Chapter 1: The Last Hooligan Standing
After the defeat of infamous dragon hunter Grimmel the Gristly, the colony of New Berk flourished and enjoyed nearly three decades of prosperity. During that time, Chief Hiccup sired two children with his wife Astrid: the older of the two was his daughter Zephyr, who took after himself as a logical thinker; the younger of the two was his son Nuffink, who took more after Astrid as an impulsive fighter. Zephyr was a tall, thin girl with freckled cheeks and brown hair in two braids under a helmet. Nuffink was a little shorter, but equally thin, with pale blond hair that he was always sweeping out of his eyes, a brown leather headband, and skin that was a little fairer than his sister's.
Those years of prosperity abruptly ended when a raven that had a scroll tied to its foot was found on Hiccup and Astrid's dining table. It was a call for aid from their allies, the Berserker Chief Dagur the Deranged and his sister Heather. The Berserkers were under attack by ruthless savages known only as the Wendel. It was unknown where the Wendel had originated from, as they seemingly appeared out of nowhere. They were without civility of any kind and spoke in a tongue that only they understood. They attacked without mercy by night and in fog and fought as if they were animals instead of men, leaving utter destruction in their wake. That wasn't the worst part, however.
The worst part was that the Wendel were cannibals. Dozens upon dozens of half-eaten Viking corpses had been found in the ruins of villages that the Wendel left behind. And not just the Berserkers either, but other Viking tribes, too. The Meatheads, Uglithugs, Lava Louts, and Bog Burglars had all been decimated by this new enemy, leaving no survivors. Not even the dreaded Outcast Tribe stood a chance against them.
Hiccup immediately gathered his strongest warriors, including his wife and children, and set sail for the main island of the Berserkers. The wind was with them, and they took minimal provisions for minimum weight and maximum speed.
They were too late.
The village was in flames, the whole tribe had been massacred, and the Wendel were gone. Not even any Wendel corpses remained, and there surely must have been plenty with how fearsome the Berserkers were as a whole, not to mention Dagur and Heather as individuals. A brief funeral was held for the fallen warriors, then they rushed back to New Berk in an attempt to return before the Wendel attacked the virtually undefended village they'd left behind.
...
"MORE STAKES! We need to finish this barricade by nightfall!" Hiccup ordered, the breeze ruffling his gray-streaked hair and beard and the fur on his yak-skin cape, the sword in his hand glinting in the waning sunlight. He helped where he could as men and women alike milled around him, lining hidden pits and trenches with sharp wooden stakes to repel the approaching invaders. Nuffink took a break from sharpening weapons at the blacksmith's shop to relieve the lookout of duty. "How does it look up there, son?" Hiccup called.
"Not good, Dad! There's a massive fog bank approaching fast from the west!" Nuffink called back while holding the makeshift spyglass to his eye. Hiccup swore; if the Wendel came with that fog, they would be there much sooner than he thought. Raising a hollowed-out yak's horn to his mouth, he blew a sharp trumpet blast.
"EVERYONE, OVER THE WALL! PREPARE FOR BATTLE!" he bellowed. Everyone hastily gathered up their tools and ascended the ropes that would take them back inside the wall of logs that surrounded the village. "Archers, to your stations!" Hiccup ordered, and two dozen men and women took positions on top of the wall with bows and arrows, Nuffink among them. Hiccup, Astrid, and Zephyr were part of a group of Vikings standing in front of the gate to intercept any Wendel that should gain entry. Faces were painted, arrows were nocked, and weapons and shields were held at the ready. Everyone was quiet, holding their breath in anticipation. Even the birds in the forest had gone silent.
Then the fog rolled in.
The only thing that could be seen more than two feet in front of them was a line of torches so long and so dense that it looked as if Jormungand, the World Serpent himself, was preparing to attack them. Hiccup wished, not for the first time, that the dragons hadn't exiled themselves to the Hidden World; if there was ever a time that they needed their help, it was now.
