by Eric Vall
Good for us.
The king fire-eye didn’t stop there. With barely a pause, it gathered a swirling fireball in its grip and lobbed it at me. I only barely had enough time to jump out of the way. The impact sent debris and fragments raining over me, and the heat of the blast seared my skin and made me wince, but I would live.
I scampered to my feet and looked at my bullet bass with a mental command. Suddenly, I was coated in metal too, but the fire-eye didn’t waste any time and didn’t care about my transformation. It threw another fireball at me. I dodged anyway. The fire wouldn’t hurt me, but the shock of the explosion could still send me flying… which was exactly what it did.
Maybe the king thought I was dead because it turned its attention to Renuad and slammed its massive fist down on him. Renuad had just enough time to catch the massive fist over his head, but the sheer force of it drove him into the earth. The stone pavement cracked and gave way beneath him as the king fire-eye drove the augmenter deeper and deeper. His magically enhanced muscles strained to hold back the crowned giant’s immense strength.
He needed help, so I summoned my drillmoles and sent them to work. Renuad shook with exertion as he held up the king’s fist, but I didn’t know if he could hold out much longer. Thankfully, he didn’t need to as the ground beneath the king fire-eye began to shake from the drillmoles’ work. The beast didn’t notice until it was too late, but it certainly noticed when the earth caved in beneath it. With a roar of shock, the immense cyclops crashed down into the depths.
Renuad stumbled away in a daze. Varleth was muttering to himself, pouring even more of his magic into his sword.
“The horde is coming,” he said simply.
I cursed as Renuad gritted his teeth and looked to me as if he wanted to assist me, but I waved him off.
“You and Varleth go find the Catalyst,” I told him through a grimace as I eyed the king fire-eye. Then I flashed him a confident smile. “I’ll handle this.”
He looked at me like I was insane. “That’s not merely a fire-eye, it’s a king fire-eye! Are you crazy? That’s a grade A monster.”
“Just do it!” I snarled.
Maybe it was something in my attitude, or maybe Renuad had simply been impressed by what he had seen me do so far. Whatever it was, he nodded at my insistence and followed my command to run off with our banisher to close the rift. And Varleth was right, I could hear the roars and cries of approaching monsters.
I focused back on the king fire-eye. It was chest deep in the ground when the dirt and dust finally settled. My drillmoles surfaced then along my flanks, ready to go back into battle.
“Alright big guy, time to--”
The king roared, and out with it came a torrent of scalding flame from its mouth. I was still metal, so the heat didn’t hurt me, but the sheer force of its mighty roar pushed me off my feet. Fortunately, the force of the impact only knocked the wind out of me. My drillmoles weren’t as lucky, and they were incinerated instantly.
I staggered to my feet and gulped down steaming air. I didn’t know how much more I could give. This was like when Nia and I fought against the hordes at the Academy, just a never-ending fight with hardly a moment to rest, but I wouldn’t give up. I had a job to do, and this Enclave was counting on me, but damn, my body hummed with fatigue.
The King fire-eye glared at me before it furiously crawled out of the hole. Fire leaked from its toothy maw, and its singular eye glared at me as the light flickered off its crown of horns. As it staggered to its feet, it conjured another fireball and hurled it at me. This one was bigger than ever, and it threw it harder, so I had no time to move before it crashed into me. I saw white, my ears rang, and everything shook as I was pitched back in an explosion that encased me in warmth.
I landed in a heap, and despite my metal coat, my bones rattled.
Thunderous footsteps approached me, and the ground quaked beneath me. As I pushed myself to my hands and knees, the king charged me. I didn’t have time to move, so I braced as best as I could.
It reared back and kicked me with all its might. Thank the Maker for my bullet bass, because even with it, pain rang through me. I was launched at near speed-slug speed. My breath caught in my throat as I crashed through walls and roofs and walls again. I’m not sure how far I flew, but when I finally landed with a bang inside of a broken building, I knew that I was far from the fight.
