by Dante King
Thinking that not touching it would be the safest option, I fired a Blazing Bolt at it, hoping to simply blast it right off its hinges.
My spell hit the door right in its middle and was absorbed as neatly, and with as little fuss, as if I had thrown a water-balloon at it.
I puffed out my cheeks.
“Guess we just have to open it, don’t we?” I said.
There was no point delaying. I couldn’t help but think that we must have been getting close to the center of the maze by now. I wondered if any of the other teams were already in there, collecting whatever egg it was that Reginald Chaosbane had mentioned.
I stepped forward and pushed open the door.
My computer gamer’s reflexes saved me.
There was a snake nailed above the jamb of the door on the other side by its tail, and it was super pissed about it. As soon as the door opened, the irate creature had acted on impulse and tried to bite me in the face with inch-long fangs dripping green venom.
I dodged to the side as the snake flashed past my face. Instinctively, having watched enough Animal Planet to know that the best way to gain control of a snake was to pin it behind its head, I snatched out with my hand and grabbed it.
The snake thrashed in my hand, a foot of fucking furious, scaly death desperately trying to sink its fangs into any part of my anatomy that it could reach. Behind me, the other four lads took a step back.
Nigel had gone white as a sheet.
“By the look on your face, I’m guessing that this is a venomous snake?” I asked while the snake hissed in a frenzied fashion.
Nigel nodded mutely.
“Just out of interest,” I said, “how dangerous is this thing that I have in my hand?”
“Uuuuh,” Nigel. He took another step back, as if his brain had caught up with itself and was availing him of the facts. “W-w-w-well, that’s a b-baby one, judging b-by the size of it. A baby hexviper.”
“That’s good then,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” said Nigel.
“No?”
“N-n-n-no. The adults will sometimes just bite you without injecting any venom, just to scare you away, you see. But the babies, they haven’t usually learned this skill so early on, so they hit you with every drop of magical venom that they have in their g-g-glands.”
“Ah,” I said. “And the venom does…”
“Well, it d-depends on what sort of mage you are,” Nigel said. He took off his glasses and polished them. “At the end of the d-d-day though, you basically spasm so hard that you break your own back and then either vomit or shit your g-g-guts out.”
I looked at the little Wind Mage.
“Oh, and that’s not hyperbole,” he added. “You will quite literally shit or spew your entrails out of your b-b-body.”
“Rough way to go, friend,” Rick said, without a trace of irony in his voice.
“At least it’s not overly angry,” Damien said. “I remember hearing that those things can get even nastier when they’re angry.”
“Its tail is nailed to the top of this door,” I said.
“Hm,” said Damien.
“Fuck it,” I said, “we can’t be hanging around here all day. Move aside.”
The boys scrabbled to clear a path.
“Right,” I said. “I’m going to free this thing, lob it as far as I can, and then Rick is going to put up a Rock Wall in the doorway so that it can’t come after us. Okay?”
Bradley raised a hand.
“Why don’t we just bloody well kill it?” he asked.
“Because, it’s already been nailed to a door frame for who knows how long,” I said. “Fair is fair. Poor little guy has probably had a hell of a day already.”
Bradley nodded. I got the distinct impression that he thought I was eating with only one chopstick with regards to the hexviper, but he hadn’t seen as many David Attenborough documentaries as I had.
I pulled the hexviper free of the nail and tossed it as far as I could manage down the path we had just come up. Then we all dashed through the door, and Rick sealed it tightly with his new Rock Wall spell.
A short while later, we came to our first real check, as far as choosing which way to go went.
We came to an intersection where the path converged with five other trails, all going in different directions.
“Shit,” Damien said. “Ain’t much use now, the old sense of direction. Any of these paths could go any which way, you know. There are a couple that I would favor—that one in particular, and that one.” I pointed at the leftmost and rightmost paths. “It’s a bit of a gamble though.”
I was struck then, with an idea. It would be a nice way to use one of my own new spells, as well as to boost the bros’ confidence in my leadership abilities.
“I’m going to send these new undead skeletal wolverines of mine down the various pathways,” I said. “I’m pretty sure, from the little bits and pieces that Odette has told me about summoning the dead, that they have a fairly limited intelligence. But, if I send one down each pathway and tell them to return if they find their way blocked by a deadend or magic of any kind, we might get one that doesn’t come back. That’ll show us that that path is open at least.”
“You’re saying that any that do return, it means that that path is one that we can definitely cross off the list?” Damien said.
“That’s right,” I said.
“S-s-s-sounds thin,” Nigel said.
“Sounds like Tara Reid circa 2016,” I said, not caring that only Damien would get the reference, “but it’s the best we’ve got right now.”
I summoned five undead wolverines, pointing my black crystal staff at the ground, and bringing the brutal, vicious-looking creatures burrowing up from the soil.
