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

monstrosity was a terror out of nightmares, but the longer Kyle looked at it, the more he wanted to kill it. A rage surged up within him and this time Kyle noticed something he hadn’t noticed before. Laced into the anger was a thread of fear. This was something that Krig, god of war, had feared. Maybe fear wasn’t the correct word. It was something he had been wary of, cautious about. Kyle couldn’t say for sure.

The creature—Aekor was the name that kept coming to his mind, so Kyle just went with it—started to scan the battlefield much as he had done. Then it cried out. “No! My children! What has happened? Who is killing my children?”

The monster first looked at the cluster of gladiators and trainers. One of the tentacle stalks leaned towards them and a bright crimson beam flared out. It struck the ground in the midst of the gathered fighters and exploded with deadly force, sending trainers and gladiators sprawling. The blast upset the balance and, in a heartbeat, the glytharen warriors began to overwhelm the humans.

Kyle watched as a flash of electricity flared out from Gilthan, but it wasn’t enough. They would all be dead in a moment.

No, he decided. That wouldn’t happen. They weren’t his friends, not yet. But he respected them, especially his fellow slaves who had been forced to train as gladiators.

He squatted down and leapt with essence-enhanced muscles. His body flew through the air and he landed behind the glytharen. He yelled out, “Hit the ground.”

He paused for a single second, hoping the trainers and gladiators would know what he intended. From deep within himself, he drew forth War Essence and channeled it into his Divine Ability. It was so much easier than before, now that he had been to his mantle, but he needed to confine it to a much more precise area.

Rather than a burst going out equally in all directions from him, Kyle envisioned a ring that surged out at waist level from him. A golden ring laced with the red of War Essence blasted out and cut thirty glytharen in half in an instant.

One of the enemy warriors had blocked the blast with a now-ruined shield. It looked different from the other glytharen. Instead of a single tentacle on its head, it had two and whereas the others all used only a single sword, this one had been wielding an oversized great sword with a single hand and a massive shield with the other.

A hissing sound came from the remaining enemy as it rushed him.

In that moment, Kyle realized that he didn’t have a weapon in hand to block the long blade aiming for him with its blade already slick with blood. Need called to his power and his pickaxe from the quarry appeared. The silver head was shaped as a warhammer on one side and a pick-like spike on the other. The metal was covered with etched runes, as was the ebony black handle.

Despite the miraculous appearance of his pick, Kyle still couldn’t get it around in time to stop the blade. Time was moving so slowly as the blade descended at a forty-five-degree angle for his neck, but the pick was too low to the ground to get into place. Kyle knew he needed a shield but didn’t have one, so he hoped he could move enough to survive the sword slash. Again, in response to the need, his pickaxe blurred and shifted more quickly than the eye could follow into a shield upon his arm.

The sword blow struck, and the force pushed him back, but he was unharmed. Instinct or muscle memory was taking over, and Kyle had an idea about how this weapon worked. If it truly shaped itself to meet his need, he decided to go with it. He swung forward while it was still a shield and by the time his hips had rotated into place the weapon was reformed in its original shape and the pick was buried in the creature’s chest.

Kyle followed through with his momentum and ripped upward, splitting the creature’s body in half before sending two more quick smashes at the pair of tentacles, crushing them against the ground. Behind him, the Aekor screamed again. Kyle looked back and saw that Lash was running around it, whipping at its legs but she seemed to only be annoying it. While they appeared to be slender, it was only a function of the overall size of the creature. They were still more than eighteen inches in diameter.

He looked at Saber and said, “Get as many of them out of here as you can. I will try to stall this thing. But I need you all to be gone for what I have in mind.”

It was obvious that the head trainer wanted to ask him a question but understood the urgency of the situation and simply yelled, “You heard the man. Make for the exit now.”

A rose-colored blast sent Lash flying to the ground where she spasmed. Kyle rushed to her but when she saw his weapon, she had regained enough composure to ask, “Where did you get that weapon?”

“I think you know,” was all that Kyle said as he charged the Aekor. Marie was a deadly fighter but not very well equipped for fighting a monster with thirty-foot-long legs and a chitinous armor that seemed to repel all her blows. He charged across the distance to the creature in four long steps and then leapt into the air.

As he flew up, he turned his pickaxe to land the hammer head. The Aekor’s body was too large for the spike to pierce deep enough, so the blunt force seemed more likely to do something. When he made contact, it was like swinging a baseball bat into a tree.

Only this time the bat didn’t break, and neither did he.

The Aekor stumbled back under the impact of his essence-enhanced blow, while Kyle fell to the ground and landed on his feet, weapon at