by Simon Archer
Fake Irish luck could only last so long, and butt fire was only so helpful to protect an ass. A particularly wild Wolf’s snarl grew louder as it jumped, more than likely to get over the rocket blast. My equally wild gunshots behind my head took care of that, with a whimper, a fwoosh, and a thud. The infinite magazine meant I could just keep the bullets going, hopefully killing whoever else was chasing me. Finally making it to the dock, I turned to see who was chasing me since I couldn’t hear any more snarls. Sure enough, there was only a trail of five or six Wolves from me to the street.
Now felt like a good time to make sure the adrenaline wasn’t ignoring my ass being on fire. The makeshift belt thing held though the burning hose coming from the horn was still concerning. A few careful cuts with my knife and I was now holding a very portable flamethrower, pushing out a good seven feet of flame continuously. You couldn’t have touched the top, near the opening, but the bottom hook was still cool to the touch. Ivory didn’t burn well, so the horn would survive for long enough. The only problem, besides the constant fire, was figuring out if I still had a gunpowder horn, or if the fire burnt it all away, making it an infinite fire horn. The solution for both was water, which was where I was heading next.
Before that, I peeked over to the street I was fighting on before to figure out why there weren’t more Wolves chasing me. My gunpowder ruse couldn’t have taken them all out. The Wolves were all still there, but they were fighting each other for some reason. Did I kill some nobles with the fire? That would have been pretty fortunate, but I wasn’t that lucky. I kept my eyes to see if anything would clue me into a more plausible cause. Sure enough, I saw the familiar colors of blonde, brown, dark red, and pale grey in the crowd fighting the guards. My boys had come to watch my back. I was almost touched. They were pretty stupid, though. Even if I had won their hearts over, I was fairly confident they wouldn’t have had the foresight to come to find me.
But a certain ass-kicking Bunny probably would have. And she had just come into the opening of the street, having landed on top of two Wolves. I struggled to find a way to put the horn down and hold the rifle to start picking off Wolves. Where do you set a seven-foot flame down? Settling for the stone walkway by the dock, I lined up my sight. Soon as I did, I witnessed three Wolves fly away from Hopper’s piston kicks. I was almost too busy marveling at that to see another two Wolves get stomped to the ground as she jumped over their heads and proudly stood over their defeated bodies. That’s seven Wolves down in less than seven seconds. I think she and the boys had a handle on it, although she didn’t mind me taking two or three out around her before she hopped out of my sight. Satisfied, I took the flamethrower horn back and headed back to the deck to begin my search.
The wooden harbor was wide, as curved as the rest of the crescent town, and the several jutting docks and parked ships adjacent consequently made the search for Timberpine’s splashdown zone a brush to sift through. I had the generic area pictured, but this was my first time here. I had no tricks to navigate or any inside knowledge. I only had the common sense to know that fiery-deathball-sized holes didn’t occur naturally in decks.
Sailor Wolves, dressed in white uniforms, were attempting to make sense of the hole as they circled around and looked in. They were mumbling to each other, tapping shoulders and pointing as they discussed this new development in the deck’s structure. If I were a betting man, I’d have said they were deciding who was going to go down to see what happened. A Rabbit slave, also in a similar uniform, walked by them on his way to some other job he must have been working on. The Wolves took the opportunity to grab him by the throat and dangle him over the hole as the first test subject. That wasn’t going to happen while I had a neverending flamethrower to abuse.
“Put him down!” I shouted to them as I approached, waving the Horn of Fiery Persuasion. “Back away from the hole! Unless you’re feeling a need to get burned alive!” Many of them had the good sense to run at the sight of the fire. The Rabbit was dropped to the side, leaving him to run away as well from the carnage.
Not the one in the stupid hat, though. A strange maroonish hue to his fur, his wolfish features were stretched more than others. Longer arms, longer legs, longer face, longer ears, longer tail, like every part of him was tied with some rope and pulled to give him that much more in every category but with no extra bulk. It gave him a lanky sort of look overall, as if he hadn’t been eating as well as he should have. The hat probably meant he was more official than the other sailors and was a pack leader. As much as I would have loved to get his pack, I had bigger fish to fry. Not bothering to address him, I made a path to the hole, keeping Wolves away from me at a very safe distance.
