Battle Under the Big Top

Gustav came back clapping for Ornna, his smile bright and practiced. But there was a deeper tension in the next change of music. A low drumbeat began in the distance while the fiddle took on a strained, uneasy edge.

“Even as the sun would rise anew,” Gustav declared, “bellowing roars would shake the lands of Xhorhas and beyond. Terrible beasts, now freed from their dark masters, scattered into our world.”

A hideous roar ripped through the tent.

Children cried out. Half the crowd jolted in their seats. From behind the flap, the really hot half-orc beefcake with the moustache and the bald human hauled something in on heavy chains. Canvas bulged. Then the creature itself lumbered into view.

The thing was twice as tall as the two men and all slick green scales and toad-swollen bulk, with a rotund torso, thick muscular arms bound in manacles, and enormous hind legs bunching under it as it fought the chains. It looked like something dragged out of a fever dream and given breath. It roared again, and the front rows recoiled hard enough to nearly topple backward.

Nott’s whole body went tight.

The thing was absolutely terrifying.

Gustav, infuriatingly unshaken, swept a hand toward the beast as if introducing a beloved old friend.

“The devil-toad crawls hungrily into the land of the free folk, lording over nightmares as they say. But what truth lies behind the eyes of this beast? What might be learned when the guiding heart of innocence pierces the hateful soul and brings it to beauty for the first time?”

His voice softened, almost reverent.

“I present to you the vivid voice of Toya.”

At first the song seemed to come from the air itself.

It was soft. Faint. So lovely it felt unreal.

Nott’s eyes, like every other pair in the tent, tore themselves from the chained monster and climbed upward. High against the central pole, on a small platform near the tent’s apex, stood Toya. A young dwarf woman of perhaps nineteen dressed for the stage in soft jewel tones, auburn curls like drills beside her face, a green stone resting at her chest. Gold hoops winked at her pointed ears when she moved. She held herself with an easy, unhurried confidence that made the whole tent feel like it already belonged to her. Then she opened her mouth, and the entire room changed.

Her voice poured down over the audience like warm honey and clear water and sunlight all at once. It was not merely pretty. It was impossible. Calming in a way that made the air itself seem to listen. The first note went clean through Nott’s drunken haze and pinned her where she sat.

Around her, the crowd gave one shared, startled gasp.

The devil-toad stopped fighting.

Just stopped.

Its massive body sagged out of its rage as if the song had reached inside it and smoothed some knot no hand could ever touch. Its ugly face softened into something almost childlike. It shuffled toward the base of the pole and sat there, rapt, while the baldy and hottie let the chains fall and backed quietly away.

Toya kept singing.

The music gathered around her until it seemed she was not singing alone, though no second throat joined hers. A phantom chorus shimmered somewhere in the air, too subtle to name, too beautiful to distrust in the moment. Her smile, when it came, was small and radiant and devastatingly sincere.

Nott realized, dimly, that her own face was wet.

Tears.

She had no idea when they’d started.

This was not lust. Not exactly. The ache in her groin was still there, hot and insistent, but Toya’s song reached a different place too, touching something bruised and homesick and deeply buried. For one long moment Nott wanted to be good. Wanted to be held. Wanted all the filth and fear and crawling want inside her to quiet just enough to let her breathe.

Beside her, even Beau had gone still. Jester stared upward with both hands pressed under her chin, eyes shining. Caleb’s sharp, suspicious face had slackened into open, **** wonder. Fjord looked caught between confusion and awe. Yasha’s body remained a wall of muscle and calm around Nott, but even she seemed quieter, drawn up into the spell of it.

The whole tent was listening.

The whole tent was hanging from that voice.

And in the front rows, not far from them, an old man stood up with his arms stretched toward the singer, tears running down his ravaged cheeks as his dirty cloak slipped from his shoulders.

Then the old man in the ring screamed.

It was not a drunk shout. Not a heckler’s bark. It was a wet, mangled sound, the kind that made every hair on Nott’s green arms try to stand up at once.

The old fellow convulsed so hard his chair tipped over. His back bowed. His arms locked. Something moved beneath his skin in thick, rolling surges, wrong in a way Nott felt in her teeth before she fully understood it with her eyes.

For one awful heartbeat, the whole tent seemed to freeze around the sight.

Toya stood high above the ring with her mouth hanging open. Orna had lowered one flaming fan, the fire trembling as badly as her hand. A man somewhere behind them gave a short, nervous laugh.

