by Harry Nix
All the icons for my spells were still lit up. Scarlet and Ori were still alive, wherever they were. I couldn’t hear them, nor move to see them.
I was going to throw some cliché shit at him—maybe a “you’ll never get away with this,” but all that came out of my mouth was a wet gurgle. I struggled to move my head, getting a burst of pain from the back. My staff was still stuck to my back. I was laying on it.
From the corner of my eye I saw movement, a flicker. There was another slot carved into the wall up high, the vent system continuing along.
Scarlet or Ori, or maybe both. I tried again to speak, to keep Rax’s focus on me but only gurgled again.
“Oh, fine,” he snapped and waved his hand. The blood on his legs soaked into him and vanished. There was a prick of pain in my throat as nerves patched themselves and I could speak again.
“You use... blood... for magic,” I gasped.
“Everything does. Where do you think magic comes from?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. Some of my teeth were smashed, I could feel that now. They were jagged and sharp.
I focused on Vibrate, not touching Rax in case he sensed it and saw the circle appear on the floor. It was just an instant before I let it go. Maybe that meant I could cast it from the end of my little finger. He was wearing two gold rings, one of the middle finger of each hand. Which had Ori said? Left? Or was it right?
Fuck, I couldn’t remember.
“Life and death. Growth and decay. The ceaseless churn of all things struggling for existence and then failing. Magic is the froth, the leftover.”
It was like he was studying me but a new symbol was blinking in my HUD. It looked like a scroll. It opened at a thought and there it was: all the dialog, right up to Rax’s last line.
I mentally scrolled back and it went way too far, almost to the beginning. Scarlet with her legs dangling over the side of the grave, making suggestive comments about what was under my rags.
It felt like several lifetimes ago, although it was only days. We escaped that place after bonding and then on the grass outside, bonded again in a much more physical way.
“I can’t be boring you, surely. You don’t have things to say about the demons, the blood, the fact that Bron is welded into their stinking city?”
He sniffed the air at that. All I could smell was blood.
“Can’t you feel it? They’re killing themselves. The ceaseless flow of food has stopped and already the poor go hungry. The suffering is going to be perfect,” he said.
I found the dialog. Middle finger, left hand, golden ring.
Some blood pooled in my mouth. I briefly considered spitting it at him but then realized I wouldn’t make the distance. I let it run out of my mouth. There were shards of teeth in it.
I couldn’t know what Scarlet and Ori were doing. I hadn’t seen anything else in the vent. I was going to cast Vibrate and hope that all luck was on my side. Maybe I could rip the ring off his finger and it would land in the pool. He might not be able to find it again.
I guess I was hoping he’d kill me in a rage at that point too, so I could resurrect elsewhere. I just had to hope he was angry enough.
“We’re going to bust Bron open and turn the whole city against you. Squish you like the pathetic blood leech you are,” I said. It was a struggle to get out. My lungs weren’t working well.
“Leech,” Rax echoed. He stood up then and came to stand beside me. If I could move I could have grabbed his ankle. He squatted down, his arms resting loosely on his knees.
“I’m the leech? What do you think Lucy is?”
Scarlet must have been positioning herself because she came shooting out of the wall, flying straight at Rax, a fireball in each hand. I didn’t get to freak out about the fact he knew the name of the Ai running this world.
I focused Vibrate on the ring and cast it in an instant. A line of fire shot down my arm and out the tip of my little finger, the spell burning its way through torn and damaged nerves.
The ring shot upwards, for a moment pulling his arm up like he was asking a question in class, before it tore his finger off. Scarlet hit him then, punching the two fireballs into his face, the pair of them crashing over me.
Rax roared, somewhere out of my sight and I heard another fireball.
A tiny figure came out of the vent, leaping to the ground and running over to me. Ori, now even smaller than before. He must have split again. He passed by my head as Rax and Scarlet fought before leaping up to stand on my chest.
