Bunnygirls 2

by Simon Archer

  My rifle fell off my shoulder and onto the stone floor, bouncing as it walked itself away from me. I didn’t mean to do that. That didn’t bode well for me.

  “I’m just big-boned, bud,” I choked out the words, trying to lift my arm to point my pistol. It was all I could do to keep it and the shotgun in my hands. “Isn’t the Hunter a myth? Hasn’t he been a myth for a billion years or something?” It would be a hard sell, but maybe I could have gotten him to believe that I wasn’t who he was looking for, leading him on a wild goose chase. “That’s just a fun story to tell at night. Do you think he’s real?”

  “So what if I do?” The Regent eyed me suspiciously again. “You’re telling me you aren’t the Hunter? You lead two bunnies who are surviving in a brawl with three of my most powerful shock troopers. You have muskets that bend with the laws of magic like none I’ve ever seen. I’ll have to take a look at those. If it’s not you, who else would it be?”

  “He’s whoever he was in the legend.” I diverted every last cell I could to provide energy and will into my arm. “Even if he was real, he’d be beyond ancient. Do I look thousands of years old to you?”

  I drifted my eyes over to the girls again, who were still doing well enough in their fight. Both were still moving fine, not showing signs of fatigue yet or getting sluggish, and they weren’t getting cornered or falling for any traps. Tinker’s hammer slammed down just as Sky Stretcher jumped out of the way, falling into a portal that placed him right next to Hopper and Green Gooper. Champiodile rushed Hopper from out of my range of vision, but she dodged out of the way, forcing the mutant lizard into the Gooper, and the Gooper into the portal.

  Tinker had lifted her hammer again, slamming it down on the gunner as he passed to the other side by her. His armor reformed, warping the metal pack under him and spilling ooze onto the floor from both it and the openings made from the armor. As the ooze melted, it sunk him into the ground, quickly dipping him past the level of the ground. He tried to take the pack off, but the straps to it had already sunk into the stone, pinched between himself and the rock. His sludge gun wouldn’t bend far enough to shoot where he wanted, firing randomly around him as he gooped around himself to melt his confines. With the ooze already spilling out of the cracks and openings made by its reshaping, his efforts only seemed to lower him into the deepening hole and take him out of the fight. Now it was just Stretcher and Champiodile, and a hole in the ground, which seemed to devolve the morale of the champions.

  The Regent turned to help them but invisible constraints stopped him. He looked over to them, blew out a frustrated breath, then looked back up to me, anger flowing out of his eyes. He had wanted to go help them out and end this quickly but was stuck here, probably because I was being drained. It seemed he couldn’t drain and walk at the same time. And my girls were doing just fine like I thought they would. It was up to me to hold on to life until they dealt with the other champions.

  “You’d be a new one, then.” He squeezed my neck, cutting off the blood flow to quicken my passage into death. “Who else could have survived in my leeching grasp for so long? Any Rabbit would have died long before they had the chance to speak. But here you are, still spouting denials. Even if you don’t know who you are, I can’t allow you to live and find out. It’s a shame; I’d have made great use of a Rabbit of your caliber.”

  I fired a shot from the pistol which ricocheted off the ground and up, passing between the Regent’s legs, off the cage, off a nearby spire, and all over the room before it settled down on the ground.

  “Oh, was that meant for me?” The Regent tilted his head in feigned sympathy. “That’s impressive that you still have the will to pull the trigger, let alone move at all. It seems your weapons have a great many charms on them. I’ll have to see how you did that, too?”

  “You’re impressed by all of that?” I squeaked out through the straw of windpipe I had left, running on the thimble of blood in my brain to assemble my sentences, “Let me get this straight. You think that I’m a phenomenon that hasn’t happened since history started, and you just want to kill me, just like that? If I really am this special Rabbit that doesn’t show up for thousands of years at a time, don’t you want to know what it takes to make another one? That seems like a waste if you ask me.”

