Volume 1, Chapter 36: Rush Hour Underground (Patreon)

Seeing the pickaxe-frogs leaping after Bri as she sped toward us, I found myself wondering whether I had ever seen anything in my life quite so absurd.

The thick-handled tools chased her, springing nimbly off the uneven stone floor, the walls, and even the stalactites jutting from the ceiling with their frog-like limbs. The only sounds were metal clanging against metal whenever they accidentally smashed their heads into one another, and the slick slap of their bodies when their lower halves or legs brushed together in the rush.

They looked like a swarm, or maybe a single bizarre body stretching itself out and hurling pieces of itself through space, only for them to be swallowed back into one unified mass a moment later.

In a hurry, everyone in our group except me—who stayed by the corner waiting for Bri—started retreating deeper into the corridor, ducking calmly beneath the rope net I had strung up.

Khufu even broke into a fairly agile gallop on all fours.

“Help!” Bri screamed as she slammed into the turn.

Her whole body failed to make the change in direction and flattened out, bursting fire in every direction against a boulder jutting from the wall, only to ricochet off it and shoot beneath the ropes toward the rest of our group.

I ran after her at once, slid lightly under the trap, and sprang up on the other side, taking cover behind the lion and Nicky at the front.

The first frogs came barreling into the tunnel right behind us, bouncing off the same wall Bri had hit, launching themselves on their long legs with the sharp ends of their pickaxe heads pointed straight at us. The leading one landed close to the ground and cleared the lower rope with a clean leap, but in doing so ran straight into the lines Eli had strung near the ceiling. They stopped it cold and left it hanging tangled in midair, with only a single leg dangling freely beneath it.

Khufu drew a deep breath and angled his ears toward the approaching wave. At the same time, his tail struck the ground and, with his jaw clenched, a long bone extended from each of his wrists. He curled his fingers and thumb around each one, turning them into spikes made from his own skeleton and laced with own blood, and held them alongside his body as he waited for the next amphibians.

One after another, the frogs became caught in the ropes. The one leading the charge was already dead, impaled by the pickaxe head of another that had crashed into it from behind. Now that second creature was struggling not only to free its body from the net, but also to pull the tip of its head out of its companion’s corpse.

Eli stayed one step behind Khufu rather than joining the front line. Whenever one of the ropes sagged or slipped, he caught it, redirected it around another support, and anchored it again.

Khufu supported by him slashed and stabbed at anything that came within reach, his arms moving with frightening speed.

Some of the frogs still managed to squeeze between the ropes and slammed into his torso with enough force to stagger him. The flower-shields Sophie had left across his body absorbed part of the impact, but not all of it, and already exhausted, the lion began retreating farther down the corridor toward us.

The frogs following him looked less like individual creatures now and more like one writhing, shifting body that constantly split apart and joined back together. I had already gotten that impression from them earlier, but the cramped corridor made it even worse, and I struggled to keep track of what was happening around me. I could hear voices and shouting, but my brain couldn’t process all the stimuli fast enough, so I focused on one thing only: backing away far enough to keep two people between me and the oncoming creatures.

Two, because Nicky moved in to help, swinging her pickaxe at any frog that came close enough. But when one managed to leap over her, she instinctively turned around to catch it, only to be struck in the back a heartbeat later and knocked to the ground.

Khufu tried to catch her, but doing so forced him to retract the bone from one of his hands.

A pickaxe smashed into his shoulder hard enough to throw him into the wall. All he managed with the spike protruding from his other wrist was to rip it free from another amphibian and drive it clean through the torso of the one that had brought Nicky down.

Only then did I realize that at some point Sophie had joined the fight. She ran closer to the fallen front line and reached for the flowers hidden behind the supports. The strength left her almost immediately. Even while clinging to the wooden beam, she couldn’t stop herself from collapsing. Her knees gave out first, dropping her onto them while she still gripped the support desperately, and then her fingers failed as well and she fell forward onto her hands.

One of the frogs leaped straight at her, clearly trying to finish her off.

Khufu managed to catch it by a hind leg, yank it violently back to the ground, and fire a bone spike from his wrist into the creature. It punched through from the lower back.

At the same time, the flower-creatures Sophie had animated sprang into action against the frogs that had slipped between Nicky and Khufu. Their plant tendrils spread wide and caught the low-flying amphibians, squeezing with such force that their seemingly wooden bodies bent like bound muscle.

A heartbeat later, petals lined with sharp thorns snapped shut around one limb after another, tearing them apart and flinging pieces of frog across the tunnel.

All of it happened in seconds. There were so many enemies and so much chaos that I couldn’t focus on what my companions were saying, or even on everything happening around me.

So I counted to three in my head, tightened my grip on the magical knife, and ran at the nearest living frog still trying to get at Nicky. I kicked it toward the wall while she was occupied with another, feeling just how much weight my leg had to overcome to move the creature. My knee flared with pain the moment I struck it, but I pushed forward anyway.

I caught it under one arm, diving after it, locking its limbs in a hold that kept it from retaliating with its legs and restricted its movement enough that it couldn’t hit me with its pickaxe head. The creature thrashed against me at close range, kicking wildly with its hind legs, and it must have hit something—or someone—because I suddenly felt myself losing balance as a force shoved me toward the wall.

I managed to turn sideways before impact to protect my spine, slammed shoulder-first into the hard stone, and bounced off it. A moment later, something else struck me from behind and drove me toward the ground.

As I rolled, still holding the frog in my grip, I caught a glimpse of some plant’s vines slithering across the floor right beside my face. Then a frog’s webbed foot appeared there—but only for a second—before Khufu’s massive four-fingered paw took its place.