“Sorry, open wide Meow Meow,” he said.
He was holding the bloody finger with the ring still attached.
I would have liked to say no but when Scarlet and Rax crashed over me, it seems another nerve had given way. Ori shoved the finger into my mouth before pushing my jaw shut. I couldn’t hold it though.
Just when I was thinking he was going to hold my nostrils shut to suffocate me or maybe slit my throat with Scarlet’s knife, the girl herself appeared beside me.
There was a dizzying spin as she hauled me off the floor and then she screamed and I felt her body shudder. I saw roof, wall, her and then she dropped me. I crashed to the edge of the pool, teetering.
Rax was still alive and very much pissed off. His face was charred where Scarlet had burned him. Parts of it was hanging off in strips and I saw he was like the Apothecary, like Ahab the Hopper. There was something else underneath, more than meat and bone. It was like congealed blood but with a greenish hue to it.
He waved his hand and bits of his face sucked inwards, like he was absorbing the clotted mess to power his magic. Scarlet shot across the room and was impaled on a statue. She screamed and then I fell into the pool.
The blood was hot and it filled my mouth, which was half open. The finger and ring were still in there but I couldn’t keep my jaw shut.
Whatever was keeping me breathing was dumb and didn’t stop under the blood. The pain that burst from my lungs was extraordinary and the world flashed red and black and then—
Blue. Brilliant blue of the bluest sky. I was on my back, looking up. I was whole again, no pain. I was—
Black and sharp things sticking into me. I became aware of weight and dots of pain all over me. The sound of my own breath.
I was in the pod, back at Deep Dive. I could faintly hear shouting, frantic Russians and then I swear two gunshots before—
Blue. Back to the bluest blue sky.
I sat up and saw I was sitting on a pale gray material, not quite stone. It was just... floor? Like a default surface, that stretched off into nothing. There was no world around me. Just surface, me and the blue sky.
“Do you wish to be transformed? Do I have your permission? You will be altered forever, and there may be some slight damage, memory loss...”
The voice was feminine and coming from all around me. The sky was changing now, lines growing paler, making a face, like Scarlet but traced in blue, looking down on me, her hands clasped in front of her like she was begging.
The ACCEPT and DECLINE buttons felt like they were a mile across. Scale was impossible here in this endless space.
Transformed? Me, James Katz, or my character would be?
Part of the sky changed, showing the shape of a man transforming into a towering demon with sharp claws and a long tail. Then he transformed back. Text appeared above it: once every three days, one hour duration.
Oh yeah, I’d drowned in demon blood. I must have absorbed it. Now I could transform into a massive killing machine for just an hour.
There was no way I’d defeat Rax as I was. He’d waved his hand and crippled me.
“Do it,” I said to the girl in the sky. She waved her hand at the ACCEPT button, inviting me to press it. I reached up, feeling like my arm was miles long. I touched the button but it was gone, a hand in its place.
“I trust you,” a voice whispered in my ear. It was so much like Scarlet but not quite. The hand squeezed mine and the pressure quickly became pain that spread
and multiplied through my body as I transformed.
I hoped it wasn’t like this every time because it was agony. My bones cracked and grew, my skin tore, healing and hardening as it went. A pain in the ass became my tail and the scale around me distorted as I shot up in height. There was nothing to compare myself to but I had to be ten feet easily. Orc size. My clothes and bag went somewhere else mostly, leaving me with a ragged pair of pants, Incredible Hulk style. I still had my staff though. It snapped off my back and into my giant clawed hand. It was red now, swirled with lines of glowing fire. The top was spiked and it had grown in size to match me.
The pain subsided as the transformation completed. I reached up to feel my face, seeing my skin was red now, expecting it to be like Scarlet but for a moment felt a muzzle, like I was halfway dragon. The bones were still cracking and moving into place, my face slowly smoothing out.