  “I can always dissect you,” he smirked, “I’m sure I’ll be able to gain much from studying your organs. When I discover how you came to be, even my Rabbits will be superior to everyone else’s, and I will remain unchallenged for all time.”

  “What about the guy you work for?” I asked, probing for a button to push and clinging to consciousness by fingertips, “You’re just a regent, right? That’s not an actual title, that’s a placeholder. What about that High Emperor Gillek Wraithmane--”

  “Don’t you dare speak his name!” He squeezed my throat tighter still, and my vision was beginning to darken. “He can’t do anything now! He’s impotent! What has he done for any of us except make demands and then let me clean up the mess he’s neglected?”

  Hmm. Present tense, indicative of an ongoing relationship, suggesting that King Steve was still alive to continue said relationship, unlike what I thought. But it did frustrate me all the more that I couldn’t get my question answered.

  “Ho, partner, that sounds like my last boss…” I tried to let out one last quip, but couldn’t get the full thing out. It wasn’t that funny, anyway. “He… was…”

  “Why aren’t you dead yet?!” His fingers shook with tension, but they squeezed no tighter than previously, “No Wolf I’ve ever stripped of their life has survived for this long. You’re a Rabbit. A Rabbit! You can’t be superior to anything but dirt! Am I not draining as fast as I’ve done before? Have you weakened me somehow? It was that bullet, wasn’t it? Some kind of dampening magic!”

  “Wouldn’t…” I was fading in and out of waking, “you… like…”

  “When I kill you,” his voice deepened as I lost my grip on consciousness, “I’ll use your very own energy as strength while I pulverize those bunnies you brought with my own fists. It’ll be like you did it to them! Then, I’ll cut off their legs and arms, but sear their wounds shut so I can have them hauled up to my Blood Moon banquet as the appetizer! We’ll eat them from the bottom up as we watch them scream! They will join you in whatever pathetic afterlife you’ve imagined for yourself, and I will eat everyone who would mourn you. Die!”

  27

  “You…” I squirted out one final puff, “first…!”

  From behind the Regent, the red-headed bunny’s eyes glowed with a powerful icy blue, the same as the swirling snowflakes that surrounded her. As she held my rifle upside down like a staff, she pointed the butt of it at SilverFang, summoning a swirling blizzard out of the snowflakes that flowed around the rifle and out. In the shortest moment, a thick block of navy blue ice had formed around the noble and danced around him like sand in a tornado, with a sideways crown of icicles facing away from her.

  I had freed her previously with my shot underneath Silverfang’s legs. In all honesty, I was just expecting her to make a break for it. Not that she was cowardly, but it would have been smart of her to just go and get somewhere safe. She might have been able to get help if she snuck out to the outside. But she didn’t. She went for the rifle, touched the ice charm on it, the ice started flurrying, slowly building up, and then the crazy light show of snow happened, killing a noble in one supercharged strike. I was both surprised and not since this was the girl who powered a whole continent’s suppression field and sourced the mana infusions for a dozen different Wolf mutants. She was filled to the brim with power, and she wasn’t afraid to let it loose where she needed to.

  I liked her.

  The arm that held me stuck out from the middle of the forearm out and had frozen to a fragile white. It slowly cracked over time as the heat of my neck loosened the icy grip holding me up. Eventually, the arm broke off, returning me to the ground while releasing my blood back to my brain and air back into
my lungs. I invited that air like it was my estranged brother after a decade, sucking it in and pushing it out in gulps.

  “Sweet mercy, beautiful sweet oxygen, I missed you so much!” I inhaled a painfully joyous breath of that precious gas, bringing myself back up as life returned to my body again. “I never thought I’d miss the sensation of my nostrils flaring! Oh my god! It’s like every illegal drug ever decided to join forces for the world’s greatest high.”

  “AAAUUGGGHH!” I looked up and saw Tinker with her megahammer resting on her shoulder while she ran, screaming a battle cry to announce her strike as she crushed the block of ice that imprisoned the Regent into a million pieces, breathing angrily as she left the hammer down. She whipped her head to look at the new bunny and at me. “This one counts as mine. I killed him. Got it? I killed a noble. If anyone asks, I did it by myself. You can have the next one.”