I groaned and rolled onto my back. My bones vibrated, and my head pounded. Everything hurt. The air was shrouded in dust and mortar. Around me was the ruined remains of a small single room home with a hearth on one wall that sat cold. The wall in front of me was collapsed, the door splintered and ruined.
As I strained to sit up, a sudden feeling pinched at my gut, signaling to me that my bullet bass was gone. My metal coating fell away, and I felt beat to hell. Well damn. This wasn’t good. Nia would be in trouble too. I hoped she would be fine without the bass’ protection. I had to believe that she would be.
I picked myself up and dusted myself off. I sucked in a breath through my mask and winced. I ached, and I felt completely drained. But… I gritted my teeth… my work wasn’t done yet.
I exited the house through the hole I’d come through. I could see the king fire-eye towering over the Shadowscape version of Bedima. It was disturbingly far away and had its back turned to me. I guessed it thought I was dead again. It roared and threw a fireball at someone, which exploded with a boom. Nia, if I were to guess, and my heart surged with hope.
As the fighting continued in the distance, I picked my way through the twisted and ruined streets of the hellscape. After a minute, I came to a small square and found some bodies strewn about, mangled and bloodied. I frowned. These people must have come to the rift to close it but failed. Two regular soldiers were gored until they were barely recognizable, their faces slashed to shreds. Nearby was an elemental mage, his golden cloak ripped to tatters and… I looked closer and saw that he had been ripped in half at the waist. My stomach lurched.
Finally, there was a mage wearing the familiar deep summoner blue. He was propped up against a wall, or, more accurately, he’d been thrown against the wall for it was cracked and chunks of brick and mortar covered the poor summoner. I knelt by his side. He had been perhaps Arwyn’s age, so five to ten years older than me. His pale blue eyes stared off lifelessly, and his sandy hair was stained red. Blood trailed down his face and from his mouth.
In a world that had yet to see the benefit and strength of summoners fully, he had made the plunge into the Shadowscape anyway so that he could help. A mixture of pride and sorrow filled my chest, and I moved my fingers to close his eyes forever.
I needed to make sure he didn’t die in vain.
My eyes drifted to the glinting crystals in the pouch at his hip. Essence crystals. Their energy hummed at me, beckoned me. I reached in and plucked one out. I could feel the monster inside, see it really. I picked up another, and I smiled. These two could be of some real help, so I slung the summoner’s pouch over my shoulder and ran back to the fight.
The king fire-eye towered over the nearby buildings as I neared it. It still had that faint blue glow about it, and honestly, even for a king, this one seemed stronger than it should have been, physically and magically. Could it be augmented by some other monster’s magic?
Either way, that was a problem to analyze later.
When I finally made my way back to my squad, Nia was, as I expected, alive and well, alone and fighting with the fire-eye. Varleth and Renuad were nowhere to be seen, no doubt still hunting for the Catalyst. Thankfully, Nia was holding her own, but she looked to be struggling. She dodged the king fire-eye’s attacks well, but she moved gingerly, her left arm hanging limply. Broken perhaps? That wasn’t good.
I needed her to distract it a bit longer though. I fished out the two crystals I’d found earlier from the summoner’s bag and gripped them tightly. There was a chance that because I’d never used them before, they would be hard to control, but that
was a risk I had to take.
Without a moment to lose, I dropped them in front of me. The first came out in a loud poof and croaked angrily. It was a gastrotoad. It resembled a common toad in the head and neck area, but that was about it. Its body was terribly round, bloated, and pocked with bulging pores that exuded a horribly noxious gas that, though not immediately deadly, could be lethal quickly, especially in a confined space. I was extra thankful for the gas mask.
Also unlike a toad, its body was rough and craggy, almost like it was made of tree bark or rock. It had oddly small leather wings that flapped frantically. They shouldn’t have been able to hold up its weight, but they did. That was magic for you. The gastrotoad regarded me curiously but didn’t try to attack or bolt, a good sign.
