by Simon Archer
On my whistle, Beau galloped right up to me, brushing by so I could saddle up on him while he sped through without stopping. Looked cool, but was terribly painful. It wasn’t worth it. Then, like a street racer, go-kart, ballerina, or a combination of those things, the big strider twisted on its front feet while sliding on them simultaneously, turning around in a one-eighty to kick Paw-Paw in the chest with his hind legs, knocking him back off those teeny legs of his. His chest rippled and boomed like a bass drum as he fell away, landing on his back like an overturned tortoise.
I’d ridden with Beau before, and I’d gotten some time with him on the trip over from Thumperton when we’d stopped to rest. Hell, Beau started bothering me to take him along for rides a few days in. Comfortably, I could have said I’d gotten a bit of experience moving around with him and him with me. We had a rhythm. I had not taught him that drifting technique, but I was very happy that we had him around to do crazy stunts to help out.
Turning Beau back around, I shot at Paw-Paw with the pistol, getting two solid shots, one to the side of his face and one to the neckless area around it, before his meaty paws came back up to shield himself. Those two shots were pouring like drainage pipes after a wet spring, and I knew we’d finally hit somewhere vital for once.
He roared in pain, pushing himself back up from Beau’s kick with his bulky arms, while I picked up Tinker with her hammer and Hopper portal- hopped in front of me. We dashed off, with Paw-Paw following closely behind like a raging silverback. We ran down a street to lead him away from the bulk of the people. Even with Beau’s motorcycle-like speeds, Paw-Paw moved like a sprinting bear, keeping up pace with us with its scaled-up size.
“Hopper, you drive.” I handed her the reins. “Don’t worry, Beau does most of the work, and you just guide him. Tinker, you guard the rear. I’ll see what I can do about slowing him down.”
Tinker and I turned around in the saddle as I pulled out the shotgun with the ice-shot. I couldn’t have told you how Hopper kept driving without skipping a beat while we shifted around, but her horse jockey stance let me slip my leg right under, bringing my full attention to the big gorilla Wolf. While I constantly fired at the mutated lord with my pistol, I shot at the ground with the ice shotgun make the street a wintery ice rink. Without the copious amounts of moisture that was the ocean from the previous battleground, the ice didn’t create the massive blocks like before, but the frozen spots were creating a few slippery spots that were tripping it up. With the lightning rounds bouncing off the buildings and street, it was forced to keep an arm blocking, switching between them, and slowing it down. Even with all of that, it was still slowly closing the distance. Hopper turned a corner, bringing the chase to a street leading nearly backward from where we were heading before.
How could we have beaten this thing? If we brought Tinker too close, its big-ass arms had more reach than her hammer, so she’d just be playing defense against them. Looking down at one of its hands, I saw the cane was still there, which probably meant that the stupid no-portal effect was still up around him, so we couldn’t just snipe him. Or better yet, just poke holes in him with a fixed portal, like we did with the old Baron. It wasn’t letting go of that anytime soon, and my luckiest shots could have only hit the top of it in its hammer fists.
While we had turned the corner, Paw-Paw did not quite fair as well, crashing into the corner building before managing to follow us, but not before demolishing the side of the building it’d crashed into. The rest of it, like a towering tree that’d been axed down, the building timbered down, flooding bricks on top of the monster’s back. It was knocked onto its stomach for a second before it crawled out from under, charging at us again at full speed. And that was where victory lay. With enough ice, I could have made that slide a lot more devastating.
“Hopper, turn some more corners!” I shouted back to her, “Break its line of sight with us!”
The next corner, Hopper turned the strider to the very next street left, then the next one right, then another left, zigzagging through the streets. The monstrous noble criminal crashed into buildings left and right and left again, each time losing distance with us while it tried to crawl out from under the rubble every time it tried to turn. I focused all of my energy into firing into the street, laying wide areas of slick ice at each intersection. Each slide became worse and worse, and we opened the distance between ourselves and Paw-Paw. Five turns later, we managed to break around a corner, losing sight of him, and him with us.
