Bunnygirls 2

by Simon Archer

  “Oh, I apologize, Sir Preymeister,” I bowed, “I just came here to inform your pal Lord Gingerclaw, who introduced himself to me as the criminal underlord of the city known as ‘Big Paw-Paw,’ that I was formally rescinding my coerced participation in his conspiracy to assassinate you during this festival by faking a sneak-attack as if it were a legitimate challenge for the barony. Some things have come to light, and I’ve decided that it’s no longer in my best interest. I’d say it was a pleasure working with you, ‘Big Paw-Paw,’ but liars have a special place in hell next to nobles who threaten the innocent lives of bunnies because they’re pissy about not being legally able to threaten innocent lives anymore. As one lord to another, I appreciated the opportunity and information you gave me, but I must conclude our formal partnership on the grounds that you’re a dickless dick.”

  “Oh, yes, um, well,” The lumbering baron processed the block of information I’d just dropped on him, “may I ask how he was planning to do this?”

  “He’s being absolutely ridiculous, Baron Preymeister,” Paw-Paw nervously laughed like an evil vizier, “I honestly intended my challenge, no matter what this foreign Rabbit thinks. Who would believe a Rabbit who thinks he’s a lord, anyway?”

  “He had your drink poisoned,” I summarized the crime in Whodunnit fashion, “Not enough to outright kill you, but enough to cripple you in a fair fight. You’ll notice that the wine in your mug had a bit more kick to it than perhaps it should have.”

  “And you had a hand in this conspiracy?” the baron inquired.

  “Personally?” I began to answer, “not with the poisoning portion, no. My job was to distract you during the challenge from a building across the city using my special musket. The poison was part of Paw-Paw’s job in the operation.”

  “Your bunny there was the one who put the powder in, not me!” Paw-Paw spouted without thinking.

  “Huh, funny, I don’t remember saying which person actually put the poison in the drink,” my nostrils flared as I looked at Paw-Paw with my best ‘Gotcha!’ face, “or what form the poison was in when it was put into the drink. How would you know that, Big Paw-Paw?”

  “I’m not this ‘Paw-Paw’ Wolf you made up, and it’s clearly obvious!” the flustered lord floundered, “You can tell by the shifty look in her eyes! She’s a bunny. They’re bound for seedy behavior if they aren’t shackled to a lord’s hip. Just look at her guilty face! Why are we even arguing about the credentials of a base bunny? Lock her up and be done with it!”

  Tinker hid behind me as Paw-Paw redirected attention from him to her.

  “Well, little bunny?” Preymeister addressed Tinker. “Did you poison my drink?”

  Tinker peeked out from behind me. Upon my prompting hand to her back, she eeked out to answer the bald titan.

  “Mr. Baron, I apologize, but it is true that I poisoned the drink,” she almost whispered but projected more as I tapped on her back, “When Paw-Paw approached me after you’d gotten your mug filled, he wasn’t happy that I hadn’t been putting the poison in fast enough. I smacked him away because he was scaring me and used the moment of distraction to put the poison in.”

  “Yes, I remember that!” the giant bellowed out a hearty chuckle, “You’re the fan waver with the strange fan that I didn’t remember assigning. A clever ploy, even if it was for a sneak- attack. It seems you have a difficult time instilling loyalty in your co-conspirators, Gingerclaw.”

  “You can’t possibly be taking the word of this slave bunny over a noble Wolf!” Paw-Paw lodged his foot firmly in his doggy jaws. “She’s just a bunny. Her testimony is just to save her own miserable hide!”

  “Didn’t you yourself say that she was the poisoner, Paw-Paw?” I questioned him, “Which is it? And who really poisoned the baron, then? I mean, since you seem to know so much about this conspiracy against the baron that you keep insisting you weren’t a part of, why don’t you tell us all the answers?”

  “That’s not what I meant!” Paw-Paw backpedaled, “Her version of the story is drastically jaundiced! I saw her trying to poison you and tried to put a stop to it! The sneaky little bunny was acting suspicious, and I saw that it was my duty as a noble to intervene. If you leave them alone for even a little bit, they’ll rob you blind! How is this even being debated?”

