Chapter 711

A Cursed Warrior was created through the use of a special magical runestone that could transform an ordinary Dark Elf soldier into something several times more powerful in an instant.

In principle, the process resembled the creation of Asgard’s Berserker army. In practice, however, Cursed Warriors were considerably more formidable.

The first difference was the quality of the soldiers themselves. Asgard’s Berserkers had originally been ordinary commoners, many of whom had worked menial jobs before taking up their enchanted weapons. Cursed Warriors, by contrast, were hardened veterans who had already survived years of battle.

The second difference was even more significant.

Berserker weapons merely unleashed their wielders’ anger. Cursed runestones burned through the user’s life force, forcing their bodies to exceed every natural limit. The resulting transformation granted them tremendous strength, enhanced durability, and an almost grotesque capacity for regeneration.

Even a wound to a vital organ, such as the heart, wasn’t necessarily enough to stop one of them from fighting.

Of course, such power came at a terrible price.

Dark Elves were a long-lived race, but a Dark Elf who became a Cursed Warrior could expect to live for only another two or three years. Their intelligence and rationality deteriorated, and some even lost the ability to speak properly. Once their transformation was complete, they would continue fighting until their mission was accomplished.

They were living weapons in the truest sense of the term. The only reliable way to make one stop was to remove its head.

A warrior reduced to little more than a weapon was hardly blessed by such power. Hence the name Cursed Warrior.

Back when the Dark Elves had ruled at the height of their power, Cursed Warriors had formed the elite of their armies. They charged straight into enemy formations and fought without regard for their own survival. It could take more than twenty Einherjar warriors of Valhalla merely to hold one in check, and killing one required an even greater effort.

But those days were long gone.

After their defeat, the Dark Elves had fled into the darkness of space, spending ages wandering the cosmos and hiding from their enemies. Now, their once-mighty civilization had dwindled to a desperate remnant.

And they had only one Cursed Warrior runestone left.

Malekith, King of the Dark Elves, had made his decision.

Using a dagger, he cut open Aggram’s abdomen and concealed the runestone inside the wound. Then he entrusted his brother with the most difficult mission of all, along with the future of their entire race.

It was a solemn farewell.

Malekith knew what would happen once Aggram activated the runestone. The brother he knew would cease to exist in any meaningful sense, replaced by a living weapon that would never again be the same person.

With the preparations complete, Aggram donned an outrageously flamboyant mask and teleported to one of Asgard’s vassal kingdoms.

As luck would have it, a patrol was operating nearby, clearing out a group of rebels. The patrol’s commander was none other than Hogun, one of Thor’s legendary Warriors Three.

Aggram emerged directly in front of the patrol and stretched both arms forward in an unmistakably theatrical gesture.

"You lapdogs of Asgard! I shall destroy your kingdom!"

Hogun blinked.

He cautiously surveyed the open terrain around them. No obvious ambush. No concealed reinforcements. No sign of an approaching army.

So where, exactly, had this idiot come from?

"Identify yourself!"

"My name..."

Aggram paused.

The Dark Elves had been in hiding for ages, but Asgardians were long-lived. There was no telling whether someone might recognize his name.

Better to play it safe.

Behind his ridiculous mask, his eyes flashed with sinister red light. He drew himself up with all the dignity he could muster.

"I am... the great Aggram!"

He had barely finished speaking before launching into another grand declaration.

"Behold my supreme power, and let your thunderous applause shake the heavens!"

Then he charged.

His acceleration was astonishing. Without so much as a preparatory movement, he drove himself forward at full speed, becoming little more than a blur racing across the grass.

Hogun tightened his grip on his weapon.

Finally. Someone who might actually be dangerous.

Aggram was halfway across the field when disaster struck.

His left foot somehow caught against the back of his right, and he pitched forward in a spectacular face-plant.

Momentum carried him across the grass, where he slid helplessly toward Hogun’s feet.

He came to a stop, slowly raised his head, and gazed up at the Asgardian with theatrical admiration.

"As expected, the people of Asgard are truly formidable! My life has been without regret! Please, take me into custody!"

Hogun stared at him.

He had spent the last several seconds preparing for a serious fight. His opponent had apparently decided to lose a footrace against himself instead.

"...That’s it? You’re done?"

