Bunnygirls 2

by Simon Archer

  The latch unhooked on the armor, but it wasn’t coming off just yet. I jumped in the opposite direction we were spinning, right past his sword arm, rolling over to take the shotgun out and blast his shield shoulder a couple of times. Finally, his shield rolled off to the side, wrenching his arm with its weight as it tried to fall to the ground.

  Grabbing his sword arm as I stood up, I pulled him back, throwing him to the ground as I unloaded the last shot in my shotgun right at his red gauntlet. Wildheart pawed at my legs with the black gauntlet to trip me while I kicked at him, switching over to the pistol once again to shoot at that same arm. It dropped, and I stepped into the dent in the armor in his chest, pushing what drops of air were still in there while I shot up the shield arm with the red gauntlet.

  Wildheart’s legs flung up while I switched my pistol magazine, ready to fling the knight back to his feet in a fit of powerful momentum. Putting my other foot in the chest dent, I turned behind myself to shoot the thighs full of dents, putting them down before they could finish up. With a few more shots to the arms for good measure, I unloaded half of the magazine into his head. Satisfied that the big dope wasn’t moving anymore, I peeled the helmet off his skull, slowly overcoming the locking bumps I had placed with bullets myself, to expose his flesh. With a few more rounds, I made absolutely sure he wasn’t getting back up again.

  “No trump card?” I said to the corpse, hoping I wasn’t jinxing myself, “I’m almost disappointed. But on edge, so don’t try to pull something now. You missed your free chance.”

  Walking over to the shield, and the red gauntlet, I peeled that off as well to find the charm inside. It laid in the palm of the gauntlet, underneath the metal. That was no longer a problem, thanks to the shotgun’s removal of the hinges keeping the plates affixed, as I now held it in my hand to work it. I tapped the thing a few times, to no change to its purple glow. With some harder taps, nothing changed. Finally, remembering how Wildheart clenched his fist, I sandwiched it between my knuckles with a long press, and the charm dimmed off. Checking my guns, I saw the charms on them glowing again, taking a sigh of relief.

  Whipping around immediately, I pointed my gun at Wildheart again, expecting some hidden super-charmed zombie to be facing behind me. Wouldn’t have been the first time. Nope. Just a dead noble. I turned to the champion’s former entourage.

  “Do you guys know if he has some kind of hidden trick for winning challenges?” I asked them. “Some kind of hidden charm that works as a failsafe?”

  They just stared at me, then at each other.

  “Let’s make sure everyone’s on the same page.” I stepped away from the body, still training my gun on it and shooting it occasionally with lightning bullets. They cut right through the armor like it was paper mache. “Either your leader’s dead and you work for me now, so you’ll tell me what I want to know, or he’s still alive because of some hidden magic bullshit, and you won’t say anything. What is the answer? Do I need to bring out the flamethrower?”

  “But…” one of the knights spoke up. “Aren’t you a slave?”

  “I’m the goddamn baron of this establishment, thank you very much.” I kept glancing over at the body, just to make sure I didn’t get sidelined by anything. “Your leader wanted to challenge the goddamn baron who is me. And I have shot him enough that he appears very dead. If he’s actually dead, you work for me. If he’s not actually dead, the challenge is still going, so you’ll shut your yapper, proving that he--Oh, goddamnit!”

  Because my magic bullshit senses were top-tier, I caught Wildheart’s body in the middle of its sorcerous transformation due to some hidden trump card. Like roots and vines of flesh, the muscles and veins of the corpse crawled outside of the body, attaching onto the black-and-gold metal like fungal parasites on a tree. The insides of the armor expanded, undenting the chest piece and all of the little divots before bursting all of the latches and straps holding it together. I had already pulled out the shotgun to roast this abomination before it did anything else gross, but they moved around too fast to catch fire really. Muscles and veins rearranged the metal pieces, now thoroughly covered in fresh blood, until they shaped a bell missing a third of itself rested on the missing side. More strands of veins and muscles snatched up the shield and sword as the shield plugged the bottom of the bell and extinguished any fire I had put it under. While muscles attached to ribs and other muscle pieces slithered out the bottom, forming a set of eight crabbish legs, the Wildheart Gut Crawler rose to its feet, with the shield acting as its… face. Head. Giant ass. No idea. It skittered along the ground on its little legs, dripping blood all over the tarps as it waltzed sporadically.

