Dalang dismantled his golem armor and started to check the injuries of Gunner, Boss, and Geek. Their gears differentiated them from the rest and their firepower reflected that. Gunner’s high caliber machine gun was shredding the concrete Dalang scavenged to armor himself with. Boss’s grenade left his ears drumming. Geek’s tiny explosive arrows, although missed, caused a sizable explosion. They were close to breaking Dalang’s armor, so he had to toss some rebars at them.

“Nothing personal. You overreacted and I had to protect myself.” Dalang squatted down and talked to Boss, who had a bebar in his abdomen.

“O shit, this creep talks, and I understand him!” Nailed to the wall by a piece of rebar, Gunner still had the strength to comment. “Look at his gas mask and his jumpsuit. We are gonna get butchered.”

“I like this Sapien, fearless even on the brink of death.” Dalang looked at Gunner and said.

Geek lost too much blood and started murmuring something inaudible next to Boss.

“Unluckily, the Valkyries won’t come for you Sapiens so there won’t be glory ever after. However, I can prevent you three from dying, but there are side effects... ”

“What side effects?” Gunner interrupted. “Are you a god? Is this a covenant?”

Dalang ignored him and continued. “You’ll no longer be Sapiens and you’ll be my agents and serve my will.”

“Boss, do you believe this crap?” Gunner looked at Boss and asked.

“Take the deal... We just want to understand this world before we die ...and... Geek and I definitely wanna see more...”

“Great. Finally.” Dalang lifted a chunk of concrete and dropped it in front of the three as an altar. He took out a jug and three copper goblets. “You three will drink this liquor after I drop some of my blood in it.” He unsheathed Boss’s karambit, from his harness, give the knife a spin, and cut his palm with it. Three drops of blood for each goblet.

The Sapiens had never smelled any liquor this divine. They dragged their broken bodies and surrounded the three.

“Kind immortal, would you give us a second chance, too? We are slaves from where we come from and after hearing your words, we want to see more of this world, to be free--” An old man with broken arms approached Dalang, kneeled, and asked.

“FREEDOM? ” Dalang interrupted the injured man. “What a joke. I am not saving those three. I am turning these three into my resource.” Without laying an eye on the rest of the slave soldiers, Dalang proceeded to pour his Asgardian mead into the goblets for the three he had chosen.

“And, I don’t need slaves. I need warriors. You lots are simply so useless that I can’t even be empowered by your death. Now Piss off before I throw you into the train with the dark god.” The old man returned to the crowd and sat down with the rest of the injured soldiers.

“Last chance, you’ll take this or not.” Dalang looked at the three and asked. “You should be grateful, this is your true ticket to this new world.”

“Give it to Geek, first. His injuries cannot wait.” Boss said. Dalang took the first goblet to Geek, ripped off the rebar that pierced his lung, and poured the mead into his wound.

“Now, you will have the keen senses of the Boar.” Dalang chanted.

He then handed the second goblet to Gunner and freed him from being nailed to the wall.

“Drink up, and you shall have the strength of the Boar.” Dalang chanted.

Last, Dalang fed Boss with the last goblet and took the rebar out of his gut.

“Hold your wound tight. You shall have the resilience of the Boar.”

All three of them had healed in a matter of seconds. Gunner was the first to fully recover as he suffered the least severe injury.

“I wanted to thank you. However, gratitude is not what you seek.” Boss stood up and said. “We are not going to kneel, either.”

“I don’t care much for the formalities. Now, any of your sorry asses carrying anything to smoke?”

Boss reached for his pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes and gave one to Dalang. With a snap of his finger, Dalang lit it up and started inhaling it through the tiny opening on this gasmask.

“Is this the crap you all smoke down there? Pfff... Shit is horrible. But it gets the job done.” Dalang looked at the roughly rolled, unfiltered cigarette and spitted pieces of tobacco left in his mouth.

“Everything on the surface is better. The food, the drink, the scenery, the ladies. That much I can promise you.” Dalang inhaled deeply and felt the numbing and hazy sensation brought by carbon monoxides and nicotine.

“How do we address you... Sir? Lord?” Gunner puffed out some smoke and asked.

“I like that, Lord. Sounds menacing.” Dalang smiled under his gas mask.

“What are you the god of, my lord?” Geek said his first words.

“I don’t know. I am not a god. Not yet anyway. But you three are Jöfurrs, the boar-warriors, from now on. ”

“Sounds cool, I dig that name,” Gunner responded. “What exactly do we do?”

“You are my eyes, my ears, and my hands.”Dalang extended

“What the Tartarus are you doing?” Dolus walked out of the train, wiping bloodstain and broken teeth off his cane, and communed with Dalang. “Did you just make these Sapiens your Thralls? Blood Oath with mortals? Are you begging to be branded as Demon?” Even the brows on his mask started frowning.

