Steele Alchemist

by Deck Davis

  “Yeah, I-”

  Faei cut him off. “It doesn’t matter. Not right now. All that matters are that you cut us loose and we fight.”

  The booming sounds were getting closer now. It wouldn’t be long until Nezrock the spider wife arrived.

  Faei was right, though. Jake couldn’t wallow. He needed to fight. He stood up.

  Just as he did, a giant shape appeared in the chamber.

  Nothing could have prepared him for the monstrosity that leered at him through the archway. Twenty-feet-tall, oil-black, bristling with hairs. Pincers that could crush a car. Rows and rows of bulbous eyes that looked like pure black caviar eggs. Her legs were thick where they met her body, but sharp and pointed where they touched the floor. Unlike her humanoid brood, she was pure spider all the way through. Even so, she seemed to have an expression on her face. It was slight, but Jake swore that her arachnid feature twisted ever so slightly, just enough to form what looked like a grin. It was so sinister that it sent a shiver from his head to his toes.

  “Jake…” said Faei.

  He ran over to Faei and Solly. Faei squirmed to get free, but Solly seemed to be frozen in place. His face was pale, so much so that it seemed like someone had cut him open and bled him dry. His fingers were curled up tight.

  “I thought you weren’t poisoned?” said Jake.

  “He saw the spider,” answered Faei.

  Their odds had just lowered. He was going to fight a giant spider, and he was going to have to do it with a mage who was petrified of arachnids.

  “Cut me loose,” said Faei.

  “I can’t find my dagger.”

  “Use mine! It’s in my belt.”

  “I can’t see it.”

  “Behind me,” said Faei.

  Her dagger was tucked tight into her belt behind her, so Jake had to almost grab her ass to get it. As he reached for the dagger, he wondered if he was lingering a bit too long. Then he grabbed it.

  The spider walked into the center of the room. She was quieter this time, and Jake wondered if she was heeding Isaac’s advice about being careful.

  “Hurry,” said Faei.

  He sawed at the webs on her wrist, but the dagger did nothing. He pulled out the vials from his pocket. He had three of them; a healing potion, a brittle bone and a dissolve. In his left pocket he had a few more glass vials, but what were they? Oh yeah – mutoctions. Not much use here.

  He opened the dissolve potion vial and dabbed it on the end of the dagger. As the metal started to sizzle, he held it against the webs and burned them away. Web by web, limb by limb, he freed Faei and Solly.

  Now they stood and faced the monster before them. A towering hulk of black. A creature with hairy skin, pincered teeth, sharp legs. The glow of the torch light gleamed on her oil-colored skin, highlighting the tiny hairs. He’d never seen anything so disgusting.

  Solly backed away. Jake grabbed his arm.

  “We need you, Solly,” he told him. “Faei and I can’t kill it alone.”

  Solly made a sound. It wasn’t words, but more of a scared gibber.

  Jake squeezed him tighter. “Push the fear back. Don’t think of it as a spider. It’s just a big, black mass that we need to destroy.”

  The mage shook his head. Without warning, he darted over toward one of the smaller archways that led into other parts of the den. The spider turned, showered her spinneret, and then spurted cobwebs out toward the exit, forming an impenetrable weaving over it. One by one, she sealed off each exit.

  There was nowhere to run. The only thing they could do was fight.

  “Faei,” said Jake. “Where’s your bow?”

  “I must have dropped it when they poisoned me.”

  Nezrock raised her front two legs. Then, bending her back legs and then pushing out, she leapt across the room. As she landed, she struck out with her front legs. One of them stabbed straight through Jake’s waist. He felt the air leave him like he was a deflated football. Curiously, there was lots of blood, but no pain. Instead, he felt a kind of numbness. Whether it was shock or something else he didn’t know, but it spread through him.

  He tried to move, but he couldn’t. His body just wouldn’t respond.

  Faei screamed. When Jake looked at her, her saw why. Nezrock had stabbed clean through Faei’s right wrist. Then, when she’d withdrawn her pointed leg, she made the hole even bigger, until Faei’s right hand hung sideways and looked like it could fall clean off.

  His stomach lurched. He took out a healing potion, even though there was no potion in the world that could heal a wound like that.

  He spoke through the pain. “Solly, I need you to snap to hell out of it. You have to keep Nezrock distracted while I help Faei.”

  The mage didn’t respond. He was frozen in a place of fear, where Jake’s words couldn’t reach him. He’d retreated to a place inside himself, hiding from the horror of the chamber.

  Jake struggled to his feet.

  Yep, there was the pain. Stabbing his waist like nothing he’d ever felt before. So much so that if he had any food in his belly to retch, it would have come up. Instead, he choked back a dry heave.

  When he was in front of Solly, he punched him in the face.

  That did it. A look of alertness crossed the mage’s features. He was back in the room. He rubbed his cheek.

