Monster Empire

by Michael-Scott Earle

  We hurried down the long tunnel as it slowly inched upward. Not far behind us, the angry kobolds growled and hissed as they began to close the distance.

  Chapter 4

  We ran for ten minutes through the tunnel with the sounds of the angry kobolds hot on our heels. I didn’t see the growling beasts whenever I glanced behind us, but they sounded close. Too close. Nika was in good shape, however, and she kept up a swift pace as we ducked through low caverns and sprinted through forests of glowing mushrooms. I had only just met Nika a few hours ago, but for some reason, I trusted her as much as I did the men in my unit.

  “How much further?” I asked as we clambered up a pile of loose stone partially blocking off a tunnel.

  “It’s up ahead.”

  I watched her cute green ass wiggle over the heap of stone and followed her down the other side. There at the end of the tunnel I saw our salvation glowing bright like only sunshine can.

  Then a crude spear hit the stone by my feet and clanked hollowly, and another whizzed by my head.

  “Run, Nika!” I shouted, as I pushed her ahead of me. I didn’t dare look back, I just ducked my head low and pumped my arms and legs as we both frantically charged toward the exit.

  A spear thudded against my molle pack, and I heard the hiss and shrieks of the kobolds mere feet behind me. My heart raced, and my worry for Nika grew. She had almost reached the exit, but the kobolds seemed to have found renewed strength and sounded as if they were just twenty feet behind me.

  Then they finally caught up to me ten feet from the exit and leapt on my molle pack. I batted the little monsters away from me as they clawed at my face and tried to sink their sharp teeth into my neck, and then I growled and pumped my arms and legs. Up ahead, Nika stopped at the threshold, and she glanced back at me nervously.

  “Go, go, go!” I urged.

  Nika stood there frozen by a lifetime of fear of the suns, but I was hauling ass through the tunnel, and when Nika stopped and turned around, I wrapped my arms around her and spun us both through the exit and out into the sunshine. As I had hoped, we landed on my molle pack and the kobolds who clung to it. The clawed hands of the little beasts that gripped my head made me blind to my surroundings, but we must have emerged at the top of a hill, because we rolled down it for a good ten seconds before we came to a stop at the bottom.

  I felt the heat of fire on my face and neck and scrambled to get up and shake loose the screaming kobolds. When I had gotten them off me, I turned around to discover four of the little bastards engulfed in flames and writhing in agony there on the hillside. Farther up, a couple more raced back toward the cave entrance panic-stricken and shrieking, but they only made it a few feet before they too burst into flames.

  The stink of the charred kobolds at the bottom of the hill made me almost gag. It smelled like burnt dog hair with a side of boiled shit, and I took a few steps upwind from the hideous remains.

  It was then that I beheld Nika standing naked in the sunlight with her arms raised high, and a look of pure ecstasy on her beautiful face. Her body had been beautiful in the glow of the crystals, but in the sunlight cast by the Holy Twins her true beauty was revealed to me. Her light jade colored skin took on a softer tone in the brilliant rays, and her hair became a rich, luminescent candy red.

  Nika spun in circles beneath the suns and laughed as she shed tears of joy. Her happiness choked me up a bit. It was like seeing someone wrongly imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit finally being set free. Her joy was infectious, and I couldn’t help but laugh with her as she danced in the world of light.

  “Oh, Ken Jewell, it is beautiful, just beautiful,” she said, and turned round and round like an overwhelmed kid in a candy shop.

  We had come out on a northern facing hillside that overlooked a snaking river. The lead sun had begun to set in the west, and the other one looked to be about six hours behind the first. I couldn’t see what lay north of the cave we had emerged from, but a thick forest and slowly rolling hills surrounded us to the east and west.

  Nika ran toward the river to the south, and I grabbed the discarded t-shirt and hurried to catch up. Before I could warn her against leaping into the unknown river, she was already diving into the water.

  “Swim with me.” She laughed and splashed me. “The water is so warm.” Before I could answer, her face lit up as though she had just realized something incredible. “No, let's make love on the grass. Sex with you the first time was wonderful, and I can’t even imagine what sex with you with the sunlight on my skin will feel like!”

