Bunnygirls 2

by Simon Archer

  Among the ground patrols, gigantic creatures roamed along with them, roughly the general size of a bull-bull elephant, like if a real bull elephant were the size of the calves of these creatures. Obvious beasts of burden and war, they lumbered on all fours, steel strapped to their limbs and head as armor. Five Wolves rode inside of a crudely constructed marksman’s nest attached like a saddle on its back. These elites were armed with muskets and sitting next to ample supplies of powder and ammo, fully capable of staying useful on top for as long as possible. Two faced the front and the back, one faced the inside of the circle, and two were positioned toward the outside, their eyes darting between the entrances to this inner chamber.

  Very fluffy, mammoth-like hair covered the creatures, but their body structure was more like the cross between a bear and a gorilla. Broad shoulders and longer arms gave it the gorilla-like shape, along with the thickness of the front legs in comparison with its whole body, while the fatter body and lighter brown fur added a bearish quality. The hands were a compromise between the two, black spearheads for claws, but longer toes like a primate, as was the face, a fearsome example of mammalian teeth. The ears were wide like an elephant’s, though not quite the same relative size to the head, and came to little points, more like a bat, though they twitched about as if they were feline in nature, scanning for noises in the area constantly. I honestly hoped that a few survived this battle because these bear-gorilla-elephant monsters needed to be a part of my army. My young, fantastical view of war demanded it, and it compelled me to obey.

  Inside these patrolling circles and at the heart of everything, another smaller dome, though still larger than a four-story building at the top of the center, rose from the stone floor, engraved in more Rabbit art history just as the walls were. This time, however, the art was laced with gold within as a display of the importance of the inner dome as well as the craftsmanship of the creators who built it. If I weren’t in more of a hurry, I might have attempted to glean some sense of the story the pictures were trying to tell to see if they held anything I would have found useful, but I directed my concerns more toward the dome’s top.

  Connected between the dome’s false roof and the top of the dome within and stretching dozens of feet between, a tower of the same make as the beast saddles pretended to support the entire structure and housed two open levels within it, each with patrolling and stationed sentries. They also spent most of their time watching the doors, making sure that nothing suspicious ever came out of them so long as they lived.

  Altogether, hundreds of elite soldiers, sixteen of the big ‘bearillaphants,’ and dozens of snipers above the ground level like a vulture looked at a corpse… against three of us. Guarding the only entrance with constant surveillance. No blind spots. No backdoors. No mercy.

  This tunnel had already gotten us as close to the inner sanctum as possible, which was where the bunny had to be located. Any way you looked at it, we would be totally exposed and completely outmanned at upwards of one-hundred-to-one. I’d expected a big defense force protecting the place, but not this many. They really, really didn’t want anyone getting to this girl.

  I was glad that I had reconciled with magic before I came to this hell of enemies and now was considering that insanely dangerous godstorm shotgun idea I said I’d never use. The one that was a suicide attempt just waiting for the trigger to be pulled in any direction. The one that didn’t even have the oryctolagium inside of it to arrange the charms properly so that it’d be at least moderately safe to handle, let alone survive. The one that had completely untested effects, so there wasn’t a guarantee it would do any of what I needed, powerful as the theoretical model was in my head.

  That one. I would have to use that one.

  25

  “This doesn’t seem safe,” Hopper looked in subdued horror at Tinker as she completed construction of the godstorm shotgun arrangement of charms, “at all. Even for your ideas, my lord, this one is fairly unorthodox and dangerous.”

  “Yeah, I’m still not sure if this is a great idea,” Tinker expressed her concerns about my idea, even as she helped implement it, “We have no idea what kind of damage this thing could do, on any level. Do we even know if the structure will survive it?”

  “This might be one of the few times that this handheld WMD will have such a low chance of causing damage to any innocent people.” I held guns and charms for Tinker as her assistant mad scientist. “I’d like to know what the true limitations of its power are. We can get out of this situation in a dozen other ways, and we can seal up the tunnel if we really need to escape, for whatever reason. I don’t want to get caught with this thing later, thinking it’s my last hope, and find out it doesn’t act anything like what I thought it would. That has a better chance of killing me than this will.”

