Elijah stepped out into what looked to him like a pound for large dogs. Cages stacked three high lined the walls, and the entire room was a large empty semicircle. Exactly the kind of room he would design if he were going to have a player endure a wave challenge.

  He immediately regretted not summoning Bitter Root back. If this were a wave challenge, the goblin would prove a useful ally, if for no other reason than he would make an excellent distraction. But if this was like the Armorer’s challenge and Bitter Root refused to take part again, summoning him would be a waste of mana.

  The cages seemed to be empty, their doors nearly rusted away to nothing just as the stations had been. If he were to fight waves, they would likely be ethereal of some nature. A good counter to the necrotic effect of his new weapon.

  He leaned in to inspect one cage. The bones of some kind of quadruped lay within. Around the size of a small dog or large cat, but the skull was wrong. The face smashed flat, similar to a pug’s face in the real world. He checked two more cages and found the same misshapen skeletons.

  “Good day, my lord.” A deep, resonant, slightly British accented, voice echoed behind him.

  He twisted around to face the speaker, the shadow of his right arm flooding down into his hand to form his sword. It felt strange, like cold coagulated blood rushing across his skin. The weapon hummed with power, seeking a target to bleed.

  In front of him stood a male member of the same species as the Armorer had been. Instead of the tattered, moth-eaten clothes she had worn, this creature wore a heavy fur and leather coat. Bandoliers crisscrossed his chest, and a riding crop dangled loosely from his belt.

  “Uh.. Hello?” Elijah muttered, the very model of intelligent and dignified conversation.

  The creature gave an amused chuckle, and the edges of his lips turned up in a smile. “As eloquent as the Armorer described.” Elijah was fairly certain that was an insult but had no time to defend himself as the man continued. “I am Head Beastmaster Klixinab Umgbulu.”

  Elijah tried the name several times before finally giving up. “I’m just going to call you Klix, okay? My name is Elijah, and yes, I’m the Dragontooth King.”

  Klix’s left eye twitched at the nickname, but he did not try to correct Elijah. “You are here to prepare for the cleansing of the Blood Oath throne, are you not?”

  Elijah nodded. While that wasn’t his primary purpose here, doing so would serve to power him up, which was his purpose.

  “The hounds are long dead, but I—” Klix cut off suddenly, his body freezing mid gesture. It wasn’t just the Beastmaster though; even the writhing hunger within his sword stopped abruptly.

  There was a heaviness to the air, reminiscent of the time Elijah had messed with Benjamin’s fortify spell. It struck him that, back then, this feeling had come from the AI arbiter working to figure out how to rationalize his modification to the code.

  He hadn’t done anything to the code to this time, but the AI was modifying something. He could sense it—code being altered—it was just on the edge of his perception. Like a song being sung far away.

  Elijah knew that this game ran on a quantum state computer. It could handle an impossible number of calculations per second, so that it had frozen good several seconds meant it was changing and predicting an astronomical amount of data for whatever it was doing.

  Klix’s model shuddered and reset to a neutral state in the blink of an eye before starting over. “The hounds are long dead, but there is another option available to you. I sense within you the ability to summon your subjects; living embodiments of your authority as King.”

  He was talking about Elijah’s familiars. He wasn’t sure how he knew that Klix was referring to Bitter Root and Dryad and not the bats, but he knew. The bats were a weapon, a tool, but his familiars were his subjects. “Yes, I have two familiars that I can summon. A goblin and a dryad.”

  “Summon them.” Klix’s voice was stern and unyielding.

  Elijah reached a hand out to his side and summoned Bitter Root. The goblin appeared curled up in a ball, asleep. Or at least, pretending to be asleep. He saw the mob’s eye open slightly to see Elijah’s reaction. Elijah nudged him with his foot, not hard, just enough to jog him. “You’re a terrible liar. Come on, get up.”

  The goblin didn’t react to the prodding other than letting out a very loud, very fake-sounding snore. Elijah rolled his eyes. “Fine, I’ll let you know when something tries to eat us.”

  That worked immediately. Bitter Root sprang to his feet, looking around for danger. Spotting the Beastmaster, he bared his fangs and withdrew his cudgel. “Bat guy want eat Bitter Root?”

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  Klix fixed the goblin with a menacing stare, causing him to shrink away. “How fascinating,” Klix told Elijah once the goblin calmed from his feral state. “Your control is incomplete, and yet your bond is strong. Summon the other.”

  Elijah wavered slightly. “My spell doesn’t allow me to summon more than one at a time.”

  Klix rolled his eyes. It was almost amusing, this sophisticated, dignified acting creature, rolling his eyes at Elijah. He reached a hand out towards Bitter Root, and Elijah felt the strings attaching them snap. His eyes went wide. The feeling had been the same as when Elijah cancelled the summoning, but this time Bitter Root remained.

  “Summon the other.” Klix said again, his voice even and calm despite the power he’d just casually shown. With a shaking hand, Elijah reached to the other side and summoned Bitter Dryad. The little wooden creature sprang forth from the bubble of mana, swinging his claws in wild arcs and screaming at the top of his lungs. He lunged at the Beastmaster, who side-stepped the insane creature. Elijah felt his connection to the dryad snap in the same way that it had with Bitter Root.

