Some of the Fae rallied to Brighid’s fire—she was again airborne on a pillar of flame, looking invincible in that armor she’d forged herself—but most of Fand’s army was broken, streaking back to the point where they’d shifted into the plane.
The lone bright spot was the yeti, Oddrún and Ísólfr, who could not be overwhelmed and whose whirling blades were devastating against the draugar. They slowed and disoriented attackers with sprays of frost to the face, then stabbed them with the tip of those blades that drank the soul within—no decapitation necessary. When they saw Manannan fall, they rallied to his side and beat back the swarm of undead Fae even as the living Fae broke into a retreat. Then Ísólfr held off multiple attackers while Oddrún encased her father and Fand together in a block of ice to prevent them from being reanimated by Hel. She pushed them along a slick track of ice she created toward Brighid’s forces, with Ísólfr and then the yewmen covering their retreat. I rather hoped the yeti would simply continue to the south and leave the field, for both their victories and their losses already exceeded anyone else’s.
I had no illusions that the Fae who joined with Brighid’s forces to fight in the second wave represented anything but a few individual triumphs; in the first clash, we’d been routed, gods had fallen, and the forces of Loki and Hel had only been strengthened by fresh meat for the necromancer’s commands. The dark elves were already tiring, and the Álfar were doing little but maintaining the right flank—and they were themselves in danger of being flanked by the remainder of Hel’s army.
We would need to do much better or the people of Sweden would never see the sunrise. Nor, for that matter, would much of Europe.
yama King Wuguan looks like the sort of fighter that relies on brute strength to win the day. He’ll gladly take some hits so long as he gets in a good one on you, because he thinks one is all it will take. And maybe he’s right. Even if he doesn’t finish me like One-Punch Man—an anime hero I’ve been enjoying recently—he’ll probably do enough damage that he can administer the coup de grâce with little resistance. So it’s probably best that I get out of the way of his leap. I can’t engage his sword when it’s way above my head.
And I feel that this is a test somehow. Wukong clearly wishes to see if I can defeat Wuguan before he teaches me anything else, and I suppose it’s fair. If we’re supposed to fight eight progressively tougher Yama Kings, I should be able to defeat the guy at the halfway point if I expect to stick around until the end.
Is it perhaps a test for Wuguan as well? Is he trying to move up in the hierarchy of Diyu or perhaps escape it entirely for a cushier job in one of the heavens? I know nothing about him or what must be his very long history, other than what I see.
It occurs to me as I scramble to my right—Wuguan’s left—that I’ve been fighting alongside beings that are older than Atticus, and that’s the sort of realization that can make you feel pretty small when you’re only in your thirties. Especially since I’ve gradually gotten a sense of the scale that such a lifetime represents after listening to Atticus’s stories. He lived nineteen centuries or so without access to plumbing, for example, which makes me cringe. The few times I’ve had to go without a toilet were unhappy and uncomfortable and I kept thinking about what could bite me. He must think we’re all pampered hedonists.
I take nothing for granted regarding Wuguan’s leaps, because if he could skate around in the air like the Monkey King, then normal physics would not apply. I automatically execute a blocking maneuver for an attack that isn’t there yet but abruptly arrives a moment later. The impact nearly rips Scáthmhaide from my hand. He does have those abilities, he’s as strong as I feared, and he is much faster than his bulk would suggest.
The battle continues to rage around us, but a space is cleared somehow for our duel; the damned must have received some signal—there must be plenty riding on this for both of us. The Monkey King and his clones are still fighting the rest of the demons and the damned all around the mountain, protecting the people of Taipei and not simply watching the duel, except in brief glances. I don’t understand why I was singled out for this, but I doubt Wuguan will pause to explain. And I doubt I will have much time to win; if he’s in Wukong’s class as a fighter, then he outclasses me.
Wukong pointed out on the roof of his shop that my fighting patterns are recognizable and easily countered. They are essentially Chinese methods that Atticus taught me, after all, and old ones at that—so old that they’re almost new again. But Wuguan knows them as Wukong does. I show him something he’s going to recognize and counter, then mix in something he doesn’t: My staff whirls around in my right and he expects it to land in my left hand, so he slaps it away, expecting me to be open to counterstrike—and I will be. Except that I’ve palmed a knife and thrown it at his right eye while his arm and sword were out of position, a gamble that pays off as it sinks home. His reflexive flinch ruins his counterstrike, but he surprises me with a stiff kick to the midsection as I try to close in, covering his retreat. He’s annoyed to be feeling pain instead of dealing it, and I’m out of breath and on my ass, my diaphragm bruised and a couple of ribs cracked. He yanks the knife out of his eye and tosses it at me, and I’m able to roll in time to have it sink into my left upper arm instead of my own eye. I pull it out and crank the healing on high.
We both take time to reset after that. He presents his left side, sword held defensively, so that he can keep his remaining eye on me. I roll to my feet and wonder how I’m going to surprise him now that he’s wary. He still has a tremendous advantage in strength and reach. In the plus column, he won’t want to be taking those huge leaps anymore, for fear I’ll get around to his blind side. In the minus column, that armor means he’s not vulnerable anywhere else to a knife throw and now he’s going to be guarding that weakness intensely.
Which…might be good? I check to confirm that I have two throwing knives left. I palm one in my right hand and twirl it. That’s right, big guy. Lookit the shiny knifey.
A couple of twirls with the staff in my left while I’m still twirling the knife in my right, and I’m watching how his eye tracks this. He flickers to the staff but keeps his eye on my knife and also on my hips to watch for telltales there. Good. Movements with my left arm and wrist he won’t be watching—or he’s confident he knows what I’ll be doing there. That’s where I need to surprise him. I lunge forward with a conventional attack and throw the knife to see what he does. He blocks the staff and ducks the knife, then slashes at me with a damn fast cut that would have taken off my beard if I had one. Good to know.
I pluck out my last knife and make the same throwing motion but don’t release. He buys the feint and I do a double-tap with Scáthmhaide wielded in my left hand: once on the flat of his blade, knocking it aside, then thrusting forward into the space where I think his cheek will be as he ducks my phantom throw, and it connects hard. He howls and staggers back, that left eye now instinctively closed, and he can’t see until he opens it again. I throw the knife for real this time and it sinks into his throat. He’s losing blood and is unable to breathe in addition to having trouble seeing, so he’s not at the top of his game when I come in to finish him. I tee off on his face and he falls backward, his head a shattered mess inside his helmet. Fare thee well, Wuguan.
His death—or, rather, his melting away—has the curious effect of destroying all his minions a minute later. They converged on me after the duel but then exploded into goo before I could engage more than two of them. The mountain is clear and I’m expecting the Monkey King to give me some approval at this point, but instead when I look at him he leans on his staff and frowns.
“You could have let that go on a little longer,” he says.
That makes absolutely no sense to me and I say as much. “What? Why would I increase my risk that way?”
“You defeated him so quickly that he lost face and recalled all his souls.”
“But that’s good, right? We won! People are safe.”