by Dante King
“Igor!” I yelled at the stooped figure, “are you wrapping it up yet or what?”
Without ceasing his carving or looking up, Igor said, “You can’t rush art, Justin. Don’t they teach you anything at that school?”
Finishing the smooth curve that he had been tracing with the stem of his long pipe, Igor sat back on his haunches and surveyed his handiwork. He gave his head a little nod, reached into the seemingly bottomless recesses of his duster pocket, pulled out a small vial, and flicked the top off so that it hit an imp right between the eyes and stopped it in its track. As the distracted imp was summarily dealt with courtesy of a Fireball from Damien, Igor tapped out a line of neon blue powder along the stem of his pipe vector and hoovered it up one nostril in a fine display of hand-eye coordination.
“What the fuck is that now?” Damien called. He jumped into the air, caught hold of a passing imp, and used it to spin about in a textbook flying roundhouse kick that caught another imp square in the kisser.
“Powdered rabbit foot, mixed with just a touch of frenzy pounce,” gasped Igor, his eyes crossing and then re-crossing.
“Personally, Igor,” I said, “I could do this all day, but let’s hurry it along, huh?” I fired another Storm Bolt at an incoming imp, just as it loosed its spiky tail projectile at me. As my Storm Bolt blew it to smithereens, a huge arm shot out of nowhere and blocked the barbed ball before it would have thwacked into my chest.
Rick looked down at me.
“Thanks, big fella,” I said. “Didn’t that hurt though?”
Rick pulled the spiked ball out his arm, which was as thick around as the limb of a young tree. He gave me a look. “I’m an Earth Mage, friend,” he said. “We are braver than bigamists. Tougher than Gorgon steak.”
The big man’s hand shot out once more and snatched another imp out of the air as it flapped past. Without so much as a spasm of exertion flickering across his face, Rick squashed the imp into jelly and tossed the flabby orange corpse away.
Nigel swooped overhead, sending another small swarm of imps flying with yet another one of his concentrated tornadoes. With a rush of leathery stubby wings, more of the little orange creatures, jabbering and frothing, came zooming out from behind one of the thick pillars that supported the dungeon’s ceiling. I didn’t know if the critters had been having a team-talk or something, but they sure came out with one thing in mind and that was to have at least one of our guts for garters. They came buzzing in low, like a multi-headed river.
Without stopping to think, I drew a circle in the air with my vector, the black crystal staff, and roared, “Come forth, Lightning Skink!”
The Lightning Skink—all eight glistening feet of it, with static energy sparking and winking down its glossy flanks—burst into being next to me. It might just have been drawn out of the magical ether, but the scintillating beast didn’t let that check its stride. It charged into the oncoming horde of imps like the lightning bolt that it resembled. It moved with the sudden precision and deadly effectiveness of electricity leaping from source to source, leaving imps cut up, charred, and extra-crispy in its wake. As this last swarm of desperate and acerbic imps turned their mean little eyes on my Lightning Skink, Damien started unloading at them with Fireballs.
“Rick!” I yelled, sprinting toward the big man who had lumbered off toward Igor. “Give me a boost!”
Rick nodded and dropped to one knee as I pelted toward him. When I reached him, I used his knee to boost me up onto his cupped hands, then the Earth Elemental thrust me up into the air. I hung in the air for a few seconds, using my Flaming Flight spell to keep me hanging for just a touch longer than was natural and poured a stream of Blazing Bolts into the ranks of the imps.
By the time that I started my descent, I had drawn level with the last two of the creatures. For an immeasurable moment, I locked eyes with the last of our enemies. Then, I brought my hands around in a simultaneous slap to each of the imps’ faces and used my Crystalize hex. The imps were instantly encased in crystal and dropped with twin ker-chunks to the ground. A second later, the heavy sandalled feet of Rick crunched down on top of them and shattered them into fragments.
Then, silence.
“Ah-ha, that’s the stuff!” Igor croaked from over to my right.
“You’ve finished?” I asked him.
The Rune Mystic turned. There was blue powder all over his face, and his eyes seemed to have decided that they weren’t talking to each other anymore and were going to spend some time apart. Both of them were looking in opposite directions.
