by Dante King
I patted him on the back. “Are we going to have to get the magical clean-up crew in again?” I said, trying to keep my voice serious. “Do we need professionals to come in and scrape all the jizz off your bedroom ceiling?”
“Fuck you, man.”
“I don’t think you’ll be fucking anything for a little while,” I said, my voice breaking. “Your cock must be worn down to a nub and your balls shrunk down to the size of raisins!”
Damien moaned. “I don’t know how the hell I’m going to go in Physical Fitness Training.”
“Hey, if it makes you feel any better, just imagine the looks on those jackasses’ faces when we see them this morning. I can’t wait to hear what happened. I’ve heard of a cheese and wine night, but I’ve never heard of a beer and swine night.”
This elicited a smile from Damien. “Yeah, that should act as a painkiller, I guess.”
“You know it,” I said. “Now, let’s get downstairs, grab some coffee and some breakfast, and see if the low-man has an ice-pack for that busted bait and tackle of yours.”
Unlike any of the other classes that I had participated in thus far, save for potions, our whole fraternity was scheduled to attend the Physical Fitness Training. This was great, as it meant that all five of us got to walk up to the Academy together and discuss the previous evening’s antics.
“It was quite interesting, really—if absolutely horrifying at the same time,” Nigel said to me when I asked the halfling Wind Mage what taking the potion had been like. “I can only really compare it to being thoroughly intoxicated, at that stage in an evening’s festivities when you think that absolutely anything is a good idea. It was very strange.”
“I’m with Nige,” Damien said. He had revived somewhat after one of Bradley’s incredible breakfast waffles, a cup of hot coffee, and the tactical application of a handful of ice wrapped in a dish cloth. “It was the sort of mentality that sees you attempt to make the impossible jump from the roof to the swimming pool.”
“Or shotgun twelve cans of Goblin Sui-Cider in one sitting,” Rick rumbled.
“Right,” Damien said. “It was like my brain was doing everything in its power to override this idea that I should just keep beating my meat forever, but my body was having none of it. It was like I was a passenger on the most embarrassing carnival ride of all time.”
“Oh, man!” I said, through my laughter. “You think you’re embarrassed. Can you imagine the sort of carnival ride those fuckers were on with those four pigs!”
This pleasant thought entertained us all the way to the arena, set in the Academy grounds, where our Physical Fitness Training was apparently taking place. The arena was basically a Roman colosseum of sorts; a huge circular sandpit surrounded by tiers of empty seating. On the arena floor were a whole bunch of ominous looking pits and pools, suspended beams, myriad hanging poles and ropes, and a climbing wall. Among the profusion of obstacles—and that was what it clearly was, an elaborate obstacle course—I caught the glint of metal, as though hinting at hidden traps.
When we arrived, most of the class were already there. Only one topic of conversation was being passed backward and forward like a hot tamale: the house party at Frat Douche. The chattering and laughter was audible the moment we stepped through the archway of the staircase leading to the seating nearest the sandpit. A few of the louder comments floated up to me and my frat brothers as we descended.
“...the Dwarf was riding his pig around like a horse, completely in the buff…”
“...Lightson had his pants around his ankles and…”
“...most hideous thing that I’ve ever seen…”
“...the squeals…”
“...I’ll never touch a sausage again…”
The stars of the moment, Arun, Qildro, Ike, and Dhor, were standing moodily off to one side and muttering sullenly amongst themselves. When they caught sight of us, the looks they shot us were so toxic and loaded with hate that Medusa would have done well to take notes. Cold and venomous as a rattlesnake snowcone, Arun’s eyes bored into mine from under his long fringe of bright orange hair. His top lip curled in a silent, feral snarl.
“Hey, fellas!” I said, waving.
The rest of the class turned at my greeting, and there was a smattering of appreciative laughter. A few girls, who could obviously appreciate a good prank when they heard it—or saw it, more likely—applauded politely.
“Hey, Arun,” I said, “how come we didn’t get an invite to your party, man?”
“Th-that’’s right,” Nigel stuttered excitedly, “wh-wh-where was our i-invite?”
“Heard it was a goddamn doozy of a time,” Damien chipped in.
Rick grinned his big, warm smile. “We have an expression on my island: You four have faces like those born downwind of the dungheap.”
Everyone cracked up at this, and I patted Rick in the middle of his broad back at using one of his Islander proverbs that actually pertained to the situation. That didn’t happen often. He was right though; Arun Lightson especially had a face like a bulldog licking shit off a thistle.
“Those were some hot dates you boys had last night!” a female voice quipped from out of the crowd.
“Yeah, we’d ask if you managed to get all the way home with ‘em,” someone else called out, “but I think everyone at that party saw you pass each and every base!”
The Frost Elemental, Ike, cracked his icy knuckles. Dhor colored. Qildro hissed something under his breath that I didn’t quite catch, but I was sure it was something about how funny we were and what a great time they’d had with the four succulent sows.
“All right, all right,” said an authoritative voice from down below us. “Cut your noise, lads and ladies. You’ll listen up, unless you fancy getting wire-brush treatment out on the training circuit today.”