The Wendel's countless torches burned the fog away as they approached, allowing the Hooligan tribe to finally get a glimpse of their enemy. The Wendel horde was composed of both men and women, their entire bodies streaked with all manner of filth. They wore no clothing, not even loincloths. Instead, they wore the hides of various creatures, ranging from deer and boars to wolves and bears, draped over their backs like capes, with the skulls of said creatures acting as helmets for their heads. Their hair and beards were long and matted, their postures were stooped or even crouched, and their eyes ranged in color from ferocious icy blue to crazed carnivorous yellow, all with mad glints in them. The only weapons they carried were the torches. It was as if they truly believed that they were animals, every single one of them.
The first Wendel to approach, when he was close enough, drew back his arm and flung his torch over the wall. Nuffink followed the torch with his eyes as it flew like a comet and landed on the thatch roof of the Great Hall, setting it ablaze almost instantly. The rest of the Wendel followed suit as they marched straight past the wall. The majority of the torches either landed harmlessly in the dirt and mud or clattered equally harmlessly against the Vikings' shields. However, a few lucky hits set several buildings on fire. A few Vikings tried to split off from the group in an effort to douse the flames, but Hiccup had other ideas.
"Forget the buildings! We can rebuild them! Focus on countering their attacks!" Hiccup yelled, and luckily the elders and children of the tribe had been moved to an easily fortifiable hillside cave, so all of the buildings were empty.
Nuffink turned his attention back to the Wendel and let loose the first arrow, impaling one of the men through the throat. The Wendel started to fall like a soothsayer's rune-stones under an onslaught of arrows tipped with a fast-acting poison. The archers were in no foreseeable danger of running short, for at each person's feet was a wooden bucket packed to bursting with ammunition.
The Wendel growled and howled, mourning their fallen comrades. Then they angrily started massing in front of the wall in numbers that the archers were hard-pressed to subdue. The Wendel were forced to retreat when Snotlout Jorgenson, one of Hiccup's friends, hurled a barrel of fish oil down on them that they unintentionally set on fire with their own torches.
"SNOTLOUT! SNOTLOUT! OI! OI! OI!" the older Viking yelled in victory as the Wendel struggled in vain to extinguish themselves, making Nuffink facepalm. Nuffink then saw something that made his face go pale.
"Oh, that can't be good..." he said. Twelve of the Wendel's biggest warriors, looking like giants compared to the rest of the horde, were rushing towards the wall, carrying a gigantic tree trunk between them. The part of the trunk that had originally been at the base of the tree had been sharpened to a point. "DAD! BRACE THE GATE! THEY HAVE A BATTERING RAM!" Nuffink cried over his shoulder.
"You heard him! Brace the gate!" Hiccup ordered, and several Vikings rushed forward to use their bodies to hold the gate closed. Meanwhile, Nuffink and the other archers concentrated their fire on the giant Wendel, only for their arrows to have little to no effect. By the time two of the giants had been felled, the rest had slammed the ram into the gate with tremendous force. The Vikings attempting to hold it closed were knocked off-balance, but quickly went back to bracing themselves against it.
In trying to turn the Wendel giants into pincushions, Nuffink and the other archers finally ran out of arrows. The giants rammed the gate a second time, forming a huge crack. Casting aside his bow, Nuffink drew his sword and somersaulted off the top of the wall to help his family and friends repel the invasion. The third strike with the ram turned the gate into matchsticks, and Wendel warriors poured like a river through the newly created opening. It seemed that their strategy was to attack like ants, overwhelming their enemy with their sheer numbers.
Never had the Hooligan tribe as a whole been so valiant as in that moment. The Thorston twins, Ruffnut and Tuffnut, cackled madly as they hurled vials of exploding potions, leaving charred and smoking corpses in their wake. Fishlegs Ingerman sent three bodies flying with each swing of his mighty warhammer that nobody else was able to wield, Snotlout doing likewise with his enormous iron gauntlets. Hiccup and Astrid fought side-by-side in coordination that few were able to match. Zephyr was untouchable with her long spear. Eret son of Eret slashed his dual swords with devastating precision.
