by Dante King
A note, written on thick expensive parchment, lay on top of the broomsticks. Bradley snatched it up.
“‘Dear Justin Mauler and company,’” he read aloud. “‘Here are five of my finest broomsticks to help you in your trials. I know that you will have been keeping your other broomsticks safe, but I have enchanted these new ones with fire-retardant charms and inserted anti-tampering crystals into the handles. Sent with luck and love, Zelara Solarphine.’”
“What no kisses and hugs, friend?” Rick said, grinning.
I ignored this, reached into the crate, and started handing out the broomsticks.
Things on the ground were certainly getting a lot more kinetic. Spells flashed with more regularity now as mages began encroaching a little too closely on the space of others.
“Right,” Damien said, swinging a leg over his broom, “let’s make like a fetus and fucking head out of here, yeah?”
“That’s quite a repulsive mental image, but I agree,” said Bradley.
“Okay, we only need one egg to finish this round,” I said,”and then we have to make it to the finish line.” I paused. “Where the fuck is the finish line?”
Then it dawned on me. There was no nest on the very highest platform.
“Cream rises to the top, boys,” I said.
“But watch out,” chimed in Bradley.
“Because so does the scum,” finished Nigel, without a single stutter.
We took off into the air.
As we went, I cast a Tundra Tempest in our wake. Storm clouds gathered directly below, and flashes of lightning and icy rain started pelting down.
It was nicely timed, because a team of five mages, dressed in figure-hugging garments of comicbook ninjas, were running as fast as they could toward us, various vectors and weapons raised in their hands. As we shot upward, I had the satisfaction of seeing one of them get blown off their feet by a lightning bolt and smash through our empty cache crate. Then the low cloud obscured them.
We made a quick lap around the series of platforms so that we could get an idea of what we were up against. I narrowed my eyes against the wind and searched the platforms for one nest that would be easier to raid than the others.
That hope lasted about as long as it took to complete the first circuit of the platforms. The wyverns nests were thickly made with interlaced branches that looked blackened and hardened with fire. Each nest contained anything between four and fifteen eggs. Over each clutch there crouched the scaly, half-reptilian and half-avian form of the mama wyvern.
They look mean, my brain supplied as we swooped around the platforms in a loose V-shape.
All the wyverns were the same uniform slate-gray color. All sported leathery wings and blunt heads with glowing orange eyes. And all of them, without exception, followed us with those burning orange eyes of theirs unblinkingly. Whenever we would draw too near to one, they would open their mouths and hiss warningly at us. Some even went so far as to shoot deep purple flames in our direction, though none of these flames came close to touching us.
Warning shots, I thought. They’re just telling us to steer clear at the moment, but I bet as soon as we make our move, they’ll try to tear us to shreds.
While I was mulling over our next move, Rick called out, “Watch out! We have incoming, friends! Four o’clock low!
I snapped my head around to see what Rick was talking about. Below us, but moving like streaks of mercury through the air, were none other than the goddamn Blade Sisters. I might have only met the women once, and briefly at that, but that silver hair and caramel-colored skin stuck in the mind. They were sitting astride their own broomsticks, and it looked like they knew how to use them.
A twinkle and a flash were the only warning as the Blade Sisters conjured spinning circular saw blades from nothing and launched them in our direction.
“Scatter!” I yelled. “Do your best to get an egg and get to the finish line!”
With that last piece of obvious advice, I barrel-rolled right. One of the saw blades zipped so close past my throat that it gave a whole new meaning to the term “a close shave.”
I dropped down like a stone as more blades flashed past me. I put on a burst of speed and maneuvered between two stone platforms. Jets of deep purple flame billowed around me as I shot past two fuming wyverns, just managing to avoid getting set on fire.
