by Dante King
“Uh,” she said, spitting yellow blood from her mouth. “Justin, you are so picking up this laundry bill.”
“That was masterfully done, Justin Mauler,” the King said, riding over and smiling widely at me. “Masterfully done indeed!” He shook his head, as if he could not believe that such a gambit had paid off. “I wish I knew what had made such a disturbance that the Alpha had been stirred from the depths of its nest though.”
“Um, I think I can solve that mystery,” I said, and pointed over his broad shoulder.
Trolls. Lots of trolls.
The Prophet King had, perhaps, twenty of his hunters left—twenty-five tops. The trolls that came streaming into the cavern must have outnumbered us by four to one.
“Oh, look,” I said, “if it isn’t our old mate, the Nutty Shaman.”
The shaman, riding atop that fantastic saber-toothed tiger that I so coveted, trotted nonchalantly in behind his hoard of trolls. Half a dozen trolls mounted on similar, but lesser, beasts accompanied him.
A deep rumble from the King told me that this shaman was known to him, and he was not the flavor of the month.
“Justin!” I looked around and saw Enwyn holding up a handful of feathery green quills that she ripped from the tail of the dead Alpha. They looked so much like giant fern fronds that I had to look closely to tell that they were feathers.
“We can leave. We have the feathers. Our task is complete. All I have to do is activate the recall stone, and we’ll be transported back to the Academy. What do you think?”
I looked from my gore-covered companions to the hoard of freshly arrived trolls to the reduced number of Elementals.
“If we leave,” I said slowly, “the Gemstone Elementals will be wiped out for sure. “
Enwyn gave me a long, calculating look.
“Hey,” I said, “if it wasn’t for us, the trolls wouldn’t be down here, would they?”
Enwyn sighed softly through her nose. She gave me a little nod.
“Come on,” I said, “lets see if we can’t get you covered in a little blue troll blood to complement those yellow brains you’re wearing so well.”
Chapter Thirteen
There was no rousing speech. No posturing between the two sides. No steady drumming of clubs on shields to get the blood pumping on the part of the trolls. No checking of weapons, roaring, or otherwise getting amped up in any discernible way.
Battle, it seems, only starts like that in fiction; it gives the reader or watcher a chance to settle back in their seat and prepare themselves for the carnage that is about to unfold. In reality, each side is far too engrossed in the pressing business of getting the first hit in, of staying alive while killing as many of the opposition as they can, of winning.
The hardened resin bows the remaining Elementals carried sang with one voice. A shower of arrows drifted through the air toward the troll ranks. The troll shaman cast a spell, and the basilisks between our legs started to shift and scream.
“Get off the basilisks!” yelled the Prophet King. “The shaman has cast a hex on them!”
Immediately, I leaped from my mount, as did everyone else. The Prophet King cast his own spell, which made the basilisks flee back the way we had come through the tunnels.
“They would have turned on us had we not sent them away,” he explained. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Janet, spellbook clasped in one hand, form a symbol in the air. As the arrows of the Gemstone warriors fell toward the trolls, a small patch of low, localized cloud instantly coalesced above a section of the troll hoard and lightning bolts started zipping down at our milling enemies.
“Storm Rain!” I yelled over the sudden swelling clamor of joining battle. “Fucking show ‘em, girl!”
The magical lightning ricocheted and tinged and sparked off the crude armor that the trolls had donned for this war expedition. It seemed that while Janet’s new spell worked, her lower level magic ability meant that it only discomforted the trolls rather than killed them—and only the few in the small radius that the little storm clouds covered. To my eye, it looked as if the group under this storm were experiencing the distracting sensation of being wrapped in electric fencing—they were yelping and twitching and jabbering furiously. Their weapons lay discarded on the ground as they attempted to force their twitching muscles to run away.
Then the trolls charged en masse. The Elementals let loose one last controlled volley, slung their bows over the backs, hefted their clubs, and lumbered out to meet their foes. The King led the Elemental counterassault, but with only twenty-five or so warriors, against close to one hundred, I thought that things looked pretty grim.
