Dragon Royale 2: An Urban Fantasy Adventure Read online

  “Anton? Let him go!” I screamed, but I feared the man was already dead.

  “I’m afraid he’s a keeper. Your cat, too. I must make every effort to weaken you by removing your helpers. I’m going to—”

  Jo pushed me to the ground. “Duck!” she yelled.

  A tank round slapped into the cube right on the corner, then cut through the entire mass of goop before it shot out the other side. Two seconds later, the round impacted somewhere out of sight.

  The sound of the gun reached us from half a mile away. I glanced over to the tank; white smoke swirled in front of it.

  Merkur spoke without a trace of worry that she’d been shot by a fucking tank. “Then again, maybe this will all stop if I use you as my own human shield.”

  The cube was so large I didn’t see it send a long tentacle over the roof of the warehouse next to me. The giant rope came down from above the door and grabbed my arm before I even realized it was there.

  Jo already had me on the ground, so her military senses weren’t quick enough to stop another threat at almost the same time. She lunged for me, but Merkur was too fast.

  My witch would be pissed at herself, for sure. At least, that was my thought as I watched the distance grow between us.

  Soon, everything went green.

  ***

  Being inside Merkur was like being at the bottom of a pool that hadn’t been cleaned all season. The gelatinous cube wasn’t exactly clear, but the numerous lights up in the sky, plus the few working streetlights along the tarmac around the warehouses, made it possible to see most of the monster’s garbage-strewn insides. Bodies were everywhere, especially the wolves and flying rats we’d seen earlier, but there were others I didn’t recognize. Most were whole, but a fair number were partially or mostly dissolved, like they’d been there for a long time.

  I held my breath and tried to shift inside the liquid, but it had the consistency of motor oil.

  My rifle floated next to me, tethered to my neck by the long sling. In the time I had left I wanted to go down fighting, so I pulled it to me and tried the trigger. The damned thing actually fired, but the hot tracer fizzled out not long after it cleared the barrel. The bullet kept going, creating a brief smudge in the green, but there was no possible way it harmed Merkur.

  “Poor knight,” Merkur’s voice somehow echoed in my brain. “Did you think your mundane weapons and low-level magic was any threat to my greatness?” Her braggadocio reminded me of Lord Bart. Both seemed convinced I was inferior because I wasn’t a natural sorcerer.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the ability to give myself air and I fast approached my limit.

  I pressed the button for my rifle’s dragon-bone bayonet, hoping against hope it would save me like it did for the last mega asshole, Bart. It sprung out, but the black bone knife looked harmless in the great mass. Unlike Bart, there was no heart to strike.

  It was worth it, I thought.

  I let go of the rifle and tried to yank out my phone. I had to pull it super close to my face to properly see the screen, but I wasn’t sure what to draw once it was there. There were mere seconds left to think of something brilliant, and my brain was already operating on less oxygen than it needed.

  My fingers held the pen long enough to draw a messy cube, but my eyes became blurry before I could write anything clever to fight it. I almost suggested it shrink itself into a person-sized cube so I could fight my way out, but a lesson from deep in the recesses of my memories bubbled up with advice saying that such a compression would shove all the mass, including me, into a squished cube.

  My lungs begged me to give them air.

  “Guys, thanks for your help,” I said on the link. My magical wires all glowed brightly at my wrist before they disappeared into the green goo. The yellow one was especially bright and went in a direction separate from the purple and red of Jo and Tex. “Save yourselves…”

  A yellow orb appeared above me, like the sun was coming down to take me to the afterlife.

  “That’s nice,” I said in a half-confused manner.

  Echo’s ethereal cord bunched up against me, and the rest of it went to the ball of sunshine moving closer. As it got to within a few feet, I realized it was Echo herself. A bubble of air reached me first, then the yellow-clad woman fell bodily on top of me with a wet, sloppy splash.

  “Matt!” she said aloud as she hugged me.

