Chapter 33: Chapter 33: Lament for the Fishmonger’s Daughter

“I don’t know where your brother is!” Nay said. She was telling the truth. Kind of. She had no idea what the women at the House of Saccharine Delights did with his body.

There were cries of terror all around them as the townsfolk who formed the mob dispersed, barricading themselves into buildings or running for places to hide, trying to get away from the tadpole monsters.

It was chaos.

There would be no one to help Nay against Mishell. And the fishmonger’s daughter knew that. She looked around and smiled. She was going to kill Nay and when the townspeople found her body, it would be blamed on the monsters.

“My father doesn’t take kindly to competition,” Mishell said. “This didn’t have to be personal. It was just business.”

“You made it pretty goddamned personal.”

Mishell swung the mace down. Nay rolled out of the way. The flange struck the cobblestone where her head was just at, cracking the stone.

Nay managed to push herself to her feet. The half-maugrim girl threw out a front kick that was more of a horizontal stomp.

It was like getting kicked by a mule.

Her boot hit Nay’s mid-section so hard she was pretty sure a rib or two cracked. The momentum threw her into the wall of a building and she felt the back of her skull bounce off the surface.

Dazed, and with adrenaline coursing through her, Nay grabbed Thorn’s handle and drew the dagger. She operated purely off some inner-instinct, a biological directive that told her she better act or die.

As Mishell closed the distance, raising the mace over her head, Nay jabbed with Thorn, flicking her wrist and whipping the tip of the blade into the half-human’s face. Nay felt the steel scrape across her orbital socket. There was a scream of pain and the mace fell out of Mishell’s hand.

It tumbled to the ground with a clang.

The fishmonger’s daughter’s hands flew to her face and cupped her eye. Blood trickled from between her hand as she howled.

Nay stood there, the half-maugrim girl’s blood dripping off the point of Thorn, in shock. She was so taken with what she just did and Mishell’s reaction that she stared at her opponent in horror.

“My eye!” Mishell screamed.

She lowered her hands, revealing the wound. Nay had cut her across the eye. The flesh was perforated at each corner. The cuts oozed blood, winking like little kisses.

Nay couldn’t see how bad the wound was on the eye itself because the socket had filled with blood.

It trickled down Mishell’s face, red tears.

Consumed with rage, Mishell charged Nay. She had more mass and more muscle than Nay. They were opponents of two entirely different weight classes.

Nay raised Thorn and delivered a diagonal slash. But she would have had better luck trying to stab a charging bull. Mishell backhanded the dagger out of Nay’s hand and crashed into her.

The fishmonger’s daughter wrapped both hands around Nay’s throat and squeezed, lifting her into the air. The muscles in the half-maugrim’s arms went taut. Nay’s airway was suddenly cut off. It felt like her neck was caught in a vice between Mishell’s strong hands.

Nay scratched at the girl’s fingers, trying to loosen her clamp-like grip. But she was too weak and Mishell was consumed with blind rage. Her feet were hovering over the street, heels kicking against the wall.

Nay couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even cough. She opened her mouth to shout but no sound came out. Her face was turning red and she was beginning to lose consciousness.

Something purple whipped out of the darkness, coiling around Mishell’s thick neck.

Green protuberances covered the half-maugrim’s mouth and nose, blocking her airways.

“You want to know where your brother is?” Nom said. “Here, l can show you.”

He pressed the tip of his stalk against Mishell’s forehead and her one good eye glazed over as she was thrust into the tentacle’s Mind Meld connection. As he tightened around her throat, Nay knew he was showing her the poisoning of her brother.

It happened in a flash.

Nay watched Mishell’s good eye widen in terrible comprehension.

Her hands released Nay.

The cook dropped to the ground, choking. She crawled on her hands and knees, hacking, clearing her airways, and her fingers found Thorn.

Mishell fell to her knees. Her hands tried to rip Nom off her, but he was too thick, too rubbery and too slick. She couldn’t get a grip on him.

