Chapter 10: Bahbahbah

  Choch was less happy than she had been. The rest of the Goom hadn’t responded to further far-speak spells. So no news was good news, except when it wasn’t. The adventurers had gotten far ahead of them. Lester and Mina also wore expressions of worry as the trio hurried through the woods.

  The elder hadn’t wanted to rush blindly forward into an ambush. A cautious but hurried advance was their decision. Three dead or captured would-be rescuers wouldn’t help their families.

  The trio was also running low on material to replenish their mana. A few gold pieces for each of them and three small diamonds. Choch gazed inward at potential power and tragedy. The rarity of the small, precious stones she had procured in this region would continue to ramp up their recovery rate to a dangerous level…mana surges like that could be deadly.

  If they consumed those…Their bodies would pop like overripe melons if costly spells were not used continuously.

  The esoteric danger was forgotten as they entered a clearing to find Gomm on the ground next to a large bad-gir with a purple-furred crown. Both bodies had a silver chain wrapped tightly around their necks.

  Lester and Mina hissed in distress and started toward their nephew, but Choch quickly put a restraining hand on her children’s shoulders. She had been watching the bodies and noticed shallow breathing.

  “They are unconscious. I don’t know who the bad-gir is, but it could be an ally since the adventurers captured them too. The chains are keyed to the guild member who used them. So we need to disable the adventurers long enough for me to remove the chains.”

  Lester spoke with anger in his voice as Choch’s face set in resigned anger,

  “Kill. Not disable. If Gomm has been captured, the rest of our clan is in serious trouble.”

  Mina nodded angrily in agreement. Choch didn’t waste time with a reply as she withdrew her diamonds and gave one to each of them. The small, furry faces of the elder Goom filled with growing rage. All three tossed the shiny gems into their mouths and swallowed.

  All three Goom elders shuddered as mana began to ramp up within them. The faint glow of rage and magic transformed their eyes into red-faceted orbs of fury, leaking whisps of green light. Each started a different low chant of sibilant hissing and chittering.

  As the tempo of the chants increased, the whisps coalesced into green orbs of light. The glow built behind the windows to the souls of furry fury within. The orbs floated smoothly to the armor of vital areas on their tiny bodies and reinforced the material. Further lights flowed across their fur and sank into their pelts. The muscles beneath their fur thickened and corded with power. Their fur gained a metallic sheen to it.

  Lastly, the orbs glided down to the claws of each Goom and latched on to the base of each digit. Where the orbs rested, green lightning flowed down their claws, sparking and spitting from the tips.

  Choch surveyed her children grimly as their chant faded. She nodded, and the trio advanced. They followed the trail broken into the brush at the edge of the clearing. They came out behind the party of adventurers to a scene of carnage. Four upright bodies were in the area.

  The closest figure, the diminutive red-headed girl in robes, was in front of the tall blond woman in an outfit that blended with the colors of the forest around them. There was a creature of vines with branches coming out of it vaguely shaped like a human hunched near the pair.

  Bits of small white-furred bodies were scattered around the clearing. Choch saw the transformed and dismembered family of her settlement. Choch’s babies…

  The adventurers had killed them.

  A juvenile owl shrieked from the nearby trees. A dark-haired man in leathers smeared with blood and dirt lay on top of one of the bad-girs with his knives sunk into its back, frantically stabbing. One plated in armor and almost as short as themselves stood far from the Goom at the opposite side of the clearing.

  It wielded an axe that hung loosely from one fist as the dwarf panted. Bodies surrounded the armored one, who looked exasperated at the man in leathers. The look on the bearded face changed to surprise at seeing the Goom emerge from the trees.

  Not looking at us. Bad idea.

  Choch didn’t follow the look. She had killing to do.

  With a loud snarl and knocking the more petite redhead to the ground in their rush, Mina and Lester leaped. They landed upon the tall blond female waving her arms at the pile of vines and branches in front of her. The creature was slowly settling to the forest floor.

  The redhead fell and saw her companion’s soon-to-be dire plight. She scrambled backward, crab-walking away as she started tugging at a large sack tied to her belt.

  The married couple’s claws sparking lightning pierced the clothes of the blond woman, carving into the amazon's flesh as she shrieked in pain. The owl hidden in the nearby trees shrieked again as they started to climb her tall form.