“It’s part of the act, right?” he said.

“No,” Beau snapped, already half out of her seat.

“Oh, no no no,” Jester breathed.

Gustav shouted something from the ring, voice cracking with real panic. Molly took two quick steps forward, stopped, and stared hard as if trying to sort trick from disaster. Even Caleb had gone still, eyes narrowed, shoulders tight with startled dread.

Nott, meanwhile, reacted with exactly the kind of heroic instinct her mother would have been ashamed to claim.

Weapons. Get the weapons. I was carried in here for a reason and that reason was easy access!

She twisted violently in Yasha’s lap, both hands diving for belts, straps, and scabbards. Her fingers fumbled across leather, buckles, and then over Yasha’s body with all the grace of a drunken rat in a pastry cart.

Her palm landed square on one of Yasha’s breasts.

Nott paused for less than half a heartbeat.

Gods above, that is a huge tit.

Then the old man’s skin tore open in a spray of blood and fabric and Nott went right back to the important work of panicking and groping. She yanked her crossbow loose, got her shortsword half free, then mashed another completely accidental handful of barbarian breast while reaching for Caleb’s dagger.

The bound bulk of her own curse made the scramble worse. Even pressed down under the wrappings, the thing was still a dense, awkward weight hanging from the front of her body, with her swollen balls packed underneath like two overripe plums in the world’s worst sling. Every frantic twist in Yasha’s lap made the whole miserable package drag, thump, and knock against her thighs.

This would all be so much easier if I had been cursed with a nice respectable affliction. Something elegant. A cough. Glowing eyes. Not this enormous swinging DICK!

Then the creature that had been an old man turned and looked straight at the front row.

Its eyes were red and bulging. Its lips had split back from its gums. One arm hung too long, ending in a blackened clutch of meat and bone that was no longer a hand so much as a hideous spiked maul.

The tent exploded into screaming.

People surged to their feet. Benches scraped. Children wailed. Mothers shouted for sons and daughters already lost in the crush. The giant lizard beast bound up the center pole and snatched Toya away under one thick arm. Muscly Moustache started physically shoving patrons toward the flaps. Gustav roared for everyone to get out.

Nott squealed, ripped the last of her gear free, and nearly pitched off Yasha’s lap in the effort. Crossbow. Shortsword. Caleb’s dagger. She clutched all three against her chest like treasure.

“Get down!” Fjord barked.

“What is that?!” Jester yelped.

“That is bad!” Nott shrieked back, which felt both obvious and useful.

Yasha moved before anyone else managed to turn shock into action.

One hand clamped on the back of Nott’s cloak and belt. The next instant Yasha hauled her bodily off her lap and tossed her behind the first few benches.

Nott hit the sawdust, rolled, and somehow kept hold of all her weapons through sheer goblin greed. Her bound cock and heavy balls thumped painfully with the landing, a compact, miserable heft that turned even a simple tumble into a crooked little disaster.

By the time she looked up, Yasha was already there, standing between her and the thing.

The barbarian’s broad back filled Nott’s view for one brief instant. No shouting. No grand pose. Just a hard stillness settling over all that pale muscle and old ****, as if some colder, sharper version of Yasha had slid cleanly into place.

The two Crownsguard near the rear entrance were trying to **** their way in, but the fleeing crowd jammed the aisle solid.

“What do we do?!” Jester cried.

Then she answered herself.

She thrust out a hand and a brilliant lance of guiding light screamed across the ring. It struck the creature square in the chest and burst in a flare of silver-blue radiance so bright Nott saw the ugly black knot of wrongness inside its torso for an instant, like a rotten egg lit from within.

The thing staggered.

Jester immediately bolted backward through the crowd, skirts flying, and as she retreated a second Jester seemed to remain where she had been, blue and shimmering and sweetly upright.

Nott blinked through her mask.

Excellent. Seeing double now. Drunk, horny, and hallucinating. Really a banner evening.

Yasha was already ripping through the remaining weapon bundle with blunt efficiency. Beau’s staff skidded over the dirt. Fjord’s falchion slapped into his waiting hand.

Nott hugged her own little armory close and took a quick inventory.

Caleb could do without the dagger for a minute. Caleb had magic. Also, if things got truly dire, there were plenty of screaming civilians around to hide behind. That was what civilians were for. Not morally, perhaps. Practically, absolutely.