  “Then you didn’t warn me after the deed was done?” Preymeister popped his neck in five different places with only a slow turn of his head. “Yet here you are, still wanting to challenge me in front of the whole of Jackalope. It appears that, even with the benefit of the doubt given, you were looking to prosper from this attempt on my life all the same. I will not accept your challenge until I am fully healed. And even if you were to still try your hand now…”

  The cracking, popping, slopping, and slurping sounds that followed would haunt my nightmares for all time after. Preymeister’s skin bubbled with mass underneath, inflating in lumps as more muscles grew underneath. His arms and chest took the brunt of it, his head expanding to even more stupefying proportions until the monster was standing near fifteen feet tall. Standing had to be redefined here, as he was now on all fours like a gorilla, resting on four- wheeler-sized meat blocks in the shape of fists, and the highest portion on him was now his massive shoulders. His legs, feet, and head still remained roughly the same size, preserving his kilt and explaining his clothing choices. He looked down at Paw-Paw from high above, his head now appearing much tinier in comparison to his ape-like torso, while the rest of us cowered at the sight.

  “… you wouldn’t have stood a chance, anyway.” The baron colossus’ voice had dropped down to hell like a second, manlier puberty had struck him all at once.

  The accused assassin snarled as he pushed his thumb against a button hidden in the grain of the gold knob of his cane, revealing a hidden compartment on the top that I already hated before I knew what was in it. From the compartment, three thin, brass-colored cables shot out, sticking into Preymeister’s chest with tiny barbs I couldn’t see from where I stood. The cables sparked with dark and shadowy energy that spiraled around the triangle of cables like dust in a clear vacuum.

  I fired some rounds from my pistol off the hip at the cane to stop this before it really started. But, because magic still hated me as much as I hated it, the shadowy energy of the cables had become a cyclone already, pulling the bullets away from their intended target. Yes, those lightning bullets magicked with lightning that moved as fast as lightning. The presumably lightning-fast bullets didn’t reach the cane or the Wolf holding it but instead corkscrewed through the cyclone in very pretty candy cane twists of lightning before shooting out straight up into the sky in four streams of blue light, fading away into nothing and having done nothing. While I kept thinking about what weapons I had at my disposal, I realized exactly what I had just truly unleashed upon us all.

  Four lightning bolts into the air were exactly the signal I told my boys to be looking for to create a distraction. Sorry, Old Yeller and Scooby. I swear, it wasn’t on purpose. I could have only prayed that their distraction didn’t kill us any more horribly than this was trying to.

  “If you are all going to insist on making this difficult for me, you have forced me to make things messy for all of you,” Paw-Paw monologued over the arcane storm he was conjuring, “I had wanted to simply take the barony with no bloodshed to avoid the hassle of subjugating the populace by hand. I told all of you that I’d already won. Once that powdered metal had made it into your body, it doomed you to this fate. Had everyone just stuck to the plan, we might have already been done with this by now, and no one would have died except for you, Preymeister. But you all had to get in my way. Now I’m going to kill everyone who doesn’t bow down to me.”

  Before long, the wind kicked up around the entire square, pushing some people away and pulling some people closer, sending Rabbits and Wolves floating along while the dark tornado built up. Hares and bunnies alike clung to the heavier Wolves for an anchor who hid behind whatever they could find to wa
rd off the gales battering them. A few of my boys had groups of bunnies and hares chained together in a barrel-of-monkeys style link from their backs, crawling as low as they could to find the next unattended Rabbit to add to them.

  “Boys!” I shouted over to them, “Get as many people out of here as you can! Clear the square! Get them out of the city!”

  With a nod, Snoopy and Pooch acknowledged, crawling over to the others who weren’t listening, and they all picked up a drunk Wolf along with them as they maneuvered the wind tunnel obstacle course that the city square had become. I was too proud to let them do all of the useful things while I did nothing.

  Time for a little teamwork.

  “Hopper, portal shelter over here!” I made a rooftop shape with my hands to show her as I gave my commands over the storm. “Keep the wind off us!” I drug a drunk off-duty guard Wolf along the floor to where we were making our impromptu cover. “Can you flip one of these portals and put the other one close by Donut Lord?”

  “Do you want to shoot him right against his head?” Hopper asked, looking out towards Paw-Paw to see where she could put the portal.

