“What happened to the rest of your band?” demanded a particularly massive Ur-vile who had strode out from the camp to greet Nuk’s much reduced groups of warriors. The tents were massive, at least seven metres tall at their peaks and covering what seemed like huge areas compared to the Mondyn versions.

  ”We met a Harvester,” growled Nuk. The other giants had formed a barrier between us and the newcomer. “These little ones are not to be harmed.”

  “Pah! Have you been hit in the head too much? Or perhaps not enough?” He strode forwards and tried to brush Nuk aside but despite being a metre shorter the First Fist shoved him back.

  “He used magic to burn the rest of the band. He has given me magic, like Narbo did for us long ago. Bend your knee and he’ll do the same for you, Marbo. If not he’ll kill you all,” snarled Nuk.

  Marbo straightened himself and dropped into a crouch, arms held out from his sides slightly. Nuk mirrored him and moved forward, the two giants circling each other slowly. Nuk snorted and stamped a foot to launch himself forward, using his mana to boost his speed and strength. It was like watching oversized sumo wrestlers moving towards each other.

  Marbo pushed forward to catch Nuk around the waist but my pet giant's right fist slammed down into the back of his head with a sound like a boulder smashing into the bottom of a canyon. Marbo stumbled and Nuk quickly slipped to the side to grasp Marbo’s furs, heaving the Ur-vile off his feet and suspending him over his head for a second before twisting and hurling his opponent over twenty metres. Marbo slammed into the ground with a boom as dust exploded to partially obscure him. Watching these lumbering creatures move with such grace and speed was unnerving.

  Nuk didn’t sit on his laurels, he was flashing forwards again, the wind of his passage clearing the dust to reveal Marbo was back on his feet and had pulled what looked like a dagger into his oversized fist. It was a six foot long blade that gleamed a milky white in the early morning sun. The knife flicked forward but Nuk was faster. The other giants were laughing and placing bets in a way that reminded me of when I’d returned to Areskit and fought Hakubin’s champion.

  The blade was slapped aside and Nuk’s knee came up in a vicious blow that connected with Marbo’s groin. The bigger creature staggered back and dropped to his knees. A weirdly high pitched ululating noise came from his mouth while as his hands moved to cover his privates as though it might help protect him from his own private universe of pain.

  “Do you all make that noise when you get hit in the balls?” asked Jandak.

  “It doesn’t happen every often,” grumbled one of our escorts as he pledged to hand over a pair of female mammoths to the winner of the impromptu gambling session. He stomped forwards and offered a hand to Marbo who was trying to struggle to his feet.

  “Come on, chief. Grethnuk wasn’t talking vile-cat shit. This Mond is more than capable of keeping his end of the bargain. We can ride north and claim the Fountainhead! We’ll feast on the Kalast, then the Pagnal, then finally the ever-damned Narbolik!” Marbo pulled himself up and glared at Nuk who had backed away and positioned himself between Marbo and myself. The Fangs were glaring at him as well and their complete confidence, the total absence of fear, must have struck him as very odd. We should have been terrified around these monsters but all we were projecting was cold indifference.

  “What-” he coughed and his voice dropped an octave as it returned to normal, “- what if I do not yield?” he asked.

  “Then I will kill your warriors until the remains surrender. Those I’ll enslave and use to help me subdue other tribes until I have an army of Huskar. I am not Narbo reborn but I’m not far off. You were made for war and I will take you to one in the south.” I felt that I was getting a lot better at these bombastic speeches. I still cringed a little inside but I was confident it no longer showed on my face.

  Marbo looked down at me and gave me a black toothed smile.

  “I’m six hundred seasons old, dwarf. I was here when those Gerihuskars on the steppes first discovered it was better to ride a horse than eat it. My grandfather served as a centurion in Narbo’s legions, he met the Maker personally. And you want me to believe that you can give us back our glory?” He moved towards me and crouched on his haunches a few metres away, bringing his massive head down to get a closer look at me. I raised my left sleeve and showed him the tattoo Aresk had given me. I was going to have to get my tunics modified so the damn thing was always showing.

  “I am the champion of Mars. My future is war, You will join me.” Shields smashing into place echoed in our minds as Aresk decided to lend me a little gravitas. Marbo snorted and stood up. He turned back to the camp and sighed, a long breath of air leaving his huge lungs.

  There was smoke from fires, bonfires to me, rising in the centre of the camp as food was prepared. The familiar noise of primitive carpentry and metal work echoed out across the icy plain.

  “You have a smith?” I asked, as casually as I could.

  “Of course,” rumbled Nuk. “All Huskars can work a hammer to some extent. And do leatherwork and carpentry. We grow up slow compared to you dwarves and learn a lot in that time.” The Fangs didn’t like the pejorative “dwarves”, they twitched and threw black looks at Nuk but it was a step up from vermin so I could live with it. Sticks and stones and all that.