“Who do you think you are?” the Wolf in the stupid hat shouted back in his nasally voice. “Where’s a slave get a torch like that?”
“Are you challenging me?” I asked him, approaching the dock with the hole.
“Why would I ever challenge a slave like you?” He took a power stance in front of the hole like he wanted to die.
“Sounds like wuss-talk to me,” I yelled, marching toward him. If I could get the pack from him on the way, that was fine by me. He was dying, no matter what. “If you’re scared, nobody blames you. Fire’s real scary.”
“I will splatter this deck with your guts, you littlAUGAHGUAAAUGH!” The hat, along with the rest of the sailor outfit and his maroon fur, burned at the touch of my patent-pending Negotiation Fire. His noodly arms flailed about above him as he ran away from me, avoiding the hole that he possibly could have just jumped in to save his life. For good measure, I shot him several times to put him down. His body thudded the deck, leaving him to burn quietly under the flames still on him.
“Does that count?” I asked the surrounding Wolves. “Do any of you now recognize me as pack leader?”
“Um…” A sailor in purplish fur spoke up. “He didn’t say specifically that he was challenging you, you know, because you’re a slave.”
“He said he’d splatter him,” a green-hinted sailor said. “That could specifically count as a challenge to resist the splattering.” What was with these colors?
“That’s not what specifically means, you idiot.” The purplish sailor slapped the green one. “Specifically means exactly or precisely, not implied--”
“Would you be satisfied with saying that I specifically threatened to burn everyone in his former pack if they tried to fight me, or fight each other while I’m here?” I stated specifically. “And if so, would anyone in his former pack be willing to be subjugated specifically to me as your new pack leader if you didn’t want to get burned alive or run?”
“Well, I guess, if you make it so…” The purple Wolf said. “… specific. Our strength recognizes yours as superior. We will fight for you until you or we die.”
“Good,” I said. “Come hold this fire for me. Someone, push this body into the water before it burns through the deck.”
Like obedient little drones, they followed my commands to the letter. The purple one came to hold the fire, and the green one went with a yellowish one, both of them using their spears to push the former captain into the water. I looked down into the hole to see any sign of Timberpine. Maybe he was just hanging off of a support beam, or he floated, so he’d just be right there in the water. Nope. No sign of him, or his magic peg leg.
“What do you suppose is down there, captain?” The purple Wolf held the fire right next to both of our faces as he looked down the hole with me.
“Jesus!” I pushed his hand to point up again. “Keep that away from anyone’s face. All faces. Only faces that I specifically allow. That includes specific categories.”
“What about slaves?” the purple wolf asked. “You know, specifically?”
“Specifically not slaves!” I laid out specifically. Why were we all stuck on the word ‘specifically?’ “No Rabbits, no pack members, not me, just enemy nobles and their pack members.” You had to ride them like bicycles to get them to do anything right.
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“That’s a very speci--” he started up before I slapped him across his maw.
“Get me some rope,” I commanded. I needed some goddamn rest, holy shit. “We’ve got to fetch the body out so I can claim the win.”
“Who’s body is it, captain?” the green sailor asked, finished with his task.
To answer his question, a bursting pillar of water tore through the deck right next to the first one, swirling in a vortex. At the top of the vortex was a blood-red swirl of fluid surrounding the familiar pink and mangled flesh of one Lord Timberpine. The blood-water mix stuck little spikes into the wounds that his body was practically composed of to fill them and hold him in place. His arms were extended with the red water, making long serpentine arms ending in several tendrils. I thought I could maybe see one bloodshot eye still functioning, looking straight at me. Or, it was trying to, between the column of water flaying the lord’s body around like a hose on full blast.
“Vermin!” Timberpine managed to utter, gargled and bubbling through the bloody ooze coating his face. “Filth! Dungrat! Vermin! Rubbish! Vermin! Vermin! Vermin! Vermin!”