  The happy smell of the beach assaulted me, but I wasn’t thinking straight, yet.

  “I must have died and gone to heaven because your body is only fit for an angel.” My words came out slurred, but I was sure I got them in the right order. “Would you hold it against me?”

  She was already plastered to my front, but she squeezed me tighter.

  “Jo picked me up and tossed me on top of this monster. I’m going to get you out!”

  “How are you alive?” I asked her with a bit of a chuckle.

  “I can shape the water, Sir Matt, so I shaped the water inside this beast to allow this bubble of air.”

  I blinked over and over as my brain started working again. “Can you change all of her insides to something else?”

  An airburst of light from outside illuminated the whole of Merkur’s insides like it was the middle of the day. Echo’s beautiful blue eyes seemed sad as the light faded again.

  “No, I can only affect small regions, like this bubble.”

  “How big can you make it?” I asked.

  She closed her eyes. “Like this.” The irregular bubble around us grew into more of a sphere. We stayed at the bottom, but the whole thing couldn’t have been more than six feet across before she started to strain.

  “OK, ease up,” I advised.

  The irregular bubble returned to being just big enough for the two of us to lay together with about six inches of air above her body.

  “We have to fight her,” I said on the link.

  The cube shifted as if it was moving, but the outside was only indistinct black shapes, so it was hard to say. However, when the tank fired its main gun again, I realized we’d moved toward it. Also, it felt like we’d been turned, or shifted, inside the blobby mass because there was less green between us and the tank.

  “Better watch out,” Merkur taunted. “Tanks can be dangerous toys.”

  We moved right to the edge of Merkur’s leading face, and a thin tube extended from our bubble and reached all the way to the cube’s boundary. A little fresh air came into our cocoon.

  “You got us more air?” I asked.

  “Yes, but I don’t like being at this edge with those guns so close,” Echo replied.

  “Can you move us out?” I suggested.

  She scratched one of her pointy ears. “I’ll try.”

  Echo used her skills to extend the air bubble on an angle downward and toward the edge, but as we slid down the hollowed-out section, Merkur seemed to harden her outer skin, so we ran up against it.

  “It’s blocked,” Echo said with despair.

  “Try going deeper inside her,” I responded. “We have to get away from the front side.”

  I didn’t know if it really mattered, because the tank rounds travelled through the entire cube, but I wasn’t going to make it easy to hit us.

  Echo managed to slide our bubble ten or fifteen feet toward the middle, but the green beast put a stop to that, too. Soon, we hovered in place.

  “She’s got us,” Echo reported. “I can’t go either way.”

  The tank fired again, and its giant projectile ripped through the goo a few feet above us. Echo and I got flung sideways like someone jumped on the opposite side of a waterbed. Her bubble warped all over but held its shape.

  “You don’t want to hide, people, I want to give you a front row seat!” Merkur’s voice sounded tinny inside the bubble of air.

  I spoke quietly and deliberately on the link with Echo, because the sick bitch was going to make sure we either suffocated to death or were shot by the tank. A bad headache stalked me, caused
by the ups and downs of the oxygen level, so I needed to be fast.

  “Have you ever heard of the poison pill?” I asked.

  ***

  My role-playing days were years in the past, but I would never forget some of the campaigns set up by my buddies. There was one that mixed magic and Nazis where our party had to go fight into Berlin and kill Hitler. Another good one was based on building our party into a full army to conquer an evil kingdom. But one of my all-time favorites was about magically inserting a righteous paladin to the center of Hell itself to cancel out all of the evil down there. My buddy called him the Poison Pill Paladin.

  Echo had been living in a stream when I found her, which was a lot like living under a rock on land, so her response didn’t surprise me.

  “I know what poison is,” she said. “Sirens used it a lot.”

  “Well, it means we have to make Merkur want to spit us out, rather than chew us up in here. I saw you change red water into clean drinking water. Can you do it again?”

