by Dante King
The guy in the hat gazed at me levelly but did not answer straight away.
“My name,” he said eventually, “is Arun Lightson.” He flicked his fine orange hair back from his face and flaunted—if flaunted was the right word—a pair of sharp elven ears.
A High Elf then, I thought.
“I’m a Holy Mage,” he said, in the sort of throwaway voice that some a-hole might say that they were an actor that had been nominated for a Golden Globe.
“Good stuff,” I said. “My name’s Justin. Justin Mauler. I’m from Earth, where any prudent man views anyone with ‘Holy’ in their intro with deep suspicion.”
Arun, the High Elf Holy Mage Cock Juggler, indicated the other two members of his group.
“These are Qildro Feybreaker, a Dark Elf Summoner, and my good friend Dhor Boulderfist.”
“Oh, you must be like a Soil Dwarf Mage or something, right?” I said. “With a name like that? C’mon, I’ve read The Hobbit, all you dudes have names like that. I love them.”
Dhor, who had extremely fine features and an aquiline nose that you could have sliced cheese with, replied, “Actually, I’m a Dwarf Earth Mage.”
“I was close,” I said, shooting Dhor one of my most disarming smiles, which ricocheted off him like a bullet from Ned Kelly.
The five of us eyed each other in that particularly friendly way that guys do when they meet other guys whom they would like nothing better than to to throw down with. The facades of many teeth were shown, but nothing that could have been accurately called a smile.
I saw the group whisper among themselves, and it was clear from the gleam in their eyes that they were intending to give me a hazing that would result in a few bruises and at least one black eye.
I was the newest kid in the schoolground, so I was pretty reluctant to kick things off—if anything was to kick off. I could have been totally wrong in my assumption that these four guys were the biggest quartet of scrote-noggins ever to set foot in the universe. Thankfully, Arun broke the ice like Lindsay Lohan smashing through the crust of a fresh margarita.
“Do you know what aggravates me?” he asked rhetorically, in the aristocratic voice of someone who rhymes ‘yes’ with ‘arse.’ “It’s—”
“Do you know what aggravates me?” I said, cutting off what promised to be an extremely dull and predictable monologue. “What aggravates me is when you’re out walking to the shops or something, and you see someone dressed up in hundreds of dollars worth of exercise gear and yet you—dressed in jeans and a tee shirt—walk right past them on the sidewalk.”
The green-clad, hat-wearing prick looked at me with a nonplussed expression.
“I mean,” I said, “why the fuck did they buy that expensive gear in the first place? Do they think that, somehow, them wearing a bunch of over-priced lycra is going to burn more calories than me because I’m wearing jeans? On the contrary; I’m wearing denim. It weighs more. If anything, not only am I able to walk about and get some wholesome exercise, but I can also cruise straight down to my local bar and get a beer without being turned away for being inappropriately dressed.”
Arun looked from me to the rest of his associates. Then a shit-eating grin spread across his face. “I’m not sure what the bloody hell you are yapping about, Mauler, or what you are trying to get at, but—”
“I’m just talking crap, Lightson,” I said, “but what I’m getting at is a distraction.”
And I lashed out with a juicily-timed right boot to the High Elf’s plums, followed by a swift backhand to Qildro Feybreakers’s face. I hit Ike Frostfoot with a jab to the throat, which got him gagging, then finished with a debilitating kick to the knee that dropped the Dwarf, Dhor, like a sack of potatoes.
Before any of them knew what the fuck was going on, they were all on the deck, clutching different parts of their anatomies.
I had to say, as far as diffusing a delicate situation went, I might have surpassed myself there. Only one thing could have improved the situation: for a young lady to be there so that she could appreciate my skills and—
“My goodness, Mr. Mauler, you do seem to have a knack for getting yourself into trouble, don’t you?”
I turned from the four groaning figures in front of me. I smiled. It was the Gemstone Princess herself, Alura.
