30 loop 1, part 10

The monster was a Frollart. It stood on its knuckles, and it had the monobrow and the slack mouth and everything. But then my brain caught up with the scale and quietly resigned in protest.

The babies upstairs had been knee-height, but this one was three of me standing on my own shoulders.

Unlike the smaller versions, though, I had no idea how this one was still alive. Its skin had split wherever the muscle outgrew it. The splits had then been stitched shut with coarse black thread and wrapped in grey gauze. The bandages on the small ones had been for hygiene. These were keeping the damn thing sown together.

A Frollart the size of a siege engine deserved a better name than Frollart. Or at least a lazier one. I decided to call it a Froll.

The Froll lowered itself onto its feet and started punching the dome of my uncle’s ward. One hit after the other. With every hit, the dome flickered, cracks spiderwebbed out from its fists, they crawled, and then they sealed slowly back. The creature didn’t react to the failure at all. Instead, it raised its arm and hit the ward again without stopping. It knocked at a patient interval over and over.

I hovered at the edge of the clearing, uncertain what to do, watching it work.

The ward was failing, that much was certain. As dumb as the Froll was, it was patient. It was going to hit the dome until the dome stopped existing, and then it was going to eat my uncle. Which meant I had to do something. A sentence I had structured my entire life around never thinking.

I didn’t bother with a plan. Plans were for reassuring other people. Instead, I just started blasting.

[Trip] went first. The bandages on its right forearm seized, twisted, and knotted into the wrapping on its bicep. The arm cinched against itself mid-swing, and for a second, I thought it would work. But the creature just tore the bandages apart, ripped its arm free, and hit the ward again, as if it hadn’t even been stopped at all.

[Slick] went second, on the stone directly underneath it. At first, the creature wobbled. But then, it planted a palm on dry stone just outside the [Slick] puddle, its feet still set on rough rock behind it. It stopped moving. And while now it was only punching with one hand, it was still making huge dents into the ward.

Fine. The floor wasn’t interested in stopping it. I’d ask the ceiling.

The rock over its head was rough-cut and crumbling, and maybe [Topple] would work. I asked the biggest loose cluster of stones I could find to stop holding on. It worked. The spell dropped the rock. In my excitement, my book slipped out from under my other arm, and hit the floor spine-first. It skidded away into the dark.

Rocks the size of bread loaves rained down on its skull and shoulders, any one of which would have put me in the infirmary for at least a week.

They bounced off the creature, leaving it completely unharmed.

The creature looked up, skipped the ceiling entirely, and glanced at me with what looked like mild annoyance. It turned back to the ward.

I had been assessed and dismissed. Honestly, that was fair. So far, I had been like a fly against a horse.

I was still thinking about what to do next when things got worse.

The sound of knocking had been rolling through the room for several minutes, and my [Topple] had gone off on top of that like an avalanche. And Frollarts, as a species, had demonstrated two consistent behaviors throughout all of mankind’s interactions with them. The first was that they loved cheese. And the second was that they went toward noise.

The sound of knuckles started on stone. It came from my left, and from behind me, from somewhere inside the shelves themselves. The soft, rhythmic slap of bandaged hands that I had spent the whole night learning to hate. The first one squeezed out from between two stacks that had no gap between them, popped free, and waddled into the clearing. Two more followed after it, and three more after that.

They ignored the Froll completely. The Froll was family. Instead, they came after me. And worse, they came for the gold thread running from my chest across the clearing to my uncle. The nearest one stopped, lifted its face, and snapped at the air three feet in front of me—exactly where the tether ran.

The pulse skipped in my chest. The thread went slack for a beat and then came back. And I decided I had officially run out of patience for being nibbled on at the soul level.

I cast [Slick] on the floor in front of the first cluster of Frollarts. The front three went down chin-first, sliding into a pale blue pile like dominoes. It bought me mere seconds. And that was all it bought. The ones behind them simply started climbing over the pile, and the walls kept producing more.

There were a dozen now. And then there weren’t, because there were fifteen, and then eighteen, and then twenty. They just kept coming.

Outlasting them, then, wasn’t an option, and leading them away meant leaving my uncle alone. Nothing stopped a Frollart horde once it got going. Nothing, nothing except food. And I already knew exactly which food.

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And I had just dropped an entire book on food magic on the far side of the clearing.

The book lay twenty feet away with twenty idiots in between. So I did the most athletic thing I’d done in practically my entire life. I leaned forward in the air, kicked off a shelf with both feet, and dove toward the book.

[Float] turned the dive into something between a glide and a swim. I skimmed over the horde of Frollarts crowding around the book. I was unfortunately low enough that one of them lunged up and clipped my shoe with its blunt teeth. Somehow, I managed to scoop the book off the stone, clutching it with both hands and kicking the Frollart off my foot.

But moving down so low came with a host of problems. The horde reoriented, and I was forced to spend the next stretch of my life weaving between knee-high monsters while trying to read the book. I dodged left around one, and the page I’d opened to flapped shut. I spun away from a lunge and nearly lost the book a second time, fumbling it off my fingertips and catching it against my hip.

This wasn’t working. I blamed it on the fact that I was tired. But finally, my brain started working.

These idiots were knee-high, and their reach barely extended two feet into the air.

I stopped dodging and used the shelves to propel myself upward. I rose three feet, then five, until the tallest lunge in the room fell comfortably below my shoes. I hung there in the dark above a churning carpet of pale blue. The horde piled up underneath me and snapped at nothing.

I opened the book and read while the monsters seethed beneath me like the world’s ugliest tide. I skimmed. I didn’t have time to read. Any moment now, the Froll would destroy my uncle’s ward and potentially kill him.