by Liam Lawson
All around the stadium rang the clang of metal striking something solid. Trorm allowed himself a savage grin as Arlen looked about in obvious confusion. Abigail had done her part well. She’d been torn between helping Winnie rescue Lilian from Arlen’s apartment or sneaking into the stadium to take over the systems there and providing Trorm with support. In the end though, she had agreed to go where her skills would make the greatest difference.
“You’re trapped, Arlen,” Trorm called out, racing forward, staff upraised like a club. With the stadium’s magical defenses casting would be absurdly difficult. Fortunately, Trorm didn’t need magic to beat Arlen into unconsciousness.
Arlen glared at Trom and held aloft his hand. “Attack!”
At first nothing happened. Then slimians came pouring out of the bleachers. A horde of them. Far more than had been at the Roaring Stag or the frat party. Trorm knew how to get around their innate spell resistance now, though it did him no good.
“You think you’re the only wizard here?” Arlen demanded. “That trick with the paperweight wasn’t bad and getting the gate closed is a neat trick, but I’ve planned contingencies for this.”
He must have summoned them outside of the stadium and had them waiting, Trorm thought. That’s why he delayed until late at night. Arlen had been stalling to summon his army ahead of time and get them into position to attack Trorm in a place where he couldn’t use his greatest weapon.
Trorm quit running after Arlen, coming to a stop. Killing him or knocking him out wouldn’t stop the summons. Spellcasting like this wasn’t anything like the movies liked to pretend, where if you just killed the wizard or destroyed the ancient artifact the spells would all miraculously come undone and their summons would crumple. Didn’t he wish it was like that.
The slimians moved fast, pouring from the bleachers in an oozing wave of rubbery monkey faces and tentacles covered in eyes, beaks, and claws. They moved in slithering hops. It was almost like watching a wave of hot, bubbling tar or oil come at him. Several of them opened their faces like grotesque flesh flowers to reveal petalled maws filled with hooked fangs.
“Face it, Froggy,” Arlen said. “You got outplayed. You didn’t do bad for an orc though. Frozen hells, you did pretty good for a freshman.”
Trorm shook his head and raised his staff high overhead. An echoing sound followed by crackling pulsed through the stadium, making him and Arlen both wince as it assaulted their ears. Feedback from a microphone hooked up to every single device in the structure. Silence followed the sound. Then came music.
Coldstorm! Coldstorm!
Unleash the fury
Rise to the fight!
Magic courses through his blood
Flood this stadium with light!
Tib’s song blasted through Trorm filling him with energy as he reached for his magic. The stadium resisted him. Like reaching through a layer of molasses to lift up objects that should only weigh half of what they did. Boosted as he was, Trorm pushed through and with a roar, unleashed a burst of chain lightning that ripped into the oncoming slimians. The eldritch creatures at the front burst like boils in clouds of blood and steaming puss.
“I am far from finished,” Trorm said, barely audible over the blasting music and shrieking creatures.
The horde came on, slithering through and bouncing over the remains of their fallen without a care. They screamed and cackled with madness, tentacles flailing, fangs bared.
Trorm roared and readied to cast again, hoping that Arlen bought his bluff. Because Trorm hadn’t been able to put together any other plans. Tibs and Abigail were in the stadium but they were hidden and out of the fight. It all came down to him holding Arlen here until Lilian and Winnie could get the cops to come.
And trying to stay alive until then.
Chapter Seventeen
The fight was not going well.
Trorm threw up a shield between himself and the horde and held it before him, an invisible barrier that caught the attacks of those that made it past his lightning. Slime and blood hung in the air where the tentacles had slapped against his shield. Initially there’d only been a few odd splatters. Now the shield was so thickly covered that it was nearly impossible to see through.
And his blasts of chain lightning were being delivered less frequently.
The problem had many fronts compounding it. First and foremost was the sheer number of slimians that Arlen had summoned. Trorm simply couldn’t blast them all. Being in the stadium weakened his spellcasting, and even with Tib’s music blasting through every fiber of his being, singing about how great his magic was, Trorm being able to cast at all was an impressive feat.
