Gregor The Cripple

Blinking through the blood, Mildred fumbled in a daze below the rubble of her home. Something must have struck her head.

Working her arms up to freedom and pushing the roofslates from her face, she found that the collapse wasn’t total. Some walls still stood, but a boulder had plowed through a good chunk of the structure.

Gregor’s light was out, but she heard the rapid staccato of teleportation somewhere outside.

Crawling to the breach, she spied nothing in the dark save for the fireball he carried, and then came the detonation and she saw the beast. It whirled about wildly, covered in flame, all claws and teeth and rabid savagery.

It looked exactly how she imagined a werewolf might look, except as tall as her cottage and wearing a pair of big leathery wings on its back.

It flapped and clawed at the ground with two great knee-reaching arms to fling itself forward, and Gregor threw the finger toward it before teleporting.

The werewolf-thing’s paw exploded with a yowl as it swatted the finger away. It didn’t seem to mind too much, because it flapped and went bounding again after Gregor, fur still burning, unflinching and inexhaustible.

Mildred, dazed and confused, noticed that Gregor was enjoying himself. He wasn’t smiling, because Gregor didn’t really do that, but something about the way his wide, attentive eye reflected the beast-born flame spoke to a profound sense of glee.

While her head-struck mind unkinked, she gradually recalled Gregor saying that he enjoyed his work. Perhaps this is what he meant.

Another fireball struck the beast and it went on not caring, so Gregor tried the finger again and it dodged with uncanny agility. Apparently, the beast was not so beastly, and had at least the intelligence to recognise a persistent threat.

Mildred realised then that she couldn’t do anything to help. If she shot, it’d pounce over and mince her.

Abruptly, a tongue of lightning split the air and snaked down from the mouth of the cave to strike Gregor’s upstretched palm, jarringly bright in the fire-lit space. The sound echoed terribly in the cavern and lingered painful in Mildred’s ears, as did the light in her eyes. The thing halted for a moment in confusion, then resumed barrelling toward the offending wizard.

A great globe of flame then formed above Gregor’s crippled limb and a luminous haze of wispy tongues of flickering not-flame gathered between his fingers.

While these spells brewed, he played a deadly game with the wolfman. Having little concentration to spare for attack or defence, Gregor only evaded, standing stock-still as the uncanny creature loped ape-like toward him, teleporting away when it came too close.

Mildred noticed from her pile of rubble that, horrifyingly, the still-flaming freak’s hand had begun to regrow. It grasped at the air weakly, small and skinless and glistening. The werewolf was recovering while Gregor prepared.

It kept lunging and swatting and gnashing at the wizard as he passively teleported about the cave in flight.

After a minute of this exhausting exercise, Gregor finally teleported directly behind the beast.

The thing swipe-swivelled at the sound and, as if he had anticipated it, Gregor flashed back to his original position, now facing again the wolfman’s back, spell-bearing hand outstretched in offensive offering.

There came a sharp blue light as the haze degenerated into an incandescent spike of something unidentifiable to Mildred. It only lasted for an instant, but its bright phantom lived in her eyes beside the lighting for the rest of the fight.

It lanced straight through the wolf, burning without resistance up from Gregor’s hand near the left kidney to the top of the sternum. She supposed that he must have missed the spine.

Again, Gregor teleported away as his victim swiped about in savage agitation, oddly spry despite the hole where its heart should be. Mildred’s arm could probably fit inside.

It backed off then, snarling at Gregor, wary of whatever spell he’d cast and buying time for its innards to repair. Pressing his advantage, the wizard flashed close and launched his fireball.

The beast knew that Gregor’s fireballs weren’t much of a threat, so it disregarded this attack and tried to maul him now that he was near.

With an intuitive guess toward Gregor’s intentions, Mildred saw the orb of flame enter the already-mending wound. It detonated the instant he flashed away and the cave began to rain burning meat.