“Beau, jump!” I slapped Beau’s side to prompt him.
The strider did so, easily leaping up onto the building to the side of us like it was just a step on a stairway. We rode along the top of the buildings on the block, viewing the city from above while I searched for the spot I wanted to lay my trap. Beau easily crossed buildings, and even whole streets from above, jumping from block to block as necessary while I kept up my scan. A long street with an incline would have been perfect, and he’d have been a living wrecking ball through a city block of buildings. Hopefully, that’d do some damage or slow it down enough that we could have gotten a few hits in ourselves.
The moment of peace ended as Paw-Paw discovered our hiding place, crawling up the side of a building a block away, spotting us while it began another charge. As it came up to a street between the blocks, it lept dozens of feet into the air, fists raised as it prepared to slam down on our heads.
Beau galloped to the side, dodging the meteor smash while jumping to the next block. The building underneath slowly crumbled away, collapsing entirely as he made another jump to slam into us like a meteor again.
“Don’t jump just yet!” Tinker yelled to us, causing Beau to sputter on his claw-hooves as Hopper held him back from saving us. The alchemist swung her megahammer down on the top of the building we were standing on, and I saw what she was doing, as did Hopper. She led Beau to the building just to the side of us right as Paw-Paw landed, collapsing the building underneath it. The monstrosity faltered, landing on its stomach with far more devastating force than before.
The opportunity was obvious to all of us. It looked like Tinker had her own trap in mind, and I wondered if there were ways to include my girls in more challenges. Like a well-oiled machine, we attacked this mutant bastard at the same time, each making a different attack in a combination maneuver that just flowed naturally from us at the moment.
While it was still reeling from its disastrous landing, Tinker was the first to go, using her megahammer to cripple both its legs and pulverize the stone surrounding it as if it was already dust in the first place. She flipped over on the shaft with her momentum as the hammer lost its massive weight, then turned the weight back on as the metal hammerhead swirled in place like a pestle to grind the bones up even more. Simultaneously, she countered the momentum from falling, swinging along with the shaft like a tetherball on a pole, continuously turning the weight back on as it turned off from the broken feather charm.
I jumped down to an awning on the building next to us, firing several ice shots on the fist with the cane in it, turning it into a solid, unmoving block. The awnings broke underneath me, keeping my fall from being fatal as I continued to lay it thick, freezing it to the street like a tongue to a flagpole after a snowstorm.
While I continued to do that, both Hopper and Beau had jumped high into the air. She jumped off the strider herself, spinning herself with a leg out like a yo-yo of death. With portals, Hopper shortened her distance to the ground so she could survive the fall, but not so much that her axe kick didn’t pulverize the icy fist into a cloud of frost sprinkles, leaving nothing left but the splintered remains of the cane and a cold stump.
Paw-Paw, at least mildly perturbed by the dismemberment and disregard for his bodily autonomy, had been trying to get up, nearly pulling himself up before Beau landed at the square of his back on one clawed foot with a nasty fracturing sound. The draft strider jumped back up to the building from the same spot, coming back into the air to do the same thing
again. Beau was a scary smart animal. Loved him.
During the time that Beau had jumped off to do his sky stomp again, I moved to Paw-Paw’s head, blasting it with the ice-shot. I’d gotten a shot to half his face before his other hand was upon me, the fingers curling around me before I could twist to shoot it. When it would have clenched on my body, I’d have been squeezed dry like a juicy fruit.
Fortunately, neither Paw-Paw nor his stolen magic muscles could have their victory over me. With a tug to my collar, I was pulled back at the very last minute, bringing me through one of Hopper’s portals to a place ten feet away from where I was. That didn’t stop the hand from reaching through the portal while it was still open, the fingers closing around me to squeeze my organs through my face.
Victory was snatched from that grasp as Beau came to the rescue, landing his second stop right on the malformed noble felon’s shoulder and releasing its grip on me before I was crushed like a grape.
