Chapter 36

-Chase-

“Do you have the ingredients ready?” I asked quietly, and Mom nodded.

“They’re all here,” she said, patting a small, wooden box under the front seat of the van. “Remember, we need to mix them as soon as we get the gland, and he has to drink it immediately.”

“You don’t have to remind me,” I muttered, peering at Dante who was still sitting in the backseat of my car that was parked right next to the van. “I am a potion master, after all.”

“Yes, you are,” she smiled, shortly glancing over her shoulder. “You focus on the potion; let your father and I deal with the monsters.”

“Absolutely not – I’m not sitting this one out,” I objected, but she shook her head.

“You may be the potion master, but your father and I are hunters, and this is our hunting ground. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I’ve been here before,” I said, trying not to get angry with her. “And I know how to fight.”

“And last time I heard, one out of three of your spells are duds.”

“One out of five,” I corrected her.

“Oh, you have been improving! That’s my boy!” she said with a motherly smile that turned into a dead-serious expression right after. “But my answer is still no. We already talked about this! You and Zane are staying here by the cars to protect Dante and the vehicles in case one of them slip past us.”

“Keep your voice down!” I whispered, peering at the dark, dead trees all around us.

“Honey, we’ve been trying to find them for two hours now. I think yelling has become our best option,” she spoke dryly.

I turned my back on her, trying to spot Roe, Paraz or Isha in the forest. They had been away for fifteen minutes already, trying to find the caraggas, and I was getting anxious. The caraggas weren’t our only enemy around here, and even though the biggest and most dangerous creatures were living much deeper in the Death Zone, that didn’t mean none of them didn’t wander closer to the sunny side.

As the minutes passed, and the demons were nowhere to be seen, I started seeing horror scenarios involving ice giants, flesh-eating tundra worms the size of Eiffel Tower, car-sized shellfish that lived in hidden caves in the ice, waiting to lure their prey with colorful, poisonous tentacles… If something had happened to the demons, we would never find out what killed them.

Just when I was about to freak out, Roe appeared next to me, looking grim.

“Well?” I asked, taking a deep breath to calm down. Everyone else came closer to hear what he had to say.

“I couldn’t find anything,” he sighed. “A lot of worms around here, though. I’m guessing they ate all the caraggas in this area.”

I tried not to fall in despair. “The deeper we go, the harder this becomes,” I muttered, looking at Dante. “He’s been staring at the ring for too long already.”

They turned to look at Dante too.

“We need to keep going. We can’t just back off now,” Mom said.

“Dante will be fine,” Roe said. “Get in the car, we need to get going.”

I rubbed my temples, but we didn’t have a choice so I sat in the car next to Dante. I checked how he was doing before we continued driving, cursing the entire planet for making things difficult for us.

And things sure got difficult after that. Our trip so far had been fairly uneventful, our biggest problem being getting the cars unstuck in the snow, but as we continued moving, we started seeing big shadows and massive footprints around the trees.

And then…

“Do you see that?” Zane asked quietly, nodding his head towards big, round piles of snow in the distance, biggest of them around the size of a two-story house.

“I see them,” Roe muttered.

“Fuck…” I sighed as I tried to see them better while Zane reached for his radiophone.

“You’re seeing that nest, Mr. Cooper?”

“We see it,” my dad’s static voice replied. “Both of them.”

“There,” Roe said with a tense voice, pointing in the opposite direction. “We’re heading right in the middle of the colony!”

“We need to get around them,” Zane spoke to my dad.

“It’ll be one massive detour,” Dad replied.

“I’ll go find a way past it,” Roe said, and vanished in a puff of black smoke.

“You heard that?” Zane asked on the radio.

“I did.”

Dad stopped his car, forcing the rest of us to do the same. Roe returned only a few minutes later and snatched the radiophone from Zane.

“We need to go right,” Roe spoke in it. “There’s at least ten nests in here, but if we drive slowly, we should be able to get past them unnoticed.”

“Did you see any movement?” Dad asked.

“No, and the snow was untouched, so they may be hibernating or, if we’re lucky, the place is empty.”

“We’re never that lucky,” Dad replied, but continued driving anyway.

Roe kept guiding us past the massive piles, but the rest of us stayed silent. It was possible that we were driving over hundreds and hundreds of worms that were sleeping in their burrows, and able to sense the tiniest vibrations of the ground all the way down into their nests.

The next fifteen minutes were absolute hell for us all. The cars were barely moving as we inched our way past the nests. Two times Dad’s van got stuck in the snow, and Paraz stepped out to create a pathway for us by melting the snow with his magic. None of us even blinked when we stared at the piles while he was at it, but even when we continued our journey, we couldn’t relax.