  Slashing claws, small but powerful jaws, and a pissed-off nature lent them a significant advantage over the tall woman. The woman struggled to throw the beasts away from her as they scaled her like a tree that had sinned against nature. The lightning arced into her as their claws afforded them a purchase she could not shake.

  The slowly writhing form of vines, thorns, and thick branches in front of the woman exploded into a violent movement toward the new prey. It grasped Mina with many of its tendrils and ripped the smaller Goom away from the woman, partially cauterized wounds spraying blood. There was a fist-sized gaping wound where her fangs had been torn away.

  Lester abandoned his perch on the woman as she collapsed and rushed to Mina’s aid. His tiny form only reached the knee of the writhing creature, but his claws left large gashes in the limbs he could reach.

  He severed any tendrils trying to grasp him as he began to scale the creature. The lightning from his claws had little effect.

  At the woman’s scream of pain and collapse, the dark-haired man on top of the transformed Goom’s corpse stopped stabbing the dead beast and looked up at the unfolding fight. Then, with dawning realization in his eyes, he left one of the daggers in the body and started to scramble at his belt for something Choch couldn’t see with that newly empty hand.

  Choch advanced past her remaining children toward the dwarf. Her thoughts flowed in a red surge to match the pace of the battle,

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  Lester and Mina can handle that thing and then deal with him. The man is a noob. Not enough of a threat to bother with right now.

  Rushing past the trio, Choch let out a passing swipe of her sparking claws at the small redhead in robes still struggling to open her pouch. The girl cried out and fell as Choch hurried towards the dwarf.

  Gotta deal with this one.

  She stampeded, as much as something her size could, towards the armored figure.

  Her claws flashed forward at the dwarf’s face. The armored arm of her foe was almost too late to intercept. The startled and pained grunt of the dwarf attested to the lightning of her claws coursing through the metal armor of the vambraces.

  Leaning back slightly with the blow, the dwarf wasn’t caught utterly flatfooted as they kicked out. Connecting with Choch’s stomach, the booted foot of the dwarf flung her small body closer to the dark-haired man Choch had ignored.

  The running spells she had cast before the fight reinforced her tiny body. However, they didn’t lend any more mass to her. She stood back up from where she had been flung and took a single step. Snarling, she screeched in a chittering roar,

  “You murdered my family!”

  The metal chain whipping around her neck from behind caught her by surprise. The end wrapped around her neck and snapped into place with a loud click and a surge of blue lightning that convulsed her muscles.

  Panicking at the turn of events that would haunt her nightmares, she staggered drunkenly away from the now grinning, leather-clad newbie she had dismissed. But, unfortunately for the adventurers, the first lightning surge hadn’t put her down. It had only blinded her with pain for a second.

  With a scream of furious agony issuing from her lips, another jolt of power flowed through the chain around her neck into her body. Her enhancement spell increased her endurance and strength, so she didn’t pass out from the jolts. Words joined her screaming,

  “Fuck you!”

  Panicking further, she took a few more quick steps away from the man who had placed the chain on her. He was standing with hands on his hips in smug satisfaction.

  Halfway up the creature he had been scaling, Lester saw her capture and cried out at his mother's danger. Then, as he tried to decide who needed his help more, Mina or his mother, a group of red, round objects rolled into view at Choch’s feet.

  Confusion cut through his battle rage as he thought,

  Apples?

  His body seized, and he fell off the vine creature from his perch. Lester’s body was not under his control, and panic rose in his mind. His small furry limbs scrambled him towards the fruit. He started picking them up and smashing them against his skull. His mind blanked with the overwhelming need to find water as his out-of-control body finished with the last apple. He needed to wash off the bits of smashed fruit.

  Lester forgot everything around him and thought of a stream near their home with obsessive, manic need. Then, abandoning everything else, he rushed back the way the Goom had come, with all other thoughts driven from his head.

  Choch saw Lester flee into the woods covered with bits of smashed apple. Despair gripped her heart. She tensed as her body resisted another surge of lightning.

  She reached for the caplace at her throat and started to course a complex flow of magical energy into the metal. This caused it to emit a shriek of an alarm, assaulting her ears and concentration. It was a warning that an escape from the chain was being attempted.