Icons appeared on the HUD. I could cast Fireballs like Scarlet and I could breathe fire, a sustained burn of superhot flame. There were no stats as usual but I could tell I was massively stronger, and faster too. I saw an upgrade tree, all of it grayed out except for a symbol in the middle—a demon with wings.
“Holy shit, I get to fly?” I said, my voice coming out as a guttural growl.
The sky girl was looking down on me again, but now had her arms crossed, regarding me with a strange look. This is going to sound weird but she was pressing up some quite nice cleavage doing that.
Of course she could read what I was thinking.
She immediately dropped her arms, frowned at me but then winked before waving a hand that was the size of a building. She didn’t quite swat me back to existence but I flew all the same, speeding through the vast blue, seeing that default texture below me struggling to keep up, loading in pieces. It managed to catch up to me and then pass and then in a burst the rest of the world loaded in. Trees and wireframes of animals, mud and the ground. I saw the cemetery, the one where I’d spanked Scarlet and I shot down from the sky like a meteor, plowing into a grave and the briefest flash of black.
I stumbled up from the ground, back in human form, not traveling a million miles an hour, tripped on a clump of grass and fell to my knees. I coughed up a golden ring, spitting it on the grave in front of me.
It took a moment to realize I was whole and another to wonder if I’d swallowed Rax’s finger. Then I saw it in my bag of holding.
Yup, I’d brought it with me. Somehow it had separated from the ring.
I was thankful I hadn’t come back to life with that bloody thing in my mouth.
Down in my HUD there was a new icon of a demonic face, roaring with the joy of battle. My new ability to transform into a Demon. There wasn’t more information about it but even as I read, I knew there had to be something different about it. I’d just seen Demons, trapped by Rax. They weren’t ten feet tall monsters like I’d transformed into. Sure, they were strong and some were tall but most were the size of an average man, just like Scarlet wasn’t a giant.
Thinking of her, I checked the icons but I couldn’t summon her or Ori. They were both alive.
Which meant Rax had them and was doing the hells knew what.
I leaped up to run back to Bron so quick I almost forgot the whole point of why Ori shoved a dismembered finger in my mouth. The ring. The one binding Delicia.
I scooped it up, wiped the spit away on my shirt and then wondered what I was meant to do with it. I had my staff but I doubted I could break the ring with it. Maybe I could bust a headstone off, try to use it to bash it against another one.
Standing there in the graveyard, I felt a ripple around me, like someone whispering from a distant room, so quiet it was like a thought rather than voice.
I should put the ring on.
Was that honey I could smell? What was that?
I was alone, the air still. It was day, mid-morning and the forest was quiet.
I should put the ring on.
This time I heard it properly. It was a voice, incredibly faint but definitely coming from the ring.
Okay, rings that tell you to put them on... not a smart thing to do.
But this wasn’t like some evil command. It was a girl’s voice, high and light, suggesting most patiently that I put the ring on and could I six pixies hurry up?
I shook my head at the voice. Six pixies?
It had to be Delicia and she was Scarlet’s... friend... (the pauses she’d used suggested more but still, friendly, definitely) so things would be fine right?
I slipped the ring on before I could second guess it and suddenly there was a pixie pressed against me.
Her legs wrapped around me.
She was blonde and had blue eyes, the brilliant color of the sky I’d seen before. I had one hand behind her neck, the other on a hip. She was only wearing a shirt, a white blowsy thing, like a peasant top, pulled up, showing her curves. Her cheeks were flushed pink and she was urging me on.
“Please, please,” she gasped, rocking her hips.
I moved with her, the scent of honeycakes flooding through me. How did I get here?
She was small, maybe just reaching five foot if she was lucky but stronger than she looked. She gripped my arm with a small hand and moved her hips again.
“Delicia,” I breathed.
Of course, we’d met at the... the...
The pleasure was intense but I was sliding out of it. This... wasn’t real. I’d been in a graveyard, slipping on a ring.
The ring!
The one Rax used to bind her.
