Kaiju- Battlefield Surgeon

by Matt Dinniman

  The nipple stiffened, shooting sideways so the “milk” hit the sides of my mouth. All around me, the witches resumed their groaning. They gyrated back and forth. The room shook with their movement. The spray turned to a hose, and suddenly my mouth was full, the donkey’s weight was on me, and I drank. And drank.

  Once, when I was twelve years old, I’d lost a bet against a kid named Joe Shipnik. We’d raced to the end of the street, slapped a blue mailbox, and returned to his driveway. He’d beat me by a hair. He’d cheated, I’d insisted, him having given himself an unfair head start. But there was a crowd, and the consensus was that I’d lost. And because there were witnesses, I was stuck. I’d lost, and a bet was a bet.

  I had to drink a glass of the milk.

  Every kid in the neighborhood knew about the milk. Earlier that day, Joe Shipnik had been tasked by his mother to clean out the travel trailer that lived in their front driveway. They’d taken it out two weekends earlier on a short camping trip. In that trailer was a refrigerator. In that refrigerator was a cardboard half-gallon of milk. It had been sitting in the fridge for two weeks without power.

  Joe had taken the half-gallon of now-solid milk out of the travel trailer, peeled away the cardboard around it, and splatted the remains into a giant mixing bowl, placing it on the sidewalk in front of his house in some sort of act of performance art. The curdled milk had started to mold, and a black fuzz covered the top layer.

  He’d found some rotten apple juice, also in the travel trailer, and he’d poured it into the bowl. Another kid named Braydon Mahey came along and poured a 5-Hour Energy drink into the mix.

  As the day wore on, more and more kids started adding things to the soup. It’d become a thing, a summer-day attraction for the neighborhood. Another kid named Samir claimed to have peed in the bowl, but nobody saw him. I’d personally added a half packet of Sour Patch Kids. By the end of the afternoon, the mix contained candy, soda, lunch meat, bits of dirt and grass, a dollop of tuna, mayonnaise, and all sorts of other unmentionables.

  Then, fifteen-year-old Brenda Wallace took the bowl, poured the contents into a blender, mixed it up good, and transferred the smoothie into a metal pot. At this point it was like brown oatmeal streaked with random rainbow swirls. She cooked it on her stove while half the neighborhood piled into her kitchen to watch. Her parents were gone at work, and within five minutes, we’d all fled because the liquified stew smelled as if it was the hot diarrhea of a diseased skunk.

  And then came the bet.

  It was my idea. I’d defeated Joe dozens of times in races at school, and I knew I could take him now. He’d been bragging about how could to run a 100-meter dash in 10-something seconds, which was absolute bullshit. So I challenged him.

  Every middle school summer has a main event. Sometimes it comes unexpectedly. But when it happens, everyone recognizes it for what it is. Word spread. A gauntlet had been thrown down. The prospect of someone drinking the milk had become a very real possibility. You didn’t just back out of bets. It was unheard of.

  So we raced. I lost.

  Brenda Wallace, who’d spent the last hour airing out her house in an attempt to cleanse it of the stench before her parents got home, had taken up the role of executioner. In an act of mercy, she chose a small double shot glass from her dad’s collection, instead of the Big Gulp cup Joe was insisting upon now that he’d won.

  By now a crowd had gathered. It was probably only 30 kids or so, but in the retellings of this day that would plague me for the rest of my life, some people would claim it was 300. Brenda dipped the glass in the concoction, and she solemnly handed it to me.

  The crowd had gone silent. A bet was a bet. They knew it, I knew it. Nothing could be done for me now.

  The milk had turned a bright yellow and had the consistency of potato soup. Things floated in it. It was still warm.

  I said a quick prayer for my soul. I held my nose, and I drank it all in one gulp.

  And up until the moment I nursed at the nipple of the donkey queen, Joe Shipnik’s summertime milk had been the most disgusting thing I had ever put in my mouth. I’d become violently ill that day so many years ago. Some said my vomit was a bright, chunky pink and actually hissed on its own accord, slipping away to live in the sewer after I splashed it all over the cul-de-sac.

