by Dante King
Madame Xel shrugged. “It has been twenty years. A lot can change in that time. I swear even my tits have dropped by a fraction.”
Odette laughed shortly as she stuck her head quickly through the open door to check if the coast was clear.
“Don’t be absurd,” she said, turning back to Madame Xel.
“You’re right,” the Infernal Mage said, flicking her mauve hair from side to side like a college cheerleader. “Some things change, but others do not. My rack is still as perky as it has ever been.”
I laughed at this and shook my head.
“What?” Madame Xel looked at me over one shapely shoulder. “Is that not the truth?”
“I’m certainly not disagreeing with you,” I said. “I was just laughing at your incredible modesty.”
“When you’ve known someone as long as I have known Odette here,” Madame Xel told me. “You’ve reached a level of friendship where there is very little reason to have any modesty whatsoever.”
We went through the door and found ourselves inside of a corridor that looked like it had been burrowed out of the earth by an enormous worm. It was perfectly round, but the edges were rough. Immediately, the image of the sandworms roaming the desert in Frank Herbert’s Dune popped into my head.
I fucking hope that the second test isn’t having to fight one of those, I thought. Although riding one does sound like an awesome way to travel.
Our footsteps echoed along the passageway. It was lit by torches placed periodically along the walls, burning with a pure white flame that gave off a sickly, greasy smoke.
After about ten minutes, we came to the end of the corridor. Another door was set into the rock. While Mortimer stepped forward to assist Odette in opening the heavy oaken portal, I turned to watch the passageway to ensure that nothing furtive and nasty was creeping along behind us.
“What the hell…” I said, completely incapable of keeping the bewilderment from my voice.
The door through which we had come was only a short stone’s throw away from us—maybe twenty yards. I blinked and tugged at Alura’s ethereal silver sleeve. The Gemstone Princess turned, and her mouth dropped open.
“But, I thought that we had been walking for almost ten minutes!” she whispered.
“Chaos Magic,” Mortimer said simply, dusting off his hands and standing politely aside so that the rest of us could pass through the newly opened door. “The easiest way to deal with it is by making use of humanity’s oldest and most useful coping mechanism.”
“What?” I said, tearing my eyes away from the nonsensical sight. “Do you mean that we should just ignore all the wacky shit that happens around here?”
Mortimer nodded. “Yes.”
I looked at Alura. “The man makes a point. Ignoring shit that we don’t understand or doesn’t seem to make any sense has been the go-to move on Earth for fucking centuries.”
Alura smiled. “I understand what you’re getting at, and I think Mortimer is right. Perhaps, we just need to stop being surprised. Perhaps we need to start ignoring what we see and simply forge onward.”
“Wise words,” I said, and on we went.
We emerged out into another chamber. This one though, was rough-hewn and irregular. All the walls and ceiling were covered completely in thick, dark green moss. It looked like a cave—a cave decorated by Oscar the Grouch to be precise—and the word dank was the first adjective that would have sprung to my mind had someone asked me to describe it.
No dank cave would be complete without the steady drip and plink of water falling into a pool, and this weird organic chamber was no exception. There was a pool in the center of the place, filled, maybe over the course of millenia, by water dripping down from the ceiling. The sound gave the cave an eerie vibe, and with the wide cracks in the ceiling, it was already plenty sinister enough.
Odette took a deep sniff of the air. In through her nose, out through her mouth. Her eyes narrowed.
“What?” I asked. “Is this the part where the shit gets flung at the windmill and starts heading right for us?”
Odette’s eyes ran over the two wide cracks that broke the mossy monotony of the high ceiling, slashing through the greenery like a couple of black wounds in jade skin.
“I would say,” she said slowly, “that you are, more than likely, correct.”
As if to punctuate her words, a soft burbling gibbering emanated from one of the cracks.
“Oh, that sounds encouraging,” I said drily.
The gibbering increased in pitch and duration.
