by Dante King
As I watched the slug-fest unfold and watched the crowd screaming and baying for blood—or whatever the hell stone golems might have in place of blood—I thought about what Zelara had told me. I would need to defeat these golems at their own game, and that would mean pummeling one of them into submission.
Well, I thought, it could have been worse. At least I didn’t get in here and find out that it was naked mud wrestling or something like that.
I looked up as a resounding communal roar of delight echoed around the cavern, causing the flames of the torches to dance and sway and dust to spiral down from the roof. The fight had concluded. At least, that’s what I believed had happened. At any rate, one of the fighters was being towed out of the circle by his ankles by a team of helpful volunteers. As far as I could make out, the creature wasn’t dead—that is, he wasn’t being swept up in a dustpan and brush. Admittedly, it was hard for me to be sure, what with the stone golems having more in common with your average kitchen benchtop than a human, but it didn’t look like they were fighting to the death. This gathering definitely had a carnival atmosphere that one might expect to find in the parking lot of a college football stadium, as opposed to a gladiatorial arena. Everyone was having a good time by the looks of it, and if anyone died it was most likely going to be through a case of overenthusiasm rather than outright bloodthirstiness.
That was some comfort I supposed, though not to the person who had accidentally been killed of course.
Would defeating one of the golems be enough to win their respect and have them agree to Zelara’s demands? Or would I have to do something more outrageous than simply beat one of them at their own game?
I took a steeling breath as a plan formed in my mind.
Yeah, that’ll work. It has to.
It never occurred to me that my scheme might not pan out. It never did. Charge at something with enough confidence and balls, I figured, and the universe wouldn’t have the heart to let you fail. Besides, what was the worst that could happen?
You could end up spread across the floor like a tin of Holiday Luncheon Meat that’s been run over by a bus, my ever faithful brain supplied.
“Up yours, brain,” I muttered and walked out to face whatever fate awaited me. “I’m going to get me one of those broomsticks, just see if I don’t.”
To illustrate the fact that the stone golems as a group were the sort of creatures that you could hit in the face with a baseball bat and not have to worry about them crying out until the following day, I got almost to the very front of the crowd before those in the back had voiced their amazement at me pushing past them.
By the time that the news had spread that some human had had the temerity to push his way into their wrestling match I was standing out in the middle of the arena and surveying the crowd that ringed it.
I had figured, from the little that I had observed of the golems, that I was going to have to keep this short and sweet. I had best make the most of the element of surprise that I had been afforded and not let the golems have too much time in which to order their thoughts. I didn’t want any among them to start getting potential ideas on just how they should deal with a stranger in their midst. There were few things more dangerous in the multiverse than an idiot, unless it was an idiot that thought he was being smart. Those were the ones that you had to keep an eye on. The unpredictable ones.
“My name is Justin!” I yelled. I didn’t bother with a last name, I didn’t want to confuse them straight off the bat. “Which one of you would be considered the greatest fighter, huh? The champion?”
The drums, which had been pounding away ceaselessly, stopped abruptly.
I gave the assembled golems a few seconds to digest my words. Then I repeated myself.
A low rumble rippled around the gathered throng of stony humanoids. Then came a muttering and a grumbling as this question was mulled over. It seemed that the creatures were incapable of dealing with more than one line of enquiry at a time, as the very fact that I—a human—was present at all had apparently been pushed to the side. To be dealt with at a later date, I assumed.
Then, just when I thought that I had inadvertently set off a discussion that was going to make the Ent Moot in The Lord of the Rings look like a chat around the watercooler, a stone golem stepped out of the press of his fellows. He was big and blocky, with a mouth that looked like a chisel wound in his face. One of his ears had been knocked off. The simple loincloth he wore made most of his lumpy, gray skin visible, which was pitted and scarred.
“You’re the champ?” I asked. “You’re the best fighter.”
