Blood Mercenaries Origins

by Ben Wolf

  “However you can,” Garrick replied.

  “Does that include using the black vial?” Irwin rummaged through his pack.

  “No. Too dangerous. Figure something else out,” Garrick said.

  Irwin grumbled something, but the skulks started charging toward them, so Garrick couldn’t hear what it was.

  As the skulks drew closer, Garrick tightened his grip on his battle-axe.

  Then he smiled.

  Chapter Four

  This was what Garrick lived for: facing an onslaught of opponents all at once, with plenty of room to do his work. Their old, rusted weapons couldn’t harm him, and he didn’t have to hold back. He could loose the most savage parts of himself and go berserk.

  And that’s exactly what he did.

  The nearest skulk went down from a vicious hack that snapped its spine. The next one caught an axe head to its jaw, caving in the entire right side of its face. The third slammed face-first into the floor tiles, courtesy of a mighty overhead blow from Garrick’s battle-axe.

  Their weapons pinged off of his arms and legs as he tore through them, batting them aside as if they were flies pestering him. He severed limbs, shattered bones, and crushed skulls to dust under his heels. They didn’t stand a chance against him.

  But Coburn and Irwin were a different story. Even amid his berserking, Garrick often stole glances back at them to make sure they could handle whatever foes managed to avoid his rampage.

  They had learned early on in working with Garrick to stay away once he got going, but the drawback was that he often left them alone, exposed, to face foes on their own. As the largest, most physically capable member of their mercenary trio, Garrick felt responsible for their wellbeing.

  Coburn deftly avoided the skulks’ clumsy attacks, slipping under blows and dodging others. Whenever the opportunity to strike back presented itself, he drove his knives into them wherever they could get a decent bite.

  The problem was, his knives did next to nothing to harm the skulks. They just weren’t large enough, heavy enough weapons, so Coburn hadn’t felled a single one.

  Irwin, on the other hand, was handling the skulks surprisingly well. He’d already taken out several of them with his vials. Two light-blue vials had frozen a pair of skulks solid and snagged the left leg of a third in ice. Then he sheared through the heads, armor, and torsos of three others with an acid solution from his green vials.

  Then Irwin jammed a glowing yellow vial into the gaping mouth of another skulk. As Irwin dove away, the skulk’s jaw clamped shut on the vial.

  It burst with a loud pop and a brilliant flash of light that blew the skulk’s head apart, showering the area with skull fragments. The rest of the skulk collapsed into a heap of bones, and the bones disintegrated into powder.

  Garrick backhanded the face of one skulk so hard that its head spun all the way around with a series of snaps, but it stayed upright and kept coming for him. He bashed its face in with the pommel of his battle-axe, and its skull crunched inward. It dropped to the floor in a pile of dust.

  “I can’t believe Irwin is killing more of these fiends than I,” Coburn shouted over the fracas.

  He sheathed his knives and scrambled over to a bony arm scraping its way along the floor with a sword curled in its fingers. Coburn stomped on its wrist and jerked the sword from its fingers, taking a couple of them off in the process. He stomped on the hand once more for good measure, then he blocked a haphazard slice from another skulk.

  With his new weapon in hand, Coburn engaged the remaining skulks near Irwin, who continued lobbing vials at his opponents with excellent precision. Meanwhile, Garrick felled several more skulks with catastrophic blows that left them either dead, destroyed, or both.

  As they battled the few remaining skulks, Garrick turned his attention toward the exit. That’s when he noticed dozens of large, black dots advancing toward them from the ceiling and the walls. The dots sharpened into focus as they drew closer, forming into a skittering mass of scorpers.

  Garrick cursed. He drove his shoulder into a skulk and sent it flying into one of the pillars, and its bones and armor clanked against the stone. He finished it off with a battle-axe strike to its head, and it reduced to dust.

  The scorpers swarmed toward him, and he smacked them aside with arcing swipes of his battle-axe, relying more on the flat sides than on the blades. The scorpers screeched and flailed through the air and crunched against the walls and the pillars, but they kept coming.