Then Hopper closed the portal around the gigantic wrist, cutting the hand off like a surgical axe swing. By its elbow, Tinker smashed the monster’s limb stump over against its other shoulder while I ran up and blasted ice-shots at the connection point, freezing the blood between and locking it in place.
Since my very first fight against a Wolf or a noble, the pattern had been that I killed them fairly soon after I met them in person. Emotionally, even with all of the asspull conversations I have to annoy the crap out of my opponents, I considered that whole time to be logged combat that drained the tank. So, in my spirit, although the fight itself was probably ten minutes at most, I felt the drag of a twenty-four-hour war press on me in one moment.
Fuck this guy.
19
“Here.” I gave Hopper the shotgun. “Keep him still.” After the first blast. Hopper rolled her shoulder, not realizing the kick that it’d have, but continued afterward with gluing the massive body to the cobblestone. Maybe we could have gotten just a little bit more out of him before the end. “I suppose you’re wondering why I stopped caring about the lives of bunnies all of a sudden? I’m happy to gloat while you slowly die.”
“You saved the bunnies, didn’t you?” Paw-Paw’s deep voice and heavy breath labored under the increasing ice. “That’s why you decided to betray me so brazenly. But that shouldn’t have been possible. I took every precaution.”
“Obviously, it must have been foolproof, since your plan worked out so well.” I looked at the mangled lord’s defunct limbs. “You had us all in the palm of your hand.”
“… Oh, I get it!” Tinker said after a pause, “It’s sarcastic because he has no hands anymore! Good one.”
“How did you do it, then?” Mr. Paw-Paw was a real cranky-pants. “Was it the new bunny? She couldn’t have done it alone. But how did she know about the hidden location? You never left. Was she hiding outside of the city with those other Wolves? You couldn’t have contacted her. My men had eyes on you since our first conversation. None of you left the city or passed any messages out.”
“Of course not,” I said, “It’s not like she was there for the conversation where you explained the whole thing and then just snuck away while I aggravated you as a distraction.”
“Did he really not see me?” Hopper piped up while she kept blasting away.
“Where were you spying on us from!?” The dying lord was much more frustrated than he was curious. “There isn’t a shadow in this city that I don’t have under my watch!”
“I found seven unwatched shadows on my route out of the city,” Hopper said, “Also, I wasn’t spying on you, I was there when you had us surrounded by your thugs.”
“Not a very observant guy when he’s angry,” I commented, “Never asked me my name once this entire time. He even insisted we sleep at his place, and there was no breakfast in the morning. Quite the brute.”
“Oh, that’s disappointing,” Hopper added, “I was operating under the idea that we were being expected, but they wouldn’t have killed the bunnies in order to preserve them for the Blood Moon. It was fairly strange that the warriors inside of the cache were surprised to see me. Maybe I’m not as sneaky as I thought.”
“So, you didn’t smuggle out the message while you were using your musket on the rooftop?” Paw-Paw sounded a little indignant now.
“This tunnel-visioned son of a bitch.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose with my fingers. “Still doesn’t know my name, by the way. Lets me cover him with a sniper rifle, but doesn’t know what to call me officially. It’s a shameful thing to overlook.”
“I only let you do your strange musket strategy because it took you out of the equation when I made my move.” His angry breaths had become visible. “You couldn’t stop me. The fact that you couldn’t have possibly found the bunnies in time, and putting your much more killable tiny bunny in your place was so much advantageous for me, was just a very unexpected and pleasant bonus. How did the taller one know where to look for them?”
“You told us,” I stated bluntly, “You called the hiding place a ‘cache’ after just telling us that you’ve been raiding the Hunter’s caches all over the place in the area. Didn’t take much to put that together. She’s seen them before. She knows where to look for them.”
“Your powers can’t have been just from runestones,” Paw-Paw puzzled the query, “You must have mana infusions. How do you know about those? Only the Regent knew how to properly give them out, and only his special select have them! The champions and the council! I had to steal what knowledge I could find, along with using my own research, so I could make a miniature mana siphon and put all of this together! You have no idea how long it took to make it work on Wolves using only the corpse of a previous champion challenger.”
