The Battle for Nome

By Swords of the Wolves

Prologue

Sometimes things don’t turn out to be as good as you expected it to be. This was the case with Balto and Jenna, who found out many disadvantages to being human or human-like. They were simply wandering out in the woods when a voice began to speak. It was menacing, yet familiar. It was the voice of Steele. He gave them both a threat that neither of them took lightly. He warned that if they do not leave each other or the city of Nome, then he would take it and Jenna from Balto by force. To make his point more clear, he stood up on his hind legs, showing his balance that Balto and Jenna thought to have been mastered by only humans. He also drew a sword from his side, another human-like thing that Steele was now able to do. It was scary for both of them. They ran back to their boat, and wondered what they should do. Leaving each other was one thing that they knew that they would never do, but leaving Nome was something that they would not want to do either. “I would rather see this boat be up in flames than see it under the control of Steele,” as Balto put it. It was not long until they could see no other solution than to leave Nome. As they began to leave to gather up their pups that still remained in Nome, Kodi burst in, looking frantic. “Mother, father, you are needed! This way!” Balto and Jenna wasted no time in following him, and Kodi led them to the boiler room where Balto and Jenna had made their love clear to each other. There, waiting for them, was a grey mist. It wasn’t smoke, but it had a supernatural feeling around it that made all of them feel uneasy. Without warning, streaks of it shot through Balto, Jenna, and Kodi, making them gasp for breath at the shock. It continued to flow into them until there was none left in the air. A voice came from the mist, “Nome must not fall into the hands of Steele. You must fight him. These gifts I have bestowed upon you will help you.” Then the voice was gone.

The story

Balto was silent. His mind was now filled with things that he never remembered learning, skills he thought he could never do, and the sense that he would never be the same again. He had a feeling in his front paws that felt strange, so he looked at them, and he saw that he actually had fingers! He moved them around like he sometimes saw humans do. He noticed a weight on his back, and reached back with his human-like arms, and felt two sword handles angled so he could draw them with ease. “If Steele couldn’t do this, I wonder if he would think I was a freak human-wolf-husky cross, or would he fear me?” said Balto to himself. He looked up at Jenna, who was doing almost the same thing that Balto was doing, but a little differently.

Jenna, after noticing her human-like dexterity, reached back to what was strapped around her. She pulled it out and looked at it. It was a bow. Finely strung and with fine carvings of wolves on it. She felt her back again and sure enough, there were arrows there. She also noticed that she was also wearing a sword on her back. She drew it. It was not as long as most double-handed swords, but it was thinner, and possibly deadlier. She found her mind to also be flowing with skills and things that she never thought she could do and things that she never remembered learning. She wondered how she would find out what those things meant and how she would use them.

Kodi was not that different mentally than the others, but the weapons he had were different. He had two swords, like Balto, but his were curved like sickles rather than straight. He was one who wanted to try them out right then and there, but he knew that his parents would advise against it. With his swords drawn, he swung them around, a couple times like his thoughts told him he could do, and then tried a couple other moves that seemed useful. He also tried to make sense of the strange words that he somehow knew. He thought that they were enchantments of some sort based on things that he heard the children discussing when they talked of stories they had just heard of. He reached into his new knowledge of these enchantments further, and found out what they did! He decided to do a harmless one first and made created water on the floor. He looked at his father and mother, who watched him do that, and said to them, “Well, I think we should be able to fight off Steele with these things, don’t you think?”

Balto sighed. “I hope. Maybe we should get to building up our defenses around the boat with our new magical powers. I think we know a few things that will help with that.” Balto and the others walked back to the boat, acting as if nothing happened so they wouldn’t arouse suspicion among the humans. When they got back to the boat, they tried out the spells that would build up the rock around it. It allowed them to have a fallback point should Steele get through this far. The rock had an opening that was small enough for them to get into, and they could always close it up if they needed to. Still, Balto and Jenna worried about Steele, since he had not given them a time period in his threat, and that could mean he could come any second now…

That night, Jenna kept watch, since she was the only one of the three that had long-range weapons. Using her new two-legged balance, she stood up and scanned the horizon. She almost got down but she saw a small thing in the distance. It came closer and Jenna could see that the figure in the front was black and white. It was being followed by hundreds more. She didn’t have to look any longer, for she knew who it was. Jenna got back to the boat and told Balto and Kodi of the approaching force. Both of them drew their swords and ran out of the boat.

It was the first time that Kodi saw Steele, the hateful bully of his father. He had hated even the sound of his name before, and now, seeing Steele in the flesh made Kodi hate him even more, and he gripped his swords more tightly.

Balto looked more at what kinds of followers Steele had gathered. To his shock, they were humans! He realized that Steele could convince weak-minded people to be on his side, as all of them seemed to show no resistance to his powers. The humans were armed with guns, but Balto, Jenna, and Kodi knew moves that would block bullets with their swords. Balto then noticed that Steele had gotten taller, seemingly, but he knew that he had really just stood up on his hind legs and started walking as a human walks.

A bullet hit the ground near where they were standing. Balto raised his swords in a T-shape in front of him; Kodi in a curved X-shape, Jenna drew back an arrow, waiting to fire. The battle had begun.

Another bullet flew at them, but Kodi was able to block it with his swords before it could hit him. Then another, blocked by Balto’s swords this time, then another blocked by Jenna’s bow. Jenna decided that they had to start fighting back, so she let fly her arrow, and as it went into the crowd, they saw one figure fall. Casualty number one was on the human’s side. Jenna now knew why humans fighting each other with guns would lie down on their stomachs; they were easy targets standing up.

Balto got an idea. He told Jenna to take up position on top of the boat to get a good shot from up there. Jenna nodded and headed up. He and Kodi waited where they were as Jenna took out some of the humans from up above and they blocked the increasing number of incoming bullets.

As the force of humans came closer, Kodi got rather uneasy. The feeling rose inside of him as it got closer and finally he let out a war cry at them and charged at them, but was running at them in the way he would have if he did not have human abilities. Kodi, however, knew what he was doing.

Balto got the hint at what he was doing, so he sheathed his swords and followed suit. As they got next to the army, they jumped up, and as they were in the air, they drew their swords, rolled them around their hands, and as they landed, they slashed through the nearest person to them.

Kodi knew that his first hit was fatal, so he moved on and started to attack multiple groups of them. He found that the side of his swords that curve outwards were more effective for hacking into their bodies, and that the other side of the swords, when used together, could effectively be used as a deadly pair of scissors when directed at the neck. He found that he could use the points of the swords to stab the enemies next to him by simply swinging them to the side, which would do as much damage as if they were on the ground. He was caught a little surprised once when a human armed with a bayonet parried his blow, but he quickly recovered from surprise and engaged in a brief clash of blades until Kodi was able to block the blade with one sword and stick the other under and behind his rib cage.

Balto, however, looked briefly for Steele after the first human nearest him met his end. Steele somehow was nowhere to be seen. Balto kept fighting on, thinking that maybe Jenna had already picked him off already. He knew that Jenna was still firing away when he saw one fly into the neck of a person who had his gun on Balto’s forehead. He continued to fight, and he saw that the humans were drawing knives and affixing their bayonets with blades. They wouldn’t shoot at Balto or Kodi because they did not want to fire on each other on accident. Balto just hoped that this had made them forget about Jenna up above so they would not shoot at her. Balto decided to prevent that in the most effective way he knew of.