Sam

  This troll was a big fucker; a mountain of blubber covered in a green elephantine hide criss-crossed with old battle scars. Its hair hung in sticky black stripes down the sides of its head, and its chin and belly were smeared with red gore.

  It sat naked in the bog, unbothered by the muddy water covering most of its legs. Absorbed in choosing its next human morsel, it paid no mind to Sam barreling toward it. Its hand hovered this way and that over the slaves remaining inside the cage, fish in a barrel as they were still chained to the floor.

  Sam charged into the flat stretch of grassy peat, wet sludge coming up to her ankles, then her shins, then almost up to her knees. It flowed in through her boot tops, cold and heavy and squelching. The viscous mud sucked at her feet and slowed her from a breakneck sprint to a labored trudge; arms swinging, legs dragging.

  The troll lifted out a wailing woman by one arm. It gave her chain a yank to effortlessly snap it loose from its mooring, broken links scattered about and quickly sinking out of sight. Still noisomely smacking blood-caked lips, it raised the woman to its mouth. Her scream dropped away to a pale, disbelieving stare as she gazed down its putrid gape, tongue like a huge red slimy worm against its chin.

  Sam reached down without slowing and scooped a big clump of muddy moss. "Hey, fuckhead!" she shouted, tossing her foul-smelling payload with all her strength.

  It found its mark, hit the troll over the ear with a wet smack. Finally, the monster looked up from its still-squirming meal. The slime-green cinderblock of a face had gone slack with shock, tongue lolling.

  Sam was just twenty feet away, closing with all possible speed.

  The troll opened its fist and let the woman fall away, her arm twisted grotesquely from its vice grip. The creature began to rise, tipping onto all fours with the grace of an enormous toddler, hands entirely submerged, then got one foot beneath it as it let out a series of snorting grunts, annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of its meal.

  Sam reached the troll while it was still on one knee. The thing towered over her as tall as a house. She put her whole back into a sweeping hook, her fist connecting with the kneecap of the troll's supporting lead leg. She felt bone and cartilage crunch, leg knocked sideways by the force of the blow.

  The troll roared with equal parts surprise and agony, spraying bloody spittle down at Sam from above, and she felt little impacts of bone shards and flesh scraps across her shoulders and head.

  Expelling a sharp, hissing breath, Sam drove her fist into the same spot, then a third time, completely shattering the knee, socket visibly popping out of place and protruding against the skin.

  The troll fell back, wailing piteously, and made a big splash of mud as its bare ass hit the loose ground. It stared gormlessly at her, propped up on its hands.

  Sam moved after her flatfooted opponent to follow up—temples thumping, face hot, the crazy drumbeat of her heart pounding in her ears. Everything was surreal. She was fighting a monster. A really fucking big one. She needed to do something while it was still off-balance. Neutralize it somehow, or…

  Should I kill it? Is that what I need to do here?

  Normally she would go for a choke to subdue an aggressive opponent, humble them enough so that by the time they woke up, they'd thought better of hurting anyone. But this was a monster. They were supposed to have no quit in them at all, and that thing had a neck nearly as wide as her torso—she doubted she could get that thing in a rear naked choke even if she put her all into it.

  Its eyes were thrown wide in an almost human kind of fear. It didn't want to die.

  I need to kill it, she told herself. There's no other way.

  But how would she even go about doing that? Figuring out how to kill things wasn't something she'd ever spent much time contemplating.

  These thoughts ran through her head in less than a second, but it was long enough for her momentum to stall, legs sinking deeper in the greedy, murky sludge as soon as she wasn't constantly moving them.

  Breaking through her paralysis, she decided the troll's head was still too high for her to punch, so she aimed a spinning heel kick at its temple, but her leg was stuck worse than she'd expected, and it was only with a lot of effort that she pulled it loose, her boot nearly coming loose in the process, and what was meant to be a kick just turned into a lot of awkward flailing.

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  When she looked up from her raised foot, she found that the troll had reached blindly behind it and taken hold of the woman it had been meaning to eat by her legs. Sam only had time to halfway raise her arms in an instinctive guard before the troll swung its victim like a club, bringing the screaming woman around in a wide arc. The woman's body collided with Sam's, and her panicked cry abruptly cut off.

  With all of Sam's durability, the other woman shattered simply against her; bones crunching, body deforming in slow motion like a bag of wet sticks. Sam was knocked clean out of the mud and was suddenly flying, wheeling through the air, catching a brief glimpse of a bloody, disembodied eyeball soaring with her.