They would have been a lot grimmer, however, if the Elementals had not been backed up by me, Enwyn, Cecilia, and Janet.
Just as the two opposing battalions were about to meet, I let loose with the newest addition to my spell arsenal: a nice, juicy Blazing Bolt. The ball of crackling red energy streaked past the ear of the Prophet King, as he raised the black crystal staff above his head and punched into the lead troll. For the space of a heartbeat, the troll froze in mid-stride, then he burst apart—just as Bernard had done in my uncle’s store. Unlike the Storm Bolt though, which had been the spell I had accidentally brought about Bernard’s untimely demise with, the Blazing Bolt also produced a few shrapnel-like bursts of flaming energy on impact. These caught a couple of the trolls running alongside the one who’d been blown to pieces and sent them tumbling over into their colleagues behind.
The next moment, the two sets of adversaries came together in a snarling, rending, smashing crash of stone and metal and flesh. Troll and Elemental grappled at one another, swinging clubs and axes, stabbing with unrefined daggers and cudgels. Cries of rage and pain rang out on both sides. The unmistakable, indescribable smell of fear hung like a miasma in the air. Seemed that no matter what race you were, or how badass you looked, when it came to a good old-fashioned mass fight to the death like this everyone got a bit nervous.
Seeing as the trolls were sporting more of their mana-loaded rifles and pistols, I had expected them to make short work of the Elementals. However, as I watched the combat unfolding—every now and again firing spells into the fray to help the beleaguered Elementals as needed—I saw that the mana rounds had very little effect on the Gemstone Elemental’s bodies.
One troll pumped five pistol rounds into the chest of an Elemental warrior not ten paces from me, but the mana bullets just deflected off of his multifaceted chest. One of them sizzled past my face as I ducked backward to avoid it, setting my fringe on fire as it zipped past. The Elemental seemed quite unfazed by the shots though, as he batted the troll’s mana-pistol out of its hand, cracked it a devastating blow to the leg which snapped its thigh bone in half, and then crushed its chest in like a coke can with a vicious stomp. Even over the noise of the battle, I heard the troll’s ribs break with the same sound you might hear if you closed your fist around a handful of Doritos.
It seemed that the only immediately fatal weapon that the trolls were carrying were the mana-grenades, but as the fighting was close-quarter, these were essentially useless. It was axe against axe, club against club.
Magic against magic.
The Prophet King looked to be an unstoppable force. He moved through the press of trolls, batting them aside with the staff, swatting at them with his huge fists. However, whenever he tried to cast any sort of substantial spell, the troll shaman—who was prowling around the outskirts of the battle with his guard of mounted cronies—would cast a counter-spell and block him.
Before Janet, Enwyn, Cecilia, and I had scattered at the start of the clash, I’d recommended to Janet that we unleash our Lightning Skinks.
“We’re going to need every body we can find, girl,” I said. “Let’s let these babies off their leashes.”
And so we had.
Now, both our Lightning Skinks roamed the battleground, attacking trolls at will and leaving confusion and chaos in their wakes.
It was like a game of chess�
�except with more explosions, blood, screams, and random magical gunfire. So, basically better in every way than conventional chess. I was under no illusions; I knew that the key to having even a prayer of defeating the blue bastards was to take down the shaman. He was powerfully magical and adept at casting multiple spells at once. Currently, he was more engrossed with keeping his own units alive than focusing on attacking us, but it would not be long before the Elementals had suffered enough casualties for him to go on the offensive.
