by Simon Archer
“That, and the total amount of time Hikki’s had is only about half of your one time,” I highlighted, maybe unwisely weighing into the conversation. “You really have no ground to stand on. If anything, you’re still winning.”
“Hey, yeah!” Hikki shouted before covering her mouth at the sound of the echo she’d made as she switched to a quieter voice. “Hurray! You’re still winning! That’s good, right? That’s what you wanted?”
“Let’s just say that we’re tied forever,” the revenant monk compromised. “It doesn’t matter what happens to either one of us. We’re always even. Alright?”
“Oh, I don’t need to be on the same level as you, Delilah.” The druid princess bowed. “I’m just happy that I didn’t have to go through with my promise. Woo, what a relief!”
“You are just the sweetest little thing, aren’t you?” Delilah laughed, picking Hikki up in a bear hug. “How Jeremiah managed to catch a treasure like you is beyond me.”
“Hey!” I interjected at the backhanded insult, “I mean, yeah, you’re right, I’m a hot mess, and it’s a miracle we have her around, but still… hey.”
“It was an arranged marriage,” Hikki stated the obvious with a giggle. “You cannot get out of having me around if you tried.”
“We wouldn’t want to.” The revenant set Hikki down. “Lead the way, trusted guide!”
“With pleasure!” With a sudden change, Hikki shrunk down until she was the size of a little bluejay which wasn’t far from the truth of the matter. All at once, her goblin green skin and buckskin attire had been changed to blue feathers, and she’d grown a pair of little wings and a beak. Instead of bird legs, however, she grew out four blue chipmunk legs and a stubby tail, becoming what must have been the smallest and most adorable griffin in existence. The little blue Hikki griffin fluttered off, buzzing through a hole in the wall we were approaching as she flew out of sight.
“Glad you two are getting along,” I said to Delilah as we followed Hikki’s blue jay griffin form. “Liking the newest addition to the team?”
“Don’t you act like you’re off the hook yet.” Delilah stepped in front of me, slowing down just enough to brush right up against me. “Just because I’ve made things up with her doesn’t mean you get to walk away clean so easily.”
“What did I do?” I asked as Delilah grabbed my hands to place around her stomach. “I am but an innocent bystander in all of this.”
“It takes two, Jeremiah.” She twisted herself inside my hug, hooking her arms around my neck and lifting herself onto my chest as I continued to walk. “You are as much an accomplice in these things as she is.”
“I thought you just settled that with a permanent agreement of even standing!” I lowered my hands to support her as she latched onto my sides with her thighs. “Was all of that heartfelt sincerity I was privileged to witness for naught? For naught, Delilah?”
“Don’t be so naïve, Thorne.” She used my last name to diffuse my fake distress. “Someone needs to be punished for what has happened here. There still has been a transgression, and I will not rest until it is paid in full.”
“So, that’s up to me, then?” I asked. “What am I supposed to do to atone for these sins I’ve committed against you? What price shall I pay, O Great Lady of Justice?”
“Oh, I like that.” Delilah lightly bit her thumb. “It’s been too long since I’ve been called by a heroic title. Can you call me that from now on?”
“You mean, like, casually?” I questioned the reasonableness of the request. “Seems like a mouthful, O Great Lady of Justice. Does this please you, O Great Lady of Justice? Are you satisfied, O Great Lady of Justice? Would you like a spot of tea, O Great Lady of Justice? How’s the new armor feeling, O Great Lady of Justice?”
“Okay, okay!” she said after she was done giggling. “Maybe not all the time, then.”
“Oh, so you mean you want me to only use it situationally?” I continued unabated, “Is that how you want me to introduce you to new people, O Great Lady of Justice? ‘Hello, bartender? Yes, I’d like you to meet someone. This is the Great Lady of Justice. Oh, no, I can’t tell you her actual name. You can only get on such an esteemed position as a first-name basis with the Great Lady of Justice after a trial period of a couple of weeks. The Great Lady of Justice is a very esteemed woman, you see, Mr. Bartender.’”
