[Blood Bowl 03] - Death Match

by Matt Forbeck - (ebook by Undead)

  “Bob?

  “Bob?”

  Dunk laid down on the rock hovering beneath him and peered over the edge. There, only a couple of yards below him, hung another rock. This one had no torches around it, which is why he’d missed it the first time he’d glanced down. It did, however, carry a small, wooden chest.

  “Oh, and look! Here comes Helmut Krakker, the Giants’ new captain. Sure was a shame what happened to his predecessor — Gurni Rockrider — during the Spike! Magazine Tournament, eh? I’ve never seen just a beard left behind like that before. Usually there’s at least some part of the chin attached to it!”

  Dunk glanced up just in time to see a dwarf in navy and gold armour leap from the doorway to the first of the floating rocks in the string. If the thrower didn’t move fast, the dwarf would be on him in seconds.

  Dunk lowered himself over the edge of the floating rock he was on. His boots dangled just a foot over the chest below. It would be a good drop for a dwarf, but Dunk didn’t hesitate to let go. He landed squarely on the chest and then slid off it to the rock below.

  Dungeonbowl chests were never locked, Dunk knew that, but he hesitated for a moment. There was a good chance the chest would explode, and if that happened he’d be lucky if the blast was the only thing that hurt him. If he got knocked off the rock, there was no telling what might happen to him.

  Then Dunk noticed a handle sticking out of each side of the chest. He got down on his knees and grabbed the one on the left. As he did, he heard Krakker land on the rock next to the one above him.

  Dunk drew a deep breath, held it, and then opened the chest.

  It exploded in his face.

  Dunk couldn’t see, hear, or feel anything for a moment — nothing but the pain and shock of the explosion. Once his head started to clear, he discovered the handle of the chest still in his hand, and he smiled. When he looked down at the handle, though, he saw nothing attached to it but his fingers. Then he noticed how windy it seemed to be. That, coupled with the fact that he didn’t see anything below him, told him he was in deep trouble.

  He screamed.

  12

  Dunk knew he was dead. Any second now, the unseen ground below him would rush up and crush him into paste…

  …Any second now.

  His voice became hoarse from all the screaming, and he stopped to clear it.

  Any second…

  Something popped into view below him: a series of lit spots stretched like a string of pearls across the darkness. As he approached them, he realised that they looked just like the set of rocks he’d just fallen from.

  The pearls grew into rocks, and Dunk wondered just how deep this bottomless pit was. If he could fall so far and then come upon another set of stepping stones like the last… It seemed impossible.

  Dunk zoomed up to the rocks, and then past them. As he did, he saw someone moving along the stepping stones far to his left: a dwarf in navy and gold armour.

  A suspicion popped into Dunk’s head, and when he zipped past the remains of an exploded chest on a rock hovering just below the line the others made, he knew what had happened.

  “Help!” he yelled. “Heeelllppp!”

  It did him no good.

  “Hey, Bob! Bob? Ah, never mind,” said Jim’s voice.

  “Well, folks, it looks like Hoffnung has finally twigged to what’s happened to him. While a bottomless pit is impossible, of course, the Colleges of Magic built the largest simulation of such a tired old cliché that I’ve ever seen. They set up a wide matrix of overlapping teleportation pads at the bottom of this massive chasm. Their pairs are set up on the ceiling of the chasm, upside down. When a victim — I mean, player!—gets within a few inches of the bottom of the chasm, he teleports to the ceiling before he hits the floor, and thus he never stops falling. That’s my favourite kind of trap: clever and cruel!”

  If Dunk hadn’t been so terrified, he might have been able to admire the inspiration and craftsmanship that had gone into torturing him so effectively. It seemed like a lot of trouble to go to just to remove a player from a game, but Dunk had long ago learned never to underestimate the public’s hunger for its sports stars to find new ways to be destroyed. He could almost hear the audience cheering now.

  Dunk had no idea how he could get himself out of this. Even if he managed to get one of the Hackers to help him — he knew the Giants would just laugh at him — what could they do? If they tried to catch him, the impact would probably kill them both. Even M’Grash wouldn’t be able to rescue him from falling what seemed to have already totalled up to a couple hundred feet.

