by Dante King
In a flash, I had myself a basic plan. It would take a little dexterity of mind, but I didn’t have another choice.
The dog-man got within grabbing range of me and lunged.
I switched Noctis from Chest slot to Head slot and used Blink to teleport right behind the slightly addled creature. The groping hands missed me—just—as I vanished. The dog-man snarled in frustration.
As soon as I landed behind the monstrous embodiment of Jealousy, I switched Noctis’ power from my Head slot to the Right Arm slot, conjured a Shadow Sphere into being, and slapped it down hard into the middle of the dog-man’s back.
There was no time for the monster to make a sound. Strangely, this time, it was not the whole creature that vanished, sucked into whatever void the magic transported body parts to. The torso disappeared, in an instant, but the legs, arms, and head of the monster simply popped loose from their moorings in the torso and splatted messily to the ground in front of me.
The thing was dead instantaneously, of course, but I still felt a bit guilty for sending it out in such a brutal fashion.
As another crash of thunder brought the hall of statues crumbling down, I was enveloped in blackness.
I couldn’t help but wonder whether these trials, apart from being a straight case of survival training, were also a way of seeing just how effectively prospective dragonmancers could use their new abilities.
I felt, weirdly, as if a modern life on Earth had somehow conditioned me for this test. I had learned to actively channel Noctis’ power into the different inventory spots as though they were the controls of a video game, or rules of a board game.
Was the whole concept—that I had been blood-bonded with a dragon and could now make use of its energy to cast spells—crazier than Tony Montana and scientology mixed up in a blender with some ice and PCP?
Yeah, it was.
But it was my new life. And I had accepted it. Taken to it like a duck to water.
“Three down, three to go,” I said as I peered up at the sinbeast. “Bear, swine, and goat.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
After the fight with the dog-man, I found myself mired in the muck of a foul, stinking swapland. I could hardly move, the clinging mud and ooze sucking hungrily at my boots. It dragged at my armor and forced me down inch by inch. It was obvious that the mire was meant to symbolize sloth, but that didn’t make the going any easier.
I waded through the boggy, foggy wasteland, waiting to be set upon by something large and bear-like. To keep myself from getting completely sucked under, I made a habit of occasionally setting off Shadow Spheres under the mud. I had no idea how it worked, but they created a reverse concussion effect of sorts, which propelled me upward and allowed me to move along with relative ease for a few yards, before the quagmire retook its hold of me.
I gave up on this ploy after a while and decided to put Noctis into the Chest slot. My Onyx Armor flowed across my back and chest instantaneously. The cool ridges of the blackened, magically enhanced metal gleamed even in the murky light of the swamps. I thought that this was the judicious move, adopting slightly defensive measures in a scenario in which I could only see about ten feet in front of me.
Eventually, after I had been making my way listlessly around this bubbling, stinky shithole for however long it had been, something emerged slowly out of the swamp ahead of me.
I had no doubt that, had I let it fully emerge, I would have seen some vast, goo-covered, dripping monstrosity of a swamp bear extricate itself from the mire.
If there’s one thing you learn on the streets of Los Angeles, it’s that you don’t give anyone or anything hostile time to gather its wits.
Before the swamp bear had gotten even halfway out of the clutching bog, I shifted Noctis’ power to my Right Arm slot. Then, I hit it with two Shadow Spheres—an extra one for luck, because it was a huge goddamn thing that promised to be about twenty feet tall once it emerged. The spheres plunged into its muddy forms and took it down.
With a suddenness that took my breath away, the swamp wrapped my thighs and pulled me under.
Sloth was, unsurprisingly, a rather quick affair. I’d never been susceptible to that particular temptation.
Next up, was Gluttony, the manifestation of the sinbeast’s pig-head.
I stood in the middle of a huge feasting hall, in which a truly repulsive man-pig eyesore was snuffling and grunting and gorging its way through a pile of roughly severed human limbs.
Flies buzzed around the gory pile of body parts. The smell was atrocious.