A man was standing on the sand in front of us, stance relaxed, arms akimbo.
I recognized him. He had been in the amphitheater before Enwyn, Janet, Cecilia, and I had set off on our quest to find the tail-feather of the Cockatrice.
His long, blond hair was elaborately braided and tied up at the back of his head in a warrior’s tail. His throat was covered in a complex collection of swirling tattoos done in dark gray that gleamed in the morning sunlight like liquid lead under his skin. His muscular arms, bared due to the weathered maroon vest he wore with its cut off sleeves, were covered in more of the same elaborate designs. When he smiled, his silver teeth glittered. I racked my brain for his name, but I wasn’t sure if we had got to the point of introductions. He did me a solid by introducing himself to the whole class.
“My name,” he said, “is Ragnar Ironskin, Earth Mage with a proclivity for metal and mineral magic, and your Physical Fitness Training instructor.”
I heard some of the young women in the row below me muttering and giggling among themselves. Clearly, Ragnar Ironskin was a hit with the ladies.
“We’re not going to be messing about today,” Ironskin said. “This is a simple three-hour session of pure endurance training. You will go through this obstacle course as many times as the three hours allows. It will test your mettle. It will test how you cope with the unexpected. It will pit you against the three Fs: fatigue, fear, and failure.”
Everyone’s attention was riveted on Ironskin as he paced slowly up and down in front of us. Looking about me, I saw the same expressions on every other student’s face; a cocktail of excitement, trepidation, and hunger to prove themselves.
“Doesn’t look too hard,” said a halfling woman standing on one of the benches so that she could get a clearer view of the course and Ironksin over the heads of the other students.
Ironskin flashed his metallic smile at her. “You’re right,” he said. “It doesn’t, does it?”
He clapped his hands once.
The enormous obstacle course came instantly to life. Blades whirled through the air, bright blue flames burst intermittently, and razor-sharp lengths of spiked chains whipped out from hidden alco
ves. Wood, steel, and magic worked in an eye-watering harmony.
The mouth of the halfling who’d spoken dropped open. “Uh,” she said, “those spikes and things… That fire… That all looks awfully real…”
Ironskin turned, as if he had only just had his attention drawn to this fact. “Yes,” he said, turning back to face the class, “it does indeed. Lethal, one might say.”
The entire student cohort—myself included—took a moment to gauge exactly how we were meant to get through this whirling vortex of potential death without being spitted, roasted, sliced, or otherwise terminally inconvenienced.
“Have you noticed something?” I muttered to Damien, who was the only member of my frat who had experience of living in my world.
“What?” he said.
“This is magic, not machinery.”
“Duh. So?”
“So, there’s no rhythm or pattern to any of the movement of any of the obstacles. It’s all totally random every time.”
Damien paused. “Ah,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Now, I won’t tell you much,” Ironskin said, breaking into the thoughts of the assembled students, “but I will tell you this; this is your first taste of what awaits you if you wish to compete in the Mage Games. I want you to think about what that means for a second. With this in mind, I will be making this a competition. The student who gets through the course the most times unscathed will win.”
“Win what?” someone blurted from the back.
“Why, the respect of your classmates and myself, of course,” Ironskin said. “Now, I shall be watching and counting. There are only two rules to this lesson. One: you cannot use offensive spells—this is a test on your physical abilities only, not your skills at blowing up my obstacle course. Two: anything goes. You can use any trick, dodge, or counter you can make that will get you through this ever-changing course unhurt. And many of you will be hurt.” The silver smile flashed again. “Begin.”
A line was formed with little fuss, and the first of the students started to dart out into the course. There were two basic types of course-runner; the balls to the wall dasher and the tentative edger.
It quickly became apparent that the obstacle course had about as much chance at passing an earthly government health and safety inspection as Thanos had at being invited to the Avengers Christmas party. It was about as safe as a tornado that’d just passed through the local medieval weapons museum. Blades scythed through the air and spikes shot out of the ground while enormous mallets and clubs whirled about.
And those were just the physical dangers, dangers meant to replicate attackers using conventional weaponry. There was magic to contend with too; spells that puffed out like noxious gases and sent students reeling about like professional drunks, fire pits that died down and flared up at will, cackling imps that popped up and tried to gouge the eyes or trip the students.
“Holy smokes, it’s absolute carnage,” Nigel said to me as we waited in line for our go at the course.
“That’s about the shape of it, Nige,” I said.
Suddenly, a joint ohhhh rose from those onlookers still waiting in line. One of the first students to enter the course, a svelte young woman who was covered in glittering bronze scales from the nape of her neck to the tops of her knees and who had spines instead of hair, had just been tripped by a lashing chain as she attempted to jump up and over a raised bar. She cried out but, before she could recover, she stumbled past a row of hidden spears nestling within a wooden pole. The first spear punched through the side of her thigh. The young woman gaped at the spear shaft in her flesh, her scales flashing from bronze to dark red. She opened her mouth to scream. The next spear took her straight through the side, just above her hip. The woman’s eyes bulged, blood drooling from her mouth. The third spear fired out and skewered her right under the armpit, emerging from her collar bone.
“Holy fucking shit!” someone yelled from the line.