“You didn’t say the ‘O’ to the bartender,” Delilah said after she collected herself from her second fit of laughter. “That is highly unprofessional, Lesser Squire of Decency.”
“Is that my title?” I asked, “Do I have to be a ‘lesser’ squire? Why can’t I also be great?”
“Because I’ve already taken the ‘Great,’ obviously,” she surmised, “and for a good reason, it seems. What kind of Great Squire would butcher a regal title so carelessly? If you’re going to evoke my fancy new title to imaginary bartenders, do it right.”
“Oh, darn it all to heck!” I cursed, “That’s twice I’ve wronged the Great Lady of-- Oh, sorry, the O Great Lady of Justice. Because that doesn’t sound strange at all.”
“It’s regal, Squire.” Delilah gave me a facsimile of a stern face. “That means that there are history and culture to be taken into account when you say it. We can’t just ignore history and culture. We’re not animals, Jeremiah, or peasants. We’re people. With strange, regal names that must be spoken right every time.”
“So, animals or peasants don’t get to have the strange-yet-regal names?” I sought clarification. “Are they barred from such honor, regality, and strangeness?”
“The strangeness makes it regal, Squire!” The great lady boomed, “Strange and unnecessarily elaborate titles are what separate us from the beasts and the poor people!”
“But, O Great Lady of Justice,” I inquired, “you have yet to speak my full title as the Lesser Squire of Decency since you first announced it. Does that mean you have also failed the regality of the regal titles?”
“Don’t be so ridiculous, Lesser Squire,” she scoffed, “what kind of regal title has the word ‘lesser’ in it? No noble would be caught dead with such a moniker to their reputation.”
“Forgive me, O Great Lady of Justice.” I tried to bow but couldn’t while holding the O Great Lady of Justice at the same time. “It seems I can’t be trusted with something so lofty and sacred as your regal mighty title that I made up for you. Perhaps I’m far too uncivilized for such things.”
“Perhaps you are, Lesser Squire.” Delilah rested her head on my shoulder as I squeezed us through a tighter patch of rubble on the trail Hikki had set out. “It’s a good thing I have other uses for you, then.”
“What about my punishment, O Great Lady of Justice?” I stepped through another tight spot. “Surely, that’s still to come, right? What kind of O Great Lady of Justice would you be if you didn’t do the ‘justice’ part of your name?”
“Oh, trust me, there’s punishment coming, don’t worry.” She kissed my neck. “And I won’t finish until I’m completely satisfied. You’re going to have to grow a set of gills by the time I’m done with you.”
“Oh, my,” I blushed as I reveled in the implication. “You know, I wonder if I could actually do that someday. Is that a thing, some kind of fish mage? Do you know?”
“That’s for you to find out in a trial under fire.” She put her hand on one of my cheeks as she kissed the other. “And in this case, I’m the fire, and you’re the trial. For your sake, I hope you’re right. Just by this conversation alone, I can say for certain that you’ll drown otherwise.”
“I hope I’m right, too,” I said, finding the air cooler against my heated skin. “Although, as far as ways to die go, that might be in my top five. In fact, the other four are very similar to that one. Mostly just involving different body parts. Is that weird?”
“Maybe just a little bit.” Delilah broke into laughter at my last comment.
As I carried us into the next part of the trail of tunnels, we were suddenly stopped by
our blue jay chipmunk griffin guide, who had put a tiny griffin wing up to tell us to halt just before the next opening in a wall. And so we did. In overtly sneaky steps, the little chipmunk legs moved her backward, and we moved backward with her, following her cues. I set Delilah down gently as Hikki reverted to her original goblin form in one quick blur of shifting flesh, feathers, and hair.
“What’s the problem?” I asked her quietly, sensing that something might have been ahead of us.
“Um…” Hikki struggled to answer me. “I don’t know if you’ll believe me if I just tell you. You’ll have to see for yourself.”
