by Dante King
Not that we weren’t doing everything that we could to stop them.
Alura had made good use of her Crystalize spell and turned both her arms into glittering blades. She was sweeping through the masses of gremlins like a scythe through hay at harvest time. Little heads were flipping and tumbling across the floor. Severed yellow limbs cartwheeled through the air, accompanied by fountains of green blood.
A part of me felt sorry for the little buggers. If it hadn’t been for their ability to strip meat from bone with the rapidity of a flesh-eating virus on steroids, I probably would have hung out with them, if given the choice between them and Arun Lightson.
A cry alerted me to the fact that, at the end of the day, the little chaps were a ravenous hoard hell-bent on consuming us from base to apex.
Damien, bereft of any kind of armor, had been hemmed into a corner, and the gremlins seemed to think that they had trapped their first course. He was shooting Fireballs just as fast as he could form them, but the gremlins climbed over their dead as if they weren’t even there. Some of the ravenous little fuckers were actually snacking on the corpses of their fallen comrades.
“A little help!” Damien called as one of his Fireballs turned a couple of closing gremlins into lumps of crisped skin and stinking singed hair.
Enwyn, in her mech suit of fire armor, strode through the gremlins. The creatures, despite having not made any dent in the imposing carapace so far, nevertheless swarmed over her as she marched through their ranks. She was only a few yards from Damien, but the sheer number of gremlins surrounding her had almost stopped her in her tracks.
“Nige! Care to give Enwyn a hand?” I yelled as I used a Paralyzing Zap to stop a handful of gremlins before backhanding another one across the room like a living tennis ball.
“On it!” Nigel said.
He swept down, flying high out of reach of the clamoring gremlins and let loose a localized tornado on Enwyn and the gremlins accosting her. Enwyn hunkered down, bracing herself against the draft that was like a helicopter backwash, while the little gremlins went tumbling and flipping away.
Enwyn reached Damien, extended her hands, and blasted the mob that was about to chow down on him with twin jets of fire that issued out of the wrists of her armor like flamethrower jets. The gremlins were cooked on the spot, eyeballs melting and turning to jelly, skin peeling away in swathes, bones cracking from the intensity of the heat. Damien, Fire Mage as he was, was unaffected.
Seeing Nigel zooming over the action made me remember one of my most recent additions to my spellbook.
I cleared a bit of space around me, lashing out left and right with my staff and laying waste to those gremlins dumb enough to come in close. I cracked the skull of one, leaving it staggering momentarily as its brains leaked out of its large ears. Another one attempted to sink its teeth into my shin, but I gave it a swift taste of my boot. It flew through the air, and Alura sliced it neatly in half, showering guts and blood everywhere.
With a little more space to maneuver, I cast Flame Flight. For the first intentional time in my life, I took to the air.
It wasn’t exactly a graceful take-off. I went up like a drunken bumblebee as I tried to get the hang of defying gravity. I wavered backward and forward above the diminishing press of furious gremlins. Nigel zipped around me, laughing and sending gremlins smacking into walls with his Air magic.
Once I stabilized myself, I surveyed the battle. It looked to be a fairly straightforward case of mopping up now. The remaining gremlins were still trying to murder my friends with the same tenacity with which they’d begun the fight, but there were far fewer of them now.
The broken, charred, mutilated bodies of yellow carnivores littered the dungeon. There were a couple of pockets of stout resistance though, but as I observed them from up high, a thought occurred to me.
While I’m up here… I thought.
I dug down into my mana and summoned one of the Crystal Magma Bombs in each hand. The little organic-looking bombs were indistinguishable from the large emeralds that I had seen in the undertemple of the Gemstone people. They were small, but the effort to summon them while flying sapped my strength. I suddenly felt like I’d run a mile.
“Bombs away,” I muttered as I tossed the bombs into the midst of a couple of groups of gremlins that were a good distance from my friends. I didn’t want to cause any friendly fire, after all.