Goody, goody! He knew more. And I knew how to fish it out.
“That’s your little cane, right?” I asked, “And you used a corpse? That is impressive. You do that all by yourself?” Flop for me, tuna fish. Flop upon the deck and gasp for my amusement.
“I invented a mana vampire made from the scrapped oryctolagium from Buckmaul’s body!” He flopped and strutted like the tuna fish he was. “I got closer to finding the secret of the Hunter’s cryptic notes than anyone! I’m the one who brought this dirt-cheap town to the economic prosperity it is today! Do not patronize me! You can’t possibly survive without me, and you can’t possibly fight the Regent. He holds the whole world in his righteous hand! You think I was a monster? Just you wait until you find what others have been blessed with. Your bid for nobility was doomed from the start. You’ll never be anything more than useless vermin!”
Interesting set of comments. It was nice to know the official name of the brass-colored metal that let the nobles cheat at fights. I didn’t quite like oryctolagium, so I was just going to call it cheat-bronze.
And I’d figured about the Regent having more monster Wolves waiting for us. However, the implication that they were worse than the baron or Wildheart didn’t excite me in the least. More cheating and cop-outs for dying properly, just as usual. I wondered how some of them were going to try to prolong their deaths. My money was on some kind of Wolf fusion monster showing up.
“Well, girls, pack it in, I guess.” I shrugged with obvious sarcasm. “The Regent has more scary monsters and magic! He’s committed the most violations of the laws of nature than anyone, and we should praise him for that. Gosh by golly, if only we had thought to ignore the decency to treat others with a modicum of respect for the living and just debase ourselves with torture and cruelty, maybe we’d be as extra-super-duper-deluxe-chocolate-coated-ultra-rare special as he was. Maybe then us measly little cretins with our weak blood could have done something about that Paw-Paw fella. I hear he’s a tough cookie. Oh, darn it all to heck!”
“These creatures you’ve dug up from the dung heap all must-have enhancements!” Paw-Paw’s breath fogged with the increasingly cold air of his lungs from Hopper’s thorough freeze-gluing. “No set of runestones could have allowed you to do everything you’ve don
e to bring me here. Do the bunnies have mana infusions? Is that how they have such power? The tall one has portals, but no living creature can kick with that much power! And the tiny one doesn’t have the mass to lift a hammer that size. Where are their oryctolagium devices? And you must have your own device. Is that how you lost your ears? Is that part of your transformation? Where could you have gotten all of this ahead of me? Who are you?”
“The guy who kicked your ass.”
“D-don’t you look-k d-down on m-me, vermin!” Paw-Paw’s chest became more and more frozen as the ice sucked the heat out of him. “I am-m th-the right-tful own-ner of this-s city! What d-dirty R-r-rabbit-t-t trick-ck d-did-d you u-use?”
I made the deliberately futile attempt to unload an infinite pistol magazine into the wall-mount-like area around his head, slowly carving a half-circle around his head with bullets. Blood flowed down over his head like red drapes on a window. The hellish beast’s warped wails echoed through the streets we stood in, resounding throughout the city so that everyone knew it was finished. He wasn’t quite dead yet, though. Not until I had wrung out every last transgression out of his hide.
“P-please!” He pleaded, “P-please! M-m-mercy! I-I c-can’t-t d-d-die! I-I w-was s-s-so c-lose! P-P-Preym-m-meister’s-s-s p-p-pow-w-w-wer is-s s-s-s-supp-pp-pp-pposed-sd-sd-d-d to be un-n-stopp- pp-ppable. W-w-why--?”
“Damn, that is quite the stutter!” I snapped my fingers once to call for my shotgun, which Hopper threw back to me. “You don’t have to be nervous around me. I can be a really nice guy once you get to know me a little better. Let me help you with all of that anxious tension you must be holding inside.”