The Gator-man rose slowly from the water, gradually standing to its full height until it towered over them.

  Its body looked like a juiced-up bodybuilder on a discolored algae-green billboard. It was disturbingly humanoid, with long claws emerging from otherwise ordinary fingers. Its feet sloshed beneath the surface, but Roy suspected they’d have both big and little toes. There were nipples and a belly button, but no visible genitals, which raised all kinds of questions about the people who’d first imagined these things.

  The only completely reptilian part was its head, which was all ridges and teeth and shiny yellow eyes.

  Roy stared in shock for a moment, then leapt for the door handle. He gripped it with both hands, braced his legs, and threw his weight back—trying to slam the door shut. He was too slow and nowhere near strong enough.

  The Gator-man seized the door in one massive hand and snapped it back, cracking the wood as it ripped free of its hinges.

  Roy back-stepped, fumbling for the bat slung over his shoulder, but the creature’s jaws were already snapping around his head. Bastion leapt in from the side and punched it in the mouth with a studded fist, knocking loose several teeth and sending the gator’s jaws wide. Even so, they raked across Roy’s brigandine with a bone-on-metal screech, leaving deep grooves that just barely failed to penetrate.

  Reeling, Roy fought to stay on his feet as scattered Ultra-Discs slipped around beneath them. Then the Gator-man twisted its massive torso to fit through the doorframe and charged straight into him.

  Roy went flying, knocking over shelves, slamming into a pile of discs which crunched against his back.

  Dizzy, he staggered back to his feet. Bastion was weaving between bargain bins, his cleaver flashing. Each strike bit deep, but the wounds closed almost instantly, flesh knitting back together like a cracked sculpture with wet clay pressed into it.

  New teeth pistoned down like spring-loaded knives. The only thing their attacks seemed to be doing so far was making it angrier.

  But then Roy noticed something. When Bastion swung his bat to keep the jaws at bay, the Gator-man winced. There was no way a creature as tough as this should be reacting that way to such minimal damage.

  The bats were far too light to cause serious injury, but they were made to look menacing and painful.

  The theming works.

  Roy clambered over the toppled shelves, a makeshift maze blocking his path back to the fight.

  “Take that!” Bastion roared. He lunged and sliced one of its hands clean off. “That’s what you get. That’s what happens when you mess with my boy Roy and Bastion fucking Cruz.”

  The Gator-man’s eyes bulged, pulsing with rage. It lunged at Bastion, backing him into a corner below the TV.

  Bastion quickly thrust his cleaver up into its jaw, but it got stuck. The gator jerked back, lifting the blade free from Bastion’s hand. Then it started thrashing around, clawing at the hilt with a freshly regrown hand.

  Roy sprinted, leapt, planted a boot between its shoulders, and slammed his bat down.

  Bastion slid out from the corner as Roy struck again, and again. Each blow was accompanied by guttural gurgles as the pain theme did its work, paralysing the monster for a few seconds each time, leaving it helpless against the next strike.

  A problem soon emerged. The bat thudded solidly with every strike, vibrating in Roy’s grip, yet he never heard a crunch.

  “Bastion, I don’t think this is gonna do it,” Roy said.

  “What do you mean? You’ve gotta be liquifying its brain right now.”

  “It’s not breaking bones. There’s not enough force. As long as the skull’s intact, the brain’ll just keep regenerating like everything else.”

  “Not if it has a bolt through it,” Bastion pulled out his crowbow.

  The bolt cracked like a gunshot, hammering into the gator-man’s ridged head—and bouncing straight off.

  “Huh,” said Roy. “I guess people were right when they said guns are useless against them. Even just theming something to look like a gun stops it from working.”

  “Fine. Then I’ll butcher it. Let's see if it can regenerate from thin slices of deli meat.” Bastion knelt and started sawing into the beast’s neck, awkwardly angled beneath Roy’s bat swings.

  “Can you walk around to the other side and hit it from there?” asked Bastion. “I can’t move the cleaver back and forth properly from here.”

  Whack. “Sure thing.” Roy stepped off the creature’s back, smashing its head again to keep it stunned. He edged around toward the front—then his boot slipped on a shard of broken Ultra-Disc.

  “Aaargh.” He’d landed flat on his back, where there was no armor to pad his fall.

  “Gurglargh.”

  The sound came from his left. The Gator-man’s eyes flicked as it started to regain consciousness.

