by Hondo Jinx
Then Dan realized his mistake. He should have put his back to Holly’s, forming a hard center with three-hundred-and-sixty-degree coverage.
Everything had happened so quickly, though, and the wily goblins had forced Dan and Holly slowly apart, further opening the passageway. More of them flooded through the gap.
Nadia charged into the fray, spinning through the goblin ranks, her glowing blades flashing. To either side of the whirling thief, goblins dropped, clutching vainly at gaping wounds she’d slashed across their throats.
But there were still so many goblins. As they surged forward, threatening to overwhelm Nadia, Dan switched tactics.
He retreated into the center of the cavern. This opened a hole in the Noob’s defensive wall. The goblins howled with bloodthirsty glee and rushed at Dan in a muddy river bristling with swords and spears.
But Dan hadn’t just redirected the flow of attackers. He had also given himself space.
“Come on!” he roared, and ripped Wulfgar from his sheath.
Then Dan went completely apeshit, hacking and slashing, kicking and stomping, breaking bones and spilling guts in a mad frenzy.
The single-minded goblins came on, climbing over fallen comrades and slipping in the wet mess of steaming entrails.
Dan slaughtered wave after wave of attackers, his battle cries inseparable from the roared curses of his blood-soaked two-handed sword.
Then it was over.
Dan stood upon a stinking carpet of dead goblins, panting for breath and covered in hot blood.
Having moved to that red place beyond pain, he now forced himself to survey his wounds. The goblins had slashed and stabbed and bitten him. Minor wounds covered him.
He turned to his women, who stood together, examining corpses and talking. “Everyone okay?”
They nodded. Holly’s bracers and Nadia’s speed and dexterity had kept them safe.
“Well done,” Zeke said, emerging from the shadowy rear of the room with a tentative look on his face. Zuggy’s head popped out of his poncho, looking just as wary.
“Nice of you to lend a hand, Zeke,” Dan said sarcastically, and bent down to pry a battered short sword from the hand of a dead goblin. Even a third-rate short sword would be better than his little knife in cramped quarters.
Zeke joined the girls, who were talking excitedly.
“Come on,” Dan said. “We don’t have time to loot corpses.”
“We’re not,” Holly said. “They have words on their foreheads.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Goblins are weird. Let’s go.”
“This one says NOOBS,” Nadia said, pointing to a female goblin missing an arm.
“It’s some kind of message,” Holly said.
“Eat at Joe’s,” Dan joked, but then he glanced at one of the dead goblins at his feet and noticed another, smaller tattoo on its eyelid.
“Hey,” Dan called. “SKY here has a number tattooed on his eyelid. 21.”
The Noobs soon realized that all twenty-nine of the goblins had tattooed foreheads and eyelids.
“Put them in order,” Holly said. “Where’s number one?”
Dan groaned. “We don’t have time for this. The other teams aren’t fiddling around with corpse puzzles. They’re racing toward the treasure.”
But his teammates ignored him.
“Here’s number one,” Nadia said. “GREETINGS.”
Holly smiled. “NOOBS is number two. Find number three.”
That’s when Dan realized that his teammates might be onto something and pitched in.
The Noobs hurried, untangling corpses, pulling down eyelids, and lugging dead goblins into the main chamber, where they assembled the world’s most morbid puzzle, which turned out to be some kind of poem.
Greetings, Noobs.
Good luck to you.
Here’s a riddle,
To help you through:
Keep going down,
Till you reach the sky.
You’ll reach the chest,
When both knights die.
“Sounds like we have to kill some knights,” Dan said. Truth be told, he hated riddles, preferring to hack and slash his way to glory. “Maybe they’re guarding the final treasure?”
“How do we reach the sky by going down?” Holly mused.
“Only one way to find out,” Nadia said. “Keep moving downward.”
46
Gruesome Fruit
Dan led the way, torch in one hand, crappy little sword in the other.