He might have been built like Fred Flinstone’s refrigerator, but the stone golem and I were of a height. At six-two I might even have had an inch or two on him. When it came to weight however, I was pretty sure that this fellow probably had me beat. I conservatively estimated that I probably weighed as much as his left leg. I was going to need something to level the playing field if I was going to beat this guy in a fight.
Luckily, I had just the thing.
“Vam is my name,” the stone golem croaked.
“Hello, Vam,” I said. “What’s up?”
Vam considered this question and then cast his little black eyes upward. “Cave,” he said. “Cave is up.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Well,” I said. “That’s not really what I meant but, to be fair, you’re not wrong.”
Vam ignored me. “What is human like what you are doing here?” he asked.
There was a grumble of assent. Vam had clearly asked a question that was on the mind of the rest of the assembly.
“I’m here to wrestle the best stone golem fighter,” I said simply.
Once more I allowed this statement to sink in and percolate through the crusty, slow minds of my audience, like water finding its way through a gravel pit.
I knew they’d got it when the laughter started up. It started like the rattle of pebbles bouncing down a mountainside, but quickly grew to mirror the steady rush and roar of a mudslide that sweeps away a village in Nicaragua and makes news around the globe. Almost, I had to cover my ears, but I decided against it. I could show no sign of weakness. I had to beat these guys at their own game, and that game revolved around strength and prowess in this wrestling circle.
After a while, Vam stepped another pace toward me and looked me up and down in what I imagined he thought was a mocking way. In actual fact, he rushed it and ended up looking more like he had an affliction of some kind. Anyway, I got what he was going for. I might have even been offended had there not been a part of me that pitied him for having a face that it would take a team of mothers, working in shifts, to love.
“You want to fight stone golems?” he guffawed. Stone golems are good at guffawing, take it from me. You had to be the type of dumb that thought Cheerios were doughnut seeds to really guffaw properly and I’d say that at least ninety-eight percent of those present in that cavern fit the bill. Vam certainly did.
“That’s right, Vam,” I said pleasantly, being careful to enunciate my words with care. “I’m here to fight the best wrestler you have.”
“You want to fight me?” Vam said, almost choking at the hilarity of the notion.
I held up a finger. “You think that’s funny, Vam? Here’s the kicker; I don’t just want to wrestle you. I want to wrestle your next best fighter too—at the same time.”
The volume of the disbelieving laughter rose a few octaves and then suddenly died away. It was as if the group of golems had suddenly realized that they had a suicidal human in their midst and felt a bit awkward about it. Either that, or this particular human was a dangerous loon who had absolutely zero idea as to what he was getting himself into.
“You want to wrestle um…” a pained look stamped itself on Vam’s flat face. It looked to me like he was doing some Turing-esque calculations. It looked painful. “You want to wrestle… two golems?” he asked.
“That’s right, Vam,” I said. “You and whoever the next best fighter is.”
Vam’s brow furrowed. It was strange to see creases appear in something that looked so rocky and solid.
“Ghar!” the stone golem yelled out suddenly.
Another golem lumbered out of the milling throng. He looked basically exactly the same as Vam, though there was a slightly reddish hint of clay in his skin tone and he had both of his ears, which gave him a slightly less lopsided look than Vam was rocking.
“Ghar here,” said Ghar helpfully.
“So, you two are the best fighters,” I asked. I needed to be sure on this point.
“That’s right,” Vam said. “But why does puny human like what you is think that it can beat us in a fight? We bigger. We meaner. We stronger.”
“Yeah, that might be so, Vam,” I said, “but I fucking love a challenge.”
Ghar looked as if this made no sense to him at all. He might have been right.
“Will you fight me?” I asked.
Ghar shrugged and looked at Vam. Vam’s craggy forehead furrowed once again. “Yes, we will fight you. And we will win.”
I nodded. Now came the key part of the operation.
“Okay. Good,” I said. I had to hold up my hand quickly as the two stone golems made to move straight toward me. “Whoa, whoa!” I said. “Hold on. How do you feel about making this a little more interesting?”