  Klix fixed Bitter Dryad with the same stern look he’s used on the goblin, and the dryad immediately settled. “Your bond with both of these creatures is strong. Forged in bloodshed and pain. They will make for a powerful conduit to forge another.”

  He raised a clawed hand, and energy lifted from both of Elijah’s familiars. As far as he could tell, it wasn’t painful for them; they didn’t react more than to follow the flow with their eyes. It coalesced in front of Klix, warping and shifting and darkening.

  When the energy finally settled, a creature the same size as his two familiars stood in the spot. It was roughly similar in shape to a goblin; however, it had the same double-jointed legs and vestigial wings attached to its arms. It was kind of cute, in the same way some people thought pugs were cute.

  “Your challenge is set, my liege. Subdue these three through combat, kill them to reassert your bond, and you will gain additional power and a third subject.” Klix took a step back, pressing himself against the wall as all three of the goblin-sized creatures turned towards Elijah. “Fail and lose your minions forever.” There was no hesitation in their minds, no consideration if they should attack Elijah or not. All three lunged while laughing gleefully.

  “What the sh—“ he dove to the side trying to get away from them. They collided in the air, laughing like maniacs as they tried to pull themselves free from the tangle of arms.

  “Really?” he yelled at them as he squared off against the mobs. “Bitter Dryad I can understand, same with Bitter Bat, but Bitter Root? What’s gotten into you?”

  Bitter Root pulled himself free first, a bloodthirsty chuckle reverberating in his throat. “Me tell prisoner when me meet. Me never taste human flesh. Me want taste it.” That told Elijah all he needed to know. Bitter Root had been reverted to his pre-familiar state. He was referring to Elijah as a prisoner instead of Boss. Hopefully, that reversion hadn’t eliminated all the personal growth and bonding they’d done since then, and it would come back once the ally tag came back.

  Elijah summoned his scouts and sent them to harass Root while he lunged towards the ball of limbs that was the bat and dryad version of his familiar. Bitter Root’s screech of fear told Elijah that a piece of his friend was still present. Whatever the Beastmaster had done wasn’t permanent.

  Bitter Bat—Elijah applauded his originality with that name—saw Elijah bearing down on them with his sword and burst into a cloud of black smoke. The scent of sulfur invaded his nose, causing his eyes to water. Dryad raised a hand and deflected Elijah’s sword with a shield made of his own wooden flesh. Black veins of necrosis spider-webbed across the shield, and Bitter Dryad let out a scream of pain.

  The room filled with a cacophony of sound. Bats screeching, familiars screaming, and Elijah’s heartbeat pounding loudly in his ears. With a kick, he forced Bitter Dryad back down onto the ground, intending to finish him before the Necrosis could. He raised his sword arm but stumbled and missed when a sharp stone smacked into the back of his head.

  He turned and saw Bitter Root, who had finished off two of the three scouts. The remaining bat dangled headfirst from his mouth, still scratching and clawing at the goblin’s face. He bent down and pried out a sizable chunk of stone from the floor, his eyes locked on Elijah, and with a wink he tossed it at his head.

  Elijah tried to dodge out of the way, but the goblin had quite the fastball, and the stone clipped Elijah’s shoulder, sending a jolt of pain along his arm and back. Elijah grimaced. The little bastard was enjoying this. He tried to rush the gap between himself and Bitter Root before he could pry another chunk of stone loose, when Bitter Bat made a reappearance. The bat creature dropped from the ceiling and dug its talons into Elijah’s back, holding on tightly as Elijah started thrashing around, trying either to pull it off, or hit it with his sword.

  He gripped hold of Bitter Bat’s arm, but the creature vanished into a puff of black smoke and sulfur.

  Then another rock smashed into Elijah’s head.

  He had to focus; if the previous fights with Bitter Root had been any proof, just one of his familiars was a hard fight. Here he was, facing three of them. He was outmatched as long as he continued trying to fight them all at once. Elijah needed to separate them from each other and deal with them one on one.

  He cancelled his connection to the scout bat still hanging out of Bitter Root’s mouth, freeing the creature from that particular cavern of horrifying smells. He shifted his footing and rushed Bitter Root again, grabbing him by the shoulders and throwing him at the wall full of cages.

  The goblin smashed through the rusted-out grating and landed inside one of the cages. Then the bats of Elijah’s ‘Dragontooth Swarm’ descended on him. Screaming, screeching, and a terrible raucous emanated from that side of the room, and Bitter Root attempted to fight the swarm, but Elijah was already focusing on Bitter Dryad. The creature was already weak; the necrosis was tearing through its body. Bitter Bat attempted to pull his ceiling drop trick again, but Elijah threw his sword at the dryad.

  Either he got lucky with his throw, or the bats who inhabited the shadowy material of the weapon helped it find its mark. The blade plunged into Bitter Dryad’s chest. He felt something return to him as the dryad shattered into shards of broken mana. Bitter Dryad was once more locked under his ‘Summon Familiar’ skill. Though he could sense that he wouldn’t be able to summon him until this trial was complete.

  Bitter Bat was grinning at him with its needle-sharp teeth, its talons flexing. And now Elijah was unarmed.