  The line of rocks appeared in front of Dunk again, signifying that he’d been teleported back up to the vast chamber’s ceiling. He noticed that his stomach flipped every time that happened, and he seemed to hover for a moment just before he started falling again. That meant, he thought, that the teleportation killed his downward momentum. When he reappeared at the ceiling, it was like he’d just been dropped from that height for the first time. Otherwise, he’d have kept accelerating downward until he passed out.

  At first, Dunk didn’t know if this meant anything to him, either for good or bad. This time, when he zipped past the stepping stones, the glow from the teleportation pad that covered the rock in the centre of the line gave him an idea.

  If he could somehow angle himself towards that rock and hit the teleportation pad, it might safely teleport him someplace else. If it killed his downward momentum, like the other teleportations seemed to, he’d land gently on the ground wherever he happened to end up.

  Of course, if he was wrong, he’d wind up as a large red splash in that same spot.

  Coming up with the idea was one thing. Putting the plan into action was something else entirely. Dunk stuck out his arms and tried flapping them like a bird.

  “Look, folks! The pressure seems to have caused Hoffnung to crack. He thinks he’s playing for the Eagles!”

  Dunk snarled at the joke, but he couldn’t let it distract him. He didn’t know how many times the teleportation pads would keep working for him. It was possible that they’d all shut off once someone won the game, and unless one of the Grey Wizards saw fit to save a member of the team that had just lost the tournament for them, he’d be doomed.

  As Dunk neared the bottom of the chasm, he readied himself. The moment his stomach flipped, he reached up and swatted his arms above him. His hands slapped into the ceiling, and propelled him backward, towards the rock with the teleportation pad.

  “Dunkel!” M’Grash said as he barged into the room. “Save Dunkel!”

  “No!” Dunk said. If M’Grash tried to grab him, they’d both be hurt, maybe killed. “Go get the ball! Leave me!”

  The ogre didn’t seem to hear a word Dunk said. He charged forward, leaping from one steppingstone to the next. As he went, Dunk saw the rocks sag and bounce in midair. The sorcery that kept the stones hovering in space seemed barely strong enough to hold M’Grash.

  Dunk knew that this would be his last clear shot at the teleportation pad. After this pass, M’Grash would officially be too close for comfort. He angled towards the rock, putting his hands in an arc over his head like the cliff divers he’d once seen leaping into the ocean from insane heights on the southern shores of Tilea.

  “Save Dunkel!” M’Grash shouted as he sprinted towards his friend.

  “No, M’Grash!” Dunk said. “No!”

  M’Grash dived for Dunk just as he hit the teleportation pad. Dunk tried to roll away from him at the last moment and only succeeded in turning his back on the ogre. Then he felt his body slam into the ogre’s arms, and everything disappeared in a flash.

  Dunk and M’Grash popped into another place. Dunk looked about, and at first glance he knew that they hadn’t died and ended up in some kind of afterlife — at least not any of which he’d ever heard. Every surface of the room had a mirror polish, and it seemed there were lots of them.

  “Dunkel not dead!” M’Grash said as Dunk pulled himself off
the ogre. “Huzzah!”

  Dunk smiled down at his friend. Despite the fact that the ogre had almost ended up getting them both killed, Dunk couldn’t get mad at someone who’d tried to save his life. Then he remembered what he’d told the ogre when they’d split up.

  “Why aren’t you back in the room with the river of lava?” Dunk asked. “Didn’t I tell you to stay there?”

  M’Grash’s face fell as he nodded at his friend. “Then Dunkel said, ‘Help!’ I heard Dunkel. Dunkel says, ‘Help!’ very loud.”

  Dunk slapped himself on his forehead as M’Grash got to his feet. “You’re right,” he said to M’Grash. “I need to be more careful about what I ask for.”

  “Mama tells me that too,” said M’Grash. As the ogre spoke, his voice trailed off to nothing. “Who are they?” he asked.

  Dunk looked around them and saw what had confused M’Grash. The room had been set up as a chamber of mirrors. There didn’t seem to be many things in it beyond the mirrors, other than Dunk and M’Grash — and an unopened chest. However, the reflections they saw made it seem like there might be a dozen of each of those things, and that made it nearly impossible to tell which image might be real.