I was a fairly self-confident man, but the idea of fighting a whole colony’s worth of massive worms really tested my courage. The only upside about this place was that the other creatures of the Death Zone tried to avoid it, too.

“That was the last one,” Roe said, lowered the radiophone, and let out a deep sigh when the final nest could be seen only in our rearview mirror.

I closed my eyes for a moment, taking in a few, deep breaths in hopes of finding at least a little bit of my confidence. Then, I turned my attention to Dante, making sure he was still breathing and blinking. He was getting really pale, and when I checked his pulse, it was way too slow.

“We need to take the ring off him soon,” I spoke to no one in particular, and Eru meowed in agreement.

The earth grumbled somewhere below our car. When I blinked, something hit us hard. The air was filled with a roar so loud it hurt my ears and I could hardly register the sounds of breaking glass behind it.

It took me a solid five seconds for me to understand that I was in pain and lying on my back. I stared up at Dante, who was hanging off his seatbelt right above me, and he was quickly being covered in snow.

Through the broken window behind him, I could see a towering, black figure with a ridiculous amount of sharp teeth, and for a moment, the world seemed to freeze around me.

“…Zane! Chase! Are you hurt?!“

I hardly heard the panicky voices on the radio. The roaring had stopped, but my mind was drawing a blank as I tried to understand what just happened.

“Chase! Get up! We need to get out!” Zane yelled, and the harshness of his voice finally snapped me out of it.

The left side of the car was crushed and it was laying on the right side in the snow. The worm had waited for us to drive over its burrow before attacking! That was the figure I was looking at! I hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt so I got thrown against the door, but I wasn’t badly injured.

I tried to push myself upwards to reach Dante’s seatbelt while Zane was trying to get rid of his. Roe was nowhere to be seen. When I finally got up on my knees, Eru jumped out of the broken window, vanishing from my view. Only a few seconds later, I could hear her roar – her true roar.

“Are you hurt?” I asked Zane, who coughed something about being fine even though he had taken the biggest hit. “Where’s Roe?”

“Outside,” he said. “Dante?”

“Unharmed, but…” I swallowed the rest of the words when I saw the ring next to my knee. I looked up to see Dante staring at me without even blinking.

“What?”

“Get out!” I yelled at him when Dante’s transformation started. “Get out! Get out! Get out now!“

He got rid of his seatbelt at the same time I blew out the windshield. We crawled out faster than we would’ve from a burning car, and ran to my parents who were hurrying towards us.

“Get back! Dante is transforming!”

“That’s the least of our problems!” Dad yelled, furiously pointing at somewhere behind us.

I did not want to turn to look back, but I did. I stopped to stare at the five… no, six massive worms that were crawling out of the snow, their round mouths agape and their teeth pointing at us. The demons and vampires were already there, fighting the closest two.

For a brief moment, I forgot the smaller problem we had until I heard loud bangs and horrible screeching of metal as the monster werewolf broke free from my now-shredded car.

“Dante,” I breathed out, taking a step towards him, but Zane stopped me.

“Let him do his thing,” he said. “We’ll catch him later.”

“What if we lose him?” I asked, not really thinking straight as I watched Dante jump out of the wreck.

“Roe can track him down,” Zane spoke hurriedly. “Come! We need to get rid of those worms first!”

“Chase! Zane! Are you all right?!” Mom yelled, trying to get through the snow on my father’s heels.

“We’re fine,” I replied, and turned to look at Dante again as they stopped next to us. “But Dante…”

Dante let out a massive roar, his transformation now complete. The rest of our group noticed him and backed away while trying to avoid the worm teeth.

“Watch out!” I yelled when Dante ran straight towards them, his fangs and claws ready to kill.

Thankfully, the vampires could easily outrun him, and Roe teleported out of his way, leaving the closest worm at his mercy. Dante didn’t care what he was attacking as long as he got to sink his teeth into someone, and the worm made the fatal mistake of trying to swallow him into its sharp maw. Dante jumped out of its way and started climbing on the massive body where the worm could no longer reach him.

“He is magnificent,” Mom breathed out. “Come – let’s give them a hand, shall we?”

I hardly saw Zane dashing towards the cars to get his weapons, and didn’t notice my parents joining the fight as I watched Dante. Mom was right: he was magnificent. The way he easily tore into the worm was beautiful to watch, and suddenly, I was filled with adrenaline and the courage I had been missing until now.

