TOO MANLY TO DIE

Dakiya wakes up to a cuddly ball of marmot nuzzling against her neck. "Ooh, cute!" she gushes.

Ayavail (not the marmot one) asks, "Did you find a hiding place for the lockpicks?"

"You'll never guess," Dakiya grins. "You know the other geography teacher? The one who doesn't share the name of my father?"

Ayavail and Hannet wrinkle their noses and nod.

"Well, that firewood holder in his study? I bored holes in every piece of wood and hid most of the lockpicks inside. The rest are in my pocket."

Hannet asks, "Would you be magnanimous enough to elucidate the cause for which we require these… lockpicks?"

"Sure!"

Leading the others through the campus and into the city, she comes to an iron cube as large as a castle. With a grand gesture, she announces, "Behold, the Admiral's Vault! Within lie concealed the charts and maps that would allow our enemies to pursue us! Take heart, me hearties. Without these charts, the mazy waterways of our local archipelago shall forsooth prove unnavigable, except to a pirate's eyepatched eye."

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

"Why's it unguarded?" Ayavail asks.

"Because they don't know about dynamite."

Dakiya sets the crate of 'buccaneer's lockpicks' against the vault door and lights a fuse. Then she hastily sets the marmot on her head, grabs her friends by the hands, and dashes away around the corner.

At the execution plaza, the far-off detonation of the Admiral's Vault is ignored, since a mere plume of blasted iron whistling up into the clouds is far less captivating than the splendors of the pirate king. His massive chest is heaving with exertion now, and creeks of sweat are coursing down the streets from his humongous body. More than half of the spectators have been annihilated in collateral accidents, and the plaza is rife with velociraptors.

Of all the executioners, the most successful so far has been the King of Rasule (a full-time executioner, part-time head-of-state), who had succeeded in calling down an extra-galactic sun to waterfall into the pirate king through the nostrils, heating his internal organs to fifty-thousand degrees.

But he was too manly to die.

Naturally, every executioner who fails must be executed themselves, and so the whole plaza has become a tangle of gallows, the spectators cheering and glutting themselves on crispy bacon, many riding atop the crosspieces of guillotines or hangman's trees.

"This is it!" the admiral calls, now audible over the lessened crowd. "This is the moment! My turn has come at last, and I know how this man can be slain! I shall discombobulate him to death with the power of my words! Then I shall be emperor over all this land, and soon, over all the universe! Every one of you miserable clods shall be my marmots and oar-slaves!"

The crowd applauds wildly, slobbering bacon, gnawed by velociraptors. They listen in wonder as the admiral's lethal speech begins, awed by the confusing way in which the ambitious admiral adamantly administers abominable admonitions to his admirable adversary, adding addling amounts of adipose adjectives and… (but we had better stop before it kills us too).