"Ah... Look at me, running beneath the setting sun. There goes my lost youth..."

Aggram let out a final burp for good measure, then dropped his face against the ground and pretended to faint.

Hogun stood there for a moment, trying to process what he’d just witnessed.

"Right. Take him into custody," he finally told his soldiers, scratching his head.

What else could he do? A lunatic was still a lunatic, and leaving one to wander around the countryside wasn’t exactly conducive to maintaining a peaceful and orderly kingdom.

And so, Aggram got precisely what he wanted.

He was arrested and taken to Asgard’s underground prison.

Once the guards had relaxed their vigilance, he turned to face the wall and gritted his teeth against the pain. Then he reached into the wound in his own abdomen and pulled out the runestone.

With the precious object in hand, he crushed it.

One might have expected Asgard, with all its advanced technology, to maintain a prison capable of preventing such an obvious escape attempt.

Apparently, however, centuries of peace had made its security personnel rather complacent.

They hadn’t even bothered to remove the prisoner’s mask, much less conduct a proper search for contraband.

And before anyone could argue that concealing a runestone inside one’s own body was an unusually sophisticated trick, consider this: even a modern airport security checkpoint on Earth might have caught something like that.

Asgard had access to technology far beyond anything Earth could manage, yet somehow its guards had missed the whole thing.

Really, they had this coming.

The moment the runestone shattered, Aggram’s body convulsed violently.

Thick black smoke poured from his skin, which seemed to ignite from within. His frame expanded rapidly, muscles swelling as he grew taller and broader. Jagged bone spikes erupted from his flesh, and even the flamboyant mask he wore fused into his transformed face.

For a race that called itself the Dark Elves, they certainly had little interest in elegance.

Their idea of an elite warrior seemed to involve borrowing every ugly trick from the Fel Orcs and then making it worse.

At last, the transformation was complete.

Aggram slowly turned toward the other prisoner sharing his cell.

There was an old saying that the four strongest bonds between men included the friendship forged by serving time together.

Aggram took that principle to heart.

He considered his cellmate a brother.

And, like any good brother, he was about to make excellent use of him.

Grabbing the unfortunate prisoner, Aggram hoisted him into the air and began slamming him against the cell’s energy barrier like a living battering ram.

Once.

Twice.

Again.

The barrier buckled beneath the combined punishment of the Cursed Warrior’s monstrous strength and the repeated impact of his very unwilling accomplice.

At last, the energy field shattered.

Aggram burst out of the cell, killed the guards who rushed to investigate, and strode deeper into the prison.

He wasn’t content merely to escape. Along the way, he smashed through barriers, wrecked anything that got in his path, and released as many prisoners as possible.

The resulting chaos was exactly what he needed.

Then he passed a rather unusual cell.

Unlike the others, it was furnished with expensive furniture, shelves of books, fresh fruit, and an assortment of pastries. It looked less like a prison cell and more like a private suite in a luxury hotel.

Inside sat a tall, elegant man with greasy shoulder-length hair and a peculiar receding hairline. He watched Aggram approach with a pleasant smile, anticipation flickering in his eyes.

The man seemed to be waiting for something.

Perhaps he expected to be rescued.

Aggram gave him a brief glance.

Then he turned around and walked away.

His remaining scraps of rationality had reached a unanimous conclusion: anyone who looked that delicate and effeminate was unlikely to be much use in a fight.

There was no reason to waste time rescuing him.

With the prison descending into chaos behind him, Aggram continued toward the energy core of the Wall of Asgard.

The time for the attack had arrived.

The Dark Elves’ assault began as scheduled.

To their credit, they had taken precautions against Asgardian detection. Rather than brazenly flying their spacecraft straight into the kingdom, they relied on stealth technology, low-altitude flight, and a variety of other countermeasures.

Such tactics might have fooled ordinary sensors.

Unfortunately for them, Asgard’s guardian had a rather different set of eyes.

Heimdall, the man stationed at the Rainbow Bridge, was renowned for his ability to see across the cosmos itself. And ever since Evenson had warned Asgard about the impending attack, Heimdall had remained on high alert.

He was at his post when something caught his attention.

His eyes narrowed.

Something was wrong.

He was looking at an illusion. Something was being concealed.