  At some point, Garrick resorted to stomping on them. A well-timed, one-footed stomp on their heads usually did the trick, but some of the time they skidded out from under him, avoiding death. So Garrick started jumping and crushing them with both feet, sending black innards and dark blood squirting out their sides—just like any other insects.

  But it wasn’t enough. Their pincers found his boots, and their wiry legs propelled them up his shins. He backhanded them off of his legs and even one on his torso, and he hopped back to try to put space between him and them. Garrick didn’t know if they were venomous or just ravenous, but he didn’t care to find out.

  “Irwin,” Garrick called. “We need fire over here.”

  “I’m kind of busy, Garrick,” Irwin shouted back. A bright light flashed behind Garrick, accompanied by a loud pop, and then a jawbone landed on the floor in front of Garrick. It dissolved into dust before it could bounce a second time.

  Garrick abandoned the idea of swatting the scorpers back again and retreated toward Irwin and Coburn, who only had two more skulks to deal with. If Garrick didn’t do something, the scorpers would overrun them. If Irwin didn’t set them on fire, they’d never get out of this room alive.

  So Garrick slammed his battle-axe into the nearest skulk’s head, shattering its skull into tiny pieces. Then he grabbed the other one by the vertebrae in its neck, lifted it off its feet, and hurled it like a ragdoll toward the encroaching scorpers.

  It served to block their progress temporarily as they swarmed it and started cleaning the remaining flesh from its bones, but plenty of them continued to advance. An ocean of scorpers wriggled between Garrick, Irwin, Coburn, and the way out.

  “Fire, please?” Garrick asked.

  Irwin already had the red vial in his hand. He calmly said, “Move, please.”

  Then he hurled the red vial over the front lines of scorpers and into the middle of their ranks.

  At first, Garrick wondered why Irwin hadn’t aimed for the front of the scorpers, but when the vial shattered, Irwin’s plan made perfect sense. Brilliant red flames erupted from the vial, completely incinerating the scorpers closest to the inferno and igniting all those in close proximity.

  The fire seared through the scorper ranks from the center outward, and blazing scorpers skittered around in a shrill, screeching frenzy, setting each other ablaze. Gradually, the flames scorched a path through the scorpers wide enough for Garrick, Irwin, and Coburn to run through.

  “Hurry!” Garrick shouted.

  They did. As the trio ran, Garrick saw the last skulk, its bones charred black from the flames, sit up in their path. So Garrick timed his steps and drove a stunning kick into the bottom of the skulk’s chin. Its head snapped off of its neck and launched across the room until it smacked against the far wall and exploded into a cloud of dust and ash.

  Scorpers all around them shrieked and burned, and the ones not on fire shuffled toward them, but they couldn’t catch up. Garrick made it through the second archway first, followed by Coburn and then Irwin.

  As soon as all three of them set foot in the room with the teal light, a new slab of rock started to rise from the stone floor. A few scorpers squelched through before the slab could totally cover the archway, and the stone pulverized a few more as it shut, but Garrick squashed the survivors right away.

  They’d made it.

  “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Garrick asked.

  Irwin and Coburn glowered at him.

  “Maybe not for you,” Cobur
n replied. “I was virtually useless in there.”

  “I wasn’t.” Irwin grinned.

  Garrick patted his shoulder. He was truly proud of Irwin. He’d come a long way in the last year or so they’d been working together. “You performed excellently.”

  Irwin’s grin widened. “Thanks. It’s just science, you know? Applied force, leveraging elemental advantages, pressure from—”

  “Yes, yes.” Coburn tossed the skulk’s old sword aside. “We understand how much smarter you are than either of us. Yet we have an enterprise to complete, and we’ve no idea how many rooms this godforsaken place holds. Shall we proceed?”

  Garrick looked around. The cavern looked similar to the one they’d just left, down to the pillars and the path and the height of the ceiling, but it differed wildly in that the path descended down into a pool of standing water that glowed with a pacifying teal light.