The young woman convulsed, then went limp.
“Is she—is she fucking dead?” someone else cried out in a shrill voice.
Well, that certainly increases the stakes, I thought to myself, an audible gulp ringing out from my throat.
Chapter Seventeen
The dead woman who’d been impaled by the spears shimmered and flickered like the hologram messages from Star Wars. Then she was gone.
“What the fuck?” Damien said on my left.
Then, across the colosseum, on a bench that had been marked out and surrounded in glowing red runes, the scaled woman suddenly reappeared. She collapsed onto the bench, gasping like someone who had just been pulled from the ocean. Even from across the arena, we could see that she was shaking. She started, like a somnambulist woken in mid sleepwalk, and clutched at her side.
“And there,” came Ragnar Ironside’s voice from above us, where he was watching the action, “is your first taste of the magic of the Mage Games—recreational regeneration.”
A collective sigh went up from the students still to set foot on the course.
“Yes. Regeneration,” Ragnar said. “Remember this though: with every regeneration comes the risk that you will return with an addled mind. The risk is small, but it is there and must be respected. Better to never know what it is like to respawn than get into the habit of throwing your ‘lives’ away on a whim. And know this also: just because you come back from the dead doesn't mean the pain you feel in your dying is in any way lessened. It hurts like hell.”
After that, the students proceeded with less caution and the number of gruesome deaths started to grow. One dude was sprayed with some sort of caustic acid that had his eyeballs running down his face like candle wax. He blundered about screaming—as you would—for a few seconds before he was engulfed in a gout of turquoise flame that turned him the same color as jerk chicken. Another guy had an aquamarine imp fasten itself to his face before his head was smashed in by a falling beam. Yet another woman was almost cut in half by a saw blade that caught her napping as she ran across a rope bridge, her guts spilling across the floor like grizzly party streamers. Each and every time the fallen would reappear in the area marked out with red runes, looking like they had gone through hell and back.
When it was my go, I stepped up to the starting line with my jaw set and my head on a swivel.
Fuck dying, I thought. Not even if it's some sort of simulation.
I launched myself out onto the course. There was no warm-up time in this lesson—that wasn’t how the Mage Games worked, after all. It wasn’t like some opponent was going to give you a friendly heads up just before he launched a Fireball at you or hit you in the kidney with a maul.
I rolled under a hail of deadly darts that passed so close to my head that I was sure I felt my hair ruffle in the wind of their passing. I popped to my feet and then springboarded up onto a box. I was about to pelt straight toward the sheer wall, which had been constructed from real stone and had a rope hanging down its face, when I saw the flickering blue flame that had claimed the unfortunate guy I had seen earlier. It was dancing almost out of sight, like the pilot-light of an oven, behind a section of broken rock. I turned aside at the last moment as the flame blossomed up to greet me, and instead slipped around the side of the wall.
Why go over when you can go around?
A flailing spiked ball swung down before I could get too cocky, and I had to flatten myself against the edge of the wall to stop from getting brained. It took the skin off my elbows, but that seemed like a small price to pay when the alternative had been having my skull crushed like a cantaloupe.
I took another few steps, and a sword blade hidden in the floor snapped up, with every intent of relieving me of those things that a Creation Mage most needed. I jumped into the air and opened my legs. The sword blade whistled through my legs. I landed on the floor and found that I was grinning.
This was fun. And I was good at it.
Another blade whistled toward me; a spear of solid steel flung from some c
oncealed bow or ballista. With a sudden rush of remembrance, I activated my newly acquired Flame Flight spell. Flames wrapped me, and I took off. The spear shot under me and thunked into a wooden post.
I boosted over two more obstacles, thinking that this might be the easiest way to get through the obstacle course—I didn’t think that I was breaking any rules, after all. However, as smart as I thought I might have been, I soon discovered that the assault course was just as clever. Spinning razor-edged disks shot out to try and pluck me from the air like a clay pigeon.
“You’re going to have to do better than that,” I grunted, corkscrewing in midair and letting the disks hiss a hand’s breadth past my body.
But, even as I congratulated myself and started swooping about like a Spitfire, my stomach lurched. My mana reserves were beginning to be depleted—and depleted fast.
I did some seriously speedy thinking as I evaded a flurry of darts, which looked like the painfully poisonous variety. I couldn’t just fly around, as fun and exhilarating as it was, until my mana ran out. For one thing, I’d fall out of the sky like a fucking rock. Secondly, the longer I was up here, the less mana I would have for potentially crucial defensive spells.
“Fine,” I growled at the universe, “I can take a hint.”
I headed for the ground where I resigned myself to duking it out the old-fashioned way.
The world narrowed, my universe contracting into the band of the obstacle course that lay ahead of me. Time ceased to have any meaning. Sweat poured down my face. The breath and blood rushed in my ears as I focused on one thing and one thing only: staying alive.
There were times when I was running and dodging through the obstacle course—my senses strained to breaking point in their quest to avoid being stabbed or cut or pulped by one thing or another—and there were times when I was standing in line waiting to run the course. At these times, I was too focused on getting my breath back to make idle chat with the people next to me.
Stay alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.