The bombs went off with a satisfying ku-whumpf. Blobs of magma sprayed in all directions. The gremlins closest to the blast were torn to shreds, but those further away had the glutinous green magma stick to them like napalm. They ran about, gnashing their teeth and clawing at the air, until Bradley stepped in—quite literally—and squashed them flat.
I sank back down to earth. Absentmindedly, I peeled a gremlin off my shoulder where it had been trying to chew through my collar bone and tossed it at Rick. The big Islander clapped his hands together and gruesomely crushed the thing like a mosquito. Green blood oozed out between his fingers.
“Ick,” he said, wiping his hands on his leafy loincloth.
Damian was fighting hand-to-hand with a few gremlins, but looked to have things under control. Nigel was zooming around, sweeping the scattered gremlins together so that they could be dispatched by Alura and Enwyn. Rick had lumbered off and was trying the door.
“Still no good?” I asked as the enormous Earth Mage tugged on the handle.
Rick shook his head.
There was one last furious shriek from the middle of the room. Nigel had landed and the last gremlin was attempting to scamper up his back and sink its fangs into his jugular. Bradley stepped over and grabbed the thing by the scruff of the neck. He looked at it with mild distaste for a moment, the epitome of an aristocrat finding a caterpillar in his caesar salad, and threw it into the air. With pleasing accuracy, I unleashed a Storm Bolt and blew the gremlin into dust.
There was a click behind us. The dungeon door swung slowly open in Rick’s big hand.
I looked at the crew and raised my eyebrows. “Piece of cake,” I said.
The girls glanced around us at the wrecked dungeon and the mounds of gremlin bodies.
“You are such boys,” Alura said.
“Have fun with the clean-up, gentlemen,” Enwyn said, and she and Alura walked out of the dungeon shaking their heads and laughing.
I looked back at my frat brothers. Rick was still wiping gremlin blood off his hands.
“All right,” I said. “Now that’s over, I guess we should start brewing up that bastard Arun and his lackeys a little party treat.”
I wiped sweat from my brow with my shoulder, even as I continued to stir the simmering, lipstick red potion with the paddle. It glooped and bubbled in a satisfying way, giving off a steam that smelled captivatingly sweet and musky too. It was the first time that I had used my rainbow cauldron and, as far as I could tell, it was cauldroning up a treat. It sure was warm though, standing over the fire that burned underneath the big vessel. I was sweating like a nun on a cucumber farm.
“Nigel, make yourself useful and hold that bottle of mead to my mouth will you?” I said.
Nigel held up the icy cold bottle of mead and poured inexpertly into my mouth. It spilled down my chin, but I didn’t care; the ale worked its magic on me like rain on a wilting bloom.
“So, Bradley,” I said, “the chief ingredient of this little brew is manticore venom, right?”
“That’s right,” Bradley said as he measured out tincture of wormwood and added it to the Panty-Dropper potion.
“And that’s the stuff that drops the panties basically?”
“Correct.”
“All right, well, I think that we’re going to have to put as much of that shit into this concoction as we can. That being said, seeing as its venom, will too much of it kill our intended recipients?”
Bradley wiped his hands on his chef’s apron, which he had brought downstairs from the kitchen, and shook his head. “No. The diamondweed leaves negate any po
isoning aspect of the potion. Of course, we could always leave the diamondweed out…”
“Oh, there’s my little ruthless aristocrat! He’s got his poisoning pants on,” I said. “Nah, I think a dose of near-fatal embarrassment will be just what the apothecary ordered, Brad. No need to go the whole hog and kill them. This time.”
Bradley grinned across at me and bowed his head. “In that case,” he said, “we’ll put so much manticore venom in this that whoever drinks it will want to fuck just about anything.”
When the potion had stewed to Bradley’s liking, we decanted it into an empty beer keg and then mixed it in with some fresh mead.
“Okie dokie,” I said, looking expectantly around at the five gathered frat brothers, “now we just need one brave soul to volunteer as a guinea pig.”