Chapter Seven
Alura was, as she had been every other time that I’d seen her, an absolute vision. She sparkled, both literally and figuratively.
I turned to face her, but making sure to keep one eye on the four douche-nuggets groaning on the ground in front of me. “Princess Alura!” I said with a broad smile. “Fancy seeing you here.”
Alura walked boldly up to stand in front of me. Her curious gold and white eyes ran over my face. I felt as if she was trying to read something in it, and I wondered if she had inherited her father’s powers of perception.
“It looks like you’ve found yourself in a bit of trouble,” she said in her soft and melodious voice as she looked at the groaning assholes on the ground.
Her ethereal gown flowed about her like clinging mist. It hugged all those places that garments should hug, emphasizing the extremely feminine curves of her glittering body, but only for as long as it took the observer’s eye to appreciate it.
“That,” I said, realizing that I had been staring for a little longer than might be considered gentlemanly, “is quite the outfit.”
Alura laughed lightly. The sound seemed to sparkle in the air. The Elemental woman was becoming more and more captivating to me by the moment.
There was a condescending cough from around calf-height. Arun Lightson had obviously removed his nuts from where I’d drop-kicked them into his chest and was attempting to get to his feet.
“A Gemstone Elemental,” he said, in a voice that was a little higher than it had been a moment before. “Excuse me for saying so, miss, but do you realize what sort of lowlife you are fraternizing with?” He pushed himself up onto one arm. “And, may I also say, that you are one of the hottest pieces of ass that I have ever—”
I kicked Arun’s arm out from under him so that he fell back with a dull expulsion of breath, winded.
Alura linked her arm through mine and steered me away from the scene of the altercation with the practiced ease of the born and raised diplomat.
“Now, now,” she said, “as much as I’m sure that quartet of malcontents deserved what was coming to them, we can’t have you being late for your first potions class, can we?”
“I suppose not,” I said, glancing a final time over my shoulder at the four young men casting malevolent stares in my direction. I looked at Alura. “How did you know what class I’ve got now, anyway?”
She looked sideways at me. “My powers of feminine deduction—and by that I mean that I notice that we are heading in the same direction—led me to guess that you were attending the same class that I myself am heading for.”
“We’re classmates?” I asked.
Alura nodded.
“That’s great!” I said enthusiastically. “I was hoping that you and I might get to know one another a little more.”
Alura gave me a smile.
We walked along in companionable silence, making our way through a series of meandering corridors, following the map in my spellbook. At one point, we had to navigate a series of stepping stones that crossed a fairly wide river running straight across a hallway we had just entered. The water entered through a grate set into one wall and out through a matching one on the other and was the color of cranberry juice.
When this sort of thing in the middle of a building failed to wow me into inaction, I realized just how far I’d come from my life back on Earth. I thought perhaps Alura might mention the strangeness of the indoor cranberry juice river, but she remained silent like me as we jumped from stone to stone to get across.
“Were you planning on killing those four back there?” the Gemstone Princess asked me abruptly.
“Nope,” I said, “I can’t say that I pl
anned on it. If there’s one thing that is becoming more and more apparent to me as I go through life, it’s that there are a lot of vindictive, petty dumbasses out there and only occasionally does the universe see fit to hit them with a lightning bolt. Besides, I was kind of excited to see whether I could make it through a whole day in this world without killing something. Wouldn’t have said much for my willpower if I hadn’t even made it to lunch without a death to my name.”
Alura laughed again. “You have strong willpower, do you?”
I couldn’t help but think that this was a slightly loaded question. “When it comes to certain things,” I said, making sure to meet her piercing eye.
She held my gaze for a suggestively long time before she looked away.
“I thought that you might have been planning on killing them,” she said. “Though maybe you were right not to. Things up here are clearly different from my homeworld.”
“You would have dealt with them differently back there?” I asked, opening an iron-bound door, which led to another corridor, and holding it open for her.
