But the breastplate started to give. The middle bent in towards Dunk’s sternum, threatening to break his ribs and crush his lungs. Dunk flailed about with his helmet and hands, looking for some opening — anything — but nothing he did had any effect.
Dunk started to black out. Somewhere impossibly far away — maybe in a dream, he thought — he heard Lügner say, “Let go of my son!”
Then Dutkus let loose a horrible howl right in Dunk’s face. The thrower screamed back, both in pain and terror, and then he was free. He staggered backward gasping for breath, and saw his father stabbing the spikes on his gauntlet up under the bear-man’s custom-made breastplate, over and over again. Each blow made a hard, meaty sound and produced gouts of blood.
Dutkus reached out and slapped Lügner away with a rough backhand, but instead of following up on the blow, the All-Star fell hard to his knees, keening in pain.
Lügner picked himself up off the ground and looked towards Dunk, worry flaring in his eyes. “Are you okay?” he asked.
Before Dunk could shout a warning, Lehrer hit Lügner from behind. The two of them went down in a tangle of tired limbs.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before, Jim! The fans are refusing to give up the ball!”
“Would you want to give it back to a team who would condemn you and the entire world around you to eternal damnation, Bob?”
“That’s a delicious idea! I’ll have to get back to you on that one!”
“This is for Greta!” Lehrer said as he used a sharp edge on the side of his gauntlet to slice through the chinstrap on Lügner’s helmet.
Dunk found that he couldn’t shout because he still couldn’t breathe. His crushed breastplate pressed so hard on his lungs, that even without Dutkus’ help, he’d pass out if he didn’t get some relief soon. He clawed at the straps that held his armour together, but they were trapped under the bent metal, and he couldn’t quite reach them on his own.
“She was mine!” Lügner said to Lehrer as he held the other man’s arm at bay. Lügner’s helmet had fallen off, exposing his head. Blood flowed from a half-dozen small cuts on his face and neck.
“She loved me first!” Lehrer said. “You stole her from me, and because of you, she’s dead!”
Lügner shoved his free hand up under Lehrer’s faceguard and wrapped his fingers around the man’s throat. “You think you grieve for her more than me? I know it’s my fault that mob stormed the castle. There’s not a day goes by that the guilt doesn’t crush me!”
Lehrer started to laugh, low and strained, as Lügner’s choking of him made anything louder impossible. “You don’t understand,” he said, “but then you never did.
“I let that mob in,” Lehrer said. “I gave Greta the chance to escape with me, to take Kirta and run away with me to start a new life somewhere else.”
“You—!”
Lehrer spat down into Lügner’s face. “She spurned me — again — because of you. She slapped my face.”
Dunk strained against his armour with all his might, but it just wouldn’t give. He fell forward on his knees and started to crawl forward, but he could not get enough air in his lungs to proceed. He collapsed onto his face.
“I killed her,” Lehrer rasped as Lügner’s fingers crushed his windpipe. “I killed them both, and I let the mob in to cover my sins.”
Lügner let go of the hand Lehrer had poised near his own neck and drove both of his hands into the other man’s larynx. As he did, Lehrer punched up under his old master’s jaw with his spiked gauntlet, piercing the soft flesh there and tearing open his throat.
As Dunk watched, unable to do anything to prevent the horrors before him, a blade slipped between the halves of his breastplate and sliced through the straps holding them together. He ignored the pain that flared in his side as the blade cut through the flesh in his haste. He drew in a large gulp of air and bellowed, “No!”
33
“Forget them,” Dirk said as he hauled Dunk to his feet and helped him shrug off his crushed breastplate. “It’s too late for them, but maybe not for the rest of us.”
Dunk growled in frustration, and turned to see the ball bouncing around in the stands. Skragger had waded in after it, slaughtering helpless fans left and right, causing a general stampede away from him, but every time he got near the ball, the fans would toss it away from him again towards another part of the stadium.
Now some of the other All-Stars, emboldened by Skragger’s success, were venturing into the stands too. Eventually, the fans would make a mistake — or one of them would decide to buy his own life with the ball — and the All-Stars would get the pigskin back, unless the Hackers did something fast.