“Alright, but whatever it is better be weird,” I told her, peering over the side of the opening we were perched at. “We’re in a fantasy world full of unexplainable magic. It’s going to take quite a bit to really throw me off--”
When I looked through the archway, there was a bit of earthen tunnel. We’d finally made it out of the crypt. Not quite to the surface, yet, since this exit wasn’t remotely close to the intended design for leaving the catacombs and tombs. Hikki had led us to some kind of secondary network of tunnels deep in the ground that were connected at this spot we were peering through. That was perfectly reasonable to be there, but also not what Hikki was talking about.
More than likely, it may have had something to do with the gigantic, pale-blue worm creature squirming a couple of dozen yards deeper in this first chamber.
24
Delilah, Bodo, Hikki, and I all looked through the opening in the wall to the first chamber of the tunnel network, the home of the giant worm monster that had stopped our progress to the surface. Just the parts of the worm that had shown itself in the open air of the hole it was poking itself out of was the size and length of three city buses. Instead of the smooth segments of skin from the typical earthworm one-one-millionth the size of it, this creature had a whole set of lumpy, bubbly leather that glistened with ooze.
As a worm, nature had left it unobligated to have eyes or maybe was encouraged not to, but that didn’t stop evolution from giving this worm all sorts of ocular domes littering the length of its slimy tube of a body. The severe lack of uniformity among the sizes of the eyes only added to the disturbing nature of the tunneling monster’s visage, some of the eyes being as large as dinner plates and some no bigger than the round tip of my thumb. Like bubbles in a foamy broth or glassy warts on a toad’s hide, the eyes were perfectly round and opened up as if they were swelling up and growing out of the skin, blinking by retreating back into the body and coming out again.
Despite its nonconformity with Earthly standards for worms and other tube creatures or its general lack of adherence to any strict guideline of logical biological structure, the worm’s mere existence wasn’t enough to discount it from my list of reasonable possibilities for what Hikki was talking about. Giant tunneling worms were easily in the first ten items I would have listed if I were to guess what Hikki was referring to. Maybe even the first five. ‘Tunneling’ would have been a descriptor word in half my guesses. And she could have just said ‘giant purple worm,’ and we wouldn’t have imagined anything too far off this mark.
But that wasn’t the trump card up Hikki’s sleeve. While the giant worm was part of the picture worth no words, what was really the strangest part was the knight in shining, golden armor, wielding a sword and shield of equally gilded yellow, that was fighting the worm by itself. Whoever he was, he was holding his own against the creature, blocking the cat-of-nine-tails whip of a tongue that shot out of its mouth. Each was like a steel cable in comparative size to the knight, and each ended with a spiked growth at the tip that made each whip into a deadly, organic flail. I did not envy this knight’s predicament.
Admittedly, a golden knight fighting a giant monster worm was, indeed, strange to see this far down into the earth. Even in a fantasy world, certain things stayed where they were supposed to be, like giant worms in caverns and golden knights in castles. I’d have guessed that gold knights were specifically exclusive to holy orders or castles found floating on heavenly clouds.
“Should we help him?” Hikki asked the group, mainly me as the de facto leader of it. “He’s out there all alone against something so huge.”
“Eh, it’s nothing we haven’t handled before,” Delilah said, much to my confusion before she offhandedly pinched me on the arm to reference what exactly she was referring to, “that being said, we don’t have to go in headfirst to our deaths. The smart play would be to let the golden knight over there wear out the labyrinth worm a little while we enjoy the show. Once the fight’s over, then we just kill whoever is left.”
“Are labyrinth worms dangerous?” I asked her.
“They’re one of the five great beasts of this world,” Hikki answered on Delilah’s behalf. “They cause earthquakes wherever they dig and can rot away at entire continents down to the foundations as they tunnel through them. Wherever a labyrinth worm digs, there is likely a volcano to erupt in the area.”
“All of that from this guy?” I looked at the creature as it flailed about against the brilliantly armored knight. “He must be longer than I’m imagining.”
“That’s an infant,” Hikki added. “The true labyrinth worms are much larger.”
