by DB King
Ella flew up to Marcus’s side, shading her eyes and blinking as she looked around.
“Is this what you expected, Ella?” Marcus asked quietly.
“I’m not sure what I was expecting,” she replied, “but it’s definitely an arena. Try summoning a monster.”
Marcus turned his attention to his magic, looking for an option. But he didn’t find one.
“I don’t know what…” he began, when he heard a loud, sudden clang. He looked around sharply. Another gate on the opposite side of the arena swung open. A massive figure armed with an enormous warhammer lumbered onto the sand floor. The figure was dressed in partial plate armor that left his legs and part of his chest bare. On his head he had a helmet that completely obscured his face.
Clang, clang. Marcus looked from left to right. Another two gates on either side—and they were open. Ogres heaved chariots into the light. The ogres were squat and broad, humanoid but with flat, undeveloped features like hastily made clay models. They were pulling chariots each crewed by two men, also dressed in half-plate and armed with javelins and bows. Like the champion, their helmets completely obscured their faces.
A message flashed across Marcus’s view.
Defeat champions to activate summoning ability.
Ah.
“Looks like we’re going to have to kill these guys before I can summon monsters!” Marcus called to his friends as the chariots circled. The ogres that pulled the chariots were surprisingly fast for their size and their ungainly appearance. Marcus led his friends into the middle of the ring as they circled the outside of the arena, waving to the cheering crowd.
“Anyone ever fought chariots before?” Anja asked nervously.
“I have,” Ben said, “but they were pulled by wargs, not ogres. We don’t have any ranged weapons, so we’re going to have to close with them.”
“I’ll give you a speed buff,” Marcus said to Ben. “You can dart in and get behind one of them. The ogres look fast, but I don’t reckon they’ll be able to turn particularly well. If you can get behind the chariot and jump up…”
“Got it!” said Ben, grinning. He was armed to the teeth, with a two-handed war axe on his back, and two one-handed swords, one on each side of his belt. He also had various small daggers about his person.
The nearest charioteer was raising a javelin, poised to throw, when Marcus slipped into the augmentation view and cast Fleetfoot on Ben. The spell took effect immediately and Ben blasted forward like a lightning bolt. The charioteers had not been expecting that, and the man who had been about to throw the javelin dropped his missile and drew a sword.
Ben grabbed the side of the chariot and vaulted up over the edge. He hadn’t drawn a weapon, but his mail-gauntleted fist smashed into the side of one man’s rib cage and backhanded the other man, crumpling the metal of his helmet.
Ben let out a roar of triumph and the crowd of onlookers roared their appreciation of the show.
The battle for the Arena had begun.
Chapter 11
Blood spurted from the neck of the charioteer as Ben drew a sword and slashed his head free from his neck with one swift stroke. The second charioteer—the man with the crumpled helmet—tried to get up and tackle Ben, but he had no chance. He staggered and Ben tripped him with a swift foot, then tumbled him out of the open back of the moving chariot.
“Go on!” Kairn roared in encouragement.
Ben grabbed the reins that held the ogres and yanked on them, but the monsters were agitated by the smell of blood. They bellowed like livestock and turned on him, smashing their slab-like hands through their traces to break free and get at the chariot.
Meanwhile, the second chariot had wheeled and was running a tight ring around the little group in the center of the ring. One charioteer was controlling the ogres, and the second was lobbing javelins at the defenders.
Anja, enhanced by her sword’s Speed enchantment, was able to knock the flying projectiles away, and Marcus blasted jets of Elemental Water from his palms, knocking others aside. The charioteer screeched in frustration from inside his helmet. With a howl like a war horn, the champion took the field.
He was huge, seven feet tall at least, with arms like tree trunks. His warhammer was as tall as he was, and the champion swung it threateningly from side to side as he stalked forward.
“Let’s get to the chariot that Ben has taken,” Marcus said. “We’ve a better chance of defending ourselves there.”