  She emerged from the river, and I took a moment to admire her glistening form. Nika’s body was amazing, but what made it even more appealing was her personality. It seemed that nothing could bring her down, and her positive attitude was infectious. She was almost always smiling, and her warm gaze was like a ray of sunshine every time it found me. She had brightened the underdark with her mere existence, and now she made the bright surface world that much more wondrous as well.

  I had only known her a short time, but I realized that I was falling for her.

  Nika was an enthusiastic lover, and her passion was matched only by her curiosity for each different sexual position that I introduced her to. We made love on the riverbank as the first sun set in the west, and our simultaneous orgasm was met with magnificent hues of orange, red, and purple that burst through the clouds triumphantly.

  Then we fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  While I slept, I dreamed that kobolds chased me through the ancient site in Syria. The monsters in my dreams were not the tiny versions found in the underdark, but one hundred-foot-tall monsters who shot lasers out of their eyes. In my dream, I had to choose between either saving my squadron or saving Nika, but I had tried to do both.

  The twin suns shone brightly overhead and glared down at me like the burning eyes of a god. The kobolds stormed through the ancient site and crushed pillars beneath their gargantuan feet. Their spears were the length of sequoia trees, and the weapons shattered sandstone walls and ancient temples.

  On one side of the site Nika hung from a giant mushroom that grew out of the desert floor. On the other side, Johnson and McAllister hung from a mammoth crystal that protruded from the desert sand at a sixty-degree angle. I hid behind the temple of Nabu and radioed in an airstrike as the giant kobolds broke off into two groups of seven. One group charged toward Nika, and the other group descended upon my soldiers. But I could only target one of the groups for the airstrike.

  It was my soldiers or Nika, and I had to choose.

  I jolted awake beside the river and shot upright. Nika’s soft hand on my shoulder made me jump, but then I realized where I was and let out a long sigh.

  “Are you alright?” the beautiful woman asked as her eyebrows lifted with concern.

  “Yeah, it was only a bad dream.” I shook off the remnants of the nightmare and glanced at the sky. The first sun had set, so I checked my watch. It had been set to Syrian time, and the device reported that it was six in the morning there. A day and night had passed on earth, but on the strange planet where I was, nighttime hadn’t even begun. I wouldn’t know exactly how the days were here until the suns were in the same position as they were when I landed in the ocean, but I guessed they were about thirty-six or forty hours away from that time. One thing I did know, however, was that the second sun would be setting soon. I held my hand up and counted three fingers from the sun to the horizon. This rough measurement would indicate three hours on earth until sunset, but I guessed that I had upwards of five on this planet.

  It was time to get some food in my belly and start working on setting up our camp. I could make a decent lean-to with the tarp in my Molle pack, but first I would need a fire.

  “What are you doing?” Nika asked as she yawned and stretched with a happy smile.

  “Setting up camp. You want to help?” I asked.

  “Of course, silly. I’m your wife.”

  I didn’t argue with that, and
I kind of liked the sound of it. The thought of introducing her to my parents forced a laugh out of me, and I was thankful that Nika didn’t ask what I found so funny.

  We gathered some pine pitch along with dead twigs and branches, and once we had a good pile built, I set to starting a fire. It would come in handy keeping wild animals away, and that outweighed my worry over humans spotting it. I had absolutely no idea what kind of beasts lurked in the forests of the surface world, and I didn’t think Nika did either. Even if there was nothing exotic in the woods, there was likely to still be bears, wildcats, and wolves. This new world was strange, but it was much like earth in terms of flora and fauna.

  I gathered some big river rocks and placed them in a two-foot wide circle about ten feet from the river bank. Then I bunched up some dried needles and twigs that we had gathered and mixed in some dead grass and the pine pitch. Once I had built up my wood like a hollow log cabin, I placed the ball of pitch and sticks in the center. Nika watched with amazement as I tried to light the wad with my magnesium fire starter, and she clapped and cheered when it finally caught fire.

  “You are magic, Ken Jewell!” she merrily declared.

  “Don’t goblins have fire?” I asked. When I found her, there had been a torch in the chamber with her after all.

