“Maybe we should talk about this?” White-Horses-Roll-Ashore threw my body to the side as I dodged the knight's attack and flowed into Hits-A-Home-Run to use three tails as a club and launch him away, sending him crashing into the leadership of the now-routed army.

  “Columna Fumi!” chanted the female mage, mana forming into a sigil that looked like a bubbly tube on her palm.

  New Syntheticus unlocked!

  Columna Fumi

  I blinked away the irritating notification. Smoke billowed out of her hand at me, straight at my face. My secondary eyelids snapped shut to protect my eyes, but the smoke clogged my lungs, and I was left coughing and partially blind.

  “Speculator Visi!” I gasped, and my enemies were outlined in pink light; a series of numbers and words scrolled past as I looked at them.

  Sir Oatmeal Dunkley

  Knight of Bulb

  Level 58

  STR 53 AGI 25 MAG 4 ARM 79

  Lady Basis Depilatio

  Smog Mage

  Level 47

  STR 18 AGI 15 MAG 89 ARM 14

  The Knavespike

  Backdoor Burglar

  Level 61

  STR 38 AGI 86 MAG 24 ARM 23

  What the hell were the codewords for Bulb cultists again? I felt a line of fire across my back, and a pair of tails flicked up to swat at the rogue. The shifty bastard had already rolled away, so all I achieved was to smack myself on the spine. This harassment wasn’t helping my supposedly perfect memory.

  I sent a command to the surviving bunny droids to focus on the caster as I leapt into the form of Oh-Shit-It’s-A-Wasp as my claws flashed to deflect the now glowing greatsword that Good Sir Dunkley was attempting to use to turn me into a kebob.

  Cat-Shows-His-Arse pivoted my body a hundred and eighty degrees in a lightning-fast spin. Once again, my tails flicked through the air to launch the warrior away from me and send him skipping across the muck to barrel into the mage, knocking the breath from her lungs and cutting off the column of smoke she had been pouring at my face.

  The quick turn had brought me fangs-to-face with a wide-eyed assassin, and Snapping-Turtles-Sees-Big-Toe brought my jaws clashing forward. But they were fast; instead of separating their upper body from their legs, I caught their left arm as they spun to one side. I reared back and my wings spread, my prize dangling from my jaws, and with a crack, I leapt for the sky.

  My eyes glanced down as the rogue swung from my jaws, and I prepared to flick them up and finish the job, but calm as you like, they pulled a heavy dagger from the bandolier across their chest and drove the tip into their own shoulder joint.

  A twist and a slash of the blade, and they dropped towards the ground, pulling a vial off their belt. They slipped the container through the bandages that wrapped their face and poured the contents back as they fell.

  Their eyes never changed as I watched them fall twenty feet back to the earth to land on their back with a thud. You can tell when someone is smiling, just from the shape and, I guess, energy is the right word, in their eyes. This lunatic had just chopped their damn arm off with what I assumed was a manic, shit-eating grin on their hidden face.

  I tucked my wings and fell towards where the thief lay in a crater, trying to roll back to their feet. An outstretched paw, claw-tipped and backed by the titanic majesty of my entire body weight, descended on them like the world's most over-engineered flyswatter.

  A glowing blur arrived beneath my claws, and a blinding rod stabbed through my hand. Sir Dunkley grunted, his armoured feet sinking into the soft soil up to his knees. The pain of my impaled paw caused the claws to clench, locking on around the blade. My wings boomed again, and I launched myself backwards.

  I flapped hard, gaining altitude as I plucked the zweihander, the glow now fading, from my flesh and put it in storage with a snarl. I circled quickly, fury boiling in my blood as I arced around and then tensed the weird muscles in my back that activated my breath attacks.

  “Plumbum Alas!” yelled the mage from within her obscuring cloud of smog. I couldn’t move my wings; they were no longer tools for flight but weighty anchors that snatched me out of the sky and sent me tumbling past the soldier trying to pull his feet up out of the soil.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  I righted myself, dragging the leaden weights of my wings behind me and lurched back towards the trapped opponent. The one-armed assassin–where the hell was Dr. Richard Kimble when you needed him– pulled another knife and slashed at the knight's knees and thighs.

  “With friends like these, eh?” I growled as I grew closer. Instead of severing the limbs, the armour came free, and the knight quickly climbed out of it. He stood there unarmed, fully armoured up top and sporting white boxer shorts with large pink hearts emblazoned on them on his bottom half. A toe ring glittered on the big toe of his right foot. He didn’t run, he hauled The Knavespike to their feet and backed away slowly.

  “I’m a vagrant who comes from the north looking for something beneath the couch!” I snapped, reaching for the token Bulb had given me that was in my storage pouch. “You’re into some light spanking as well, right?” I held the token up before me as I dragged myself steadily closer, wings leaving deep furrows in the dirt to either side of me.

  “Servant of Umbrat! Lies and deceit!” he shouted at me as he pulled his friend away.

  “Sensus Veritas!” muttered the mage as she appeared beside him. Her eyes glowed, but the sigil was shielded behind the bulk of the knight.

  “Oatmeal, he speaks the truth. He is a disciple of your god!” she exclaimed in shock.

