Volume 1, Chapter 37: I Toad You So (Patreon)

My legs obeyed the demands of a mind that, unlike them, was operating at accelerated speed, and I turned and started limping toward the rock from which the bandage cord hung.

“Move! All of you!” I shouted at the others. “Khufu! Cut the lower rope, now!” I yelled specifically at him.

“What’s, um… happening?” Bri asked, turning toward me.

I kept backing uphill while watching the situation unfold, and I saw her flames flare sideways when her gaze followed the direction of my retreat toward the opposite end of the tunnel.

The enormous toad standing there had just begun tearing the tunnel apart with its massive feet.

Nicky thrust one hand forward, bracing it with the other, and fired a projectile straight into the flames roaring from the creature’s throat. When the fat she had hardened struck, the beast rocked backward several inches, while its internal furnace flared several times and scattered sparks all around it. A few landed on the tunnel supports, but thankfully the wood didn’t catch fire.

The lion, meanwhile, spurred on by my shouting, dropped to all fours and rushed toward the last rope stretched across the ground. When he reached it, he extended the claws from one paw and sliced through.

“There are frog bodies on the tracks!” Nicky shouted. “We forgot to account for that!” She hurried over to Sophie, whose eyes were wandering unfocused.

“Fuck!” Eli shouted. He moved before anyone else.

“Leave them!” I yelled when I realized where he was going. The first corpse lay sideways across one rail. Eli planted his boot against its wooden torso and shoved with everything he had. It rolled away just enough for both wheels to pass.

Nicky threw one of Sophie’s arms over her shoulders, reached around her from the other side, and hauled her up from the ground, helping her retreat toward me and as far away from the danger as possible.

Slowed by Nicky’s shot, the toad was just beginning to recover its footing. Its huge webbed, steel-like feet shook the entire tunnel structure with every movement. Dirt and stones began sliding down over its body while crystals cracked in the walls.

“Too late to change anything,” I forced myself to answer.

I yanked on the bandage cord. It pulled the pickaxe free from its improvised lock, and the moment the tool sprang aside, gravity took over. The mine cart screamed down the slope, sparks jumping from rail to rail beneath its wheels.

Khufu sprang aside, dragging one of the bodies off the tracks as he went, and watched the cart slam into another, slowing slightly. But between the momentum it had already built and, apparently, its own internal aggression, it still had enough force to keep going despite every obstacle scattered in front of it. At the same time, the teeth that sprang from its front wall began snapping wildly, biting at anything they could reach. They tore a chunk of flesh from one corpse, crushing and splintering the frog’s wooden parts along with it.

The cart hurtled downhill, throwing bodies aside as it passed first Bri, then the women, and finally Khufu. The instant it reached him, the lion jumped, twisted in midair, planted his feet against a supporting beam, and launched himself forward with both paws extended. He slammed them into the rear of the cart, restoring some of the speed it had lost to the earlier collisions.

A moment later, the cart passed Eli and crashed into the enormous toad with tremendous force. Its throat bent so violently that five separate tongues of flame erupted from the vents running along it, while the entire beast was flattened and hurled into the wall.

Its legs withdrew. Then, as it hurriedly tried to pull itself back out of the tunnel that was too narrow for its body, it grabbed the cart and began trying to tear the machine free from where it had embedded itself in its flesh.

Blood sprayed from beneath its steel-like skin. At the same time, glowing puddles of something resembling molten metal spilled onto the ground, reflecting the surroundings across their surfaces for a brief moment before the heat made them burst into flame.

Eli was running away from the entrance to the cavern and deeper into the tunnel when the furnace toad opened its mouth. The steel tongue it released rebounded off the tunnel ceiling in a flash.

It struck Eli high in the chest and burst through between his shoulder blades in a spray of blood. His feet left the ground. For one moment, his entire body was carried backward through the air toward the enormous creature, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. Then the telescoping rings collapsed into one another. The tongue withdrew, and the beast swallowed him whole.