“Now that you’ve seen where he’s gone,” Nom said, “it’s time to schedule a reunion.”

When Nay pushed herself to her feet, that’s when the river of tadpole dogs hit them.

One clipped her at the knees and she flew up into the air and landed on the backs of the pack.

The same thing happened to Mishell and Nom and the stream of monsters carried them off in different directions.

“Nom!” Nay cried.

He uncoiled off Mishell. Nay's last glimpse of him was the tentacle bouncing in the air across the backs of the mutant tadpoles as the flow carried him onto a different street.

Nay crashed into a fountain and fell into the cold water. She groaned, scrambling so that she was right side-up. Two of the tadpole monsters had broken off from the main roil and were in the fountain with her, righting themselves.

Before the one nearest could get its grounding and attack her, she grasped Thorn in an icepick grip and drove the dagger down into the top of the thing’s head. The amphibious flesh was soft and there was a crunch as the combat dagger punctured its skull, finding its brain.

It immediately went still and fell limp, almost pulling Thorn out of her hand. She jerked up and a glop of pink and blue ichor apexed into the air, then fell into the water.

“Why does everything that tries to kill me here have to be so gross?"

Then that’s when the other tadpole dog spun towards her. Instead of running at her on its legs, it dropped into the water and propelled itself at her with its undulating tail.

She didn’t have time to jump out of the fountain so she braced herself, getting ready to thrust. As she was about to strike, fearing that the thing would missile into her and tear at her flesh with its piranha teeth, the thin spike of a poleax pierced its head, pinning it.

The poleax lifted into the air, taking the mutant tadpole monstrosity with it.

Rolf Bouldershield swung the poleax, flinging the corpse out of the fountain.

More tadpole dogs poured into the fountain and Rolf and his brother Jolf jumped in with Nay, water splashing all over their plate mail.

They positioned themselves between the monsters and the cook.

“Do we need to ask why you’re out here and not in the kitchen?” Rolf said.

“Don’t you think that’s a little sexist?” Nay said.

“Huh?” Rolf said.

“Shut up,” Jolf said. “Here they come!”

The first wave of tadpoles rocketed towards them and the Bouldershield Brothers demonstrated their namesake.

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While Rolf was swinging the poleax, slicing and bludgeoning at the tadpole dogs from afar, Jolf wielded a battle-hammer, swinging it like a baseball bat, hammering tadpoles into the sky as he dealt with the creatures that managed to slip through his brother’s defenses.

“Bring it, ye ugly shits!” Jolf said.

The Brothers were brutal, dealing with the first wave like a pair of machetes hacking through a jungle.

But by the time the second wave came, the Brothers were a bit gassed. One of the tadpoles got past both of them only to meet the tip of Thorn in its brain. Its razor teeth posthumously snapped at the air.

Nay had to jump back to avoid the nip, the movement a manifestation of last nerve signals being sent from the brain.

Then the third and fourth waves arrived together, spilling over each other to get into the fountain.

They had to get out of there.

The Brothers hitched Nay up over the fountain. She leaned over the side and put a hand and grabbed Jolf. Jolf threw his hammer over the side.

His brother pushed him up as Nay pulled him. Not an easy task for her as half-maugrims had a lot of body mass and the man was wearing some plate armor. But he hooked a hand over the side and scrambled out of the fountain.

Rolf leaned his poleax against the side and had to jump to grab his brother’s hand.

But as he did so the tadpoles crashed into him, smashing him against the inner wall of the fountain. The sheriff pounded on their heads with his gauntlet, shattering their faces.

There was a horrible sound of claws and teeth scraping against plate mail.

“No!” Jolf shouted. He was about to jump back into the fountain full of tadpole dogs with his battle-hammer to save his brother when a volley of exploding crossbow bolts arced into the fountain, hitting the tadpole mutants and turning them into a pink and blue mist.

Nay looked up and saw Martygan perched on the lip of the fountain, sweeping his crossbows back and forth, spraying bolts and vigor projectiles into the pool, mowing the tadpoles down.