The five of us looked up at the crack with more than a little trepidation.
“Would this be trial two, do you reckon?” I asked Madame Xel as the succubus drew a wand that looked more like a rubber baton from her jacket.
“I think I’d be confident in betting one, if not both, of my exquisite breasts on that being the case, yes,” she replied. Her yellow eyes were narrowed, her white teeth bared in a pre-combat snarl.
The gibbering, mumbling blather reached a new pitch before it abruptly ceased. Then there was a chorus of venomous hisses.
“Here we fucking go,” I said to Mortimer, giving the lanky man a nudge with my elbow as I twirled my staff in my other hand. “This should shake the last of that hangover, eh? Want to bet a bottle of Mademoiselle Crowther’s Christmas Claret that I can kill more of these things than you can?”
Mortimer’s face went pale at the mention of the alcohol that had done him so much wrong the previous evening. “Justin,” he whispered, his dagger appearing as if by magic in his hand, “you don’t know what it is we are about to face.”
“Two bottles then?” I said.
Before Mort could answer, the hissing stopped, and the answer to the question of what was coming was answered.
Sort of.
The creatures that issued from the cracks above us were men and women of various magical races—or at least they had been once.
The first creature to appear was a Water Nymph from the waist up, who had probably been quite a looker until something vile had transformed her into a Resident Evil-esque creature.
From the waist downward, the Water Nymph was a tangled mass of ulcerated blue limbs, bursting out of her pelvis like some hideous travesty of a spider. There were at least seven of the tentacles, but there might have been more. Pus leaked down the crooked legs, with their feet splayed in all sorts of different directions.
The Water Nymph’s eyes blazed a bright, mad red.
“She’s looking a bit rough,” I said as the monstrosity scuttled across the ceiling of the cavern, then halted and hissed at us again.
“I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that we just put these motherfucking things down, yeah?” I asked.
“Agreed.” Mortimer pointed his dagger vector at the creature and let loose with a pulsating volley of smoky black darts. The darts peppered the horrible spider creature all up one side, causing it to screech in anger and dismay. It began sprinting across the ceiling, heading for the wall so that it could make its way down to us.
I doubted very much that what it had in mind next was a nice big hug and a sloppy kiss.
Thankfully though, we didn’t get a chance to find out what it had in mind. Even as the ghastly thing scuttled across the ceiling like some fucked up love-child of Regan MacNeil and Spawn, Mortimer’s darts faded into its blue skin. The skin turned black and suddenly dissolved, as if the creature was suffering from an ultra-fast necrosis. Before it had managed to get another ten paces—even with all those crooked legs—the creature fell from the ceiling and exploded into a cloud of vile black dust on the cavern floor.
There was no time to hand around the celebratory cigars and pour the victory brandy. Already, there were more of the vile things swarming into the cave. They all looked to have once been members of diverse races, but they all had the same mutations; too many legs or too many arms, covered in weeping boils and disgusting pustules.
“What the hell has happened to these
guys?” I asked as a host of the creatures scuttled across the ceiling and headed for the walls. “Are these more followers of your pal Entwistle?”
“Yes, I think so,” Odette said. There was a trace of surprise in her voice that did more to unsettle me than the creatures did themselves.
“They surely are,” Madame Xel said, and even the succubus seemed to be bereft of her usual bluster and flirtatious swagger. “But it’s as if they have been hit or dosed with healing magic.”
“Healing magic?” Alura said. “That doesn’t look like healing magic to me.”
The Gemstone Princess’ eyes tracked one of the spider mutants as it made it to the floor and started sprinting toward us. When it was about fifteen yards away, she hit it with a blast of light energy that she had absorbed from one of the smoky white torches. The concentrated light beam punched through the creature like a hot wire, leaving a hole in its chest as round as a volleyball. The mutant crashed forward and skidded across the uneven, moss-covered floor of the cavern.