I thought I heard the feline humanoid roar, and a moment later droplets of blood splattered across my skin.

Rolling across the ground, I noticed one of the ropes stretched nearby—the same rope I was going to have to cut sooner or later anyway. I also realized that I still had the drawn knife in my right hand, so I released the frog for a moment and cut through the rope. The tension made it whip away in the opposite direction.

A moment later, I felt something crash down near me and hit the ground just behind my back. Then I saw Nicky drop into a crouch, wipe blood from her mouth, and quickly rise again, throwing her arms forward to catch another frog and slam it into the wall.

Somehow, in all that chaos, I managed to roll my way to the other end of the rope and cut that free from the supporting beam as well, then quickly started using it to tie up the struggling frog.

For a moment, my vision disappeared completely and everything went white. Then came the headache, the warmth of blood running down my nose and over one eye, forcing me to blink rapidly, and with those sensations came the realization that I had taken the blunt side of a pickaxe straight to the forehead.

I caught the frog’s writhing leg with my own and kept wrapping the rope around it despite its protests.

Then I raised the knife toward the next one charging me. With my left hand, I caught it just beneath its wooden neck, while with my right I stabbed as quickly as I could, trying to inflict as many wounds as possible before it could respond.

When it dropped, I moved back toward the one I had bound and slashed once along its arm.

Just enough to wound it. Not enough to kill it. Immediately, I felt the knife’s magic reach into me. It clashed with my Authority, trying to force my mind into a heightened state of reaction. I allowed it. The conflict ended, but I could feel the black magic moving through my soul.

It stank of blood and shit. It brought on vertigo and the sound of grinding teeth that I knew only I could hear. I held the knife out in front of me and watched one of the teeth set into its jaw turn black and start vibrating. Then the world in front of me seemed to flash into impossible clarity.

I immediately felt just how badly my body was lagging behind what I wanted it to do, as though I were somewhere outside it, watching it operate and controlling it from a distance with a slight delay. At the same time, that disconnect allowed me to process additional stimuli my brain had been ignoring before.

There were three living frogs left in front of us, all trying to reach Nicky. She was leaning one side of her body against the wall, pieces of her flower armor dropping away from her, along with blood running down the forearm pressed to the rocks. She held her pickaxe ready to strike the first amphibian that threw itself at her, keeping it in her closed fist right below the head of the pick.

At the same time, she was shouting at Khufu to deal with the two that had crawled free of my web and were heading toward Sophie, who was barely conscious.

The lion’s armor had completely wilted by now, but his muscles were still tense and ready to act. Even beneath clothing so similar to mine, I could see every movement they made.

Bri was doing everything she could to remain close to him, hovering beside his hip where he had been cut open. Even though her proximity was singeing his fur, she was sealing the wound shut.

“Everything is, um… going to be okay…” she told him, shrinking with fear. “Right?” she added, far less certain.

Even though the number of amphibians in front of us had fallen drastically and we had killed almost all of them, the situation was beginning to deteriorate fast and I was pretty certain only I had a thought to spare to notice it. From deep inside the chamber, I could hear—and practically feel through the vibrations that made pebbles bounce across the ground—that the enormous toad had decided to grace us with its presence as well.

So I forced my sluggish body into motion, hating how slow it was. I had to rewire my thinking from reacting into predicting on the spot.

One of the frogs broke away to the side with a long leap and was flying between Khufu, who was extending a sharpened bone toward it, and Nicky, who didn’t have time to swing.

I knew the lion was going to miss. So I turned sideways toward the creature and started swinging my arm while it was still a good two feet away from me. As it twisted in midair, preparing to whip its neck around and drive the pickaxe into me, my open palm struck its stomach and altered its trajectory. Its own momentum carried it straight into a rock jutting from the wall, snapping its spine.

I sprang forward immediately, anticipating Khufu’s next movement, and landed in a lunge beneath him. My knife punched into the lower part of another frog’s wooden belly, and I drew it upward in what I hoped would be a smooth motion, but proved to require more strength than I anticipated. I forced my body to push through the flesh that held remarkably well, and with that gutted the creature completely.

At the same time, Nicky finished off the second-to-last living amphibian with a powerful blow from her pickaxe. That left only one. The one I still needed. It writhed behind us, tied in the rope and bleeding out slowly, while I continued taking advantage of the perception I had stolen from it.

Khufu dropped onto all fours and was catching his breath, his ears practically flattened against his mane and his tail lying limp on the ground.

Sophie was half sitting, half lying against the wall, while her enlarged flowers began to wilt around the strangled bodies of the frogs upon which they had focused the aggression she had lent them.

Nicky was pulling herself away from the wall—literally. When she pushed off, it turned out she had been pinned against it so hard that strands of blood, skin, and muscle stretched between her and the stone like spiderwebs. Groaning and crying, she forced herself to take another step sideways until those last connections finally tore free with a sickly wet sound and even more horrible smell, when they splashed against the stones.

Before Bri could even notice that she needed help, however, Nicky’s skin began knitting itself together like writhing living worms searching for a way into the earth. The pieces intertwined with surprising speed until everything appeared to return to normal. Once Nicky realized her arm was whole again, she rolled it upward at the shoulder with the sound of a bone sliding back into its socket.

Then she repeated the process with every joint down to her fingers, making me shudder at each pop.

Most of my newly expanded attention, however, was focused on the enormous webbed, bulbous feet ahead of us, covered in slick skin that nevertheless looked like roughened steel.

One of them had just wrapped around the wall beside the bend leading into our tunnel. The other stretched an absurd distance forward and planted itself on the ground. The toad’s massive body followed those bending limbs, and its enormous, heat-radiating face emerged around the corner.