They looked like what you might have got if a black bear and a weasel had met at a bar, had a few too many tequilas, and decided to screw animal kingdom convention by screwing each other. The undead wolverines were each about the size of a Labrador, with bullet heads, spade-like paws and teeth that looked like they could tear your muscle from your bone as easily as you might strip a chicken drumstick. Being undead, they were also patchily furred, ragged, and showing bones through rents in their skin. A feral green light burned in their eye sockets.
Then, using my mind to instill in their magical, flickering little consciousnesses what I wanted them to do, I sent them off on their way.
It was hard waiting for the creatures to disperse and come back. Every fiber of my being nagged at me to get moving—even though we had no real idea which way to go.
The crowd roared and raged unseen around us, sounding like a storm-tossed ocean. The cries of the fans rose and fell suddenly and without warning, hinting at other action taking place around the maze. Chants started up, carried by ten thousand throats before being replaced by abrupt shrieks of shock or outrage, groans of despair, or commiserating cries.
The other four lads looked around at the empty hedges, while above us the lilt underside of the leaves alternated from electric blue to venomous yellow, glaring red to bubblegum pink.
After what felt like a goddamn lifetime, but was maybe no more than two minutes, one of the wolverines reappeared. Then another and another.
“Yes!” I said. “Remember what those paths were.”
We waited another minute or so for the other pair of undead creatures, but they never showed.
“Fuck it,” Damien said. He pointed at the rightmost path. It went left before turning right a little further along. “That was one of the paths that I was leaning toward. The other one, I reckon that’s going in the complete wrong direction.”
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“Of course, I’m not sure!” Damien retorted. “But I’m as close to sure as can realistically be expected in this situation.”
I punched him on the arm. “That’s good enough for me,” I said, breaking the spell that I still held on the skeletal wolverines so that they collapsed into piles of bones. “Let’
s roll.”
We moved quickly along the path that we had decided on. I was at the front of the pack, my senses questing for any sign of magical boobie traps or creatures that might want to do us ill.
Something was dragging at me, something that might have been instinct or my gut. It was telling me that we were close to reaching the end of the maze now.
We turned a couple of short, sharp corners and, all of a sudden, we saw light at the end of the tunnel of foliage.
“That’s the clean light of day, right there,” I said.
“Yes, it is,” said Bradely. “So what are we waiting for?”
He had a point. As one, we set off at a jog, moving quickly onward.
Once more, lounging around and watching movies paid off for me then. I knew that it was here, when it looked like the protagonists were home and dry, when things all too often came unstuck.
The skellies—undead, animated skeletons—ambushed us as we were halfway down the home stretch. There must have been over a dozen of them, lurching out from the walls of the maze and heaving themselves up from out of the soil beneath our feet. They appeared from both in front of us and behind us.
Where some less experienced War Mages might have hesitated and sealed their dooms at this point, my fraternity brothers and I barely even hesitated. Likely our confidence came from the fact that the very first time we had all fought as a unit, as a fraternity, it had been against such creatures as these.
As I was at the front, I conjured a couple of Crystal Magma Bombs and tossed them down the tunnel. The little magical explosives rolled beneath the feet of the few skellies shambling down the path to cut us off. The enchanted grenades bounced and tumbled across the dirt before going off with a satisfying whomph that sent the three skellies showering in all directions.
I used my Flame Barrier spell to form a flaming machete. I plucked the floating weapon from the air and brought it scything down onto the arm of a skellie that was reaching for Rick. The creature’s arm flew off, and it looked down at the stump in dull-witted consternation.
Rick crushed the thing’s skull with one hand, picked up its femur as it crumbled to the deck, and used the thigh bone to smash another one’s head off. The skellie’s skull was torn from the top of its head and hurtled down the length of the tunnel and threw another skellie off its feet.
To buy us a little more time, Nigel activated his fresh new spell, Sandstorm, and aimed the sand-filled wind back down the way we came. The quartet of skellies coming at us from that direction were buffeted mercilessly, the few bits of flesh and skin that coated their bodies torn away. After a few seconds of this, the two skellies at the front of the group of four fell to pieces.
Damien, stepping forward, then directed a couple of Fireballs, no bigger than my thumbnail, into the gaping eye sockets of the remaining two animated skeletons. The Fireballs rocketed around inside the two creature’s skulls until the old bone simply cracked and fell to bits.
The skellies dropped.
Bradley, Rick, and I went to work on the remaining four skellies. I had my flaming machete. Bradley was grappling with a skellie with his bare hands and attempting to twist its head off. Rick kicked the legs off of one and then picked up the other and pulled it apart like a Christmas cracker.
As I went over to hack at the legless skeleton’s head with the machete, Rick helped Bradley rip his skeleton’s clean off.
In a matter of seconds, we were all done.
“That was f-f-fucking fun,” Nigel stammered, wiping a bit of bone dust off his glasses.
“I concur,” Bradley said. He reached up and touched a small cut on his forehead.
Damien pointed at him. “Ah, the low-man drew first blood! That’s a shot of ghoul venom later!”
I clapped my hands to capture the attention of the other four. I pointed down the last one-hundred yards or so of maze.