  “Of course we do, silly. But we don’t know how to make it like you. Our fire has been in the clan for centuries. It is said that a great goblin adventurer brought it from the surface world long, long ago.”

  “Do goblins come up to the surface often? I met a farmer who told me that sometimes monsters come out of the underdark at night to raid,” I said.

  “War parties come to the surface sometimes,” she explained, “but not much lately. They’ve been too busy trying to fight back the kobolds and the vengeful dwarves.”

  My stomach growled, and Nika giggled. “Are you as hungry as I am?” I asked her.

  “Starved,” she said.

  “Alright, I’ll see if I can catch some fish in the river.” I slapped my molle pack. “I’ve also got some food in here if you want to try it. A half a soldier fuel energy bar opened, anyway. I’d like to save the other stuff though, as it lasts a really long time and might come in handy if we get in a bind.”

  “You are a very good provider, Ken Jewell,” she said with a delightful smile.

  “Thank you,” I said as I gave her a kiss. Merely being around Nika put me in a good mood, and I thanked my lucky stars once again that I had run into someone like her.

  “I can think of something else I'd like to eat,” she whispered in my ears as she pulled me down with her and snaked her hand under my pants.

  “You’re insatiable,” I told her, and gave her a few playful kisses of my own. My lips flirted in the shadow of her cleavage, then I dotted kisses down her belly and lingered near her hot spot.

  “I have to get back to work,” I said after I gave her one final kiss and pulled away from her.

  “Hey, no fair,” she pouted as she squirmed on the grass with pent up passion.

  “First things first, dear. We need to eat.”

  “Mmmm, I like the sound of that,” she purred.

  I grabbed my spade out of my molle pack. It still had some kobold blood on it, so I washed it in the river. Once it was clean, I used it to dig a few shallow holes by the bank.

  “What can I do to help?” Nika asked. She came to kneel beside me in my camo t-shirt, and I was once again taken by how damn cute she was. Her full, dark green lips were so inviting that I could hardly keep my eyes off of them.

  “You can gather some worms and grubs if you want,” I said, and she set about the work happily.

  This was all a grand adventure for her, and it was for me as well. We were kindred spirits in a strange new land, and it was us against the world. It seemed that fate had brought us together, and I thought about the long odds against us ever having met. I was no mathematician, but I knew they really weren’t good odds.

  I had a fishing kit in the survival pack on my utility belt, but I had hooks and line in my survival knife as well. The army left it up to us to provide ourselves with our own knives beyond the standard issue M9, and I had always opted for a good old 184 Buckmaster. It was a solid survival knife with an eight-inch blade and a hollow handle that held waterproof matches, fish hooks, and extra line.

  I used my knife to first shave the bark off two nice straight oak branches that were seven feet long. Then I carved a groove in the thick end of each, about a foot from what were to be the handles. I worked the line around the groove of one and tied it off, then spun the makeshift pole around in my hand to wrap the surrounding line all the way to the end. By tying it off near the handle, I ensured that I wouldn’t lose the line if the fish snapped the stick during the fight.

  “I have your worms, Ken Jewell.” Nika walked over to me with a dozen or so worms and a few slugs in my cap. “Can you teach me how to fish?”

  “Sure,” I said as she leaned against my shoulder so she could see my fingers work. “First, I’m going to make a slit on the end here.”

  “Ahh.” She stole a kiss and watched with enthusiasm as I carved the pole.

  “Then I run the line through the slit, tie it off like so, and voila, the first pole is ready.” I set the pole down against the grass and then gestured to it proudly.

  “Oh, let me do the other one,” she said eagerly, and I grinned at her enthusiasm.

  “Alright, go ahead. Let’s see what you’ve learned.”

  Nika rubbed her green hands together and took the line and the second pole from me. I watched as she tied off the line like I had shown her, twirled the pole like I had said, and then cut a slit in the end. Lastly, she ran the line through the slit, tied it off, and turned to me with a wide grin.

  “How does it look?”

  “Great,” I said. “Now we need to make sure the line floats so that the hook is near the surface.”