Unsurprisingly, no one put their hand up.
“This disappointing display of cowardice was expected,” I said, “and so I have these five straws cut and ready to be pulled.” I extracted the five straws from my pocket and held them out.
It was Nigel that drew the short one. I pointed out how befitting this was—because of his halfling stature—and he told me, rather rudely, to go and fuck myself with the nearest sharp object.
Nigel might have been short, but he clearly had a big set of nuts on him, because he reached stoically for the beaker proffered to him by Bradley. The little Wind Mage took a deep breath and knocked the potion back with admirable gusto. He just had time to let out a small mmm of appreciation before his eyes went as glassy as a college girl’s in Cancun, ten minutes after the tequila water pistols came out.
Damien stepped forward, an evil grin spread across his face.
“Rick is the fairest of them all,” he said, completing the incantation.
The result was instantaneous and quite startling. Nigel’s eyes snapped to Rick, and the halfling shimmied coquettishly over to the enormous Islander.
“Uuuuuh,” was all that Rick could say, before Nigel took one of Rick’s tree trunk-like thighs in his hands and gyrated against it.
I thought I was going to be sick, I was laughing so hard. Damien and Bradley had fallen over in hysterics, Damien pounding the ground with his fist. With all the laughter and Rick’s burbling protests as he tried to shake Nigel Casanova off his leg, I didn’t catch any of the Wind Mage’s whispered entreaties. Rick obviously did though, because he started to flap his thick leg around, desperately trying to shake off the amorous Nigel.
“It’s—it’s like watching a—a—a chihuahua try and woo a Saint Bernard,” I gasped, clutching my sides so that my ribs wouldn’t break.
Rick eventually managed to grab Nigel by the scruff of the neck and haul him into the air, holding him at arm’s length. The impressive show of strength was somewhat robbed of its awe by the fact that, now that he was off his feet, it was clear to all of us that Nige pitched quite the tent in his baggy breeches.
“Let’s take him upstairs,” I said. “We can lock him in his room while we take the beer over to Frat Douche.”
Rick handed the lusty halfling into the custody of me, Bradley, and Damien. While he manhandled the heavy barrel that contained the potion out of the dungeon and into the main hall, the three of us managed to wrestle the woody-sporting Nigel upstairs to his room on the second floor.
“Rick! Rick, darling, I’ll find y—” was the last thing we heard from him before we slammed the door on him. Damien had swiped the key from the inside lock before we’d tossed the horny halfling in, and he secured the door, leaving the key in the lock.
“Well,” I said, looking at Bradley, who was leaning against the door. “I think it’s safe to say that the Panty-Dropper potion works.”
We met Rick back downstairs and set out for the Arun Lightson’s frat house, which was most easily accessed by a path that ran around the outskirts of Nevermoor. Rick carried the keg of spiked ale over his shoulder with as much ease as I might have carried a sack of potatoes.
“You’re a bit quiet back there, big fella,” I said as we walked down the hill and entered the lane that would lead us around the town and toward our target destination. Next to me, Damien attempted to turn a snort of laughter into a pretty convincing cough.
Rick was never what you might call a loquacious man. He weighed each and every word before he spoke them, usually. However, as we had left our frat house and begun our short journey, he had been even more subdued than usual.
“You all right, man?” Damien asked.
Rick rumbled deep in his chest. Then he said, “I could feel it, friends.”
“Feel it? Feel what?” Bradley asked in a puzzled voice.
“The pecker of our friend, Nigel,” Rick clarified. “His pecker was rubbing up against my leg.”
There was a stunned silence at this, then Bradley, Damien, and myself dissolved into fits of laughter once more.
“Gods, no wonder you’re more reticent than usual!” Bradley said, choking on his words.
“I could feel it, I could feel the pecker!” Damien howled in mock imitation of our Islander friend.
Rick scowled at us.
“Oh, come on, it was funny!” Damien said. “No need to go all moody about it.”
