BXBX NOVEL Chapter 180 - Payback
Everyone in the group except for Thomas hopped onto their Amphiboards. "How is it that a little pile of beast baits attracts this many?" Elero asked as she scanned through the fog crowded with unknown entities with life essence around her eyes. "There are enough creatures to make an army."
"It is because it is getting close to winter," Doevm responded. Behind his closed eyelids, his eyes moved back and forth, as if looking at all the possible options of escape. "Almost everything in the swamp goes into hibernation, so they all develop a ravenous appetite. They will go after anything they can get."
"But what about the Bullfrogs?" Frey asked, glancing at all of their wasted hard work.
"Leave them," Doevm muttered. "Better we have our lives than some replaceable corpses." He opened his eyes and nodded before reaching down and stuffing a bunch of the beast baits into his spatial ring. "I got a plan. Let\'s go." He pushed off with a paddle but Elero held out a hand to stop him.
She then pointed into the fog, where a few faint, smaller shadows disappeared into: "How about we instead go chase down the fuckers who denied us from what we earned?" Doevm shrugged and followed behind. Elero went faster than all of them, going in a northwest direction. Doevm and Frey followed on their Amphiboards, but Thomas didn\'t take out his. He instead lept from patch of soil to patch of soil.
Doevm cursed: "Thomas, hop on an Amphiboard before the hoard reaches us."
Thomas shook his head: "I can\'t go very fast on those things. I just fall off. I can only go this way. Also…" He pointed to his busted arm, which was turning red by the second. "This thing is busted. I can\'t paddle yet-" His head whipped down to find that he wasn\'t standing on soil anymore, but in muddy water. The waterlevel rose up to encompass everything in the area in ankle-high mud. "Why?"
"It must be all the monsters," Doevm said. He glanced at the rapidly approaching figures. "They are so big that they are displacing the water. Just get on an Amphiboard and follow. Now!"
Before Thomas could object, Frey reached over, picked Thomas up by the back of his shirt, and put him on his back in a piggy-back ride: "There. Problem solved." Frey paddled with the rest, who simply shrugged. Thomas sighed, knowing that Frey, even with the added weight, was going much faster on an Amphiboard than he ever could.
"I\'m sorry," Thomas whispered, too ashamed to meet their gazes.
The further the group went, the bigger the shadows got. The shadows cried and shrieked while slamming against each other, fighting for the delicious prizes that the group had so graciously prepared for them.
Bright orbs of light shot up into the sky and penetrated through the thick fog. The hideously deformed creatures and all their many mangled mutations came into color. Shouting echoed through the swamps, other groups that had been caught. Almost immediately after the orbs lit up, three glowing figures of dark copper, dark silver, and golden life essence shot through the area. Water and soil splattered everywhere whenever one of the figures hit the earth. When the figures shot back up, they carried beaten and bloodied groups on their backs. Creatures lashed out at them only for their attacks to ping off of the generals.
An ever so slight hiss caused Thomas to turn to the right. Two sets of green, slitted eyes reflected his pale completion. The pupils dilated upon seeing its prey, and the water below the eyes rippled. "on your right!" Thomas yelled right as a long slender figure shot out of the foliage only for Frey to punt it back into the bushes.
"Just keep going." Doevm ducked under a ginormous snake wrapped in blue life essence. Its venomous fangs whiffed right over his hair hair. Doevm responded by stabbing his spear through its head. The light had barely left its eyes but he stuffed the corpse into his spatial ring. Three more snakes appeared, all bigger than the first and all covered with light copper life essence. The group kept paddling with life essence surging around their arms, but Frey wasn\'t as fast as the rest, and the snakes were just barely gaining on him.
Thomas pulled his paddle out into his off hand and paddled along with Frey. The snakes were inches away. Thomas could feel their breath. They opened their mouths and shot out.
