I pulled one end of my portal pair in front of me, and eight cyber-bunnies spilled out and went to town on the army in a non-lethal fashion. I could feel their vicious minds chafing at the limitations I was enforcing, and they were doing their best to violate the spirit of the law while sticking to its letter.

  Mana-cannons flickered scarlet beams across the charging soldiers. They were aiming low. The front ranks lost their legs at mid-thigh as burning beams sliced across them and cauterised the wounds. A few rows back, the attackers were cut off at the knees, and ten rows deep, they lost their feet, or parts of them.

  Screams rose from the maimed men and women as the charge stumbled to a halt, and the momentum of the rear ranks ground to a stop to avoid crushing their fellow soldiers underfoot. They spread out to encircle me rather than pushing in close, and my bunnie spread out in a circle as well. They all assumed combat stances, bar one.

  “People! Why are we fighting? Hee hee!” called Jacko-bunnie as he danced to the front and began moonwalking into the mob of stunned soldiers. “Can’t you see Bob just wants to be friends? He wants to be left alone–SHAMONE!”

  I brought the control gem, attached to a sucker on one of my tails, around to my face, peered at it closely, then gave it a good shake. It all seemed to be working; the other bunnies were bundles of hate trapped in their cybernetics, but this one was filled with… love? Maybe not quite that, but warmth and goodwill to all beings, and an overwhelming desire to be loved, were definitely major parts of the emotional core of the thing.

  “It’s a monster!” yelled one of the officers as she edged forward, armour gleaming in the sun and her sword held in a low guard as she stepped out from the uncertain mass of troops.

  “I resemble that remark,” I muttered aloud. I couldn’t really deny it.

  “It even says it is!” she snapped, wafting her sword in my direction. “What the hell are you anyway?” she finished as she realised what she was talking to.

  “I just want to make people dance and sing! Awha-When the lights go down–hee hee--shamone-you know ya just want to feel the lo-” An arc of power from a flick of her sword sliced the head off the Jacko-bunny, and the body collapsed in a heap. Sparks shot from the hole where the bunny's head had been connected to the rest of the nightmarish macguffins of the cyborg body, blood, and thick oil leaking out onto the dirt.

  “NO!” I growled. A wave of power, a force of will I didn’t know I possessed, rolled out from me, and the enemy troopers swayed like tall grass in a strong breeze. I wasn’t anywhere close to the mysterious stranger in the pub's strength, but these weak mammals couldn’t stand before me. I could devour and destroy, burn from on high, kill with impunity. They murdered the one bunny I kind of half liked, and my wings spread, my legs bent as I prepared to take to the skies and avenge what was mine.

  “Don’t, Bob. Hee hee! They can’t kill the music!” said the closest robo-rabbit, and my neck craned round. Where the hell did it get that hat? One of the angry bunnies had been replaced with the soul of whatever this was. It moonwalked forwards, spun, flicked a heel, and grabbed a crotch that I knew damn well was entirely mechanical. It tipped its hat forward to hide half of its face.

  “HOOOOOOOOOOOO!” it yelled, and the sound became pressure, became force, and drove the humans to their knees. “Now, Bob!”

  I shifted the portal again so it hung horizontally above us. I sent a command to the cyborgs waiting behind the bank back in the Mill, and they followed my instructions. Wood cracked as tops were struck from barrels, and a week's worth of accumulated shit and piss were decanted through the far portal. As the first wave began to fall, judging by the splashes and horrified shouts from my enemies, I shifted the portal from side to side to ensure even coverage.

  “My armour! I’ll never get this clean again!” “Screw your armour! My nose!” “What the actual fuck!”

  The cacophony of horror and disgust washed over me as I tracked the portal back and forth, aiming for as even a layer as possible. The mages stopped trying to cast magic at me or my minions, and the warriors lost all interest in fighting. It began gradually, long before I would run out of stored sewage, but the ones at the back, not yet coated in filth, broke and ran first. The abuse and threats of their officers meant nothing compared to the mildly fermented excrement that robbed them of their joie de vivre, their will to fight, and their desire for anything other than a very long, extremely thorough bath.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Soon, their soggier and smellier counterparts were also racing away from me and my small force, a single cubber-bunny strutting back and forth and periodically spinning and clutching at itself while it sang about being bad.

  “Sometimes, if you listen very carefully, you can hear the sound of my genius,” I mumbled happily as the Foreverknot forces dissolved into a rabble of shit-covered individuals. The cohesion was gone, they weren’t an army now, they were– A lance of actinic light emerged from a pile of filth, glancing off my armoured hide and leaving a sizzling scar down my scaly side.

