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

Both heads, as one, snapped around to look at me. The growling, which had been an ever-present soundtrack to this little dance we had been enjoying, raised in pitch and grew in intensity. There was blood in the hydrahound’s stare, death in its heart.

“Whoa Nelly, this is it,” I said to no one.

The beast came on, the toads apparently having disappeared. It seemed to happen in slow motion, so I was able to make out every muscle bunching under the thick, bristling fur. I could see every drop of foaming spittle as it flew from the quivering, snarling jowls.

And then, finally, inspiration flowered in my mind. In a cold, hard moment, a path fell into place in my head, laid out before me, gleaming with possibility.

The dog came on, a mess of teeth and claws and destruction.

It bounded over the pond this time, so enthusiastic was it to peel the skin from my flesh and use me as a chew toy. Its eyes were fixed on me, unwavering orbs of hate.

As the hydrahound hit my proximity sensitive Arcane Mines, I used my Crystalize spell to transform my right arm into an unyielding crystal club.

The Arcane Mines went off under the hound’s feet like firecrackers. They didn’t cause much damage, only blowing a couple of its claws off in bursts of Earth and Storm magic. It checked its stride though, making it falter in its charge, which was my intention.

Thrown off-balance, the hydrahound skidded to a halt in front of me. Its heads reared  above me, as big as a pair of bull elephant heads. The left head, the one with the busted eye, came in, snapping ferociously. I kept my composure and dodged it, sidestepped a lunge from the right head, and smacked the right head with my crystal arm-club before it could withdraw. The right head’s red eyes crossed at the force of the blow, and it ceased its movements for a second, allowing me to leap up and onto its snout.

“Don’t mind me!” I said as I clambered agilely up the wide, meaty face, between the rolling, dazed eyes and onto the hydrahound’s bony forehead.

I ducked as the other head snapped half-heartedly at me, but the thing was still smarting from the mess I’d made of its eye, and obviously struggling a little with its depth perception.

I was just about to continue with the next devilishly cunning part of my plan, when the left head came launching unexpectedly in again. I was forced to roll over its snout like a guy rolling onto a car bonnet to avoid being run over. I found myself on the top of the left head. I smacked the hydrahound again with my crystal club-arm, but was then obliged to break the spell so I could use both hands to hang onto the hound’s head as it shook and tried to dislodge me.

“Fuck it, this’ll do!” I muttered.

And, flying in the face of commonsense, I summoned the Abomination into the world.

The Abomination was a creature from the depths of the void, from the place of pure, undiluted magic. It was chaos incarnate. It was a creature that had no allies. A monster that would consume friend and foe alike given half a chance.

Happily, as I thought it might be after seeing the Frostfire Golem, it was also much smaller than it usually was—about the size of a tennis ball, in fact.

I didn’t dare touch the thing so, holding onto one of the furious hellhound’s eyelids with one hand, I used my Telekinesis spell to levitate the tentacle covered, stinking, slimy jellyfish nightmare of an Abomination into the ear canal of the head onto which I was currently clinging.

It was the work of a moment, which was good, because a moment later, the hydrahound flicked me loose from its noggin and sent me cartwheeling through the air.

“Shit,” I managed to say, before I splashed down into the icy water of the pond in the middle of the garden.

I came up gasping, spitting water from my mouth. In my shrunken state, I was up to my neck in the pond that turned out to be quite shallow. Wiping water from my eyes, I saw that all was not well with the hydrahound.

The two-headed hellhound was shaking its head in anguished fury, no doubt trying to dislodge the parasitic Abomination that was doing gods-knew-what inside of it. The beast lumbered over to me, pawing blindly at the air, biting and roaring at nothing, at the thing inside itself that it could not reach.

I threw myself out of the way of a swipe from the hydrahound’s foreleg, climbed quickly up, sprang off the already severed head that was lying half-submerged in the pool, and tossed a couple of Crystal Magma Bombs at my enemy. I landed on the edge of the pool as the grenade-like spells went off and knocked the hydrahound over backward.

“Please, please be dead,” I said, getting to my feet and willing the creature to stay down.

The hydrahound moaned, legs thrashing and then, with a suddenness that would have gained Ridley Scott’s approval, the Abomination burst out of the center of the hydrahound’s chest in a spray of blood and gore and buckled ribs.

Small it might have been. Slow, certainly. But, fucking deadly nonetheless.

The body of the hydrahound went limp, while the disgusting little Abomination continued to feast on and dissolve the corpse.

Water was running off me in rivulets, pooling in the stone around me. I felt pretty beat, I’m not going to lie. It had been a tough fight, and I hoped more than anything that it was over.

I looked over at the blocked exit, but the horizontal portcullis was still drawn across the opening.

There was a soft, bubbling noise from