  “Yes,” my machete sliced off the first few straps of the chest plate on the barely conscious Wolf I had tagging along involuntarily, “but I think we can do one better, too.”

  The monstrous King Kong canine struggled against the convulsions of the mystical pseudo-taser in his chest, but once its grotesque oak logs of flesh had channeled the baron’s will to rise slowly into the air. Higher and higher, it hung close to thirty feet in the air, a hammer of vengeance and digits. The hand boulder was ready to slam down on the cyclone- carrier, who consistently laughed throughout the ordeal like any remotely put-together individual wouldn’t have done at any point in their lives. Though the arm had slowly risen up, it fell down like a stone before any of its vengeance had been seized. Both muscle columns had given way more and more at the elbows, lowering the judicial beast down little by little.

  “Tinker, what free charms do you have on hand?” I finished surgically removing the chest plate with my giant scalpel.

  “Nothing useful!” Tinker took inventory while we huddled in the shelter Hopper had manifested from two of her biggest portals. “Including the broken ones I made nervously while we were stuck in that inn, I think--!”

  “Put literally all of them on this metal plate!” I presented it like a platter.

  “What?!” Tinker didn’t quite believe that I was serious, though I was a deadly sort of it.

  Pulling them out in a handful, I helped Tinker lay down some charms on the plate, wishing I’d brought some gloves to handle the leaking ice magic from these charms.

  While the arms bent lower, the length of its shelf of shoulders shortened, the pillars became a bit more like just tree trunks, and the gorilla body slowly regained definition as it retreated. His head was becoming a teeny bit more normal for his body with every passing moment like the air was being let out of him. Preymeister was shrinking.

  The twisted usurper’s laughter, like an octave dial on a fancy soundboard, had gotten connected to it, gradually deepened, and his arms and chest inflated with muscle at the same rate. His fancy clothes tore at the seams, buttons bursting and sleeves shredding. More and more, the two wolves were matching up in body type as the cyclone cables drained Preymeister dry and filled the villainous dog up. Paw-Paw was growing.

  This latest affront to the established limitations of magic wasn’t surprising. I didn’t have the will to be angry anymore. This was merely the next step in the waltz of chaos that was my relationship with it, and magic was a stiletto-heeled toestomper.

  18

  “This is going to explode soon!” Tinker handed me the metal plate, now eight or so ice charms and a few silence charms. “Really, really soon!”

  “Hopper!” I signaled Hopper to chain the spaces so the plan could commence and not kill us.

  Hopper dropped one of our shelter walls and flexed her fingers to make the portal next to the cyclone-happy crime lord. The oval of purple staticy, misty energy flickered transparently right above him, but never fully manifested.

  “My lord--!” Hopper opened her mouth to explain or apologize for the cow pies Paw-Paw was feeding us with his magic cane.

  “Goddamnit.” I tossed the plate and its increasingly bright charms away into the wind, muttering my dissatisfaction under the sound of the wind. She didn’t have to apologize to anyone. I knew who and what I was angry with.

  The currents whipped and flipped the plate as they pulled and pushed it into the cyclone, flashing the charms on it dramatically. Once the shadowy magic of the cyclone itself had touched the plate’s charms, the chaotic energy within them erupted in a sphere of magical ice, creating a snowball of almost perfect spherical shape. The extra weight pulled the cables down with it, but both of the Wolves were far too jacked to let a simple thing like weight ever affect them even slightly, so they held on. A frozen display case perfectly encapsulated the black cyclone of energy, preserved in its stillness between the two Wolf brutish mutants.

  More importantly, the wind stopped with it.

  The bullets flew out of my gun like I’d set the bottom of the infinite magazine on fire, rapidly zapping into Paw-Paw’s fresh putty arms. The crime hulk put his new meatshield hands up in front of him to protect his face, the tattered silks of his former garment hanging on by strips. Though I could see that the bullets were entering, and blood was coming out of the wounds, the trickle did not quite satisfy me enough to say that this was supremely effective. If I was going to kill this sucker, it was going to be with a headshot.

