by Dante King
“Fuck, what I’d give for just a few more mages!” I yelled at no one in particular.
One of the saber-tooths was stalking toward me. It was riderless, but that did not seem to have dampened its appetite or its desire to have me for lunch. It leapt at me before I had time to compose myself sufficiently to blow it to pieces with a Storm Bolt, and it plowed into me, knocking me backward with paws the size of trashcan lids. I rolled with the attack and came to my feet in one smooth motion, just as the creature turned and launched itself at me again. I thrust my staff into its side and hit it with a Paralyzing Zap. The beast dropped, shook its head, before it came at me again in a great leap.
I wasn’t sure whether it was the saber-tooth itself that inspired me to craft the Wolverine claws with the Flame Barrier spell, or whether it was just a luck of the draw sort of thing. Whatever the reason, I dropped my vector and punched both hands upward as the saber-tooth hit me. The instantaneously appearing claws—three on each hand—sank, burning, into the throat of the monster. I turned as the saber-tooth hurtled past me and ripped the claws out of its neck with a savage twist, tearing out most of the creature’s throat as it passed.
A stream of mana-bullets flew toward me like tracer rounds. The outrider that had fired at me leered unpleasantly down the ironsights of his weapon.
“Ah, sh—” I began to say, before another one of Cecilia’s timely Ice Walls magically appeared in front of me. The mana-rounds zipped into the ice wall, peppering it with holes before it shattered completely. As it fell away, cascading in a million diamond shards to the ground, I was already running through it, roaring, toward the outrider who’d just had the audacity to try and plug me.
The outrider’s piggy eyes widened as I burst through the tumbling ice wall. He pulled the trigger of his rifle and was rewarded with a dull click and a sad little psst noise.
Dead Man’s Click.
I spear-tackled him, bellowing my fury like a Dothraki berzerker, and slammed him off his feet.
It was a sudden lesson, but in that moment I learned that, on occasion, magic can go and fuck itself. Sometimes, it’s the old ways that are the best.
I headbutted the troll right in its face—once, twice, third time’s the charm. He’d been as ugly as my uncle’s toenails to begin with, but the third headbutt smeared his nose across his face so widely that the only way he was going to be blowing it in the future was with the help of a handkerchief on the end of a long pole.
Not that he had much of a future.
I jumped to my feet and brought my booted foot down as hard as I could in the center of the porcine face. The heel of my boot crunched satisfyingly through the bridge of the troll’s shattered nose, blue blood welling up. The outrider squealed and struggled, but a sharp, vicious thrust with the end of my staff caved his teeth in. The next thrust went right out the back of his neck.
“Fuck!” I bellowed again, staring around. I felt a sweet madness on me. It was almost a desperation—almost panic. It was frustration at not being able to be all over the battlefield at once, at knowing that, no matter how hard the four of us fought or how stalwart the Gemstone Warriors were, we would eventually be worn down by the numbers of the trolls. Time slowed. My eyes moved about, looking at the scene unfolding at glacial pace around me—at such a slow speed that it was almost like reality had frozen into a bloody tableau.
The Prophet King’s diamond teeth were gritted as he pummeled a troll with one hand and slammed another into the wall of the cavern with the other, its torso pulping under his meteoric strength so that its intestines burst out off the side of its pot metal armor.
Cecilia’s beautiful elven face was contorted in concentration as she punched her icicle spear through one troll’s thigh, pinning it to the ground like a particularly hideous butterfly, while she simultaneously sent a stream of concentrated icicles into the face of one of the five remaining outrider’s mounts.
Enwyn had just finally managed to penetrate the armor of one of the other outriders and set the bastard on fire. She was snarling as she turned to find her next foe, her spectacles flashing under the transparent orange visor that was protecting her face.
Lightning crackled from Janet’s fingertips as she sent another Storm Bolt at one of the other outriders, bowling him ass over tit, gravel spraying in all directions.