I had come up with a rough plan in the opening moments of the skirmish, and I needed to tell it to my three fellow mages. With this in mind, I started to weave and fight my way through the periphery of the battleground. One thing that I found my first battle really good for—and you have to look for the silver-linings in these sort of situations—was for honing my own skills and building my self-confidence in my spell-casting abilities. As I moved through the edge of the battle, I blocked a thrust from a sharpened stake—which apparently passed for a spear with the trolls—with my staff, fired a Storm Bolt with my usual gusto at a troll that was about to brain an Elemental from behind and blew his arm clean out of its socket, and then hit the troll that had just tried to skewer me in the face with my staff. As he stumbled back, I conjured a Flame Barrier, which absorbed the mana rounds from a troll rifle I had noticed swivel in my direction, then knocked the stumbling troll senseless with a brutal overhand strike with my vector. The staff flashed with coldblooded delight as the troll’s skull caved in like a smashed egg, its brain gleaming wetly as it fell to the ground. I spun, ready to take out the troll who had fired the mana-rifle at me but, before I could loose one of my tasty little Storm Bolts in his direction, Enwyn jumped in and engulfed the rifle-bearer in flames with a perfectly executed Fireball. The troll dropped its weapon and commenced writhing on the floor in a futile attempt to stop its skin blistering and its melted eyeballs from running out of their sockets.
“Just the woman I wanted to see!” I yelled as Enwyn strode over to me.
“Is that right?” she asked. Her pupils were wide with the adrenaline coursing through her, and she had a streak of troll blood across her already gore-covered face. She was cloaked in the strange magical, almost gelatinous armor that Bradley had conjured that night in the graveyard. I ran my eyes over the impressive magical protection, noting that it fit Enwyn differently than it had Bradley. Bradley’s had been chunky—slabs of inch thick armor that protected him against the rending, persistent fingers of the skellies—but encumbering. Enwyn’s seemed to be sleeker somehow. There were more plates to the armor, they were thinner, and they fitted together with the same ease that an armadillo’s did. There was also something else about Enwyn’s armor that Bradley’s had lacked—it was, in some way that I couldn’t put my finger on, sexy.
The armor equivalent of a panties, bra, and stocking combination, I thought.
“Justin?” Enwyn prompted, nudging me out of my thoughts—which just goes to prove, perhaps, that old line about men having sex on the brain even in the most inappropriate circumstances.
“Oh, right. Yeah. So, here’s what I think we need to do to swing this fight before it gets away from us,” I said.
Enwyn raised an eyebrow and pointed. I followed her magic-plated finger and watched as one of the Gemstone warriors was swamped by five trolls and brought to the ground. It would have gone pretty badly for him indeed, if it hadn’t been for the fortuitous arrival of a hail of those icy needles that was fast becoming Cecilia’s calling card. The trolls howled in dismay and pain, as the stinging, stabbing sleet drove them backward, away from the downed Elemental. Before they could recover themselves, Cecilia summoned a twelve-foot tall defensive Ice Wall that ringed them in. Suddenly inspired, I fired off a Blazing Bolt, which I guided up and over the ice wall and dropped into the laps of the panicking trolls. It killed a couple outright, and the remaining three that were maimed were finished off by Janet collapsing the ice wall on top of them with a few sweetly aimed Storm Bolts.
“All right, we’re all together again!” I said. “Huddle in, team, I think I’ve got a game plan.”
The girls, all of whom were still caked in the yellow blood of the Alpha, moved in closer.
“Does it involve getting covered in more brain-matter?” Cecilia asked. “Because, I’m not sure that there’s enough shampoo in the world to get any more blood out of my hair.”
“Well, I can’t make any promises,” I said, grinning. “Basically, we need to get rid of that fucking shaman, agreed?”
The young women around me nodded. Their faces were suddenly illuminated by the neon-cobalt flash of a mana-grenade going off from somewhere behind me. Grit came down like rain.
“We haven’t got long!” I yelled over the growing din. “We have to take out his six outriders, then I say we converge on him and work together to smoke him. I’ll let the King know of our plans. If we can distract that little shaman a-hole for just a second, it might be enough for the Prophet King to take him apart with the black crystal staff. Everyone clear on that?”
The other three nodded.
“Slaughter his crew and then butcher him,” Cecilia said, flashing another one of those surprisingly bloodthirsty smiles of hers.
“That about covers it, yeah,” I said. “Good luck!”
The sheer weight of numbers was clearly starting to tell in the battle. As fierce, hardy, and courageous as the Gemstone Elementals were, there was no getting around the fact that each one of them was going to have to kill at least four trolls to win the fight. The trolls, as I had recently discovered, were a pig-headed bunch, but not unintelligent. They may not have been able to count, per say, but they could see that if a bunch of them swarmed one Elemental at a time, they would eventually kill all of the Prophet King’s warriors.
