[Blood Bowl 04] - Rumble in the Jungle

by Matt Forbeck - (ebook by Undead)

  Dunk hammered away at the replaced steps, but they would not give. He walked over and stomped on the trigger plate, but it didn’t budge. Perhaps it needed to be reset by hand.

  Dunk sat down on the steps. He’d avoided the trap, but at what cost? He was alive, but alone, trapped in the heart of an ancient lizardman temple, surrounded by brain-hungry zombies. He couldn’t see how things could get worse.

  Then he heard the rumbling, howling noise again, closer than ever.

  Dunk turned and looked down the stairs, the camra’s beam of light following his gaze. At least he still had Lästiges’s device to count on. He wondered what had happened to her and the others.

  He suspected they were still alive. If the creators of the temple had wanted to kill someone with that trap, it would have been far easier to just drop them into a pit filled with spikes. Instead, they’d been taken somewhere, although for what purpose Dunk couldn’t begin to guess.

  Then he thought of the altar high above him, and he had an idea about why the priests of this place might have wanted live captives.

  He started straight down the stairs. This time, he was more careful than before. He only touched every third step, and he prodded them with his foot before stepping on them. It seemed ridiculous and took forever, but it paid off.

  He found two other trigger plates set into steps. Then he reached the third. When he tested the step, he felt the subtle wobble of an untriggered plate.

  Dunk tried the step in front of that one. It wobbled too. He went a step beyond. It wobbled too. Every step in front of him that he could reach wobbled.

  The temple’s builders had been canny. They’d known that experienced intruders would figure out about the trigger plates soon enough, so they’d installed a long line of trigger plates that stretched at least as far as Dunk’s reach, and perhaps far beyond.

  Dunk suspected that not all of the trigger plates were attached to something. That would have made it difficult for the legitimate travellers in the tunnel to get through. It was likely that only one or two of the plates would activate anything. The trouble was that Dunk had no way of knowing which ones they might be.

  Dunk rubbed the stubble on his chin and thought about it. He soon concluded that, since he had no way to know what to do, he had to guess. He could turn around and go back, maybe try his luck with the zombies. Just one man, on his own, and a Blood Bowl player to boot, might be able to punch a hole through the zombies’ line and find daylight.

  But his woman, his brother, his agent, his brother’s woman, and his new friend were all trapped somewhere down in the depths of the temple. He couldn’t leave them all behind. He couldn’t leave any of them behind.

  Dunk steeled himself and jumped. This time, instead of rolling into a ball, he stopped on the step on which he landed. He wanted to touch as few steps as he could, in the hope that the temple’s builders had been stingy with the traps. If so, he might get lucky and avoid them all.

  The step he landed on clicked under his weight, but Dunk had expected that. He told himself that it didn’t mean that he’d activated a trap, just that he’d stepped on a trigger plate. The chances were good that it was a dummy, or so he told himself.

  Not all traps waited for the victim to move off the plate. Some activated right away, shooting spikes, spilling burning oil or unleashing poison gas. Dunk held still until he was sure he hadn’t landed on one of those.

  He made ready for another leap, and then sprang into the air. As he fell towards the next step he’d selected as a target, the light of the floating camra came with him and illuminated his way.

  Dunk saw a wire strung across the passageway at about chest height. He knew instantly that he could not avoid it, and that trying to do so might cause him to injure himself when landing. Instead of avoiding the wire, he reached out and grabbed it.

  The wire turned out to be as thin as a spider’s web, although far stronger. It snapped in Dunk’s grasp, each half zipping apart and disappearing into tiny holes set into the passage’s opposite walls.

  Dunk landed on the step he’d chosen and stopped. He held his breath, listening for anything to tip him off to what horrors he might have unleashed.

  For a long moment, nothing happened, and Dunk blew out a long sigh. Then the horrible noise from below rumbled through the entire place again, and something large and heavy smacked down where Dunk had been.

