[Blood Bowl 04] - Rumble in the Jungle

by Matt Forbeck - (ebook by Undead)

  Seeing his mother again reminded him that his own childhood had not been a particularly happy one. His parents had provided for him, Dirk and Kirta. The Hoffnungs had long been one of the wealthiest noble families in Altdorf after all, but Lügner and Greta had always had a relationship with their children that was distant, even at its best.

  As much as Dunk hated to admit it, the words he’d shouted at his mother’s ghost had more than a little truth to them. Lügner had sold his family to Khorne, the Blood God, and Dunk was certain his mother had to have known something about it. At the very least, she was guilty of living in denial about something that had endangered every one of their lives.

  “Let’s hope not,” Dunk said quietly to Slick.

  “All right,” Dunk said to the group. “We’ll camp here tonight. It’s too dark to try to row out of here, unless we’re being chased, and as hard as it is for me to believe it, I haven’t heard anyone crashing through the jungle after us yet. We’ll stay the night on the beach, close to the boat in case we need to make a quick getaway.”

  He looked to Edgar. “Are you all right with taking the watch again?”

  “Aren’t I bloody always?” the treeman said. He made a half-hearted attempt at a grumble, but Dunk could tell that Edgar was happy to have something useful to do.

  “We’ll have to get you going first thing in the morning to reach Tobazco in time for the first game,” Jiminy said as he built a fire from driftwood for the crew to gather around.

  “You think Big Richard will make good on his pledge to have the rest of the team there?” Dunk asked as he settled down next to Spinne.

  “I’d bet on it,” said Slick. “The pygmy halflings want to win a game more than they want another meal. They probably already have the others there and registered.”

  “Let’s hope they’re sweating bullets about us not being there yet,” said Dirk. “Given the chance, I’m going to stomp all over our new team-mates, accidentally, of course.”

  “That’s not much of a fair fight,” said Dunk.

  “Who said anything about a fair fight? This is Blood Bowl.”

  The others all laughed, but Dunk stayed silent. After a long moment, when they’d all laid down to sleep, he spoke.

  “If playing Blood Bowl means stomping on people the size of small children, I’m not so sure I’m interested in playing.”

  “It was a joke, Dunk,” said Dirk. “Don’t take it so seriously.”

  “Blood Bowl’s always been a joke to you,” said Dunk. “Maybe it should be more than that.”

  “How?” said Lästiges. “It’s a game. It’s the greatest game in the world, but it’s still only a game.”

  “Only a game?” said Slick, sitting up, indignant. “Tell me I’m not hearing you right. There is nothing better than Blood Bowl, nothing!”

  “What about peace?” Dunk asked. “What about going to work each day and not wondering if you’ll be killed, or if you’ll have to kill someone else?”

  “Have to?” said Dirk. “You mean ‘get to’.”

  The laughter from the others was more uneasy this time.

  “What are you going to do?” Dirk asked. “Quit? You’re a star player on the world championship team. Slick’s cut one hell of a deal for you. That’s not the kind of thing you walk away from.”

  “Why not?” asked Dunk. “We have the family fortune back, such as it is, and I have my earnings from the last three years. If I wanted, I would never have to work again, much less pick up a football. Same goes for you, Spinne, Edgar, and M’Grash too.”

  Silence fell over the crew so hard that Dunk thought he could hear the twinkling of the stars.

  “I like playing Blood Bowl.”

  It took Dunk a moment to realise that the words had come from Spinne’s mouth. He got up on his side to look at her as she lay next to him in the sand.

  “I enjoy it. Sure, there’s the gold and the glory and the fame that goes with all that, but I honestly love the game.”

  Dunk tried to swallow this, but found it went down hard. “You enjoy murdering people?”

  Spinne smacked him lightly on the arm to tell him to stop being silly. “That’s only one part of the game, and not the main one. I enjoy the athleticism, the competition, the sensation you feel when you slip past the defence to snag a pass in the end zone. That’s all very real to me and has nothing to do with killing anyone.”

  “Check her stats, son,” said Slick. “Her kills-per-game ratio is lower than yours.”