Nuffink saw that two of the original twelve giants were still standing, so he made them his top priority. He ran up behind the first one and slashed the backs of his heels with his sword, then decapitated him when he fell to his knees. The second giant tried to crush him with his fists. Nuffink rolled to the side, drew a dagger from his boot, and threw it at the giant's face, impaling him through the eye. He made the mistake of stopping to catch his breath, and a Wendel woman tackled him, dragging him by the collar to a secluded place away from the battle so that she could kill him and eat him.
Pain unlike anything he'd ever felt erupted in the side of Nuffink's face as the Wendel swiped her long, jagged fingernails across his left eye when he tried to fight back. She dragged him under an overturned wooden cart and began frantically tearing at his clothes in an attempt to get to his soft innards. Her fingernails cut deep into his flesh in numerous places across his torso, and he desperately grappled with her before her gnashing teeth, which had been filed into points, could sink into his throat. Nuffink held her by her own throat while he groped for something to use as a weapon with his free hand. He found a sharp fragment of the cart's axle and immediately thrust it through the Wendel woman's heart.
The fight and blood loss took their toll on Nuffink, and once he rolled the corpse off of him, he lapsed into unconsciousness while still lying under the cart.
...
It was unclear how much time had passed before Nuffink woke up. All he knew was that it had been long enough for scabs to form over the gouges on his face, chest, and stomach. He couldn't see out of his left eye, meaning the eye was probably gouged out. Everything around him was quiet.
Too quiet.
He gingerly crawled out from under the cart, and his heart stopped at the sight of the carnage surrounding him on all sides. It seemed that the Hooligans and Wendel had killed each other off, and he was the only one on either side who was still alive. Even the elders and children had been slaughtered. By Odin's grace, the ravens were only feeding on the Wendel's corpses and not the Vikings.
Stumbling over to the village doctor's hut and looking in the large mirror, Nuffink took off his wide leather headband and bit down on it as he carefully cleaned out his wounds and stitched them shut. There was nothing he could do about his eye except scoop out what was left of it. Shoving into its place a false eye he found lying around that was made from a round white moonstone, he covered the ensemble with a crude eyepatch made from his headband.
Next, he went down to the docks and lashed together all of the longboats except one, which he saved for himself. He piled the ships high with firewood doused with oil, then, one by one, dragged the corpses of his fallen tribesmen to the docks and arranged them on top of the firewood, saving his family for last. He let the tears flow freely as he dragged an oil-saturated sail over the bodies of his parents and sister, since there was nobody but the animals to see them. That done, he wrapped a strip of gauze around a single arrow and dipped it in oil. The sun had long since set, and a light drizzle had begun to fall.
"Lo there do I see my father! Lo there do I see my mother! Lo there do I see my sisters and brothers, the whole line of my people, all the way to the beginning! They bid me take my place among them, in the halls of Valhalla, where the brave live forever!" Nuffink cried out, thrusting the gauze-tipped arrow into the blazing campfire next to him. Loading the flaming arrow into his father's favorite hunting bow, he took aim with his good eye and fired the arrow at the ship in the middle of the lashed-together fleet, the ship his family was on.
His aim was true, and the ship caught fire. With the ships arranged like they were, the fire spread to the whole fleet. Nuffink kept vigil until the last of the burning longboats sank beneath the waves, then returned to his family's cottage in the empty village to sleep.
If you couldn't tell, this first chapter was heavily inspired by the movie The Thirteenth Warrior, starring Antonio Banderas. He plays a devout Muslim inadvertently thrust into a war between the Northmen (Vikings) and their unknown adversaries, the Eaters of the Dead, otherwise known as the Wendel. The word Wendel has Germanic pronunciation, so the "W" actually sounds like a "V."
Nuffink Hofferson Haddock (as I believe his full name would be, with him being the son of Hiccup Haddock and Astrid Hofferson) is now the last surviving member of the Hooligan Tribe. In the next chapter, with nothing worth staying on New Berk for, he will leave the Barbaric Archipelago behind entirely to begin a new life in a new land.