  Hundreds of smiths. Hundreds of carpenters and leather workers. All of them with decades or even human lifetimes of experience. Maybe thousands of them if I could figure out a way to avoid having to kill most of the Huskars. My greed rubbed its hands together in the back of my mind.

  “Pick out some witnesses. Some warriors to come north with us to the Kalast lands. I’ll make an example of the Kalast and whoever survives will be sent ahead of us to spread the good news,” I said firmly and Marbo glanced back but snorted softly. He rose and stretched.

  “You are similar to Narbo in the stories Grandfather used to tell. Whether you live up to it remains to be seen.” Marbo moved forward and we followed him into the town. The neatness and care put into the layout surprised me. I had been expecting some kind of ogre den, shit and carcasses left lying about, but everything was clean and well spaced out.

  “I feel like a toddler again,” muttered Kos as dozens of giants, Huskar as they preferred to be called, took notice of us and ambled over.

  “I’ll take that one! What do you want in trade?” demanded a small skinny Huskar with a scar running down the side of his face. Nuk stepped over and punched him so hard it left a crater where his head hit the hard packed dirt.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  “These dwarves are not for trade or touching!” he bellowed which only drew even more attention.

  “Pets are they?” asked a female, almost identical to the males but with pendulous breasts bulging beneath her furs.

  “No. They’re god-touched and not to be troubled. They will help us make war in the north!” snapped Marbo. “Watch! Dwarf, give me the power you promised!” There was a glint in his eyes that I didn’t like but it wouldn’t matter once he accepted the Souls. I walked over and offered a hand. He extended a single fingertip to rest against my palm and I sent five hundred to him. I was down to just under twenty three thousand again but I could see a substantial windfall in my near future.

  “Accept,” I ordered and I felt the bond form. I snapped it and forced him to stop everything. His eyes flicked left and right as he realised the control I had over him and sweat broke out on his brow.

  “Buy ten levels and put your stat points into whichever of Strength or Reflexes is the lowest until they are even, then level them up evenly. Do not choose an affinity yet.”

  Marbos Body stat went from B+ to A-. Bloody hell. The only way we could match them was by using magic.

  “Choose Fire and Life as your affinities. Split the rest of your Souls between Range and Intensity for Fire, and Enhancement from the Life tree.” I felt him obeying through whatever weird medium now joined our souls together.

  “Cast fire over there,” I pointed to an empty patch of grass and a ball of fire the size of my head erupted. It was only a pale yellow but it burned on and on. I checked his Mind stat and it was B-. The other giants shied away as the straw coloured fire burned for a good thirty seconds, leaving a blackened mark on the ground.

  “Tell them what I am.” The order was flat and cold. Nuk was failing to suppress a grin as he took pleasure in Marbo finding out the new pecking order.

  “He is a Harvester and will lead us in a war to reclaim the Fountainhead,” Marbo ground out through clenched teeth. I strummed the link and he moved back to stand behind me.

  “I am not Narbo. Your maker is long gone but perhaps I will follow the path he forged. If I can I will solve your fertility problem in addition to making you the first clan of the tundra. In exchange I will need warriors and workers. I’m building an empire to the south and a war has already begun! I need great warriors and skilled craftsmen to serve me! To show my good faith, I will deal with the Kalast for you. They will be an example of what happens if I am crossed.” I decided to hold off on extending the “no eating people” rule at this point.

  “Marbo, gather a warband together and we’ll go deal with your river-shitter problem,” I said.

  “Mond! The Barefoot King!” laughed Jandak with a fist in the air. Kos and Mune echoed him, their laughter breaking the stunned silence that had followed my announcement. Aresk’s aura washed over the entire camp and all the Huskar looked about in wonder. I drew my dagger and slashed the left sleeve off my travel stained tunic so the tattoo could be seen clearly.

  I had half expected them to lunge forward and try to stomp us into paste. I was ready for the possibility, fireballs held on a hair trigger to let us blast our way clear before Burning Skies could finish them. Instead a deafening roar rang out, every Huskar bellowing defiance and rage at the sky before bowing their heads in my direction.

  “Right. Well I’m glad that’s sorted then. Marbo?” The largest of the Huskar snapped a look at me and nodded, striding around the camp and slapping smaller giants on the head until he’d formed up a warband of perhaps fifty of the monsters. I took the time to recover my poise. When they’d all yelled I had damn near crapped myself.

  We marched north as the sun climbed into the sky. I kept the Huskar I already controlled in a group around us. Some of the giants kept looking our way and licking their lips or wiping saliva from the corner of their mouths.