Once more, I didn't waste any more time than I needed to. I could feel mana exhaustion threatening to overwhelm me, so I decided to save my mana-based attacks for if I really needed them.
The man-pig was a grossly fat, sweaty, blood covered humanoid; a true excrescence. When I engaged him with hand-to-hand, he squealed as he swung heavy, dangerous fists at me, but his blows were telegraphed, and I easily dodged them. I pummeled the creature’s thick hide with my fists and feet, battering him with a combination of punches and kicks that I doubted the Mystocean Empire had ever seen before. I felt a grin touch my face as I drilled the fucker, as though he were the perfect punching bag.
Try as I might though, and as heartily as I went at the man-pig, the monster seemed to be practically unaffected. It squealed and flinched as I struck it over and over again, but I couldn’t take it down.
In the meantime, I found myself swelling dangerously. My muscles bulged, and with every punch I landed, I felt my brain slipping further and further into a pleasant red haze.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, I thought, with some difficulty. This isn’t right.
Then, I clicked as to what must be happening. The man-pig was allowing me to beat it. It was making me hungry—ravenous and insatiably glutinous—for its pain and misery.
I felt a little sick with myself then. A little ashamed of the bloodlust that had come over me. A dragonmancer, I imagined, should have more control over that sort of thing. You couldn’t get too caught up with the killing, you couldn’t get to love violence. The only thing that you should love about violence, I reckoned, was what that violence was being used to protect.
I looked down at the worryingly strained appearance of my forearm muscles. They felt tight against my skin, as if they might burst.
Ah-ha, I thought.
I lowered my hands then, and adopted a defensive stance.
“Come on then, Miss Piggy,” I said as I summoned my Onyx Armor, and the black plates formed around my body. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
The man-pig went to town now, pummeling me this way and that, while I did my best to defend myself against his blows.
His heavy, strong, flabby arms came down with the force of clobbering tree limbs, but my MMA training helped me ward off most of his blows, or else catch them in a way that took a lot of the sting out of them. When he hit hard, my new armor dispersed much of the force.
The man-pig grew larger and larger, the flabby skin of his torso and arms stretching. He became stronger, his unrefined haymakers and uppercuts becoming slower but more powerful. I found myself, even if I got an arm of elbow up to protect myself, being flung across the grotty feasting hall.
The man-pig laughed as he tried to administer an amateur ass-whooping. He laughed right up until the point when he clubbed me with a severed arm, the broken humerus cracking my Onyx Armor’s helmet. Then, abruptly, the swollen figure burst in a spray of vile-smelling bile and chunks of viscera and ragged flaps of skin.
The world imploded again, swam together, and reformed into sunlight and grass.
I found myself standing in front of the giant sinbeast, only one of its heads remaining on its shoulders. The other five were littered about the grassy arena.
“That’s careless of you, pal,” I said. “You better hope that goat’s head of yours does a better job of cooking up a trial than the others did.”
The beast snatched out and grabbed at me with its odd bear-like claws. It bro
ught its goat head back and went to headbutt me, just as I raised my spear up to its eye level.
The impact of the goat’s headbutt shattered my already damaged helmet, and sent me reeling into another plane of existence.
It felt as if I was floating for a few moments, suspended in the air, and then I splashed down unexpectedly into cool, clean water.
This came as somewhat of a relief, as I had still been coated in the man-pig’s guts, blood, half-chewed gobbets of human flesh, and digestive juices.
I was on the brink of exhaustion from the five rounds, and I couldn’t help wanting to surrender to the cooling, soothing water that held me in its soft embrace.
It was a tempting alternative to carrying on fighting and scrapping. I found myself being lulled into a restful semi-coma.
It’s hard to slap yourself with any great force underwater, so I pinched myself instead.
The goat is Lust, I thought. Resist it. How many times have you been led astray by lusting after a woman? This is like that, but that fucking thing is going to try to tempt you to your death.