I could feel a mood settling on me. It was the sort of feeling that I’d had a few times before in college. It was the feeling that you get when you’re at a bar and some bullying, loud-mouthed prick won’t shut the fuck up. You put up with him for a little while but, at the end of the day, you know that the only way you’re going to get him to shut up is by taking him outside and use him as a mop to clean the street.
It was this feeling, concerning the shaman, that was filling me up now. He was just another annoying prick, standing at the bar of life, getting in the way of me having a really good time with my friends.
Still, who would I hone my magic skills on, if not the a-holes? I thought.
Once more, I found myself skirting the edge of the main battle. I would have liked nothing more than diving in there and getting among the trolls that were fighting with the remaining Elementals, but time really was of the essence. The precious minutes that I might spend knocking over a few troll grunts, could be all that separated us from the shaman unleashing some fresh and unstoppable hell.
I contemplated what might be the best tactic in dealing with his half a dozen mounted guards. In the end though, in true Millennial style, I just decided to go in there and see what happened. Plans were all very well up to a point, and that point was the point when everything went tits up. Being a man in whom optimism sprung eternal, I bypassed the whole planning stage and jumped with both feet into the part where the shit usually hits the fan.
My first Storm Bolt hit one of the outriders squarely in the chest and sent him spinning off his saber-toothed mount with a cry of surprise. I would have uttered a cry of shock myself—shock at not blowing the little motherfucker into at least fifty pieces—but at that moment the shaman casually flicked his wrist at me and sent a shower of electric-yellow sparks my way. I threw myself to the side, and the sparks punched into the ground not far from where I had been standing. The earth kicked up like it had been raked with fifty-caliber machine gun fire, and I rolled behind a boulder. Peering out, it was only then that I noticed that, whereas some of the trolls had donned armor that looked like it had been knocked up out of a bunch of scrap metal, the shaman’s bodyguard were sporting some rather nifty
-looking chestplates that looked to be made of beaten bronze. You didn’t have to be a genius to work out that they were resistant to magic up to a point.
The attention of the outriders was now firmly fixed on me. To attest to this, the rock that I was crouching behind, while I waited for my next brilliant brainwave to amble along, was pummeled with mana-rifle fire. Chunks of rock pinwheeled over my head and dust filled the air. I chanced a quick glance around the fragmented edge of my cover, got a clear picture of the guys trying to terminally perforate me with raw magic, and then ducked back again. Then, I summoned a Blazing Bolt and sent it looping over my head and toward where I’d seen a couple of the outriders sitting atop their saber-tooths and firing at me. There was a dull whumpf as the bolt impacted, followed by some concerned yells from the trolls.
Another quick glance around the boulder showed me that I’d thrown another guard from his saddle, but not killed any of them. Of more interest, was the fact that the shaman had wandered off a little way, prowling around the battle as if he were looking for the Prophet King. Clearly, he didn’t hold me or my three mage friends in much regard.
There’s your first mistake, I thought. And the thing about that first mistake is that it means you don’t get to make a second.
From behind the half a dozen outriders—who were still concentrating on me—I saw Enwyn and Janet converging.
Those ladies do like to work together…
I set a Flame Barrier to shield me as I emerged from the cover of the boulder, and dashed out and toward the six outriders, just as Enwyn and Janet filled the air with fire and lightning.
All that was going through my head was that I should at least close the gap between myself and the outriders so that it was harder for them to use their mana weapons. I figured that, the closer I was to them, the more powerful my spells would be, and the less likely I was to miss my foes when I fired one off at them.
Enwyn was lighting things up with Fireballs, while Janet was making a real nuisance of herself with her Storm Rain spell. However, no matter how they pummeled the outriders, the magical chestplates worn by the trolls deflected the worst of the magic. Most of the beasts they’d been riding had fled or lay dying, but the trolls themselves were still very much alive and kicking.
