Leif the Red loathed sirens. Among his companions, his hatred for those monsters everyone called mermaids was well known.
He despised them not only because several of the wounds on his body had been inflicted by them, but because every time they attacked, their upper bodies swayed back and forth in front of him, stirring certain urges in him, and that made him feel sick with himself.
So, with the swarm falling on him from all sides, he fought with boundless fury and boundless courage. But because of that, he neglected the attack coming from behind. Two sirens hooked his arms, one on each side, and lifted him into the air. He could already see his fate, being dashed to death against the ground.
Thankfully, whoosh, an arrow shot through the air and killed the monster gripping his right arm. Leif immediately thrust the steel sword in his hand to the left, and he dropped from midair. It still hurt like hell, but at least he was not badly injured.
"My thanks, Folan!" Leif roared.
He scrambled back to his feet, just about to throw himself into the fight again, when from the far horizon came the sound of Fus, Ro, Dah, a Dragon Shout like thunder crashing through the soul.
Quite some time had already passed since King Bran had recognized the title of Dovahkiin, and the legend of Unrelenting Force blasting sirens out of the sky had spread far and wide. Especially for those who had witnessed the fall of the champion Olaf in the Fist of Fury arena, there was no way they could ever forget that cry carved straight into the spirit.
So Aviro cut down a siren with one swing and shouted, "Brothers, raise your spirits! The Dragonborn will be here to support us soon!"
"Did you all skip breakfast or what? Show some Skellige backbone! The Dovahkiin is surely fighting too, don't let him see us making fools of ourselves!" Leif said.
Folan smiled faintly and kept loosing arrow after arrow.
But before long, a monster's cry of agony suddenly rang out from the mountain. Then the sirens began growing restless, and one after another they turned and flew toward the source of that howl.
When Folan jumped out from cover and hurried to Hjalmar's side, Dorve had already gone still again. If not for the corpses strewn all over the ground, the village looked so peaceful it felt unreal.
"That second howl just now, could it have been calling the sirens for help?" Folan asked.
The commander of the giant-slaying party looked thoughtful. "Very likely. The Dovahkiin may be fighting the ice giant even now."
Leif the Red cut in from the side with his usual bluntness. "Then what are we waiting for? That direction's Clan Tordarroch Forge. Let's follow the plank path and go help him!"
"Wait... what if by the time we get there, the Dragonborn has already fallen, and we're exhausted from the march, only to be wiped out by the giant and the sirens together?" Aviro objected.
Folan of Clan Tuirseach angrily shot back, "You're the one who said the Dovahkiin was strong enough to handle it, and now you're the one worrying he's fallen. Can you make up your mind!?"
"I'm making a calm judgment based on the situation. No matter how strong he is, being swarmed by that many monsters, surely he... besides, he isn't really from Skellige..." By the end, Aviro's voice had grown quieter and quieter.
Waving a hand to stop his men from arguing, Hjalmar settled the matter in one blow. "I'm going to Clan Tordarroch Forge. Listen well, Victor Corion is the brother of Ciri, princess of Cintra, which means he's my brother too. I will not stand by and watch him be surrounded without doing everything I can. I am willing to live and die beside him, like a true son of Skellige!"
...
Biting out the stopper, Victor chugged down the Dragon Shout Potion in one go. He could guess that the giant's howl had likely been a call for reinforcements, so he had to make every moment count.
He quickly leaped to the passage leading from the forge to the mine, drew in a deep breath, and roared at full volume, letting the sound travel down the tunnel and spread into every distant corner.
Then the boy turned back and stared at the ice giant. Dawn Sword was still lodged in its shoulder, though the blood had already been wiped from its face.
Unable to find Vigi beneath the rubble, it glared murderously at Victor as though it wanted to tear the flesh from his body piece by piece. No, the words "as though" could be removed.
Vigi's strike, thrown with certain death in mind, was the greatest wound the giant had suffered since waking from hibernation. In the past, almost every attack against it had failed even to pierce its defenses.
The few that had some effect had mostly been blunt blows that did no more than make it feel the shock. But pain this violent, this explosive, was something wholly new. So it had cried out for help, and it no longer swung its chained anchor around in impatience. The food before it was a rat that knew how to run. Scare it off, and that would be troublesome.
He had to become the finest main course on tonight's table. The giant wanted him alive, so it could watch itself bite off his limbs one by one. Once the sirens arrived, no matter how nimble he was, he would not escape the net closing from every direction.
And the boy, meanwhile, was waiting for reinforcements of his own to arrive. It suited him perfectly that the giant was no longer swinging the chained anchor. He used the opportunity to recover his strength, and so under this strange, silent understanding, the two of them stood facing one another for quite some time.
