by Zeke Biddle
She charges through, scattering skeletons like bowling pins, tumbling to the ground with several draped on her back. Most of the skeletons turn their attention to her, leaving me alone for a brief second.
I raise my staff and prepare to cast my fireball, but a skeleton who hadn’t followed Alexandra enters the doorway and reaches for me.
I doubt I have enough magic to kill Jargot if I have to waste a fireball on the skeleton, but I can’t attack him with it in the way.
Alexandra can’t help because she’s already too occupied.
I scream in frustration. We are so close to victory. Jargot’s just lucky the other two women in my party are unconscious. With all four of us fighting as one, there’s no way he could have survived our fury.
My desperate plan is to blast the fireball into the skeleton’s chest, and then try to overwhelm Jargot in the chaos and hope I’m stronger than him.
The odds are not in my favor, but I can’t think of anything else to do.
I cast the spell, but before the fireball shoots off the end of my wand, the skeleton pirouettes. The fireball flies past it.
Time slows down. Microseconds feel like days.
I hold my breath and watch the fireball.
Jargot doesn’t seem to have noticed he’s lost his fire protection. He puffs out his chest, but his eyes go wide with confusion and terror when the fireball hits him.
For a man with so much magic at his disposal, the fire seems to burn right through him.
Guess he relied a little too much on his one layer of protection from fire.
It’s a good reminder for me to always strive for redundancies.
Jargot falls writhing to the ground. His legs kick one last time.
I turn to check on Gillian and Eulalia. Gillian has her bow held out in front of her body, still aimed at the open door. It was her arrow that knocked the skeleton out of the way of my fireball.
“Nice shot. We’re quite a team,” I say.
Gillian smiles back at me. “We have a pretty great leader.”
“Can I get a little help out here, Eulalia? These fuckers did quite a number on me.” Alexandra cries out.
Eulalia brushes past me on her way to heal our warrior.
A spark of the flame that killed Jargot’s thugs in the shack has started to spread to a full-blown flame in the tiny room.
I take Gillian’s hand in mine. “Come on. Let’s get some fresh air.”
We all sit down in the grass to watch the building burn down.
You’ve destroyed 2 of 2 Hybrid Generators. Congratulations! Return to Raven Haven to receive your reward!
“Thank God that was the last machine. I’ve had enough of those hybrids,” I say.
Gillian shivers against my body, most likely with memories that will haunt her for a long time.
“Well, well, looks like you’ve made quite a mess of things here,” a raspy breath from behind us says.
19
We all jump to our feet and spread out in battle formation. “Hi there, Esmeralda,” I say. “What brings you here tonight? If you are looking to join up with Jargot, you’re too late. We already killed him and his hybrids.”
Esmeralda cackles at the moon. “Fools. Machines are a dime a dozen. Jargot has been destroying them for months.”
My blood turns to ice. I know the two of them are enemies, but in all the chaos and immediate peril, I haven’t had a chance to sit still long enough to figure out much beyond that. But if she’s really responsible for the generators…
“Did we kill a good guy?” I ask no one in particular.
“Fuck no,” the witch says. “He was a piece of shit. He’s thwarted most of my efforts of expanding my base with those fucking skeletons of his. Another month, and he probably would have been ready to lead a slaughter on these lands like hasn’t been seen in generations, killing everyone and animating their dead bodies.”
Nothing makes sense. If he’s evil and she’s evil, how could they have hated each other so much?
Buying time, I ask, “Sounds like we’re pretty big damn heroes, huh?”
Esmeralda cocks her head and looks at me like I’m stupid. “You have my gratitude. Now I can lick my wounds and lead my own attack soon. I have you and your pretty women to thank for it all.” Her laughter fills the forest. “As a reward, I think I’ll let you live long enough to watch me destroy the world.”
She disappears into thin air just as quickly as she arrived, leaving us with our thoughts.
“Well, fuck,” I say. “That didn’t go the way I wanted at all.”
Gillian leans her head on my shoulder. “You did the best you could with the information you had. That’s all anyone can ever do.”
“Red is right,” Alexandra said. “Leaders never have all the information. They must make guesses, and yours kept us alive and protected the lands for a while longer. We can use that time to get stronger.”
“And fuck,” Eulalia adds, sending us all into a fit of much-needed laughter after a long night of horrors.
When we recover, I ask if anyone has any suggestions on where we should go next.
“I’d like to go back home if we could,” Eulalia says. “My village deserves to know the truth about what happened here. They need to hear they should prepare for war.”
