Read Ascendance for Free Online

realised that yes, it was, and why it was so shit-faced.
    Bloodwine.
    ‘You are the Dave,’ growled the Hunn, which had no leashed Fangr, either because Karen had slain them all, or because it was a free-roaming thrall-boss. The growl sounded garbled and indistinct. The creature’s face was crimson with fresh blood and dead meat hung in grotesque strips and chunks from its jagged fangs. ‘I have heard tell of your prowess in combat but it does not impress me, for I am Jägur and I shall have my battle name from you this night.’
    ‘Dude, really, you’re embarrassing yourself,’ said Dave. ‘You don’t even have a battle name yet? Bet your little weenie blade doesn’t have a name either.’
    He was moving slowly as he trash-talked the daemon, moving away from Karen who was still locked into her Thunderdome duel with the enormous psychic toad.
    ‘Am I right? Or am I right, Jerker. Was that your nest name? Jerker of the Hunn. And that mighty blade you’re packing, what are you gonna call that, urmin-tickler or something?’
    The Hunn swayed from side to side, unsteady on its giant haunches. Its yellowed eyes squinted at Dave, or maybe just against the light of the burning cars. In a lower voice, and speaking directly to the Hunn now, Dave grinned nastily and channelled his inner python.
    ‘No chance, nest-wetting urmin-type. I burst my pustules at you and call your battle name a silly thing. You are but a tiny-balled wiper of this Threshrend’s bottom.’
    He didn’t have any pustules of course, but the insult did its work. In what passed for etiquette among the Hunn, to purposely rupture a pustule into the face of an opponent was akin to issuing a challenge to a duel by way of flinging a freshly squeezed turd squarely between the eyes.
    Dave saw the remaining onlookers flinch back as the young Hunn roared with ungovernable rage and leaped out of the crouch in which it had been standing. The howling bellow all but drowned out the flat, cracking reports of two handguns unloading five rounds into the head of the Threshrend daemon, and the war cries and snarls of the other two Hunn and their leashed Fangr.
    Dave felt the pressure that had been building in his head suddenly fall away and, as he dodged to one side to avoid the first clumsy swing of Jägur’s cutlass-style blade, he was surprised to find the world suspended again.
    Warat.
    There was no time to check on her. Lucille sang her high keening tune as he jumped under the arc of the cutlass swing and drove the axehead of the splitting maul up into the Hunn’s breastplate, aiming for the vulnerable area just beneath its shield-wise arm, where the smaller of the creature’s two hearts lay close to the surface. The steel head bit through boiled leather and shattered hundreds of chain-mail links. Daemon-hide split, bones disintegrated and gore erupted from the wound in a slow geyser.
    Dave whipped the hammer head back as the Hunn – moving slowly, but still appreciably faster than the human beings frozen outside Dave’s warp bubble – folded in on itself around the fatal wound. Fatal, but not quite fast enough for Dave’s liking. He spun Lucille in his hands and swung, bringing the flat, crushing surface of the hammer to bear on the creature’s head as it dropped toward the ground. Twelve pounds of forged and magical American steel punched through the thick, nobbled bone of Jägur’s skull. Twelve pounds which felt light in Dave’s hands, but which he wielded with all his power. The Hunn’s skull blew apart in an explosion of daemon ichor, grey-green brain jelly and shards of broken bone.
    Lucille came free of the obscene wound with one fierce tug and a sucking sound that made Dave wince. Still half expecting to be forced out of the warp bubble at any moment, he braced himself for the rest of the war band, but it was too late. Warat had all but cut them down.
    He shook his head in surprise at the sight of the Fangr, which were markedly swifter in attack