Without hesitation, Heimdall sprinted onto the Rainbow Bridge.

As he ran, he kept glancing to his left, shouting warnings to anyone who could hear him. To the people around him, there was little more than a faint distortion in the air.

To Heimdall, however, the truth was unmistakable.

A bizarrely shaped spacecraft was approaching under cover of invisibility.

Heimdall accelerated, caught up with the vessel, and leaped toward it. As he rose into the air, he drew the two short blades at his waist.

"I’ll drain every last drop of your pathetic blood!"

His blades struck home.

The impact disrupted the ship’s camouflage, forcing it out of its invisible state. Unfortunately, although his attack punched through the vessel’s outer armor, it failed to inflict a fatal blow.

Heimdall didn’t let that discourage him.

Instead, he resorted to a far more underhanded tactic.

He blocked the exhaust.

The spacecraft immediately began belching black smoke. Its systems failed, and the vessel went down in a spectacular wreck.

It was little wonder Asgard had maintained its dominance across the cosmos for so long.

Just look at its guardian.

The occasional warrior managing to destroy a spacecraft with a melee weapon wasn’t unheard of. Usually, though, such feats involved a forty-meter sword designed specifically for cutting ships in half.

Heimdall had accomplished the same thing with two blades barely longer than daggers.

And he wasn’t finished.

The destruction of one vessel had done little to ease his concerns. Through his extraordinary sight, he could see numerous other cloaked ships surging toward the Golden Palace.

Heimdall immediately returned to his post.

Gripping his massive two-handed sword, he twisted it into position.

Golden light erupted beneath the palace, spreading upward in a brilliant wave. In an instant, the Wall of Asgard activated at full power, enveloping the Golden Palace in a magnificent protective barrier.

The attacking Dark Elves had no choice but to abandon stealth.

Their ships emerged from invisibility and raced toward the palace, desperately attempting to reach their target before the barrier could fully form.

They were too late.

The shield sealed itself just as the first wave arrived. One unfortunate pilot failed to brake in time, and his spacecraft slammed directly into the barrier.

The resulting explosion left no survivors.

The Dark Elves were suddenly in an exceptionally unpleasant position.

They couldn’t get inside the Golden Palace, but retreating was no longer a simple matter either. Asgard’s anti-aircraft batteries had opened fire in earnest, filling the surrounding space with deadly volleys.

If the attackers lingered, they would be annihilated.

Malekith watched the situation deteriorate, his anxiety mounting.

Then, at last, his brother came through.

Deep within the palace, Aggram had just finished surveying the bodies of two slain Einherjar warriors. He nodded to himself with complete satisfaction.

"Stealth mission successful!"

Without another word, he tore into the energy core with his claws.

The core shattered.

Outside, the Wall of Asgard collapsed in an instant.

Malekith seized the opportunity without hesitation.

His flagship surged forward, crashing through the palace’s defenses and smashing directly into the throne room.

It came to a stop before Odin’s throne.

The collision unleashed chaos.

Debris filled the air. Soldiers and attendants were caught in the destruction, and the impact left a trail of dead and wounded in its wake.

Yet the palace guards stationed in the throne room were no ordinary soldiers. They were members of Odin’s royal guard, seasoned warriors whose service to the throne stretched back through generations.

They didn’t panic.

They didn’t scatter.

Instead, they formed ranks with disciplined precision, surrounding the crashed vessel before the Dark Elves could fully emerge.

But the royal guard had underestimated the enemy’s preparations.

Malekith’s personal retinue consisted of elite Dark Warriors, and the attackers possessed several advantages of their own. They had surprise on their side, centuries of hatred driving them forward, and, most importantly, ranged weapons.

As the ship’s doors opened, the Dark Warriors raised their energy rifles and unleashed a coordinated volley.

The first barrage tore through the tightly packed Asgardian formation, sending warriors sprawling across the ruined floor.

The royal guard, however, was made of sterner stuff.

They recovered quickly, spreading out to avoid becoming easy targets. Their shields blazed with brilliant white light, and the Dark Elves’ energy rounds vanished against the luminous surfaces without causing so much as a scratch.

The distance between the two forces was already minimal.

Within moments, both sides charged.

The battle devolved into brutal close-quarters combat, blades clashing against armor as the two armies fought for every inch of ground.