The creature shook off Jester’s magic and lunged, not at the people attacking it, but at the easiest prey in reach. A young woman in the aisle barely got her arms up before it smashed her down into the sawdust and tore into her.

Her scream cut through the whole tent like a sawblade.

“Oh Traveler! Where are you?” Jester gasped from farther back.

“Move!” Molly shouted, shoving a staggering man toward the exit. “Move, move, keep moving!”

Fjord did not keep moving away.

With his falchion in both hands, he rushed the thing in a long, hard stride, circling around the shimmering Jester that still stood there waving its arms at the creature. He swung and the blade biting into the creature’s side just as Caleb, now sensibly deeper in the crowd with bodies and benches between himself and danger, hurled a crackling orb of magic from cover.

It struck almost in the same breath as Fjord’s blow.

Steel bit. The orb burst across the creature’s flesh in a violent splash of acid and light.

Nott’s whole little goblin soul warmed.

That’s right, my clever nervous wizard. Let the broad idiots with muscles go first.

This was exactly why they needed more people. Such a great idea! Not for friendship. Friendship was flimsy. Friendship could not stop claws. No, what mattered was having enough extra bodies around that danger had several other appetizing options before it reached her or Caleb.

See? This is basic planning. Always travel with decoys. Preferably tall ones.

Nott ducked lower behind another fleeing woman in a heavy wool skirt and tried to line up a shot through the chaos. Her hands were shaking too badly. The crossbow wavered. The whole tent seemed to rock under her.

“Hold still,” she hissed at absolutely everyone. “Just for one second, you flopping sacks of panic.”

The woman in front of her stumbled, and Nott’s free hand shot out on instinct, grabbing a full handful of ass through her skirt to steady herself. The stranger yelped.

Nott did not let go.

A thick, intimate scent rose immediately from between the woman’s legs, warm and wet and unmistakably female, and it hit Nott’s nose like a velvet mallet.

Oh. Well. That’s vulgar.

It was distracting. It was obscene. It also, infuriatingly, helped. Something about the hot, lived-in smell of a woman’s cunt cut through the spin in Nott’s head and pinned her wobbling thoughts in place.

There we go. A proper handhold.

She leaned out from behind the skirts, set the stock against her shoulder, and fired.

The bolt punched up through the creature’s lower jaw and burst one red eye from its socket. The eye flew away trailing black fluid.

The thing reeled and turned toward her.

“Bad,” Nott squeaked immediately. “Very bad.”

Molly met it before it could reach her.

The tiefling moved with that easy grace of his, but there was no smile in it now. He carved his twin blades across the monster’s body in a flashing arc and drove it sideways, away from the crowd and away from the front bench where Yasha still stood like a barricade.

“Eyes on me, darling,” Molly snapped at the thing, as if insulting it back into line might actually work.

Beau came in from the other side a heartbeat later, all elbows, speed, and pissed-off ****. She tried to get a hold on it, failed when the flesh shifted grossly under her grip, and abandoned finesse on the spot.

“Cool. Great. Hate that,” she snarled, hammering a fist into its face.

Jester called down another blast of dark, tolling magic that made the air itself shudder. Caleb launched a second spell from the crowd and nearly lost it when a fleeing man slammed into his shoulder, sending the acid hissing into the tent wall instead.

The creature staggered under the combined ****.

Then Yasha arrived.

She drew her greatsword in one smooth motion. The blade looked absurdly large in the lanternlight. In her hands it looked inevitable.

There was still no speech from her. No warning. No flourish. Just that same terrifying quiet as she stepped in and brought the sword down in a single annihilating stroke.

The creature simply came apart.

Nott felt a hot, feral thrill run through her that had embarrassingly little to do with safety and far too much to do with how Yasha looked while protecting her. The breadth of her, the quiet of her, the sheer brutal certainty in the way she stood between Nott and **** made something ugly and yearning turn over low in Nott’s belly.

All right, yes, kill me later if you must, but that was hot.

“All right, Yasha!” Nott shrilled before she could stop herself.

Then the mauled woman on the ground spasmed.

Every sound in the tent seemed to lurch sideways.

The young woman arched hard enough to lift off the dirt. Her limbs jerked. Her fingers clawed trenches in the sawdust. Flesh crawled under her skin in ugly ripples as her chest and shoulder began to swell. When she rose, it was faster than the old man had been. Less bloating, more snapping. Her neck cranked to one side with a hideous pop. One eye rolled white. Her hands split open into blood-slick talons.