  Though similar torches were mounted on the pillars and comparable lamps hung from the ceiling, none of them burned at all. The pool of water gave off the only light in the room. Across the pool, the next archway beckoned them to enter, and like the first one, no light shone from inside.

  “Who’s up for a swim?” Coburn rubbed his hands together. “Truth be told, I don’t like the look of this one bit. Who puts a lake inside a room?”

  “An irradiated lake, at that,” Irwin added.

  “There’s nothing good in that water,” Garrick said. “That, I guarantee.”

  “And yet we must traverse the water in order to conquer this room,” Coburn said. “So tie your blue hair back, and let’s wade in.”

  Garrick frowned. His dark blue hair was another side effect of the troll blood in his lineage, and he couldn’t do anything about it but wear hoods or cut it short, and he preferred longer hair. In certain lighting, it looked black, but most of the time it was clearly and obviously blue to everyone who saw it.

  “Sorry,” Coburn said. “I forgot you don’t appreciate mentions of your hair.”

  “Forget it,” Garrick said. “I’m more concerned about that water.”

  The water itself wouldn’t hurt Garrick, but he could certainly drown. At over 400 pounds and wielding a heavy battle-axe, he’d sink far easier than he could swim.

  “Spread out. Look for a boat or a raft or something we can use to get across.” Garrick added, “And be alert. There could be more of those scorpers or something even worse in here that we don’t know about yet.”

  The search didn’t last long, and it turned up nothing of use. Though roughly the same size as the room they’d just left, most of it was submerged, leaving very little surface area for stashing boats.

  “I suppose we’re swimming after all, then,” Coburn said.

  “Lead the way.” Garrick motioned toward the pool.

  Coburn stepped into the water, the first to disturb its serene surface. The water rippled with each of his movements, and the ripples seemed to extend throughout the entirety of the pool, interrupted only by the pillars protruding from the water.

  “Feel any different?” Irwin asked.

  Coburn, now five feet ahead and knee-deep, shook his head. “It is a comfortable temperature, despite its subterranean location. I don’t believe there is any magic influence in the water. Or at least, if there is, I don’t seem to be affected by it.”

  “Perhaps the light is some sort of natural luminescence, then.” Irwin nudged Garrick. “See? Science.”

  Garrick just nodded. “You’re next in.”

  Irwin gulped, removed his spectacles, and tucked them into his pack. Then he stepped one foot into the water. Then the other.

  Before long, all three of them had waded into the pool. To Garrick’s dismay, Coburn and Irwin had to start swimming about twenty feet in. He hoped that with his additional height, he’d be able to touch the bottom, but instead, when the water reached the top of his shoulders, his foot slipped off a steep drop-off.

  Surprised, he scrambled to keep his head above the water, but it rushed up to meet him all the way to his nose. He sputtered and spat and kicked his legs furiously until he found the edge of the drop off again.

  Stability. Sure footing. It had only been an hour or two since the last time he’d been without them—thanks to the temple’s exterior wall—but he’d already begun to take them for granted. The drop-off had humbled him yet again.

  “You alright?” Irwin called back, looking at Garrick while treading water.

  “Fine. I just wish you’d told me about the drop-off.”

  “What drop-off?” Coburn asked from beyond Irwin.

  “The one I just—” Garrick stopped. He was at least a foot taller than Coburn and even taller compared to Irwin. They probably hadn’t even had a chance to find the drop-off point because of their heights. “Never mind.”

  Garrick adjusted his footing, strapped his battle-axe to his back, and pushed off the edge into the water. He tried to swim with steady, even strokes, but once he started struggling to keep his head above the water, he abandoned the idea. Between his own body weight and the battle-axe on his back, he had to change his approach.

  He resorted to frantic dog-paddling. He knew it would use more energy and that it would take him longer to get across the pool, but swimming with better form and ultimately drowning wasn’t a viable alternative.

  As he swam, Garrick tried to take in his surroundings, particularly in the water but also the walls and ceiling. If something were to attack them right now, they’d have a far rougher time trying to fight back. With how this swim was going, Garrick wasn’t sure he could even fight back at all.