“What a way to go that would have been!” I said into the wind as I banked left, trying to get an eyeball on my attackers. “Sliced, diced, and barbecued!”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my fraternity brothers shooting around the sky like four panicked swallows trying to dodge some pursuing hawks. In the brief view I had of him, I figured Damien had gotten a shade closer to a wyvern than I had; one of his boots was trailing smoke and embers.
I pelted straight toward the stand of spectators in front of me. Then, at the last possible second, I wrenched hard on the handle of my broomstick and pulled up into an almost perfectly vertical ascent. Looking over my shoulder, I saw what looked like five knife blades shoot underneath me and head straight toward the crowd.
There was a collective scream from the spectators, and then the knife blades simply burst into fragments of metal when they were a couple of yards from smacking into the luckless onlookers.
Reginald Chaosbane, defying all expectations of anyone that knew him, had remembered to include safety measures.
As I was climbing and looking over my shoulder, I saw that the Blade Sister who was chasing me was none other than Afro.
I smiled grimly to myself. It looked like the woman had something personal against me. Well, that was okay. It had been a while since I had been involved in a good, old-fashioned dogfight. What with the crowd going crazy all around us and below us, I could feel the adrenaline spiking inside of me.
I was going to put on a show.
With that thought in mind, I conjured another couple of Magma Bombs, let them cook for a couple of seconds, and then dropped them behind me.
I banked right, so that I could see whether my present had been accepted by my pursuer. Afro, however, looked like she had seen the little grenades coming and had swerved away just in time. Nevertheless, the concussion wave almost knocked her off her broom, and I heard her curse loudly as she struggled to stay on.
I had gained a little breathing room, so I boosted back toward the center of the arena, hoping I could use the time to snatch up an egg and zoom up to the finish line.
In front of me and slightly below, veering wildly around one of the platforms, Rick came shooting in the opposite direction as me. Behind him, the Blade Sister with the sideways ponytail was throwing axes at the big man’s back. As I watched, as the two figures headed toward me, one of the whirling axes flew over Rick’s head.
The next hit him square in the back.
I almost cried out in fury, but then I saw that the axe had bounced off. Rick had obviously prudently invoked his Rock Skin spell again.
Rick was not the best flier in our group, but clearly these Blade Sisters were fucking maestros in the air. Not only that, they were supreme spellcasters. Afro had said that they specialized in Metal Magic, but it looked to me like they couldn’t possibly be students. They were way too adept.
I felt my face crack into a cold smile.
Still, as good as they were, no one could have eyes everywhere, and the chick who was chasing Rick had her eyes locked on her prize.
With a slight twitch of my wrists, I swooped downward, just as Rick was passing underneath me. I slid nimbly off the side of my broomstick, a millisecond before the ponytail wearing Blade Sister went past me. Hanging from my still moving broom, I lashed out and connected with a double-footed kick that caught the woman right in the chest.
She let out a breathy “Ooomph!” as I connected. Then she tumbled through the air toward the ground a hundred yards below.
My broom jerked sideways at the impact of our collision, kind of controlled and on purpose as it was, and I had to fight ha
rd to keep my grip on the handle.
The crowd went goddamn bananas at the stunt I had just pulled. With a heave, and grinning like a maniac, I pulled myself up onto my broom, just as another one of those round saw blades whirred underneath me.
Had I been only a second later, I would have been lacing my sneakers to my knee stumps.
“Shit!” I yelled and corkscrewed left as more blades of varying designs flashed past me.
I was skirting one of the platforms, with Afro still in hot pursuit, when one of the other Sisters came zooming around in the other direction. In the splintered second of time that I had to analyze the situation, she had transfigured her arm into something that looked very much like a scimitar.
Managing to conjure my black crystal staff in my hand just in time, I deflected a blow that would have taken my head right off my shoulders.
Goddamn, but these bitches are good!
For one of the first times in my Avalonian life, I was really at a loss as to how the boys and I were going to survive this encounter. There just didn’t seem to be a way that we could get into a position where we could attack these guys. True, I had taken one out, but that had been luck, really.
