War God for Hire- Adventurer: A Reincarnation, Cultivation Adventure

by David Burke

  War God for Hire- Adventurer

  by

  David Burke

  License Notes: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. This e-book is licenses for your personal enjoyment. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this e-book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  War God for Hire- Adventurer

  Copyright © 2021

  David Burke

  Cover art copyright

  © David Burke

  Cover art created by Yanaidraws

  Contents

  Prologue - A Slow Death

  Chapter 1 - Fresh Beginning

  Chapter 2 - Obvious Clues

  Chapter 3 - New Owners, New Rules

  Chapter 4 - What Just Happened

  Chapter 5 - Howling at the Moon

  Chapter 6 - Cleaning the Kill

  Chapter 7 - A New Day, A New Voice

  Chapter 8 - Why So Hesitant?

  Interlude 1 - Moving to Stage Two

  Chapter 9 - A New Awareness

  Chapter 10 - Decisions to Make

  Chapter 11 - Team Meeting

  Interlude 2 - Wraiths of the Past

  Chapter 12 - Indecent Proposal

  Chapter 13 - Invisible Battles

  Chapter 14 - Team Set Up

  Chapter 15 - Into the Bowels of the Earth

  Chapter 16 - Moving Parts

  Interlude 3 - Shadows in Heaven

  Chapter 17 - Mantle of the Mind

  Chapter 18 - Forging a New Beginning

  Chapter 19 - Forging a Follower

  Chapter 20 - Clearing the Hall

  Chapter 21 - Death at the Heart

  Chapter 22 - Lost in Translation

  Chapter 23 - Back to the Arena

  Chapter 24 - Barak’s Round Two

  Chapter 25 - Choosing Sides

  Chapter 26 - Taking Charge

  Chapter 27 - Adventurer’s Hall

  Interlude 4 - Skylar

  Chapter 28- Skrug’s Cousins

  Chapter 29- Awakening Nyda

  Chapter 30- Reputation for Hire

  Epilogue- Raina’s plot

  Prologue - A Slow Death

  Krig sat in his mortal frame fuming. None of this had gone as he intended. He was still dying and he knew it. But a god didn’t die easily, least of all him.

  Still, that didn’t change one incontrovertible fact. Day by day another sliver of him faded away. For the first time in his existence, Krig knew fear. Without access to his mantle, he had only a little more power than any of the mortals around him.

  Essence was virtually non-existent in this world. That had played a large part in his decision to choose Kyle Hudson. Sure, the mortal had a burning drive for victory that matched his own, but that was more of a requirement than a justification for Krig choosing him. The anorexic amounts of essence at play in this realm hopefully meant his surrogate had no experience controlling essence and thus, would be unable to gain control of the mantle.

  At least that had been the plan. It was not going as expected, though. The little mortal was gaining control too damn quickly. On the one hand, that meant it was more likely he would stay alive long enough for Krig to return and claim both the construct and the mantle. On the other hand though, it was going to make it much harder for Krig to seize control again.

  Of course, Krig had problems of his own right now. He shook his head in frustration as he looked around at the holding cell he was in. It was twenty feet by fifteen feet and had filthy wooden benches anchored to the concrete walls all around the sides. Of course, there were steel bars along the entire front wall of the cell.

  He’d thought that with some effort, he might be able to gather enough War Essence to part the bars. But what would he do then? This would likely drain him and it took so long to build a decent level of power here. Since he had healed Kyle Hudson’s mortal body, so that he could use it, he had been drained of essence. Running on fumes seemed to be the appropriate local expression.

  Then again, healing had never been his forte.

  The refuse of humanity was in the cell with him. He thought he remembered hearing it referred to as a ‘drunk tank’. He had been thrown in here by a group of human constables. They were a city guard of some sort. Normally he would have struck them down, but for this feeble form, their firearms were deadly weapons. Although he didn’t understand how they’d earned such a name. Could one see actual fire when they were discharged?

  He’d managed to last a few years here. Kyle Hudson had plenty of wealth and even after he’d refused to play that childish game, baseball, there was still plenty of money in the bank. His problems began when he’d gotten tired of the mewling humans gathering around him and begging for him to scribble his name on a piece of paper for them. Worse even than the younglings, were the females who kept trying to rub themselves up against him. Krig had never understood those particular desires.

  Eventually, he had snapped and smashed in the face of a man who had refused to get out of his way. His lawyer, and Krig shuddered that he had been forced to deal with such a creature, had gotten that taken care of for a sizable payout. The problem was, that it wasn’t an isolated incident.

  Krig found it happening more and more often, till eventually he was without any money and he’d been evicted from the dwelling he lived in.

