It was late autumn. The Swedish commanders and a few allied Jarls stood at the edge of the cleared kill-zone, waving a white banner of parley.
Bilal walked out of his stone gates. He didn't wear his heavy helmet. He walked out with the swagger of an invincible movie hero.
He was flanked by ten of his Green Tunic guards, including Elin—the orphan girl who had helped him discover the cowpox vaccine, now a bright, fierce nineteen-year-old shieldmaiden who loved Bilal like a father.
Bilal stood fifty paces from the Swedish warlords. He raised his voice, his ego taking the wheel.
"You are nothing!" Bilal mocked them in perfect Norse, pointing a massive, dismissive finger.
"You are just pieces of shit! You freeze in the mud while my people eat warm bread. You cannot even touch the level of Axiomra. Go back to your pigs before I—"
THWIP.
It wasn't a Swedish arrow. It came from the side. From the deep woods to his left.
Time slowed down to a crawl. Bilal's modern brain registered the sound of a heavy recurve bow, but his 42-year-old reflexes were a fraction of a second too late.
He didn't move fast enough. But Elin did.
She didn't hesitate. She threw her body directly in front of the Giant.
The heavy, jagged iron broadhead tore through the chainmail of her stomach with a sickening crunch. She gasped, her eyes going wide as she collapsed backward into Bilal's arms.
Before Bilal could even scream her name, the horn blew.
It was a trap. The Swedes hadn't come alone.
From the treeline on the flanks, hundreds of Norwegian Jarls—men loyal to King Olaf who had secretly marched through the mountains—poured out, screaming like demons.
"FORM THE WALL!" Bilal roared, dragging Elin's bleeding body backward.
The melee that followed was pure, unadulterated horror. Bilal expected the enemy to break when his crossbows fired. He expected them to fear death.
They didn't.
These were zealots and berserkers. They climbed over the bodies of their own dead brothers just to hack at the Green Tunics.
They didn't care if they died, as long as they took an Axiomran with them.
The clash of iron, the screaming, the mud turning into a slippery soup of blood and intestines—it was not glorious. It was a chaotic, desperate slaughter.
Bilal swung his axe with one hand, dragging Elin with the other, his mind shattering as he watched thirty of his elite, beloved children—the orphans he had raised from the mud—hacked to pieces in the ambush.
They barely made it back inside the gates.