And it wasn’t just Dante that empowered me. Aaliyah and the twins continued tearing the second worm apart with the help of Eru while the demons incinerated the next one. My parents kept their distance while they bombarded the other worms with their spells to keep them at bay, and I had to admit that I still had a lot to learn about using magic. Then there was Zane who blew one of them in half with his bazooka, and Ben helped him to reload it.

This was why I brought these people here. Alone, I would never be able to survive in this place, but with this small army of lunatics, getting what we needed didn’t feel like such a dangerous task anymore. Once I joined the fight, taking my place next to my parents, I soon realized that our biggest problem was indeed Dante, but all we really had to do was to stay out of his way. At least for now.

It didn’t end with only six worms trying to come to eat us. The loud ruckus we were making attracted more and more of them, and the pile of dead demon maggots kept on growing. I had no idea how long we fought when the worms were starting to get the picture.

“They’re retreating!” Dad gasped, sounding tired.

“Not all of them,” Mom said.

She was right. There were still some worms brave enough to push past their fallen kin, but most of the ones that were still left either crawled back into their caves or tried to slither away. I thought it was a good thing.

Until it wasn’t.

“Dante!” I gasped when I realized he was following one of the worms that was speeding away from us. He was already far away, and soon vanished behind a hill. “We need to go after him!”

It took us way too long to get rid of the worms. I was again nearly in a panic when we were finally able to run back to the cars, but Roe promised to find him. He took Zane’s radiophone and vanished in thin air.

Dad backed his van to my destroyed one so I could get my bag and Dante’s ring from the wreck. A few moments later, we were driving as fast as the cars could in the deep snow, following Roe’s instructions.

“He killed the worm, but he’s still running,” Roe informed us. “You’ll find the tracks easily.”

“Keep following him,” I said, feeling anxious. “If he turns back to human and we’re not there to protect him…”

The line was silent for five minutes or so, but then, Roe contacted us again.

“Uhm… Just to keep you updated, he found a couple of durncats.“

“What?” I coughed – durncats were similar to Eru, but thrived in freezing temperatures unlike her.

“He killed them already. Keep driving forward.”

I let out a deep breath, exchanging worried looks with Ben.

“…and there’s a corpse of an ice giant on your way. Try not to hit that.“

“Dante is… not joking around,” Ben muttered with wide eyes. “I have never witnessed their full power.”

“First time for everything,” Dad muttered on my other side.

“Wait… Wait!” Roe suddenly shouted, but fell silent right after.

“What?!” I yelled back at him.

“He found caraggas!“

“What? Really?” I asked with wide eyes.

“Yes! There’s a big herd coming straight at us! I think the fight we had with the worms is luring the monsters to us.”

“That means there’s going to be more than just caraggas coming for us,” Dad said.

“We just need the gland,” I said, and turned my attention back to Roe. “Follow Dante and keep him safe. We’re coming as fast as we can.”

“You’d better – it’s a big herd.”

“Hurry,” I told my father.

“I’m driving as fast as I can,” he replied.

Soon we found the dead durncats, and the ice giant was looming up ahead. That beast was bigger than the van we were in, but it looked like Dante had ended its life with one swipe of his claws. Ben stared at the corpse, looking pale, but didn’t say a word. I had the feeling this was the first time he fully realized just how dangerous these beasts were.

We reached a top of another hill, and Dad stopped the car. The ground was relatively flat and reached as far as the eye could see, and the herd was looming in the distance. I sighed in relief when I spotted Dante quite close to us. He was trying to catch Roe who was teleporting back and forth, clearly trying to keep him preoccupied so he wouldn’t start running away from us again.

“Smart move,” I told Roe.

“He’s getting tired. We should be able to chain him up now,” Roe replied, and I could tell that he was right: Dante’s movements were getting clumsy and slow, and he was breathing heavily.

“Let’s move,” Dad said, and we followed him out of the car, keeping a close eye on our surroundings while we hastily went over our plan.

While we waited for the caraggas to arrive, Roe, Paraz and Izha cornered Dante and conjured massive chains to contain him. This time, Dante didn’t have the energy to drag them around, but they were still having trouble holding him still, so they did what I did on the first time I found myself face-to-face with this beast and created several pillars around him.

Once they were done, my heart felt heavy to see him tied to the pillars, too tired to even fight back anymore.

“You’ll be healed soon,” I told him, and got an angry growl as a reply.

“Man… What is he?” Roscoe asked as he stared at Dante.

“Aaliyah said he’s a monster, but I have never seen anything like this,” Denzel muttered, shaking his head.

“That’s what we’re going to find out after we get the cure,” I said, but our chat couldn’t go on longer than that.

“The herd is almost here!”