He let flight blasting, leaping bolt after bolt. Electricity coursing through the slimian ranks and making them explode. Just not quickly enough. One got through, bounced off of his shield, and made to move around him. Trorm let fly another bolt, then spun to crush the thing’s head in with a blow from his staff.
The slimian fell over dead, but in the time it took him to kill it, three more had managed to close the distance. He blasted them with a chain lightning spell, killing them all and sending the remnants of the lightning from them into the horde. Which had taken advantage of his distraction to close even more distance between him and them.
Every second Trorm was not obliterating them with lightning they drew closer. More and more slipped through his defenses, forcing him to maneuver his shield and slow his casting, which allowed them closer still. They didn’t care how many of their companions he annihilated. The creatures seemed to have neither a sense of companionship nor even basic self-preparation. It was like fighting an army of idiots who didn’t realize how weak or insignificant they were. All they cared about was killing Trorm.
Trorm let out a bellow and spun himself in a circle, using his force shield like a battering ram, staff extended in the opposite direction and letting fly a tempest of electricity. It was not the refined casting of his arc lightning, it simply blasted everything in its path. It’s path only existed for a brief few seconds though. Trorm used, them, spinning back around to club the slimians knocked over by his shield that hadn’t gotten caught up in the burst of lightning.
He twisted, intending to get his floating shield back up between himself and the slimians no doubt circling around behind him. That was the only thing that saved him as Arlen crashed into him with blinding speed, a wand spewing fire in one hand, and a hunting knife, blade flashing in the stadium lights, in the other.
The flames were caught upon the shield, boiling away the slime clinging to the invisible barrier in an angry hiss. The shield only partially stopped the heat from getting through, having been designed primarily to serve as a kinetic barrier. Spellcasters were uncommon among orcs and Trorm had focused his spells on dealing with more physical threats rather than energy-based ones.
The pain of it almost kept him from getting his staff up in time to ward off the knife thrust. Close as Arlen was, Trorm couldn’t properly ward him off with his long weapon. The blade skipped over the wooden haft, scored a shallow cut across his knuckles, and then was brought in low in a thrust meant to slip up beneath Trorm’s ribs.
Trorm had never been more grateful for a lifetime spent with his more imposing, violence-loving brothers. He threw himself forward, accepting the attack, but taking it across his ribs instead of under them. The blade scored through his flesh, spraying blood. Painful, but ultimately a flesh wound.
Arlen’s eyes went wide. If he had any experience fighting with a knife it probably wasn’t against anyone who was themselves experienced in fighting back. Up close, Trorm brought his elbow around, cracking Arlen across the temple, simultaneously bringing the butt of his staff in low to strike the back of his opponent’s knee. Arlen dropped with a shout, the flames from his wand winking out.
Trorm made to strike him across the face with his staff, but a slimian launched itself at him. Then another. He caught the first with the head of his staff, and the second on his for
ce field and let fly another burst of chain lightning. The necessarily alterations that allowed the spell to penetrate the slimian’s natural resistance also made it target them, sparing Arlen from his electric wrath.
By the time the two slimian’s attacking him, as well as the half dozen others that had closed while he was distracted, were taken care of, Arlen was back on his feet, darting back, and then coming back in. Flames and blade at the ready.
Trorm made to stop him with his staff but Arlen moved, ducking around it with inhuman speed. Trorm caught the blade with his force shield and barely knocked his opponent’s wand hand aside in time to prevent taking a tongue of flame across the face. The stream of fire instead enveloped another slimian, which shrieked as it died.
The blade flashed. Arlen bobbed and weaved. Trorm spun his staff, using it like a polearm. Between it and his force shield he was barely able to keep Arlen at bay. The man was just too fast. Faster than any man had a right to be. The reason for that clicked into place in Trorm’s mind an instant before pain exploded up his back.