Trolls were falling to the brutal ministrations of the Gemstone Elementals. Crucially though, there were more trolls to replace those that were killed. Every time that an Elemental was overwhelmed and driven to the floor, hacked ruthlessly apart with axes or otherwise killed, the void that they left would be filled with more trolls.
We just need a little more help. A little more time.
The shaman kept slipping in and out of my vision. He looked to be searching specifically among the chaos for something, but I couldn’t think what.
Just a bit more time. Just a little help…
Time flowed back in a sudden, deafening rush as I heard a voice that took me completely by surprise, but was no less welcome for that.
“J-Jiminy Crickets, Justin, how in the hell do you manage to get yourself into these sorts of messes?”
I looked over my shoulder, toward the tunnel that the Alpha and then the trolls had made their entry.
“Nige?” I exclaimed, completely failing to retain my appearance of outward calm and resorting to nonsensical cursing. “Fuck a duck with Christmas tree! What the hell are you doing here?”
My jaw dropped an inch or so lower when, coming up behind the floating Wind Mage, strode the rest of my frat brothers; Damien, Bradley, and Rick.
“No time for whats and hows, friend,” Rick rumbled. “We help and then we can sit around slapping each other’s backs after. As the people on my island say, ‘There is a time to fuck spiders, and this is not it.”
I didn’t have a clue what Rick meant specifically with that, but I got the rough idea.
“Fellas,” I said, “the trolls with the fancy bronze armor—those four—we need them dead and we need them dead now.”
Damien nodded. “Consider them toast, bro,” he said.
“Then,” I said, “you find the little creep who looks like the love child of Christopher Walken and a gremlin and we take him down together.”
“Christopher who?” Nigel asked.
I shook my head, already heading off in the direction I’d last seen the shaman. “Just come and find me,” I called, “and you’ll see who I mean.”
Nigel gave me an ironic salute. Behind him, Rick had just unleashed one of his earth rippling spells right into a massed group of fighting Elementals and trolls. The trolls were all thrown off their feet, but the Elementals took almost no notice of the surging ground. They did, however, take advantage of the suddenly horizontal trolls and pounced on them as fast as a people made out of crystal could; crushing skulls and snapping limbs with impunity. Bradley, , having grown a foot and now encased in his armored plating, followed the Elemental Warriors and crushed any of the surviving trolls in that area.
I ducked and wove through the last few fighters, trusting in the Elemental’s strength and invulnerability to get them through the rest of the fight. With another four mages—untrained, but far from useless—on hand, I felt that the only obstacle to the Gemstone people getting through this fight was that goddamn shaman.
But where is he?
I looked wildly about. I could hear the blood pounding in my ears, the breath rushing in and out of my nose, the lust for blood singing through my head. At a slight vibration from my vector—a slight hint that tugged at my mind more than any part of my body—I looked down. There were heavy animal tracks set deep into the gravel of the cave floor and leading around a slight outcropping of jagged stone. Putting on my Davy Crockett hat, I jumped to the conclusion that those were most likely left by some large, saber-toothed animal. I looked behind me, entertaining the notion of going to look for backup in the form of one of my fellow mages or the Prophet King, but I couldn’t see anyone to
hand.
“Fuck it,” I said, and followed the tracks.
It didn’t take me long to find the shaman, and when I did, he was being just as much as a pain in the ass as I might have expected him to be. It became apparent who it was that he’d been searching for among the crowds of fighters.
The Gemstone Princess.
“Typical diabolical villain maneuver,” I said as I approached. There was no way I was going to stealthily sneak up on this guy. The gravel crunched under my feet, and his enormous and highly dangerous-looking saber-toothed beast’s head had swung around as soon as I’d come into view.
“Ah, Justin,” the shaman crooned, his voice dripping with a delight that made me feel far from comfortable, “just the, ah, man, I was hoping to see again. We parted so abruptly last time.”