  “They look like friends,” M’Grash said, although he seemed unsure of his judgement.

  Dunk stepped forward and put his foot out at a chest. His toes struck a mirror instead. He moved back a step and then spat at the mirror. His saliva ran down its slick surface, marking it. As he looked around, he saw the mark on another nearby image, so he could rule that one out as real too.

  “M’Grash?” Dunk pointed at where he’d spat on the mirror. “Think you could do that to every other mirror in this place?”

  “Dunkel want me to spit on people?”

  “No. Don’t spit on us.”

  “Dunkel just did. Look!” The ogre pointed to where Dunk’s spit ran down his own face.

  “That’s just…” Dunk arched an eyebrow at M’Grash. “Never mind. Can you just spit at the chests — and hurry.” Dunk thought he heard someone coming. Instead of the stomping feet of a human or dwarf, it sounded something like the stamp of metal-booted halflings, distant now, but coming closer.

  M’Grash hocked up something evil from deep inside his chest and then began to spew it about in all directions. Not wishing to depend on the ogre’s sense of what constituted a “chest”—Dunk had a chest of his own on the front of his upper body, after all — he worked hard to stay behind the ogre, where the creature’s spit could not reach.

  That’s when one of the Dwarf Giants rolled in — literally. The dwarf player sat in the saddle of a monstrous steam-driven machine fronted by a steel-spiked cylinder of stone that stood almost as tall as Dunk.

  “Uh-oh,” said Jim’s voice. “It looks like Zam Boney has found a dwarf death-roller, and he’s not afraid to use it!”

  Dunk and M’Grash stared at the machine as Boney forced it through the doorway and onto the mirrored floor. The glassy material there cracked and crumbled as the death-roller moved across it, shattering it into countless thousands of pieces. The dwarf riding the machine shouted something — a threat, no doubt — but Dunk couldn’t hear it over the engine’s noise. Then the thing came straight at them, picking up speed as it went.

  “Run!” Dunk said, turning and grabbing M’Grash’s hand, and hauling the ogre along behind him.

  “Devices like the death-roller are strictly against the rules, of course,” Jim’s voice said, “but who cares when they’re so much fun! Besides which, what are the chances of the referee stumbling into the right room to spot it — especially when two of the Giants are busy drowning him in the merdwarf room!”

  As the two Hackers took off across the room, Dunk felt grateful that M’Grash had managed to mark as many surfaces as he had, no matter how disgusting the method. Otherwise, he knew, they’d have bounced into one mirrored wall after another until the death-roller had crushed them under its tremendous, spiked mass.

  “Dunkel!” M’Grash shouted.

  Dunk glanced back over his shoulder and saw that the death-roller was almost on them. Boney cackled so loudly that Dunk could hear him, even over the roar of his accelerating machine as it bore down on him and M’Grash.

  The ogre grabbed Dunk and thrust him to one side as he dived for the other at the last instant. Boney seemed to have a hard time deciding which of the Hackers to go after, perhaps hoping to take them both out at the same time. Instead, he missed them both, but only by bare inches.

  As Dunk scrambled to his feet, he watched Boney race past and then put the death-roller into a controlled slide that ended with the machine swivelled around and pointing back in his direction. The Giant pointed at M’Grash and held up an index finger. Then he pointed to Dunk and held up two fingers, indicating the human would go down last.

  Dunk held up his middle finger in response, and then howled in dismay as the machine took off after M’Grash. Despite its size, the death-roller moved so fast that Dunk knew he could never catch it on foot, not in a straight-up race. He needed something to even the odds.

  He scanned the area around him, hoping to spy something — anything — that could help. Then his eyes fell on what he’d been looking for before: a small chest.

  Dunk dashed over and picked up the chest. At that moment, he was less interested in how it could help the Hackers win the game than he was in how he might use it to stop Boney dead.

  “Hey, you sawed-off, half-pint, runt of a litter of dwarf-orcs!” Dunk shouted at Boney. As the Giant turned to look at the thrower over his shoulder, Dunk raised the chest over his head and waved it about like a red flag in front of a bull.