Though it was hard to make out through the manglement and the low light, the thing actually wasn’t dead.

Through the jagged remnants of a flesh-bare ribcage, she thought that she could see a single pulped lung still breathing. There was no heart, and not much else besides, but it still alive. Its stomach had entirely disappeared and she could see straight to the spine, which was quite misshapen, like a spring stretched too far.

Unstoppable, it began clawing at the ground to drag itself toward Gregor, legs trailing uselessly behind.

Little buds of bone began sprouting and growing from the shattered ribs as sinewy flesh-ropes strung themselves across the breach, growing thick and fibrous to make the monster whole again.

Gregor had found himself an irascible immortal. He must be happy, Mildred supposed. Being presented with such an interesting abomination to kill must be a rare treat for a person like Gregor, though she doubted that there were people like Gregor other than himself. And if there ever had been, they probably didn’t last long, for to survive after developing such interests ought to be very challenging.

She found herself wondering at his age, which was an odd thing to think about in these circumstances.

Gregor approached with the finger again, and stared slashing in wide arcs that the leg-crippled thing was helpless to avoid. It first lost an arm, then the finger descended from above to burst its brain and it was finally dead, head-riven.

***

“Werewolves,” began Gregor, “cannot be killed.”

He saw Mildred raise her brow at this. They were in the room they had passed on the way down to the cave floor – a workshop mostly spared the ravages of time. He was seated and she leaned against a table.

The storm above had dissipated to nothing, which he took to mean that the danger was actually over.

“Recent events force me to disagree.”

“That wasn’t a werewolf, it was a pricolici.” And, he thought to himself, I could probably still kill a werewolf. He didn’t know how, but he was sure that he could manage it.

“A what?”

“They’re probably the only example of something that becomes mortal by dying. It’s very fascinating.”

Mildred had now grown familiar with Gregor’s habit of saying impossible things as if they were reasonable, so she just waited for him to explain himself.

“Werewolves cannot be killed, but they can become undead, which is semantically and technically distinct. The vampires of the continental south-east have a sporting tradition of hunting werewolves and turning them into thralls. Pricolici are the products of these hunts. They occasionally invited my master to participate, but he never went. I’ve always wanted to see one.”

She just shrugged, because nothing was really that strange to her anymore. “So how is a vampire werewolf less immortal than a regular werewolf?”

“In short, normal bodily function ceases completely when something dies. The basic practice behind undeath is to induce new bodily functions sufficient to maintain the brain’s tether to the soul. Thus, the mechanisms which keep werewolves alive when they are alive do not function when they are dead, and are in fact supplanted by the inferior mechanisms of vampirism.”

“… Swell.

“I agree.”

To Gregor’s eye, Mildred seemed somehow limp, or deflated. She didn’t look so tall anymore.

She idly fiddled with the pieces of some stripped-down firearm prototype that lay on the table – something she’d made, she mentioned.

It occurred to him then that this was her workshop.

If her cave was like his tower, then this workshop was her private place of study, inaccessible to her Kaius. Gregor didn’t have a place like that, and he was almost envious until he realised that she didn’t have a Kaius, she instead had a father who was now missing, and that was the reason she looked so despondent.

“Why was it so-” She paused to search for the right word. “…Resilient? I’ve seen your fireballs launch people, but that thing didn’t seem to feel them.”

“That isn’t magic, that’s just meat. It had too much mass for the blast to move, and the force of the explosion had to travel through so much muscle tissue that it was too weak to rupture anything important by the time it reached the organs, not that the thing was likely to have cared. The not caring part is magic.”

Adept in the workings of these things, Mildred nodded in understanding. “And most of the blast is wasted on empty air anyway, so you decided to put the explosion on the inside, where none of the force would be wasted and it would have the greatest effect.”

The simple truth is that explosions aren’t very effective against big targets, and especially not against big targets who don’t care about being burned.