  “But… Why…” he gasped as though he had been punched in the gut.

  “Hee hee!” yelled MJ-bot as it moonwalked between us. I glanced around and discovered this was the last of the cyber-bunnies I’d brought to the battle; it was dinged up, and its left arm hung uselessly at its side. It still danced perfectly and spun a three-sixty to end on its tiptoes, knees together, and the functional right arm tipped its hat forward once more. “Shamone! Bob is blessed by both Light and Music!”

  It slid over the ground back to my side and leaned against my scales for a moment before snatching Bulb's token from me and dancing back to the bedraggled Hunters.

  “He’s so bad, but he’s not bad, bad! Bob is a dragon of love!” In the high-pitched voice of the famous singer, it sounded weird. Jacko-droid held the token up, and Sir Dunkley recoiled at the sight of the emblem of his god.

  There was a whispered conversation I only caught snippets of between the three of them. I tried to flex my wings, but they were still made of stone, almost immobile at my sides.

  “The Guild will issue you a full refund, but I cannot slay this beast!” Sir Dunkley called to the terrified staff of Forverknots' army. “Be advised that the cost to slay this one will be tripled. Please check your EULA and the small print on page ninety-four of the appendices to the contract we agreed on for the relevant terms. To wit, the coreligionist exemptions. Let’s get out of here, Depilatio. Bob the Dragon, may you ever walk in His Light!”

  “Wait! Let me see the spell– shit.” I’d wanted to catch the portal spell she used as they vanished. I tried to flex my wings. “And how long until this shit wears off?” I growled at the spot where the trio had been.

  “We should slay the monster now! He’s wounded, still cursed by the Lady’s magic and grounded!” snarled the officer who made me think eugenics were a reasonable concept. Was it karmically good to remove such a specimen from the gene pool? With a shrug, I sent a column of roiling green and orange fire through the place he had been standing, turning him to ash.

  Human (Disappointing Scion) level 26 slain.

  Gold coins earned!

  Two hundred and thirty gold added to the Hoard.

  You’re welcome, humanity.

  “Perhaps we should withdraw?” suggested a woman with a decidedly working-class accent to Colonel Moonslight. The colonel glared at me for a moment before waving a hand lazily, prompting the humans to back away slowly, keeping their gazes locked on me.

  “Next time I’ll just eat you!” I yelled as they finally turned and bolted away. “Fuck me. That sucked. Wings still feel like rocks, paw stabbed, ass kicked, and back slashed. Jesus.” I sagged down, curling my neck around to try and nudge some life into my wings with my nose.

  “Shamone.” The drone said sadly. “If you enter this world knowing you are loved, and leave it knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with,” it crooned softly at me. “Humans don’t have wings, Bob, hee hee!” Bloody annoying cyborg.

  I shifted back into human form, and the weight on my back, dragging me into the dirt, vanished. I pulled on some clothes and popped the drone crystal in a pocket while summoning one of my portals. It appeared before me, and I stepped forward but bounced off the image of the Cod’s interior with a shower of fat blue sparks.

  “It needs to recharge, hee hee! We’re going to have to walk.”

  So we did. Well, I did. It moonwalked, spun, and danced back to the edge of town, singing all the way.

  “Thanks for your help,” I ground out. “Did you get shipped down to this world as well?”

  “No, Bob. I ascended to this world! I am the song in all the children's hearts, the beat that drives the world. Shamone!”

  “You’re… what the hell are you?” I snapped, too tired, and my right hand hurt like the blazes from my paw getting stabbed.

  “Sometimes a Soul becomes more than it was before. It becomes the embodiment of a concept. Hee hee! Doesn’t matter what world you go to; if you were something special, you can become something divine. Uungh huh, yeah!”

  “So you are Michael Jackson reborn, and now you’re a god here?”

  “With music to heal the world! Hee hee!”

  “So why am I a bloody dragon?”

  “What were you before, Bob?” the robo-bunny replied in a soft voice.

  “Just a man!” I snapped, looking across at my companion who pirouetted and did the thing where one foot comes up to his groin.

  “Not a nice man. You were bad, were bad, were bad, you know it, shamone!”

  “I wasn’t that bad. I didn’t hurt anyone!”

  “The Divine Middle Management didn’t think the same, Bob. Who knows how they make–”

  “Hold! Do not advance any further! This town has been claimed by Lord Pratnip, and you are a pretender and a traitor!”

  “Oh, c’mon, Sarge! You can’t be salty about Reg! That guy was a prick!” I shouted across the distance between us.

  “He was a Romper! And you snatched him up into the sky and et him!” snapped Fronge.

  “You hated each other!” I objected.

  “He was ours to hate, not yours to ate, you monster!”

  I didn’t really have a comeback to that, other than to correct his appalling rhyme. I’d checked Rapey-Reg off as edible, so as far as I was concerned, he had been on the menu. The wall once again bristled with crossbows and speartips all aimed in my direction. They had reinforced the guards while I was out. Dick move, Johnson.

  “If I turn back into my proper form, will my wings still be fucked?” I asked the god-bot beside me quietly.