  “How do you know things will work out?” Tinker asked me.

  “I really don’t,” I honestly replied, “It’ll be a teeny bit like this game back in my world called ‘American Football.’ One team’s hurting and limping behind the other in points, and it’s the last quarter of the big game, the Superbowl, even. The coach tells the team to use a strategy that’s real hit-or-miss, a wild one, a screwball plan with risk and reward both reaching out of orbit. If the strategy works, everyone will say that he ‘bet on a risky strategy, and it paid off for him,’ or ‘that was a bold move, and it’ll go down in the hall of fame,’ or something like that. If they lose, it’s seen as a miserable failure, ‘worst call to make,’ ‘the coach choked under all of the pressure,’ and everyone will hate him for it.”

  “That’s not encouraging, Hank,” Hopper stared me down, softening when she realized how stern she’d gotten, “Forgive me, my lord. I guess I do not understand what you mean.”

  “It’s not about what people think,” I explained, “No one knows how it will turn out until it turns out. We can project all we want, but there’s only one thing to focus on. The victory is what determines whether a risky idea is really stupid or not, and if the risk isn’t any innocent life, we’ve got nothing to lose by trying.”

  “Except you!” Tinker shouted before covering her mouth to quiet herself, “We have no idea what this will do, sir.”

  “Honestly, I’m fairly certain this won’t work nearly as well as I want it to,” I checked my gear for anything I could use to protect myself, just in case of the worst, “and we’ll probably all have to come out swinging right afterward. But that’s okay with me, and the victory is more than worth the risk. Besides, you all can just hide in the tunnel, and I’ll be right in after I fire these shots. I’ll aim it so it has a better chance of bouncing out into the dome without backfiring if it even could fly out that far. We’ll be fine, whatever happens. That’s a huge army out there, and we’re only getting that girl out of that torture machine if we shred their numbers down dramatically before we even begin.”

  “Do not scare me, okay?” Hopper got her convicting finger wag out to cast her binding spell with the help of her pleading eyes. “I mean it. No long pauses without saying anything, no screaming if you aren’t hurt, absolutely no jokes until after you’re done being crazy, no nonsense whatsoever.”

  “That goes double for me!” Tinker helped with her own covenant finger of adorable power, going so far as to poke me with its awesome might. “Triple! Quadruple! Double quadruple! Double triple quadruple! You shoot and come right back to tell us how it went. If you die or get hurt, I will find whatever charm I need to bring you back to life so I can kill you again myself. I will take my time, as many times as I like, until I’m happy.” She handed me the godstorm in a huff.

  “I solemnly swear, I am playing it safe and secure,” I assured, “I even have the safety on as we speak and my finger away from the trigger, barrel pointed away from everybody. Wouldn’t want anyone to resort to sadistic necromancy, would we?”

  “No, we would not,” Hopper kissed me on the cheek, “We’ll be right here if you need us.”

  “I know,” I said, “Don�
��t open the door until I say so. I don’t want you to get hurt, either. I’ll be right back.”

  If the charms all worked perfectly, fire would have made the pellets burn like dragon breath, and lightning would have sent the pellets out much farther in bolts of electricity. Bubble would have protected the bullets as they flew farther faster, bounce would have denied the pellets from lodging themselves in anything that wasn’t a soft fleshy surface, and burst will make them explode on contact with such a surface in a fiery and sparked blast. Dust would have left clouds of behind wherever they exploded, sturdy would have prevented the gun from warping too much from its own power, and pristine would have frozen the gun’s condition, further protecting it from itself. Without the full cup to keep the magazine from running out, I only had six shots, and I’d have had to move out of the way if I wanted to stay alive. I’d hit the limit of charms that were safe on it already, and ol’ Dragonbreath wasn’t exploding or retiring on me until I was dead. I didn’t go for the ice-shot simply because I needed quick damage, and fire was the way to go. When I had more cheat bronze, a more perfect godstorm configuration would have been possible, but its usage would have entirely depended on how this trial run went.