I came up blowing water and sucking air. I pushed my sopping long hair out of my face and looked around.
I was floating in the middle of a pool that was in the center of a bathhouse. The room was surrounded by columns that disappeared up into an invisible hazy ceiling. Steam swirled between these intricately carved columns, along with music and laughter.
The soft laughter came from the thirteen women lounging, completely naked, around the pool that I was treading water in. They were regarding me with extreme interest; leaning forward and sitting up in various highly distracting poses, whispering behind their hands and licking their lips.
These women were the sort of broads that could have walked down Rodeo Drive and secured about two score eager sugar-daddies apiece. In the few brief moments that I allowed my cock to do the thinking, I glanced around and saw that there was a woman here for almost every conceivable taste; skinny, curvaceous, dark skinned, light skinned, blue skinned, huge tits, petite tits, three tits.
Three tits?
I looked back.
“Would you look at those,” I said aloud.
It was hardly subtle, this place. Then again, lust was rarely subtle either.
I swam over to the side of the pool and was met by a gorgeous woman with platinum blonde hair styled in tight curls. Her eyes were a liquid green, and I noticed that she had two horns poking through her hair.
Goats horns…
Well, shit. Discovering that the beautiful woman before your eyes was, in fact, a goat beneath her tantalizing exterior was a boner killer if there ever was one. I liked my monster girls as much as the next guy, but this was a bridge too far.
After I had noted that little physiological trait, the ensuing flirting on the goat woman’s part was wasted on me. The spell was broken, and the rest of the women gathered around me lost their attraction.
It was very peculiar, but as much as I knew they were talking to me and begging me to stay, I could never make out the individual words or the language they were using.
Well, it didn’t take long for the ladies to get all riled up. I spurned every advance that they made, ignoring them or politely declining their offers to have them sit on my face—along with numerous other, less savory, activities.
After I had turned Lust and her groupies down what must have been a million times, the goat-horned woman grabbed me roughly by the face and twisted my head so I could look into her eyes.
“You will stay!” she said, in a voice gone suddenly hard and harsh and cold as ice. “Your seed is the key to our survival! The key to the survival of all magical creatures! You will stay.”
“I don’t fucking think so, darling,” I said. I elbowed her hard in the temple to break her grip on my face, and then drove her face down into the marble step on which we were sitting with a nasty crack.
Lust’s team of top models went from tens to zeros in less time than it took to say it.
Where once there had been thirteen women that most men would sell their grandmothers just to run a hand over, there were now thirteen bent and long-fingered demonoids.
Withered and tousle haired, with sunken eyes and beaky noses, they were what I imagined the Olsen sisters might look like if they were to spend the next seventy odd years smoking crack and sleeping once every three weeks.
They surged at me, like a dozen zombie models. So, in response, I summoned Noctis to help me out.
The dragon arrived, conjured into being with the speed of thought, and instantly bit into the back of a female fiend’s skull with a soft crunching sound. Noctis shook her, like a fox worrying a bunny, then flung her away.
I used my dragon’s arrival to strike out at two other women. I cracked one with an edgewise strike of the hand right in the throat. Another fiend, I side-kicked so hard that her legs were swept from under her, and she broke her neck on the fancy polished tiles lining the floor.
The fiendish creatures were desperate and angry in their fighting, but they could do little against the combined ferocity of myself and Noctis.
We went through them like a thunderbolt through dry woodland.
Noctis was all quick claws and snapping teeth. I used my fists, knees, and elbows to pummel the demonfolk into submission. I dispatched a couple of the women by using an ornate vase as a blunt instrument, but Noctis did most of the killing. His claws were long, and the women were all skin and bone once they had transformed. The demons’ skin came apart like wet newspaper under the slashing talons of the Onyx Dragon.
Eventually, it was only Lust herself left. Her face was all busted up where I had introduced it to the step. She had looked a little intimidating at first, but now that I had the embodiment of lust in my grip, I saw that there was far less to her than met the eye.