When faint rustling footsteps finally began to echo from the mine behind him, along with a thin waft of foul stench, the boy whistled. He ran both hands over his temples and raked all his hair back with his fingers, slicking it into a swept-back style.
A random thought flashed through his mind, he wondered if the wild girl had awakened some hidden potential too.
At the very least, he had.
His left foot slammed against the ground, and he shot forward like an arrow loosed from the string. Charging straight at the ice giant behind him came five rotfiends, ravenous and savage, with delicious prey right ahead.
Victor's sudden rush confused the ice giant, but did not frighten it. The monster raised the chained anchor high, saw clearly that Victor intended to dart to its left, and the instant the boy came close it smashed the weapon down like a hammer striking a rat.
A direct hit meant instant death!!!
But at the very moment the iron anchor crashed down, the boy twisted sideways and slipped past the fatal blow by a hair. That one hundred and eighty degree spin and change of direction, the Marseille Turn!
Then, with a body as fluid as water flowing around stone, he slid through beneath the monster's right armpit with almost no loss of speed at all.
If the eunuch Happen had seen that moment, he would surely have felt his skin crawl, because that terrifying confidence and ruthless resolve were exactly like those of the mad doppler Janne.
As he brushed past the ice giant, Victor tossed down a Dancing Star and a Grapeshot between it and the five rotfiends.
Chain explosion!!!
A crack like thunder erupted. At such close range, the blast was nearly the equal of a Dragon Shout. Luckily, the giant's enormous body stood like a screen, shielding the boy from all the force of the explosion and the splashing corrosive poison-blood.
Clang!
The chained anchor crashed to the ground again.
But this time, the giant's scream split heaven and earth.
Its upper body had been corroded into an unspeakable ruin. It howled and rampaged, smashing blindly in every direction, but there was no changing the fact that the splashing venom had already blinded and deafened it.
Each rotfiend was practically a small bomb, and the corrosive poison inside them was lethal enough that even a witcher could not withstand it. Detonated in the proper way, this ancient and powerful monster was still no match for the changes of the age.
Victor watched the beast struggle uselessly in its death throes. The arm waving the iron anchor seemed as if it would never stop.
Shing!
Blazing Strike left its scabbard, flames surging over the blade.
Catching the opening, Victor leaped up, planted both feet on the giant's swaying shoulder, and drove the sword-point straight down with all his strength, piercing through its skull.
"Ugh... roar... ooooooohhhhhhh!!!!!!"
The monster's final frenzy at death's door flung the boy away. He flipped beautifully through the air and landed in a steady crouch.
With Blazing Strike buried in its head, the giant looked like some grotesque oversized toy. It staggered and swayed for quite a while...
Then at last, boom, it toppled backward with a crash, throwing up a cloud of dust.
Lying on the ground, its huge body still radiated menace. Its twitching limbs seemed unwilling to accept defeat, but its life was draining away all the same. The thick dust beneath it slowly darkened with blood, turning black and wet.
Victor stood before the monster without saying a word. He wanted to see this creature die with his own eyes, to make sure it truly passed into the next world.
Only when its throat gave a long hissing rattle, like a funnel emptied to the last drop, did he know the giant's life had finally come to its end.
He clenched both fists. "I really... pulled it off..."
From the hint Vigi had given him, to the flash of inspiration, to calling in the rotfiends, to the silent standoff with the giant, and finally to that desperate charge, this whole gamble had been a kind of risk Victor would normally never have taken.
He covered his face with one hand. The crushing pressure was gone, and the joy surging through him could no longer be restrained.
"Woooh... huhhehehe... wooohahahahaha!!!"
He laughed with wild excitement, laughed with arrogant triumph, and at that moment there was no doubt at all that the hour belonged to the victor.
Sadly, the laughter did not last very long. After only a few seconds, he had to stop, because shadows screaming across the sky were the sirens coming to reinforce the giant.
He raised his head and looked up. The silver sword slid from its sheath, thick with Hybrid Oil. Victor, having drunk the Dragon Shout Potion, drew in one deep breath.
...
On the mountain plank path, the last thirty-odd warriors of the giant-slaying party, after more than an hour of forced marching, finally arrived within sight of Clan Tordarroch Forge.
"Fus, Ro, Dah!"
Another Dragon Shout tore through the air, and Leif the Red's face lit with excitement. "Look! We've come this close and the Dovahkiin is still fighting. Victor is incredible!"
"That's true! I'm ashamed of what I said earlier. Hjalmar, you were right. If we failed to come support him and let the Dragonborn fall because of that, then we'd be no better than those vile traitors," Aviro said sincerely.
Hjalmar, walking at the very front, gave no answer to Aviro, he merely quickened his pace. Hearing that Dragon Shout had not eased his mind in the slightest. If anything, his expression had grown grimmer.