“I would agree with Alura that these abominations don’t look very healthy to me,” Odette said to Madame Xel as she sliced the throat out of one mutant that had incautiously dropped from the ceiling and landed next to her.
“You misunderstand me,” said Madame Xel. “They have been engorged with healing magic to the point where they have sprouted new limbs. They have been pumped full of magic until their bodies could hold it no longer. They are,” and the succubus Infernal Mage cast about for the right words, “someone’s idea of a joke. A parody.”
“At least they’re not super strong from all that healing they’ve been getting,” I said. “They seem to be just as brittle as regular people, and way dumber.”
I pointed my staff at one of the mutants and let off a Blazing Bolt. The creature tried vainly to get out of the way, flipping across the ceiling with its four deformed arms, like a hideous mockery of an ape. The Blazing Bolt was locked onto it though. The spell struck the mutant in its back. The crackle of energy reverberated around the cavern, and the creature fell limply from the ceiling and splashed down into the pool below. Its head struck a rock and shockingly bright crimson blood sprayed from its ruptured skull.
From then on, there was not much talking, as we used all the ranged spells we had in our arsenal. Dead mutants fell from the ceiling like gruesome bugs. As I’d said, they were not intelligent enough to swarm us at once, or any stronger than your average dwarf, elf, gnoll, or nymph.
We didn’t even need to kill the monsters outright, as they scuttled or clawed their way across the ceiling. If we managed to knock any of them free of the cavern roof, more often than not, they fell to the ground and died on impact. Or else were so injured that all they could do was lie there and screech vainly.
I fired Frost Shards at a cluster of the gross things and managed to knock them from their lofty perch as they gazed balefully with their glowing red eyes. The four monstrosities fell fifty feet from the cavern roof and smashed onto the ground, where they twitched and shuddered.
There was no real joy in this sort of work. No real sense of accomplishment. I could see by the set of Alura’s jaw that she felt the same. It was simply a battle for our survival against a bunch of inferior foes with addled brains that were set on killing us.
I wonder if this is all part of this Priestess’ grand plan? I thought. To demoralize us by having us mow down countless numbers of these mutated zealots.
If that was the case, I was dead set on using her plan against her. I’d use this time to get familiar and proficient with my array of spells so that, when I finally came face to face with the bitch, I could take her down and alakazam her ass into gory chunks.
A few weeks ago, I would have been all out of mana by now, but my mana reserves had increased exponentially with all the training. I couldn’t help but think that Madame Xel’s little potion was also partly to thank for my large reserves of mana.
I used Flame Flight periodically to propel myself up to ceiling level and distract the overly-healed mutants, smacking them with gusto with my black crystal staff; breaking bones and cracking skulls, spilling blood and brains with wild abandon.
This tactic was great for slowing the advance of the mindless monsters, since any of those in the immediate vicinity of where I popped up would instantly stop their running and slash and swipe at me. This would give my friends on the ground the opportunity to fire spells up at the preoccupied creatures and blast them from the roof of the cavern.
Madame Xel helped me in diverting the attention of the devotee mutants. She flapped upward on her giant bat’s wings, spinning and pirouetting. In typical Madame Xel style, she somehow managed to exude an aura of carefree sensuality—even while she was flicking devotees from the cave ceiling and sending them crashing to the floor below.
Unintentionally, the five of us fell into roles. I realized that this wasn’t just good individual practice for all of us, it was a taste of working as a Mage Games team for Alura and me.
Madame Xel and I would fly upward to distract and take the fight to the creatures scuttling over the roof, Alura would scythe and blast down any that reached the walls—with occasional Chaos Magic help from Mort—and any that came particularly close would be split and sliced apart by Odette with her bone spear. Mortimer would also make himself useful if it looked like Odette was in danger of getting overwhelmed, flicking throwing knives into the throats, chests, and eyes of any mutants that drew near.