  I’m pretty sure I was supposed to be poisoned and die when I drank Lamashtu’s milk. But thanks to my invulnerability, I just felt like dying. I did not vomit. Colors flashed. The world spun. The nipple raised away. The witches waved their long arms toward the donkey and me. They swayed and chanted, shrieking something in a language I did not understand.

  You have consumed Milk of Lamashtu!

  +1 Strength

  +1 Acumen

  +1 Durability

  +1 Deftness

  +1 Charm

  The legions of Queen Lamashtu will no longer attack you as long as you remain in Lamashtu’s favor. If you fall out of favor, the queen’s legions (Cellar Hags, Pain Seedlings, and Drivets) will have a +10% damage bonus upon attack.

  And then Queen Lamashtu floated into the air. Clara scrambled out of the way as the donkey rose, snorting and flicking its ears, seemingly oblivious. It floated out of the room and disappeared.

  I caught Clara’s eye. My face dripped with black milk. I gasped for breath.

  “So that just happened,” she said.

  Chapter 35

  “Zagan fends them off, but he is cornered in one area of the city, unable to leave. Every day they advance, but he holds them back. We will open a hole for you to enter. Once you have fertilized the egg, bring it to Queen Lamashtu. Once she has the egg, she will return to hell. You are free to follow.”

  “Hey, wait a second,” I said. “That’s not what we said before. You said we’d get a key.”

  “Yes,” the witch said. “You will receive the key.”

  “But we have to follow her?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  “All will be made clear. Just be prepared.”

  Well, shit. I guess that meant we better be ready to do this when we brought the egg back to the donkey.

  The witches—apparently called cellar hags—had all retreated except the one who did the talking. I’d returned to the first floor of the building, pulling my milk-soaked body up the stairs. A giant hole had formed in the lobby, but the east side by the front doors was still solid. Banksy had collapsed the stairs when he tried to ascend, and he’d had to burrow his way back up, going through the basement wall and back into the building.

  A pounding storm had come out of nowhere. The night filled with the clapping rain. Thunder rumbled through the sky.

  “Where will I find your queen?” I asked the hag. I pulled yet another beetle out of my hair. In the relative light up here, the hag was even more terrifying. Her dripping, black cloak seemed to be of a different dimension, a hole in the virtual reality of the game. The cloaks were more like shawls, clutched tight to their heads. Upon closer inspection, I realized the shawl, cloak, whatever it was, and the black strands of the hag’s hair were all interwoven, as if the garment was growing out of her head. Her hook nose poked from the darkness, black and covered with red, pulsing veins. While human-shaped, she still walked on all fours, though she occasionally reared up to her full height, as tall as the ceiling.

  “You may evoke her. Also, Lamashtu’s pavilion is on your map,” the hag said.

  I pulled up my map, and sure enough, her location had been added, a good seven miles south of here, right in the middle of one of the danger areas known as “pavilions.”

  I realized then that the location of Andras, the demon I was supposed to kill for Stolas was also in one of these pavilions. The locations indicated the home bases of the demon royalty. I filed that information away.

  Also, this was the second time someone had mentioned evoking as a way to produce a demon lord. I had a spell when I hit level 40 called Evocation, so it wasn’t something I’d be able to utilize for a while.


  “Okay, so when are we going to do this?” I asked.

  The hag hissed. “We do this now. Head toward Zagan. We will stop the glazers the best we can, but some may get through. Move swiftly as they are much more powerful than we.”

  Clara alighted next to me. Winky buzzed about her head. “What do glazers look like?”

  The hag growled. “They are small but fast imps, able to leap great distances. Do not let their appearance fool you. They are the favored infantry troops of King Vinea, and there are many of them.”

  Clara looked at me. “Those are the little bastards we saw on top of the buildings when we were coming here.”

  I’d seen this kind of challenge before in many different games. This was a gauntlet run. We had to get from point A to B as quickly as we could, and we’d be attacked from all angles along the way. I suspected most worm surgeons playing the game would have to do this, though I didn’t know what level we were supposed to be when we got to this point.