  A single night on the street was all it had taken for him to be drawn to the wrong side of town. He had been lured there by the sense of conflict he felt. His ability to detect battle was far from what it once had been, but he had still felt this. Two rival gangs were having a turf war, although it seemed like far more bluster than actual fighting to Krig.

  When all was said and done, there were more than twenty dead and the police had been called to deal with ‘the raving lunatic’, as they called him. His patience had been at an end and Krig demanded that they release him and bow before the war god, but that had only elicited more laughter. Several Tasers later, he found himself on the ground and every muscle in his body seized until he passed out.

  He came to in this drunk tank. He had to think his way out of this. As he examined the cell and his current predicament, he kept coming back to one cold hard fact: his chances of returning home seemed to be slipping further and further beyond his reach.

  Chapter 1 - Fresh Beginning

  The heavy axe came down at Kyle’s head, but rather than block it, he pivoted on his left foot to shift his body’s position and allowed the weapon to whistle past his cheek. A few weeks before, he wouldn’t have been comfortable with such a maneuver, but training and acclimation to what this body could do had made him more confident. He countered with a short, smashing blow of his maul into Skrug’s side.

  The blow should have cracked ribs, but the heavy hide and thick muscles of the half troll absorbed most of the impact. The force of the blow was still strong enough to push Skrug back a pace. Kyle used the space to drop his maul on the creature’s huge foot.

  The small and numerous bones of the foot are vulnerable, even in the foot of a half troll. Despite all his strength and his regeneration, even Skrug was vulnerable there. It was something that had been drilled into Kyle, first on Earth, but which had been reinforced in the arena.

  Taki
ng care of your feet was important as a ballplayer, but doubly so as a fighter. Injured feet meant a weak foundation. The larger the man, or creature, the more important their feet were.

  Kyle knew that the half troll’s regeneration would soon heal those bones. But he had always been good at sizing up his competition and he had observed that broken bones healed more slowly for the troll than torn flesh.

  Once again though, it was just a set up. The painful injury caused Skrug to howl in pain and stumble backwards. His training kicked in, allowing the troll to keep a hold of his axe with one hand, even as the other arm flailed in the air to keep his balance.

  Kyle surged forward. He stomped on the haft of Skrug’s axe, breaking it, and then drove his shoulder into the off balance half troll, completing his fall and sending him to the ground. Kyle swung his maul in an overhead arc straight at Skrug’s head, stopping it a half inch from the big man’s nose.

  As Kyle leaned forward to help his sparring mate get back up, he heard clapping behind him. When he looked back over his shoulder, he noticed Kierra sitting on one of the benches watching silently, but the clapping hadn’t come from her. That was coming from Lash.

  “These past two weeks have been beneficial. You are getting better, and quickly. Your control is improving and you are learning how to chain movements and strikes together into combinations,” she said. Then she laughed and added, “You are a natural with the combos, but I’m even more impressed with your control. It will come in handy, especially in those fights when you don’t want to kill your opponent.”

  Kyle nodded at her, but then a dark expression crossed his face. “And why wouldn’t I want to kill my opponent?” His voice sounded unnaturally grim and resounded through the room with an aura of power.

  Lash’s eyes flashed open wide, and a look of shock crossed her face before she regained her normally stoic exterior. Skrug looked at him and there was fear in his eyes, while Kierra seemed to be emitting a strange aroma in the air that Kyle suddenly noticed. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was, but it distracted him.

  That lapse of concentration allowed him to realize what had just happened. For a second there, he had allowed that battle urge, the part of him that he identified with Krig’s remnant, to rise up within him. Kyle was getting used to fighting, but he valued control. He always had. And he most definitely didn’t want to have to kill any more than was absolutely necessary, especially other people.

  Yet, somehow, those words had come out of his mouth. He felt like he had subconsciously exuded some kind of aura of dread, for lack of a better word. All he could think to try to do to cover it up was to make a clumsy attempt at humor.

  “Just kidding!” He chuckled. “Of course I know that it won’t always be a fight to the death.”

  Skrug seemed to relax, but the look on the women’s faces didn’t change. Fortunately, Gilthan broke the lingering tension when he walked into the training area at the center of their dorm building. He walked down the stairs from his second-floor room, but the middle of the building was open, with a balcony looking down into it that wrapped around most of the second floor.

  He called out, “Anyone else hungry?”

  The elven sorcerer was not the warmest or most open teammate, but the past few weeks of training had at least helped them get to know each other a bit better. Back at the arena, Saber’s method had been to train each of them separately, based on their specific strengths and weaknesses. When they sparred, it was mostly with trainers. Lash believed that they should train with each other exclusively, so that they could better learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

  For Gilthan, his primary weakness was his lack of motivation. He had been gifted with this power and had not had to work for his skills, like Kierra had. He stayed up late and slept in late. But Lash hadn’t stopped him. The rules here were much more lax than at the arena. As long as she saw that you were putting in the effort and—more importantly—continually improving, she was satisfied.