While focusing on Arlen, a slimian had struck him from behind, lashing his back with a barbed tentacle, hooks and beaks sinking into his flesh and then ripping free in great chunks. Blood, cloth, and skin with bits of muscle sprayed.
Trorm fell to the ground. His shield vanished. He flung a hand behind him and cast wildly with an unfocussed burst of lightning. The slimian’s immediately behind him died. It was a mistake. Trorm staggered to his knees. Arlen stood before him. He tried to cast and found that it was like trying to pick up a perfectly round boulder covered in oil with only one hand. The magic rose, then slipped from his exhausted grasp.
Arlen grinned down at him, a small tongue of flames dancing at the tip of his wand. That should have registered with him sooner. The flame spells should have given Arlen away rather than the enhanced speed. Somehow just knowing that Arlen was also a wizard had caused Trorm to overlook something that now seemed glaringly obvious.
“How are you casting here?” Trorm asked through ragged breathing. “The stadium….”
Arlen’s grin widened. “What can I say, Froggy. I got homefield advantage.”
“You’ve been cheating.” He couldn’t say why that mattered so much to him. Out of everything that had been revealed this evening, including Arlen’s apparent willingness to commit group homicide, that fact somehow seemed the most shocking. “Football…that’s why…you’re so fast.”
Arlen’s grin died. “Really? I’m going to remake the world and you’re interested in a stupid game?”
“Not the game,” Trorm heaved. “The honor. You’ve betrayed…the team’s honor.”
It was a crack. A flaw. The final flaw. As wrong as Arlen’s reasoning was, as disgusting as it was, Trorm had on some level been able to empathize with him. To see that there was an argument to be made from his point of view. This though…this wasn’t just a crack in his argument. It was a fissure in the foundation, the very bedrock of his character. Whatever it was Arlen was fighting for, it wasn’t for some greater good.
Oh, the bastard might believe that it was. He’d probably been lying to himself for so long that he could no longer tell the truth from the lie. And the truth was that whatever he was doing, the root of it was ultimately self-serving, destructive, and completely without honor.
Trorm bared his tusks. He would not lose to this bastard. He would not.
He made to lunge forward, intending to break Arlen’s neck with his bare hands. Arlen leapt back, inhumanly fast. What had he said? A homefield advantage. Was he somehow tapping into the magic powering the stadium itself? Could Trorm do that?
“Whoah!” Arlen laughed. “Almost got me you slippery bastard.” He waved a hand and the slimians crept forward. “You know, you talk a lot about honor and fighting and shit, but I bet if they eat you alive, you’ll die screaming like any other bitch.”
A shadow fell across Arlen.
He spotted it at the last instant and spun aside. Winnie’s baseball bat cracked into the hand holding his wand instead of his skull. Bone and blood exploded through Arlen’s skin. He screamed, moving back faster than anyone suddenly injured had a right to move.
Winnie kept after him, screaming in a sudden rage. She was still wearing her cheerleader uniform and the contrast between it and the raw savagery on her face and the force of her attacks was not just jarring, it was terrifying. “You cheating fuck! Do you have any idea what you’ve done to the team? All of our wins? Our records?”
That almost made Trorm laugh. She was a cheerleader through and through.
Her natural lagothrope speed almost let her keep up with Arlen, who was forced onto the defensive. Not a good position to take when armed only with a knife. Arlen seemed to realize this too because he bellowed and a wall of flames erupted between him and Winnie, disrupting her attack just as a peel of thunder reverberated through the stadium.
Trorm turned to find Lilian rushing toward them, her sword in one hand, a smoking revolver in the other. That shield had gone up just in time to save Arlen’s life. She shifted her aim and fired twice more. Two slimians that had leapt at Trorm were suddenly flying through the air without their heads.
He rose up, swinging his staff around to beat back more of the attackers. Lilian reached him at about the same time as Winnie, who’d been forced back by the intensity of the firewall’s heat. Lilian engulfed them both in light and the pain in Trorm’s back and across his ribs eased a little. He let out a sigh of relief.
