War of the Posers Page 5

  There was no referee down in the pit, and none would be coming, since the ladders were being pulled back up. Plenty of faces looked over the edge above us, but they were quiet. Something must have been blocking the noise they were making, because I could see they were cheering and yelling.

  Down at the bottom, it felt wet and cold. Sounds came out of the drain in the center of the pit, echoing drips of some liquid, the subtle noises of the sewers.

  “I reckon I will enjoy this,” my opponent, the Living Flame said.

  “Just for the record,” I replied, “I really don’t want to kill you.”

  “For the record,” she sneered back, “I am going to kill you. And I want to.”

  Her fingers were still moving, so I could count on her slinging a spell as soon as our duel started. And if her name had anything to do with her it, I assumed I’d see a fireball of some variety. Maybe a fire wall. Or a fire dart.

  On the other hand, maybe she was doing that to get me to blow my big spell right at the outset.

  This was not my strong suit. I am not a good one-on-one fighter. I’m much more disposed to punch you in the back of the head in the darkness. Or, as I was starting to realize, make someone else punch you in the back of the in from the darkness while I was somewhere else entirely.

  And yet, here I was. I had no recourse, but I had two ways out. Death or victory.

  I started cycling my mana, pushing it through my body, just like I’d been told not to do. But it was habit now, and I didn’t see how it could make things worse. I was just glad I didn’t have to burn my mana channels in with each death. I did notice that as I passed the mana cycle around my eyes, I could see, ever so slightly, a glow in Livinia’s body.

  It had to be her mana.

  She didn’t have it cycling, and she didn’t have anything going to her hands.

  So she wasn’t prepping a spell. She was just trying to make me think she was prepping a spell. And that changed everything.

  Instead of a dodge to the side, I was going to make a quick jump toward the grate, which was really the hinge point to my stupid plan.

  A voice boomed out from above, feeling like it was coming from everywhere at once.

  “Let the duel begin!”

  Chapter Ten

  I am someone who has no problem admitting when I am wrong.

  This would be one of those cases. I was wrong.

  As soon as the voice boomed out, the Living Flame herself threw a ball of fire right at my face.

  But I was already moving, diving toward the grate in the center of the “arena.”

  The fireball flew right over me and exploded against the wall, splashing brilliant orange fire like an over-filled, over-sized water balloon from hell.

  I felt the immense heat as it blossomed out toward me, and I had the distinct impression I now had a completely different hairstyle than I’d entered the arena with.

  I slid across the slick stones to the grate, and pulled on it as hard as I could.

  Nothing.

  It didn’t budge. There went that plan.

  “Oh, dear,” came Livinia’s annoying voice, “you thought you’d try and make an escape? Pity.”

  I snuck a glance at her, and saw that one of her hands was on fire.

  She playfully tossed the fire at me, and I rolled out of the way.

  The fire hit the grate, and sort of splashed around into various little puddles of flame. But unlike the fireball, which had flared and dissipated nearly immediately, these flames stuck around.

  She tossed more of the sticky fire out, and I rolled out of the way again.

  More and more of the fire came out of her, and pretty soon I saw what she was doing: trapping me. Playing with me.

  “You made a mistake, pretty boy,” she said. “Thinking you could come down here, thinking you’d have what it takes to go up against one of us.”

  “That was his decision,” I said. “Not mine. I came to ask—“

  She tossed another ball of fire at me, one I barely dodged out of the way of. Cleary, I was only meant to listen.

  But I also felt a little more confident. I wasn’t exactly seeing any variety in her spell casting, nor was I seeing much skill. She couldn’t varying the globs of fire up at all — they were exactly the same each time. That had me thinking it was a book spell. I hadn’t even cast anything yet.

  But one big downside: I couldn’t use Shadow Step with all the fire lighting up the whole ring. No shadows.

  “You stink of wealth,” she said. “What are you, some noble’s bastard child, down here because your father won’t deign let you become a mancer?”

