Thanks to the horrendous smell of the gurgling dung textured hive, Deborah was slowly coming out of her daze. She was able to stand on her own without leaning on me and she shook the hair out of her eyes. She bent and grabbed her sword with her good arm.

I was nervously spinning the haft of my polearm in my demon hand, a weird itching sensation running through my horns. It felt as though they were somehow twitching as if they could feel what was coming. Were my horns communicating with the hive? If so, what were they telling it?

“We should warn Gauss,” Deborah said, her voice slightly slurred.

“You should do it,” I said, “I think your shoulder might be dislocated.”

She opened her mouth to protest but I poked the upper part of her arm with a small amount of effort, making her wince badly.

“Fine,” she said. “What about you? What are you going to do? You've never faced one of these before. All the black knights know taking on a hive alone is suicide.”

“I don't plan on taking it on alone for long,” I said, trying to keep my cool. I breathed into my stomach through my nose and let it out of my mouth. “Not if you get going right away.”

Deborah nodded, “Gauss has faced one of these. He'll know what to do.” She turned and started to jog away, a slight limp in her step.

When had Gauss had a chance to fight one of these things? Come to think of it, I hardly knew anything about the mysterious man even after a year of training with him each and every day. When had the black knights seen action? And, if they had fought these things out in the real world, why didn't anyone else in the real world know about them?

I turned my attention back to the shit pile sloshing and bubbling as it grew higher and higher. With each bubble that popped, a red eye was left staring at me. Small little heads pulled themselves out of the muck, screeching as they ripped the skin apart that turned out to be their mouths.

I took a step back, trying to focus on the task at hand. What to do? How do I kill this thing? Think. Think.

Fire!

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I looked around the training arena for the torches that were placed around them.

“Almighty be with me,” I said under my breath when I saw that the torches were not lit. And why would they be? It was mid-day, the sun was out and shining brightly. The torches only needed to be lit during night training.

Still, I ran over to the closest torch and brought it to my nose. It smelt of burning oil, but how would I light it now?

As I placed the torch in my belt I heard one of the exit doors creak open as Deborah made her way out of the arena. Suddenly, a thin line of goo, brown and lumpy, shot passed me. It connected to the back of Deborah's armor, the impact of which sending brown all over the armor's black. She screamed a high pitch feminine scream as she was wrenched off her feet and pulled back toward the hive.

With quick thinking, I lifted my polearm to cut the thin slimy tentacle of shit, but I was too late. Deborah zipped passed me, her eyes pleading with me. In an instant, she slammed into the hive and was quickly overcome with it as she was sucked inside.

“No!” I cried, rushing towards it.

Most of the demons were halfway out of the hive by now, tiny brown hands, resembling much of my own, were struggling against the hardened ooze as they tried to pull themselves out. Three, however, had plopped to the ground, their thin veiny wings beating frantically at the wind. I was halfway to the hive, still with no idea of how I was going to stop it when they the three demons took flight.

They were mindless beings, their only motive in life was to seek out the nearest living thing and rip it to shreds with their two tiny arms, each with two razor-sharp claws. They flew towards me, screaming their small heads off. Each looked to have a defect in some way as if the hive hadn't had the time to properly manufacture them. One was missing an eye, another couldn't open its mouth correctly, and another had an extra long genitalia that drug on the ground as it flew towards me.

I swung my polearm out in front of me, using its length to my advantage. I slapped the head clean off the demon without the mouth, pulled my polearm back, and pushed its blade directly into the throat of the one with the massive penis.

A claw from the remaining demon slashed my cheek open and the skin flapped lazily down to my jaw. I could feel the cold breeze of the day enter my mouth and cool my hot tongue. The pain was intense but I let it fuel my turning sweep of my polearm, cutting the wings off the flying shit.

The one-eyed demon fell to the sand, its wings landing beside it as it flapped its nubs uselessly. My attention was on it for only half a second when something hard hit my chest. I looked down to see that the hive had caught me with its tentacle. It wasted no time and pulled me off my feet just like it had done Deborah. I turned in the air just as Gauss entered the arena, his face twisted in fear.

With my final moment outside in the fresh air, Gauss flung something from his hand in my direction. I caught it just before being pulled into the massive glob of shit.

The question now was, how would I use this red alchemical sphere without blowing up myself and Deborah in the process?