They hurried along the passageway, which sloped gently downward into the earth. When the corridor T-ed into another rough-hewn hallway, they chose the side that sloped downward and hustled forward until they arrived at a large wooden door.
“Hold on,” Nadia said, examining the door for traps. She inspected the edges slowly, tracing them with the tip of her dagger. Dan could see her jaw muscles clenching and unclenching.
“It’s fine,” he said, and reached for the door handle. “We don’t have time to keep slowing down.”
But Nadia held up one hand. “Wait.”
Leaning forward, she squinted at the door handle. Then she turned, stared into the darkness behind them, and told everyone to press up against the walls.
Once the Noobs had flattened themselves against the corridor walls, Nadia lay upon the floor, reached up, jabbed at the door handle with her dagger, and jerked her arm back to her body.
Whap-whap-whap!
Three arrows vibrated, now jutting from the center of the wooden door.
“Good call,” Dan admitted.
“You can’t rush everything in life,” Nadia said, and they opened the door.
That’s when things got strange.
Not that a riddle tattooed across the foreheads of dead goblins wasn’t odd, but the space beyond the door was remarkably bizarre.
Stepping into the room was like stepping onto the peak of some flat-topped mountain.
The room was cold and dark and windy. Powerful gales howled through the darkness, extinguishing their torches and making them squint. The freezing wind roared over them, making their cloaks crack like flags in a storm.
Without their torches, they could see nothing.
At least Dan could see nothing.
“I see no heat,” Holly reported. The wind was so loud that she had to shout it twice for them to hear her.
Ah yes, Dan thought. Holly’s an elf. She has dark vision.
As he understood it, dark vision allowed elves to see heat signatures but not much else, so it wouldn’t be much good to them right now.
No one bothered to relight the torches. There would be no shielding them from this wind.
Nadia pulled out her magical daggers, which gave off a weak glow. Crouching down, she examined the floor.
“Careful,” Nadia said, pointing past Dan’s feet. “Drop off. Big one.”
Dan looked at the floor where Nadia was pointing, and his heart did a backflip.
There was no floor behind him.
The Noobs stood upon a stone rectangle, the top landing of a set of stone steps that descended into the unknown. To either side, a dark void gaped, screaming icy wind.
“We have to keep going down,” Dan shouted against the roaring wind.
“Wait,” Holly said. “I’m going to try something.”
Holly lifted one hand and spoke, her words lost in the raging wind.
Then pop-pop, pop-pop-pop…
Softball-sized bundles of blue-white flame whooshed from her outstretched palm, arching out into the darkness like Roman candle pyrotechnics.
Dan’s jaw dropped.
Holly swiveled side to side, launching balls of flame up, down, out, and away, partially illuminating the vast space around them. The fiery projectiles were magical, so the wind didn’t affect them. They simply soared through the darkness, then tumbled away and sputtered out.
The Noobs were standing atop a wide set of stone stairs that descended into a massive cavern. Just how massiv
e, they couldn’t say. The flames trailed light across a wide-open space, then petered out without any sign of a ceiling or walls or a floor. Only a set of stairs descending into a yawning darkness howling with freezing wind.
Then the spell died, and they were in darkness again.
Everyone hesitated for a moment. This was clearly the way down, if they wanted to follow the riddle, but the steps were pitch black again, and one wrong step or a stronger blast of icy wind could send one or all of them plummeting into the void.
“I’ll go first,” Dan said, moving past them.
He started down the stairs, testing each new step, sliding his boot back and forth, doing his best to make sure that he wasn’t angling off one side or another.
The wind battered him, forcing him to hunker into a crouch.
Dan had inched his way down perhaps a dozen steps when Zeke said, “Oh screw it,” and a globe of bright light sixty feet across encircled them. The gigantic cavern remained in shadow, but noon-bright light revealed the stairs and landing behind them and a long stretch of stairs before them.
“Keep going,” Zeke told Dan. “The light will move with us.”