  I pressed my fists on the charm, activating the field again and killing the Gut Crawler before it crawled its way into my nightmares. Except that last part didn’t happen, proven by the fact that the Gut Crawler was still firmly existing moving in jerking spurts just like before and still firmly cemented in my subconscious so I could deal with him while I was swimming in the magical lake of jerky in my dreams.

  “Boys, get everyone to safety!” I shouted to the guards in the crowd, “Evacuate the keep! Wall sentries, watch the challenger’s pack! None of them leave until I give the word personally!” I strafed over to said entourage. “If he doesn’t come back from being this crab-monster thing, you guys work for me and have to answer my questions. Does he come back from this?”

  They drew their spears.

  “Goddamnit.”

  6

  I did my best to kill him. Everyone saw it. I left no part of him unshot, especially his head. That is usually very good at killing normal things. It had even stopped moving. Why must these Wolf nobles insist upon living beyond pleasant means? It couldn’t have been comfortable to have that many bullets in the body. Should have just given up the ghost while the giving was good. Now he was a crab monster.

  That was going to be investigated thoroughly.

  For now, the only thing I could have said was that this was a failsafe in the event of his untimely death. Part of what made him so great at being a champion, I’d have assumed. He pretended to be dead, or maybe actually was dead, and then this Gut Crawler thing jumped out to kill them while they were celebrating their victory. It was all organs, though, so there was no way it could have lived past this, right? Wildheart was going to come back from this, eventually. I mean, it ripped up his fancy, openly expensive armor. His Wolf and crab forms were not on the same page. Once I found out why, we were in the clear.

  The former champion Gut Crawler crawled from side to side, keeping its shield cap face facing me. The stone archways flooded with Rabbits, ushered by guards, as they all escaped to safer places. A few guards left with them, while the rest stayed behind with weapons drawn. The gunmen on the battlements shot down at the Gut Crawler.

  “Focus fire on the knights!” I pointed to the horsemen, prompting the rest of the gunman to obey and give the knights something to distract them.

  I shot the pistol pointed at the metal meat monster as the lightning bolts deflected off the tarps on the ground. The bolts of electricity created an effective cage as I carefully drew deadly, angled lines in the air, trapping the creature between them. With properly angled shots, I pierced through the armor plates as they bounced off the walls to go around the shield. These bolts just passed through the shell, coming out the other side without affecting it in the slightest besides.

  The creature moved the shield out of the way, snapping out the giant sword on a string of tangled veins like a chameleon’s tongue, whizzing right past my head as I barely moved out of the way and sticking to the wall behind me. As quickly as it shot out, it retreated, covering itself back up with the shield once again.

  Gross. How did it see me? I didn’t see any eyes in the shell. It was mostly hollow inside, save for the organs sloshing around in a wet web. I could have turned that armor into swiss cheese, and it wouldn’t have mattered in the slightest. I’d have needed a bigger hole to get the shotgun to c
lean house. Or remove that shield. We’d have to see what we could have done about any of that with a little extra speed to keep me aimed at the side of this nasty annoyance.

  While one of the knights, the carriage driver trying to mount Wildheart’s dino-horse he had just unhooked, was distracted with one of my keep guards, I shot him at the top of his neck under his chin with a ricochet shot from the ground to get the angle, the momentum of the bullet bouncing him off the steed and on the ground in a limp scrap pile. The sword-tongue shot out again, crashing into the wall as I mounted the dino-horse into an immediate gallop, shedding off the rest of the straps holding its saddle and harness to the carriage.