  Dunk considered this for a moment. “I don’t try to kill anyone when I play,” said Dunk. “It just happens.”

  Dunk could almost hear Dirk rolling his eyes in the darkness. “Are you the guy who just bought part of a team?” Dirk said. “I think that makes you more complicit than any of us. You’re supporting a pack of killers. You help pay their salaries.”

  “I did that so we could come here to find our sister.”

  “You could have just sailed here on your own. You didn’t need to bring everybody else.”

  “Pegleg held my contract over me—”

  “Please,” said Lästiges. “Isn’t that what you pay Slick for? Are you saying he couldn’t have got you out of your contract, at least for a little while?”

  Slick cleared his throat. “Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, but this was the cleanest route to travel. When you’re one of the team’s owners, people ask a lot fewer uncomfortable questions.”

  “I play this game because I have to,” Dunk said. “I was flat broke when I started.”

  “But you aren’t now,” said Lästiges, “and that’s not what I asked.”

  “I-I don’t know,” Dunk said. He fell silent, and no one else said a word.

  One by one, everyone but Edgar fell asleep, their snores forming a shore side symphony that overpowered the sound of the surf. Dunk lay awake for a long time, thinking about what they’d said.

  30

  “Welcome to the Tobazco Bowl, Blood Bowl fans, for what is being billed as the first true word championship in Blood Bowl history! The best teams of the New World are set to face off against the Bad Bay Hackers, the best of the Old, in a battle for bragging rights the world over. Isn’t that right, Bob?”

  “So right I’m turning in that direction, Jim! I haven’t seen this kind of hype for a four-team tournament since the NAF disbanded. Commissioner Roze-El really knew how to whip the fans into a frenzy, and it looks like the teams of Lustria do too!”

  “I understand that’s mostly thanks to the Lustrian Lusties, the Amazon team, and their ace promoter Enojada. Without her advances, the Hackers would never have even known about this tournament, much less agreed to take part in it!”

  “Do we have to listen to this dreck?” Dunk asked.

  Pegleg glared at him and at the rest of the Hackers who’d been squirming in their seats since before the Cabalvision broadcast had begun. “Because of you and your damned, miniature ‘sponsors’, Mr. Hoffnung, we haven’t had any time to scout out our opponents, so yes, we will sit here and suffer through this entire pre-game show.”

  “What about a pep talk?” asked Dirk. “We always get a lot out of those. Won’t this cut into your quality ranting time?”

  Pegleg stared at Dirk as if he thought keelhauling him through a lake of sewage might be too good for him. “You remember the speech I gave before the Blood Bowl tournament championship game?”

  Dirk, silenced by Pegleg’s menace, nodded. So did everyone else in the room.

  “Mull that over in your head while we watch these idiots, Mr. Heldmann, and keep your mouth shut.”

  Every pair of eyes turned towards the large crystal ball that took up most of one side of the room.

  “After the disastrous Dungeonbowl fiasco this year, Blood Bowl fans are hungry for a special treat!” said Bob.

  Jim nodded along. “I’ve never seen the College of Wizards so angry! I suppose that’s what happens when the Oldheim Ogres decide to destroy the entire underground stadium as so
on as they go up by a touchdown!”

  “From their point of view, it was a flawless strategy,” said Bob. “Start to win, end the game. If you can’t play any longer, then the team in the lead must be the winner!”

  “It all fell apart when they broke into the VIP box and devoured all the Verifiably Insane Panderers! Without that cabal of advertising agents, financial support for the event collapsed! We can only hope they’ll manage to pull everything back together in time for next year’s major.”

  “There’s an excellent chance of that. Even before the dust settled over the stadium, the PAs, Pandering Assistants, were making plans to move out of their cubicles and into their bosses’ offices. Once the succession wars are over, we should have the right people in place to make sure that next year’s Dungeonbowl goes off without a hitch!”

  “I don’t think they’ll invite the Oldheim Ogres back to play again though!”

  “I wouldn’t say that! The footage of their demise is the most watched show on BooTube, the new ghost-run aggregation of shows too short and silly to show on a real Cabalvision network!”