  With a boom, the mound of muck exploded into a literal shower of shit as the command team of the Foreverknot army unburied themselves. I should have known that it had been too easy. I pulled the portal back to my side and brought through the rest of the bunnies, bar those guarding my new seat of government: the pub.

  “Beast! F–Filthy beast!” A man spluttered as he lowered his outstretched palm and swiped at the cack caking him.

  “Would you like something soft and absorbent to help you tidy up? Might not be for the best, though. A decent roll of TP would wipe you up as well.” I was not a quipper, judging by the disgusted looks I received from the enemy and Jacko-bunny.

  I reached into my pouch and summoned an item I’d received weeks ago, the Sanctified Shit Tickets. I snatched it up in one of my tails, and another caught the trailing end, before I launched the roll across the intervening space. It spun through the air and curled round, scooping up the remaining fighters and wrapping them into a ball of magical Andrex.

  “Reptile Ignis!” I flinched at the words. I knew one word meant me, and the other meant burn or fire or something, but no flames tried to consume me; instead, the divine bottom wipes erupted in foul-smelling flames.

  I didn’t catch sight of the sigil, so I didn’t get to learn the spell, but it felt like it was perhaps a little too closely aimed at me personally to be worth the trouble of picking up. There were perhaps twenty of them that spilled out from the holy bog roll. An even split between men and women. Half of them wore bulky armour, half wore leather or robes.

  “I can’t get a bead on how strong he is!”

  “He’s a dragon, you dolt. Of course you can’t.”

  “His pet monsters are kinda tough. Not a real problem though!”

  “You idiots could just talk to me rather than trying to fight? How thick are you not to see I’m trying not to kill anyone?” I roared across the sound of the screaming legless soldiers being dragged away by their mates. In the privacy of my own head, I had to admit that the weeping did not lend weight to my argument. “You guys have antibiotics, right?” While the mana-cannons had cauterised the wounds, I had just coated them in shit as well.

  “Your restraint is just a sign of weakness! A true dragon wouldn’t hesitate!” barked a young man I mentally tagged as ‘too stupid to be allowed to breed’. His noble accent, so similar to the young Pratnip, only reinforced my belief that a moneyed upbringing equalled dysgenics.

  “How about you lot just bugger off? I could have just rained fire from the sky on you idiots!” I moved slowly closer. If I were forced to strike, I wanted to be able to douse as many of them in acid-fire before I took to the air.

  “Our lady has given us our orders. The Mill, and the frontier beyond, are hers to claim.”

  What the hell did they want with the Fuderation, the only thing north of the Mill? Sure, the Orlics were tough, weird, and seemed committed to deciding the chain of command by literal pissing contests, but why would the humans want to venture into the endless grasslands I’d seen to the north? No cities, just wandering bands of green-skinned psychos. No trade hubs, no mines… So what on Helstat had caught this noble's attention?

  “If she wants them, she has to deal with me first,” I growled.

  “Enough! I am Brigadier Moonslight! I don’t argue with beasts!” She strode forward, her armour had shed the mess I’d dropped on them, but her hair was matted to her face and the back of her neck. The gleaming metal contrasted nicely with the brown, and it made me share a saurian smile.

  “Leave now. Your army has fled. You mammals are no threat to me.” I was just letting the old god complex roll out, not bothering to downplay it.

  “Hunters!” she yelled, and a portal opened beside her, pale orange to the blue or pink I’d grown used to seeing for teleportation magic. “We might have come prepared. Your presence wasn’t unknown,” the commander sneered.

  Three warriors stepped out. One was clad in full plate from head to toe. He could have been one of those armour displays in an old manor house back on Earth, except he moved with a flowing, liquid grace that made clear the weight of the metal meant nothing to him. He pulled a zweihander clear of its sheath, throwing the leather to the side and taking up the classic knightly stance.

  His first companion was a slim woman wearing a silver robe that came down to her ankles. A dozen necklaces hung from her neck, some shiny and delicious-looking, and some crude, stones with holes drilled through them threaded on simple leather thongs. Her wrists sported an assortment of bracelets, and her fingers had a dozen glowing rings on them.

  The final person to emerge from the portal was androgynous. I couldn’t tell what gender they were, and a hood and mask covered their face and hair. They wore a belt across their chest that was lined with knives and vials that glowed a variety of sickly colours.

  “Hail, beast! The Biscuit Dippers are here to slay you! I am Sir Dunkley, Knight Extraordinaire! My companions are Lady Depilatio and The Knavespike. You will die today, dragon!”

  “Shamone!” said my favourite robo-bunny in a worried voice.