  She lazily threw another glob of fire, and even though I managed to jump over it, a little got on my robe. Great. Now I was on fire.

  “Oops,” she said, “I guess the game is over.”

  “I didn’t want it to be this way,” I said.

  “Too bad,” Livinia spat out. She brought both hands up over her head, gathering a ridiculous amount of mana and fire into a swirling maelstrom.

  “Sorry,” I said, and almost meant it.

  I lashed out a quick cast of Vicious Wrench, aimed right at her humerus.

  Her face registered surprise first, then shock.

  Then her bone ripped out of her arm and shot across the arena at me. I snatched it out of the air.

  Because her right arm lacked support, it fell, bringing the whole ball of magic and fire down on her face.

  She ignited, and for a moment, at least, she actually was a living flame.

  I enjoyed my little internal monologue joke for a second, but then her screams got to me. It was even more chilling when she couldn’t scream any more, and I still hadn’t gotten her death notice. She wasn’t dying for some reason. She was just existing in a horrific liminal state of burning. I couldn’t imagine the pain.

  I could only think of one way to put her out of her misery, and it was something I wasn’t sure I wanted to use. But I didn’t know what else to do. So I took the few steps over to her, forcing myself to ignore the searing heat and the feeling of my own skin starting to char. I reached in, and I drained her.

  Whizz-bang! You’ve absorbed the following from Livinia: +4 Intelligence and the following spells: firespear, sticky fireball, flameweaving

  GG! You’ve killed Livinia (Lvl 18 Human Hedgemage)

  You’ve earned 0 xp! What a mighty hero you are!

  I gave the bone a little twirl, which I thought had some panache until such time as I felt droplets of her blood splash across my face.

  Without Livinia talking, it was eerily quiet down in the pit. Until the little bits of fat on her body started to pop and sizzle in the fire.

  I tried to not think about that. Instead, I swallowed hard a few times, looked away from the charred remains, and just sort of stood there awkwardly.

  There was an audible pop, and I heard the hushed noise of the crowd.

  “Looks like I won,” I said.

  Chapter Eleven

  No one was excited for me.

  I mean, they weren’t exactly throwing tomatoes, but I was definitely looking up at a sea of angry faces.

  Ignatius swaggered over from his throne and leaned on the wall to sneer down at me.

  “I smell a rat,” he said.

  “Think it might be something you stepped in?” I replied.

  He grimaced. “You aren’t very smart are you, boy?”

  “I probably should put more points in intelligence.”

  “I think you set us up,” he said. “I think you lied about your level, you came in here, played the fool, drove up the odds against you, and then you come and kill one of my favorite pet magicians. Is this how you make your coin? Travel and con?”

  “It’s not like I wanted to do this,” I snapped back. “I didn’t want to kill anyone tonight. You made me do that.”

  “Or was I fooled into doing that? We will never know the truth.”

  He made a motion with his hand, and one of the ladder
s dropped down. It wasn’t mine. A man was already climbing down before the last run unfurled.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Round two,” Ignatius said. “I don’t like cheaters.”

  “I didn’t cheat.”

  “Perhaps, then, I just don’t like you.”

  The man across from me turned around, and he was ugly. He was missing a few teeth, and his smile was more of a leer. A gross leer, his lips a weird purple hue slick with saliva. His eyes were wide and yellow, like he had a serious liver problem, and his hair was lank and stringy. He wore a black robe that did not look anything like mine. Rather than shiny and smooth like silk, it appeared more along the lines of a heavy itchy wool or rough cotton. His hands were gnarled, with huge knuckles and disconcertingly skinny fingers ending in oddly broken fingernails. He licked his lips as he looked over at me.

  “Oh, you excite me,” the man said.

  “Is that a good thing? I asked.

  “It is for me,” he replied.

  “How exciting,” Ignatius boomed out from his throne, “a bonus bonus bout! An opportunity for revenge! The Maneater himself has come to challenge this challenger!”