  With all of the confidence that I could gather, I walked out with the godstorm mode shotgun in hand, listening to the doors creak shut just before I replaced the protection foam in my ears and put the sunglasses I’d packed when I first came here. Never thought I’d have had to use those. Choosing to ignore the second sound of grinding stone from my girls cracking the door to see me, I pointed the gun at the floor, quickly finding the best possible angle for the first shot. When I found it, I’d pressed my free arm against my face to plug my ears with my shoulder and wrist, covering my vision of the floor as I looked up to see that I was about to be spotted.

  “Back to your station, slave!” one of the elites shouted over from the central tower, drawing the attention of many other troopers and snipers as they looked to see what he was yelling at. I could barely hear what he was saying, what with how far away he was, but he hadn’t fired at me yet. Wolves were really that stupid. If I was a Wolf myself, I’d have been shot on the spot to remove the threat. Nope, I must have been a stupid Rabbit slave, lost from my post and wandering about. I had to find the humor in that, or I’d have ended up depressed. But, come to think of it, musket

  I pulled the trigger.

  My arm acted as the saving grace for my eyes, sparing me from the supernova of light right below me that I’d manifested with magic. Even with the plugs in my ears and hearing protection that I wore within them, I felt the grim reaper of tinnitus upon me, whispering only pain and ringing into my throbbing eardrums. Having just my vision of the dome ceiling guiding me, I moved myself to the side and fired the rest of the blind shots, somewhat disoriented as I was.

  Before I knew it, I was back in the dark tunnel, attended to by two bunnies I’d broken a very special promise to just seconds after I’d made it. They touched my face, tears welling up in their eyes, as their jaws moved around to speak words I couldn’t quite get all of the words. I felt a tinge of regret for not prioritizing the silence charm. However, I’d denied the Angel of Deaf from claiming my hearing for one more day, delighting in their muffled voices came back to me, clearing up as I heard exactly what I expected them to say.

  Though the slap was a surprise. Maybe not so much in hindsight.

  “What did we say?” Hopper shook me after she’d slapped me, smashing my head again and again against the wall. “Did you not believe that Tinker could bring you back, is that it?” She slapped me again, then wrapped herself around me as if she was trying to melt into my very body. “You ass.”

  “I’m starting with razors!” Tinker smothered my face with her kisses, her arms wrapped around my head. “A thousand of them!” More kisses. “All over your body!” Even more kisses moving around. “Then I’ll peel off your fingernails,” she continued to love on my face and badger me with her torturous imagery, “with a hammer.”

  “Thanks for saving me,” I smiled, my senses now back to full strength, “I will not be doing that again.”

  “Damn right,” Hopper’s muffled voice came out of my chest, “I don’t care if the moon is falling out of the sky. No more crazy ideas.”

  “Honey, I’d have to stop this whole damn crusade we’re on if I agreed to that,” I chuckled, “But don’t worry, I’ll tone it down from now on. I think I just broke my future self’s hip in thirty years. Let’s go see what I just did.”

  “If I’m interpreting these sounds right,” Tinker stopped kissing my head to hold it against her breastplate while she twitched her ears and listened, “a lot.”

  “Rock-and-roll.” I got myself up as the girls released me. “I’d hate for all of that hullabaloo to come out to nothing. I’m sorry I made you guys worry, and that I broke my promise.”

  “You were trying not to.” Hopper wiped the tears from her eyes. “You’re recovering so quickly, which means you braced yourself for the worst of it.” She sucked a big breath into her little nostrils. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go!”

  “We’re waiting for Tinker to finish--” I tried to answer until Tinker handed me the two guns, returned to their original states. “Nevermind.”

  “May I request that you don’t tell me to make something dangerously explosive for at least a week?” She sighed out an exhausted breath, “I need to decompress.”