  We had a couple advantages. I had Clara and Banksy. The Shrill was only a couple miles away. If we followed the main thoroughfare, we’d be upon him in a matter of minutes. I guessed we moved about fifteen miles per hour when I rode on the back of Banksy, though I knew he could go much faster for short sprints. And Clara could move even faster than that.

  I’d used up my daily Invulnerable spell already, so we had to rely on good-old-fashioned shooting and running.

  “I need to kill something before we do this,” I said, looking about for prey. I’d had to heal myself a few times, and my soul points needed to be refilled.

  Snap. Banksy crunched Winky right out of the air, fast as a whip. I felt the surge of soul power. I didn’t receive any experience, but the soul power filled me about halfway.

  “Hey!” Clara said. “What the hell?”

  “Winky doesn’t mind,” Banksy said, crunching. “She comes right back. Do you need more, father? I can eat her again. She tastes bad, but I don’t mind.”

  “I mind!” Clara said.

  I pointed at the trio of rats rushing through the corner of the room. They’d rushed into the building, fleeing the storm outside. “I do need more, but let’s avoid eating your best friend if we can. Try these guys.”

  They were vile rats. They always traveled in groups of three. Banksy gobbled them right up. It brought my soul power to about 95%. A minute later, Winky returned. She squeaked angrily at Banksy.

  “We must do this before the sun rises,” the hag said. “Or else we can not help you.”

  “Okay guys,” I said, strolling out into the street. Heavy rain pelted into me. Tall, dark forms of the hags surrounded us. In the distance, the Shrill roared. “Let’s do this.”

  “Give us a moment,” the hag said. “When you are given the signal, you run.” She pointed down the street. The wide, three-lane boulevard was littered with rusted-out hulks. “Zagan is this way.”

  “I know where he is,” I said. I could feel him looming in the distance. If it was light outside, I knew he’d be clearly visible. “What will be the signal?”

  “You will know it when you see it.” The hag paused. “Good hunting, worm surgeon. Do not betray our queen. You will not like the consequences.”

  “Good talk,” I said. I mounted up on the back of Banksy, and Clara took back to the air, hovering easily in the rain. In the dark, she looked like a larger version of her own familiar. A large, hovering bat. I pulled my rifle.

  The cellar hags spread before me, rushing away like a tidal wave into the city.

  “Banksy,” I said as we waited for the signal. “If any of these hag things die near us, I want you to bite off their heads and store them in your storage vault. Just their heads. Do you understand? Don’t kill any yourself. Make sure they’re dead before you bite. If you accidentally kill any, the queen will get mad at us. But I want their heads. I need as many of them as you can get.”

  “Okay, father,” Banksy said.

  “Why?” Clara asked.

  “They have very interesting scalps,” I said. “I’ll explain later.”

  An explosion rocked the night, followed a moment later by a second and a third. A mushroom cloud of dust and smoke pulsed upwards as a distant building crumbled.

  In the flash, I finally saw the Shrill for the first time.

  “Holy crap,” Clara exclaimed. “Did you see that thing?”

  A fourth explosion ripped through the night, lighting the guardian once again.

  The Shrill was about one and a half times bigger than Bast, making him the biggest kaiju I’d seen so far. A potato-shaped golem of flesh and eyeballs and slathering mouths. A beast of nightmares, he towered as big as a mountain. A dozen tentacles erupted from the lower half the monster, thrashing frantically. It looked as if someone had peeled the faces off of old, dead guardians and sewn them all together, creating a terrible, lumpy masterpiece of flesh and horror. Several hundred eyes of all sizes and colors dotted the exterior of the monster and just as many mouths, including one gaping maw that faced directly upward.

  I spent the next five seconds recovering from the sight of the monster before I realized that the explosions were the signal. I shook my head. “Go,” I cried to Banksy. “Go, go, go! Head straight for that thing while I shoot.”

  We surged forward, pushing into the street, dodging debris. For the first several seconds, I didn’t hear or see anything except the driving rain.

  Then I saw them, fighting on the roof of a building. It was a hag, covered in red, biting, slashing demons. And then they were all over. A thousand hags fending off tens of thousands of the glazers. They were everywhere. In front of us, behind us, on the buildings to the left and right, up the walls and upon the roofs.