Meanwhile, I had to force myself, both physically and mentally, to not walk toward the frog I had entangled. I wanted to kill it so badly—to end its life, plunge the blade into its belly, and eviscerate it. The hand holding the knife trembled and smelled of both rot and, somehow, hatred. I hadn’t even known until then that emotions could have scents.

I quickly hid the blade in my backpack, because I had a feeling this was my only chance to do so.

“After that thing!” Nicky shouted, setting Sophie down somewhere safe. “It ate Eli!”

Brigid, despite the hesitation visible in the rippling that had begun to run through her fiery hair, moved after the running woman. Khufu did the same, having only just managed to get back on his feet.

I, meanwhile, gave the makeshift cord I had made from bandages one more pull and started after them, winding it up as I ran until the crowbar tied to its end reached my hand.

I tossed the prepared tool and its bundle against the wall, then sprinted after my companions into the larger chamber.

The toad backed away while struggling with the mine cart still clamped around its throat. Torn from the tracks, the cart had lost its ability to move, but its jaws remained locked in place around the creature’s neck. The amphibian’s skin began to fester and glow around its warts and along the seams between the metallic sheets of hide, as though the heat contained within it were steadily building.

With one of its forelegs, it finally dislodged the cart and slammed it into the wall of the chamber, tearing part of its skin away. That made it spill even more of this metallic liquid onto the ground.

Khufu charged toward it, running practically on all fours with only his right arm stretched out to the side. During his charge, a pointed spike of bone once again grew from the palm of that hand, and he wrapped his fingers around it.

[Kill!] Some murderous intent appeared in my soul.

By the time the toad, finally freed from the cart’s jaws, noticed him with its glowing, candle-like eyes, it was already too late to react.

Khufu leaped into the air, twisted above the creature, and landed on its head. Bracing himself with his other hand, he drove the spike into the skin of its skull.

Softened by the heat, the metallic hide gave way, and the spike sank deep, forcing the toad’s jaws open. Living fire erupted from inside its mouth, while tremendous heat began radiating from the cracks along its throat, filling the entire chamber.

That was when I noticed a passage at the far end of the room that we could use to continue onward. Unfortunately, it was narrow enough that trying to rush into it while the creature still blocked the way would have been nearly impossible. We had to deal with the monster guarding it first.

Its color was changing with every passing second, shifting from dark gray toward the pale glow of white-hot metal.

Forced away by the heat, which had already begun setting his fur and clothes on fire, Khufu yanked the spike free and jumped into a pool of water about a dozen feet from the toad.

Despite the puncture wound in its head, the creature continued crawling toward that same source of water. As it moved, it thrashed its limbs hard enough to rip chunks of rock from the ground and send them flying toward me, Bri, and Nicky.

One of them was large and sharp enough that, anticipating its trajectory, I forced my body to move aside before it reached me.

Unfortunately, Nicky didn’t know that.

Acting on instinct, she threw herself in front of me to take the impact herself. The solid chunk of rock struck her and hurled her backward. She immediately reached down with both hands, grabbed the stone embedded in her chest, and ripped it free before tossing it aside. Her body began slimming almost instantly as the wound repaired and regenerated itself, aided further by Bri, who hovered over the woman and helped seal the injury shut.

[Kill!]

“Bri!” Nicky shouted to my fireball, and she instinctively pulled away so she wouldn’t hurt her while healing. “Check if that toad’s okay! Can you do that?”

“Um… yeah… I think so!” Bri shouted back while I decided to take a more active role in the fight.

Watching the creature’s movements carefully and timing myself between the stomps of its enormous legs, I rushed it from the side, jumped onto one of its limbs, and landed roughly on its knee joint during the brief moment it remained planted against the ground.

First, I immediately regretted it when I felt the heat scorching my feet and instinctively activated Cinderhide on one of them while lifting the other into the air.

Second, I felt the bloodlust rising within me, trying to overwhelm me from somewhere both inside and out. I overcame it this time and focused on the task at hand.