  He spun around and saw a tall, thin strip of something metallic that had landed behind him. It stood as tall as him, but was thinner than his thumb. He had to lean to the side to see that it was actually a gigantic metal disc fastened to the ceiling by a triangular rigging.

  The wheel had vicious teeth cut into its outer edge, giving it a vicious, hungry look. Dunk wondered what it was meant to eat. Then it started to spin.

  At first, the motion only confused Dunk. Then, as the disc began to spin faster, he grew concerned. The disc spun up to a high-pitched buzzing noise that sounded sharper than a sword, and then it started to move forward.

  Dunk didn’t want to run down the passageway in front of the buzzing disc, but he didn’t want to be sliced in half by it either. So, he threw himself against the nearest wall and hugged it tight.

  Although the stairwell was narrow, he guessed that he would be able to avoid the blade by an inch or more. If he was wrong, he knew he would pay a bloody and painful price.

  As the disc spun closer, it sped up, and the buzzing of the blade seemed to reach a howl. Dunk was tempted to try to cover his ears, but he didn’t want to risk losing his elbows. He felt a strong urge to close his eyes, but when the next blade popped out of the wall, this time perpendicular to the first disc, he felt glad he hadn’t given into the urge.

  The second blade spun up as fast as the first and slipped in right behind its partner, almost close enough for their savage teeth to act like those of interlocking gears. Dunk could see that even a halfling might have trouble avoiding the combination of the two, especially squeezing past the first. One of the pygmy halflings might have made it past, but Dunk guessed the people behind the Temple of Gloom wouldn’t think of such creatures as threats, more like snacks.

  Dunk couldn’t see how he could manage to avoid both spinning blades. His only choice seemed to be to race farther down the stairs, but he knew that’s just what the trappers who’d tricked out this place wanted him to do.

  He hesitated for a moment, and the blades leapt forward, cutting off any hope of retreat. Dunk exhaled to fit closer to the wall, and the edge of the first blade spun past him. He still had the other blade to deal with, though, the one that would cut him in half at the waist.

  For a moment, panic entered Dunk’s head and wouldn’t get out. The blades had trapped him. The temple’s keepers had outwitted him. He would be killed in a horrible, painful way, and die here in this forsaken, forgotten hallway, all alone. What’s more, the damned camra would record the whole thing.

  Dunk refused to let it happen. He knew he only had seconds to act, if that, but he resolved to go down fighting. If he died, his last moments would not be filled with fear, but with hope.

  Dunk shoved against the wall before him as hard as he could. His back smacked into the spinning blade behind him, catching it on the flat, unserrated part. It slowed as he pressed against it harder, but the friction from the spinning began to heat up the back of his shirt, and tiny imperfections in the blade tore at the fabric and his skin beneath.

  With enough room to put his feet against the wall, Dunk planted both boots, as high up as he could, and shoved with all his might. His muscles bulged, and the tendons in his legs threatened to burst out of his skin. With a mighty roar, he pushed one last time, and the blade behind him gave.

  The disc smashed into the far wall with a horrible clang that Dunk thought might be the best thing he’d ever heard. As the larger disc broke away from its mooring, the smaller one jumped forward, just as angry and deadly as its bigger partner.

  Dunk kept his boots planted against on
e wall and his shoulders against the other. As the smaller blade spun at him, he arched his belly up as high as it would go, and the spinning disc cut through the air beneath him.

  Sweating with the effort, and from the heat of the friction from the first blade, Dunk felt his joy turn to terror as his grip on the wall behind his shoulders slipped and he fell towards the buzzing blade below.

  25

  Dunk pulled himself into a ball as he fell, hoping to pull any appendages away from the edges of the spinning disc as he landed on it. He crashed into it hard, knocking the blade right from its mounting, and it went spinning down the stairs at high speed with Dunk still on it.

  Dunk’s sudden landing didn’t seem to stop the disc’s spinning much, if at all. Lying atop it, its momentum sent him spinning too, and the world around him became a blur of walls and open passageways as the disc began its long slide down the stairwell.