  Sam's head hit off a tree, reversed her spin, and she hurtled on until her momentum was violently arrested by a thick birch trunk, body wrapping around it. She rolled to the ground, groaning with the pain exploding through her side while she struggled to figure out which way was up in the topsy-turvy world swaying drunkenly around her.

  Her heartbeat was so loud.

  Flailing wildly, her hand eventually found something solid to push off of. She tried to stand, fell over, shook her head a little clearer, and tried a second time with more success. The ground held fairly well under her, a bit drier here. She looked around, saw the troll a ways off as it tossed aside its spent weapon, the woman's mangled corpse hitting off the wagon and tumbling over the top out of view.

  The monster came at her, each massive footfall producing a lazy swell of dark, viscous water. It stepped onto the back of a weakly flailing mercenary, snapping his spine and muffling the man's scream by plunging him into the mud. The troll did not appear to notice.

  Sam blinked, her jaw hanging dumbly open, legs still trembling under her.

  Those people… If I hadn't hesitated…

  The troll picked up speed as it reached the end of the most sodden terrain. It pounded toward her with a bellow that promised violent and bloody murder. Its knee was holding its weight, the ruined joint somehow mending itself as broken bits of bone shifted under the skin and clicked back into place.

  Sam's hands twitched. She wanted to turn them into fists but couldn't quite find the will. Couldn't think at all. Nothing felt real. All of this had to be happening to someone else.

  I have to… I should…

  "Brainstorm!" came a loud, bassy shout from somewhere behind her, the suddenness of it making her flinch.

  Before she had time to see what was causing the commotion, an enormous figure slid in front of her. Gug had removed his hat and suit jacket, now in his bright shirtsleeves and brown waistcoat. His back was to her, broad as a barn. Something about his demeanor was different. He stood taller, great big fists raised in a tight boxer's guard.

  "Don't interfere, human," Gug said—an oddly chill edge to his voice—as he spared a glance back at her. "I can't guarantee your safety if you get in my way."

  Sam was too stunned to argue.

  The enemy looked just as shocked to be staring down one of its own kind, but quickly got over its surprise. The two moved toward each other, the enemy at least a foot taller and probably two hundred pounds heavier than Gug.

  The two titans collided violently.

  Gug was no faster than before, but there was a new, strangely graceful fluidity to his movements. Each step, each minute shift of his weight was calculated, economical, perfect. He sidestepped the enemy troll's opening haymaker, countered with a stabbing hook that connected only with the ends of two folded fingers, providing a sharp enough cutting edge to puncture the bigger monster's thick hide and produce a trickle of blackish monster blood.

  The enemy roared and threw its weight around, throwing a series of groping swipes, but Gug avoided each one, stepping calmly so that the giant hands flew harmlessly past, missing by fractions of an inch. He barely seemed to be putting any effort into it, taking one step here, two there, barely needing to move his torso to weave. It was as though he was anticipating the other troll's movements—even though they looked wildly unpredictable to Sam—so that he was always just where he needed to be to avoid danger.

  He bounced a stray hit off his guard with a grunt, ducked under the next swing, retaliated with a quick combination of those short, stabbing punches that left more holes in the enemy.

  Gug was moving well—really well, actually—but the damage he was producing was negligible. The wounds he had opened up on the enemy had already begun to close, the oldest one letting out one last spurt of blood before the ends of the thick hide joined together in a new puckered scar. But Gug maintained the same perfectly even pace, kiting the other troll around in small circles to keep everybody else out of harm's way.

  The other troll noticed it wasn't connecting even as it swung over and over. That riled it up pretty quick. The huge monster lunged with a bellow, and Gug met it with a hard low kick to the inside of the shin. The other troll's leg went sideways. It slipped in the mud and pitched a little off-balance, its big heaving belly luckily concealing its crotch. Gug took his chance and moved in, going from almost lazily effortless to lightning-quick, delivering a palm strike to the bigger troll's chest that sent it stumbling back. Its eyes went wide as it drew in a panicked gasp and clutched at its heart.

  Making no effort to close the distance as the enemy fell back, Gug instead raised one finger toward the other troll, resting his other hand in the pocket of his trousers.

  "Power Word [Death]," he rumbled.

  A silent ripple of twitching muscles went through the enemy's whole body. Its face slackened. Its eyes rolled back in its head, and its body went limp all at once, toppling backward and landing in the bog with an enormous splash of water and peat and chunks of moss and grass.

  There was no movement after that. Not a twitch.

  The thing was dead.