The others agreed, and Marcus led them to where Ben was grappling with one of the ogres. He had taken out his two-handed axe and tried to bury it in the ogre’s skull, but the monster had caught the shaft in its hands and pushed Ben back against the outside wall of the chariot, pinning him.
As they approached, Marcus cast Hero’s Might on Ben, and the big guy heaved forward and slammed his shoulder into the ogre’s noseless face.
The second ogre was tangled up in its reins and the wreckage of the traces that had attached it to the chariot. Anja leaped into a sprint and flung herself up in the air, landing on the back of the ogre that Ben was fighting. Ben had his hands on the ogre’s head and was trying to break its neck, but Anja braced herself and stabbed the point of her blade downward through the monster’s vertebrae, severing its spine.
The ogre went limp and crashed to the ground like a sack of rocks.
Marcus leaped into the wrecked chariot and grabbed the remaining javelins. The surviving chariot weaved back and forth behind the approaching champion. Anja killed the second ogre with a swift thrust through the eye. Ben, Kairn, and Anja lined up in front of the wreckage of the chariot to face the approaching champion.
Behind the monstrously tall champion, the second chariot turned head on. It looked as if it were about to make a straight charge for them. But Marcus had an idea. In his chariot there were nine javelins that the previous crew had left unused, and Marcus was a good shot with a javelin.
He threw the first one, a second following it moments later. The two javelins thudded into the enemy charioteers, one in the chest just above the heart, and the other straight through the eye-socket of the other charioteer’s helmet. They fell backward, blood squirting up.
The ogres became enraged by the death of their handlers, and tried to free themselves of the chariot. The champion ignored them, however. He was ten feet from Marcus and the others. He threw back his head and bellowed again, raising his warhammer up and waving it in the air.
Kairn darted forward and smashed the blade of his axe into the champion’s side. Blood fountained out from the wound, splattering the sand. Kairn’s blow had been so devastatingly strong that it had nearly cut the champion in two. His guts spilled out onto the warm sand in a wet heap, and the champion, blood pouring from the mouthpiece of his full-face helmet, collapsed on top of them.
The dwarf spat on his fallen enemy as the crowd bellowed their approval of the swift dispatch. Marcus looked up at the onlookers. They looked like regular people, like the kind of folk you would see in the marketplaces in Kraken City. They were dressed as if for a day out, in bright colors and high boots, mostly bare-headed in the heat of the day.
The ogres broke free. Trailing bits of harness, they thundered forward, but Kairn sprang to greet them. He lopped off one ogre’s arm, then spun, using his momentum to take the same ogre’s leg off at the knee with a satisfying crunch.
He shouldered into the ogre, heaving the stunned creature’s flailing form into its fellow. The two went down in a heap, but the second ogre rolled and flung its dying companion at Kairn like a missile.
At that moment, Marcus added a new Hero’s Might augmentation to Kairn’s already boosted strength. The dwarf roared in exultation at the new strength and dropped his axe. He raised his arms in the air and caught the flying ogre in both hands. The creature was much bigger than him, but he guffawed as he heaved it up into the air and sent it soaring up over the wall and into the astonished crowd.
The last ogre stood, blinking its little red ey
es and growling, but evidently unwilling to attack. Without missing a beat, Kairn grabbed his axe up from the ground, swung it around his head and flung it with all his strength. It whipped through the air, turning end over end in a blur before smacking into the ogre’s face and burying itself up to the shaft in the monster’s skull.
A great shout of appreciation went up from the crowd, then silence fell.
Marcus drew a breath to speak—but a new power appeared, as if under his hand.
Summon Creature:
Summon Trap:
“Woah!” Marcus exclaimed, dropping into the augmentation view so that Ella could see as well. She had stayed mostly behind the others during the fight, and hadn’t done much except for that one burst of augmentation to Marcus’s powers, but now she was hovering in place behind Marcus’s shoulder, looking at the options.