“Stop it,” I murmured, even as I moved against her.
I was suddenly cold and upright, no longer on some endless soft bed with a hotter than hot pixie but in a cell. She was standing across from me, dressed in rags now, her arms crossed and pouting.
“No fair! Do you know how long in the six pixies it has been? Forever!”
She stomped her foot and I saw a little gold dust sparkle as it shook loose from... well, around her perfectly curved butt.
“Ah, so Scarlet told you. You’re already not holding me like Rax was. I’ll be able to use my magic to get out, if you release me. Then we can get together and do it for real,” she said.
“I’m James,” I said, my mind starting to come back together. The scent of honeycakes was still strong but fading. It was her magic. It had some kind of stupefying effect, like a hypnosis.
“I know. You have the ring, our minds are squished right up against each other,” Delicia said, pressing her hands together. She turned slightly as she did and I saw an iridescent glimmer across her shoulders, like the wing of a dragonfly. She was looking out the bars of the cell.
I followed her gaze. There was a door half-open, a corridor and at the far end, the Apothecary, standing by a table, fiddling with a golden collar. There was a new ring sitting beside it.
I looked back at Delicia and saw the skin around her neck shimmer gold for a moment. The collar was sunk in, part of her.
“Release me fully and I’ll find you. Some really serious shit is about to go down. Like six pixies bad. Get the spiders, and yes, go on a bloody rampage when the time is right,” Delicia said.
Of course she could read my mind. I was getting hints of stray thoughts from her. I saw her glance down and saw I was stark naked, like I’d been in the imaginary bed with her. I heard some murmuring thoughts from Delicia and saw her glance before her cheeks flushed pink again.
“Now would be a good time,” she said after looking away.
I turned and saw the Apothecary at the bars, the collar in his hand. A guard was fumbling with a key for the cell door.
“You’re free,” I said and then I snapped back to the graveyard.
Then, I ran.
21
I had to skirt the long way around Bron. Rax’s guards and mercenaries had finished their barricades and had now spread out from the palace. Twice I had to avoid patrols and just to add more fun, a wild dog with purple streaked through its fur attempted to attack me before I
scared it away.
It wasn’t like running in a game where there was some action point bar or stamina draining away and it’s just a thing to get from one place to another. I was running, for real. Legs hurting, lungs too. I had to shuffle at times, barely faster than walking but doing everything I could to get back to Scarlet. In the forest I passed bushes with yellow berries on them, showing a question mark in my HUD. Game me would have picked them because why not?
I just kept moving instead.
Two thoughts were in my mind—Scarlet, and Rax’s blood pool. Last I’d seen Scarlet was impaled on a statue. The idea Rax was keeping her alive, in pain, was unbearable. I had to save her.
The only thing keeping my mind off her, was piecing together Rax’s motivations. He was feeding off the suffering in Bron somehow. Once I got Scarlet free, maybe the plan should change to busting the gates of Bron wide open.
Eventually I reached the cliff again, the one with Armando at the top if she was still there.
There were new guards, six of them again but all of them holding swords. They weren’t bored guards worn out from waiting but on high alert, scanning the area around them.
I sat in a bush downslope from them, recovering from my run and trying to tell myself it wasn’t totally futile to go this way.
As a group we’d barely defeated six guards that we’d gotten the jump on. Alone I had zero, zip, nada hope of doing anything other that getting slaughtered and taking a quick trip back to the graveyard. Or worse, they’d capture me, cut off my hands and deliver me straight back to Rax.
Then, music.
Faint at first, coming from all around me, then growing louder.
Shake your booty, shake your booty...
“Delicia?” I whispered.
I’ve never heard this song before. It seems appropriate.
Honeycakes again and the light sound of the pixie’s voice in my mind. I was still wearing the ring and it hadn’t occurred to me I could use it to communicate with her.
“Where are you?”
About to perform a... golden shower? Ew, actually no, that’s not right, why is that in your mind?