  “Don’t take it personally,” I looked over to the bunny who was clearly frightened by the display of savagery from Tinker. “She just needs a win in her belt.”

  The girl tucked a strand of her red hair behind her ear as I spoke to her, her shoulders relaxing as my words calmed her. Tinker walked back over to stand by Hopper stretching out her legs, as well as the two champions, the sky blue rubber Wolf getting down onto his knees with his hands behind his head and the wolfish crocodile reverting back to his crocodile-like Wolf form. They had both surrendered, and I was certainly happy. The stupid Regent didn’t have any cheat powers after death or at least none that could counter becoming a solid block chunk of glacial ice and smashed to pieces, and I thanked God for that.

  “Didn’t see that coming, did you?” I rested with my outstretched arms on my knees for a bit. “That’s bunny power, right there. Amazing. Simply amazing.” I stood back up, looking at our new redhead. “You literally saved my life. I owe you one.”

  “I am the one who owes you, great prince,” she spoke in a soft, delicate voice, “I would save you a thousand times, and it still wouldn’t be enough. You must have everything that I am, or I would live in shame. I will gladly throw my life on the line for you.”

  “I feel the same way about you,” I replied, “Don’t get carried away with sacrificing your life, though. You have no idea how long I’ve been looking for you, and I do not want to lose you ever. I’ve literally taken over two towns to get to you. I need you just as much as you feel you owe me. And now that I’ve seen what a brave soul you are, I’m happy I was able to find you. You’re an amazing bunny.”

  “I… make you happy?” It seemed like she couldn’t process what I was saying. “You say I’m amazing to you? I’m brave?”

  “Yeah, of course!” I said to her, “Nobody just charges into a fight head-on for a person they’ve only seen for two seconds. You hadn’t even known my name, and I hadn’t heard your voice, and you thought I was worth the trouble of risking your life. I appreciate you for that.”

  “I could only do that because of my mana,” she said, disappointed in herself, “That is why I am useful. I exist because they bred me to be powerful.”

  “Who told you that?” I scoffed, “You can’t breed power into someone. You can breed some better resources to use, sure, like better muscle growth, better height, better friendliness, and stuff like that. But power comes from what you do with what you’ve been given. If a horse and a turtle were to race, and the horse only wins by a nose, is the horse particularly fast, or is it the turtle who’s amazing? You’d have to assume there’s something supernatural, or the horse didn’t actually race, or make some other excuse. My point is that when you can do something that people say you can’t with what you have, you prove that you’re more powerful than them. So you are very powerful since you had the guts to use what little you had to do something big.”

  “You’re the first person to say that to me,” she admitted, blushing as she avoided contact with my eyes. “Why are you saying these nice things?”

  “Because I want to,” I said plainly, “You’re very nice. You deserve people to say nice things about you. You also deserve a name. How do you feel about Sorceress? No wait, I should come up with something better. Give me a minute.”

  “What?” Sorceress was confused, as was everyone else who got a new name around here, “I am not a noble. I’m not even a slave. I’m a mana well. I exist so others can harvest it from me. I wouldn’t have even been taught how to speak if it didn’t help them determine my mana potential in my earlier years.”

  “You used to be just a well of mana,” I said to her, “That’s when you were in the cage. Now you aren’t. Now you’re Sorceress. Or something else, maybe. I’m running out of unique regular names.”

  “What is a Sorceress?” she asked.

  “It’s who you are if you want to be,” I said plainly again, “Whatever you have, like bravery, kindness, compassion, mana, grace, or whatever else you have, all wrapped up together to make up you. Everything you do is Sorceress. That’s you. If you didn’t have mana, you still have four other things on that list that makeup you, and that’s just the stuff I mentioned. And that still makes you worth having a name.”