  The spinning left Dunk so disoriented he didn’t realise he was sliding down the stairwell until the disc careened off one of the walls. The screeching sound he heard didn’t come from his throat, but from the metal scraping along the front edges of the steps as the disc zoomed down the stairs. The knocking against the walls slowed down the disc’s rotation, but did nothing at all to halt its descent.

  As Dunk and the disc went, they tripped off every other trap along the way. Because they moved so fast, though, they were by and gone before the deadly devices could harm them. Dunk caught glimpses of stabbing spears, flying darts, gaping pits, dropping blocks, jetting flames, buzzing blades coming from every angle, billowing clouds of poison gas; and even more horrible devices of death that he couldn’t identify in the small glimpses he got as he and his blade-sled whizzed past.

  Dunk held on to the disc for his life. He’d sliced his fingers by reflexively grabbing at the disc’s edges, but he’d discovered that he could slip his fingers into the gaps between the teeth without losing his digits. This also served for the teeth to protect his fingers when the disc bounced off one wall or the other, instead of crushing them to bits.

  Still, Dunk felt like every impact with a wall or even rough contact with the next step, and there were countless such bangs and dings, might send him careening off on his own. If he was lucky, he’d fall backward, and the blade would spin on ahead of him. Then, if he managed not to trigger another trap with his landing, he might survive, or he might fall off the front end of the disc and have it slice him in two.

  The corners were the worst. As Dunk slid deeper and deeper under the temple, they grew farther and farther apart, but every time the disc slammed into one it took everything he had not to give up and let himself fall off.

  After what seemed like forever, Dunk realised that the darkness he, the camra and the disc were spinning through was getting brighter. The camra had given up on trying to keep up with Dunk’s acrobatic changes of perspective. Instead, it had opted to hover just behind him, keeping low to avoid the various traps the disc had set off.

  The camra had nearly been crushed, cracked or destroyed countless times, but it had just barely slipped past each incident with a tenacity that gave Dunk hope for his own situation. At the speed they moved, though, it did little to illuminate what lay ahead of them. By the time Dunk could see something ahead of him and understand what it was, it was already behind him.

  The light did an admirable job of lighting up the horrors that Dunk had barely avoided. This, however, did little to make him feel better. It only confirmed that he was in the worst position he’d ever been in, and he despaired of ever finding a way out.

  At that moment, he was sure that the people who’d fallen into the first pit and disappeared had been the fortunate ones.

  When the light started to grow at the bottom of the stairs, Dunk thought that perhaps he’d finally taken one blow too many to the head, and the stars he often saw at such moments would never stop. Then he wondered if the lower levels of the pyramid were on fire. He’d heard tales that the centre of the world, towards which he’d been skidding and bouncing at a bone-shaking rate, was a ball of molten lava, the stuff that volcanoes expelled when they got angry enough to erupt.

  With all the volcanic activity in the area, Dunk wondered if he might be heading for an all-too-close encounter with such scorching materials. Or perhaps he was heading for a fiery pit of hell, which he’d been told was somewhere beneath the surface of the world. His trip to Khorne’s section of the Realms of Chaos last year had disintegrated any remaining shreds of belief he might have still had from his childhood, but he couldn’t discount the possibility entirely. After all, he’d seen far stranger things since he’d started playing Blood Bowl.

  Dunk decided that if the disc managed to make it into the open, he’d hurl himself off it, just in case. As the thought crept into his head, the opportunity arose.

  The walls that had hugged and battered him on both sides for so long gave way in an instant. He found himself skidding through an open chamber, heading right for what could only be a moat filled with lava, which ran along the far side of the chamber.

  The glowing red light from the lava illuminated the entire chamber, which was filled from one end to the other with lizardmen of all different types. Dunk had never considered that there might be more than one kind of lizardman, but upon reflection it made sense. After all, there were countless different kinds of lizards. It stood to reason that there might be lots of humanoids that resembled them.