We all hurried to take our places. The rest of us were supposed to keep the rest of the herd away while Roe and Izha were getting the gland. We spread out on the hill, Ben climbing on top of the van to watch our back and my mom preparing the rest of the ingredients.

The herd eventually spotted us, probably thinking we’d make an easy meal. The biggest of them, the patriarchs, started bellowing and lowered their ugly heads as they started running faster. They had relatively thin legs and necks compared to their massive bodies, like someone had drawn an elephant’s torso with an antelopes limbs but with an eagle’s talons, and then added a head of a rhino that had the teeth of an alligator.

“Fifty… Sixty… Give or take,” Aaliyah muttered.

“All we need is one,” I replied.

“Kill the big ones and leave a couple of small ones for us!” Roe commanded.

“Let’s get this party started,” Zane grinned, aiming his bazooka at the herd, and fired.

The caraggas did not like seeing three of their friends getting blown up. The ground was shaking, and their angry roars filled the air as they pressed on, and we would’ve gotten trampled if they weren’t suddenly hit with magical missiles, forcing them to slow down. Some even stopped. The magic couldn’t quite penetrate their fur and thick skin, but it did cause pain.

After facing the colony of worms, the herd of caraggas wasn’t as intimidating. We were all warmed up and knew how to fight as a team, but the difference was that now we had to fight them all at once. The start of the fight was almost overwhelming when the entire herd was suddenly on top of us. Too many got too close to us, so Roe and Izha had to help to fight them off.

By the time they were able to disengage to go capture one of the smaller ones, I was already sweating. Even though my magic was stronger now, my body wasn’t used to it, so I was getting more and more tired after each burst of fire or explosion I created.

“Better hurry!” I yelled, but wasn’t sure if anyone heard me. The noise was unbearably loud.

“How are we going to make him drink the potion?!” Aaliyah yelled somewhere behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder at the highly pissed Dante. The battle had made him agitated, and he was fighting against the chains, roaring in anger.

“We’re warlocks!” Mom replied. “Let me worry about it!”

We were so close… So close! I turned to look at Roe and Izha just in time to see them lassoing a caragga with heavy chains. The beast screamed and fought back, and for a moment, I forgot what I was supposed to be doing instead of watching them in explosive excitement. All we needed was that gland!

An actual explosion nearby caught my attention and I remembered I was supposed to help with the rest of the herd. They were now easier to keep away from us since we had taken out several of them already, and the rest were scattered all across the field. I tried to do my best to help, but I couldn’t stop myself from peering at Roe who was holding the caragga still, while Izha grabbed a long knife.

The monster let out a terrible scream when she cut its throat open and started searching for the gland.

I focused on the fight, feeling victorious until I heard her cursing loudly. I quickly turned to see what had happened and saw her throwing away something slimy. The gland… It broke.

“We need a new one!” Roe yelled in frustration, leaving the caragga to die on the ground when he lunged at another one without wasting a second.

My excitement took a hit, but I refused to let it bring me down. I was ready to continue fighting until there was nothing left to fight with, and then go find another herd to get that gland.

They caught another one. This time I didn’t look at what they were doing for my own good. From the corner of my eye, I saw Izha kneeling down next to the thrashing being, but forced myself to focus on the herd.

And then…

“I got it!”

I nearly forgot to breathe when I stopped casting spells to see her run to my mom with a small, green bauble of slime in her hands. I run after her to Dante, who was still not calming down.

“It’s intact? Good. Hold it for a moment,” Mom smiled, and hurried to grab a bag of human blood, the base of the potion.

“I swear to God, if this doesn’t work…” I muttered while sitting down to help her mix the ingredients.

“There’s no God in Njizrski,” Izha said grimly.

“Thanks, Izha…” Mom murmured.

We quickly prepared the potion until the very last ingredient: the gland.

“It needs to be placed carefully in the potion,” Mom spoke.

“I know,” Izha muttered, moving her hands ever so carefully right above the bloody potion before letting the gland fall down into it.

We all held our breaths, staring at the potion while the battle still raged on. Nothing happened in the first few seconds, but then the gland returned to the surface. Another few seconds passed by, and the gland popped open, letting the green slime into the potion.

“Did it we do it right?” Izha asked.

“There’s only one way to find out,” Mom said, hovering her hand over the potion.

The liquid began to float upwards without the bowl, reshaping itself into a wobbly ball. I watched her get up on her feet, unable to follow her example. I had completely forgotten myself at that moment. All I could do was to watch as she moved the potion through the air and stopped next to Dante, who opened his mouth into a furious roar.

With a flick of her hand, the potion flew across the air straight into Dante’s mouth. He swallowed it in surprise, and Mom began reading the short spell. Soon, she was done.

And we waited.