent he accept it. What was more, the kids kept staring at him, now more like he was Santa Claus than the boogieman.

Kyle was tempted to ask the voice what he had said to the poor people. Of course, he remembered reading somewhere that hearing voices wasn’t what made you crazy. It was when you started talking back to them that you earned the title.

Besides, he found that he was really hungry, and the stew was really good. It was pretty simple fare, but sometimes that was for the best anyway. Especially now, when it felt like he hadn’t eaten in years.

The more he ate, the more he felt himself growing tired. Of course, that raised a whole new kind of panic as he glanced at the knife Lucas had been holding, where it still laid on the floor.

The voice in his head sounded off again. “It’s okay. You can fall asleep. They have agreed to honor the old invocation. They would sooner kill themselves than allow harm to come to one such as you. You will be safe sleeping beside their hearth tonight, so to speak.”

Kyle realized that he was gonna have to talk to the voice. It had seemed to respond to his thoughts earlier, so he hoped he could do so silently in his head. At least that way, he wouldn’t end up sounding like a total loon.

“Um, so who are you?” Instead of speaking out loud, Kyle directed the thoughts inside as though he was trying to speak to the voice.

No response.

“And how do I know they aren’t gonna cut my throat as soon as I lay down?”

Miracle of miracles, it worked.

This time, the voice replied, “I am called Ild’engel. For now, you are just gonna