Third, I reached toward one of the toad’s bizarre eyes and activated Pyrography. I decided to pull a line directly from the candle flame, making a series of complicated movements with each of the fingers I used to catch hold of it.

[Authority Conflict detected. Competing Claims: The desire to shape the fire according to one’s will versus the fire’s will to remain in its current form. Sources of Strength: conceptual, precision. Anchors: Authorship. Resistances: Soul Resistance, Identity Cohesion. Conflict State: Contested.] The same concepts I had felt the first time I tried to change Bri made themselves known inside my Anima again. But now, in that brief instant, I felt something else as well. Something new. [Dynamic Factors: Opposing soul heavily strained. Conflict State: Resolved.] Almost as quickly as I felt the toad’s opposition, it fell silent within the melody of the Universe, and the fire obeyed my will.

Five tangled lines of flame trailed through the air behind my hand, stretching the entire distance of the backward somersault I performed when I sensed the toad was about to move. The moment my feet touched the ground, I stopped drawing, leaving the fiery creation I had painted attached to the creature’s strange eye.

The reaction was immediate.

Where before it had been moving toward the pool without difficulty, now its movements slowed and it began turning its head from side to side, trying to find the correct direction.

My magic had managed to blind its sense of sight—or at least impair it considerably.

“Its, um, condition is critical,” Bri said in the meantime, having flown closer to the toad so she could use her magical eye. “It needs to, um, cool down, or its internal organs are going to burn themselves out!”

“I’ll stop it!” Khufu shouted, charging out of the pool toward the frog just as the creature drew its whole body backward as if preparing to jump.

He ran into it shoulder-first.

The leap it had been about to make only partially succeeded. It launched into the air, scraping past the lion and knocking him aside, but instead of flying straight toward the opening leading to the pool, the sudden weight added to one side threw it off course. It sailed over him, dragging one hind leg across the ground, and crashed into a wall of stalagmites.

“He increased the weight of its bones!” Nicky shouted as she watched what happened.

The lion, battered by the impact, was still rolling across the ground toward one of the walls while the rocks the toad had crashed into, weakened by its mass and heat, cracked apart and opened a new route toward the pool.

Chunks of stone and dirt began sliding down from the damaged ceiling over its overheated body, but despite the heavily weighted leg, the amphibian kept crawling toward the water. In the process, it shoved Khufu away with enough force to send him flying several feet. He landed on one shoulder, rolled onto his back, and grabbed his arm with a groan of pain.

“We can’t let it reach the water!” Nicky shouted to me.

Bri flew toward the creature and began darting back and forth in front of its face, trying to disrupt its vision, but the toad ignored her, crushing more of the stalagmites blocking its path with every passing moment.

[Kill!]

Nicky fired another ball of fat at one of the stalactites hanging above the monster, loosening it enough that it broke free from the ceiling and crashed down onto its skull, pinning it in place for a moment. Unfortunately, only for that one moment. The creature quickly shook off the stagger and resumed crawling.

“Fuck this!” I shouted.

I rushed closer to the toad, ducking beneath the sweep of its limb a moment before it moved because, by watching the joints, I had managed to predict what it was about to do.

I ran directly in front of it and reached inward, straining my Psyche as I applied Cinderhide to my face and one hand. I could feel myself getting closer to the maximum I could currently squeeze out of it, but to my surprise, it wasn’t nearly as difficult as it had been before. I ignored that discovery for the moment.

Standing directly before the towering cross between an amphibian and a blast furnace, I raised my hand, blackened by its magma-like armor, and once again defeated the creature in a contest of wills, drawing a single line of fire out of it.

Then I ran toward the pool it was trying to reach, splashing hot water in every direction—hot, but not scalding. I could feel that only the surface had been heated to extreme temperatures, so I dove deeper while sending my will back along the line I had painted.

I willed Stoke to make the fire burning inside the monster grow.

[Skill branching available.]