The slimians tried to come at them, but were repelled by Lilian’s divine aura. Apparently not even the stadium could prevent a god’s work from being done. She holstered her revolver and produced a stoppered vial full of shimmering purple liquid. “Drink this!”
Trom took it. “Where are the police? I thought you were supposed to go to them?”
Lilian rolled her eyes. “I have a phone, Trorm. I don’t need to go there in person to let them know what’s going on. They’re on their way here.”
Reinforcements were coming. That was good. But they were still minutes away at least. Minutes would be all it would take for Arlen and his minions to regain their footing and overtake them. If that.
“We need to go on the offensive,” Trorm said.
“Like, duh,” Winnie said. “Drink your potion already.”
Trorm pulled the stopper out with his teeth and downed the contents. It tasted like blood and cotton candy. His ribs and back stopped hurting altogether. Energy surged through him. He could reach for his magic once again.
He glanced at Lilian. “A health and mana potion?” Expensive didn’t begin to cover it.
“Make it count,” she said.
He nodded. “Like the warehouse?”
“Do it.”
He drew upon her divine power, focused it into his shield, energized by Tib’s music, still blasting through every speaker in the stadium, and pushed. A bubble of light exploded out from him, liquifying the slimians where they stood.
The three of them turned as one to regard the wall of flames between them and Arlen. Injured and with his minions gone, he was still dangerous. They could hear him screaming unintelligible words from behind his flaming barrier. In fact, it sounded a lot like…
“He’s casting!” Trorm cried out.
The flames vanished and a pillar of pure darkness erupted from where it had been. The stadium lights flickered. Something enormous slithered free, tentacles writhing across the field.
Tib’s music faltered, the bard shocked into silence by the creature’s sudden appearance.
“Thodos preserve us,” Lilian whispered.
Winnie shook her head. “Like, yeah.”
Chapter Eighteen
The creature was big. Bigger than its shape should have allowed it to be in this reality. Oh, there were some things, such as ancient dragons, whose size could rival buildings. But those things made a kind of sense. Their anatomy belonged. Their skeletal structure
s and natural magic made sense. This slimy thing might have been able to survive in the lightless depths of the ocean, but it should have been crushed beneath its own bulk on land.
At first Trorm thought it was the size of a school bus. Then it kept growing, pulsing, bursting with pus and ooze as it pulled free of the shadows in the ground, doubling in size. Then doubling again. Now someone suicidal enough could drive a school bus through its gaping, toothless maw and down its gullet.
Trorm’s brain struggled to come up with earthly analogs for this thing. A cross between a leach and a salamander? A lamprey and a lizard? But it was covered in tentacles. Tentacles that gleamed with glowing green slime and blinked at him with eyes positioned next to maws and beaks, incongruously filled with teeth that the mouth attached to what Trorm tentatively thought of as the head completely lacked.
The thing seemed to have legs but no real sense of how to use them as it flopped ungainly about. Whatever it was, this was not where it belonged. For a moment, Trorm actually felt bad for the thing, the way he might any animal released abruptly into an unfamiliar ecosystem. Then those many eyes affixed on him and the sightless head turned. Not so sightless. He could feel it watching him. Taking his measure.
Trorm’s sunglasses tried to give him a reading but instead gave him a series of gibberish text followed by HUNGRY.
It spoke, its voice a warbling sound that wanted to be a whisper but was simply too huge. The sound of it made him feel as if his brain were bleeding. “Youuuu willll beeee delicioussssssss.”
Trorm stopped feeling bad for it.
Magic coursed through him, restored by Lilian’s potion. His body returned to peak capacity with it. He felt as if he could run a marathon while solving calculus problems on a whiteboard he was carrying. He mentally checked himself. Potions could have odd effects like that at times. This was not a moment to indulge the accompanying sensations, even if they were somewhat beneficial.