  “Distract her,” Jake told him.

  “I…how? I can’t! I need to go.”

  Jake was ready to punch him again. He didn’t want to, but he would if it came to it.

  “I know you’re scared, Solly. But pull yourself together. For us. Being scared doesn’t help. If anything, it makes it even more likely that the thing you’re scared of, which in this case is being killed by a giant goddamn spider, will come true.”

  “I don’t think I can…”

  Jake raised his fist. “This is what you need to fear. Not the spider. Distract her, Solly.”

  This seemed to shake the mage out of it. Traces of blood flushed his cheeks. Jake had no idea how Solly was going to distract the spider, but he needed to tend to Faei.

  Solly warily approached Nezrock. The arachnid shifted her weight toward him. While her attention was on Solly, Jake ran to Faei and poured healing potion over her wrist. This closed the wound and stopped blood gushing out, but there was little else it could do. Her hand was hanging on by sinews of skin. She’d never use it again.

  He poured some of the potion on his waist wound, and then drank some. The pain began to recede.

  “Know what’s really funny?” said Faei, her face pale. Her eyelids flickered.

  “Don’t lose consciousnesses,” he told her. “Fight it. Stay awake.”

  “I said, know what’s really funny?”

  Nezrock scuttled forward. Out of the corner of his eye, Jake saw Solly raise his hands in the air.

  “What’s funny?” he said.

  “I just realized that my bow is over there,” she said, and nodded across the room. Jake followed her nod and saw a pile of her and Solly’s things, including her bow and bolts.

  “We could have really used your talents right now,” he said.

  He stood up. Across from him, Nezrock and Solly faced off; one giant arachnid with pincers bigger than icicles, and a scared, completely bald and weaponless mage.

  Solly kept his hands in the air in front of him. They started to shake as though some furious energy was running through them.

  In one motion, he swept them forward toward Nezrock and shouted, “Maximo Inferno!”

  Five tall ogres appeared in front of Solly in a line. Their skin was pond-water brown, and their muscles rippled. They looked like they could crunch a skull to dust like a giant smashing a cracker.

  Okay, it wasn’t a fireball, but at least this was something to help against Nezrock. Five ogre soldiers evened their odds just a little.

  And then the ogres turned around. Instead of facing Nezrock, they stared at Solly. Their faces were angry; they certainly weren’t looking on their creator w
ith love. Another of them focused on Faei, and another on Jake.

  “Solly, what the hell have you done?”

  “You told me to try!”

  “Damn it.”

  So now they had a giant arachnid and five ogres to deal with. Faei’s bow arm was completely ravaged, and Solly couldn’t even shoot a fireball without screwing them over.

  What did Jake have that he could use? Half a dissolve potion, and a brittle bone potion. A dagger. Not enough to fight an army of ogres. This couldn’t get any worse.

  “Jake!” shouted Faei.

  She pointed to the roof with her left hand, and when he looked up, he saw that familiar black shapes were squeezing themselves back through a hole, making themselves impossibly small to get through, only to straighten up into their full size once they were in the room.

  It was six spider humanoids dressed in custom-made spider battle armor. They had human faces and seem to regard Jake with a modicum of intelligence.

  One of them, one who had grown a handlebar moustache, made a series of clacking sounds in the direction of Nezrock. The giant spider, presumably their mother, returned with sounds of her own. The spiders scurried down the walls until they were on the ground.

  Solly backed toward Jake, bumping into him. Jake looked at Nezrock, then the ogres, then the spider humanoids. No vial was going to cut it against this onslaught. They were impossibly outnumbered and completely outmatched.

  The ogres began to approach, a hunger for blood and death burning in their eyes.

  “Okay,” said Jake. “Solly, I hate to say this, but you need to cast a few more spells.”

  “What? That doesn’t seem wise.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but since you created the ogres, they feed from your mana, right? So, if you run out of mana, they disappear.”

  Solly scratched his head. “That is true. But who knows what I will cast in the meantime? I could even conjure more of them by accident.”

  “We don’t really have options. We either try this, or we die. So, come on, mage. Give us a show.”

  Solly turned to Nezrock.

  “Inferno!” he shouted, and pushed his arms forward, sending mystical mana energy seeping out.

  The ground beneath them began to crack. The stone rumbled and then tore apart to reveal the tip of a tree pushing its way upwards into the room. Up and up it went until it hit the roof. Then, it spread out its branches.

  “How’s your mana?”

  “Three more spells before I’m drained,” said Solly.

  The tree had split the ogres up, but it didn’t take them long to recover. Not only that, but the spiders scuttled to and fro at the side of him, making it hard to judge their position. He needed to deal with them.

  Solly raised his hands for a second spell. As he did, Nezrock lashed out with her front legs. The mage dived to the left, just in front of the tree, and Nezrock’s leg stabbed straight through the trunk.