Dunk and Dirk sprinted towards the end zone, where they saw Spinne sparring with Kathula. They looked like they’d been at it for a while. Each of them had lost pieces of armour and bled from a handful of superficial wounds. Kathula’s helmet had gone missing, but she made up for it by lashing out harder and faster with the unrestrained tentacles that made up the lower half of her face.
One of the tentacles wrapped around Spinne’s bare forearm and started to pull her in towards Kathula’s snapping beak. Spinne braced her feet and spun around, swinging Kathula after her by the tentacle attached to the catcher’s arm.
The squeals of pain that spouted from Kathula’s face only encouraged Spinne, and she began to turn faster and faster, pulling the squid-woman from her feet. The soft tissue of the attached tentacle began to stretch, and this caused the tentacle’s grip around Spinne’s arm to tighten until it started to cut off the circulation to her hand.
The Hackers’ catcher spun faster and faster. She screamed from the pain in her arm as the tentacle stretched thinner and thinner and began to slice into her bare flesh like a length of sharp wire.
“That’s one way to dance!” Bob said. “Looks like Schönheit’s the one calling the tune!”
“I think Kathula is regretting extending the invitation now. She looks like she — or her face, rather — might snap at any second!” said Jim.
A moment later, that’s exactly what happened. The tentacle around Spinne’s arm pulled free from Kathula’s face, and the squid-woman went flying towards the stands. She landed against the restraining wall, and the fans in the first row caught her. She screamed again as they pulled her into the bleachers, blood spouting from her face. The people there tore her to pieces with a dozen sets of hands at once, and they kept at her until long after she stopped screaming from the pain.
“What happened to you?” Spinne asked Dunk as she unwrapped the length of tentacle from her arm. It left a deep cut behind, but it had not gone through the muscle to the bone. She glanced at his bare chest. “I like the new look.”
Dunk wanted to smile at her, but found he couldn’t. “We need to get that ball,” he said. “Do you think we’ll survive if we go into the crowd?”
Spinne nodded. “The trick is that the All-Stars will then use you as a shield so they can get in too. At least, that’s what they’ve done twice so far, and when the shield fails, they’ll kill you if they can. We’ve lost Anfager and Hernd that way already. I think I even saw Slick disappear in there.”
Dunk glanced around. M’Grash and Cavre were trying to get into the crowd, but a trio of All-Stars had blocked them. Spiel had climbed into Edgar’s upper branches to get away from an orc whose arms seemed to have become axes. Guillermo had made it ten rows up into the stands and was waving and hollering for the fans to throw him the ball. Skragger was working his way towards the Estalian, slaughtering fans as he went.
Up in the stands, Dunk saw a Hacker helmet bouncing along atop the heads and upraised hands of the fans, but there didn’t seem to be anything but a jersey beneath it, somehow snagged inside the helmet. It turned his stomach to think whose head might be in it. Oddly, it seemed to be heading for the ball, as if the fans wished to bring the two together.
“We’ll have to chance it,” Dunk said. “I’ll distract Skragger. You two g
et that ball!”
He charged towards the worst part of the devastation, a section of stands cleared out entirely but for a couple of handfuls of dead or dying fans. “Skragger!” he shouted. “You damned coward! Come on down here and fight someone your own — fight me, you wuss! I’m looking forward to keeping your tiny head in the bottom of my chamber pot from now on.”
“You!” Skragger said as he turned to see who had insulted him. “Kill you!”
Dunk stood his ground in the end zone, waiting for the crazed troll-bodied, vampire-headed orc creature to make his way down to him. They were going to end this here, one way or the other, he was sure.
As Dunk braced for Skragger’s attack, a bolt of red lightning cracked into the Astrogranite next to him. He turned around just in time to see a pillar of ash that had once been a dark elf in an All-Stars’ uniform crumble into a pile of dust.
“That Chaos Cup must have made Zauberer a better shot,” Jim said, “because without it he doesn’t seem like he could hit the backside of an ogre!”