  Based on how easily it followed with the reins, intuitively moving as I directed, the training it must have gotten was apparent and extensive. We zipped around the Gut Crawler, creating a net of lightning from the bouncing bullets weaving their magical energy and hooking from the walls. Without skipping a beat, he’d jumped off the walls to avoid the bolts of electricity, leaping up and down from them while I freely added more lines while they disappeared. The Gut Crawler stayed within the edges of the fence I’d trapped him in, setting him up to be cooked from the inside out. The dino-horse was speeding up as we moved about, seemingly getting excited from the chance to stretch its legs. From its unmistakable heartbeat, I felt that this was a real treat for the steed. Poor thing. But only so much enthusiasm was healthy and helpful before it became impulsively reckless.

  Should I have expected that the steeds of a race of monster men that could have outrun the regular horses of my world would have been able to speed around like a racing motorcycle? Probably. Did I expect that the steeds of a race of monstermen that could outrun the regular horses of my world were able to do that? No. I did not think to expect that. Holding on for dear life, I death-gripped the saddle of the dino-steed as it raced clear across the courtyard and vaulted the keep wall in a single bound, heading straight for the water. That one, no one could have guessed in a million years. You’d have thought they would have built walls to avoid that sort of thing happening, from a tactical standpoint.

  “What the hell, you useless iguana?” I shouted what I thought would have been my last, stupid words, watching in horror as the ocean waves came closer and closer. In a moment, the world slowed down to a crawl as everything reached a near stillness.

  I couldn’t have believed it. This one idea, out of all of my ideas to that point, was going to have been the one to have killed me. And I didn’t even get to tell my girls goodbye. But maybe it wasn’t a total loss. Sure, dying was never fun for most people, but it was going to happen, eventually. I guess that Bugs’ Baron-for-a-day position was going to be a little bit more permanent than I had anticipated. And he’d carry on at least some of my vision for me, along with Hopper and Tinker, and they’d have done something about the Blood Moon before it was too late. Saved the girl in the generator, and all of the other bunnies. Taken down the Regent and the rest of the Wolf nobility. They did most of the footwork, anyway. Maybe they’d have to find another way around the challengers, or have the next best fighter take the helm there.

  It was possible. Slim, but possible.

  But what was I doing? I couldn’t have given up. I had to help them, and no pool dive was going to have taken me out before I grabbed this world’s shitty underbelly by the throat and choked it to death. And there were still too many unanswered questions to leave the fate of the Great Burrows to chance. There was something big going on, and we weren’t prepared for it. I had to live, no matter what, to stop that from happening.

  How was that going to happen, though? I was heading straight for the watery depths and was drifting miles away from the battle. It’d have taken me forever to get back up there, and back into the keep to fight that Gut Crawler. None of them were prepared to face that, and I was only barely above that.

  One problem at a time. Survive the splash first, then worry about swimming back to shore in full armor and joining the fight again. I’d have to dive to have any chance of surviving. Then I’d have to swim back up to the surface before all of this chainmail, along with the wet cotton, sunk me like an anchor. Oh, that was going to hurt like a bitch. Not excited about that. I didn’t have the five minutes necessary to strip the excess, so I was stuck with all of this metal. This was bad. I might have been dying here.

  Then I took a better look at this steed. It wasn’t flailing around like it was falling. It was ready to hit the water. If I was crazy, I might have thought this lizard horse was sentient and trained enough to attempt to kill itself and its rider in the event of a theft, and therefore had planned this suicide jump. If that were true, couldn’t it have just been trained to thrash and buck to knock the thief off, or just not moved, gone limp even, to discourage any stealing? Teaching an animal the concept of sacrificial suicide seemed a few intellectual steps above teaching it to throw a fit if it didn’t like who was riding it. And it wouldn’t have been trying to land like it was definitely doing now. It was perfectly likely, regardless of any of this, that this dino-horse didn’t realize that there wasn’t a floor on the other end of the wall. But, again, it wasn’t flailing. But that could have just meant that it was supremely impaired. Were they all like that? Did I happen to have picked the only moron dino-horse?