“Interesting how?” Ghar asked, cracking his thick fingers and leering at me.
“A wager,” I said. “A bet.”
The stone golems that surrounded us, and were listening intently to the discussion taking place, murmured and rumbled amongst themselves eagerly. It seemed that, slow as they might be, they had sporting blood coursing through their veins.
“If I win,” I continued, raising my voice so that my words rang out loud and clear over the crowd of onlookers, “then you have to stop wrestling all the time. You can only wrestle for one hour at noon.”
I figured that this little dispensation would be least likely to disturb Zelara Solarphine’s work day. She could just use that hour in which the golems were wrestling to take her lunch break, or do whatever it was she did in the middle of the day.
“Why we have to stop wrestling?” Vam asked suspiciously.
“I live up the valley,” I said. “Your wrestling keeps me awake in the night and gives me a headache in the day. If I win, then it means I get some peace, while you still get to have wrestling once a day. That seems pretty fair to me, no?”
Vam mulled this over for quite a while. I felt that he had some reservations so far as this proposed bet went, but the crowd were egging him on. There were calls from the audience, in a language that I assumed was the golem tongue, the tone of which I recognized to be something along the lines of “Don’t be a pussy!” and “Look at the size of him, you could use him as a toothpick!”.
Eventually, like any good tough guy, Vam ceded to peer-pressure and nodded his head. “Okay,” he grunted, hitching a look of disdain onto his mug. “And when we win?”
I shrugged. “You can fucking grind my bones to make your bread, or whatever you guys do to get your rocks off,” I said.
Ghar peered at me, narrowing his beetle-black eyes in a vaguely menacing fashion. “You going to have even bigger headache when we are done,” he said. “When we squash your head.”
The crowd bellowed and hooted at this bit of quality banter.
Vam pointed at the staff that I still carried in my hand. “And no magic,” he said. “Anyway, stone golems cannot be hurt by Elemental Magic, puny human.” He grinned. “There have been many mages who have found this out hard way…”
“That’s all good, Vam, my dude,” I said. “The only magic that I was going to perform was on myself in any case.”
And, with that, I concentrated and activated my Metamorphosis spell.
It was an Earth magic spell that I had picked up from Alura, the Princess of the Gemstone Elementals, after we had slept together for the first time. As soon as I cast it, I felt the mana that was stored at the center of my being spread outwards in a warm rush. Plates of armor formed on my forearms, shins, chest, and shoulder. My skin hardened and fused into an exoskeleton that would have given dermatologists back on Earth some serious cause for concern.
It was clear from the stunned silence, which fell like a blanket over the entire crowd, that the golems had not been expecting this. They hadn’t struck me as a particularly creative bunch—your bog-standard door handle probably had a greater imagination—but it was obvious that they had never dreamed that a human could pop in among them and turn himself into something that quite closely resembled one of them. Suddenly, I wasn’t some puny meatsack. I was an Elemental of unknown power and potency.
“But—but—but how have you done this?” Vam asked, flabbergasted.
I shrugged. There was no way that I was going to waste my breath going into detail with Vam. There were too many multi-syllable words that might trip him up. I gave an enigmatic shrug.
“I learn spells in interesting ways,” I told Vam and Ghar. “The magic will not affect you. Not directly anyway.” I smiled and raised my hands in the traditional stance of the 1920s pugilist. “Now, shall we fight?” I grinned, setting my teeth in a smile that I hoped worried my two opponents as much as I thought it should and then whispered to myself, “I’ve got a broomstick sponsorship to secure.”
The volume of the crowd began to swell. Now that all the boring talking and deal-making had been concluded, it sounded as if the golem spectators were quite excited about this little impromptu match that was to be played out before their eyes. Doubtless it would break the monotony of the everyday stone golem versus stone golem bouts.
