by Dante King
“Die, fucker!” I growled and threw a blistering punch at my enemy.
The minotaur whipped its head around and deflected my overzealous punch with a well-timed horn. My fist plowed through the wall, crashing through the solid rock blocks like a jackhammer.
The minotaur whipped its head the other way, and I had to step back to avoid its razor-tipped horns as they hissed past my face. The battle-axe came up toward my stomach, and I blocked it with my palm, the blade smacking into the naked flesh of my hand.
A bead of blood welled up from where the blow, a blow that should have gone through my hand and my body and out of the other side, landed.
My eyes narrowed.
“Ow,” I said.
I moved with the unstoppable fury of a tornado, stepping backward, pirouetting, and letting loose a roundhouse kick that caught my opponent right in the face. Blood sprayed outward as my beefy foe’s snout burst apart in a shower of teeth and crimson saliva.
The minotaur struck out with an uppercut to my ribs, but I allowed the punch to land, absorbing the brunt of the blow with my abdominals. I stepped in and hit him with a palm strike, hard in the forearm. His radius snapped in two, as neatly as a dry stick. The minotaur bellowed thickly through his ruined face, while I plunged my hooked finger up into his unarmored armpit. My enemy gave a horrible gurgle of surprise and spasmed backward as I pressed my finger into his muscly chest cavity and punctured his heart. With a last breathy sigh through his mangled face, the minotaur slid down the wall behind him.
Hell, I’d never been one to think that clean gentlemanly fighting was the way to go. Back on Earth, outside of the octagon, I was a firm believer in fighting dirty to get yourself out of a fix. The dirtier the better, if it meant that you were the one to walk away from a street altercation. Low blows, cheap shots, and kicking someone when they were down, they were all part of a winner’s repertoire.
Still, that was the first time that I had killed someone with my finger before.
I took a steadying breath and wiped my warm, bloody finger on my shirt. As I did so, I noticed a couple of things about the armor that the minotaur wore. The first was that it was good, really good. It had fit the minotaur warrior like a glove. Not the sort of gear you’d expect some wandering bandit to be wearing. Secondly, there was a sigil etched into the breastplate, right in the middle.
I squinted, looked around to make sure that I wasn’t about to get stabbed in the ass, and then knelt down.
It was a simple crest of sorts; a roaring bear’s head with twin crossed axes underneath and what I guessed to be a crown over the top, though this last detail was hard to make out because it had been rudely and amateurishly scratched out.
I had been so caught up with just fighting these strangers that it hadn’t even crossed my mind to check them for clues as to who they were. If this guy had been sporting someone’s mark though, if he had been representing a higher authority, then I was sure that Renji or Dasyr or Tanila would be able to pinpoint this sigil and identify its owner.
Well, I thought as I rose to my feet once more, there seems little point worrying about any of that just yet. First thing’s first: survive this fray. Once that’s done, we can start scratching our heads and begin playing Guess Who.
I jogged down into the main square, into a world that had turned to carnage. The bodies of the attackers were cast haphazardly around, all in various states of disfigurement or dismemberment.
An elf had been broken clean in half, her spine sticking out of the bloody stump of her torso like a little white tail. That had Saya written all over it.
A circle of corpses looked like they had all been brained with a large, blood-covered paving stone that was lying nearby. A werewolf, wearing chainmail and with a cruel dagger clutched in its paw, had been neutralized quite effectively by someone slicing the top of its head off as neatly as a soft-boiled egg.
Blood and viscera were splashed everywhere. Arrows and crossbow quarrels stuck in door jambs and windowsills, marking where our company had been moving and taking cover.
I went without any real plan into the main square and helped out where I was needed. I fought hand to hand against the desperate, furious ambushers. As I slew the wild warriors, I noticed that many of them had the same sigils etched into their leather and steel armor: the bear’s head, the crossed axes, and the scratched-out crown.
Every one of my allies was comporting themselves with commendable ferocity. And I saw now just what difference lay between regular soldiers, skilled as they might be, and those warriors whose blood was mixed with that of dragons.
Tanila and Dasyr were standing together now in the middle of the square. As I threw a half-dead dark elf from me, Dasyr let loose with a roar of such primal fury that it must have turned the backbones of any nearby enemies to jelly.
Both tiger-looking dragonmancers had their claws out and their ears laid flat back against their heads. Their robes whirled around them as they ripped the flesh from the bones of their hapless foes, crumpling armor like tin with a single punch.
I jumped up and through the roof of an abandoned chandler’s shop, to burst out in a shower of wet thatch right in the face of a stunned archer, when I caught sight of a figure standing at the top of one of the rises that led down in the village.
The archer, who had been understandably taken aback by my sudden, loosed the arrow he had nocked to his string. I blocked the flying projectile by getting my vambrace in the way and it spun off to the right. I kicked out and booted the archer hard in the guts, doubling him over and making him spew a sticky line of blood down his front. I grabbed an arrow from the quiver on his back and stabbed it down through the base of his skull. The archer dropped through the hole in the roof I had made and landed in a very dead heap on the dusty boards below.
