I’m a coward. I froze up out of fear of hurting someone, and I endangered Cuppy and myself instead. Goddammit! Richie bitterly thought to himself.

They both stopped and stared at the sight of O'Gravy slumped against the wall, the vertical pipe he had struck cracked and indented at the middle. The shape of the fishing pole's float ball was dented into the leprechaun's face, and his flattened nose had blood pouring out of both nostrils.

"Is he dead?" Cuppy asked gingerly.

Richie noticed liquid dripping down the busted pipe, congealed on the top of O'Gravy's hat. It pooled out to the edges of the hat's brim and spilled a few drops onto the leprechaun's still hand. Then that hand twitched.

"Nope." Richie said bluntly.

"Had me a bit too much whiskey." O'Gravy grumbled, eyes opening to murderous bloodshot pinpricks, hand going to his aching head.

The little man looked at his slicked hand with a look of dawning shock, then smug confidence. He stood up again, dusting himself off and grinning through a split lip at the boys.

"Thanks to you chumps, I found it." O'Gravy sneered, pressing his pointed ear to a horizontal pipe branching off and away from the main sewage line he had broken with his body.

The leprechaun stepped a single pace away, then slammed a brass-knuckled punch straight through and into the pipe. Sickly black liquid began to leak and spray from the breach in the sewer's blood vessel, and then a backwash of that same substance flooded down from the other broken pipe, pooling at O'Gravy's feet.

Richie recoiled, feeling suddenly deathly cold, like he had passed through the shadow of the Underworld or had a ghost walk through him.

This is the same feeling I got a whiff of from that bed sheet parasite. Is it coming from that black gunk? Richie shuddered, his breath visibly turning to freezing mist as it left his lips.

"I found the Elixir of Life, at last!" O'Gravy delighted as the black pool at his feet began to be unnaturally drawn up and into his body through his feet.

The leprechaun's arm began to swell and engorged grotesquely, veins bulging, as he drew up the so-called elixir through the gap in the pipe his hand was planted in.

Elixir of Life? No, it's Death, whatever that shit is. Richie thought grimly.

He was still panting from their earlier chase, and his back and joints all felt stiff.

What's wrong with my body all of a sudden?

Cuppy stared, sensing something in the wind too, even if he couldn't accurately pin down what.

"Ew! Gross! That ain't very sanitary! That's gallons and gallons of poop, little guy!" Cuppy stuck his tongue out in disgust.

"Cuppy… I don't think that's poop…" Richie gulped.

O'Gravy's face became an agonized rictus, and he stumbled onto one knee, as if under the weight of his own body. His head lolled a moment and he gave a protracted groan as drool poured down his chin and into his collar. Finally, he looked up, and his rotted teeth were displaced by razor-sharp fangs bursting from his gums, tumbling the humanoid dentures to a pile at his feet. His eyes had become blood-red except for his pinprick pupils.

"Now behold, my Evolution!" O'Gravy boomed in a deeper, demonic voice.

His shoulders engorged explosively, becoming as big as dinner plate-sized pillars bursting from his coat, and his torso followed suit as it instantly stretched and swelled, rocketing O'Gravy's height from a single foot to ten or twelve, towering the leprechaun over the dumbstruck boys. Huge, bulky biceps burst from his sleeves, and his shirt and overcoat were all ripped to shreds by the sudden influx of mass and swollen muscle, grotesquely displacing his residual beer belly and pushing it down to dangle over his widening waistline. His feet, massive and hairy, burst out of his boots, the golden buckles making clunking noises as they were shot off like shrapnel. O'Gravy's legs were the last to go, rapidly engorging and stretching in proportion to the rest of the vulgar fey's now gigantic hulking body.

A massive hand, the brass knuckles dug into his flesh and fused to his hands as though they had become his actual knuckles, grabbed his green hat from his head, unfurling a wild mane of tangled orange hair that merged with O'Gravy's beard. He tossed the hat at his feet, ripping the drained pipe from the wall as he yanked his other giant hand out of the cracked wall. He stomped like an elephant onto his discarded hat, cratering part of the floor.

"Pip pip, motherfuckers." O'Gravy roared, and punched his giant brass knuckles together, kicking off a waterfall of cascading sparks with a horrendous metallic screech.