  “Of course,” I obliged her, “There’s only so much explosion that anyone can be responsible for at a time. Speaking of…”

  Opening the tunnel door, the symphony of Wolf screams were probably the best to hear first. That was the sound of success. I had assumed that the warbeasts provided the bass accompaniment and not a collection of angry motorboat engines. Another nice addition to that was the crackling of fire and the cracking of wood. All of that structural integrity of their wooden carpentry had gone down the drain, it seemed. With any luck, that orchestra of armament annihilation included the central tower, and we’d have been in business.

  Witnessing the damage changed my mood at the moment, from joyous at the success to a regretful pity. Not that I’d done anything particularly evil or heinous, only that the dramatic shift between the image I’d gathered from my few moments I had not a couple of seconds ago out here to now had enhanced the starkness of the contrast between the two different versions. My unholy shotgun’s creative critiques of the Wolf construction had definitely left their mark, the main one being all of the fire. It was everywhere.

  At the ground floor, the surviving elites, a generous one-third of the previous total, ran about like chickens with their heads cut off, scrambling for any place they could find that wasn’t wreathed in flame. With all of the fiery vapor magically floating through the air from the godstorm shots, that was nowhere within my eyesight. None of the tower-saddle occupants had stayed on their respective bearillaphants, and only half of the bearillaphants weren’t crispy bones. The previous military order I’d seen before was a faded memory.

  The balconies were almost all gone, the last surviving two being on fire, and the intact stairs and ladders did not connect to any of them. Whatever elites unfortunate enough to have been posted on them were long gone, probably having fallen to the ground or disappeared into ashy specs in the air.

  That wasn’t something I had considered when I was firing all of these blasts. All the ashen atmosphere created by the burning everything would have been incredibly deadly to stay in if we lingered in the fight. We'd have needed to at least attempt to filter our mouths with some kind of cloth just to safeguard against any permanent damage. If my lungs were going to kill me, it was going to be after I smoked my last rich Cuban cigar when I was eighty. Fortunately, Hopper had made us cloth masks already to help mask and muffle our foggy breath in the cold. Not necessarily a gas mask or an air tank, but it’d do in a pinch.

  Looking out to the tower, I smiled when I saw that calling it a tower was now misleading,
as it had become more of a ruin, or a wreck, or a beautiful disaster. The false steel roof it had attached itself to was still up, and that would trap all of the ash inside, turning this dry sweat lodge into a furnace, then a vacuum chamber, then a crypt. That would have been an unsolvable problem for almost anyone except for Hopper.

  “Do you think you can pop that lid up there for me, honey?” I shouted to her over the howls of dying monsters, “It’s getting stuffy in here.”

  Without another word, she’d jumped through a portal she’d made in the ceiling, pointing the other just outside our inlet, putting a portal below, and another above, as she floated and fell. The portals climbed ever higher as she flew out farther and zigzagged from top to bottom at an angle, loading her kinetic cannon with the power to stop a rhino stampede. Soon as she was floating above the tower wreckage, she’d flipped the last portal, launching her foot upward as an icy needle. Her ice-charmed metal shoe froze the metal roof and shattered it like glass, sending pits of metal crashing down upon the column wreckage, the dome, and the ground below. The smoke cleared up almost immediately, bringing to my attention just how smoggy it had gotten before.

  Tinker and I headed down the passage inside of our cut-out in the wall, traveling to the ground level of the temple to make our move, coming out to see the devastation up close. The fiery dust left in the air still lingered, catching fire to elites running through it that were already on fire. Trying out an idea, I blasted the new ice-bullets from my pistol in an attempt to counter the fire dust. My hunch turned out to be correct, and the ice helped to clear a path through the fire, as well as through the elites screaming bloody murder. Turning off the dust on the shotgun, I blasted a clearer path through the fire, not leaving any icy clouds so we could pass through. Tinker kept the crazies off my back with a swing of the flaming megahammer, knocking them deep back into the fiery abyss that we’d passed through. In all of the chaos, we made it to the inner dome’s unblocked entrance just as Hopper crashed down on a charging half-corpse bearillaphant’s head, ending its suffering quickly and concaving its cranium. She ran over to us, and we passed through the door to the smaller dome, where the Wolves sequestered the bunny that all of this craziness was about.