  By the time they reached the halfway point, Garrick was exhausted. He swam over to one of the pillars and grabbed the lip of one of the carvings with his fingers. It reminded him of trying to find grips in the temple’s exterior wall—his fingers were too big and the carved rock offered him little by way of true holds, but it gave his arms and legs a much-needed respite.

  “I’m taking a break,” he said to Irwin and Coburn.

  They each took up spots at pillars of their own—Coburn at the pillar ahead of Garrick’s, and Irwin at the pillar across from Garrick’s.

  “Perhaps you should swim from pillar to pillar and take breaks in between,” Coburn suggested.

  Normally Garrick would’ve rejected such advice. The last thing he wanted was to be seen as weak, but here, in this dungeon with his closest friends, he had to be honest with himself.

  “I think I will,” he said. “I’m not built for swimming.”

  “No, you’re not,” Irwin agreed. “Some of the things I’ve seen you do defy the natural order of things, so it’s understandable and even expected that you’d be deficient in other areas of your life, particularly buoyancy and—”

  Something yanked Irwin under the teal water with a splash.

  “Irwin!” Garrick and Coburn shouted.

  Coburn launched away from his pillar and dug into the water, splashing as he glided toward Irwin.

  Almost everything within Garrick urged him to join Coburn in trying to save Irwin, but what good would he do? He could barely keep himself afloat. So he stayed put, hoping Coburn could handle whatever had happened on his own.

  A series of frenetic splashes and gasps marked Irwin’s desperation to stay above the water, but he slipped under the surface again before Coburn could reach him.

  “Irwin!” Garrick shouted again. “Coburn, is there something down there?”

  “I’m not sure,” Coburn called back. “It’s… murky. Hazy. Despite the light, I’m having a hard time seeing anything. I’m going to dive down and see if—”

  Coburn jerked under the water as well, splashing as he went down.

  “Coburn? No!” Garrick shouted and cursed.

  Coburn resurfaced and inhaled a ragged breath, but the thing snatched him under the water again, silencing him.

  Garrick cursed again. He released his grip on the pillar with his right hand but still held it with his left, and he took hol
d of his battle-axe. What good it would do him in the water against whatever unknown foe he was about to face, he didn’t know. Probably none whatsoever, but holding it made him feel less worthless.

  He held his position, perfectly still, watching the ripples from Coburn’s splashes echo past him and scanning the water. He saw nothing. The water had calmed back to the perfect teal tranquility he’d seen when they’d first entered the room.

  Then something latched onto his foot and hauled him down hard.

  Garrick’s faulty grip on the pillar slipped, and he went under the water with only half a breath in his lungs. He swung the battle-axe toward his feet, hoping to hit whatever had grabbed him, but he hit nothing solid.

  As he started to swing again, the thing jerked him deeper, and the battle-axe squirted out of his hands and disappeared into the water below.

  In that moment, all Garrick could think was that he should’ve taken the lava path instead.

  Then he saw it. A gaping mouth rose up at him, translucent and glowing bright teal. A vivid orange tongue waggled at him as the mouth rose to meet his body.

  As Garrick clawed at the water, toward the surface, the mouth enveloped his legs. It didn’t hurt—it just felt rubbery, but the thing’s strength was undeniable.

  Garrick couldn’t escape. He was going to die.

  The thing’s mouth closed over his torso, and then over his arms and head. Then it swallowed him whole.

  Chapter Five

  Garrick dropped into a pit, and something bony, squishy, and fleshy softened his fall. The space constricted around him, and he grunted, unable to move.

  Yet somehow he could still breathe. The air inside the creature’s belly was foul and putrid, but at least Garrick wasn’t drowning anymore.

  He grunted again, and something below him grunted in response. He recognized the voice.

  “Coburn?” Garrick managed.

  “Garrick?” It was Coburn.

  “What’s happening?” Garrick asked. He could hardly move. The space in the creature’s belly continued to tighten, hindering his limbs.