  Roy had managed to keep his grip on the bat as he fell. He swiped at its head to keep it down. Bastion was already ahead of him, covering for Roy with his own swings.

  “That was too close,” said Bastion as Roy resumed batting. “We need to get this done faster. Look.” The flesh had healed around Bastion’s blade, and he had to saw back in the direction he’d started from to reopen the wound.

  “Here.” Roy scooped up disc shards and handed them over. “They’ve gotta be good for something besides tripping me up.”

  Bastion caught on quickly and began wedging disc fragments in the gator-man’s neck to hold the wound open. Progress was good then, until they started to hear a grinding sound.

  “I can’t get through the bone,” said Bastion.

  For what was supposed to be the Gator-man’s weakness, these bones were proving surprisingly durable.

  “You bat, I’ll try cutting.” Roy drew his sword and hacked at the Gator-man’s neck. All his resonance, all his focus, slamming down with each cut.

  “Roy,” said Bastion.

  “Focusing,” said Roy. How hard could it be to decapitate one gator?

  ‘Roy!”

  He looked up from the Gator-man gurgling beneath them…to a second one snarling above them.

  This one was leaner, with corded muscle running along its long limbs and dark skin that glistened with an oily sheen. It was also smaller, though that was a relative term here; it still stood a head above Roy.

  By the time he noticed it was there, it was already charging, darting from side to side like a predator feinting prey. It’s faster too. It lunged for him, but Bastion slid in and cracked its jaw with an underhand bat swing. The blow launched it backward into one of the last shelves still standing.

  Snarling came from behind, too; the bat’s stunning effect had worn off.

  “Run!” Bastion shouted.

  They sprinted for the exit, only to find a massive, bloated figure blocking the doorway. Its swollen gut sagged in mottled clumps between trunk-like legs. Its head bulged oddly, as though its body had run out of places to store fat and dumped the overflow on its forehead.

  Roy slashed at its belly. His sword sank through the soft flesh with little resistance. Blood coated his blade and spilled out onto his armor. Resonance surged through him, and he made a mental note to experiment with cosmetic blood in the future. He also noted that it wasn’t regenerating as fast as the other one had.

  Behind them, the snarls turned to bellows. Out of time.

  He hammered his bat straight down, into the lumbering juggernaut’s exposed toes. It let out a guttural yowl and lurched back, giving them just enough space to squeeze through.

  “Back to the hovercraft,” Roy shouted.

  “But we didn’t get the discs yet,” said Bastion.

  “What? No. We’re not running away. We need to go get the maul so we can kill these things.”

  Roy sprinted, feeling some of his resonance drain away. Apparently, running toward a weapon still counted as running away in the knight rulebook.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  When he chanced a look over his shoulder. Bastion wasn’t behind him, but a gator-man was. The small, fast one, faster than Roy without a magical boost. He pumped his legs harder. The snarls behind him grew louder until Roy could feel hot breath against his back.

  Claws, or maybe teeth, raked across his spine. Roy threw himself forward, rolling off the concrete ledge and landing on the slippery siding of the hovercraft.

  A lithe black form dove past him, spearing into the water like a missile and launching a narrow geyser in its place.

  Roy scrambled onto the deck, eyeing the controls. If he picked up enough speed, he could ram the gator-man when it tried to surface. Then he saw the embers burning in the engine and the pitiful wisp of steam rising from the smokestack and tried to think of a plan B.

  A black blur on his left. Impact. Blood thumped in his skull. He reeled, watching sky and swamp spin around him. His bat flew from his hand and vanished with a splash.

  He touched his ear, and his glove came away red. The trickle of resonance that gave him did nothing to stop the sinking feeling in his stomach.

  Staggering toward the railing, he slipped and dropped to one knee—just as the Gator-man slashed through the air where his head had been.

  This time, he got a clearer look: the predator Gator-man darted in and out of the water like an eel, quick and erratic, launching itself into the air.

  Roy crouched low, watching its inky body vanish below the surface.

  The castle maul lay flat along the edge of the deck; W’s surprise container sat by the boiler in the center. He stepped back to the middle. The maul was a maul, but the surprise could be anything, even a better weapon.

  He held his sword over the padlocks and tried to imagine a knight errant opening a treasure chest.

  Before the blow could land, the deck shuddered beneath him as something slammed into it. Roy fell again, burying his sword in the deck. He wrenched at the hilt, but it was wedged in place so firmly it wouldn’t move an inch. Worse, it flopped from side to side like cheap plastic when he tried.