“What?” he said. “No, I haven’t finished. No, no, no, but this stuff,” and he pointed to the blue dust that coated his mustache, “is the absolute dog’s bollocks!”
“Well,” Nigel said, landing next to me and patting me on the shoulder, “at least we didn’t have to fight anything too dangerous.”
With Hollywood timing, another ragged gash appeared in the very fabric of the air at the far end of the dungeon. Out of this newly opened portal, emerged a slithering mass of teeth and tentacles, three stories high and reeking of fish and offal and death.
“What fresh hell is this?” I wondered aloud.
“This shit is good!” Igor cackled happily to himself. “I could swear that I can even smell that Abomination!”
“A fucking Abomination.” Damien rolled his black eyes and gave Nigel a miffed look. “You had to go and jinx it didn’t you, genius boy?”
Nigel swallowed and pushed his glasses up his nose in a determined manner. “It’s not all that bad. It could have been a Black Dragon. An Abomination is child’s play compared to one of those.”
I stepped forward; that special grin that always bloomed on my face at the imminent prospect of a fight for my life tugging at the corners of my mouth.
I hefted the black crystal staff and felt it pulse eagerly in my hand, keen to enter the fray.
“Now,” I said, “let’s send this Abomination to meet its maker.” I sniffed theatrically and raised an eyebrow at the stench of the thing. “Because I’m not smelling what this motherfucker is selling.”
Chapter Three
The Abomination exuded an almost palpable air of malevolence and must have weighed all of fifteen tons. The great swaying bag of its body pulsated with a sapphire light as a forest of slimy tentacles undulated out from it. Within its giant mouth, its teeth were yellow and serrated, and ropes of milky saliva dripped from its thin lips. All in all, the thing was as ugly as they came. The last time I’d seen something that repulsive was when I’d gone into the bathroom after Rick, and I’d flushed it.
There was a lot hanging in the balance here. It was imperative that we held the Abomination off long enough for Igor to finish inscribing the regeneration runes into the dungeon’s floor. The catch was, of course, that we had to do it without dying. If one of us was butchered in the course of this fight, and Igor hadn’t finished carving those runes, then that frat bro would be gone for good.
So, I thought, no pressure then.
“All right, boys,” I said, analyzing the creature in the space of a fractured second. “Old Stinky here doesn’t look the fastest.”
One of the thick tentacles slapped downward as the Abomination shuffled around to face us. At least, I assumed it was facing us. The thing had no eyes, but the mouth was pointing in our direction. It was a fucking big mouth. Another tentacle slapped down with enough force to crash a car like an aluminium can.
“It m-m-might not be afforded speed, but it would seem that this thing has prodigious strength,” Nigel observed as the Abomination lumbered toward us with its tentacles writhing. Its great maw opened wide, revealing rows and rows of teeth that disappeared back into its glistening throat as far as we were able to see.
“You get swallowed by that thing,” I said, “and it’s going to hurt all the way down.”
“I suppose that we had better kill it then,” Bradley said. He was still in his Crimson Titan form; semi-transparent plates of inch-thick armor
lying like an exoskeleton over his magically enhanced body. He was about a head taller than Rick in that form—maybe seven and a half or eight feet tall—and endowed with more muscle than he would ordinarily have had. From previous experience, I knew that, with that added brawn and toughness, came a lack of speed. However, judging by the fact that our enormous adversary moved with the sort of speed and agility usually associated with a sloth, I didn’t think that was going to be a problem.
The Abomination drew in a deep, slow breath, an inhalation of such power that I saw Rick’s dreadlocks actually sway forward toward the beast. My own jacket fluttered and flapped, and Nigel actually took one involuntary step forward before he steadied himself.
Then, the Abomination let loose a roar. It was a good, deep, crackling roar. The sort of roar that might have made me reassess my options as far as standing my ground went. Unfortunately for the Abomination though, I wasn’t one to be put off by some foul, stinking bastard yelling throatily in my face. I wouldn’t have come half so far, not since entering the magical world of Avalonia, if I got rattled by a little noise.