“The ritual is oriental, the mead is nordic, the blood is from a half-breed who is barely remembered, and everything is under the presence of a trickster god. Which authority is going to make this a case? Huh? Grey areas, my friend. Grey areas.” He paused. “There are always loopholes….”

“And rules are meant to be challenged.” Dolus interrupted him with his own words.

“Guess I have said that before. Ha! Aren’t you a fast learner?”

“Actually…Can your Thrall operate the train and get us to their base? All my treasures are there. I can enlist a bounty and we shall raid the Terminus in my name. Two of us might not be enough.”

“Isn’t it just getting better? O Contractor mine.” More jobs meant more loot. More jobs meant more deeds to be recorded and remembered. “You sure we need more boys to be sharing out loots? I can turn these sorry lot into Necrophages and send them to eat their friends.”

“Nah. As much as I’d like to see that, it would be too messy and too inefficient. Don’t wanna end up like the Pit, where you have to be the side mission. ” Dolus sat down on the make-shift concrete altar, lifted his Owl mask, and drank directly from the container. “We blend in with the slave soldiers and infiltrate them.”

All the sapiens included Dalang’s Thrall, saw a face of glowing darkness and nightmarish terror----a common trick came with any deity’s mask.

“Yeah, right. The vulgar taste still lingers.” Dalang took a long inhale and tossed away the end of the cigarette. “You know what? I’ll let these three go with you. I’ll be the distraction for y’all.”

“You sure I can trust those three Thralls? They seem to be loyal to only themselves.” Dolus sounded concerned. For a deity who mastered deception and subterfuge, trust is an overrated commodity.

“They drank my blood! If I want, I can have hundreds of different ways to kill them, revive them, and kill them again.” Dalang said that one out loud and gazed upon the three. “I can tap into their mind if I want; I can re-edit their memories to serve my purpose!”

“But, I will not do so. Unless their actions force me.” Dalang slowly took off his gas mask and stared at the three with his fiery eyes: his broken tusks pointed upwards like war-torn pikes, his muddy snout breathed smoke and ash like a furnace, and the stench of death and horror oozed out of his mouth like a well connected to the underworld.

Gunner was shocked by their Lord’s true appearance, choked on the cigarette, and started coughing heavily. Geek tried his best to control his gag reflexes from the pungent smell. Boss had no expression at all. He started to worry about what kind of errands he would have to run for such a vicious-looking immortal.

“Damn it, what did I say about hygiene! Pig! ” Dolus genuinely, telepathically sounded disgusted. “Stop showing your true face without warning!”

“My bad. That was for the Sapiens.” Dalang grinned as he heard the injured Sapiens screamed in fear. “So, what do we do the bodies that died from friendly fires?”

“Sapien corpse makes good jerky, you know.” Dalang was clearly trying to gross Dolus out.

“Just Shut up and use your magical pocket to store everything. We are leaving with the train in a few. ”“Are you okay with this? The path ahead has little glory and opulence is not guaranteed.”

“You know. I was a lot like the three thralls I just took in. I wanted to comprehend and make sense of this world. ” Dalang answered. “We called the sapiens svartálfar or myrkálfar: murky ones, the dusky ones---up in Asgard. And it turned out they were Homo Sapiens, which made me one-eighth of them since I am half-mortal and mortals are evolved Sapiens. Killing them started to weigh heavily on my mind, you know. I thought killing the past is no way forward.”

“What changed? You had no problem hurting them. Injuries and infections could be a fate worse than death.” Dolus slightly tilted his head out of habit.

“Oh I started hating myself, and my hate had sept into things that caused my creation.” Dalang loved saying depressing words with a smile on his face. “Such an irony that you asked that question. You love breaking bones, too.”

“Your suppressed form has been unleashed after you fell from the Bifrost. Unfortunately, only the destructive side was released. You then lived like a freed, caged animal, abandoning what you once were. You roamed the wilderness with your new-given freedom, asking for none and answering to none. The ordeal, the fall extinguished your divinity rather than rekindled it. And now your path leads you closer to a daimon more than a deity. ”

“Wow….thanks?” Dalang. “A little too early and too sober for this, aren’t we?”

“Hey, I am a spirit of deception, and observation is the trick. And I asked you as your friend. You need to take good care of yourself, Boar-skin. Free-lancers like you are hard to come by.”

“Yeah yeah, spymaster. One day you’ll get into trouble for knowing too much.” Dalang smiled and put his gas mask back on. “If one day I started doing things that even I wouldn’t tolerate, help me and stop me.” Dalang tapped Dolus on the shoulder. “This is a request from a friend.”

Dalang stretched his back, cracked his joints, and started yelling: “Alright, my little piglets, get to work. Geek, check if the train is still functioning after all these friendly fires, and grab me some fancy firearms and outfits from the dead! Gunner! Move the bodies and those unable to walk back on the train and wipe off all the goos and blood. Boss! Make a speech or something to make sure they comply like a flock.”