“I’m glad you’re having a good time,” I said, “but I think you’ll find that the fun is only just beginning!”
With no more said, we brushed ourselves down, girded ourselves, and ran out into the light to face whatever fresh hell was in store for us next.
Chapter Fourteen
What awaited us was made immediately evident on exiting the maze.
We all stood blinking in the comparative brightness of the daylight and waited impatiently for our eyes to adjust.
Then, as one, we looked up.
“Ah,” I said, “so that’s what all those fucking egg puns were about.”
“I thought they were pretty crack-up,” Damien said quietly, his mouth hanging open slightly as he ran his eyes over the sight in front of him.
“Yeah,” Rick rumbled slowly, “the crowd sounded like they were having a shell of a time.”
I held up a hand. “That’s enough of that,” I said. “Seriously.”
In front of us, towering up into the air in multi-storied levels, were a series of levitating platforms. These platforms varied in proportion from basketball court-sized to so small that only one person could stand on them at a time. On every one of them, regardless of their size, was a nest. These nests were what I had caught a glimpse of at the very beginning of the Qualifiers, when the maze was first being raised.
“Where’s our resident wildlife expert?” I asked, looking around for our token halfling.
Rick pointed down at Nigel who was looking up, entranced.
“Nigel,” I said. “Nigel!”
Nigel jumped and looked over at me.
“H-hello,”he said, in a strained voice.
“What sort of creature do those nests belong to?” I asked.
“Wyverns,” the Wind Mage said without hesitation.
“Wyverns…” I said. “Aren’t they just dragons?”
Nigel shook his head. His eyes were darting all over the place, trying to catch a glimpse of the creature that he had just named.
“A close cousin,” he said. “They’re much smaller and only h-h-have two legs, as opposed to four. Their w-wings act as their other two legs.”
“Right,” I said. “Rare are they, wyverns?”
“N-n-not especially,” Nigel said, “but they are elusive and shy. Look there’s one!”
We all followed where Nigel was pointing upward. On one of the smaller floating platforms, a long, scaly neck and blunt head had appeared. It was only a silhouette against the bright sky beyond, but the creature looked about ten to fifteen feet long.
“Are they vicious?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“I sure as shit bet they’re going to be vicious when we try and steal one of their eggs,” Damien said.
Nigel nodded.
I pulled my gaze down from the floating platforms that rose up to the very rim of the gargantuan stadium. I had just remembered what Headmaster Chaosbane had said during his introduction.
“There shall be an item or gear cache waiting for each team. Inside, they will find equipment or weapons that have been supplied by their sponsors to aid them…”
The maze encircled us now, pressing at our backs. There were already a few teams milling around the area with us, but it wouldn’t be long before more and more mages started coming through.
“Let’s hurry up and find our cache,” I said. “It’s going to turn into a fucking slaughterhouse down here once more teams arrive.”
It seemed like we were not the only ones with that idea. The few teams who had conquered the maze were already dashing from one cache of weapons and equipment to the next, clearly searching for the crate which had their names.
“Let’s spread out,” Bradley said.
Spreading out was a little risky. It was, afterall, a lot easier to pick off one mage than it was to get the better of five mages together. However, while there were relatively few other War Mages down here with us, I thought that we may as well do as Bradley suggested.
“Go!” I said. “If anyone finds it, then don’t be afraid to sing out.”
“Sing what?” Rick asked.
“Sing whatever the hell you like, man,” Damien said over his shoulder as he tore off. “But just sing it loud!”
It only took a few moments for me to stumble across our cache of gear. I yelled out to the others, and they came running in.
Even in the five minutes or so it had taken me to chance upon our stuff, more mages had emerged from out of the maze. Some looked distinctly woebegone. One group of colorfully robed girls, wearing stereotypical wizard hats, limped out of an exit. They were bleeding, their clothes tattered, looking as if they had just gone twelve rounds with a rabid grizzly.
Me and the boys gathered around the large crate that had the following stenciled across the top of it, as well as down the side:
MAULER
DAVIS
FLAMEWALKER
WINDMAKER
HAMMERSMITH
“That’d be us then,” Rick said approvingly.
“You think?” Damien said brusquely. The Fire Mage was glancing around us with narrowed eyes. He looked up and muttered something to himself.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I said, I hope we’ve got something in there of the broomstick persuasion, because things are going to be heating up in here very soon.”
I looked around. He was right. More mages were showing up. Already, on the other side of the circle to us, a small pitched battle had kicked off. Spells flashed backward and forward.
Damien pointed up. Each of the floating platforms was connected to the one above it by rope bridges, crude stone ramps, or dangling chains.
“That’s going to be a bloody shitshow once everyone starts swarming up,” Bradley said, voicing all of our thoughts.
I reached down and ripped up the lid of the large wooden crate.
“Fucking hallelujah,” Damien breathed.
Inside the cache were five broomsticks. Whether they were the same broomsticks I had acquired from Zelara Solarphine way back when, I wasn’t sure at first glance.