The second monster was tiny, about the size of my thumb. It was a galimokshi, or, translated into common tongue, the fly of large and small. The western dialect was absurd to me sometimes.
The galimokshi wasn’t a fly, however, but more of a mosquito. It had a sickly body that seemed to shrink and engorge at will, sometimes being as small as a nail, and then growing as large as my palm. That was appropriate because when the galimokshi stuck its needle-like sucker into something, it could shrink or enlarge it. They were exceedingly rare, and because of their size, near impossible to find and catch in and out of the Shadowscape. It would be perfect for my plan.
I gave it an order in my mind, forceful and determined. It didn’t hesitate. It flew onto the gastrotoad’s stubby shoulder and pricked it with its needle. A second later, the gastrotoad jerked and convulsed until it began to shrink slowly down to the same size as the shifty mosquito. I smiled. This would work, I knew it.
Nia’s cry of pain jerked my attention forward. I looked up in time to see her stumble out of a pile of shattered earth. She must have used some of her earth magic to shield her, but the king had easily smashed through it. As I watched, her long stocking covered legs tripped over some rubble, and she fell to her stomach. She winced and struggled to stand. The fire-eye towered over her and lifted its massive foot, and it was clear Nia was too dazed and exhausted to dodge.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Over here, you big ugly fuck!”
The fire-eye hesitated with its stomp and turned its vicious gaze my way. It snarled at me, its large eye a little wider as it took me in.
“That’s right, I’m still alive. Come and get me.”
The king roared loudly which was perfect as that gave my tiny little gastrotoad the space it needed to fly into its mouth and down the cyclops’s throat. If the fire-eye noticed, it didn’t let on. It bounded toward me and away from Nia, who was slowly picking herself back up from the rubble.
As soon as I sensed the pair slide down the king’s gullet, I mentally commanded the toad to begin pumping out its gas as I had the galmiokshi expand the toad to twice its normal size. Even that large, the mighty cyclops didn’t notice the thing expand in its throat. I wasn’t out of the woods yet though.
I jumped out of the way as the fire-eye swiped at me and dodged again when it tried to step on me, and yet again when it lobbed a fireball my way. My body was long since past the point of exhaustion, and I was running high on pure adrenaline right now. Honestly, I could have had a broken limb for all I knew, and I wouldn’t have felt it at that moment.
Finally, the fire-eye stared me down and sucked in its belly, ready to breathe fire on me. Its stomach glowed from the fire within as it built and ignited. But then, there was a split-second rumble in the pit of its stomach, and all of a sudden, the king fire-eye vomited out not a torrent of fire, but a fountain of blood and bile that soaked me completely. Why did that keep happening to me?
The immense king thrashed as it fell to its knees as blood now spilled out of its ears and one eye, then it let out a horrid belch of goo and gore before its entire abdomen dissolved from the gastrotoad’s caustic toxins. What remained of the fire-eye fell away with a loud thud as it hit the ground and then faded into dust. Despite my pain and exhaustion, I laughed. I couldn’t believe that had worked.
I ran over to Nia’s side. She looked on at the disintegrating remains of the fire-eye with wide eyes, then her gaze fell to me. She was covered in the fire-eye’s blood, so it was hard to tell if she was bleeding from any wounds, but that blood did nothing to hide her exhaustion.
“H-how did you do that?” she gasped.
I lifted up the other summoner’s bag of crystals. “I found these on a fallen summoner. I thought they’d be of use.”
“But how did you do that, with the explosion.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” I said excitedly. “I used a galimokshi, which are these little mosquitos that can shrink things, and used it to shrink a gastrotoad. It flew into the fire-eye’s throat and lungs, expanded the toad to create more potent gases, and when the king inhaled for that final attack, it sucked in a very fatal dose of gastrotoad toxin.”
“A mighty king laid low by the humblest of beasts,” she laughed. “That was a good plan then.”
“It definitely worked, didn’t it?” I smiled through my mask, then it faded as Nia continued to breathe raggedly. She winced as she looked at her arm. “Where are you hurt, Nia?”