As I circled up and around another platform, I avoided a lashing, spear-tipped tail that was whipped at me by a wyvern. I saw the Blade Sister with the slicked back hair harrying Bradley. She was holding onto her broomstick with one hand, occasionally flying no-handed so that she could fling crossbow quarrels at him in the same sort of way that Spiderman shoots his webs.
Bradley had once more assumed his Crimson Titan form, which enabled him to absorb some of the damage caused by the quarrels that hit him. He had also activated his cannon arm augmentation. He could fire over his shoulders at his pursuer, but had to steer his broom with his thighs. The fact that the broomstick was still able to keep him flying with all that extra weight was testament to Zelara Solarphine’s craftsmanship.
As insane and impressive a spectacle as this chase was to watch, with fireballs flashing across the sky and crossbow quarrels smacking into Bradley’s back before falling into the void, what really captured my attention was the object in the woman’s hand.
She had a wyvern egg clutched under her arm.
What the fuck was going on?
Here were a bunch of badass chicks who had magical, combat and flying skills the likes of which I personally had never seen. Chicks that were surely heads and shoulders above everyone else in the Qualifiers and, probably, even more powerful than me and my crew. They had their pick of wyverns nests that they could be targeting, but they looked like they just wanted to ruin my fraternity team’s chances of progressing.
They don’t seem all that interested in winning themselves, I thought confusedly. I mean, they have their very own egg already. There’s nothing to stop that Sister flying up to the finish line now and calling it a day!
I didn’t know what to make of it. Didn’t know what could be compelling these Blade Sisters to act like this.
Well, if they were going to play this weird little vindictive game, then I was going to make it as much of a pain in the ass for them as I possibly could.
Managing to ignore the blades periodically hissing past my ears, I swerved my broom right toward where Nigel was ducking and weaving and occasionally blasting unaimed gusts of galeforce wind back at the shaven-headed sister in pursuit.
“Nigel!” I yelled as loudly as I could over the rush of the air. “Nigel, throw this at that hellcat!”
Nigel looked up toward me as he pelted in my direction. I had no real idea as to whether he heard me or not. Things being as desperate as they were, I wasn’t really too bothered.
For the second time that day, I summoned my undead wolverines.
The five beasts materialized in the air around me and dropped, spitting and snarling. Nigel, flashing underneath me, turned almost fully in his saddle and let loose with one of those localized tornadoes of his.
The wolverines, shining with that dead green light, which I took to mean they were infused with my Leech curse, were catapulted like large, animated grapeshot at the pursuing Blade Sister.
Two of them missed her altogether, the third struck her in the chest and bounced off, but the other two hit her and latched on with teeth and claws.
The shaven-headed Blade Sister screamed, took her hands off her broom, and attempted to rip the wolverines free of her.
But the wolverines were of the undead variety, and the undead cannot feel pain. They only stop trying to attack when their brains have been disconnected from their bodies. Any kid who has watched Shaun of the Dead can tell you that.
The wolverines cut the Blade Sister’s face to ribbons. They tore her eyelids off with their savage, broken teeth. They chewed off her nose and sank their claw into the bloody hole that her missing nose left behind, and they started to dig inward.
She was still gurgling and thrashing when she finally toppled off her broom, but I was pretty sure she would have been dead by the time she hit the floor. The wolverines were still tearing chunks of flesh out of her chest and shoulders, burying their claws in her eyes and generally turning what should have been a fun dogfight into a living nightmare.
That was two down, but none of us had any idea where the regeneration runes were in this battleground. The two eliminated Sisters might be back in the air at any moment.
We needed an egg.
We needed one now.
Trying to get close enough to a wyvern’s nest to steal an egg, without being gutted or incinerated, would ordinarily have been a tricky task. It was almost impossible with Afro behind me, flying so close up my ass that if she burped it was going to come out of my mouth.
I was just going to have to get a little more creative, and a little more merciless.
