Fishwhacked: Reign of the Walrus Witch

Chapter 9

Mayhem coursed through the vegetabloke city. Guard vegetablokes found themselves being assaulted by guerrilla resistance fighters and the gang of escaped prisoners. The prisoners, those who had survived colosseum battle after battle, were conditioned for fighting more than the hazy, obedient vegetabloke soldiers. However, the soldiers outnumbered them tremendously, and had all the axes they could throw.

Arbort led Ebb and the others through quieter hallways. They occasionally met a stray resistance vegetabloke who gave them a quick salute, and they heard the sounds of battle through the walls. Arbort's three eyes glowed in the same way Omno did and they were the only sources of light in the dark dome.

"Here!" Arbort kicked a door aside. A sudden pale luminescence lit the hallway up. The room they entered was damp and musty. It contained old vegetablokes furnishings but they were rotted and dominated by fungus. The room stunk of mold, and huge, pulsating pods were lining the walls. Mushrooms dotting the floor provided the only light. "Show yourself!"

A booming guffaw shook the walls. "Little twig man, I knew you would come for me. All it took was a single spore to spy on your pissant resistance. I would love to know how you freed the sacrifices, but there will be plenty of time to find out when I worm my spores through your brain. I will give you a last chance to benefit my vegetablokes. Come and be blessed on the battlefield. Die for your king!"

The pods erupted. The clouds of spores were so thick that even with Omno's ability to burn them away, the party in the king's chamber were knocked back by the force of them and into a wall of vines. The vines, imbued with spores, contorted and fell away. The chamber's occupants were pushed down the slide of vines and into the massive center circle of the vegetablokes dome. Slivers of sunlight poked through but it was otherwise only lit by big batches of more glowing mushrooms.

There was a central platform of dirt. Bones stuck out of the soil, and there were numerous blood stains. A moat of red water surrounded the platform, and a wall of pikes pointed inward to keep anyone from getting out of the arena. Rings of seating logs ran around the moat. They were lined with a forest of vegetablokes, sitting and swaying, quietly chanting prayers in unison.

The vines dumped Ebb into the dirt of the arena. She made sure she had Omno in her grip, and stood up. She met her allies in the center.

"I may have been mistaken regarding Mushruin's location," Arbort said.

"So now what?" Ebb asked.

Arbort readied his hatchets. "They make us fight."

"Fight who?" Paistra said. "We freed the other combatants. And he knows we're not going to fight each other."

"So they'll just send vegetablokes in to kill us," Ebb replied. 

"No. Mushruin would not have us slaughtered like that. The ritual is sacred, it must be done just right, we must die in battle against other sacrifices or else our spilled blood is worthless," Arbort explained.

Ebb looked up at the top stand, where mushroom-ridden logs were set up in the shape of a throne. Two vegetablokes stood at either side but the throne was empty. "So what's he going to do?"

The two vegetablokes blew into hollowed animal horns and the sound echoed throughout the dome. The wall above the throne parted, and a bulbous entity, roughly Yawp's size, descended into the chair. It was at one point a vegetabloke. Their legs were like thick tree stumps, and their body had been bloated into a tumorous girth. They were covered in a green and brown sludge that formed mass over a rotting tree frame. Their head was bald of leaves, instead dotted with gnarled mushrooms. Two massive fangs hung from their upper lip, and their three eyes were blood-red. Every movement they made shot a cloud of spores from any crevice on their body. They held a mighty axe that seemed to be composed of an entire human skeleton and coated in metal.