  Paw-Paw’s strength siphon had done enough of its work to give him the power to move both the ice globe and Preymeister at the same time, but not quite enough to counter what strength Preymeister had left fully. As a result, the taser cane and its frozen cables could have been moved from side to side along with its victim, but it stayed suspended in the air by Preymeister’s stubbornness, preventing the ice from touching the ground with the force needed to crack it. That didn’t stop Paw-Paw from trying, wrestling with the baron like he was a Doberman dog with a chew toy.

  Their wrestling match made for tough terrain, the sidestepping kilted giant sprawling across the field in wide swaths and forcing me to step back a bit into the no-crushing zone. The baron also made for an excellent shield as the crime lord kept shifting him between us, forcing me to get really creative and rely on a lot of luck with ricochet shots. Even so, the best I had available kept hitting him in the back, which was also a wall of meat that didn’t quite get hurt like a regular body did. And the legs were almost impossible to hit, especially since the behemoth Wolf kept his canine speed and agility along with the muscles. The freezing shotgun did no good, laying a coat of ice only thick enough to inconvenience both Paw-Paw and Preymeister mildly without losing any mobility whatsoever. Fire wasn’t effective against Preymeister at all, which seemed like a good indicator that Paw-Paw was equally unimpressed with it.

  Could I have just shot Preymeister in the face and forced Paw-Paw to drag him along the ground? Probably, but Paw-Paw’s strength was herculean, even at this incomplete size. He’d have had no trouble using Preymeister as a flail instead, and that just felt like a bad idea. Plus, I had to figure out why Preymeister put a stop to Blood Moons. That had to be something I could have capitalized on. Kneecapping did about as well as the rest of the body shots were doing, so he was staying mobile.

  Thankfully, my girls kept me afloat in this battle enough to gain some ground with their combo tactics. Hopper’s portals let me get right in Paw-Paw’s face, functionally blinding him as he protected his whole head with his giant fist to guarantee my bullets wouldn’t touch anything vital. Tinker’s megahammer bumpered Preymeister away from my line of sight, letting me take the shots I needed to keep Paw-Paw off-balance.

  With that massive size, though, he brushed past all of my fancy tactics when he rushed forward with the knobhead of his cane, smashing throug
h the ice to free the cables and the cyclone of shadow once again. Paw-Paw stabbed the cyclone deeper into the baron’s chest like a blade with the cane acting as its sword hilt, pointing it down to slam the shrinking giant lord to the ground. Now that it was closer to Preymeister’s body, the effect of the drain was much faster, but the wind wasn’t nearly as strong as it was before, only picking the wind up to umbrella-stealing speeds instead of galeforce. His shoulders rolled as Paw-Paw adjusted to the new musculature and bone structure, having all but sucked Preymeister dry of extra muscle at this close distance. My electric rounds were only turning this muscle creature’s hand into a dimpled cushion, even as I relentlessly assaulted him throughout all of his actions. Close combat was completely out of the question, unless the question was, “Are you sure your inevitable death is going to be painful enough, and would you like to opt-out of an open casket funeral?”

  If there was a bright side to all of this, it was that when I finally dealt with Paw-Paw, Preymeister was going to be an absolute breeze without his transforming power. Unless magic was still being ornery and decided that it’d just go back to Preymeister once Paw-Paw was dead. That would have been just like magic to do that.

  The universe, or whatever was its steering wheel at the time, must have thought that there wasn’t nearly enough chaos for its liking, choosing that exact moment to spice things up a bit. Charging into the square from three different streets, striders of every color and pattern stomped in stampedes to flood the area. Three proud leaders lead the waves of clawed feet; Old Yeller upon a black strider, from the leftmost street, Scooby from the right on a green-and-blue steed, and Beau without a rider, triumphantly leading the distraction I’d called for without meaning to.

  At the same time, Big Paw-Paw had upgraded fully to Huge Paw-Paw, a mangy bizarro version of Preymeister’s former physique. The baron, on the other hand, had returned to normal, if not a little dried up in the musculature, and had passed out from the procedure. The adrenaline rush, along with the gallons of supernatural testosterone he just injected himself with, had Paw-Paw roaring up to the heavens with both hammy fists in the air in celebration of the victory he hadn’t quite gotten yet. If those fists came down, they’d crush Preymeister like a bug. While I didn’t care on a personal level, rounding up all of those city guards who’d have become independent Wolves afterward was a hassle I’d have liked to avoid.