The silence that followed David's command was heavier than the snow piling on the bus roof. For a moment, it held. Then, as if his words had broken a dam, the frantic energy inside the wrecked vehicle erupted anew.
"Barricade with what?" a voice wailed from within. "My phone has no service!" "We can't just stay here!He's crazy!"
David ignored them. Their fear was a buzzing in his ears, irrelevant. His entire being was focused on the woods, his senses stretched to a breaking point he hadn't known this young body could achieve. The falling snow muffled sound, but it couldn't hide everything. It couldn't hide the crunch of a careless footstep on a frozen twig thirty yards away. It couldn't hide the faint, guttural click of a tongue. It couldn't hide the scent of unwashed, greasy skin carried on a shift of the wind.
Five. He didn't see them yet, but he knew. A hunting party. The goblin scout's absence had been noted.
He tightened his grip on the rusty dagger, the cold metal a grounding presence against his palm. His other hand flexed, the memory of the ice shard's creation a fresh, throbbing ache behind his eyes. His mana reserves were a shallow puddle, rippling with the strain.
A flicker of movement between the thick boles of two pines. Then another. Small, hunched shadows separating from the greater darkness. Yellow eyes, like chips of dirty amber, gleamed in the twilight gloom.
They were fanning out. A basic pincer movement. They weren't mindless beasts; they were cunning, pack-hunting vermin.
David dropped into a low crouch behind the bulk of the bus's engine block, making himself a smaller target. His breath plumed in the air, and he forced it to steady, to become shallow and silent. The cacophony from the bus was a problem, a dinner bell ringing for every monster in the forest. But it was also a distraction. They were focused on the louder, easier prey.
He was the hidden threat.
Whhhht-THUNK!
The sound was unmistakable. An arrow, poorly fletched, whistled through the air and embedded itself into the bus's metal siding with a dull impact, right where his head had been a second before.
Archer. One. Positioned high, probably in the low branches of a tree for a better angle. The four others would be the melee fighters, closing in now that their ranged cover had fired.
David's mind, a weapon sharpened in a thousand life-or-death moments, mapped the battlefield in an instant. The archer was the priority. It would keep him pinned, a fish in a barrel for the daggers.
He risked a glance. The four melee goblins were scurrying forward, using undergrowth and snowdrifts for cover, their rusty blades held in a reverse grip. They were closer than he'd thought, their stench beginning to overpower the scent of pine and cold.
Another arrow sliced past, this one shattering the remaining glass in a bus window and eliciting a fresh wave of screams from inside. The archer was adjusting, trying to flush him out or find a target of opportunity.
David made a decision. It was a gamble that would cost him dearly.
As the four melee goblins closed to within twenty feet, letting out unified, high-pitched shrieks as they charged the bus, David broke from cover. But not away. Towards them.
He ran straight at the charging pack, his movement unpredictable, a zig-zagging sprint through the snow. The archer wouldn't risk a shot into its own kin. He had seconds.
The lead goblin, bolder than the others, leaped at him, dagger aimed for his thigh. David didn't try to block. He pivoted, letting the creature's momentum carry it past him. As it did, his own rusty dagger lashed out in a short, brutal arc. It wasn't a killing blow. It was a message. The blade opened a deep gash across the creature's arm, and it screeched in pain and surprise, tumbling into the snow.
Two more were on him immediately. He became a whirlwind of desperate, efficient motion. He wasn't the skilled martial artist of his future; he was a brawler with the ghost of experience haunting his muscles. He ducked a wild swipe, drove his shoulder into a goblin's chest to knock it off balance, and parried a stab from the third, the clash of cheap iron sending a jarring vibration up his arm.
It was a losing battle. He was outnumbered, weaker, and getting slower. A dagger tip grazed his ribs, slicing through his jacket and drawing a hot line of fire across his skin. He grunted, kicking out hard and catching one in the knee with a satisfying crack. The goblin went down with a squeal.
But the fourth was coming around his blind side. And the archer was waiting for a clean shot.
Now. It has to be now.