The Abomination roared again, and this time it was even louder and more skull-penetrating in its intensity. Rick’s dreadlocks were blown streaming behind him by the force of the roar. Little Nigel, being a halfling as he was—and, what was more, a halfling that did yoga each and every morning and picked at his food like a bird—tottered backward. Bradley held a protective hand to his perfect, painstakingly styled hair before he remembered that his Crimson Titan armor shielded his head as well as his body. Damien rocked on his heels, and I saw a nice glob of monster phlegm splatter against his chest. For my part, I bared my teeth and narrowed my eyes against the foul gusting of hot, fishy breath that buffeted our group.
“Goddamn,” I said, “that thing’s breath smells like a fucking pelvic burrito!”
“Would you keep it down over there? Some of us are trying to work,” Igor said in a waspish voice. “Why don’t you make yourselves useful and deal with that repugnant and malodorous thing?”
The five of us looked around at the countless imp corpses that littered the dungeon floor and, in some ruthless cases, coated the walls.
“You heard the man,” I said to the rest of my fraternity brothers, rolling my eyes, “let’s make ourselves useful.”
Rick gave me a big grin, his teeth like tombstones in his giant, blocky head. “We work as a team, friend.”
“That’s right,” I said. “We work as one unit on this. Move in and move out. Never let it corner you. We’re going to piss it off like a bunch of mosquitos at a barbecue, okay?”
“Got it,” Damien said.
“No problem,” Bradley said.
“Okie dokie,” Nigel said, gritting his teeth and stretching his neck in what I thought—due to that daily yoga routine of his—was a purely theatrical way.
“Rick,” I said, “you take it away with that earth shaking maneuver of yours, will you? Then, we freestyle it.”
Rick stepped forward as the Abomination slithered and dragged and heaved itself toward us, radiating that unmistakable aura of malice ahead of it. The big Islander raised his mighty fists high over his head and, with a guttural roar, smashed them down onto the ground. Shockwaves emanated out from where he had struck, like ripples in a pond when a stone was thrown into it. The floor heaved and bulged as these magical ripples spread out and grew. They raced toward the oncoming Abomination before they struck the giant monster, knocking most of its many feet from under it. It lurched, screeched, and toppled over to one side. Tentacles though, had an advantage over legs in that, essentially, they were one long, sticky foot—as opposed to legs that were simply limbs that were topped off with a bit of foot, as it were.
The Abomination was down, but far from out.
As soon as Rick’s seismic wave hit it, the rest of us charged toward it. Nigel took off and boosted ahead of Damien, Bradley, and myself. As the revolting monster began to climb up slowly on its many feet once again, the halfling Wind Mage attempted to pin it with a concentrated tornado. Hovering above the reeking Abomination, Nigel blasted it with the sort of wind that would have stripped the paint off the outside of a house. The magical monstrosity bellowed and writhed as it was forced back down to whatever the tentacular equivalent of knees were. Even so, it managed to sneak out one snaking tentacle and whip it out in Nigel’s direction. Nigel executed a corkscrew that would have had an olympic gymnast in awe and avoided the oncoming limb. The halfling dived under another that, freed from his concentrated wind barrage, had struck out to grab hold of him. Instead of crashing into the floor, Nigel pulled out of the dive a foot from the ground.
I made a mental note to try and bring in the nickname of ‘Maverick’ for the halfling after seeing that display as Damien, Bradley, and I came within striking distance of the Abomination.
Up close and personal, the monster stank even worse. It was the sort of stench that you could taste in the back of your throat, the sort of smell that would doubtless get into your clothes to such an extent that eradicating it would require a Viking funeral pyre or an exorcism.
Just as I drew back my hand to hit the stinking sack of fish shit with a Blazing Bolt, my Lightning Skink flashed in from the side and started peppering the Abomination’s head with micro lightning zaps. The Abomination let out a venomous stream of hisses, its yellow teeth slavering and gnashing madly in its fury.
The Lightning Skink shot about our enemy’s head, not staying in the same place for any length of time. It dashed in a few times to use its sharp black fangs and claws on the Abomination’s apparently soft and putrid hide, but always a tentacle or two snaked out to bar its way.