Nia shook her head. “My arm is probably sprained at a minimum. And I just… I don’t know how much more I can go. I’m drained.”
“Mana depletion?”
She nodded, and I furrowed my brow. That wasn’t good. If she pushed herself any further, she could die. I’d already watched that nearly happen to her once before when we fought inside the rift that opened at the Academy. I would not let that happen to her again even if I was probably nearing that point myself.
Unfortunately, we were still in the Shadowscape and far from being out of harm’s way.
I put a hand on Nia’s shoulder. “Did you see what direction the others went?”
“They ran past me as I came back after that big brute swatted me. They went that way,” she said, her eyes going to a clock tower in the distance. “Varleth said that the Catalyst was close, and Renuad practically picked him up and ran there.” She paused and looked in the direction they went. “I heard monsters go after them, but I thought you needed more help here.”
I frowned. “You made the right decision. Varleth and Renuad can handle themselves.” I lifted my wrist to my face and activated the communicator. “Varleth, are you there? Varleth?”
I was met only with static. I cursed. That didn’t mean something bad had necessarily happened. The Shadowscape could interfere with the magical frequencies that the communicators used to work, but it still worried me.
Nia sucked in a breath and struggled to her feet. “We need to go after them, make sure they’re okay.”
“I don’t think you’re in any condition to do anything, Nia,” I said sternly.
I could feel her glare through her mask. “Do you propose I just sit here and wait?”
“I don’t want you to die!”
She softened then and put her hands on my face gently. “I won’t. As long as you’re with me, Gryff, I know we’ll be fine.”
My heart throbbed at those words, and I could feel my cheeks flush. I covered Nia’s hands with my own.
“You’re right,” I agreed. “We can do anything together.”
Her cheeks arched with a smile beneath her mask. With that settled, we started toward the east where the clock tower was. That’s when we felt it, a sinister presence so powerful and heavy that it knocked the wind out of us. We both stumbled to our knees as if the now icy cold air had grown physically heavy around us.
Drawn by that weight, I looked up, and a gasp got caught in my throat. Floating over us was a massive monster, unlike any I’d ever seen, that had appeared without warning, without a sound or a trace. It hovered in the air as massive as the fire-eye had been. No, bigger. It dominated the space around it and seemed to suck out all the heat from the air, what little there was.
The monster looked… angelic. It was humanoid in shape, like a
beautiful buxom woman, with pale blue skin and lots of curves exposed by her black leotard. Her arms were bound behind her back, and her body was wrapped by thick golden chains. She had stark white hair and huge white wings, the feathers the brilliant white of clouds basking in the sun. A strange, broken halo, looking tarnished and dented, floated over her head. Her eyes were milky white like she was blind.
She was beautiful, but she had that same faint glow as the king fire-eye. Could this creature have been what had given the king fire-eye that boost?
Nia and I were stunned. We’d never seen anything like this before. I held Nia close. She shook as fear gripped her. It was always a shock to me when I saw her afraid, but at this moment, I didn’t blame her in the slightest.
Most terrifying of all was the fact that this monster spoke.
“You fight valiantly, but your time is nearly over,” she said. Oddly, her lips didn’t move, but I heard the words as clearly as if she was whispering in my ear. Her words were soft and her voice strangely elegant, but their meaning was horrifying.
“What do you want?” I asked though I hate to admit that my voice came out shaky.
“We want you to burn. To die. To be consumed.”
It was hard to tell if she was referring to Nia and me or all of humanity. I decided that either way, her words weren’t good, and I wouldn’t sit back and take them silently.
I mustered up my courage and spoke with a steady voice. “You can come back time and time again, but humanity will never fall to you.”
As if to punctuate my point, the air shifted, and the whole realm began to quake. That meant that Varleth had done it, he’d found the Catalyst. Bedima was saved, or at least, spared more destruction than it had already seen so far. The angelic monster didn’t seem all too phased by this development, however. She cocked her head to the side in a curious manner, with no hint of emotion.
