BY SURTR'S BLADE - A Heavy Metal Apocalypse

You are lying naked in a crater.

Your teeth taste the dirt as you lie in the earth, still smoldering from your entrance. You wearily stand, ash flaking off your body as you stumble around in a daze. You shake your hands once, then twice, and you look around for it...where is it? Where'd you put it?

You stumble out of the crater, footfalls starting clumsy, then getting more steady as you look for the weapon; you landed in the remains of a fallen castle, bricks falling and collapsing and rumbling and tumbling. You sneer as your mind comes back to you.

That's right. You met a king once, didn't you?

Your feet slide across the ground and you see the castle in the distance. The top of it glows red.

He summoned you here. Here to get your power.

Your teeth grind against each other, and you stare forwards as thunderclouds gather around the castle. You've seen men like his kind time and time again; always the same. Always cowardly and weak, always seeking power. This isn't the first time your power has been stolen.

And as you stumble forwards you can see it; you see the hilt of a great weapon, lying on its side. You grasp it firmly with a single muscled hand, before you heft it over your head; even with most of your strength gone, you are still superhuman.

You are more than a mortal.

You are the first woman.

You are a God.

Your name is Freya.

And by your own name, you will get your strength back, and bring ruin to this realm.

You stop in your tracks as your grip tightens. You see an army rumbling towards you in the distance; tiny from here. The cowardly king was wise enough to try and end your life with a thousand men, it seems.

[] Fight. Weakened though you are, they are but ants.

[] Spare their lives and flee. You needn't fight here.

[] Hide. Watch their movements.
-[] And if the time calls for it, strike.
-[] And abstain; there needn't be bloodshed.

[x] Fight.

You bring the hilt of your weapon over your shoulder, and for a second muscle memory commands you to summon the primordial rage of the earth below. Then you remember that you have to actually fight.

You smile. You were, after all, a God of War, Death, Virilty and Light in your heyday. And it's been eons since you've had a good war.

The army marches towards you as clouds gather overhead; it's beginning to rain. You can hear the rumblings of hooves on earth, of feet both armored and unarmored. In the distance, you see a line of people getting to their knees as rifles are aimed by armored men and women, as wizards lined their spells up to blast you to kingdom come.

Rain falls upon your caramel skin, running through platinum blonde hair as you take in a deep breath.

You stretch your hand to the side, hilt in your palm.

You let anger flow into your blade.

The hilt shakes and rumbles and howls as the ground below it begins to glow. Your teeth clench as you let hate course through your body, and weight begins to build on your already heavy hilt. Molten lava explodes from the dirt, rising into the air in an eerie parody of pouring liquid. A marker of sludge, nine feet long, begins to form, before you twist your wrist. The blade grows _solid,_ lava flickering before a hardened shell gives it form; a gigantic broken blade. At the base is a floating ball of liquid metal, and all along its hilt are runes that shift and change, lined with the markings of a civilization long-dead.

A gun fires. A bullet makes a crack as it whizzes by your head.

A mistake.

In a motion too fast for a weapon as large and heavy as your blade, you bring the weapon over your head and slam downwards. The ground below you is cratered in an explosion of red-hot magma, and your blade is gone again. You soar through the air, wind running through your hair, rain hitting your bare skin as you soar over the heads of the army. What looked like a thousand from afar was really just a hundred men and women, all there to pick off a weakling.

Perfect.

You whip the hilt over your head, and the lava explodes back out of the ground all over again. A wave of molten metal speeds through the air, carefully arched so that it just overshoots. You bring the hilt forwards, and it speeds past you and latches into your hilt. You lurch forwards, weapon spinning, metal screaming, weapon seething as water droplets immediately evaporate upon your skin. Gunfire grows more intense as you get closer and closer to the army.

A fireball misses your face. A lightning bolt scratches your cheek. A bullet bounces across your blade. Then you hit the ground and bodies go flying.

Anyone not incinerated is knocked off their feet by the combination of heat and force. You slide across the ground with an empty hilt before you bring back the blade. Momentum carries you bare-footed across the ground as you swing with the force of a thousand men through a crowd of people. Armor puts up a token attempt to stop your swing, but it can hardly stand up to a metric tonne of molten rock.

A woman tries to attack you with a zweihander. You respond by turning her head into molten slag with a swing.

A man tries to fire a gun point-blank into your head. Convection causes the bullet to cook in his hand. His fingers are blown off, before you plunge a fist into his breastplate and rip out his sternum.

Wisely, the wizards of the group take a step back. They bark orders, some reading staves in preparation for a strike, others bring out summoning books.

Honestly, you think that's cute. You grab one unfortunate soldier by the face and take a look. She looks like a grenadier. You slam her back into the flat of your blade, and she screams into your palm as her back catches fire. You throw her straight to the wizards, and her ammo immediately cooks off. There's an explosion of flame and sharpnel, before the remaining wizard quickly finishes his summoning.

A golem emerges from the dirt, eyes glowing red in the rain, your sword illuminating elaborate stone armor. Dust and dirt falls from it as the golem towers over you, before it plunges its fist into the dirt and rips out an elaborate zweihander of solid rock.

You respond by headbutting its chest. It stumbles backwards with a smoldering crater in the middle of its chest, before it quickly swings down with its zweihander. You block it with a swing of your blade. You can feel your feet digging into the mud, as several of the survivors immediately begin to retreat. You push back, but the golem pushes back even harder. You can just tell that your strength has been sapped away. Were it not for that king, things would be on track. You would be whole.

Your teeth sizzle with anger. Your eyes pop with apocalyptic rage. Your skin turns blackened as a thin layer of soot and ash lines your body, and your bones turn molten with anger. You scream, spittle of molten hate spew onto the dirt as smoke and steam billow out of your throat. Then you shove.

The golem's weapon shatters under the combination of pressure and heat, and you impale. Your molten blade plunges through the head of the Golem out the back of its skull, before you let the magma seep through its pores. It stumbles back and grasps at you, before you pull up just a little bit and yank down.

The blade rips into the body of the Golem and tears it in half, your feet hit the ground just a moment later. It collapses in simmering pieces, as you fall to your feet and let out a long, deep withered sigh.

The rest of the army retreated after your display; by the looks of the bodies around you, you managed to kill two thirds of them. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot left of the corpses...

But you're certain you can find something.

[] Loot the corpses.

[] No need to loot. Go to town and look for a smith.

[] Find the survivors.