  Maneater? I thought.

  “Will this cheating upstart be able to withstand the onslaught of this master of dark magics?” Ignatius continued. “Which of these foul creatures will emerge victorious from this pit of death tonight?! Place your bets, and--“

  “Hey!” I shouted at Ignatius. “Roll my bet over!”

  The man in charge gave me a dirty look, but he also nodded at whoever was taking bets.

  An unpleasant rasping sound came from my opponent, and I realized he was laughing.

  “Smart,” he said, spraying thick saliva out with his extra-sibilant ’s.’

  The top barrier popped into existence, and, once again, my world shrank down to the bottom of the pit-arena.

  Just me and the Maneater.

  Chapter Twelve

  I looked over at my opponent, and watched him watching me.

  “I won’t actually eat you,” he said suddenly. “In case you were worried.”

  “Not, you know, to discount that bit of nicety, but once I’m dead, I don’t really care what it is you might do with my remains.”

  “A refreshing point of view,” the Maneater said. “Most people have weird hang ups.”

  “Are we, I mean, should we be talking like this?”

  “Ignatius goes on for a while,” my opponent said, looking almost relaxed. “He likes to amp up the crowd. And he knows I like to talk to my opponent first. Gives me a chance to gauge who you are, what you might be capable of.”

  “Useful.”

  “Suppose you want to tell me your tactics?”

  “Hardly seems fair.”

  “Necromancer?”

  “Sometimes. You?”

  “I dabble in a bit of everything.”

  “Fire?”

  “Fire is nasty stuff. I don’t like it much myself. Too easy to wind up burned.” He gestured at the still smoldering remains of the former living flame. “I prefer some other—“

  “And, fight!!” boomed out Ignatius’s disembodied voice.

  Immediately, with no discernible movement on my opponent’s part, a glob of green goo started flying toward my face.

  I dodged left, and the goo splashed across the stone wall behind me, smoking where it hit.

  Acid.

  I was already on my back foot, so I whipped Livinia’s arm bone across at the Maneater’s face.

  Now, no matter how much one has dealt with bodies, I don’t think there is ever a time anyone can be prepared for a bone flying through the air, covered in a bits of viscera and plenty of blood.

  Maneater put his own arms up to block the spinning bone, and dropped whatever spell he’d been casting. The magic fizzled into the air with a charge.

  I pulled my mana together, and unleashed Animate Skeleton on the rest of Livinia’s bones.

  The bones kind of to snapped together and stood up out of the remains, blackened, and charred. They advanced on Maneater, who was busy wiping blood from his eyes. Notably, my new skeleton only had one arm.

  Whoops. Guess that was obvious.

  Maneater took a step back from my shambling skeleton, and then gave me a dry look.

  “Is this the extent of your powers?” he asked, pulling a glob of acid out of the air, and holding it for a second.

  I realized, at that moment, that these magicians were also performers. They toyed with me not because that was how they were trained, but to make the show as good as possible for the moneymakers up above.

  It was really my one advantage. Maneater, just like the Living Flame, wasn’t used to pouncing on his opponent’s mistakes or moves without first making a display of it.

  I cast Animate Flesh on the clump of smoldering ash. Sure enough, it started to schlump toward Maneater, a bit like a horrific slug. And wow did it make the worst noise as it went.

  Maneater didn’t seem to care at all, flicking bits of acid at the skeleton, taking it apart almost surgically.

  “I will give you a little credit,” he said, looking over at me almost languidly as one of the skeleton’s legs fell off, causing the skeleton to overbalance precariously, “you do seem to have some skill in necromancy.”

  He stomped on the smoking flesh slug thing. It made a sort of screech noise? Hard to describe without getting into the real horror of it. But it was close enough to what I’d hoped would happen. The bones of the skeleton were scattered around Maneater, and the flesh, though no longer animated, hung around his leg.