“He can’t even do that!” said Bob. “He’s missed K’Thragsh three times already today!”
Dunk spotted Zauberer floating high over the stadium, cursing as he pointed his wand in Dunk’s direction again. The thrower stared up at the wizard and wondered just how someone could try to dodge a lightning bolt. As he watched, Zauberer’s robes transformed into a writhing sheet of vipers.
“Got ’em!” Blaque shouted from the sidelines near the Hackers’ dugout. He turned towards Whyte. “Do you have something about snakes? Why not just kill the bugger?”
Dunk never heard the reply. As he laughed, watching the snakes strike at the wizard in an effort to keep from falling to their deaths, a shadow fell over him. He had just enough time to glance over and see Skragger coming down at him — and maybe to wonder just how he could possibly survive this.
Acting on instinct instead of conscious thought, Dunk dived forward. Most of Skragger sailed over him, but the creature’s boot tagged Dunk on his pauldron and knocked him spinning to the ground.
When Dunk got up, he found Skragger standing over him. “You’re dead!” the creature snarled, spreading its arms wide and gathering Dunk into its fatal embrace.
Contact with Skragger’s skin burned Dunk’s bare chest, but just barely. At first he fought it, but having gone through that just moments ago with Dutkus, he knew that he was doomed to fail. Instead, he began to claw at Skragger with everything he had.
As Dunk clawed at Skragger with his fingers, he realised that the creature wasn’t all there. His fingers passed right through Skragger’s flesh, striking bone instead. When Khorne had remade the body, it seemed it had only been an illusion, not real at all. The bits that had burned Dunk’s skin a bit were the bare remnants that were left: not much more than a skeletal frame underneath it all.
Confused, but still determined, Dunk kept pulling at Skragger. His efforts became more desperate as the bony Skragger increased the pressure on him, squeezing the breath from him, realising that the skin he thought would burn Dunk wasn’t doing a thing. Dunk’s digging hands found a set of ribs and started yanking on them, pulling them out and tossing them over his shoulder.
“Crush you dead!” Skragger growled as Dunk continued his grisly work. Once through the ribcage, he stabbed his hand into the creature’s chest, hoping to find a vital organ, or maybe to snap Skragger’s borrowed spine.
Instead, his fingers struck something hard and gnarled. He felt for purchase, and then it bit him hard, straight to the bone. Dunk pulled his bloody fingers back for a second and then dived back in with both arms. This time the thing inside didn’t put up a fight. But the creature it was inside of did.
“No!” Skragger screeched in his high-pitched voice. “You can’t! I won’t let you!”
Skragger went from crushing Dunk to his chest to desperately trying to shove him away. He wedged an arm between himself and Dunk and pushed with all his might.
Dunk had found the grips his hands needed, and he refused to let go, no matter what happened. He gritted his teeth and pulled with both his arms, using Skragger’s strength to reinforce his own.
“No!” Skragger said, bashing at Dunk with his free arm. The blows smashed into Dunk’s helmet and rattled his brains in his skull. Still he held on as best he could. He worked his knees up between himself and Skragger and pulled as hard as he could on the thing in the creature’s chest. Soon, he knew either the thing would give out or he would. Soon it would all be over, one way or another.
Then Bob said, “Touchdown, Hackers!”
“No!” something inside of Skragger screamed. At first, Dunk thought it had come from Skragger’s head, but the voice had been far too deep. Then, with one last pull, the thing inside Skragger yanked free from his ribcage, and Dunk went tumbling backward off the beast.
Dunk landed in the end zone, right next to Slick, who stood over him, grinning and holding the ball. The halfling wore a Hacker helmet that fit him like an umbrella, and a Hacker jersey that tumbled past his knees like a dress.
“Good work, son!” Slick said. “That’s an astonishing prize you have there.”
Dunk glanced back to discover what he held in his hands, and he saw the Chaos Cup staring back at him. It screamed at him, its beady, black eyes blazing red fire.
Another, more horrible scream, echoed that of the Chaos Cup. It came from the All-Stars’ dugout, still shrouded in blackness. It didn’t remain in there. A moment later, Khorne’s blood-soaked form burst from the dugout and sailed high into the sky over the stadium.