  “You are so smart, Ken Jewell,” she said as she rested her chin on my shoulder.

  I showed Nika how to fashion a bobber out of a few lighter pieces of dry wood, and then I had her do it with her own pole. Her fingers were amazingly dexterous, and she quickly tied her bobbers to the line and then smiled at me.

  “You did great,” I said as my heart filled with pride. “Now comes the sticky part.”

  I retrieved two worms from my cap. They were lively little bastards who had started to crawl their way out along the brim, and I knew that they would perform well underwater. I handed one to Nika, grabbed my hook, and impaled my worm.

  She made a delightfully gruesome face, stabbed her worm with glee, turned to me and asked, “Now do we get to eat the worms?”

  I burst with laughter. “What? No. The worms aren’t for us, they’re for the fish. When the fish go to eat the worm, the hook will stick into their cheek, like this.” I hooked my cheek with my finger. “But they can’t slide off the hook, see. It is barbed in the other direction, so it gets stuck. Once we’ve got the fish hooked, we pull them up on shore.”

  “Then we eat them?” she asked, and her stomach growled.

  “After we cook them over the fire, yes, then we eat them,” I said with a laugh.

  “Oh good. I’ve never eaten fish before, only merfolk.”

  “Uhhh, ok,” I said with a sideways glance.

  “You are very clever Ken Jewell,” she said as she nodded approvingly at me, “and it was very clever of me to make you my husband. Now teach me how to catch fish.”

  “Now we throw the line out into the water,” I said as I twisted my arm back and then flipped my hands forward. The hook and bobber flew into the middle of the river, and then I nodded to her pole. She proved a natural when it came to casting the line, and we were soon sitting on the side of the water and chatting about how happy she was to be on the surface.

  Nika was the first to snag a fish, and I almost fell in the river in my attempt to get to her before she lost it. But she had listened closely, and when the bobber d
arted below the surface the third time, she had yanked back firmly. As I tripped over my own discarded rod she began spinning hers in wide arcs and wound the line up the pole while at the same time tugging back on it occasionally. She whooped and giggled as she pulled in her catch, and I was right there to cheer her on. When the fish flung out of the water and landed on the bank, Nika leapt with delight.

  “I got one! I got one!” she cheered.

  “Hold on--” I said as I grabbed her line and took hold of the slippery fish with expert precision.

  I offered it to Nika, and she hooked her finger through its gill the way I had shown her and held it up to admire the catch. She looked to the twin suns with a happy smile, but then her smile faded, and she offered the fish back to me.

  “I was going to sacrifice my first catch to the goblin god,” said Nika, “but I would rather you have it. The gods never answered my prayers anyway. They never stopped the teasing by the other goblins. They didn’t rescue me from the underdark. You did, Ken Jewell, and I want you to have my first catch instead.”

  “I appreciate the sentiment, Nika, but I can’t eat your fish when I know you’re as hungry as I am.”

  “But it is a wife's duty to provide for her husband,” she said.

  “It is also a husband’s duty to provide for his wife. How about we split it?”

  “Thank you, Ken Jewell!” she giggled. “You are such a wonderful husband!”

  The fish reminded me of a rainbow trout, with multi-colored dots speckling its sides and a soft pink underbelly. I accepted the fish from Nika and laid it down on a stone to clean it. Once I had cut off the head and cleaned out the guts, we cooked it over the small fire. The trout was delicious, and Nika moaned and grinned happily as we sat on the bank and watched our bobbers as we ate.

  “Fish on!” Nika yelled the term that I had taught her. “Your pole is bending, Ken Jewell!”

  I snapped myself out of my ponderings, grabbed my pole, and began twisting the line up around it. The fish was a big one and bent my pole nearly to the breaking point. I yanked back with calculated strength, not too much, not too little, and continued to twist the slack onto the pole. I realized that this fish was much bigger than I had thought, so I moved closer to the riverbank in case I needed to jump in the water and grab it. My fisherman’s ego was in full swing, and I was hell bent on impressing my goblin wife. But when I yanked fiercely on the pole and pulled the catch out of the water, I realized that I hadn’t caught a fish at all.