Heretical Fishing

Book 2: Chapter 90: The Theft

High above the streets of Gormona, Corporal Claws commanded the sky.

Evening air rushed past, tickling her whiskers and making a toothy grin cross her face. She stood tall on her noble steed, reaching her forepaws high and praising the moon.

Bill, her formerly obedient steed, let out a loud honk as her weight shifted, so Claws sat back down, giving him a mighty pout as she did so. First he’d brought more creatures than her, now he dared order her around?

The audacity of this junior…

Cinnamon let out a squeak of laughter from her right. Claws turned her ire on the troublesome bunny. Cinnamon rode on Pelly’s back, whose large avian eye sparkled with amusement. Claws opened her mouth to give her junior sisters a taste of her mind, but something brought her up short.

A pillar of light, wider than any of the castle’s spires, shot into the sky. It illuminated everything in sight, seeming to cleanse the city with its purity. Then, the pillar imploded. It collapsed in on itself, all of that light being converted into sound.

Crack!

It was like the world itself was torn in two, and the sound reverberated in Claws’s very soul. Bill’s flight faltered. He dropped toward the ground before balancing out again. Her master had said he would release two distracting blasts, but as Claws stared where the pillar of light had been, both her eyebrows rose to their peak. Her master was terrifying. It was fantastic.

Movement stirred in a window just across from Claws. A little girl—just younger than Barry’s son, Paul—stared at Claws with eyes like saucers. Letting out a cheerful chirp, Claws smiled and waved at the little girl. Another face appeared in the window. An older man, likely the little girl’s father, dropped his jaw open when he spied the pelican-riding otter. The girl raised a hand to wave back, but the father swept her away, sprinting to some hidden corner of the house.

They all ran and hid. Was it too much to ask that someone witness Claws’s brilliance as she conquered the skies? Was she not Corporal Claws, maiden of the forest and cutest of Fischer’s animals?

Shaking her head, Claws focused down on the ground once more. Fine. Let them ignore her. There was still another gang of cultivators about, anyway. She’d be the one to find them. Then, she'd have an outlet for her indignation.

Not at all upset that there was no one to witness her brilliance—okay, maybe just a little upset—the hunt began.

***

As Borks loped along the stone hallway, a crack struck like two mountains colliding.

He turned his head in its direction. His master was over there; no one else could have released such a powerful burst of chi. Thinking of his master, Borks wagged his serpentine tail.

Returning to the task at hand, he bounded across the floor. He no longer needed to follow the map in his head—Borks could smell his destination. It was an ancient scent, something he knew well from his former life as a hellhound. And it grew closer.

He rounded a corner, running along the wall so he didn’t skid along the smooth stones. A guard stood ahead, his back to a closed door, his eyes panicked. As he whirled toward Borks’s movement, the blood flowed from the man’s face.

Borks skidded to a stop before him.

“B…” He dropped to his knees. “Bog—”

Borks smacked him across the chin with his tail, knocking the man out cold, then caught him on his back and lowered the guard to the ground. He looked up at the door, considered opening it by the handle. But where was the fun in that? Instead, he leaped through it.

Wood splintered, hinges buckled, and the metal handle clattered across the floor, coming to rest at the foot of an ancient artifact. As the door’s debris settled, Borks gazed over a treasure trove. In his long life, he’d never seen so many relics in one place. There had to be multiple kingdom’s worth here.

His tail started wagging; his master was going to be so happy. Maybe he’d even call Borks a good boy.

Grasping for his power, Borks tore a portal open to his dimensional space.

***

Barry leaped through the portal the moment it opened. After only a moment of staring at the veritable treasure trove—and giving Borks a pat on the head, of course—the theft began.

“Screen here!” Brad said, his amusement clear. “It lists awakenings. I see ‘Fat Rat Pack’ and ‘The Beetle Boys.’”

“Marvelous!” Ellis replied. “They are aware of the names!”

“Another here!” Fergus called when they’d loaded half of the relics already. “It’s the one Trent told us about. They found it.”

“They know about the levels?” Barry laughed, unable to hold it back. “All those skills that Roger has been gaining as An Entire Flock of Birds must have been terrifying.”

“One here!” Duncan interrupted from the side of the room. “It—whoa. The Domain…” Duncan’s eyes went wide. “It says what our Domain does. It also says there’s one here that—”

“What does it say?” Ellis demanded, marching over.

“Not now!” Barry called, carrying a relic with Peter. “We can converse when Borks seals us back in!”

“Right. My apologies.” Shaking his head, Ellis strode over and helped Duncan lift it. As they walked, he craned his neck over the top, no-so-subtly reading the Domain’s effect.

Barry helped them take it into the portal, sharing a smirk with Duncan as Ellis continued examining the screen. They placed it against the others, and as Barry came back into the room, Theo made an excited noise.

“Another here!” He stared down at the screen, his eyebrow furrowing. “Ah… you guys might want to see this one.”

“Get it inside first. We’re almost done!”

“Oh. Right…”

They were a well-oiled machine as they loaded up the last of them, all knowing that the success of Operation Sticky Fingers was on the line. When the final one was in place, they met in the now empty room.

“Okay,” Barry said. “We have confirmation they know of the false names.” He turned to the spirit beasts. “Are you all up for the Marinate variant?”

As one, they nodded and made various sounds of confirmation.

“Good.”

“Me too,” Ellis said.

Barry’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re sure?”

“I am.” The former archivist lifted the scaled head adorning his own. “It is necessary for proper marination.”