  The food and housing here was also a significant improvement. Lady Avarda had simply left them to their training, since they had arrived two weeks ago. Everything about the experience was better than the arena, even if Kyle had liked Saber.

  The only real downside so far, was that Kyle hadn’t seen Nyda since he’d left the arena. Lash promised she was here, just being trained for a role serving in the house. He wondered when he might find an opportunity to accidentally run into her.

  The change in circumstances had Gilthan feeling like Kyle had kept his word and he had become noticeably nicer to them all. Kyle looked at the elf, and thought visiting the kitchen might not be a bad idea. There were standing orders that the gladiators could eat anytime they wanted, around the clock.

  It would give him some time to talk to Hilde about his little outburst earlier. And he might even run into Nyda.

  Lash said, “I don’t want to spoil your breakfast, but we just got the schedule for the first matches. Repairs on the coliseum have gone quicker than expected, and we will be starting matches up again this next holy day. Because of the delay from the repairs, though, there will only be three weeks of open matches. After that, the Konkurranse will start and go for another ten weeks—that is the event that we want to win for house Avarda.”

  Kierra came over by the others to hear this. Even the dim-witted Skrug was glued to Lash’s every word. Gilthan asked, “Will we all be fighting in the open matches?”

  “Good question. If you just waited, though, I would have answered all your questions and you could go get your breakfast,” Lash answered. She tapped her foot rapidly. It was a sign Kyle had come to recognize as an indicator of impatience.

  With a frown, she continued. “I have recommended to Lady Meeka that she not put more than one of you in the open matches each week. While it is good for you to see the competition and get a little practice in live matches, there is an obvious trade off—we don’t want to show the other teams too much of what we can do.”

  Kyle grinned and said, “I assume you have some information on the established fighters from the other teams, but they won’t really know anything concrete about us, even you. They will just know that you are a badass.”

  He wasn’t sure which was worse, Lash’s glare at him for interrupting her, or Hilde’s irritated voice in his head saying, “You sure seem to spend a lot of time focused on her ass.”

  “That is mostly accurate. But as any true strategist would realize, we can’t know the full extent of the enemy’s capabilities before battle. I was taught that underestimating your enemy is a cardinal sin. It is entirely possible that some of the other teams have added fighters with diverse backgrounds, such as yours,” Lash said. He didn’t miss her acidic tone or the barbed jab at him.

  “Once the Konkurranse begins, you will each fight every week. On weeks three, five, seven, and nine there will be doubles matches—meaning you fight in pairs. Then, in weeks four, eight and ten there will be full five on five team matches in addition to your individual bouts. Team matches occur after the individual matches, though, and since we don’t have any back up fighters to fill in, if one of you is severely injured in your individual matches, the next team match becomes that much harder,” she continued.

  That statement gave everyone something to think about. The arena had healers, though, and it was likely that even House Avarda had a flesh mage or two. None of us had needed to visit them for the past two weeks we had been here, though. That was largely because Lash was good enough to not get hit, Gilthan fought from a distance, and the rest of us had varying, but significant, regeneration factors.

  Kyle found himself wondering how Selma, the chief flesh mage at the arena, was getting on. He had only known her for a few weeks, but had liked her. And she had shown him a book that she couldn’t read, but which he could—a book written in English. It implied that there was, or had been, someone else here from Earth.

  “What happens after the Kon?” Kyle asked, putting such musings
out of his mind.

  Lash answered, “That will depend on how well you perform in the Kon and if you are willing to fight in the matches that follow. I think for now, we should focus on getting ready for the Kon. If House Avarda could win it their first year competing, that would be a huge boon for Lady Meeka’s family and you would all be appropriately rewarded.”

  Lash studied them. “Now, speaking of Lady Meeka, she has asked to speak with each of you, starting with Kyle.”

  Gilthan’s eyebrows rose, but before he could ask a question, Lash lifted her hand.

  “Don’t bother asking me what this is about. She probably just wants to get to know her team a bit better. After all, she spent a great deal of coin to buy you four.”

  Chapter 2 - Obvious Clues

  As Kyle was walking down the path to the luxurious mansion at the center of the estate with Marie--or Lash, as she preferred to be called—at his side, he thought about the past two weeks. First off, two weeks here was actually twenty days and much closer to three weeks back home.

  The unions would have gone ballistic about the idea of employees working twelve-hour days for nine days in a row, with only a single standard day off on the first day of the new week. Small shop and business owners often worked far closer to sixteen hours a day, to build or maintain their life's work.