He focused every ounce of his will, every shred of the minuscule energy the first green orb had granted him. He ignored the four threats in front of him and turned his head, his gaze locking onto a shape hunched in the branches of a pine tree forty feet away. He raised his empty left hand, not to form a weapon, but to push.
The agony was transcendent. It felt like his skull was splitting open. His vision swam with black spots, and the coppery taste of blood flooded his mouth so intensely he nearly choked. He wasn't creating ice; he was violently seizing the moisture in the air around the archer's perch and flash-freezing it.
A sharp crack echoed through the forest, louder than any weapon.
On the branch, the goblin archer let out a confused yelp as the layer of frost on its branch instantly thickened into a shell of sheer ice. Its clawed feet lost purchase. It flailed, dropping its bow, and plummeted backward out of the tree, landing on its head with a nauseating, final crunch.
The green orb, slightly larger and brighter than the first, shot from the broken corpse and into David's chest.
The influx of energy was a shock, a jolt of lightning that momentarily overrode the agony. It didn't heal him, but it refilled his mana well from utterly empty to critically shallow. It gave him a second wind.
He spat a mouthful of hot, metallic blood onto the snow just as the goblin he'd kicked was getting up. Rage and newfound energy fused in his veins. He didn't fight with skill anymore; he fought with feral desperation. He slammed into the wounded creature, bearing it to the ground. They rolled in the snow, a tangle of limbs and snarls. David ended up on top, and he brought his dagger down once, twice, three times, until the struggling stopped. Another orb. Another sip of power.
He rose, panting, blood dripping from his mouth and his side. Two left. The one with the gashed arm was cowering, its courage broken. The other, the one whose swipe he'd parried, charged him with a reckless scream.
David met the charge. He took the dagger slash on his forearm—a deep, grating cut that made him cry out—but he grabbed the goblin's wrist with his free hand, stopping the weapon's descent. He headbutted the creature square in its snotty nose. It staggered, dazed. David reversed his grip on his own dagger and drove it up under the goblin's ribcage, into its heart.
The light died in its yellow eyes. The third orb flowed into him.
The last goblin turned to flee. David didn't let it. He couldn't afford a scout to bring back a war party. With a groan of effort that tore at his wounded ribs, he bent and snatched the dead archer's bow and a single, poorly made arrow from the snow. He nocked it, his arms trembling with fatigue and pain. He drew. The bow was weak, meant for a creature half his strength. He aimed not at the fleeing goblin, but ahead of it, leading the target.
He released.
The arrow flew, wobbling pathetically, but true enough. It struck the fleeing goblin in the back of its thigh. It went down with a shriek, clutching at the shaft. David was on it in moments, ending its misery with a grim, final thrust of his dagger. The fourth and final orb entered him.
Silence.
The only sounds were his own ragged, sobbing breaths and the terrified whimpers from the bus.
David stood amidst five cooling corpses, painted in their blood and his own. The snow around him was churned into a pink and brown slurry. Every muscle screamed. His head pounded as if it were in a vice. He spat again, another gob of blood joining the mess on the ground. His body was a tapestry of fresh pain.
But he was alive. And he was stronger. The orbs hadn't just given him mana; they had thrummed with a faint, vital energy that seeped into his muscles, into his bones. He could feel the difference. A fractional increase in strength, a slight quickening of his reflexes.
He slowly, painfully, collected the serviceable weapons: two more rusty daggers and the bow with its remaining three arrows. He was a walking armory of junk, but it was more than he had minutes ago.
He turned back to the bus. The faces in the windows were no longer pleading. They were utterly horrified. They hadn't seen a hero. They had seen a demon engage in a brutal, bloody ballet of death. They had seen him spit blood with a casual, terrifying familiarity. They had seen the cold, efficient way he'd executed the wounded runner.
Lena was staring, her face pale as the snow, her hand clamped over her mouth. Her eyes were wide with a terror far more profound than anything the goblins had elicited.
David met her gaze, his own eyes hollow, exhausted, and devoid of anything resembling the boy she had known. He wiped the back of his bloody hand across his mouth.