“My bet’s on the knight.” Delilah watched the fight with keen eyes. “It takes a lot of guts to fight something that big by yourself, and he’s handling himself well. I’m also hoping we don’t have to fight the worm.”
“While waiting for them to tire each other is the smart thing to do,” I agreed, “it doesn’t feel like the heroic thing to do. If we see someone in danger, we should help them, regardless of the risk to ourselves. It’s the right thing to do. Also, there’s no way a gold knight is native to these tunnels and will probably have a way back up to the surface that’s cleared of baddies. He needs to be alive to tell us where that tunnel is.”
“That settles it, then.” Delilah put a hand to her chin to pop her neck. “Is there a way you want to approach this, or should we just jump in?”
“I can get close to the knight to heal his injuries,” Hikki suggested. “That way, we can more easily guarantee his survival and support in the coming battle.”
“Good idea, but we need to prioritize getting him out of harm’s way first.” I laid out the battle strategy. “Hikki, get to him and heal him, but also see what you can do about buffing his speed and moving him out of the way. Delilah, you’ll go straight to him and escort him to a safe distance from the worm. I’ll run interference between the worm and you guys until you two can get back here to help me finish it off. Everyone understand?”
“Don’t kill yourself, Jeremiah,” Delilah warned me, “You still have an appointment with O Great Lady of Justice later, and you’re not getting out of your punishment by dying here. Got it?”
“Who’s O Great Lady of Justice?” Hikki asked as we all headed into the chamber with the ongoing battle inside. “Is she another woman in our group?”
“The short answer is yes.” I sprinted alongside Delilah and Hikki as we headed to the worm and implemented our plan. Hikki transformed into a yellow-feathered crested eagle and flew towards the gold knight, following Delilah's lightning-quick feet that were nearly at the knight already.
I rolled Bodo onto my arm and threw him over my head to land on the back end of the worm creature as the little yeti went to town on one of the eyes with his beastly teeth and sharp claws. Staying in range of my special radius to let him teleport, he poofed and zipped between the eyes on my side of the giant meat tube as he tore out eyeball after eyeball from its socket. The massive creature roared in pain as the eyes began to fall out one by one.
Not one to want to be left out of a fight, I helped Bodo out with some magic of my own, taking out the new bastard sword and coating it with bright flames. As the flames filled the length of the blade, they shot out in a pillar of swirling red and yellow, blasting the side of the creature right behind Bodo’s path of destruction to cook all of the eyes t
hat the yeti familiar didn’t rip out. The heat steamed the sides of the creature, drying the slimy surface of its warty skin into a crispy, crusty white.
The eyes had retreated back into the creature’s skin, learning from the pattern of movement my yeti cub and I had moved along. Before we’d even gotten to them, the little yellow domes were gone, the skin sufficiently protecting them from both Bodo’s prying fingers and my probing flames.
The mouth of the labyrinth worm had turned over to face me, now sufficiently distracted by the eye-gouging antics Bodo and I had pulled off brilliantly. Now that its head was closer to me, I took a look at its screen for any weaknesses or strengths that could have helped me out in this fight:
Labyrinth Worm Grub, earth elemental Lv 30
Health: 9000 Magic: 100
Armor: 80 Aegis: 50
Abilities: Tunneler, Titanic, Ouroboros, Corrosive
Tunneler: This creature moves through the earth like a fish through the sea or a bird through the sky. Depending on its size, the movements can feel like earthquakes and are often just as devastating.
+enhanced dig movement
+Special monster type-elemental Activate: feeds off of its elemental subtype for magic and health - Earth
Titanic: Rivaling the great shapers of the continent from before the dawn of history, this creature’s size can shake mountains to their core without breaking a sweat. Its strength is as immeasurable as its appetite, often an appetite for destruction.
+10x strength for load-bearing actions
+50% all damage reduction
Ouroboros: A creature prone to self-destruction, it can regenerate itself just as quickly as it falls apart. If it is able to consume any of its own parts that it’s lost again, it can reintegrate them and any lingering damage from their loss.