“Yeah, that sure was too bad,” I replied, stifling a huge fake yawn. As I acted out this piece of inflammatory theater, my eyes darted around for anything I could take advantage of in this situation. There was nothing promising about it in the least.
The shaman, bandy-legged and crooked as he appeared, was obviously imbued with prodigious magical strength because he clasped the Princess by the throat as easily as if she was made of paper mache instead of very solid precious stone. The Prophet King stood a dozen yards from the shaman, clearly as coiled and tense as a four-hundred kilo mousetrap. It was obvious to all of us that, should he move a single inch closer, the shaman would crush the Princess's neck in his fist.
“Why did you want to see me again, you blue fuck?” I asked in my most polite dinner party voice.
The shaman’s expression twitched. “You know why. I told you before. I want to tap your powers and help my people rise to take their place as the greatest magical race. Just as it was before we fell into ignominy.”
I nodded. I needed to keep this crazy prick talking, needed to buy the King some time in which he could act and save Princess Alura. Just how the hell he was going to do that though was something that I hoped he was working on too, because I was drawing a big fat blank as far as that went.
“Right,” I said, “well, I guess that puts us in a fairly straightforward position, doesn't it?”
“How do you mean? You have a proposition?” the shaman asked, his eyes narrowing.
“Well, yeah, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” I said. “You hand over the Princess and I’ll come and work for you. I’ll help you whip up whatever bullshit magic you think you can accomplish with me to help restore your people, but only if you release the Gemstone Princess. A straight swap.”
There was a moment of silence. “How can I trust you in this?” the shaman asked.
I laughed at that one. That was rich. “Trust me? You can’t trust me! Are you nuts? No. But, the way I see it, you can either give trusting me a go, or things get bloody. Chances are you’ll be the only one to limp out of here, but what will you have gained really? Nada.”
“You would willingly sacrifice yourself for this female?” the shaman sneered.
“Sacrifice?”
The shaman chuckled in such a greasily supercilious manner that it took all the self-control I had not to shoot a Storm Bolt right into his beanbag.
“The tapping of your powers would drain you to such an extent that, after the ritual was complete, you would be little more than a desiccated husk,” he said.
“Dead you mean?” I asked.
“Extremely so.”
“Hm, well in that case—”
“In that case, you can go and smoke a dick, you troll bastard!”
Nigel Windmaker streaked around the corner of the rocky outcrop, about two feet off the floor, gravel flying out behind him in the wind of his speed. His appearance caught everyone on the hop—especially the saber-tooth, who found itself caught in a localized tornado and thrown spinning toward the shaman.
For a being that had about a quarter of a ton of spitting-mad carnivore, bristling with teeth and claws, flying toward him, the shaman was remarkably calm. With a wave of his hand, as if he was simply shooing off a fly, the shaman sent his steed somersaulting over his head, to land in a spray of rock and dirt about thirty feet away. With another annoyed flick, he seemed to pluck Nigel from the air and hurl him against the cavern wall. My most timid fraternity brother crumpled to the floor, senseless.
This little sideshow had not been without effect, however. The Prophet King moved with the speed of a striking rattlesnake. Raising the black crystal staff, he fired a spell at the shaman, a spell that seemed to distort the air between them as it moved. It reminded me of the cool bullet-time effect that they used in the first Matrix movie.
With impossibly fast reactions, especially for something that looked like it had already been old when Morgan Freeman was a boy, the shaman wrenched the King’s daughter around so that she was in the path of the oncoming incantation. The King cried out and, at the last moment, diverted the spell so that it left a bubbling crater in the rock wall just behind the troll shaman. With a gesture, the shaman brought the King to his knees and tore the staff from his hand so that it bounced and spun across the stony floor.
And landed at my feet.
Without a single moment’s conscious thought, I snatched up the length of black crystal—curiously warm and curiously light—and brought it up to bear on the shaman alongside my own extended vector.
“Please, boy,” the shaman said, “you can see that you have no power that can match me. You’re a novice and a peasant, and I have just disarmed a master and a king.”