“His body,” I said to the sailors calmly, who were all frozen in shock at the sight of this maddeningly monstrous lord. I snatched the burning horn away from the purple Wolf. “He’s supposed to be dead. You can run away now.”
19
My new sailors took my command to run very seriously, dashing away from the watery leviathan as it flailed like those inflatable salesman props outside car dealerships. This was just upsetting. ‘Upsetting’ wasn’t really the right word for it, but I didn’t have a strong enough word for what I was feeling, nor would I ever have found it in the future. ‘Upsetting’ was broad enough to fit this feeling into. I was upset.
I’d shot him enough to make him bleed to death and to block any organ from working, including his brain. I’d shot his head several times, especially at the top. That’s supposed to kill anything. In fact, stopping the brain from working was the killing part of any kill. Everything else was just to help make that part happen except for Magic-Racist over here.
His slew of insults, mostly ‘vermin,’ filled the air along with the swinging of his tentacle arms and head. From all of his griping, it was painfully clear that he was trying to kill me and unable to control his magical powers anymore to do so. The pillar holding up his body tubed about wildly but never bent far enough to bend near the base at the deck, making it a safe place to camp out while I thought about how to deal with him properly. I crouched down in the safety space, looking through the things I had on hand while I went over what I knew about him.
The bullets weren’t working. Well, they were, but they weren’t stopping or slowing him. They just made him angry. When he was on fire, the wounds just filled up with flames when I added more. And now they were filled with water since the fire died out. Could they just fill up with anything? Why would they do that? Was that just how the magic worked? Could he have just filled himself up on anything to keep from dying? It wasn’t healing him, obviously. But it did keep him functional and demony, if only barely. Was he doing that before? What would he have been filling up with? Air? That would have explained the flying before.
I looked up to Timberpine, spotting the wizard leg amongst the flailing. Although it was a little difficult to pick it out fully, I could tell that the runes on the charms weren’t glowing red anymore. From here, it looked like blue, and I was betting that color was representing the water, just like the red was for fire. Maybe. Who knew for sure?
The heat from the flamethrower horn drew my attention, reminding me I was next to a convenient water source to douse it in. As I did, the fire stopped, turning the horn back to a powder horn. Alright, so the horn was back to normal. Did I just make it an infinite damp powder horn? That would have sucked and also had to be a problem for another time. As the edge of the opening touched the pillar, some of the powder spread out into the watery swirl, the black cloud quickly dissipating into the blue.
What exactly was he able to fill himself up on? More importantly, could he do more than one thing at a time? Time to test that out.
I poured the horn out over the pillar, just a touch away from the water, so I spared the powder horn from more dampness if it mattered. The black cloud flooded the watery trunk like a viral plague, crawling up the swirls as it reached Timberpine’s thrashing body. None of it was going down into the greater ocean, so I wasn’t having to worry about polluting for now. When I lived here, I was going to have a clean ocean to look at, dammit. I was hoping this was going to work, but it was going to take a while if it did. I had time, it seemed. Holding the horn in place, I let its eternal fount do its magic.
After not too long, the blue water was mostly black. Timberpine’s thrashing slowly changed from flailing madness to squirming twitchiness, like it was sick. Sick was better than wild, I assumed. And, remembering that black powder dissolves in water, I decided to play it safe and add a third element into the mix. I shot randomly up into the vortex, putting in both the bullets and the magical lightning they carried into the concoction I was stirring up. With the dissolved powder in it, the water carried the electricity straight up to Timberpine, forcing all of the thrashing to turn into squirming and twitching. The hydro-monster’s arms folded up as his regular arms curled up from the volts and watts in the water as the lightning froze the serpentine body into a straight trunk.
