The war-wolf hit Ronan's shield exactly where it had hit nothing at all the first time.
He did not simply stop it. He turned the shield at the last instant so the animal's own speed threw it sideways off the boss, and it landed skidding in the road with its legs tangled.
It landed directly in the path of a man who had been waiting a week for it. Finn split its skull before the nearest convoy guard had finished drawing his sword.
"Left trees," Cillian said, already turned that way, and fired into a treeline where nothing had happened yet.
The bolt cracked into the undergrowth at knee height and the ogre came out of it three steps early, roaring, one leg dragging where the lightning had found the tendon behind its knee.
It arrived in the open with its balance gone and its hands still empty, and Finn was standing in the road waiting for it with both axes up.
