فصل 19

Do Not Call Me Beantown. Like, Ever

I TOLD MY NEW FRIENDS I was allergic to dismemberment. They just laughed and herded me toward the combat arena. This is why I don’t like making new friends.

The battlefield was so huge I couldn’t process what I was seeing.

Back in the good old days when I was a street kid, I used to sleep on rooftops in the summertime. I could see the entire cityscape of Boston from Fenway Park to Bunker Hill. Valhalla’s battlefield was bigger than that. It offered maybe three square miles of interesting places to die, all contained within the hotel like an interior courtyard.

On all four sides rose the walls of the building—cliffs of white marble and gold-railed balconies, some hung with banners, some decorated with shields, some fitted with catapults. The upper floors seemed to dissolve in the hazy glow of the sky, as blank white as a fluorescent light.

In the center of the field loomed a few craggy hills. Clumps of forest marbled the landscape. The outer rim was mostly rolling pastures, with a river as wide as the Charles snaking through. Several villages dotted the riverbank, maybe for those who preferred their warfare urban.

From hundreds of doors in the walls around the field, battalions of warriors were streaming in, their weapons and armor glinting in the harsh light. Some einherjar wore full plate mail like medieval knights. Others wore chain mail shirts, breeches, and combat boots. A few sported camo fatigues and AK-47s. One guy wore nothing but a Speedo. He’d painted himself blue and was armed only with a baseball bat. Across his chest were the words COME AT ME, BRO.

“I feel underdressed,” I said.

X cracked his knuckles. “Armor does not make victory. Neither do weapons.”

Easy for him to say. He was larger than some sovereign nations.

Halfborn Gunderson was also taking the minimalist approach. He’d stripped down to nothing but his leggings, though he did sport a pair of vicious-looking double-bladed axes. Standing next to anyone else, Halfborn would’ve looked massive. Next to X, he looked like a toddler…with a beard, abs, and axes.

T.J. fastened his bayonet to his rifle. “Magnus, if you want more than the basic equipment, you’ll have to capture it or trade for it. The hotel armories take red gold, or they work on a barter system.”

“Is that how you got your rifle?”

“Nah, this is the weapon I died with. I hardly ever fire it. Bullets don’t have much effect on einherjar. Those guys out there with the assault rifles? That’s all flash and noise. They’re the least dangerous people on the field. But this bayonet? It’s bone steel, a gift from my father. Bone steel works just fine.”

“Bone steel.”

“Yeah. You’ll learn.”

My sword hand was already sweating. My shield felt much too flimsy. “So which groups are we fighting against?”

Halfborn clapped me on the back. “All of them! Vikings fight in small groups, my friend. We are your shield brothers.”

“And shield sister,” Mallory said. “Though some of us are shield idiots.”

Halfborn ignored her. “Stick with us, Magnus, and…well, you won’t do fine. You’ll get killed quickly. But stick with us anyway. We’ll wade into battle and slaughter as many as possible!”

“That’s your plan?”

Halfborn tilted his head. “Why would I have a plan?”

“Oh, sometimes we do,” said T.J. “Wednesdays are siege warfare. That’s more complicated. Thursdays they bring out the dragons.”

Mallory drew her sword and serrated dagger. “Today is free-for-all combat. I love Tuesdays.”

From a thousand different balconies, horns blasted. The einherjar charged into battle.

Until that morning, I’d never understood the term bloodbath. Within a few minutes, we were literally slipping in the stuff.

We’d just stepped onto the field when an ax flew out of nowhere and stuck in my shield, the blade going right through the wood above my arm.

Mallory yelled and threw her knife, which sank into the ax thrower’s chest. He fell to his knees, laughing. “Good one!” Then he collapsed, dead.

Halfborn waded through enemies, his axes whirling, chopping off heads and limbs until he looked like he’d been playing paintball with only red paint. It was disgusting. And horrifying. And the most disturbing part? The einherjar treated it like a game. They killed with glee. They died as if someone had just taken down their avatar in Call of Duty. I’d never liked that game.

“Ah, that sucks,” one guy muttered as he studied the four arrows in his chest.

Another yelled, “I’ll get you tomorrow, Trixie!” before falling sideways, a spear stuck through his gut.

T.J. sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” while he stabbed and parried with his bayonet.

X smashed through one group after another. A dozen arrows now stuck out of his back like porcupine quills, but they didn’t seem to bother him. Every time his fist connected, an einherji turned two-dimensional.

As for me, I shuffled along in abject terror, my shield raised, my sword dragging. I’d been told that death here wasn’t permanent, but I had a hard time believing it. A bunch of warriors with sharp pointy objects were trying to kill me. I didn’t want to be killed.

I managed to parry a sword strike. I deflected a spear with my shield. I had a clear opening to stab one girl whose guard was down, but I just couldn’t make myself do it.

That was a mistake. Her ax bit into my thigh. Pain flared all the way up to my neck.

Mallory cut the girl down. “Come on, Chase, keep moving! You’ll get used to the pain after a while.”

“Great.” I grimaced. “Something to look forward to.”

T.J. jabbed his bayonet through the faceplate of a medieval knight. “Let’s take that hill!” He pointed to a nearby ridge at the edge of the woods.