Satisfied that all of that should have done the trick, I stepped back, pulling my horn back from the pillar and backing away. The pillar stayed upright for a while before falling down, landing on the deck beside me. The water splashed down, spreading out flat and draining off the deck and leaving a wet trail to the hole. Timberpine lay down on his back, covered in wet powder and still legally dead except for the moving and gurgled curses. The glyphs on his wizard leg glowed a shadowy black, indicating the next element was chosen. The powder attempted the Cthulhu-monster trick, but only managed to make little grasslike strands on his body. His still functioning bloodshot eye glared at me.
“You will burn, vermin.” He still insisted, crawling away with his arms and attempting to reach the ocean. “You will die when they hunt you down for your treachery against the natural order.” How was his brain still functioning? How? I hated magic. I shot him in his functioning eye, as well as a few times in the head.
Looking at his sorry state, I noticed that the black powder on him was seeping into his wounds, disappearing as his body ate it away. Aha! So that was the trick. His body was absorbing things, not just filling up with them. And I was right to think it was limited to only one at a time. Looked like physical things like water and gunpowder required a constant supply, or it’d switch over to something else touching the body. He’d always rely on air being the only nearby substance, allowing him to do his flying trick. Now he was just stuck to however much powder I let him have.
I grabbed his wizard leg, dumping some more black powder on him as I flipped his body over. With a lift and a stomp, I snapped whatever remained of his stump as the leg moved parallel to his back. He screamed at the sound of it, still trying to paw away at his freedom.
“How could a vermin do this?” he asked me on the verge of tears, wiggling himself about as he tried to get away. “My charms are unbeatable. I am immortal! I am a god amongst Wolves! Who are you? You can’t be a Rabbit. What are you? Are you the Hunter?”
Kneeling on the peg and periodically dumping more powder, I ignored the weak pawing of his mangled arms attempting to reach behind himself. As the arms grabbed my shirt to try to pull me down, I brought out the machete and slashed at both of them, cutting them nearly halfway through on each as their grip loosened.
“You can’t be the Hunter!” he screamed. “He’s gone! His magic is ours! He can’t ever come back! We made sure of it! You can’t be him!”
Curious word choice there for talking about a guy who’s a couple of thousand years dead, or a couple hundred if he made it back to my world. Es
pecially when you weren’t supposed to be able to remember him with your short-ass memory. Things weren’t adding up.
His arms fell off completely as I hacked through them, still hanging onto my shirt in a death grip as they hung off. My attention returned to his wizard leg once again, my first slash peeling at the meat like sliced ham. The next slash brought the leg closer to his chest.
“Please!” He actually pleaded with me. “I’ll give you anything. You can have all of my slaves. All of my pack! My mansion! All the Timberpine estate! Please don’t kill me!”
My veins were piping with heat as I slashed against the flesh. I could feel myself getting slower in my chops, savoring the kill. Call me sadistic, but I couldn’t help but feel more human than I ever have in my life while putting an end to a real monster, inside and out.
“Everything is yours!” He begged through a sob. “Just let me go! Let me go! I can’t die from a vermin or the Hunter, I can’t! Please!”
No mercy for the likes of you. No mercy for anyone who acted like you do. No mercy for the monsters who kept this world under their hairy thumb for so long. No mercy.
“I surrender to your challenge!” He tried one last desperate trick. “I concede! My strength recognized yours as superior! I will be loyal only to you--”
“Until one of us dies, I know.” I finished for him. “You have the gall to offer me what’s already mine? Learn your place.”
With my machete raised high, I made one final at the stump until it finally came off, running towards the ocean and frisbeeing the magic piece of driftwood before it exploded like the first. The explosion rang out, sending swirling winds, fire, and sprays of water and powder in random directions and raining them down over the water.
I looked down to the mutilated cadaver of the noble, watching the powder spray out of the wounds in thin streams, changing to a wet powder, then a stream of water, a steam spray, a heat vent, an air vent, and finally gushing blood, quickly deflating the corpse into little less than a skeleton with skin draped over it. I shot the thing a few times near where the head used to be just to be safe. This infinite magazine was smooth stuff, but I’d have to service my gun as soon as I could from all the extra wear and tear from the rapid fire. Glad I wore hearing protection.