  Actually, it made no sense at all, but in a universe that held treemen, orcs, elves, dwarfs and so on, a little variety on the lizard side didn’t faze Dunk in the least.

  Dunk saw many things all at once, and taking them in kept him from leaping from his skidding wheel of doom. First, trapped in a cage before him, surrounded on all sides by a wide stream of lava, stood his friends. Spinne, Dirk, Lästiges, Slick and Jiminy looked battered by whatever means had been used to bring them to this point, but they were all breathing and standing under their own power. Spinne cheered when she saw him.

  The centre of the room, which led up to and past the captives, lay empty. Lizardmen in a vast variety of shapes and colours milled around the rest of the chamber, but the centre was clear.

  The path that Dunk skidded on led straight up to the throne, situated on the far side of the chamber. On this throne sat a monstrously large, wide and morbidly obese creature that resembled nothing more than a slimy bullfrog gone to seed. While the creatures around it were mostly painted in hues of greens, yellows, and blues, this squatting beast’s slick, greasy skin was a dark, bloody red.

  The beast opened a mouth wide enough to swallow Dunk whole and croaked something loud and unintelligible at the thrower as he skidded uncontrollably towards it. The language difference, if the thing spoke a language, would have been enough to stop the conversation right there, but Dunk couldn’t hear much at all over the horrible screech his disc made as it skittered along the rough stone floor.

  The lizardmen in the room all turned towards Dunk, and most of them reached for their weapons. Others, which resembled something more akin to lizard-lions, spat fire in his direction, although none of them were close enough to even singe the speeding thrower.

  Dunk had no idea what to do about any of this or how to handle the tremendous number of threats coming at him from every direction. His sense of terror had long since overloaded on his careening trip down the stairs, and, now that he was here, he found the only thing he wanted to do was stop.

  Dunk jumped to his feet and found that he could stand on the disc, riding it like a wild beast that refused to be chained with bit or yoke. Still, this did nothing to stop his progress and only made him a better target to all of the lizardmen hoisting spears to hurl in his direction. Dunk decided that the ride had come to an end and it was time to get off.

  He stomped down on the back of the disc with his heel and then leapt high into the air behind it. The disc bucked up like a wild bull trying to throw its rider, which was just what Dunk wanted to see happen. He
went tumbling back into the air and hit the stone floor in a tight ball, rolling with the impact and the horrendous momentum he and the disc had built up after such a long, terrifying slide.

  With the experience born of being tossed around countless times on the Astrogranite, Dunk sprang to his feet as his momentum finally slowed. He found himself in the centre of the room, spitting distance from the cage that held his friends, bouncing on the balls of his feet and ready to take on the entire lizardman army.

  At that moment, he heard a voice in his head that was not his own, a psychic voice that could only have come from the massive beast that sat on the scaly throne on the other side of the lava-filled moat. “Oh, no,” it said. “Not like th—”

  Dunk heard a sickening sound, like a cleaver through a sack of rotten meat, followed by a mighty clang that he could feel in his bones. Such a sound should have been reserved for the battle at the end of the world, when the swords of the gods met in the final conflict. Instead, it had come from the disc he’d ridden into this strange and horrid temple.

  He looked up and gawked at the destruction the disc had caused. When he’d leapt from it, he’d felt it spring into the air, and he’d guided it forward with his feet until it left him behind. From there, it had caught the air and sailed through it, gaining altitude until it had been able to scud straight across the moat of lava and slam straight into the monstrous creature on his wide, low throne.

  The tremendous creature sat there, its bulk quivering around the carnage the disc had left behind it. The disc had sailed straight through the creature’s flesh, severing everything in its path, sending flesh, blood, and fat flying through the room, spattering everyone within several yards of the mortally wounded beast. Blood gushed from the wound and cascaded down the creature’s front like a waterfall of gore.