“Every monster I’ve ever encountered in the dungeons is here,” Marcus marveled as he looked at the scrolling list of monsters he had the option to summon. “And there are others here, too, new ones. Look, here’s the ogre chariot we just fought, and here’s the arena champion.”
“And what’s that one?” Ella asked, pointing at a new option that had appeared at the bottom of the list.
“Airborne Arachnid,” Marcus said thoughtfully. “I wonder what that is?”
“I think that as soon as you exit the augmentation view, you’re going to find out.”
She pointed at the far side of the arena. Slowly—because they were in the augmentation view—a cloud of black smoke was forming by the wall.
“I have a feeling that my adventurers will be able to handle whatever appears here,” Marcus said with a smile. “Let’s make it a bit more challenging.”
He summoned two more airborne arachnids. Two black clouds formed, flanking the first. Then, he summoned skeleton duelists. These were creatures from the Harpy dungeon. They were based on the duelists, a class of honorable fighters-for-hire who inhabited an area of Kraken City’s docklands. A team of these duelists had joined Marcus as an adventurer team, and some of their gear, lost in a dungeon run, had evolved into these monsters.
Now, as he summoned them, he was offered an option.
Summon skeleton duelists: Mob? Single?
“Nice!” Marcus exclaimed, and chose the Mob option.
As Marcus slipped out of augmentation view, he called out to the adventurers. “Here are some more monsters for you to fight, friends!”
“Yes!” shouted Kairn, leaping forward. Anja and Ben flanked him, and together they advanced on the clouds of black smoke that had appeared at the far side of the arena. As they approached, the smoke cleared, and the monsters appeared from their depths.
The skeleton duelists were upgraded. Before, they had been dressed like the Kraken City duelists, in light robes and light leather armor. Now, they were dressed in mail and partial plate, with horned helmets. Five of them huddled together in a group, leaving just enough space between each other so they would not hinder one another with their blades. Their swords were long and thin, and they held round shields of gleaming bronze in their off-hands.
The airborne arachnids appeared. They were terrifying creatures. Spiderlike, they had eight jointed legs and long, thin bodies. Many eyes covered their heads, glittering with cold malice. Unlike spiders, they were equipped with leathery wings like bats that flapped outward and lifted them into the air. Their mouths were like the mouths of lizards—long snouts full of teeth that jutted like beaks from below their rows of horrible eyes.
“Flying spiders!” Anja cried as the monstrosities lifted off and hovered above the heads of the skeleton duelists. “Let’s take them out!”
The three adventurers charged forward, and Marcus, after a moment’s hesitation, leaped out of the chariot with his mace in hand and joined them. He cast Fleetfoot and Hero’s Might over everyone, and felt Ella grant him her Ally’s Power augmentation to boost his augmenting capacity as he charged in.
“Kairn,” he shouted over the excited roar of the crowd, “handle the duelists! Anja, Ben, with me!”
Kairn roared out a challenge as he crashed into the knot of duelists, swinging his axe to left and right. Every blow crunched through armor and bone and sent bits of duelists flying.
Anja and Ben flanked Marcus as he charged toward the flying arachnids. Ben drew one of his daggers and flung it. He missed the head of the spider he’d been aiming at, but the blade caught the monster in the wing instead, shearing a great cut through the leathery flesh.
There was no blood, but the monster lost its balance in the air and tumbled to the ground. Anja dashed to where a spider was about to dive on Kairn.
“Hold steady, Kairn!” she shouted. The dwarf braced his feet as he traded blows with two duelists, and Anja took a running jump. Her feet landed on Kairn’s shoulders, and she continued her momentum, leaping up into the air so that she was on a level with the spider.
The monster, shocked at finding an enemy in its face even at this height, lashed out at Anja with its sharp, toothy beak. Anja batted the blow aside with her sword and grabbed the creature by its leg, hauling it down after her as she fell. They crashed into the middle of Kairn’s fight with the duelists, and Anja severed one of the spider’s wings with a sweep of her blade.