I hunkered down lower on my broomstick to present a smaller target to Afro. She was still as tight on my ass as bark on a tree, but I was feeling more confident in my evasive maneuvers and used my spare mental energy to figure out how to get my hands on an egg and end this thing.
Of the Blade Sisters, there were three still left in the fight; Afro, Slick, and the one that I had nicknamed Lara because of the Tomb Raider style braid that her silver hair was styled into.
Fighting on broomsticks makes it hard to assess where someone was or what they were doing at any particular time. Things change very, very quickly. It’s like having a bunch of people who are trying to kill each other on dirt bikes… that can fly.
What added to the confusion was that scores of other mages were scaling the rope bridges, lengths of chain and ramps, and climbing up into the combat zone that we had, only five minutes before, had all to ourselves.
The result: increasing bloodsoaked carnage.
Predictably, the crowd was going absolutely wild for it.
As I streaked past a platform, a team of Dwarves dressed in thick plate armor ran hard for a deserted nest, which was crammed with a dozen gray eggs. Just as they reached it, the wyvern, who had been hanging from the far edge of the platform and trying to broil Bradley as he flew past with Lara in hot pursuit, reappeared.
Armor is all very good when it comes to sharp and pointy weaponry. It’s handy for deflecting sword thrusts, stopping arrows, and taking the sting out of maces. When a wyvern gives you everything it has in its napalm tanks however, that armor becomes a very localized, very effective, oven.
The team of five dwarves were engulfed in aubergine-colored flame. Their armor glowed incandescent orange almost immediately. They ran shrieking and gurgling around the platform until all but one of them had run off the edge and plummeted to the ground below. The last dwarf sank to his knees and clawed vainly at the ornate helmet he was wearing. Try as he might, he could not free himself.
The wyvern, showing a consideration I wouldn’t have thought possible, reached over and tried to give the dying dwarf a hand. The beast was a bit overzealous though, and ripped the dwarf’s head off his shoulders with such force that his spine was torn
clean out of his body.
The added confusion of the growing melee meant that spells, magic, and arrows were flying in all directions now.
Unsurprisingly, Zelara Solarphine, a broomstick making virtuoso, was as good as her word when it came to her products. Some random War Mage tried a potshot at me as I passed close to a platform, obviously intent on disabling my broom with some spell or other. The curse got within three feet of my broom and then abruptly veered away and splashed harmlessly into the underside of the platform above.
Finally, after much circling and dodging around, I caught sight of Nigel. He was probing the defenses of a wyvern on one of the topmost platforms.
“Nigel!” I roared as I approached him with Afro still ten yards or so behind me. “Little help here!” I jerked my thumb at the woman behind me as I zoomed past the Wind Mage.
Nigel, without hesitating, conjured another one of his Sandstorms. Afro was forced away by the stinging, abrasive barrage.
“Nigel,” I said quickly, while the halfling concentrated his efforts on keeping Afro at bay, “I’ve got a plan. You and me, we find Bradley and the chick that is gunning for him. You drop below the chick, follow her, and keep your goddamn eyes open, okay? If my little plan works, you’re going to become target number one for these Blade Sisters, so hand off the egg to Rick or Bradley if you can.”
Nigel’s teeth gritted and perspiration ran down his face with the effort of keeping his Sandstorm going.
“Did you hear me?” I asked.
He managed a nod.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go!”
I shot off again, recapturing Afro’s attention by firing a Storm Bolt at her. She leaned back, and the crackling ball of energy whipped past her, so close that it actually singed a chunk out of her hairdo. Nigel rocketed away to find Bradley.
As I went in search of Bradley and his pursuer myself, I spied Rick and told him in about four words, that he should find Nigel and Bradely and stick with them.
I felt that my plan should work. The only potential hiccup was Afro. Her blades were still hurling around me and past me. The only reason that she hadn’t skewered me already was that I had been able to fire off the occasional spell to keep her at bay.