Creation Mage 6 by Dante King (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📗

finger. “Looks like he’s getting his weekly hour of sleep in. Poor timing on his behalf, really.”

“Incoming!” Idman yelled from the back of the sleigh.

“Fire off the starboard bow!” Barry joined in.

The Yuletide Yeti had booted one of the bubble-ensnared patrons of the mid-air bumper-car ride right at us. The bubble, containing a terrified halfling with a bushy ginger afro, flew toward us at breakneck speed. With a deft twitch of the reins, Reginald Chaosbane performed a slow-motion airborne handbrake turn and used the tail-end of the sleigh to bat the bubble away.

The bubble, and its screaming occupant, whizzed away. It ended up at the top of a pine tree some one-hundred yards distance, spraying branches, snow, and pine needles onto the ground below.

Thinking that the time for worrying about property damage was past, I let loose with a Blazing Bolt. The ball of crackling red energy streaked downward, hit the Yuletide Yeti between its big eyes, and rebounded off. The diverted spell sizzled across the clearing and cut through a hefty fir tree. The tree swayed for a moment, then, in a flurry of snow and cracking of branches, toppled sideways and destroyed the strongman booth.

Not one to let a single failure dampen my enthusiasm, I reached within my mana reserves and summoned three undead wolverines—one of the latest additions to my spell arsenal.

The trio of skeletal beasts were bundles of rending, tearing, slashing fury that fell away from the sleigh toward the forest floor. They hit the deck hard, but being dead, this didn’t slow them much.

What slowed one of them, though, was instantly being crushed under one of the enormous inflatable feet and ground into the earth like a finished cigar stub.

The other two wolverines, powered by the slow release of mana from within me, launched their raggedy, bony bodies at the leg of the Yuletide Yeti. Powered by blind, fearless undead compulsion to end life, it was not enough. They were thwarted by the rubbery, giving skin of the inflatable foe. They bounced and rebounded off the giant yeti’s legs, their sharp claws and crushing jaws unable to find purchase on their foe.

“This is fucking ridiculous,” I said as another one of the undead wolverines was kicked so hard into a cluster of boulders nearby that it burst apart in puff of green magic.

With only one annoyance to focus on, the cursed Yuletide Yeti quickly snuffed out the final wolverine by spearing it with an enormous, fairy-light festooned yule log. This job done, it resumed its slow methodical destruction of the carnival.

While Igor snored in the back and Leah painted her nails and watched the carnage with the same interest that I might have watched daytime TV, I instructed Reginald to maneuver the sleigh over to a nearby towering pine.

“What’s your plan, Mr. Mauler?” the Headmaster asked, trying to calm the six massive bulls as they drew nearer to the giant yeti.

“I haven’t quite got that far,” I admitted.

“Well, it is Yuletide,” the Headmaster conceded understandingly. “Anyone with a prearranged plan of how to take down a gargantuan, enchanted, inflatable Yuletide Yeti blundering through a funfair has obviously been working far too hard. I will watch your future progress with considerable interest, dear fellow!”

“You don’t have a plan?” Enwyn asked me.

“Not as such…” I began.

Below me, the Yuletide Yeti bent at the middle so that it could reach down with its clumsy, bouncy fingers and start tearing pegasi off a revolving carousel.

And, just like that, I saw how I could let the Yuletide Yeti down with a bang.

I jumped from the sleigh, reaching for the tree branches, and caught them. Snow cascaded down at the impact, and one of my feet slipped off the rimy branch I had aimed for.

“If you guys wouldn’t mind distracting it from time to time that would be really handy, I’m sure,” I said, looking back over my shoulder at Leah, Enwyn, Mallory, Idman, and Mort.

Leah made a comisterating face and held up her freshly painted pink nails.

“Dear sweet pot of honey, you know I would,” she said, “but you can’t hurry this shade, you know.”

Mort pulled some throwing knives from the depths of his brown monk’s robes and held them up. “I have your distraction right here, Justin,” he said amicably.

“Great,” I said, and began shimmying down the tree.

I reached the bottom and dropped to the fragrant, pine needle covered floor with a soft crunch. With the speed of thought,  my father’s black crystal staff appeared in my hand.

The sleigh had moved away, and I could see Enwyn leaning over the side, firing the occasional Fireball down at the Yuletide Yeti. It was a distraction fraught with peril though, as the spells bounced and ricocheted from the yeti’s rubbery hide and ignited small spot fires in a couple of the stalls.

Sparks flurried through the air and all around me as I ran around the back of the huge inflatable monster. Large clumps of snow thudded down as the Yuletide Yeti smashed its way around the funfair. Mindless destruction seemed to fill whatever passed for its mind. I preferred not to be a part of its plan.

That quickly went out of the window when I got too close to my adversary, looking for the opening—literally—that I needed to take it down.

The yeti must have spied me through its beefy blow-up legs because it lumbered about and flapped its tusks at me. A huge hand swatted at me, and I stumbled and rolled backward, feeling the great wash of cold, smoky air roll over me as the massive paw missed me by a foot or two. There was a rending screech of metal as a small Ferris wheel took the brunt of the blow. It wobbled dangerously from side to side.

“Don’t you do it,” I hissed.

The Ferris wheel passed the