  Boney reached over and hauled on a lever as he wrenched the steering wheel to the left. This sent the machine into a hard spin that nearly threw the dwarf from his seat, but it put the death-roller on a path towards Dunk, still moving at top speed.

  Dunk glanced left and right, and discovered he’d found the chest in a mirrored cul-de-sac. There was nowhere for him to go. When Boney realised the thrower’s predicament, he tossed back his head and loosed a loud cackle that rang out over the engine’s noise.

  “Well, folks, it looks like the Hackers better put in their order for a Dunk Hoffnung-sized coffin,” Jim’s voice said. “Boney has the thrower dead to rights, and he seemed like he had such promise too.”

  Dunk thrust the chest up over his head and then hurled it straight into the death-roller’s path. It bounced once, and then landed squarely in front of the machine’s spiked roller.

  When Boney saw Dunk start to throw the chest at him, the dwarf knew what the Hacker meant to do, and he hauled back on the death-roller’s brakes and yanked the wheel to the right. The thing’s forward momentum was too much for it to stop that quickly, though, and the machine skidded right into the chest.

  Dunk held his breath and waited for the explosion. Instead, all he heard was a loud crunching noise, followed by a muffled pop.

  The death-roller smashed into one of the cul-de-sac’s walls, and Boney catapulted out of his seat and crunched into the wall right after it, leaving a wet, red streak on the mirrored surface as he slid down it. Dunk raced forward and spotted the remnants of the chest poking out underneath the machine’s rear wheels. The death-roller had reduced it to little more than splinters, but Dunk spied a few shiny spikes sticking up out of the wreckage.

  The Hacker scrambled underneath the death-roller and snatched the flattened football out from beneath it. The heat from the boiler that drove the machine’s steam engine threatened to bake the skin from the back of his arm, but he gritted his teeth and ignored the pain. As he pulled the pancake of a ball free from the wreckage, he heard a high-pitched whistle start to shriek from the steam engine.

  A rivet shot out of the engine’s casing and zinged over Dunk’s head like a bullet from a sling. A fine spray of scalding water and steam followed it, and the pitch of the whistling rose to an ear-splitting crescendo.

  Dunk tucked the flat ball unde
r his arm and sprinted away from the machine. He didn’t get ten feet before he ran past M’Grash. As he did, he grabbed the ogre’s hand and tugged the big guy after him, shouting, “Run!”

  Just then, the steam engine exploded. The Shockwave knocked M’Grash and Dunk flying across the room, skidding along the floor’s silvery surface to come to a crashing halt in a pile against the far wall.

  “M’Grash?” Dunk asked as he mentally took inventory of his body parts. Although a bit squished, everything seemed to be there.

  The ogre nodded. “Dunkel alive!” he shouted with glee.

  “Hey, buddy,” Dunk said. “Are you all right?”

  The ogre nodded again.

  “Then can you get off me so I can breathe?”

  M’Grash leapt off his friend and helped him to his feet. “Sorry, Dunkel,” he said, blushing.

  “It’s all right.” Dunk plucked the flat ball up from the ground and held it up for M’Grash to see. “It was worth it.”

  13

  “The Hackers have the ball!” Jim’s voice said. “The Hackers have the ball. Now all they need to do is get it back to their end zone to score. Remember, folks, in Dungeonbowl, the first to score wins the game!”

  Dunk cursed the camras scattered throughout the dungeon. If he’d been thinking, he might have tried to hide the ball from them — and everyone else — a bit longer. Sure, Jim would have eventually figured out that if the chest hadn’t exploded then it must have had a ball in it, but as an ogre Jim wasn’t the sharpest knife in the corpse.

  “Let’s get to the end zone,” Dunk said to M’Grash. “How did you get in here?”

  The ogre pointed to the door through which he’d come.

  “Then lead the way, big guy,” Dunk said with a grin.

  M’Grash lumbered forward like a galloping elephant, and Dunk paced after him, stuffing the flat ball underneath his breastplate to keep it safe. In the confines of the dungeon’s passages, M’Grash’s head and pauldrons scraped the ceiling and walls. Unlike the other players, the ogre rarely wore a helmet. They were hard to find in his size, and his skull was harder than any helmet could be.