  We didn’t stop as noon came and went, simply pulling jerky from our storage spaces and jogging along with the giants around us. A few of our escorts broke off at one point and charged forwards to slaughter some mastodons for no reason other than sheer joyful murder.

  “Kalast herds. We can’t take them back so might as well kill them,” muttered Nuk when I asked him about it. The killers jogged back over with fists and weapons stained red, grinning like the cat that caught the mouse.

  Eventually we slowed and saw another immaculate, albeit primitive, town of massive tents laid out on a slight rise half a mile from the bank of the river. Someone was keeping a decent watch as once we crested a hill and could see across to the place it burst into frenzied activity.

  A stream of warriors flowed out of the yurts and formed up across from us. Marbo started to shift nervously in place. There were three times as many of them than us already and they kept coming.

  “Don’t worry, big guy. We’ve got this. Fangs, with me,” I said and like little kids emerging from behind their mothers skirts we advanced into the no man’s land separating the two warbands.

  The air was fresh and crisp here. An icy tang filled my lungs as I drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly as we walked. I waved the Fangs back and they fell into a V-shape behind me. I was about to start some fires and soon it would smell like smoke and ash. But first I’d give these poor bastards the same choice I gave to Nuk.

  We stopped about forty metres from the Kaltast. The Fangs formed a trio behind me, Jandak at the front and the other two close by on either side. Against regular humans, and probably a few giants it was a good formation. If one of these guys lobbed a rock at them or if one of Mortimers wizards flung a fireball at them it might become a liability. New doctrines needed. There’s never enough time in the day.

  “I am a Harvester and you will submit to me or die!” I yelled. Both groups of giants snickered among themselves and I shot a look back at my supposed allies. Nuk and Marbo smacked a few heads and they settled down.

  One of the opposing group strode forwards a few metres and leant on a tree trunk scale staff. He leaned forward to look at me then spat in my direction.

  “What happened to the runties to make them so cocky? You’ll be going in my pot tonight, vermin,” he growled and shifted his weight to take his staff in both hands. As he raised his right foot to stomp in my direction I summoned a fireball from a ring and the blue white streak shot across and exploded into a perfect sphere of fire.

  The other giants grunted in shock then as one they charged, long legs reaching out to devour the distance between us. The skies darkened and turned red, casting a demonic light over the battlefield. My conscience was happy enough. I had given them a chance to do this without bloodshed.

  "For Aresk!" I yelled. Before they were halfway to us a rolling barrage of meteors fell among them and drove them back. I cast again and another wall of falling fireballs destroyed the centre of their formation.

  Vilis Humano slain x 242

  Twelve thousand and one hundred Souls harvested.

  “Up and at them boys!” I called as I charged forward, my Shop-bought sword glowing a sickly pink from the still red skies and the fires ahead of me as I held it out horizontally at my side as I ran into what remained of the Huskar formation.

  They panicked and my size turned out to be an advantage. Any blows I ducked inevitably struck one of their allies and my impossible blade sliced limbs off cleanly without any resistance.

  The Fangs worked together like they’d been trained. Spear tips flashed this way and that to leave long streaks of blood behind while the men moved like quicksilver. Once I crippled a giant I worked to finish them as quickly as possible while my friends kept the worst of the remaining mob distracted.

  Ten minutes later we were all breathing heavily. Kos had taken a bash from a staff and been sent tumbling but he was already back on his feet and kicking the one that had hit him in the balls repeatedly.

  “Not so fucking big now are you fucker!” he snarled as his foot slammed forward again. I walked over and took the Huskar’s head. It really was a mercy in this case.

  Vilis Humano slain x 27

  One thousand three hundred and fifty Souls harvested.

  We were painted a deep red from head to foot as we walked back towards our “allies”. The giant's dark blood had sprayed out as we cut our way through them, leaving us looking like savages. We took our time walking back to the North Star clan. Nuk was grinning broadly, mouldy teeth on full display. Marbo had gone pale and was glancing back and forth between the Fangs and myself.

  “Now you know. I’m going to offer you all a soul bond. If you refuse you will die like those poor buggers.” None of them refused and I gave each of the other warriors sixty souls from my reserves. Enough for a paltry couple of levels to them, but it tied them to me in a way they could never escape.

  If you want to read 21 chapters ahead of Royal Road you can do so on my

  follow, a rating or maybe even a favourite! Any of them would really help the story get seen by more people and I'd be very grateful to you for taking the time! I'm happy to respond to any and all comments so if you see something: say something :)

  Amazon. It's a system apocalypse/superhero/father-daughter kind of adventure. There's five books in the main series, plus a side story, that are available on KU :)

  discord. Come along and say hi!