“I think they’re running out of numbers!” I yelled as I conjured a Lightning Skink. The magical, Great Dane-sized creature—all gleaming neon flanks, teeth like shards of glass, and razor-edged claws—appeared in the cave. It shot away across the floor of the mossy cavern, up the nearest wall, and started mauling the disgusting, pus-oozing monsters.
“I think you’re right.” Madame Xel dabbed at a bead of perspiration on her top lip with the back of her hand. “Thank goodness. If we had to go on for very much longer, my make-up would start to run.”
“Don’t give me that, Madame Xel,” I laughed, blowing a deformed dryad apart in a spray of yellow stomach bile and flopping entrails. “We know that you don’t have to wear make-up!”
Madame Xel, who was fighting with her back to mine, ducked under the clumsy swing of a screeching devotee and stunned it with a perfect roundhouse kick to the face. She scooped up a rock from the cave floor and brought it down hard onto the crown of the halfling abomination’s head, caving it in and sending brains seeping through the broken skull.
“You know just what to say to a lady, Justin,” the succubus said, beaming over at me.
It wasn’t too much longer before the last of the creatures were shambling on their bent legs in our direction. To preserve mana for the final trial, we elected to take the last of them out the old fashioned way.
Mortimer, admittedly, did most of the work. I was guilty of slacking a little, due to the fact that I was watching the Chaos Mage bounty hunter. For a dude who was so unassuming—except for those mutton chops of his—and so spookily placid, he sure could kick the shit out of monsters. He moved with the grace of a dancer, never ceasing in his sinuous movements, his knives moving in his hands like streaks of mercury.
He danced through half a dozen of the devotee mutants like they were standing still. His blades flicked out with pinpoint accuracy to slice through necks. He cleaved hamstrings and elbows to leave limbs flopping uselessly in his wake. Arterial spray misted the air red behind him.
Assassin and kidnapper this guy might be, I thought, but I could probably learn more than a few things from him when it comes to the art of knife-fighting.
Alura finished off the very last mutant devotee. She used her extremely helpful Crystalize Augment spell to turn one of her usually dainty hands into the crystal head of a hatchet. She pivoted away from the last of our enemies and bounced off her other foot before bringing the edge of her hardened hand whirling down, karate chop style, right into the middle of the mutant dwarf’s chest.
Sternum and ribs caved under the blow. The devotee shrieked in pain and frustration before the Gemstone Princess brought her hatchet-hand up and took the monster’s bottom jaw off.
The mutant gargled a little, then slumped over backward, multiple legs splayed in all directions.
Mortimer walked casually over and surveyed the mutant at Alura’s feet. It was twitching feebly.
“I believe that should mean we can move on,” he said. “Trial two passed, but…” He brought a booted foot down hard and crushed the larynx of the still convulsing monstrosity. It lay still.
“But what, Mortimer?” Odette asked.
“But, I cannot help but feel that perhaps this endeavor is going to test us more than perhaps you or Madame Xel anticipated,” the bounty hunter said.
Madame Xel swapped looks with Odette. “I’m not sure about your fashion sense, Mr. Chaosbane,” the succubus said sweetly, “but I’m in no doubt that you’ve a sound mind in that pale head of yours.”
“You think that the third trial will be noticeably harder?” Alura asked.
“I think,” Madame Xel said, biting her tongue thoughtfully before she answered, “that these poor things,” and she nudged one of the fallen mutants with her foot, “were not what Odette and I expected to find here.”
“Not at all,” Odette said.
“What were you expecting?” I asked. “Margaritas on arrival?”
“Not quite,” Odette said. “But I think it is safe to say that Priestess Entwistle’s powers ‘ave most definitely eclipsed mine and Madame Xel’s expectations. They are far beyond the skills and abilities that she ‘ad during the Void Wars.”
“So we’re in for a shitshow then?” I asked.
“I think that a shitshow, as you call it, will be a good result for us, all things considered,” Odette said ominously.
Chapter Nineteen