Son of Thunder - Murray J. D. Leeder [61]
What scared him most was how natural it felt.
Two trolls were bearing down on him, their green flesh stretched taut over jagged bones. The woods were bright here, the trees spaced far apart and the sun shining brightly above. This was the reason Lanaal had lured the trolls here, where the space was open enough to accommodate even a behemoth.
Lanaal was here, Vell knew, perched somewhere in the trees above, watching and waiting. Within his blood frenzy, his eyes were clouded over with the insensibility of rage, but he could still hear a sharp, shrill bird call-Lanaal goading him forward, daring him to call on his full transformation. But he held back, even as one of the trolls wrapped its huge hands around his neck and twisted.
Vell clapped his hands on the troll's forearm and squeezed tight, ripping the arm free of his scaled neck. He kicked the troll's left knee then the other, sending it tumbling backward onto the leaf-covered forest floor. Before it could recover, he jumped onto it with all of his weight, landing with both feet on the troll's chest. Troll bones snapped under his impact, and he watched its hideous face as the shock hit home, it eyes bugging out and its mouth spewing forth a plume of thick green liquid that splashed over its face.
Vell knew he shouldn't finish the fight too swiftly. Though his sense of reasoning was weakened in his state, he had no intention of drawing the death blow yet. He was enjoying himself. When Vell shifted his attention to the other troll, staring up into the green-gray face topped with a wiry shock of black hair, he saw something he never would have suspected: fear.
The ground trembled around Vell as he walked. So it was with the beast shamans of his tribe when they called on the powers of the Thunderbeast and grew armor of scales.
Vell commanded the tremors to cease, to see if they would. And they did.
Hopping off his downed victim, Vell strode toward the troll slowly and it stepped backward, watching him intently and bracing for the attack. Armed with nothing but his own scaly strength, Vell plunged forward toward the troll's middle, delivering a forceful punch. The troll withstood the blow and struggled with Vell, raking its claws through his tribal robes, ripping them to find any skin beneath not protected by those thick scales. Finding none, the troll brought its fist to the side of Vell's head. The blow echoed like thunder through his skull and sent him flying against a fragile tree nearby. The trunk cracked behind him as the full brunt of his weight struck. The tree toppled into the clearing with a mighty noise.
The first troll's regenerative powers worked to knit its shattered bones together, and the monster rose to confront Vell again. With his feet against the stump of the broken tree, Vell wrapped his arms around the fallen trunk and spun it in a circle, its branches breaking off as it struck other trees. This brought complaint from the treetops above, and even in his rage, he thought of Lanaal in bird form, likely dislodged from her perch.
Facing the two trolls, his arms still around the trunk, Vell used it as a caber, hurling it full on against the trolls. It struck them both in the midsection, knocking them both backward. Like a great pin it rolled, over their chests and faces, stripping its bark on their rough skin. And like an engine of destruction, Vell was on them, tearing into their bodies with foot and fist.
A high-pitched trill sounded above him, and Vell was partly drawn out of his blood fury to remember what he was here to do. Standing tall and straight, he summoned the heart of his courage, not the courage that compelled him to fight monsters, but that which let him look into the most frightening things lurking inside him. He clapped his eyes shut and searched his depths for the will to leave his body behind and fully accept the scales' embrace.
Vell's throat went dry and his mouth filled