“Now, who the fuck goes there?” I whispered, squinting against the murky, stormy light to try and make out anything about the stationary figure on the slope.
Thanks to my dragon-augmented eyesight, I was able to see that the figure was actually a warrior sitting astride a large bear.
“A bearmancer?” I breathed. “But what the hell are they doing overseeing an attack on us?”
I let out a long, slow breath through my nostrils. If he had still been alive, I was sure that the minotaur that I had faced earlier would have been proud of that snort.
“Yeah,” I answered myself, “there’s only one way to find out.”
I set off at a dead run across the rooftops, leaping from hovel to hovel like they were steppingstones in a stream. I vaulted off the edge of the last house, arms and legs pumping in the air, before landing in the open grassland beyond.
“You!” I bellowed up at the stationary warrior sitting atop the bear. “I have questions! Don’t worry, though, they are easy questions with easy answers!”
Then, I was running.
The bearmancer’s mount lumbered around to face me as I sprinted up the slope. The rider gazed down at me through an elaborate covered helmet, through which eyes gleamed like bitter stars. The grace with which the rider sat atop the bear, the tilt of the head, and the set of the shoulders, told me that ‘it’ was a ‘she’. Not to mention that I had learned there were no male bearmancers.
As I got closer, I noticed that the bear was strange looking. Quite how it was strange, except for being about twice as big as the biggest grizzly, I couldn’t put my finger on at first.
The rider drew a curved sword from a scabbard that hung at her waist. She raised it high and to her right, ready to bring it sweeping down on me—should her bear not manage to tear me apart when I got within mauling distance.
I realized then that she probably thought she was dealing with some overconfident foot soldier with a death wish. Sure, there had been the leaping over rooftops thing, but there were many strange races in this world. I was sure more than a few of them could easily outperform the average human.
I hoped that this was the case. I hoped that this female bearmancer
was about to underestimate me.
As I got within about twenty feet of the bear, it reared suddenly on its hind legs with a howling roar that would have had Chuck Norris questioning what he was doing. Then I realized what had struck me as odd about the beast. It was not furry. Its flanks were smooth, as smooth as…
“Stone,” I said, and threw myself forward under the raking claws that were suddenly slashing toward my throat.
It’s a tricky thing to roll forward up a hill, but I managed it. The wind of the bear’s massive paw ruffled my long brown hair as its blow just missed me. I could imagine how the rider was probably hefting her sword. Could practically hear the creak of leather, the clink of chainmail, the elastic stretching of muscles as she prepared her downward cut at me.
I conjured the stunning harpoon in my left hand. Propelled by a combination of mana and will, it thunked heavily into the belly of the stone bear. I had used this particular bit of dragon magic only once before and was still a little unsure how to ratchet up the force of the stunning charge.
As it was, I decided to err on the side of caution and let the great stone bear beast have as much as I could give it.
The mana flowed through the supernatural chain that connected the rose-colored barbed point of the harpoon to me. The bear, caught by surprise, shrieked suddenly and went rigid. The rider was thrown from her perch on the beast’s back.
With a great heave, I wrenched on the pale pink chain and toppled the electrified bear over onto its side. The rider landed hard on her back, her breath driven out of her in a great whoosh. The bear vanished with as little fuss as Noctis might when recalled to his crystal, and I knew that the connection between the mancer and her steed had been momentarily interrupted.
Not wanting to waste a second. I pounced on the downed bearmancer.
The woman, even taken by surprise, turned out to be a damned worthy opponent. She was as fast and sly as a fox, and as vicious as a cornered wolf. We grappled with one another, trading the odd blow and kick as we rolled awkwardly along the hillside.
The woman’s breath came hissing through the mouth hole of her covered helm, sharp and desperate and angry. She tried to knee me in the meat and potatoes, but I read her like a book and blocked the attempt with my thigh.
I needed answers from this woman, for it was as clear as the nose on my face that she had to have been behind this little raid. She was wearing a burnished steel breastplate on which was etched the disfigured sigil that I had noticed the other soldiers wearing.
The warrior woman growled something at me in a throaty language and fastened her fingers around my throat. She was well trained, that much was evident, because her clawing digits found the carotid artery in my thick neck and pressed hard into it.
My vision flickered. I had been expecting a magical attack more than I had been expecting this more conventional piece of fighting and I was taken unawares.
The world grew hazy as the bearmancer squeezed with all her might, trying to force me into unconsciousness.
In the throbbing, red confines of my head, I was struck with an idea. I saw a heavy branch lying nearby. It was beyond my reach at that moment, but if I could just get my mitts on it somehow…
I used the spell that Wayne’s burgeoning power had opened to me. For the first time, I used Smog Form.
It was an unparalleled sensation. A feeling of spreading, of dissipating, of almost complete freedom. A dangerous sensation. My body, such as I had known it, was gone.
All of us are made up of atoms joined together by electrons, but we never feel like we are big things made up of countless small things. Embodying this spell, becoming smog, I became acutely conscious of this fact. I knew intimately that I was a zillion particles squashed into a single humanoid shape.