Not for the first time, Dan felt like strangling the old man. “You can cast a light spell?”
“I congratulate you on your firm grasp of the obvious,” Zeke said.
Dan frowned. “Why didn’t you cast it before?”
The wizard shrugged. “I like to play it cool,” he explained as they descended. “Let you kids have your fun. But darkness creeps me out. Reminds me of the Plane of Ever-Shade.”
The weird old wizard launched into a series of weird recollections about his extensive travels through parallel dimensions, making Dan wish that the wind would blow hard enough to drown out the old man’s non-stop rambling.
Dan didn’t know exactly how long they descended those stairs. He only knew that it felt like forever.
They had traveled at least a mile when they reached the tips of the highest spikes. Continuing their descent, they realized that to either side of the stairs rose a forest of spikes, some of which bore gruesome fruit: suits of armor impaled with drooping skeletons still inside.
Guess they didn’t have a wizard with a light spell to guide their way, Dan thought, and he shouted to Zeke, “How much longer will this spell work?”
“Oh, a while,” Zeke said, matter-of-factly.
We’d better make it to the bottom before it gives out, Dan thought.
He couldn’t imagine going back at this point. But crawling down another mile or two of dark steps with ice cold winds blasting them didn’t sound great, either.
The cold was intense. As a barbarian from the Endless Mountains, he was no stranger to winter, but he hoped that the others were holding up all right.
Fifteen minutes later, they finally reached the bottom of the massive cavern. The Noobs cheered and embraced.
The ground beneath their feet was soil, soft with loam. The wind wasn’t so intense down here, but a loud creaking filled the air. The sound was many-noted and rhythmic, like a thousand boats, moored and rocking in an unsteady sea.
It was the spikes.
And Dan saw then that the spikes were trees. A tightly packed forest of tall, straight, limbless trees sharpened to points.
“Man,” Dan said, “whoever made this place is fucking weird.”
They followed a winding path into the forest. Dan took point, Wulfgar in hand, and the sword launched into a curse-laden rant about just how much he hated this creepy-ass place.
“Shh,” Dan said, hushing the sword.
He had heard something, faintly, in the wind. Though the sound had been too faint for his conscious mind to identify, it had sparked a bone deep, primal fear that made the hair on his arm and the back of his neck stand up.
What was coming for them out of the darkness?
“I heard it, too,” Holly said, sounding worried. “It sounded like… there!” She pointed into the darkness. “Three heat signatures. Four… no, five. They’re big, coming fast, running on all fours. They’re giving off a lot of heat!”
47
Kill That One First!
Dan squinted into the darkness, wishing for night vision. Around him, everyone prepared for battle. Holly laid her staff at her feet, strung her bow, and nocked an arrow.
Nadia filled her fists with glowing daggers.
Then Dan spotted five sets of glowing red eyes racing through the darkness, coming this way.
A thunderous bark shook the darkness. Then another. Then the charging beasts were all barking and growling.
One by one, the eyes disappeared as huffing flames billowed out, giving the rough impression of huge, dark shapes moving very quickly. Then the flames died away, and the red eyes returned, having drawn much closer.
“Hellhounds,” Zeke said, sounding pleasantly surprised. “Terribly interesting creatures.”
“Great,” Dan said. “Do you know a spell that will kill them?”
“I suppose so…”
“All right. Use that spell, then.”
A jet-black dog the size of a pony burst into the light and paused, glaring at them with bright red eyes. The beast panted, tiny jets of flame cycling from its nostrils.
The hellhound uttered a low growl. A fiery froth leaked from its terrible, snarling muzzle. A line of sizzling drool snapped off and hit the ground with a hiss.
It’s drooling lava, Dan thought.
Four more hellhounds trotted into view and stood growling just behind the first dog.
“Everyone! Attack that one!” Nadia shouted, pointing at the biggest hound. “Kill the alpha first!”
Dan wanted to argue.