“The preparation of a thousand years gone to waste!” the Blood God shouted in disgust. “I was so close! It was almost mine!”
With that, the blazing hot air around the stadium shimmered and gave way to crisp, cool weather. The sky turned clear and blue once more, and the leering mountains disappeared from the distance. The scent of brimstone faded away, and Dunk’s mouth tasted not of ash, but of his own tongue again.
The crowd stood up and cheered.
“Hackers win!” Bob said, even happier than when he’d announced the touchdown. “The world is saved! We all get to live! Hackers win!”
34
“Let’s see that replay again,” Slick said. The image on the crystal ball leapt backward and showed the halfling standing alone in the stands with the ball in his hands. Then Dirk appeared next to him and lifted him up over his head. With a two-handed throw, Dirk hurled Slick down the field, where Spinne caught him just before his head smacked into the ground.
Dunk listened from the doorway for a moment and smiled. Seeing everyone together like this made all the strange, horrible, and sometimes even wonderful adventures of the past three years seem worthwhile.
“I think that’s enough,” Lästiges said. “You’ll wear out my Daemonic Visual Display.”
“I thought you could run a DVD forever?”
Lästiges smiled as she leaned back into Dirk’s arms in the plush couch. “After what we’ve all been through, I thought you’d know that daemons don’t last forever.”
“Show what happens to Skragger instead, then,” Slick said. “I love seeing justice served.”
“Must we suffer through that again?” Guillermo asked with a shiver, from the other end of the couch. “It is bad enough we have to watch his tiny head torn from the skeleton time after time, but to see the sad little thing disappear into the stadium’s communal bog… I can do without that.”
“Are you getting soft, Mr. Reyes?” Cavre asked with a smile from his overstuffed chair across the way.
“Just on myself,” Guillermo said with a wry smile.
“That bloody bastard had worse than that coming to him,” said Edgar. Here in the private courtyard, he could stretch his branches high into the open sky, which tended to put him in a much better mood than when he was forced indoors just to be near his teammates, his friends. “He’s just lucky I didn’t get my bloody twigs on him, or I’d have crushed him under my roots.
”
“He got off easier than that accursed wizard for sure,” Pegleg said. The coach reclined on a divan, his good leg up on the furniture while his wooden one rested, removed, on the floor.
“Still sorry,” M’Grash said with a frown. He sat on the floor, too morose still to permit himself anything more comfortable. “Didn’t know.”
“It’s okay, M’Grash,” Spiel said. “The way you don’t like snakes, it’s easy to see why you’d want to stomp all those vipers to a bloody paste. It’s just unfortunate that Zauberer happened to be underneath them when you did.”
Dunk took this as his cue to stroll back into the room. The best thing he could do for M’Grash would be to help keep his mind off that accidental, but convenient killing.
“Did you get rid of it, Mr. Hoffnung?” Pegleg asked.
Dunk nodded. “The Champions of Death were pleased to get their trophy, and I was happy to get rid of it.”
“We could have won that game if not for the Game Wizards,” Pegleg said. “The Chaos Cup should be ours.”
“That’s one honour I think I can do without,” Dunk said.
“Besides, captain, we do have the Blood Bowl trophy to help assuage that pain,” said Cavre. “I can contact Dr. Pill if you need anything stronger.”
“That one-eyed elf gives me the willies,” Spinne said from an overstuffed loveseat that bore scorch marks from a wayward torch. “I’ll be happy to not see him for a couple of months.”
“Careful,” said Pegleg. “Just because we’ve won the greatest trophy in the land doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels. Now we have a title to defend!”
“Right,” said Dunk, “but for my part I’m looking forward to a little rest and relaxation.” He raised his head and looked around at the walls of his old family keep. “Besides, cleaning up this place properly is going to take weeks.”
Dirk grinned at his brother. “So you got it back in roughly the same condition as when you left it. As I recall, a mob of angry people ran through the place back then too, just like yesterday.”
[Blood Bowl 03] - Death Match Page 28
