"When I come back I will supply more Asgardian vocabulary words. It is the sorcery I am worried would be too much of a distraction. Be as comfortable as you can," she adds, and she turns to go.
And then she turns into an invisible bird and flies away.
The orcs had been hiding in the dense brush of these foothills, and waiting to attack until the weary host was in their midst; then more of them came pouring in, tens of thousands of them, and the front of the host was overwhelmed and desperately trying to back up into the middle of the host, which was desperately trying to protect the supplies and children.
Oh for fuck's sake.
Loki blinds and deafens every orc she can see, blobs of darkness and silence to follow their eyes and ears, and she changes midair to land Lævateinn-first in the front and scythe through the orcs.
It will keep doing that until there is no more fight. She can wield Lævateinn with enough strength to decapitate an orc even if the thing is long enough to do ten at a time, with the right shape of handle and a firm grip. She clears swaths of them, working her way outward from the host, not bending to tap but twisting to kick downed elves and see if she can get them up again.
Loki's instinct honed over battles with frost giants, strategy lessons, long-running sparring games in the field, is to chase them -
She snarls at the departing orcs but turns and shrinks her weapon and runs for the wounded to dance from body to body.
She falls into step with him when everyone is healed or past it.
"Your opinion on whether they should go blind and deaf indefinitely or recover their senses?"
"Well, I doubt I can speed it up by giving them their sight and hearing back."
"Well, for one thing when I'm using sorcery I am certainly no worse than the third best warrior in the realm, possibly first, I haven't used sorcery in combat enough to be sure; and for another I think the typical Asgardian warrior would take with alacrity to being aimed at orcs instead. And for a third I doubt that if I were supposed to be banished here I should expect company or that if I were not they would use the Bifrost again before discovering its problem."
"Better than I expected, although I was surprised that half of my conversation with the fellow I am presuming was Fëanor was him attempting to learn Asgardian."
"Fëanor invented our writing system, is the only Elf to speak the language of the Valar, and ran the linguistics guild until he'd managed to generate so much political drama that it collapsed under its own weight and now we have three linguistics guilds. Most of what they publish is articles about the shibboleths that have arisen among members of the linguistics guilds. I didn't share that because it seems unlikely to either kill us or save us."