“My family told me that the Academy road would be one paved with trails too dark and mysterious for me to even contemplate,” Rick said, in his gravelly voice. “How true their words turned out to be.”
As we made our way around the outskirts of Nevermoor, along the quiet dirt lane that skirted the town proper, we passed numerous little pens of big, friendly pigs that I had seen earlier in the day. I stopped and leaned on the fence of one pen, and the particularly friendly pig that had waddled along beside me that morning came over to join me.
I looked down at the guileless animal as my frat bros came over to stand beside me.
I scratched the pig’s ears and gave it a little pat on the head. “You and your friends are in for an eventful evening if all goes to plan.”
Chapter Fifteen
We arrived at the impressive and freshly-painted front door of Frat Douche, 15 or so minutes later. As much as I disliked Arun, Dhor, Qildro, and Ike, I couldn’t deny that their pad was pretty fucking sweet.
We’d had to wend our way through a beautifully cut hedge maze that bordered a chalk-white path to get to the front door. The front facade was all imposing and elegant marble, the tall double front door painted a royal blue and flanked by a pair of rearing griffin statues. These statues were magically enchanted so that, when I put my foot on the first step leading up to the front door, they turned to face me and said in one shared voice, “Who goes there?”
“Fucking Bond, James Bond,” I said. “Who wants to know?”
“Your name is not among our fraternity charters, Bond James Bond,” the griffins replied. “Allow us to summon a fraternity member.”
“Swell,” I said.
There was the sound of a deep gong being rung from within the mansion.
A few moments later, good old Arun Lightson opened the door. His face morphed into that smirk that made me want to instinctively reach out and twist his head off. Nonchalantly, he flicked his bright orange hair out of his eyes and leaned against the door jamb.
“What,” he said, in a lazy and bored voice, “the bloody hell do you pack of swine want? Are you doing a collection for some sort of charity? Raising funds for that festering dog turd of a fraternity house of yours? Here.” He flicked a silver coin at me. I caught it before it could hit me in the chest.
It was all that I could do to bite back a snappy retort about how I was going to slip that coin into his mother’s vajayjay and wear the old dear out like some sort of coin-operated blowjob machine. Instead, keeping my eye fixed on the greater prize, I said, “Not quite. This is a peace-keeping mission.”
Ike, Qildro, and Dhor appeared at Arun’s shoulder.
Arun’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Speak on,” he said to me.
I gestured to Rick, who stepped forward and place
d the barrel of spiked ale on the stone porch.
“An offering of peace,” I said. “Ale.”
Arun looked from me to the keg. “You must think I was born yesterday,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked, my expression a picture of innocence.
“Well, you’ve obviously done something to this barrel, haven’t you?”
I shook my head. “Nope. We just want to clear the air and move on with our lives. We’re too fucking old to be chasing each other around the Academy, trading blows and tricks. That’s so fucking hackneyed, the thought of it makes me want to weep. No, you just enjoy this ale, on us, and when we cross paths again, let’s just ignore one another, yeah?”
Arun still eyed me with utter distrust. Then he said to Rick and Damien, “You two, drink some.”
To their everlasting credit, my two fraternity brothers didn’t even hesitate, giving Arun no reason not to trust the deception. They cracked the tap on the keg and, using their hands as cups, took a few generous mouthfuls of the ale.
Rick belched and stepped back. “Trails too dark and mysterious...” he muttered under his breath as he used a massive forearm to wipe the froth from his mouth.
“We can take it back,” Damien said as he gestured at the keg. “We’ve got a few chicks who are keen to come over and help us polish this thing off tonight if you guys don’t want it.”
It was an inspired and irresistible little bit of bait.
I could see exactly what was going through Arun’s mind, as clearly as if it was being tattooed across that high and haughty brow of his. He didn’t trust us, but he also didn’t want us to take the keg away either. If we did that, then we might snare the company of girls that should be going to his not-so-secret party later on, and his pride clearly wouldn’t allow that.