The very swamp shook under the group and the waterlevel rose. A massive snapping turtle\'s jaws shot out from under them and clamped down on the three snakes. Two shakes of the turtle\'s head made its prey go limp. The many trees and rocks that had grown along its back had served as cover. The shell was mostly flat, barely taller than a Bullfrog, but it was extremely wide. Caws assaulted the four\'s ears. Dozens of massive hawks swooped down onto the turtle, which retracted itself into its shell dragging the snakes with it.
The hawks gave up on the turtle and turned to the group. Each of them had two sets of scaled wings, which shone in the light like their yellow slitted eyes. They crashed into the water, which formed wave that sent the group flying off of their Amphiboards. A mess of claws and brown feathers blurred as the group tumbled into the mud.
Frey was the first to his feet, but Elero had been slammed into a tree and fell down. She tried to get up but immediately fell back down on her shaking legs. She held her head and cursed. Another hawk locked its gaze onto her. It cawed before curling its wings up and diving down. Frey jumped in its way. Its claws went straight around his shield and dug into his forearm. Frey ducked under the second claw, which scraped him just shy of his eyes.
The hawk reeled back. It raised its massive barbed beak to the sky before plunging down at Frey. Right before it struck however, a piece of meat slapped against its face. It cocked its head to the side, not understanding where this piece of meat could have come from. Then it sniffed, and its eyes went wide. All the hawks in the area locked onto the hawk and dived at it. Frey backed away seconds before the hawk became a mess of feathers and calls as the group all fought for the beast bait, which Doevm had thrown in the mix.
Frey glanced back to find that Thomas was already helping Elero to her feet. She shook her head and her legs became stable. "I\'m fine." She glanced at the fog, at the group which was still running away. "We\'re close. Let\'s just keep going after them." Frey threw Thomas onto his back and the three kept paddling.
Whenever another creature jumped out at them, Doevm smacked it in the face with a piece of beast bait from his spatial ring. Then the attacking creature would be torn apart by the others. "Thomas, you should throw these," he tried to hand them over but Thomas shook his head. Doevm glanced at Thomas\'s red arm and cursed. He kept throwing them, getting only a few close calls as they left the riot.
Just as they had gotten out of the frenzy, the air changed. At the center of it all, a roar echoed out, so loud that it shook the entire swamp. The residents of the swamp, which had cried out, shrieked, and growled, were muffled by it. The hawks fled through air. Fish crowded through the water. Turtles, snakes, and just about anything else that moved by land, ran. Five balls of light entered the air and a creeping, unsettling quiet enveloped the area.
A deafening quiet, that did not define this kind of silence. No, it was the silence of the creatures, who did not want to be found. It was the quiet of everything else. Crunching of bone and tearing of flesh announced the winner. The water, which had risen over all land, bowed. A giant mass emerged from the entanglement of shadows, bigger than them all combined. Its sharp silhouette engulfed each circular body of each Bullfrog.
The group found themselves paddling back. The creatures did not chase or fight each other as they retreated back to their dens, allowing the group to continue chasing their new prey. Elero still lead them, but now they could all see what was ahead, who was ahead. Two people dressed in bright, colorful clothes paddled away, but not fast enough. "Remember, no killing." Doevm said.
"Who do you think I am?" Elero asked as she drew her longsword, but she hesitated. "I\'ll only put them on the edge of death." She smiled. "But I wonder why there are only two of them."
"I have a pretty good guess." Doevm said as he slapped an especially greedy snake with a piece of beast bait. Its former companions all hissed at each other and tangled up. "are they both nobles?" Elero nodded and then realization hit her, shown by a nod.
Thomas scrunched his eyebrows: "What? Is there something wrong? Why wouldn\'t there be any commoners?"
Elero sighed: "We\'ll explain later. For now, let\'s go beat the shit out of them." As they drew closer, the two nobles collapsed, and four more people walked out of the dense patch of trees. The group, all dressed in black masks, stepped onto the soil, for this part of the swamp held no water.