While my magically conjured ally distracted the Abomination, Bradley strode past me and began to try and fight his way past the thrashing nest of slime-covered appendages. I was dubious whether his armor would withstand the powerful tentacles. Bradley’s Crimson Titan enchantment was a Fire Magic-based spell, and it seemed that the mucilaginous tentacles received a severe burning sensation whenever they touched him. I watched as jelly-like limb after jelly-like limb attempted to grip my armor-plated frat bro, but each one could only hold him for a few seconds before it was forced to drop him like a hot tamale.
The athletic Damien was running around the Abomination, using the parkour skills he had honed on the mean streets of L.A, fleeing from the police as part of a notorious gang. He was flinging Fireballs at it—not as large or powerful as my own fiery projectiles, but still plenty big enough to cause some serious discomfort to the creature. A tentacle whipped sideways and looked like it was going to catch my fellow human straight in the ribs. Damien sprinted toward one of the thick wooden pillars holding up the roof, then ran straight up it. The tentacle crashed into the beam just below him, with the force of a minivan hitting a tree at speed, and Damien flipped backward over it. He then, briefly, laid his hands upon the slimy limb and concentrated hard. Damien was naked from the waist up, and so I was able to see his pale skin flush a deep magenta in the space of a couple of heartbeats, before darkening to the color of a ripe plum. White hot fire spread from where he had touched the Abomination’s appendage and shot along the length of the tentacle, completely engulfing it.
“Holy shit!” Damien gasped, staggering back. It was clear to me that he had just suffered a mana drain far exceeding what he had prepared himself for. Perspiration was standing on his forehead, and his legs shook.
“Holy… shit…” he said again, weakly this time.
Another tentacle lashed through the air.
Without pausing to think, I dived at Damien, tackling the weak man around the middle and sending us both crashing to the ground. The tentacle scythed over the top of us but looped fluidly around in midair. It was clear that it was coming back for another attempt. Thinking fast, I directed my gaze and my black crystal staff at the Lightning Skink that was harrying the main body of the creature not far from us, then pointed my vector at the looming limb.
; The Lightning Skink shot across the intervening space and cannonned into the descending tentacle as it came at Damien and myself again. I tensed, taking a hold of Damien’s arm and his belt, thinking that I might have to roll us both out of the way at the last moment.
The Lightning Skink’s intervention was enough to distract the Abomination’s appendage though. The tentacle fastened itself around the Lightning Skink, even as the electro-magic creature sunk its black teeth into the clammy limb. With inexorable strength, the tentacle retracted back to the body of the Abomination and, with a lethal whip-crack flick, threw the Lightning Skink into the tooth-filled maw. The monster’s teeth ground together with brutal efficiency, and the Lightning Skink exploded into magical particles of crackling energy.
“Igor, how much longer?” I called.
“Moments. Mere moments,” Igor replied. “But one cannot go hell for leather as far as this is concerned. If I balls this up, the runes will be ineffective.”
“Ineffective as in when we die it’ll be terminal?” I asked.
“Yes,” the Rune Mystic replied nonchalantly.
“Take your time then, Igor, take your time,” I called.
I turned back to the creature, summoned a Magma Bomb into my hand, and tossed it into the Abomination’s huge, grinding mouth.
The Magma Bomb went off in the Abomination’s mouth mid-chew and blew out a cluster of the creature’s teeth. Great shards of yellow enamel went whizzing through the air. A dinner plate sized piece shot a hand’s breadth past Nigel’s face as he swept overhead and almost caused him to fall out of the sky. The Abomination roared, spittle flying everywhere as it thrashed backward and forward in agony.
“You can be hurt,” I said. “Which means you can die.”
A pair of tentacles swept in to snare me. I felt a sudden, heavy, familiar presence loom over me, then Rick was there. He had one tentacle grasped in each hand. As I dodged away and sent a Storm Bolt at the swaying, pulsating bag which constituted the Abomination’s body, Rick’s massive forearm’s flexed, and he ripped first one, then the other tentacle free of the monster’s body. Inky black blood gushed out of the hideous creature’s body, as if the Earth Mage had just struck oil.