  Trying to ignore the shriek of alarm and pain from another lightning surge, she focused on the task at paw. She focused every scrap of mana she could produce into the spell she was casting. The reinforcement to her armor and body faded as she diverted the energies, and the lightning at her claws dimmed.

  Unfortunately, the dwarf seemed aware of how preoccupied the eldest Goom had become. They rushed forward, striking hard with the flat of their axe against the side of Choch’s head.

  Her world tilted sharply as the complex magic she was attempting to use ran out of her control and surged from her paws at her throat to her head as it attempted to escape her control. Magic would fight her for control normally, but not like this.

  She let all her dimming spells fail. She needed the focus to control her attempt at escaping the capture necklace. She needed to redirect the flow of all that excess Mana before her head exploded from the pressure. An outlet…she needed an outlet.

  A blast of magical energy poured forth from her eyes in a green beam of destruction. Narrowly missing the dwarf’s position, the beam slashed past the armored form and through the trees behind them. The crashing of trees echoed as the beam slashed for half a mile beyond the clearing.

  Nixen looked at the tunnel of destruction carved through the forest. They had been lucky to avoid obliteration. The paladin whispered a curse to themselves,

  “What are mobs capable of that doing in this small of a county? What do you have me mixed up in now, Jeph?”

  Before the mob could do anything else, the dwarf advanced in a blur on the distracted Goom and lashed out with another kick aimed at her head. As the armored foot connected with her face, she had time for a last thought,

  Fuck.

  The tiny creature that had issued forth such an incredible blast being captured and rendered unconscious, Nixen turned to help his other junior party members. The dwarf was in time to see Winnie’s out-of-control simulacrum gripping the last creature with several tendrils on either end of the small body.

  Several were wrapped around the creature’s legs and more around the head, all of the vines straining. The poor creature was screaming in pain as the vines pulled harder. Coruscating waves of magical green energy flowed from its eyes as it screamed. The spells covering its body were sparking and sputtering.

  Nixen cried out to Winnie,

  “Winnie! Calm it!”

  The druid apprentice looked in bad shape with burned slashes and a weeping wound from the gaping bite that had taken a sizeable chunk of flesh from her side. She struggled to sit up with one hand covering the wound and reached out her other hand to her creation. She was gritting her teeth at the pain but beginning to chant through them again.

  The simulacrum didn’t seem interested in peaceable mediation as it let forth a loud, creaking groan of wood as it wrenched harder. Finally, the small furry body let out one last muffled shriek as it was ripped in half with a burst of magical energy, blood, and viscera spraying over itself and the blond woman hunched in front of it. The halves of the white-furred corpse clutched in its vines.

  The spray of magic and blood now covering the woman attracted the simulacrum’s attention. It rushed its former mistress and slammed into her form with a burst of leaves still clutching the halves of its prey. The magic washing over Winnie pulled the mass of vines closer, wrapping around the woman in a bloody cocoon.

  Nixen rushed forward to end the now out-of-control minion, or at least pull it off her. But, instead, the two halves of the Goom exploded in a flash of energy in the simulacrum’s grip. This ignited the concentrated magic that had been infused throughout the cocoon.

  Instead of rushing to save their novice, the heavy form of the dwarf was blasted backward from the explosion. Cato and Omara were sent tumbling. Cato groaned at the magical backlash that had flung him away from the pair at the center of the explosion.

  Omara was not far from him and unmoving after bouncing off a tree. The body of the captured Goom had been blown into the mess of corpses of the bad-gir. The blast crater around Winnie had formed messy piles of bloody remains in a circle of charred earth around her. Nixen smelled hotdogs from where he had landed.

  Why hotdogs?

  Only laying on his back for a moment, Nixen kipped up to a standing position with a clank of their armor, though coughing and unsteady. The dwarf looked to where the explosion of magic had occurred.

  In a ring of blown back and blackened vegetation, Winnie lay. Pellet was nuzzling at her prone form frantically. The previously bleeding slashes and bites were closed over with rough bark and buds of leaves slowly sprouting from her now primarily bald head.

  Nixen whispered in bewilderment,

  “What the fuck just happened?”