  “I thought that was only for goblin-stompers and other go-to-sleep aids!”

  “Our boss here on the Wolf Network, Ruprect Murdark, just bought the Ghost Writers behind BooTube for several dozen sets of polished gold chains with Advanced Rattling Technology, so you can expect to see a lot more of Funniest Horrible Accidents rejects soon on a crystal ball near you!”

  “Thankfully, we have a hot series of games here for you this weekend to make up for the astonishing lack in our schedule that old clips on BooTube can’t begin to fill.”

  “First up,” Bob Bifford said in his ogrish way, “it’s the Hackers, under the auspices of their local sponsors the Sacrifice Flies, versus the all-lizardman team, the Ssservants of the Ssslann!”

  “Isn’t their name just Servants of the Slann? Or are you trying to mimic the local accent again?”

  “No, look! It’s written on the copy just like that!”

  “Who taught you how to read? Or how to pronounce auspices? I thought you’d been forbidden from lessons after having your last tutor for dinner.”

  “True, but she was delicious! Wolf Sports put me into an intense language camp, with wizards enchanting the words directly into my brain with little machines with glowing screens!”

  “Still, how did they get anything to stick in that mind of yours when everything else failed?”

  “Torture! Every time I got a word wrong, they removed one of my fingers!”

  Bob held up his hand. All the fingers were there, but they’d been reattached at the wrong angles, often with the joints twisted in the wrong directions.

  “Good thing they had an apothecary on the premises!” said Jim.

  “I’ll say! I went through each hand and foot at least six times!”

  “I thought you were walking a little funny… er, than usual!”

  “Anyhow, after the prime match-up, which is being played early to accommodate our viewers back in the Old World, we’ll have the second part of our double-header: the lovely ladies of the Lustrian Lusties pitted against the Skaven Scab-Eaters.”

  “I hear the Lusties are heavily favoured in that game,” said Jim. “Word is that the skaven captain chewed off his right arm after a date with a particularly ugly cheerleader last night, and it has yet to grow back!”

  “That seems like it should set up a final confrontation between the Hacker-Flies and the Lusties tomorrow!”

  “Tell me, Bob, why do they play the games so close together?”

  “For the answer to that, let’s go to our roving reporter, Lästiges Weibchen! Lästiges?”

  The scene shifted to show Lästiges standing on the edge of a field outlined in the bowl of an active volcano. Lava glowed along one side of the pitch and showed in cracks throughout the entire playing surface.

  “Thanks, Bob!” said Lästiges. “I’m here with Madre Caliente, the groundskeeper for the Lusties, who claim the Tobazco Bowl as their home field. Tell me Madre, what is it about this playing surface that makes it so special?”

  The camra swivelled to focus on a woman whom Dunk had no doubt had once had men chasing after her for as long as they could manage to avoid slipping in each others’ drool. Her skin had seen so many seasons of tan, though, that it had become as wrinkled as a shepherd’s jacket. The only exception to this was her face, on which her skin had been pulled back so tightly that it looked like her features had been drawn on the outside of a baby-smooth football. She wore a bright yellow bikini that offered precious little protection from the sunlight that had ravaged her so regularly over the years. Her smile, though, seemed natural, except for how blindingly white it stood out against her bronzed skin.

  “Well, Lassie, you don’t mind if I call you that, do you?”

  “Actually—”

  “As I was saying, Lassie, this volcano explodes, like, once a year, you know? Right about this same time, kinda like a cute little clock, except, of course, it’s big and deadly.”

  “Why would anyone want to play Blood Bowl on such a deadly surface? Are the Lusties all crazy?”

  “Like the hot, little foxes they are! The pitch is so hot, you know, that you can barely wear armour at all. That’s why our girls wear bikinis on the field instead of all that stifling, restricting stuff. Those silly people who refuse to loosen up usually end up passing out from heat stroke before halftime. We even saw a treeman burst into flames once!”

  Edgar yowled in sympathy from the back of the room.

  “What did you do?”