Because he remembered that at the Fist of Fury, when Victor fought Olaf, Svani had once said that Dragon Shouts might have a limited number of uses, or some other kind of restriction.
And over the last hour or more, they had heard Unrelenting Force at least four or five times on the road. If using it really demanded some price, Hjalmar feared the boy was burning away his life to keep fighting. The thought made him see Victor before his eyes, drenched in blood and covered in wounds.
"Look! The sirens are fleeing... the sirens are running!" Folan suddenly shouted into his ear. As the best marksman among them, he was the first to spot that the monsters had stopped swarming the forge and were instead retreating into the distance.
Everyone raised their heads to look, and sure enough the dark shapes of the sirens were flying away, their cries no longer sharp and piercing.
The warriors looked at one another.
They all knew what this meant, the Dragonborn had either died...
or won the final victory!
Of course everyone desperately hoped it was the latter, but... was that really possible!?
That was the dreadful ice giant and a sky blackened by sirens!
...
Inside Clan Tordarroch Forge,
After pushing aside another splintered beam and moving several more chunks of rubble, Victor, soaked all over in red blood, finally found the buried Vigi.
Seeing the dented curve caved into the breastplate over his belly, the boy pulled off his mask and smiled in relief. "Bloody hell! You damned bastard, you really didn't die after all!" He poured a bottle of healing potion into his mouth.
Plate armor truly deserved its reputation as the peak of defense in the age of cold steel. The great curved plates of hammered steel, layered over mail and padding, had let Vigi take a giant's punch head-on and survive with no more than light injuries and unconsciousness.
The scoundrel's survival proved that the craftsmanship of Clan Tordarroch was the real thing, and naturally the enchanted defense reinforcement Victor had added deserved part of the credit too.
Summoning the last of his strength, the boy dragged Vigi out of the rubble and back into the hall, then collapsed onto the floor, panting for breath.
During the last hour or more, perhaps because their master, the ice giant, had died, the monsters it had tamed had fought without the slightest fear of death.
And though Victor had finally scattered the sirens after a bloody battle, strong as his body had always been, he now felt wave after wave of emptiness, and wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep like the dead.
Unfortunately, the heavy footsteps approaching from nearby made him spring up on instinct. Axe in one hand and silver sword in the other, the boy gave a weary sigh. "Don't tell me an ice troll's come along to join the fun too..."
...
When the giant-slaying party stepped into the forge, what they saw in that moment on that day became a painting they would never forget for the rest of their lives.
Under the winter sunlight, the Dovahkiin stood there with sword and axe in hand, drenched in blood so dark it had begun to blacken. His face was nearly impossible to make out, only his eyes still shone brilliantly.
Their target, the fearsome ice giant, lay not far away. A steel sword had been driven into its hideous head and another into its shoulder. Though one glance made it obvious the thing was already dead, its mountain-like body still made them tremble.
And the field of slaughtered sirens all around it only made the Dragonborn's martial glory shine all the brighter. Surely his fierce battle with the ice giant had taken so long only because he had fought beneath a sky full of monsters and slain them all as well!
Destiny favored him! A legendary champion! A peerless hero!
Aviro, stunned out of his senses, wondered where that chattering sound was coming from, until he suddenly realized it was his own teeth.
Leif the Red made a hoarse sound, trying to speak, but his throat had gone tight and not a word would come out.
And Folan, though he had already expected something like this, was still so moved by the scene before him that tears streamed down his face in two steady lines.
At last, it was the giant-slaying party's commander, Hjalmar, whose loud order snapped the nearly petrified men back to themselves.
"Everyone! Salute, the Dovahkiin!"
An order once given was carried out at once. Led by the eldest son of Clan an Craite, the entire expedition bowed deeply with hands pressed to their chests, offering the highest respect to the last Dragonborn, the great Giant-Slayer, Victor Corion.
"Victor! I swear it, I'll personally stand over the bards and make sure they write songs praising your deeds!" Hjalmar said, his voice thick with feeling as he lifted his head.
And the focus of every gaze, Giant-Slayer Victor, replied in a cool, restrained murmur.
Because his voice was so soft, only Hjalmar at the very front barely managed to hear him clearly.
"Bloody hell... you bastards nearly scared me to death..."
The moment the words left him, he pitched straight forward.
Fortunately, Hjalmar reacted quickly enough to catch the boy in his arms.
...
"Dovahkiin, Dovahkiin,
Save Undvik, never let evil come again.
Hear his cry of victory, even the fiercest giant falls before his feet!
Dragonborn, we pray for your blessing."
, The Return of the Dragonborn, The Immortal Epic of Undvik
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