But no longer. It would, in this new form, be so easy to drift away, to float up into the atmosphere and let the winds take me where they would…
All this passed through my consciousness in the space it takes to blink. I held onto reason and to myself with some difficulty. With a concerted effort, I maneuvered my insubstantial self toward the heavy stick that I had noticed lying in the grass, while the bearmancer flailed at me in a gratifyingly flabbergasted manner.
When I was over the lump of wood, I released the magic. I returned, with a head-spinning rush, to my proper solid state. I landed in the grass on hands and knees, scooped up the chunk of wood, and cracked the still disorientated warrior next to me on the side of the head.
My adversary slumped into the grass, her hands falling limply to her side, her bell well and truly rung. She made a weak moaning noise, but it was clear that she was out for the count.
I reached quickly into my pocket and extricated the bag that I knew I would find in there. It was, at first glance, a simple black sack. It was only when scrutinized closely that someone might see that the bag wasn’t made of fabric, but a compound like ultra-fine chainmail. This sack had been given to me by Ashrin and was enchanted with an anti-thaumaturgical forcefield on the inside. It might have looked like any other black sack, but it was a terrifically powerful magical object and was used to stop a dragonmancer—or any mancer for that matter—from being able to communicate with the Etherstone in which their soul companion resided.
I found a granite gray crystal worked into a bronze ring on the bearmancer’s little finger, and I deposited it into the black sack.
Once this was done, I sat back on my haunches, reached down, and pulled the helmet off my enemy’s head.
She had skin the color of the chocolate and a shock of bright blonde hair. Her eyes were a color somewhere between tangerine and ginger and were a little unfocused just then. Her lips were full and, currently, covered in blood. She turned her head to the side and spat a string of bloody drool into the grass, revealing a single gold canine set amongst otherwise white teeth.
Thinking that it might save time and trouble, I cut a strip of cloth from around the leather surcoat that she wore under her mail and plate and bound her hands behind her back. Now that I had severed the tie that she had with the bear in her crystal, the woman was nowhere near as capable or dangerous an adversary as she had been only a moment before. Although there was still no reason to go asking for a knife across the throat if it could be helped.
While the bearmancer groaned and took her time returning to consciousness, I picked her up and began carrying her down the hill back toward the village.
The sounds of fighting had lessened now. I guessed that my friends were currently engaged in that distasteful mopping up stage, where the last few fanatic stragglers are finally brought to bay. None of these raiders struck me as the kind to throw down their weapons and come quietly. That was just as well, really. The last thing that we needed was a moral dilemma regarding what to do with prisoners out here.
The woman over my shoulder began to struggle more as I reached the bottom of the hill and the tussocky grassland leveled out. She wriggled, then kicked out, then tried to throw a knee into my chest.
It was all futile. The bearmancers, as I knew well at that point, did not undergo the Transfusion Ceremony. That meant that, even when they were linked with the bears in their crystals, they could not tap into the same level of power as dragonmancers.
The bearmancer’s flailing grew angrier and more erratic. She snarled curses at me as I headed toward the village.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, “you can vent that spleen of yours in a second. I just want to make sure that my compatriots are all okay before you start spilling your guts as to why Queen Frami sent you and your pals here to meet us.”
The woman on my shoulder went still and thoughtful at hearing my words. Then, unexpectedly, she writhed like a salmon trying to leap its way up stream and struck me with a powerful knee in the head. My grip loosened, and the bearmancer dropped to the earth. Somehow, with an agility that far outshone my own pre-Transfusion dexterity, she landed on her feet and was able to take off.
I sighed as she sprinted away, rubbing
distractedly at the spot on the side of my head where her knee had connected.
“Can you stop, please?” I called after her.
She didn’t. I hadn’t thought she would.
My stunning harpoon hit her in the back of the knee and sank its supernatural barbs into the flesh of her leg. The bearmancer let out a wordless cry, but that was cut off almost immediately when I hit her with some of that good old-fashioned mana charge. She jerked, writhed on one foot for a few seconds, and then collapsed to the grass.
Slowly, and with very little concern for her ego or feelings, I hauled her in like a fish on a line.
When she was within reach, I hoisted her up and threw her back over my shoulder like a sack of turnips. With a slap on her rump, I strolled into the outskirts of the hamlet and made my way to the center of town, following the faint sounds of the dead and the dying.
When I walked around a corner into the old market square, I was just in time to see Renji split a dryad warrior down the middle like a dry round of firewood with the blade on the back of her warhammer. Guts and blood dropped into a sloppy pile, and the two halves of the last of the raiders fell twitching to the blood-soaked earth.
“What have you got there, Dragonmancer Noctis?” Dasyr asked me, licking arterial blood off the back of her paw with her rough, pink tongue.
“A prisoner,” I said. “The leader of this band, I think. And a bearmancer to boot.”
“A fucking bearmancer?” Saya growled. Her arms were slick with blood to the elbows and her face was speckled with gore.
I looked around at the other women and saw that they were similarly make-upped.