Rolf was half-buried in the creatures, punching them with his gauntleted fist and bellowing.

Their teeth puncturing his armor and peeling it open like it was a soda can. He screamed as they started to rip at the exposed flesh of his arms and torso. He disappeared under their numbers, his gauntlet reaching out from underneath the mass.

The aura encasing Martygan’s arms and hands changed colors from violet to orange as he reloaded the crossbows with different cartridges, an array of bolts that looked like glass.

He fired and the glass bolts tumbled through the air, trailing tendrils of orange light, before they landed in the fountain, causing a chain-reaction of bursting tadpoles as they succumbed to a magical napalm.

A fountain of tadpole gore bubbled into the air, revealing Rolf, bloodied and half his armor torn-off, covered in puncture wounds, lying in the mixture of water and gore.

Lain landed on the side of the fountain, jumping down from one of the roofs.

Jolf hopped back into the fountain. “Rolf!”

He picked his unconscious brother up and handed him up to Lain. Nay helped her pull the unconscious sheriff out.

The flesh on his arm and torso looked like raw hamburger. Nay had to look away.

“Brother…” Jolf put his forehead against his brother’s face.

Lain whispered over him, “Mend Flesh.”

Wisps of gold light blew out of her mouth like dandelion fluff and settled over the sheriff. As each feather of gold touched him, there was a burst of light.

When the lights faded, his churned flesh had been healed. It was smooth and pink, like the new skin underneath a scab.

The healer looked at the amazed Jolf. “He’s going to be okay, but he’s going to be asleep for a bit. Trauma still takes its toll, even when its physical manifestation has been erased.”

Martygan continued firing lobs of the napalm into the streets, exterminating the tadpole dogs.

He was making his way to where the giant bipedal toad was thrashing, one of its legs pinned to a stone building with a large crossbow bolt that had gone through the flap of skin on its massive toad leg.

A night watchman, keeping his distance, tried to jab it in the face with a long pike.

But its brown-pink tongue shot out of its mouth, the blossoming tip thwacking the man in the face. The sucker on the end of the tongue wrapped around his head.

In the blink of an eye, the tongue retracted, ripping the watchman’s head off.

It flung back, disappearing back into its mouth, swallowing the man’s head with a gulp.

"What the fuck!" Nay said.

The young faun’s bleating cries could be heard coming from the sack slung over its back.

The humanoid toad grabbed at the bolt with its hands and began to pull. It ripped the bolt out of the stone, bringing the wall down with it.

“No, you don’t,” Martygan said. He reloaded a different set of bolt cartridges into his crossbows. These looked like coiled discs of chain and a rack of eyebolts.

As he pointed the crossbows at the bipedal toad, he shouted, “Chains of Harrow!”

He pulled the trigger on one crossbow and multiple barbed hooks shot towards the creature, trailing chains.

The toad let out a strange bleating and hacking sound as the barbed hooks impaled its flesh.

Then Martygan pointed his other crossbow at the cobblestone street and fired.

Eyebolt anchors quivered into the ground. He anchored the Chains of Harrow to the eyebolts studded into the street.

The toad tried to hop away but it was leashed to the ground. It pulled on the chains. They grew taut but didn’t give.

“Martygan!” Lain said.

He glanced away from the toad and saw more tadpoles coming at them in a half-crescent.

He reloaded another set cartridges into the crossbows.

There was a moment where he closed his eyes in concentration, the vigor aura around him encasing his whole body. Then he blurred, vaulting into the crescent of tadpole dogs. He spun through them like a literal whirlwind, arms outstretched with the crossbows, bolts firing in three-hundred and sixty degrees, melting the clusters of monsters.

Martygan appeared out of the blur, vigor smoke rising off him, standing in the remains of the monster tadpoles.

He checked his bandolier. He was out of bolts and cartridges.

He slung the crossbows to his belt holsters and drew his small sword. He pointed it at the chained bipedal toad.

“Now, we finish this.”

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