  No, this beast knew how to ride. I’d felt it. It knew what I was doing. It anticipated my movements once I’d kept a pattern. It knew how to jump and land exactly where it wanted to. That was not the sign of a stupid horse. Was it smart enough, then, to want to kill itself? That could have been what it was working itself up to. Then, wouldn’t it have jumped straight into the water instead of letting me lead it around? Nothing made sense with this beast.

  My options were to either survive the dive and swim in armor and wet clothes, climb all the way back up, miss the whole battle anyway, and figure out how to kill Wildheart’s Gut Crawler while it slaughtered its way through my people, or to trust that this dino-horse knew what it was doing. Honestly, it was a coin flip. Well, maybe I could have used the beast to break my fall a bit if it really was going to kill us.

  I stayed on the dino-horse, like an idiot.

  Time returned to normal right as we touched down at the surface of the ocean. When the claws of the dino-horse touched down on the water, the water bent underneath it, like it was a film of plastic, bending beneath our weight as we fell deeper into the water without submerging into it. The bending water film cushioned us as I settled down upon the steed’s saddle, regaining the reigns and composure to steer it where I needed. With a whip and a “Hyah!” like a magic cowboy, I directed the horse into another gallop, as the water’s surface bounced us back to sea level, and we rushed out towards the horizon. The dino-horse’s feet never broke the surface of the water, in some strange way that I was only going to question later. The strange creature from another world that had magic was allowed to defy the laws of physics for the time being without my disapproval.

  Damn, if I had the time, I’d have loved to watch that seaside sunset. The colors are so different, with a dark blue sun to accent an explosion of blues and greens, and eventually violets, just skimming across the water. But I had a job to do and a place to go.

  A pull of the reins led my dino-steed back around, making a long half circle as we came to see the keep. On the keep, the champion Gut Crawler had crested the battlement, crawling along the outer wall, and down the stone cliff side. It was coming for me. Good. That meant I had actually helped out by jumping off the side of the cliff like a complete idiot. I was just going to count my blessings and not reflect on the decisions made.

  The dino-steed was heading parallel to the keep, and I pulled out my rifle to take a few shots. Whatever holes I could make now would always help out later, since I already used the bomb. Still, I kept my grouping tight with shots I’d already made, trying to make a big enough hole to get some damage into. One, then two, then three shots, as the metal monstrosity came down to reach us. Or tried to. It’d h
ave had to use up its whole damn body like a yarn string to reach us out here. Even if it could have, it’d expose itself. If I just kept my distance, I could have grown that hole until I was good and ready to roast it.

  The Gut Crawler jumped off the wall, falling down the cliff and careening for the water. The metal plates shifted on it, changing the broken bell shape into an undulating umbrella, with nasty, spindly tentacles coming off to make it look like a giant jellyfish. A Gut Jelly. It crashed into the water, spinning rapidly to give it speed like a speedboat to rush towards us.

  “Why?” I questioned the champion’s cheating corpse and the universe that allowed such a monstrosity to happen. “Why? Why? What is--why?”

  I only had the one, apparently, and it was very pressing. There could not have been a charm that did this to anyone. I’d already proven that, but magic was just bunnies and the charms they made, right? Magic and I needed to have a little talk about rules and limitations for what it was allowed to let my enemies do. I had some very strong concerns. It only got a pass because of charms, which were very helpful and easy to follow along, but the water-striding horse was pushing it, and the racist shapeshifting monster was just spitting in my face. Don’t get me wrong. I was thankful for the water-striding. I would probably have been dead without it. I just thought that there should have been some clearer guidelines for what I should have been expecting.

  I galloped along with the horse, keeping the Gut Jelly at pace with myself, though it was fairly rapidly gaining on us with its spinning top, the plates arranged like the blades of a jet turbine to funnel more water behind itself and boost its speed. How did it know to do that? It shouldn’t have had a working brain in there. I shot Wildheart’s brain to nonfunctional standards. Of course, none of it should have been functional. But there it was anyway, coming in hot as a torpedo missile shaped like a disk. The creature’s sword-tongue, now a sword-stinger, reared up from behind it, twisting as it prepared to strike when it got close enough to me.