Nadia’s suggestion flew in the face of everything he’d learned playing T&T. It was a mistake to pile up damage on the strongest monster. Even if you killed it, that would leave all those other fiery jaws to do damage. Better to kill as many attackers as quickly as possible, then pile up on the head honcho.
But Nadia delivered her command with such confidence that he and the rest of the Noobs followed her order.
The huge hellhound roared like a lion, filling the air with a burst of flames.
Dan heard a twang, and one of Holly’s arrows sunk into the beast’s chest.
The hound charged.
Dan raced toward the beast, drawing back with Wulfgar, ready to swing.
The hellhound’s fiery gaze locked onto him. The red eyes glowed even more brightly, and the monster’s smoldering jaws pulled back in a diabolical grin.
A glowing dagger plunged into its neck. A second arrow sunk to the fletchings in the muscular black chest.
Unfazed, the hellhound launched growling into the air, pouncing straight at Dan.
Dan braced himself and swung his cursing sword with all his might, swinging downward in a powerful axman’s chop, aiming for the space between the glowing eyes.
Wulfgar slammed into the gigantic dog’s skull. Then the whole world exploded in flames.
Everything was heat and blinding brightness.
The gigantic dog hit Dan like a charging bull, knocking him off his feet. Wulfgar ripped out of his hands.
Dan hit the ground hard, still blinded and hurting from the flames. He grunted as the dog, hurtling over him, pounded down on his chest with its massive rear paws and kicked away, shredding his new shirt and carving lines of fire in his flesh.
Dan rolled onto all fours with barbaric speed, his face screaming with burn damage, his nostrils filled with the smell of singed hair.
But his vision had returned. He scanned the ground for Wulfgar but couldn’t see his sword anywhere.
“Over here, asshole!” Wulfgar shouted, and Dan followed the voice to where the hellhound was wheeling to charge again. Wulfgar was lodged in the dog’s forehead like an axe in a stump.
Apparently, the hellhound didn’t care. It paused just long enough to give Dan another demonic grin and charged back in for the kill.
Dan got to his feet, tugged t
he crappy goblin sword from his belt, and roared defiantly.
The beast was too strong, he realized, too strong to kill with this glorified frog sticker, but maybe he would get lucky and score enough damage that the others could finish the monster. Though by the sound of things, the Noobs were now busy fighting the other hounds.
The demon dog coughed flame and hurtled toward Dan, Wulfgar shaking back and forth along with its roaring head.
Dan bellowed, ready to thrust the puny sword as hard as he could.
The hound raced toward him, flying through the air, opening its jaws to roast him with another blast of infernal flames–and then yelped and spun away, skewered through the center by a crackling yellow arrow the size of a javelin.
The hound thumped loudly into the ground and lay in a steaming heap. The arrow sizzled and dissipated.
“Crom!” Dan uttered. He ran to the corpse, pressed one boot into the dead dog’s muzzle, and yanked Wulfgar free.
Then he turned to see two more hounds, dead on the ground, and the remaining pair bounding away through the forest of spikes in full retreat.
Sizzling yellow arrows jutting from the dead hellhounds wavered and extinguished.
Dan ran to his friends.
Nadia’s face was torn and bleeding, and one arm was burned.
Holly had been bowled over and stunned. Raking claws had torn off one of her sleeves and ripped bloody lines down her arm.
Dan helped Holly to her feet, and she blinked, looking around and clearing her head.
A second later, Holly was back to herself. Surveying the damage, she prepared to heal Nadia, whose wounds were the worst.
Nadia shook her head. “Wait. The burn hurts like hell, but I’m fine. These wounds won’t slow me down or hurt my performance. Hold onto your healing spell in case someone gets hurt worse.”
Holly nodded. “Good thinking.”
“Also good thinking to suggest killing the alpha first,” Zeke said. “Had we concentrated on the others, we’d still be fighting, but with the alpha dead, the last two lost their nerve.