  Got it, falling over is not what knights do.

  The floor shook again as the Gator-man landed in front of him, its weight tilting the whole craft backwards. It snorted in a way that sounded like laughter. So they’d been dreamt up with a sense of humour.

  Roy used those precious few seconds to roll to the side, grabbing the Castle Maul along the way. It was light, still covered in cloth to hide its theming.

  The Gator-man coiled its body like a sprinter at his mark, claws scratching the deck.

  There was no time or space to stand; instead, Roy readied the maul.

  He did his best to make the reveal itself into a ritual, like he was raising a banner or unsheathing a legendary weapon, but there was no time for anything fancy. He couldn’t announce it with a speech, or even stylishly swish the cloth like a matador before a bull.

  Waiting until the last possible moment, he lifted the cloth. It instantly felt like lead in his hands, but when the claws scraped against it, it became slightly lighter.

  Roy had enough resonance to move it a little now, blocking more attacks as the Gator-man tried to swipe at him from the sides.

  Then it tried to bite the weapon instead, crunching hard enough to shatter teeth. A small cloud of stone dust billowed away from the miniature castle.

  The predator bellowed with fury. Smarter than the average gator, but not smart enough to figure out how theme magic works.

  Roy, however, was finding out more and more with every attack he blocked. The harder something tries to strike it, the harder it resists. Resonance surged through his body, charging him up enough to kick his heels into the deck and jump five feet above the craft.

  Midair, he swung, the Maul growing heavier the closer it got to impact. It smashed into the gator’s lower jaw before its teeth had time to regrow, and by that point it was so heavy it dragged Roy down with it. He slammed onto the deck; this time, he was the one making the hovercraft tilt with his impact.

  The Gator-man went flying, landing against the rear fan. Its jaw was dislocated, hanging off its face.

  It recovered quickly and lunged for him.

  Roy swung, but it was too fast for him and lurched to the side. He sidestepped the attack and carried on swinging, spinning the Maul all the way around. It became lighter, picking up speed as it moved.

  He wasn’t ready for the extra weight when he came around for another swipe, and the unbalanced weapon hit a glancing blow, digging a corner tower into the gator-man’s upper ribs.

  Still, the blow must have done something, since the Gator-man’s breaths had turned ragged.

  It pounced again, claws out, but slowly, too slow to dodge as Roy raised his stone hammer high. This time, he used the weight gain as he swung to his advantage. Gravity, and strength, and magic all joined forces to shatter the Gator-man’s skull.

  It slumped against the deck, and after a few seconds of waiting with the maul raised over the ruins of its head, Roy was sure it had stopped regenerating.

  Only then did he throw the cloth back over the maul and scramble back up the concrete cliff.

  Between the stores, he found Bastion leading the big Gator-man on a merry chase, weaving between cars and phone booths, slowing it down as it stopped to smash them apart.

  “Did you kill the fast one?” Bastion shouted, circling the Revus Bandit.

  “Yeah. The Maul works, by the way.”

  “Great. I had to keep this big bastard away from the hovercraft. It would have sunk it with one stomp. I have a plan for it, we just need to—”

  The fast-regenerating Gator-man from Smash Hit Video burst through the doorway, head drooping to the right, jaws slack. It clawed at its neck, trying to rip free the shards of ultra-disc buried in its flesh. With physical barriers in the way, the severed muscles couldn’t knit themselves back together, and scaly skin had healed around the shards, making them difficult to pull loose.

  It wouldn’t be biting them in that condition, but it was still fast on its feet. Roy wished they’d cut the front of its neck first instead. Cutting off the blood supply to its brain would have done a lot more good than severing the muscles and tendons holding its head up.

  “Follow your plan,” he called out to Bastion. “I’ll deal with this one.”

  He gripped the Maul’s handle halfway down and grabbed the cloth. This time, he was going to do the reveal right.

  “This is the Castle Maul, and it’s about to turn your bones to dust.” He whipped the cloth away in one fluid motion, letting the breeze catch it as he raised the hammer with both hands.

  It felt like lightning had struck the Maul, pouring energy down into him through the handle. The hammer grew heavier, but at the same time, his strength increased to match it, until it felt like he was holding up a truck with steel arms.