Alura nodded. “Here, at the Academy, you are expected to diffuse situations like that with words rather than spells. This is not the Gemstone Elemental way. Where I come from, when one party disrespects another party by talking down to them, or treating them as inferior in some other way, the disrespect is dealt with through a show of force and a test of mettle—sometimes to the death.”
“I suppose we have to adapt to the environment. Just know that you’re not the only one that’s new here. I’m figuring stuff out as I go along too.”
“I hope that we can figure things out here together, Justin,” Alura said.
“I’d like that. You can never have too many, ah, friends.”
“Especially a Creation Mage, no?”
I smiled ruefully. “Yeah. Well…”
Alura laid her soft crystal hand on my shoulder. “We are both, as my people would say, cave serpents out of their depths.”
I took this to be the Gemstone Elemental equivalent of a fish out of water.
A little pulse of warmth from the spellbook in my hand made me look down. I saw that the little letter ‘J’ which symbolized me was now outside a room marked ‘Frosthall’. I looked up.
“Yep,” I said, “that looks like the place.”
We were outside a large, wooden door that looked like it had been carved from a single piece of oak about two yards across. It was studded with heavy iron bolts, and the heavy iron door handle was shaped in the likeness of a snowflake. The whole door was also rimmed and encrusted with frost.
“You’re not the only one with a hell of a sense of deduction,” I said dryly to Alura.
“Oh, yes, I’m very impressed, Mr. Mauler,” Alura replied.
I opened the door, pushed it open, and led the way into the classroom. The air inside the large room was frigid, but not freezing. It was more like a refrigerator than a freezer, which was good because I wasn’t exactly dressed for arctic conditions. The walls were stone, but layered with a thick render of blue ice. This also covered the floor, though it wasn’t slick or slippery at all. A few ice sculptures were dotted about the classroom; an enormous carved ice beaker in one corner was filled with what must have been dry ice, as smoke poured continuously from its top. In another corner stood an ice statue of a huge nine-foot tall creature that I thought might have been a yeti.
Apart from these decorative pieces and the long science lab desks that stretched across the room, there was no one else in the place.
“So much for not being late,” I said. An image of Arun Lightson and his three cronies flashed through my head. “Note to self; if they look shitty and they talk crap, chances are they’re assholes,” I muttered. “And not worth talking to.”
“This is not the start that my father would have been hoping for,” Alura said. I noticed a trace of worry in her voice. “He’ll be livid if this tardiness sees me ejected from the Academy before I have even started!”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Just say that I distracted you with my dazzling good looks and sparkling repartee. He’ll understand. I think he and I really hit it off.”
“And to think,” Alura continued, either not hearing me or choosing to ignore me, “I never even had the chance to copulate with Mazirian’s very own Creation Mage.”
I raised an eyebrow at this, suddenly pushing the rather inconvenient truth that I was also late for my very first class out of my head. Before I could think of anything to say to this, a trilling voice spoke from behind us.
“It’s never too late to copulate!”
Alura and I spun about and came face to face with a rather eccentric—but quite gorgeous—woman standing with her head cocked to one side and a grin on her bright red lips. She had deep mauve-colored hair, skin as pale as snow, and eyes that darted about like a couple of purple hummingbirds. More notably, she also had a pair of large, leathery bat-like wings protruding from her shoulders and two short, gleaming silver horns sticking up from her forehead.
“Never too late to copulate,” she said, shaking her head to herself. “That rhymed didn’t it? Dear me, but it’s so hard to shake that habit sometimes.”
Despite her arresting physical traits, the woman’s outfit garnered most of my attention. It was the sort of shiny, PVC-looking, skin-tight playsuit that brought to mind a Catwoman who had discovered that her real calling in life was, in fact, not crime-fighting, but heavy bondage.
This eye-catching female apparition giggled to herself as she approached us. Where she had come from was anyone’s guess, but she was standing between us and the door we had just entered through, so unless she had been hanging from the ceiling when we’d entered...