  “Well, thankfully, I always keep a fresh supply of marshmallows in the dugout. We just broke off some of his branches — they were so dry, you know, I don’t think he knew anything about a proper moisturising regimen, and then we had ourselves a tasty little roast right there on the field. After the Lusties scored, of course. Go, Lusties!”

  “But why now? Certainly there are better times to play a match than just before an eruption.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Caliente winked at the camra. “If you were a bunch of wussies! It’s just a little lava. What’s a second degree burn? That’s how I keep my skin looking so young and fresh!”

  “But isn’t there a danger that the field will explode while the players are on it?”

  “Oh, sure! Happens all the time.”

  “But that’s not a concern?”

  “Oh, honey, a volcano’s just like a man. It rumbles a lot and gets really steamed sometimes, but once it does its burning-hot business, it calms right down again.

  “The key is to know when to get out of the way. We almost never lose a whole team, usually just a player or two, mostly catchers for some reason.” She scratched her head, and her scalp wiggled back and forth.

  “Until then, though, that soft, hot surface is the best thing in the world to play on, you know. I love it so much I sometimes lay down on it and roll around on it. I rub my whole body on it until I feel toasty warm, inside and out!”

  “There you have it!” Lästiges said to the camra. “A playing surface that’s deadly when toyed with, um, improperly. Hope the team apothecaries have vats of burn ointment lined up. They’re going to need them! Back to you, Bob!”

  Pegleg shut the crystal ball off. All eyes in the room turned to Dr. Pill.

  “What?” the cranky, old apothecary said. Like the rest of the team, he seemed no worse the wear for his time with the pygmy halflings. In fact, he seemed more relaxed than Dunk had ever seen him. That hadn’t blunted his attitude though. “Suck it up, you pansies.”

  “You have to be kidding me, coach,” Dunk said as he stood in the dugout dressed in nothing but his helmet, boots, and shorts. “We’ll get killed.”

  The other players on the team grumbled in agreement. None of them liked this arrangement.

  “I feel naked,” said Spinne, who at least got to wear a short shirt in addition to her shorts.

  “I can help you out of those last bi
ts, baby,” Getrunken said. He was intoxicated again, although Dunk couldn’t say for sure on what. His eyes looked like they’d been open for days, and he stank of some kind of burnt weed.

  “Aren’t you going to defend her honour?” Hernd asked Dunk.

  Dunk looked at her like she was insane. “Have you met Spinne?” he asked. “She doesn’t need my help. More to the point, she doesn’t want it. I used to try to help her out with things like this.”

  “And?”

  “Watch.”

  Getrunken draped a long, lazy arm around Spinne’s shoulders and let his hand rest on her breast. “Come on, baby, we’ve still got a few minutes before the game.”

  In the blink of an eye, Spinne moved, and Getrunken dropped to the ground, clutching his crotch and moaning in a high-pitched voice that sounded like that of a little girl.

  “Coach,” Guillermo said, looking down at his fallen team-mate, “I’m going to have to insist on being able to wear a cup.”

  All of the male players shot up their hands to call for one too.

  A line formed at the equipment cage, and Cavre handed each of the players some additional pieces of armour. These included elbow pads and kneepads, each of which bore vicious gold spikes against the Hacker green. Each of the men received a codpiece, and this had a spike on it too.

  “Isn’t this a little, um, you know,” Dunk said to Spinne.

  “Small for you?” She laughed. “Get used to it, big guy.”

  Dunk blushed. “No, I mean it’s ridiculous. Am I supposed to hurt someone with this?”

  “It’s extra protection,” Spiel said. “Somebody would think, ah, long and hard before kicking you there.”

  “Point taken,” Dunk said, being careful not to injure himself as he put the spiked codpiece on.

  “Here,” Dr. Pill said, as he wheeled a huge vat out into the centre of the room, “be sure to cover all of your exposed skin with this too.”

  Big Richard came walking in behind the apothecary, dressed in a tiny Hackers uniform. The few pieces of armour he wore were Hacker green, but the paint on them was so fresh it had rubbed off on to his skin in places. Someone had glued a label with a Hacker logo on it on the side of the helmet, but it had already fallen askew.