A duelist tried to tackle her, but she dodged and its blow went wild. She swung a vicious backstroke, smashing the duelist’s head from its shoulders.
Meanwhile the spider that Ben’s dagger had brought down lurched to its feet and charged at Marcus, while the third spider, still flying, turned in the air, folded its wings, and dived beak-first at Ben like a striking gull.
The crowd again roared its appreciation at the spectacle, and stamped until the whole arena shook with the sound.
Marcus dived forward and swung his mace at the spider, but the creature dodged, snapping at Marcus with its beak in return. The blow connected, and the teeth latched onto Marcus’s left leg just above the knee. Marcus’s thick leather britches stopped the sharp teeth from plunging through and finding his flesh, but the spider grabbed at him with its forelegs, got a solid grip, and started to chew.
Marcus cursed in disgust as he felt the horrible creature’s teeth work, and he brought his mace down in an augmented sweep that smashed through its eyes and head, turning the whole top part of the creature into an ugly black and purple mess.
The thing’s grip loosened, and Marcus kicked it away. He shook the mess off his mace and spider brains splattered onto the sand. He looked around just in time to see Ben finish his spider with a thrust of his sword through its face.
Kairn cracked the last duelist in two with a mighty blow of his axe, and Anja pulled her sword from the head of the last spider. The adventurers cheered their victory and turned to face each other.
But the dungeon wasn’t done with them yet.
The sand blasted up from three spots around them. There was a growling noise and the four adventurers, with Ella flying near them, gathered together to face the new threat.
“Tree-demons!” Marcus yelled as three monstrous trees emerged from the sand. They were like trees from a nightmare, with wooden bodies and hides of thick ridged bark, but with faces. Huge, gaping mouths roared wordlessly, and shield-sized eyes stared with killing rage. Their roots became like whipping tentacles, moving them across the sand the way an octopus moves itself across the sea floor. Their upper branches groped the air like snakes, and each one was tipped with an eye.
Kairn, with his enchantments in place and a fresh Hero’s Might augmentation, was an unstoppable dynamo of battle. Without hesitation, he charged at the nearest tree-demon, roaring out curses and battle cries in the ancient dwarf language. Splinters of wood flew as he engaged, smashing at the tentacles that grabbed at him and hitting the creature in the mouth and eyes with the blade of his huge axe. Anja and Ben tackled another tree together, with Ben wielding his axe as Anja backed him up, cutting at the creature’s tentacles with her sword.
Marcus was left
facing the third tree. He dropped his mace and it snapped back to his belt without him intending it. That was neat, and it was new, but he didn’t have time to wonder about it. The monster was on him. He drew his sword, hacking away the reaching tentacles as the thing towered over him.
He summoned Elemental Water, blasting a high-pressure jet into the monster’s eyes. It roared and reeled away from him, and he followed up with a flurry of blows that cut into the monster’s tentacles. But he couldn’t get close enough to get at the monster’s eyes, which he knew were the key to defeating them. The tree-demon was surprisingly fast, and it scooted away from him while lashing at him with its upper limbs.
Marcus slashed the limbs that got near him, and they fell away from his sword like leaves, but the monster dodged to the side as he tried to advance on its face.
Ella was there above him.
“Ella!” he called. “Be careful!”
She dove in toward the tree-demon’s eyes, her tiny black sword in her hand and her green, elfin face determined.
“This one is mine!” she yelled, and with that she landed on the tree-demon’s face. She gripped its bark with one hand and plunged her sword up to the hilt into its eye.
The creature shuddered and fell backward, woody tentacles flailing in the air as Ella let out a whoop of victory and launched herself back out of the way.
“Well done!” Marcus called to her as she approached him with a grin.
He looked to his other adventurers. Kairn was on top of his fallen enemy, smashing it around the face with his axe and shouting war cries. The tree was dying, but it was not dead yet. Wooden arms grappled the dwarf’s legs, trying to pull him off and toward the demon’s mouth.
