Chapter 158: The Big Scary Noise
Grackle had been a fiend tender all of his life. He looked forward to when they were finished taking over this little shit hole of a Hollow, and he would become its new Fiend Master. Gangrene had promised that to him. All his hard work would finally pay off!
His father, Grickle had tended fiends for Wurchwitz Hollow, and so had his grandfather, Gunkel. Grickle had started teaching his oldest whelp his trade early in life, a tradition since Fiend Tenders didn't have a long life expectancy.
"Remember, they all look like monsters, but every fiend is different. They still have pieces of themselves from before. Those pieces fight with the animal that's taking over their mind. Some fiends get sneaky, some get bad tempers, and others just want more food. You need to take advantage of the differences to keep them in control. A heavy fiend prod only works so long, and the more you use it, the quicker a fiend figures out it only stings and doesn't really hurt them. Then either you put the fiend down hard and fast, or they put you down."
Grackle had learned fast. He'd helped his father with the training of the Hunting Fiend packs, and then the Battle Fiends. He had some new ideas on how to train up fiends, but his father was too set in his ways to listen. Grackle endured years of mucking out cages and listening to his father grovel to the Fiend Master, never offering a new idea.
But he'd certainly been correct about what happened when a fiend lost its fear of the prod. His father had stepped into Black Betty's cage one day, to clean a wound on her shoulder. She'd been hit with a goblin war axe and the sharp blade had left a cut that got infected. You never knew where a goblin or his axe had been, and both were usually filthy. BlackBetty was in a bad mood, and his father had used the prod to settle her down. But after shocking her for the third time, her eyes had narrowed to slits and she snarled. His father had hit her again and she tore his legs off and ate them.
Grackle had managed to lock her cage before she got out. Two good things happened after that: Grackle was promoted to full fiend tender, and BlackBetty seemed to have developed a better attitude.
A year later he took a huge risk and asked for an audience with General Gangrene. He'd used most of his savings to buy an appropriate gift for the General, a three-pound chunk of Livarot Munster. That bought him five minutes of the General's time. It was enough to put forth his theory of using younger subjects. It was the bits of personality that were left that gave the fiends their quirks and made them dangerous. Most fiends were soldiers who used too much battle cheese or cheese addicts that a tender found in an alley, passed out from too much cheddar. They made difficult fiends.
Gangrene had simply stared at him when he proposed a different type of test subject, and his eyes got small and mean. He giggled a little. "Turn children into fiends? And I thought I was a monster! Ha! I like it. I'll send over two brats to your kennels. See what you can make of them. If the experiment fails, you'll be eating your own cheese and joining them. So don't fail me."
Gangrene had been true to his word. Rosie and Buttercup were delivered to him that day. Their parents had failed to gather their quota for the third time, and been sent to the lower caverns. Their two children would have gone to the whelp master for training, a slightly worse fate than what Grackle had in store for them. Rosie had been holding her doll, and Buttercup had shown him her hair ribbon. He'd fed them, and taken care of them for two weeks, getting to know them. Then he put them in large cages with a big plate of special cheese in front of each of them.
He heard them crying, and then the sobbing had turned into growls and snarling. Their training began the next day. Gangrene had been pleased with the results and now, two years later, they were all moving to a new hollow.
Two-Screws handed Jester a tankard of beer. "Here you go, we were just having lunch, you might as well have a couple of beers with us since we're heading the same way. You mentioned a raid?"
Jester tasted the beer, then took two long swallows. He wondered how the hell beer could taste so good in this game. The stuff he and his roommates drank was crap compared to this. And strong, he could already feel a buzz coming on. "Yeah, the raid. Hitting the ratkin village hard and then looting it. Branigan has been putting it together and grabbing everyone he can. Guess you didn't get all the details?" Jester was impressed by whatever guild this was. They were pretty hardcore to all play dwarves. If it wasn't for their silly names, he might have thought they weren't players. But NPC dwarves have always been named things like Nordy Bluntnose or Ori Stoutoak or Axebeard the Mighty. Anyone with a name like Two-Screws or Boomboom had to be a player. He finished his beer and his new friends handed him another.
"So, why don't you fill us in about this raid, my new friend? We have a bit of travel to go, and I have a lot of beer to share."
Luckily, when Harry rejoined the group after stopping to harvest some interesting mushrooms in a side tunnel, Jester had already drunk three tankards of beer and didn't think twice about the large troll joining the group. He kept answering questions and they kept filling his tankard. A few hundred yards away from where the fighting was happening, he finally passed out, and Vary leaned him up against the wall.
Boomboom was juggling grenades with Narwhale as they walked down the tunnel. "I think our brother Milo might need some rescuing from these greedy humans."
Two-Screws rolled his eyes. "You just want an excuse to get into a fight!"
Narwhale watched as Two-Screws and Sledgemonkey deployed their rivet guns. "You look pretty anxious to cause some mayhem yourself."
Sledgemonkey laughed. "Yes, but we don't need an excuse to do it. Although I am fond of brother Milo and do feel we need to help him out."
"You newlyweds get the first shot. It's traditional, and I want to see how good of a shot a scavenger is when the targets can move around."
Narwhale ran her hand down the barrel of her rocket launcher. "Challenge accepted!"N0v3lRealm was the platform where this chapter was initially revealed on N0v3l.B1n.