  It was tempting to try to poison the big monster, but there was so much crap floating around, including numerous bodies, it was basically a junkyard. I figured the greatest enemy of that filth would be pure H-2-oh.

  “Sure, but why?” she asked.

  “And how much can you do at one time. Could you do all the water inside Merkur at the same instant?” I was pretty sure magic didn’t work like that. At least, not at the beginning.

  “I never tried to do a lot, Sir Matt, but the little amounts you saw me do are like breathing for me. I could maybe do something the size of this bubble pretty easily, but I’d also have to maintain our air. I’m not sure I should do more than that at once.”

  My plan was doomed to fail if she could only change patches of Merkur the size of the bubble. We’d be discovered long before we did any real damage.

  “OK. Hang on a second, I have another idea.” I squirmed around as I pulled out my phone again, already knowing the screen I wanted.

  As I expected, the text on Echo’s character page reported she had new abilities to choose from. She’d officially reached level 1 back at the giant warehouse and could now pick either Water Warping/2nd degree or something called Liquid Heal.

  “Fuck,” I mumbled. I’d been hoping one of the girls would bring some first aid skills to the table, but this couldn’t have come at a worse time. “Echo, I need you to pick the second degree of water warping. We have to hit her hard and fast if we want to do any damage.”

  “What do you mean? Pick what?” She struggled to see me working the phone in my left hand.

  There was no time to explain. “You have to trust me. My magic can help you with your water abilities, but you have to choose what I tell you. Water Warping, level 2.”

  She smiled at me and I caught sight of her straight hair in the glow of my phone. The streaks of blue and aqua were barely visible. “I trust you.”

  Echo stole a brief kiss.

  “And I choose Water Warping, level 2.”

  The screen changed as I watched. The choice of Liquid Heal was now greyed out.

  “It worked!” I said aloud. The air was stuffy as shit inside the little bubble, and the garbage smell of the slime was ripe, but her ocean perfume did make it almost bearable. “Do what you can.”

  “I’ll try,” she replied.

  The bubble re-oriented so we stood next to each other, rather than her on top of me. That freed her hands and arms.

  She took a deep breath. “Here goes.”

  A yellow orb shot out from her body, like another balloon of air, but this time it extended in a perfect sphere to about five feet on every side of us. The water immediately changed from baby diarrhea green to bottled water pure.

  “You did it!” I shouted.

  Almost like magic, the bubble of clear water rose upward through the murk.

  “The clean water is not weighed down with impurities, so it rises,” she said as if watching a science project unfold.

  “Do it again, and fast,” I whispered. “We’re running out of air.”

  When most of the fresh water left the area around us, she cranked out another blast of magic, which purified the water again. Like the other one, the orb of clean water rose toward the top.

  We both admired the bulbous masses of fresh water as they cruised the thirty feet to the surface of the creature. It became brighter above as if even the small bit of pure water allowed more light to reach us.

  Before she could unleash a third bubble of the cleanliness infection, a long string of tracer bullets came out of the darkness and drilled into Merkur’s flesh. It felt like watching a cross between a strobe light and dripping molten steel as the machine gun penetrated the goopy green along its right side.

  Then the gunner dragged the string of death toward the center of the cube.

  “Damn! Drop us to the bottom!” I shouted at Echo.

  “I have an idea,” she said as she aimed her hands down.

  The bubble of pure water erupted below our feet and the air bubble fell through it right away. She did it a second time and we fell all the way to the concrete.

  The machine gun tore through the tunnel of pure water above our heads. The bullets cut across the gap with ferocious kinetic energy.

  “Make as many bubbles as you can,” I choked out. The air in our cramped space became even more stale and polluted as if being at the bottom of the massive slime block increased the pressure.

  Merkur chose the moment to check in. “These are the armies of your world? I knew General Anton was part of the collaboration effort, but he never said how primitive your weapons were.”

  “What can kill you, bitch?” I mumbled. “I’ll use that.”