  She seemed confused by that last statement, looking off to the side to chew on it some more. Her mind was obviously very lost in all the possibilities I’d just revealed to her, and I didn’t want to overwhelm her. As much as I’d have liked to keep talking to her, she needed some time, and I had some new recruits to inaugurate and a battle to check on outside. I gave her a kiss on the cheek, then turned to my mutant manglers.

  “Hello, my new boys!” I addressed the two former champions. “So, are we swearing loyalty? Mutants are a new kind of servant for me, so forgive me if I do something you don’t like. Except for names. I don’t care what your names were before because I’m changing them now.”

  “I can’t believe you survived so long against Silverfang,” the Stretcher remarked, “he had me down in seconds when he did it to me. Are you some kind of super Rabbit, like the Hunter?”

  “I’m something different entirely,” I answered, “Nothing super about me. Maybe that’s why. I don’t have any of that fancy mana inside me like you all do, so I’m not draining like you all are. Though I must say, I’m happy I now hold the Pain Drain record. Very prestigious, apparently.”

  “How are all of you so strong?” the crocodile champion asked. “I’ve never had to fight that hard against anyone other than Silverfang. Then he caught me in that grip of his, and I was out. He’s just so fast in those short bursts, and then neither of you can move until you give in to it. I always hated it when he used that on me. He has to kill you to finish it, and he restarts your heart with a mana infusion.”

  “Ouch.” I rubbed the sore growing on my neck. “Well, as your pack leader--”

  Both champions screamed bloody murder out of seemingly nowhere, interrupting me and clawing at their own faces as if they were in some sort of intense pain. Before we could so much as ask them what was wrong, their fur began to glow, slowly enveloping their whole bodies, including their armor, until they had become a golden white, shining too brightly to look at them directly.

  “Cover!” I shouted to the girls, pulling the red-head away from her train of thought physically as I moved behind the altar. In a zapping flash, the light exploded outward, filling the room with its pure color. The zapping became voiping, then popping, and finally nothing as the light vanished without a trace. I looked back over to where my two new associates were supposed to be, seeing nothing. Not even a scorch mark to show that they’d been vaporized. The question was on everyone’s mind, and I was about to ask it before something answered it for me.

  “You have garnered my attention.” The ominous, deeply masculine voice reverberated from everywhere and echoed off the walls, pulsing from inside my head as if it was my own internal monologue as well. “This highest honor will be your undoing come the Final Blood Moon. I will allow you until then to abandon this world.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” I stood
up as I spoke to the voice, guessing who it might have been. “What makes this Blood Moon so special?”

  The voice didn’t speak again. The room was eerily quiet.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing. That was a lot to unpack, but first, I had to double-check a few things.

  “Did everyone else hear that?” I asked around, affirmed by unanimous nods. “Good. Didn’t want to sound crazy just shouting to the sky like that. Alright, let’s go check on that war we started, shall we?”

  “I found him!” The voice of a very speedy Peter came bursting through the ornate brass doors along with him as he jumped for joy at the sight of me and looking back outside. “He’s in the inner dome! He’s safe! He did it!”

  The familiar giant frame of Wallace stepped in, adorned in a scuffed battle plate with a missing pauldron. He waved to us as he stepped inside, ducking his head to enter through the door.

  “From the carnage of bodies and flames we’ve been quelling outside, I see we have you to truly thank for our overwhelming victory here today,” He chuckled as he spoke, “Well done, my lord. With no reinforcements from the inside, the piddly number of soldiers at the frontline was a trifle. The Grand Temple is yours to command.”

  “Is this true?” The redhead peaked out from behind the cylinder of stone beside me, “We can leave if we wanted to? You’re not going to stop me?”

  “Good evening, dear bunny,” Wallace bowed, “Yes, it is indeed safe. You must be sick of being cooped up in here. The outside is free for you to explore as you wish now.”

  “It’s okay,” I held out my hand, seeing her trepidation, “You can come out, see the world. Would you like that?”