“Were you just hanging from the ceiling when we came in?” I asked the stranger.
“Hmm? Why, yes, yes I was. Hanging out, you might say,” and the woman giggled again.
I let the dad-joke slide.
“You’re a—you’re a succubus,” I said, recognition hitting me like a wet fish in the face.
“A succubus, yes,” the woman said. “And you and you,” she said, pointing at Alura and me with a finger ending in something that was more a talon than a nail, “are late.”
“Sorry?” I tried.
“Such a heartfelt apology has seldom graced my ear canals,” the succubus said with an eye roll. “My name is Madame Xel, and I am the teacher responsible for this potions tutorial.”
“So,” I said, “we’re off to a good start, then?”
“Maybe not in this lesson, but it sounds like your entrance into the Mazirian Academy could not have got off to any more of a bang, Mr. Mauler,” Madame Xel said.
“You’ve heard of me?” I asked.
“Hmm, yes. Yes, I have heard extensively of your exploits from my dear friend and colleague, Enwyn Emberskull,” Madame Xel said, and her flitting eyes fastened suddenly onto mine. “Yes, yes, yes, most extensively indeed.”
“I, uh, well, that’s good, right?” I asked.
“Sounded very good to me,” Madame Xel said. She rolled her ‘r’s when she talked and the word ‘very’ came out like a purr.
If she was flirting any more obviously with me, she’d have her tits out! I thought.
Madame Xel’s attention snapped suddenly across to Alura.
“And you, of course, must be the incomparably dazzling Princess Alura,” she said.
Alura inclined her head. “My sincere apologies on our tardiness, Madame Xel,” she said, with just the right amount of respectful deference.
Madame Xel gave me another look that was so unashamedly hot that I could have fried an egg on it.
“Hmm, well, apologies accepted,” she said. “If anyone deserves a pass on their first day, it’s those two that helped bring me the tail feathers of a Cockatrice—and an Alpha no less.”
So, this woman was the one who’d obtained the items from our quest where I’d first met Princess Alura and her Gemstone Kingdom.
Madame Xel suddenly raised her arms over her head and stretched, her leathery wings rustling, in such an overtly sexual way that I felt the Dicktator, who ruled from the stronghold of my underwear, give a little sigh of longing.
“Mmmm, that’s better,” she said, after what felt like a glorious two minutes. “Now, your classmates have already gone off to retrieve cauldrons, in which they will be brewing a potion—the primary ingredient of which will be a pinch of the diced Cockatrice feathers that you so kindly provided me.”
I frowned. “Retrieving cauldrons? Does that mean we’re going shopping?”
I thought of dropping by Barry’s store again, if it was still in business.
Madame Xel laughed throatily. “Shopping? What good would that be to anyone?” she asked. “No, no, no, Justin! This is the Mazirian Academy after all: the crucible in which some of the most skilled and deadly War Mages in all the worlds are forged. We wouldn’t have our students obtain equipment as central to their education as a brewer’s cauldron just by wandering down to the local shop, would we?”
“I guess not,” I said.
“No. You and the Princess here—along with all your classmates—shall hunt down and find your cauldrons in the wild.”
“Oh, right,” I said, “the wild, of course. Where cauldrons gambol around all happy and free.”
Madame Xel looked at me, her head cocked once more to the side. “That’s right,” she said.
“You’re telling me that cauldrons actually live in the wild?” I said, trying my best to keep the incredulity out of my voice.
I mean, I had already faced off with a plethora of supernatural and fantastical creatures—including, but not limited to: Cockatrices, animated skeletons, trolls, and ghouls—but the idea of having to hunt down a cauldron… It was like someone telling me that they wanted me to go and magically capture a spatula… or a cake tin. Hardly a pulse-raising assignment.
“You didn’t know this?” Alura asked me, her tone surprised.