“Oh, come on,” Beau said. Then, furious and genuinely offended, “She was pretty too.”

The second creature hit like a charging cart.

It smashed both fists into Beau and sent her stumbling backward with the wind knocked out of her. Fjord cursed and stepped in. Molly slashed at its side. Yasha pivoted immediately, already moving to intercept if it got past them.

Nott scrambled to a new patch of cover, half scampering and half stumbling with all the graceless haste of someone cursed with far too much anatomy in entirely the wrong place. The weight bound to the front of her body dragged at her center of gravity like usual, making every step feel crooked and bunched.

If I survive this, I am demanding a tailor. Or a wheelbarrow.

She crouched again, crossbow up, Caleb’s dagger still clenched in her other hand. Her breath came hard. Her body was a mess of fear, sweat, pain, and that stubborn under-throb of arousal that refused to die even now. Horniness had not left her. It had merely put on a helmet.

The second creature barreled after Beau with its hanging jaw and ruined neck. Fjord hewed at one side. Molly carved at the other. Black fluid sprayed across the sawdust. Still it came.

Then Jester flung out her hand with a sharp little cry, and a gigantic glowing lollipop simply appeared beside the thing, all bright sugar-pink light. It was as tall as a man, thick as a shield, and before Nott could even begin to understand what sort of deranged magic she was looking at, the thing swung sideways and smashed into the creature’s skull with a wet, cracking THOOM.

The monster lurched.

Nott blinked hard through her mask.

Her hot tiefling mama had just conjured a giant shining candy and used it to beat a nightmare in the face.

That was one of the hottest things Nott had ever seen right after her big barbarian sword mama raging ****-blow.

Jester looked half terrified and half thrilled, curls bouncing, eyes wide, as the glowing confection hovered there beside the monster like some lunatic guardian spirit waiting to strike again.

Beau planted her feet.

Blood ran from the corner of her mouth. Her expression had gone flat in that particular way people got right before they decided to solve a problem by punching it until the universe apologized.

“You are being such an asshole right now,” she informed the monster.

Then she launched herself at it.

The first hit snapped its head back. The second broke half its face in. Her next blows landed in a blur of shoulders, hips, and ugly precision. The thing clawed for her and missed. Beau drove her fist up through its ruined mouth with a wet crunch.

The creature toppled backward and stayed down.

Nott stared for one stunned beat.

Beau was still breathing hard, blood at the corner of her mouth, chest heaving, fists slick with gore, and somehow that only made her look better. She had just beaten a nightmare to **** with her bare hands because apparently she was too angry and too stupid to use a safer plan like a civilized pervert.

Gods, she is such a sexy idiot.

Nott did, in fact, think Beau was a dummy for getting that close. A glorious, punch-happy, half-dressed dummy with sharp eyes, hard lines, a tight ass worth noticing even in a **** tent, and the kind of reckless confidence that made a body feel warmer in all the worst places. The goblin part of Nott’s brain, crude and immediate, appreciated strength the same way a starving thing appreciated meat.

I would never do that, Nott told herself, appalled and fascinated. I would absolutely hide behind her sweet ass while she did it again, though.

For one breathless moment, the center of the tent went still.

Not silent. Never silent. People were still sobbing, shouting, pushing for the exits. Wind snapped the torn canvas where Caleb’s spell had burned through it. Somewhere a child was crying for her mother. But the ring itself, where two people had become nightmares and been hacked apart in less than a minute, seemed to pause and look at the survivors.

Nott remained crouched with the crossbow up, Caleb’s dagger still in her off hand. Her ears rang. Her bound cock and balls ached dully from being jostled, thrown, and **** through what counted for goblin acrobatics under truly unfair conditions. The leather wrappings across her belly were damp with sweat and pre-cum. She could taste metal in the back of her throat.

And, because the world was obscene, her eyes kept drifting back to Yasha. To the barbarian standing over the other dead thing with her greatsword in hand, chest rising and falling, that wild bright edge not yet gone from her face.

Yes, all right. Fine. Still would climb that like a tree.

Then the front flaps of the tent folded inward.

One, two, three, four, then more bronze-and-vermilion uniforms spilled into the chamber with weapons drawn, faces pale and hard as they took in the bodies, the blood, the shattered benches, the smoking hole in the canvas, the carnies, and the strangers standing among the dead.

The command of th lead Crowns Guard cracked across the tent like a whip.

“You! You! Stay where you are!”