  Even breathing felt great now. Resonance charged his chest with every inhale. He was rearing to go like a race car revved up at the starting line, but he was wielding a fortress on a stick. He’d let the enemy come to him.

  Roy kept the rapid regenerator in view while watching Bastion build up a lead on the juggernaut in his peripheral vision.

  Bastion weaved through tight spaces where the large gator-man couldn’t follow, and worked his way around to the turreted tower to the side of Kino Kingdom.

  The Gator-man watched Roy cautiously, narrowing its eyes even as its head flopped around.

  Through the arrow-slit windows, Roy could see Bastion rapidly ascending the spiral stairway while the juggernaut looked up and down the building in confusion.

  The regenerator hunched forward, ready to break into a sprint.

  Bastion emerged onto the roof, above the sign which spelled out the restaurant’s name in old-timey text with decorative curls at the ends of the letters, painted within individual rectangles of yellowing plastic. The whole thing was affixed to a battlement of stone-look foam and fiberglass, which sagged under the sign’s weight.

  Bastion stood directly behind the sign, waving his bat and blade in the air and shouting to get the juggernaut’s attention. Roy knew exactly what he had in mind.

  The juggernaut ran toward the restaurant, stomping a mailbox in the process.

  A moment later, the regenerator stopped short of charging at Roy, its loose head staring in the direction of Bastion and the juggernaut.

  It quickly reached up and clawed out the back of its own neck. A lump of flesh and optical disc fell to the ground, and a moment later its head was back in place.

  The regenerator bellowed, and the juggernaut turned away from Bastion’s trap and towards Roy. They’d been communicating. The man part of the Gator-man makeup was finally showing itself.

  Roy made a split-second decision and ran for the smaller foe. When he got close enough, he flipped the maul and swung it like an underhand bat. The Gator-man went flying, landing under the Kino Kingdom sign.

  He leapt out of the way of the juggernaut’s charge just in time to watch Bastion shove the sign. With a low, groaning sound, it tore the whole section of wall from the roof, crushing the rapid-regenerating Gator-man beneath it, leaving only its twitching head poking out.

  The juggernaut charged again, stomping with earth-shaking force—an unstoppable wall of flesh, a living siege engine.

  As it barreled towards him, Roy was still thinking of the fiberglass battlements. They hadn’t broken against the regenerator; they’d broken it instead. Even while falling, they’d still behaved like stone.

  Themed objects acted like what they looked like, and the Castle Maul looked like a fortress, with walls that withstood anything that flew at them. It gained weight as he swung it, because from the perspective of the Maul, the enemies Roy swung it at were actually siege weapons flying towards it.

  The faster something approached, the stronger it became.

  Roy lowered his weapon until it pointed directly forward, holding it like a battering ram. Then he charged, screaming as he ran at the juggernaut.

  The closer he got, the more massive it seemed. Its head was at three times his height, which luckily meant its teeth were out of reach, but its bellowing breath still thundered around him. The ground shook with every step it took. The sheer weight of this thing. If it hit him, it would mow him down like a truck.

  But it didn’t hit him. It hit the Castle Maul.

  The turrets slammed into its weirdly featureless crotch. Towers tore through flesh. Energy rushed through him, powering his legs to drive the blow further. A feedback loop of force pushed the Maul right through to the other side, snapping the juggernaut’s spine as Roy ran between its tree trunk-sized legs.

  The Maul flipped as Roy dragged the handle behind him, fighting some final resistance as it tore through the last of the Gator-man’s rear end.

  Roy spun. It writhed on the concrete, legs hanging limp. The flesh he’d punched through had already started regrowing, but the bones stayed broken. It wouldn’t be standing up again.

  He ran up onto its back, taking quick, jumping steps to stay balanced, and brought the maul down on its head in a flurry of blows. What started as crisp, crunchy strikes quickly turned wet and mushy, until he felt like he was whisking a cake mix inside the giant’s skull. The scaly skin failed to break the whole time, even as the bone beneath it crumpled and the brain beneath that turned to red paste.

  He kept at it even after it stopped moving. Not trusting that it would stop regenerating.

  Eventually, Bastion tapped him on the shoulder. “There’s another one that this would do more good against.”

  Roy swivelled on the spot, maul raised, expecting another Gator-man to have joined the fight. Instead, he saw the first one, head still snarling even with its entire body crushed beneath the sign.

  “This is for interrupting us,” said Roy, as he silenced it with a single swing. “Now, let’s get back to picking out movies.”