  “This will likely hurt,” Maneater said with a grim smile while he pushed up his sleeves.

  “Maybe,” I said, and quickly cast Stitch Flesh and Bone, thinking through what it was I wanted to stitch together. In this case, it was all of Livinia’s remaining flesh, and her remaining bones to Maneater’s flesh.

  He frowned, looking down at his leg.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, trying to lift his leg up. But he couldn’t — the weight was too much.

  “Not much,” I said.

  Then I cast Animate Flesh again. The mound of flesh, now attached to Maneater, began to try and crawl up to attack him.

  But because, unfortunately, it was now partially attached to him, that meant crawling required extra effort. I could hear a soft tearing sound that was quickly overshadowed by Maneater’s screams of horrific pain.

  A quick cast of Minor Illusion, and then Shadow Step.

  I slipped into the shadow realm, saw my illusory self watching Maneater writhe in agony in slow motion. I moved around behind my opponent, and stepped back into reality.

  Maneater was pulling at the animated flesh crawling up his legs. All the while it was tearing his flesh off his bones beneath. I wasn’t even sure why he was still standing. Or how.

  It was time to end this. I felt a bit bad about killing Maneater, but I also felt like he was a pretty garbage person, so maybe the world was better off without a man like him.

  So I reached out, touched the back of his neck, and cast Lesser Drain.

  Whizz-bang! You’ve absorbed the following from Maneater: +5 Intelligence, -1 Charisma, and the following spells: acid arrow, acid glob, snowball storm

  GG! You’ve killed Maneater (Lvl 24 Human HedgeNecromancer)

  You’ve earned 0 xp! What a mighty hero you are!

  His screams stopped instantly, and his body just sort of folded to the floor. Notably, the animated flesh was still ripping itself up the corpse of Maneater, but a quick cast of Banish Undead, and that stopped.

  The barrier popped off, and I looked up at a crowd of quiet, almost fearful faces.

  “Is that enough?” I asked. “Or do I have to kill someone else?”

  “You will—“ Ignatius started, but a sharp voice cracked out, cutting him off.

  “That is enough,” the voice said. “Our evening of duels is concluded. The night is finished.”

  Cha
pter Thirteen

  Ignatius’s face turned bright red. He tried to talk and then to move, but something held him firm.

  The crowd dissipated quickly as a ladder rolled down opposite me.

  A short, rotund figure in a gray robe came down the ladder with more than a little trouble. I couldn’t help but watch because I was pretty sure the figure was going to take a tumble.

  Nope. The figure got down fine, turned around, and dusted herself off. She looked like a grandmother. Grey curly hair, cherubic cheeks, smile lines.

  “Hello there,” she said sweetly. “I thought it might be time for me to come and have a little chat with you.”

  She gestured over to the side, away from the bodies, and two chairs materialized out of nowhere with a little table set neatly between them.

  “A seat?”

  “Down here?” I asked.

  “I like it here,” she said, already moving over to the chairs. She sat down, pulled a mug of something steamy out of her sleeve, and set it on the table across from her. Then she repeated the process, but held onto that mug. “Some hot cider, if you like.”

  I didn’t know what was going on, but cider did sound nice, so I sat down next to the woman. I didn’t take the mug, though, despite the delightful apple aroma curling up and out of it.

  She sipped at the liquid, almost slurping.

  “Ouch, too hot,” she said, fanning her tongue. “You’d think I’d have figured it out by now. But it still eludes me.”

  “I, uh,” I stopped as Flossie and two others climbed down the ladders. Flossie did not make eye contact with me.

  Flossie opened up the large central grate, using a key, and then helped haul the remains of my opponents close enough to be tossed inside.

  “You have put us in a strange situation,” she said.

  “I mean, samesies,” I replied, mentally berating myself for not coming up with a better word than ‘samesies.’ What on Earth was wrong with me? “Are you, uh, I mean, isn’t Ignatius in charge?”