Vam and Ghar looked at one another and stumped toward me. They jostled and growled at one another as they came on. It looked as if both were eager to be the one that was heaped with the kudos that would come from crushing the strange human-cum-Gemstone Elemental.
I watched the two creatures lumber slowly toward me. I set my feet, twisting them into the loose gravel that covered the floor of the spartan combat circle. Along with the plates of protective armor that the spell had endowed me with, I could feel latent power that far exceeded my own physical strength burgeoning inside of me. Idly, I wondered whether the spell took your opposition into consideration when you cast it. I mused on whether I’d pay for it later in the form of heavier exhaustion than I might be expecting.
Who the fuck cares about that? I can fly my ass back from the Academy on a broomstick if I need!
That thought buoyed me up, sending a surge of adrenaline running out from my heart to the tips of every single hair on my head.
The drums boomed into life once more.
The world became a wonderfully simple place, bereft of all but a single problem: how to survive this confrontation.
Vam, with his slightly higher status in the stone golem wrestling community, won the right to come at me first, while Ghar hung back and bared his teeth at me over Vam’s shoulder. Vam drew back his fist. It was as plain as the nose on my face that Vam was already thinking that he had me licked. So, it was probably with quite a deal of surprise that, before he could even get his punch moving on the forward stroke, I had smashed my own fist into his own nose making it a lot less plain than it had been only a moment before. The stone golem’s eyes went wide and he howled, clutching at his mangled nose and jerking backward. Personally, I didn’t know what he was complaining about. I was of the opinion that I’d made him better looking if anything.
Ghar bellowed with an interesting mixture of glee at the failure of his compatriot and excitement at getting to have a go at squishing me himself. He stepped in with a wild haymaker aimed at my chest that would have had me coughing up ribs, but I pirouetted around the blow. I felt the wind of the punch’s passing, then slammed my elbow into the back of Ghar’s rock-hard head. Even with the protective plates that the Metamorphosis spell had given me my arm went numb. It had been like elbow-striking a bowling ball.
I turned,
cursing softly under my breath, and was pleased to see that Ghar had felt it too. The stone troll was staggering away from me in the same way that Nigel Windmaker might after downing a quart of Grandmama Tuckettt’s Old Peculiar Bellyfire Whisky. His head tried to guide him left while his feet attempted to take him right. Then his legs decided that left would actually be the sensible direction to take just at the moment when his head suggested that he should just lie down for a moment. The result of this anatomical confusion was that Ghar plowed headfirst into one of the stalagmites that marked the edge of the wrestling arena and went through it like a fucking wrecking ball.
I almost felt sorry for Vam. It wasn’t that the stone golem was a bad fighter—he probably was quite skilled when it came to wrestling the other golems, and he had raw strength in spades. But pure power counted for very little if you couldn’t get a grip on your opponent. While Ghar tried to extricate himself from the wreckage of the stalagmite, Vam hounded me around the arena and tried to get to grips with me.
For my part, I dodged and skipped about like the parody of a boxer. I ducked and weaved, sending the stone golem first this way and then the other, as he fell for the most obvious feints. He did get a hold on me at one point, but I stuck a mana-enforced leg behind him and used my greater agility to bowl him backward and over. I rolled to my feet, kicked out viciously at his clutching hand with a spin kick, then delivered a couple of meaty blows to Vam’s neck and head before dancing away again.
At this moment, the other golem, Ghar, grappled me from behind. The bastard was game, there was no denying that, but I cracked my armored head backward when I felt his dry breath on the back of my neck.
“Got you, human,” he managed to say optimistically, before the back of my armor-plated cranium smashed into his face with the force of a hammer blow. He reeled backward once more and collided with Vam who was heading toward me. Vam, on instinct I guessed, brought his fist down right on top of Ghar’s dome with a sickening crack. Ghar’s beady black eyes crossed, his gray tongue protruded from his mouth, and he went over like a fucking tree to lie senseless and unmoving on the ground.