I had the strangest sensation that the staffs in my hands were communicating with each other in some way. The two of them felt quite different in my hand—and it wasn’t the obvious differences between wood and crystal. The vector that had come to me in Barry’s magical paraphernalia store felt like an acquaintance that I’d just met but hit it off with straightaway, while the black crystal staff somehow gave off the impression that we’d run into each other a long time ago.
I cocked my head to one side and hit the shaman with a stare you could have bent a horseshoe around.
“Did you just call me ‘boy’?” I asked.
“A slip of the tongue,” the shaman said, with mocking obsequiousness, “but the fact remains; you cannot harm me, you know no magic that can penetrate my wards. Submit to me or the Princess dies.”
I sighed and gave the shaman a cold smile. “You can’t help being ugly maybe, but you could’ve stayed at home.”
With a flourish of the staffs, which came to me in the moment, I unleashed a bolt of spiraling magic that pulsed across the space between us in the blink of an eye. It hit the shaman and, with the little smirk still on his wizened face, twisted his head around seven-hundred and twenty degrees and then popped it off his neck. The troll’s head flew into the air like a champagne cork designed by Hannibal Lector, ripping out his spinal cord as it went, and landed some twenty strides away. The shaman’s body keeled slowly over backward, and his hand released the Princess.
It was, of course, at this point that the cavalry arrived in the form of Cecilia, Enwyn, Janet, and the three other frat boys. Rick went over to the groaning form of Nigel and helped him to his feet.
“You killed the shaman?” Enwyn asked, looking amazed and delighted.
“You didn’t see it?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Ah, man, that’s typical,” I said. “That was probably the most bad-ass thing I’ve done since I found out I had powers!” I turned to look at my fraternity brothers.
“How are you here?” I asked simply.
“Luck,” Damien said. “We were tasked with finding this weird kind of blood-clotting moss”—he extracted a handful of bright white moss from his pocket—“and Bradley heard noises coming from this passageway near the temple.”
“Next thing we know,” Bradley said, “we were in the middle of a damned slaughterhouse!”
I shook my head at the workings of the universe. I was suddenly pretty keen for a sit down and a bee
r. “You saved our asses,” I said. I looked around at the gathered mages; seven of the toughest men and women I’d ever met. “How about we get the fuck out of here and back to the Academy for a drink and a debrief? I assume the rest of the trolls are dead?”
Enwyn nodded and held up the Alpha’s tail feathers and grinned. “Whenever you’re ready.”
I grinned. “I’m always ready, Enwyn, you know that.”
A touch on my hand made me turn.
Princess Alura was looking at me with those fantastic eyes of hers.
“Justin,” she said hesitantly, as if she was fishing for the right words, “I have to say...thank you.”
“It’s no problem,” I said. “You didn’t think I’d let that bandy-legged fuck do anything to you, did you?”
She smiled, turned away, and addressed her father. “I wish to return to the Academy with these humans, Father, if you’ll allow it.”
The Gemstone King had gotten to his feet. He looked from his pretty sparkling daughter to me.
“I can think of no more fitting a classmate to learn magic with,” he said, in his deep, slow voice, “than the son of Zenidor and Istrea.”
Enwyn stepped forward. “I think, your Majesty, that I can pull a few strings and find a place for your daughter in this year’s enrollment.”
The King bowed his head. “I am much obliged, Miss Emberskull.”
It seemed that all the necessary chit-chat had been made, so I turned to follow Enwyn and the others as they trooped out to the more open space of the cavern to summon the portal back to the Academy. I stopped though, when I realized I was still clutching the black crystal staff. I turned around and held it out to the Prophet King. The King, however, crossed his mighty arms across his armored chest.
“A Creation Mage must have a vector to match, Justin,” he said. “This staff once belonged to your father, Zenidor. He gave it to me on the eve of our first campaign together. Now, it is yours.”