  The tree began to groan. It tipped to the right, slowly at first, but gaining momentum. Before they could react, the tree tipped all the way to its side and crashed on top of two of the spider children.

  Nezrock let out a wail so loud that it hurt Jake’s ears. The spiders advanced on him.

  He needed a way to attack them. His dagger just wasn’t going to cut it, so what could he use?

  The bow! Faei’s bow! It’ was stronger than his blade, and it’d give him a bit of range. The only problem was that he couldn’t aim for shit.

  Solly raised his hands again. He crouched behind the tree stump, just out of view of Nezrock. The arachnid stared at him with all her eight bulbous eyes. She tensed her legs, ready to strike as soon as Solly popped his head up.

  Jake sprinted across the room and to the far end, where he grabbed Faei’s bow. He clumsily nocked an arrow, aimed at a spider, and let fly. The bolt picked enough speed, but then struck the wall two feet above the arachnid’s head.

  The remaining four advanced on him, while the ogres focused on Faei. She was sat against the stone wall, her face pale, her eyes barely open.

  Solly leapt out from the tree trunk and shouted “Blizzardon!”

  Jake crossed his fingers and prayed for an ice attack.

  Instead, Solly’s left arm suddenly doubled in size. His sleeves ripped as though he was the Incredible Hulk undergoing an anger-fueled transformation. Within a second, the mage had an impossibly muscular left arm. It was so heavy that, since the rest of his body was his normal size, he struggled to keep balance. He staggered over to the left, away from the protection of the tree stump.

  Nezrock saw this as her chance to strike. She lashed out with her legs. One caught Solly on his calf, splitting it open and sending him to the ground. The other leg aimed for his throat, but Solly pivoted in time for it to stab through the bicep of his new left arm.

  The scuttling sound in front of Jake meant he didn’t have long now. Nor did Faei, who was useless against the oncoming ogres.

  He nocked another arrow. He aimed at a spider’s head, and breathed in. Just as he was about to fire, he stopped.

  This wasn’t going to work unless he did something else.

  Then he remembered. He quickly reached into his left pocket and gathered his mutoctions vials. He found the one he’d made from Faei’s blood, and he drank it all.

  This time, when he readied an arrow, it felt different. He had an instinctive feeling that it would hit whatever he wanted it to. He aimed at a spider, let fly, and then smiled as the bolt pierced its skull. He gave a fist pump, then nocked another bolt.

  Solly had nowhere to go now. He was too far away from the tree stump to hide behind it, and anyway, his calf was torn to pieces. He couldn’t even stand. Instead, he got to his knees. He faced Nezrock. He held his hands up.

  Come on, thought Jake. Just one more spell and the ogres are gone.

  The ogres were within touching distance of Faei now.

  Nezrock east tensed up and ready to end Solly’s life.

  Solly raised his hands and roared, in a commanding voice Jake had never heard from him before, “Transmortify!”

  Sizzling purple energy gathered in Solly’s palms. It seemed to coat him, and it was almost too bright to stare at, like little purple suns that burned in his hands. The energy leapt away from him and rushed to Nezrock, where it coated her body.

  Jake waited for the inevitable ridiculous effect. Would Solly’s spell spawn a flock of sheep? An army of hungry trolls?

  It didn’t seem that way. Nezrock began to change. Her legs started to grow shorter and shorter, and her body mess halved. On and on this change went, until within a few seconds, Nezrock was the size of a house spider.

  Solly stood there wide-eyed.

  “It worked,” he said, in a zombie-like tone. “It worked…. I can’t believe…It worked!”

  With the realization that he had just cast his first intentional spell, a look of sheer delight exploded on his face. It seemed to take decades off his age instantly. He started to dance around on the spot. He had no rhythm, but Jake couldn’t help but grin.

  He glanced over at Faei and saw that the ogres were gone. The transforming spell must have drained Solly’s mana. That left just three spider-humanoids to deal with, though Jake realized that none of them were looking at him. Instead they were staring at a tiny spot on the ground ahead of them, where their much-smaller mother now crept.

  Jake nocked a bolt. Then, one after the other, he killed the spiders. When he was done, he slung the bow around his shoulder and crossed the room until he found Nezrock. She was barely bigger than a coin now.

  “Anyone got a glass?” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  He collected Nezrock, the former twenty-foot high monstrous arachnid, in an empty vial barely bigger than his thumb. After that, in the silence that followed battle, he checked his stat updates. He’d expected a massive influx of experience points from beating Nezrock, but instead all he got was a level up from eight to nine. While the HP and stam
ina boost were useful, it wasn’t what he thought he was going to get.

  It made sense, really. Solly had been the one to cast the spell, and besides, Nezrock wasn’t actually dead. She was just really, really small.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Solly turned around.

  Jake held the vial, displaying the miniature Nezrock. “You did great, buddy.”