Smiling, Barry nodded. “All right. Good luck, then.”

Everyone but the animals and Ellis entered Borks’s portal. When the portal sealed behind them, Barry spun, rubbing his hands together as he spied the working artifacts.

***

Augustus Reginald Gormona leaned into the madness as he ran through the castle’s twisting corridors. It was a long way between the spire he had been in and the artifact-filled room.

Getting there as fast as possible, he expelled vast amounts of chi with every step, but they were only drops in the bucket that was his core. The smell of his own robes burning greeted him like an old friend, reminding him of years long passed.

It smelled like training and his youth. Most of all, it smelled of his father. Thinking of the old man made a shudder run down Augustus’s spine, and he shook his head, returning to the present. He could reminisce later. For now, there were enemies within the capital's walls.

Augustus stopped on the spot. He could feel cultivators. They were close.

For a moment, he dismissed his worry, thinking it was only one of the girls with a handful of cultivators under her control. But if that were the case, why were they in the castle and not defending the streets?

When the cultivators got close enough to count, his blood ran cold.

The cultivator squads only run with four at a time, and there are five of them…

They stopped moving on the other side of a wall.

Can they sense me, too? He wondered, a smirk coming to his face.

If they thought of ambushing him, they would soon regret it. He cocked his arm back, aimed it at the wall, and channeled as much chi through his elbow as he could. His fist rocketed forward, the strike filled with deadly intent.

Before it could hit, a yell loud enough to travel through stone came from the other side of the wall.

***

“Fire!” Ellis yelled.

Pistachio, Rocky, and Snips all released the power welling in their claws. Their abilities combined into a single blast that slammed into—and through—the stone wall. The cultivator Ellis had felt on the other side of the wall rocketed back as if shot from a cannon. From his position, Ellis saw each subsequent wall the stranger struck and broke through.

“That may have been a little too much force…” he mused, sensing the cultivator coming to a stop a few rooms away.

The backlash from the blasts would have torn the spirit beasts’ costumes to shreds if not for the fact they were System-made, and Ellis quickly jotted that down as he stepped through the hole left in the first wall.

“Let us go be seen, shall we? Our presence must be marinated within the locals’ minds.”

Rocky was already scuttling forward, his disguised claws held high and promising future violence.

“Don’t let him kill them,” Ellis said to Snips, who tore off after Rocky, followed closely by Pistachio and Borks.

***

If not for the skills the king had honed over a lifetime, the attack would have killed him on the spot. He’d rerouted the chi to form a protective shield in front of his torso just in time.

As he flew backward, crashing through walls like they were paper mache, he had time to consider his next move. By the time he came skidding to a stop within the grand banquet hall, he had the entire fight mapped out in his mind’s eye.

They had gotten the jump on him, yet they had failed to kill him. Augustus grinned, letting the madness running through his veins show. Let them gaze upon his true form. Let the world… let… the…

Augustus’s mind came sputtering to a stop as the first of his attackers came skidding into the banquet hall.

Unmistakably mammalian, the creature made the king’s breath catch in his chest. With the pelt of a goat and more limbs than a spider, it was no natural beast. The hat atop the spirit beast’s head made its identity clear.

“Boat Goat…” the king muttered, his eyes locked on his adversary.

He gathered his power and forced it to come roiling up from his core, but before he could attack, the rest of them arrived.

Glare Bear, its body too low to the ground to be anything but an evolved creature. It almost seemed to slither, its many legs like that of a centipede. The namesake glare came from two enormous eyes that sprouted from its head. Augustus quickly averted his gaze from the awakened bear, suspecting it had some sort of ocular power.

Next was Hurtle the turtle. It was the same size as Boat Goat and also had entirely too many limbs, but that was where the similarities ended. Its armored shell glinted in the banquet hall, reflecting the firelight of multiple torches.

A humongous canid came bounding through the breach, covered in remnants of the bog whence it came. Bog Dog was as tall as a man, and the visible patches of body beneath its swamp trappings were lithe and muscular.

When the last of the cultivators came strolling through the shattered wall, Augustus clenched his jaw.

Standing on two legs, the spirit beast was more anomalous than the rest. Its body was covered from head to toe in obsidian scales as large as a gold coin. The scales seemed to absorb the torchlight and reflect it out at the wrong angle. The creature was a humanoid, having advanced enough to leave behind its beastly form. Within its thumbed and scaled hands, the spirit beast grasped a notepad and pencil.

Looking up from the notes it was taking, it turned toward the king with beady, dead eyes, freezing in place when it saw him.

“... Augustus?” it asked in a too-human voice, apparently surprised. “You are a cultivator…?”

“So you finally show yourself?” The king laughed, sounding mad even to himself. “You think to ambush me? To unsettle me by knowing my name? In my seat of power?” He spat. “You waste your breath, wizard.”

The leader of the enemy forces bent in response. Its body convulsed, and Augustus took a step back, preparing himself for an attack. But then he heard the sound coming from his enemy’s throat.

The scaled humanoid was laughing.

“How did we not expect this?” it asked, shaking its reptilian head. “It all makes so much sense now!”

The fire chi seethed from the king’s core and bathed everywhere it touched in fiery rage.

This cretin dares laugh at me?

His chi spread out in an instant, burning away shock and leaving only righteous indignation. Channeling his chi outward, Augustus rocketed forward on streams of molten energy, heading directly for the still-cackling spirit beast.

“Lizard Wizard!” he roared. “Fight me!”