Amid the fighting, Malekith stepped down from his flagship.

His gaze rose toward the towering throne.

The sight filled him with rage.

For millions of years, Odin and his kind had sat upon that throne, accepting the adoration of countless subjects while allowing the light of their so-called civilization to poison the universe he loved.

Meanwhile, the Dark Elves had been reduced to fugitives, wandering the cosmos like abandoned dogs with nowhere to call home.

That ended today.

Today, the arrogant power represented by that throne would crumble before him.

Malekith moved through the fighting warriors and snatched a grenade from the belt of a nearby Dark Warrior.

He pulled the pin and hurled it toward Odin’s throne.

"Feel the fury of ten thousand years!"

But the grenade never reached its target.

A female warrior suddenly sprang into its path, raising her sword and striking the projectile upward with a sharp metallic crack.

The grenade shot toward the ceiling.

Then it detonated.

Ordinary grenades relied on explosive force and shrapnel to kill. Dark Elf grenades were considerably more sophisticated.

The explosion produced something resembling a miniature singularity, generating an immense gravitational pull that dragged everything nearby toward its center before compressing it into a tiny sphere.

The projectile had been knocked high enough to spare everyone below from its effects.

Nevertheless, the gravity well was powerful enough to tear away an entire layer of the enormous murals decorating the throne room’s ceiling.

As fragments of the damaged artwork rained down, the female warrior landed with her sword ready.

"Your atrocities end here!"

It was Sif.

Malekith looked at her.

Then, without bothering to reply, he turned and withdrew with a squad of his warriors.

This wasn’t cowardice. Malekith could recognize a dangerous opponent when he saw one, and Sif was clearly capable of putting up a serious fight.

Defeating her would take time he couldn’t afford to waste.

He had a mission to complete.

"Don’t think you can escape!"

Sif was furious.

Not only had Malekith ignored her challenge, but he had turned his back on her without even offering the courtesy of a proper fight. To her, the act was an insult to every warrior’s code of honor.

She immediately pursued him.

Unfortunately, the Dark Warriors still fighting in the throne room had anticipated that possibility. They surged forward, forming a wall of bodies between their king and the Asgardian warrior.

These were soldiers who had already accepted their deaths. If sacrificing their lives bought their king another few moments, they would gladly pay the price.

Sif let out a frustrated growl as the path ahead of her disappeared beneath a mass of enemies.

Then she turned toward a corner of the throne room.

"Care to make a bet? I’ll definitely get the first kill. What on earth is wrong with you?"

A familiar figure was making his way toward her.

Evenson Richter.

He was bent almost double, one hand braced against a pillar and the other clutching his chest. Every breath came out in a ragged gasp.

"Well..." He wheezed. "I... I must confess... I’m not particularly good at running."

When the attack began, Sif had practically come alive.

The prospect of a real battle had sent the Asgardian warrior into a state of barely contained excitement. She immediately began searching for enemies, using the sounds of explosions and the impact of crashing spacecraft to determine where the fighting was most intense.

It hadn’t taken her long to realize the attackers were concentrating on the throne room.

And once she’d reached that conclusion, she’d wasted no time dragging Evenson along with her.

Unfortunately, Evenson was a Warlock, not an endurance athlete.

His physical conditioning was respectable enough by ordinary standards, but that meant very little when compared to an Asgardian warrior. Sif could cover ground at a pace that made an ordinary human look positively stationary.

Evenson, meanwhile, possessed neither her stamina nor her stride.

Halfway to the throne room, he was convinced his heart was about to explode.

He tried to slow down. He tried to catch his breath. He tried desperately to explain that there was a limit to how much running one reasonably expected of a Warlock.

None of it mattered.

Sif had already grabbed his hand, and stopping wasn’t an option.

By the time they arrived, Evenson was barely conscious. For the final stretch, he’d been reduced to little more than dead weight, dragged across the floor by an increasingly impatient Asgardian warrior.

Now, at last, he had a moment to breathe.

He straightened up as best he could, drawing several deep, painful breaths before finally looking around the throne room.

Then he saw the Dark Elves.

His expression darkened.

These bastards.

Because of them, he’d nearly run himself into an early grave.

He’d remember this.

Every last one of them was going to pay.