“Any objections?” I ask.
“No one’s going to object, Marcus,” Alexandra says. “Can we just start walking before some stray hybrids return to their nest?”
I stand and wipe grass from my pants. “In that case, let’s return back to where we began.”
“We can’t go back until we make it out the other side of the forest,” Alexandra reminds me.
“Crap. Is nothing easy in this world?”
“I am,” Gillian says with a giggle. “Come on. How long could it take?”
20
It takes two days before we reach the edge of the forest and can see more than ten feet in front of us. Once we spend a few hours enjoying the open sky, we turn back.
We argue for an entire night about whether to return to Raven Haven.
I want to claim the reward Dasandra promised. Eulalia wants to make sure her people know the monster generators have been destroyed before whatever journey we take next. Gillian says she’s just along for the ride but votes to return just so we don’t end up in a tie.
We celebrate our victory with a quick night of sex at the house in the middle of the woods. Well, it started as a quick romp. After two days of listening to us making love, Alexandra finally demanded that we leave so she wouldn’t have to listen to our fucking and smell the stink of our lovemaking.
So before the sun sets on the fourth night after defeating Jargot, we emerge from the Cursed Woods at the edge of the Raven Haven. The trees hadn’t been quite so eager to contain us when I blasted the one blocking our path with my biggest fireball.
“This place is so small. How are they going to protect themselves from an army?” Between Titus and Esmeralda, and lord knows who else, I have no idea which army will reach here first, but there’s no hope of the village surviving any of them. “We need to find a bigger town to set up our base,” I say.
Alexandra agrees. “This little dump is entirely too far from all the action. The One-Eyed Monster, Esmeralda, hell, none of the random major monsters will even bother coming around here.”
“That sounds like a perk, not a flaw, to me,” Eulalia says.
I nod my agreement. The endorphins from our victory wore off after the first night. Now I just want to settle down, make love to my women, and maybe learn a simple trade to pass the rest of my days.
“So we just hide and let those evil monsters crush the rest of the world?” Alexandra says, pulling away from our group. “There are thousands of innocent people who will get crushed as the evil armies fight back and forth for little patches of land, destroying places like this with no thought at all. We can help them. We can give them a stable leadership and safe borders.”
“You w
ant to be the queen of all the kingdoms?” I ask.
”No. I definitely don’t want that kind of responsibility. But we can help bring stability to whoever is willing to rule fairly.”
Eulalia, as always, steps between us to try and put out the fight brewing between us. “Let’s just sleep on it a few nights. We’ll come up with a plan we all agree on.”
Alexandra and I glare at each other, challenging the other to make a peep.
Eulalia and Gillian skip off ahead of us into the center of the village. When everyone rushes out to greet them, I tell Alexandra, “You don’t have to stay with us, you know? I want you to, but you are free to do whatever you want.”
“I know that, wizard,” Alexandra says with a grunt. She shoves against my shoulder as she marches after the girls, leaving me alone to wonder why she does any of the things she does.
When I reach the celebration, Dasandra grabs my face with both of her wrinkled hands. “Well done. For your bravery, and for saving our village from the hybrids and returning with Eulalia, we offer you a plot of land and the beginnings of a humble shelter.”
She points off into the distance where I see an empty patch of land. There’s no house, just a pile of odds and ends in the middle of the area.
“Thanks,” I say, trying to keep the disappointment from my voice.
But she must’ve heard. “It may not look like much, but when you pitch your tent there, good things will happen.”
Eulalia and Gillian fall against each other giggling.
“Oh, yes,” Gillian says. “Let’s hurry over to our new home and see how quickly we can get Marcus to pitch his tent.”
The two of them nearly fall over, they’re laughing so hard.
I roll my eyes at their silliness. “Truly, thank you for your generosity. We’ll definitely take you up on your offer, at least until we know what our next plan will be. Now, if you don’t mind, no time like the present to…umm, assemble that tent. Gotta be easier to do before the sun sets, right?”
The old lady pats me on my back as Eulalia and Gillian drag me toward our new home.
Before we even reach our humble plot of land, though, the crowd behind us starts screaming in terror.
We turn and fall into formation without a word, our weapons at the ready.
I can’t see anything because of the glare of the setting sun.
“What is it?” I ask.
Before any of the women can answer, someone from the middle of the chaos screams, “Orcs!”
Order Hard and Deep today to read the continuing adventures of Marcus and his harem.
About the Author
Zeke Biddle loves fantasy, and monsters, and sexy babes. The more the merrier…in his books at least.
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