  “Why don’t I give you the location of my retirement chest?” Merkur laughed. “Why don’t I…” The gelatinous beast quivered. “What in the six faces is going on? I’m poisoned.”

  “More. Do it more.” I ordered Echo to hit it with all she had.

  “Who? What?” Merkur had no eyes that I could see, but I felt her gaze fall upon me nonetheless.

  Another sphere of magic erupted around Echo, cleaning another ball of muck from the dirtiest nether region of the gel.

  ***

  The tank sent another swath of smaller bullets over our heads. It was almost as if the machine gun operator had it in his head to cut the beast in half by sawing back and forth across its middle.

  Merkur sounded surprised. “What are you two doing down there? Why aren’t you dead like the others? And…what are you doing to my bodily fluids?”

  The gel quivered again, like it had goosebumps.

  I spoke on the link to all three of my girls. “Our plan isn’t working. Can you stop that tank? It’s going to hit us one of these times.”

  Tex jumped on. “There are army men over there, Matt. I don’t think we can do shit. I’m breaking crates to find a weapon to free you two.”

  “And I’m hitting the cube on the corners, but it isn’t doing enough damage,” Jo added.

  It made me proud they’d taken the initiative out there, but we were almost out of air in our safety bubble. If there was some way to save us, it was going to have to come from me.

  “Banger, you there?” I asked over our link.

  “Affirmative, master. I’m pleased to report I am now in cleaner liquid. The acid is not as strong here.”

  He’d found one of Echo’s bubbles. “That’s great. Listen. I need to know the tactical situation outside. What’s going on out there?”

  “I am in an unfavorable alignment at this time, so I cannot see the arriving enemy, but I do have eyes on the main warehouse.”

  “Are there any creatures coming out of it to fight the army men and the tank?”

  “Not that I can see. Lord Merkur punched her way out through the roof, but so far there are no other creatures following her lead.”

  “Are we about twenty-five yards from the warehouse?” I could see large shapes and some lights, but getting the exact distan
ce wasn’t easy in the green soup.

  “Correct, master.”

  My headache was now in full meltdown mode.

  “Listen to me,” I wheezed. “We tried to fuck her up from the inside, but it isn’t working fast enough. You have to blow open a garage door to let out whatever is inside that warehouse now. Send the water right at Merkur’s side.”

  “You’ll be killed if the water gets to you,” Tex said with anger creeping into her voice. “Think of something else.”

  Jo was silent, so I reached out to her. “Jo? You’re my gun out there. Can you blow a hole in that wall?”

  “Jo! Don’t do it. I can find a safer weapon in here.”

  I imagined Tex tipping crates to get them to split open.

  “Jo, I need you. We’re out of air. You have to kill this thing if we have any chance of getting out. We’ll try to keep her busy in here.”

  “I found more staffs, Matt. Maybe one of these will help you. We can try!”

  “I’m sorry, Andi Texford. I really am. But this is what we have to do to beat the biggest assholes.” I’d only used her full name a handful of times, and this seemed like the appropriate moment.

  “I’ll do it,” Jo said quietly.

  I expected a complaint from Tex, but she didn’t reply.

  “Hurry,” I croaked.

  Echo stuck her head through the wispy boundary created by the air bubble and took a breath underwater. She pulled back and smiled sadly. “I wish I could transfer my ability to live underwater to you.”

  “Can you punch an air bubble through to the edge?” I pointed sideways, but I was light-headed and dizzy, so I wasn’t sure which way I was pointing.

  “I’ve never tried warping air,” she replied.

  “No, warp the water around the air. Get to the edge and it should come in.”

  “I’ll try,” she replied. I felt the magic crackle between us, but I was unable to really watch what she was doing. I closed my eyes and steadied my runaway heart beat to try to slow my breathing.

  “It’s too polluted, Sir Matt. I can only get about half the way there with a thin bubble.”

  I looked up through a tower of clear water. One of the military’s wobbling lights hung in the sky almost directly above, which gave me the feeling of being at the bottom of a well.