“Another important lesson there, Noctis,” I said, and shoved the demon’s head under the water of the pool.
She managed to rip herself free before I could force her head back under again, she spoke a few more words about my seed being the key to her survival. When she surfaced a second time, Noctis craned forward and shoved one of his claws up and under the base of her skull. The squelching sound went beyond my ability to describe.
Lust’s feet kicked randomly a few times, and then she lay still. Blood curled and blossomed into the water. I let out a breath, tried to get my heartrate back under control, and wondered if the wet line running down my back was pool water or one of the demon’s blood.
“Effective, I’ll give you that,” I said, looking up at the dragon. I pointed down at the whitish gunk oozing out of the puncture wound Noctis had made. “But, it’s messy.”
Noctis rolled his yellow eyes. “You would have preferred that I didn’t assist you?”
“Oh, I’m glad for the assist,” I said.
The pool water rose suddenly, sweeping me, Noctis, and the thirteen demon whore corpses upward. Everything went a beautiful crystalline blue—tinged with a little blood. And then…
… I stood, panting and blinking and disorientated. My spear was heavy in my hand, and sweat streamed down my body beneath my armor.
The great, formerly six-headed embodiment of sin—six-headed no longer—crashed onto its knees. The goat’s head was gone, laying in the lush, blood-soaked grass of the field. The sextet of hideous animal heads had now been completely downgraded to six neck stumps. As far as immediate threat levels went, six neck stumps did not pose much of a threat at all.
With a nice, slow, final thump the body of the massive, vaguely mythical, and quite metaphorical monster keeled forward onto its front and lay still.
“Congratulations, Michael Gilmore,” Dasyr said from behind me. Her rich, calming voice seemingly even more serene after the madness of the seven trials I had just faced.
“Or, as you shall henceforth be known as, Michael Noctis,” Tanila said.
“Michael Noctis?” I asked, looking over at the Onyx Dragon next to me. “Are we a packag
e deal now? Two for the price of one?”
“You have sealed the warrior’s bond,” Tanila said. Her blue eyes flashed as she regarded both myself and Noctis. The sunlight made her strange striped skin glow, the black standing more prominently against the paleness. “You have completed the Transfusion Ceremony. You are, to all intents and purposes, one being inhabiting two bodies. You are both now imbued with each other’s strengths. This is well worth remembering in battle, of course. However, you also wear each other’s weaknesses too, and that is worth remembering even more so.”
Dasyr inclined her head at the wisdom of her compatriot’s words.
“What has transpired here must not be spoken about outside to anyone who is not one of your fellow dragonmancers,” she said. Her golden eyes pinned me in place as she spoke, and her tufted tiger ears were turned straight forward.
“Not even my squad—my little coterie of three guys?” I asked.
Dasyr shook her head, those golden orb eyes of hers fixed and unblinking. It might have been a look that could unnerve a man, if he hadn’t just finished fighting a six-headed metaphorical beast.
“This ceremony is sacred,” the tall Red Tiger of the Seething Crag said. “It is the last and most important secret of the Mystocean Empire. No matter who the person—no matter how much you think you can or should trust them—you must remember that this secret trumps all trust.”
“Even the trust that those three guys are handing me; the trust of their lives?” I asked.
“Even that,” Dasyr said gravely. “And that is the greatest trust that one person can show another. Don’t think we don’t know what we are asking. However, it is good to hear you voice that question. It gives me a new faith in you, Earthling.”
“Meaning that you didn’t have much faith in me straight off the cuff?” I said. “Ouch.”
“A person who voices genuine concern for whose he barely knows might go far in this world,” Dasyr said, a small smile creeping onto her feline features. “It is evident to me—from the way that you carry yourself, as well as the skills and discernment that you displayed during your battle with the sin-beast—that you are a warrior to watch. But, I think you have great potential in you to be more than just a distinguished fighter. You have the makings to be one of the great Dragonmancers of the age.”