  Snap. Banksy severed the large head off a hopefully dead hag as it flew through the air in front of us. Three of the glazers rode her body like a damn surfboard. They went sprawling when they hit the street. The yellow-tagged beasts leaped up, rushing us as we sped by. I blasted one with my rifle, finishing it off. Clara’s Uzi sputtered to life, raining uneven pulses in staccato bursts. Banksy snapped again, easily killing another. Every time he snapped, he yanked the reins right from my hands. I finally gave up and instead clutched onto the saddle’s horn.

  “Watch out,” Clara cried, pointing her gun. Ahead of us, a manhole burst into the air. Dozens of the glazers poured out. We bowled over them, Banksy snatching them up left and right. I ducked as a spear flew at my head.

  A spear-wielding glazer jumped onto Banksy’s back. I shot it point blank with my rifle, and it went tumbling away.

  As a general rule, if a monster was green tagged, a single shot from my Epiviper was enough to kill it outright. A yellow-tagged monster usually took anywhere from two to ten shots to kill.

  A single shot from my gun was enough to send them skidding across the pavement, but they usually bounced right back up. It took three or four shots to kill one. And there were thousands of them. We were about 2/3’s of the way there, but the distance seemed impossible.

  The closer we got to the Shrill, the less the hags held them back. The little red monsters started rushing us from the alleys as we passed. If we weren’t already moving so quickly, we’d be overwhelmed. Dead witches poured from the sides of the building, falling like rain. Their soul power flowed into me. The power meter on my gun was getting worryingly low.

  A dart erupted out of my shoulder. “Gah,” I cried. I yanked it out. I prayed it wasn’t poisoned. It didn’t appear so. Just painful.

  “Clara,” I called up to her. “Focus on the ones with the blowguns and the slings. And let me borrow your knife.”

  Several of the cellar hags appeared, galloping alongside us, terrifyingly fast on all fours. They had some sort of shock attack where they could electrify their entire bodies and blast the glazers away with a jolt. But it had a slow recharge. A single shock was enough to kill every glazer in contact, but the dead demons were soon replaced by more of the jumping little assholes who turned the hags into pi
ncushions.

  “That’s enough heads, Banksy,” I called. My worm was decapitating the dead hags indiscriminately. “Focus on the glazers!”

  “Here,” Clara called, tossing the knife at me.

  I shouldered my depleted rifle and grasped the amplification knife with my left hand.

  Banksy has low health.

  I looked down in surprise to see several dozen darts sticking from Banksy’s head, making him look like a hedgehog. With horror, I realized my breastplate’s anti-missile enchantment was rerouting the needles into him.

  “Clara, heal Banksy!” I cried as I extended the amplification knife to its full length of seven inches.

  I watched as she popped one of her blood nuggets into her mouth. She was also doing a porcupine impersonation. I didn’t know how she managed to stay alight. She glowed, followed a second later by Banksy. The needles pushed out of him as he was healed.

  I extended my grappling hook to about three feet, clutching the knife awkwardly in my four grabbers. I swung my arm like a flail, cutting easily through the approaching glazers.

  But it was hard to control, and I hadn’t practiced with this. It quickly became clear this wasn’t going to be an effective weapon. Banksy and the remaining hags were in just as much danger from the knife as the glazers. I stiffened and retracted my arm. I tried a new tactic, keeping my arm rigid as I shot it out and pierced them one by one. This worked great, easily killing every monster it touched. But it wasn’t fast enough.

  “Oh shit,” Clara called.

  The Shrill loomed, a mountain of flesh and eyes and screaming mouths. He flung his building-sized tentacles, smashing them on the ground, causing an earthquake with each crash. No buildings stood anywhere near him. He lived upon piles and piles of pulverized rock and concrete.

  Between him and us was a wall of glazers. A last stand. Thousands of them, boiling directly at us, all with their spears pointed in a pike wall formation.

  In the center of the formation stood a towering presence. It was a large man sitting atop a dark horse. At this distance, I couldn’t see the blazing name over the demon’s head, but I knew who this was. King Vinea.