[ WP ] You were a soldier in a future conflict , until your heroic death . Now you face the battlefield of the Ragnarok of Nordic myth , with your full war kit .

Hafthor was a giant - almost eight feet tall, clad in black armor, and wielding the mighty *Dramthir The Unfathomable*. It was hard to tell which scars were from battle, and which scars were self-inflicted tattoos - both telling true stories of conquest and glory. 
 
 The first time that I had met him was in the dining halls of Valhallla. He had made some unbecoming remark about *letting anyone in*. I had slapped him across the face. 
 
 The older ones do n't take well to being struck like that, especially by a woman. 
 
 He clenched my neck and picked me up off of the floor, bellowing Norse profanity at me. You get all sorts of beat up in basic, and I've since been killed a hundred times during the day's battles, but I'd never felt hurt quite like that. Thor himself had to separate us. The ground shook as Hafthor stomped away, and as much as I wanted to take his head in battle, I knew that even I could n't best him - not up close. 
 
 But now it was the end of times, and rules had gone the way of the polar bear. I was six miles away, ocular implants rendering him as clear as our understanding of atmospheric diffraction would permit. He swung *Dramthir* like a child sword fighting with a twig, slicing another demon cleanly in half. *stead.IO* steadied the jitter that even six generations of neural optimization could not quite remove from my hands. 
 
 The forest glowed as my *Heimdall* class battle rifle propelled a slug at 1 % *c*. It was n't a bullet, so much as it was the breath of a thermonuclear dragon, burning away poor Hafthor and the mountain of demon corpses upon which he once stood. 
 
 Two of us will make it to the life after this one, and I'll be goddamned if Hafthor is one of them.