He’d tried the same thing against the kopfbiest, and in neither case were the results satisfactory. As he saw it, the problem lay with creating the hole.

Here, he’d accomplished it with an electromagnetically focused jet of ionised hydrogen, but that certainly wasn’t ideal. It wasn’t too exhausting, but it was unspeakably complex and required far too much time to arrange, and without a storm it would take even longer to gather enough of a charge to get going. It also required him to be dangerously close to his target, which was unwise, seeing as nothing less than an insane hazard could possibly necessitate such an abstruse attack.

Thinking on the problem a little, he recalled the behaviour of the water when he crossed the river Kaius. The river’s rate of flow had been increased by constricting the area it was able to occupy, which wasn’t really such a revolutionary concept, but it gave him an idea.

When one of Gregor’s fireballs explodes, it produces a very violently expanding pocket of gas. This expansion correspondingly compresses nearby matter, usually air, which then tries immediately to return to normal density, thereby also compressing proximate matter and creating a chain reaction which continues as a shockwave expanding from the epicentre of the explosion until all its energy has bled away.

Gasses behave as fluids. Just like the water in the river.

What if he could constrict and direct the blast of the explosion in the same way?

If he could contain an explosion within a barrier and direct the force to exit at a single point, the characteristic wave of expansion would instead become a thin jet of superheated gas, with (hopefully) ruinous velocity. Given that a fireball could ordinarily bowl people over at a distance of several yards when most of its energy was being wasted in even dispersion over a large area, Gregor could barely imagine the penetrative potential if all that energy were directed toward a single point.

Blades are sharp because they allow for the application of force over a very small area. The smaller the point of contact, the sharper the blade. Gregor figured that there wasn’t any reason fireballs shouldn’t follow the same principle. What if an explosion could be made to cut things? It was an arousing proposition.

However, there was a problem with the practicality of this sharp fireball.

Explosions have value for their concussive force. They cause people to lose their footing, they concuss opponents, and they crush organs.

This hypothetical directed explosion would be very effective if aimed at a small armoured opponent with vulnerable fleshy bits inside, but not more than a regular fireball which can additionally hit multiple others, and what of massive opponents who wouldn’t be bothered by having a few holes burned through them, like a dragon or hydra, or a werewolf? And what of walls and fortifications? In all these cases, while hole-punching might have the utility of opening avenues to other destructive options, like an internal fireball, the method wasn’t worth the expense, because containing a sizeable explosion within a tiny barrier would be incredibly taxing.

How to remedy this? It was a promising concept, but if all it amounted to was a novel but unnecessarily expensive way to kill people, it wasn’t worth developing into a functional spell. It would be better to look for an alternative.

Just then, Gregor had a terrible, horrible, terihorrible stroke of magical genius. It was a thought that would go on to cause the deaths of innumerable people and things, both at his own hands and from the ideas that this initial idea would eventually inspire in the mind of a certain other.

A smirk grew upon his lips and he inclined his head, stroking his chin.

“Gregor? Stop that, you look evil.”

What if the spell had two stages? The first stage shaped the blast into a penetrative jet, while the second did away with the fine control and forced the blunt concussive bulk of the explosion into the narrow channel formed by the jet, which would then expand violently with far more power than the original explosion, owing to the fact all the energy was still being concentrated into a fraction of the area it would otherwise be expanding to occupy.

He would construct a spherical barrier, the strongest he could muster, and on one side have a nozzle formed from a vastly inferior barrier, designed to create the jet and fail almost immediately under the pressure, thereby rapidly releasing the rest of the blast into the jet-formed wound.

There would need to be much fine-tuning of the strength of the blast and the tolerances and sizes of the barriers to ensure maximum trauma. Gregor felt an extremely academic urge to draw a graph.

“Do you want to make some magic?”

“I can do that?”

“Come. It will be very exciting, I promise. You can be my research assistant. We’ll conduct an experiment.”