Loki

Chapter 19

The Jotuns had tried to go around the Asgardian armies at first, as their goal was to kill Odin. As a result, the battle had spread across the realm, and was now being waged in a ring of sorts around the palace of Asgard - the Jotuns on the outside, trying to fight their way in, and the Asgardians on the inside, working to keep the Frost Giants out. It was at the boundary between the two armies that Loki sought out Thor.

He wove among the warriors like a wisp of smoke, kept invisible and insubstantial by his magic, trying to find his Asgardian brother. He didn't want to, but he couldn't avoid getting a very detailed view of just how the battle was transpiring. What he quickly noticed was that, while the Jotuns were severely outnumbered, the Asgardians were severely outmatched: While the Asgardians were going about their typical battle tactic of shouting at the tops of their lungs and attacking their enemies head-on, the Jotuns were applying a degree of cleverness to their battle tactics - something Asgardians by and large tended to lack. Something Loki saw a lot of was a situation where one Jotun and one Asgardian would charge at each other, only for the Jotun to feint at the last moment, resulting in the Asgardian throwing themselves forwards in a futile attack and leaving themselves completely vulnerable, after which the Jotun would either decapitate them or impale their skull with an icicle spear. For every one Jotun who fell, there were at least a dozen Asgardian casualties; overall, the two armies were very evenly matched, and it wasn't immediately apparent which side was winning. What was apparent, however, was that both sides would be decimated by the battle's end.

Stop it! Loki wanted to shout at the lot of them. Stop it! Stop fighting! It's not worth it! Asgardians, you don't even know what you're fighting for! And Jotuns, can't you see that annihilating yourselves against the Asgardian armies is exactly what Odin wants? It doesn't have to be this way! You don't have to be enemies! Stop killing each other, all of you! Stop it! Stop it! STOP IT!

Of course, there was nothing he could do. He could only do his best not to be sick at the sight of his two families soaking the ground in each other's blood - blood that, in the end, was indistinguishable between the two races as it mixed underfoot - as he wove among the warriors as quickly as he could, searching for Thor. He hadn't thought it would be difficult to find his Asgardian brother - all he should have had to do was search for someone who was making a spectacle of themselves on the front lines. Strangely, though, Thor was nowhere to be seen; the only person on the battlefield making a spectacle of themselves was Enchessa.

And what a spectacle she was making. When Loki saw her, in spite of everything, he couldn't help but stop to watch her in awe. Her every movement meant death for at least one Asgardian warrior; the grace with which she flowed between attacks gave her fighting style the appearance of a deadly dance. A spinning strike forward, an ice blade clenched in each hand, slashed through five surrounding Asgardians; coming to a stop, flinging the two ice blades in opposite directions, where each of them found and embedded themselves in Asgardian throats, so deep that the points came well out the other sides; slashing both hands inward and downwards, throwing her whole body into the movement, sent two razor-thin sickles of ice cleaving through the bodies of another half-dozen Asgardian warriors; without missing a beat, bringing her hands upwards and forcefully rising to her feet, raising a wall of ice that blocked several attacks; a push of one hand shattered the wall into multiple long, deadly-sharp spears of ice; a push of the other hand, and the blades all flew forward, impaling the skulls of over a dozen Asgardians so forcefully that many of the warriors' heads flat-out exploded, showering the already blood-soaked, corpse-covered ground with bits of flesh, bone, and brain. It was clear that Enchessa could easily have punched a hole in the Asgardian defenses and made her way into the palace to kill Odin and end the entire war if she wanted to; what was equally apparent, however, was that, unlike the rest of the Jotuns, her aim was to kill as many Asgardians as she could before the battle's end.