“Why?” I yelled.

“Because it’s a hill!”

“He loves taking hills,” Mallory grumbled. “It’s a Civil War thing.”

We waded through the battle, heading for the high ground. My thigh still hurt, but the bleeding had stopped. Was that normal?

T.J. raised his rifle. He yelled, “Charge!” just as a javelin ran him through from behind.

“T.J!” I yelled.

He caught my eye, managed a weak smile, then face-planted in the mud.

“For Frigg’s sake!” Mallory cursed. “Come on, newbie.”

She grabbed my arm and pulled me along. More javelins sailed over my head.

“You guys do this every day?” I demanded.

“No. Like we told you—Thursdays are dragons.”

“But—”

“Hey, Beantown, the whole point is to get used to the horrors of battle. You think this is bad? Wait until we actually have to fight at Ragnarok.”

“Why am I Beantown? T.J.’s from Boston. Why isn’t he Beantown?”

“Because T.J. is slightly less annoying.”

We reached the edge of the woods. X and Halfborn guarded our backs, slowing down the pursuing horde. And the enemies were a horde now. All the scattered groups within sight had stopped fighting one another and were after us. Some pointed at me. Some called my name, and not in a friendly way.

“Yeah, they’ve spotted you.” Mallory sighed. “When I said I wanted to see you eviscerated, I didn’t mean I wanted to be standing next to you. Oh, well.”

I almost asked why everyone was after me. But I got it. I was a newbie. Of course the other einherjar would gang up on me and the other newcomers. Lars Ahlstrom was probably already decapitated. Dede might be running around with her arms cut off. The veteran einherjar would make this as painful and terrifying for us as possible to see how we handled ourselves. That made me angry.

We climbed the hill, weaving from tree to tree for cover. Halfborn threw himself into a group of twenty guys who were following us. He destroyed them all. He came up laughing, an insane light in his eyes. He was bleeding from a dozen wounds. A dagger stuck out of his chest, right over his heart.

“How is he not dead yet?” I asked.

“He’s a berserker.” Mallory glanced back, her expression a mix of disdain and exasperation and something else…admiration? “That idiot will keep fighting until he is literally hacked to pieces.”

Something clicked in my head. Mallory liked Halfborn. You don’t call somebody an idiot that many times unless you’re really into them. Under different circumstances, I might have teased her, but while she was distracted there was a wet thwack. An arrow sprouted from her neck.

She scowled at me as if to say, Totally your fault.

She collapsed. I knelt at her side, putting my hand on her neck. I could feel the life seeping out of her. I could sense the severed artery, the fading heartbeat, all the damage that had to be mended. My fingers seemed to grow warmer. If I had a little more time—

“Look out!” shouted X.

I raised my shield. A sword clanged against it. I pushed back, knocking the attacker downhill. My arms ached. My head was throbbing, but somehow I got to my feet.

Halfborn was forty yards away, surrounded by a mob of warriors all jabbing him with spears, shooting him full of arrows. Somehow he kept fighting, but even he wouldn’t be able to stand much longer.

X ripped a guy’s AK-47 out of his hands and smacked him over the head with it.

“Go, Magnus Beantown,” said the half-troll. “Take the crest for floor nineteen!”

“My nickname will not be Beantown,” I muttered. “I refuse.”

I stumbled uphill until I reached the summit. I put my back against a big oak tree while X smashed and backhanded and head-butted Vikings into oblivion.

An arrow hit my shoulder, pinning me to the tree. The pain almost made me black out, but I snapped the shaft and pulled myself free. The bleeding stopped instantly. I felt the wound closing as if somebody had filled it with hot wax.

A shadow passed over me—something large and dark hurtling from the sky. It took me a millisecond to realize it was a boulder, probably shot from a balcony catapult. It took me another millisecond to realize where it would land.

Too late. Before I could shout a warning to X, the half-troll and a dozen other einherjar disappeared under a twenty-ton chunk of limestone, the side of which was painted: WITH LOVE FROM FLOOR 63.

A hundred warriors stared at the rock. Leaves and broken twigs fluttered around them. Then the einherjar all turned toward me.

Another arrow hit me in the chest. I screamed, more in rage than in pain, and pulled it out.

“Wow,” one of the Vikings commented. “He’s a fast healer.”

“Try a spear,” someone suggested. “Try two spears.”

They spoke as if I wasn’t worth addressing—as if I were a cornered animal they could experiment with.

Twenty or thirty einherjar raised their weapons. The anger inside me exploded. I shouted, expelling energy like the shockwave from a bomb. Bowstrings snapped. Swords fell out of their owners’ hands. Spears and guns and axes went flying into the trees.

As quickly as it started, the surge of power shut off. All around me, a hundred einherjar had been stripped of their weapons.

The blue-painted guy stood in the front row, his baseball bat at his feet. He stared at me in shock. “What just happened?”

The warrior next to him had an eye patch and red leather armor decorated with silver curlicues. Cautiously, he crouched and retrieved his fallen ax.

“Alf seidr,” said Eye Patch. “Nicely done, son of Frey. I haven’t seen a trick like that in centuries. But bone steel is better.”

My eyes crossed as his ax blade spun toward my face. Then everything went dark.