"I can see Darwin missed a few addendums." Cuppy whistled at O'Gravy's transformation.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

"Cuppy, move it!" Richie thrust an arm out in front of Cuppy, shoving him back.

They both tumbled as O'Gravy's massive fist punched through the stone ground.

"Hey, naughty boys, hold still and take yer medicine!" O'Gravy chuckled.

The ceiling overhead shook, dropping flecks of dislodged stone and dust. The boys dove out of the way as O'Gravy slammed a clumsy backfist against the wall, crushing it's surface in and nearly breaking clean through the wall wholesale. The sewer shook ominously again.

"Stop rampaging around like a bull in a damned china shop, you great big idiot!" Richie shouted up at O'Gravy, covering his head in case of falling debris. "We're in a hollow underground system, if you wrecking ball around like this you'll bring the hole fucking city down on our heads!"

O'Gravy smirked. "Of our merry trio, only you two will be buried, in that case. I'm more than tough enough to survive a collapse now. Which will happen first? Will I pound you into bloody paste, or will you cling to life long enough to get crushed under rubble?"

Cuppy unfurled his fishing pole again and charged at O'Gravy with it poised like a fencing blade. "I'm picking option C - beat you up!"

Richie's composure broke and he cried out after Cuppy. "Cup, knock it off, that's no good!"

O'Gravy pistoned a crushing blow down into Cuppy, cracking the floor again. Richie stumbled, both because of the tremor from the shockwave, and in panic and terror that he had just seen Cuppy crushed like an insect.

"Shit!" Richie screamed.

Cuppy's fishing pole tumbled to his side as O'Gravy crouched, hunched over like an orange-skinned gorilla, and continued to wail on Cuppy's limp broken body, pounding him more and more into the ground.

"One two, beat 'em blue~" O'Gravy sang, planting another fist in Cuppy's stomach, practically folding him up like a collapsible futon from the shock of the attack. As Cuppy went limp again, O'Gravy cracked out his knuckles and his neck, then started jumping up and down, stomping on Cuppy. "Three four, do it some more~!"

With each stomp, the ground cracked more, and whole chunks of the walkway at its edges broke clean off and tumbled with punctuated splashes into the sewage river.

Richie stifled his horror as he realized that none of the monstrous leprechaun's thunderous blows had drawn so much as a speck of blood.

"Wuzzis?" O'Gravy looked down at the small form he had trampled underfoot.

He had not been pounding Cuppy, but his marionette doppelganger. The puppet's lifeless eyes stared back up at O'Gravy as if mocking him, grinning cheekily even through the wreck of its splintered wooden body and twisted, broken limbs. O'Gravy scanned the tangle of strings leading up and away from the marionette's body with his eyes, finally jerking his head up only in time to see Cuppy descending on him from overhead, slinging another five strings at O'Gravy like nigh-invisible dart-cords.

"Get serious!" O'Gravy roared, batting the strings away with his outer forearm, then leaping into the air after Cuppy to meet him with the interior of his other forearm.

"No!" Richie cried out, his surroundings seeming to darken and slow as his dragons roared to furious life.

"Level 2 unlocked!" Richie flashed to Cuppy's aid, leaving a brief afterimage in his wake.

Richie was in the air beside Cuppy, whereupon he roughly grabbed him and tossed the smaller boy across the bridge, out of the oncoming path of O'Gravy's huge clothesline. He saw Cuppy look up at him with surprised, startled eyes as the puppeteer fell away in slow motion. Richie turned back to look at O'Gravy, and prepare a midair counterattack.

Then he heard a series of cracks inside his body, accompanied by paralyzing jolts of intense stabbing pain. He hadn't been imagining the aches and pains of his body earlier. As he felt his body give out, still hanging midair, stuck in slowed time, Richie remembered in an instant what Cuppy had cautioned him about in the prior days.

“I used my strings to sew your body back together internally. It’s not really the same thing as healing, you’re still broken, but they can kind of hold you together and let you forget your pain and fatigue for a little while. You’ll regret it later when you ache like heck after the effects wear off, but if you really wanted to, you could walk around and do stuff for a bit now.”

Richie grit his teeth as time crashed back into the present.

O'Gravy's outstretched arm caught Richie under the arms, his stomach and floating ribs in its crux. Richie felt like a marble column got dropped on his midsection, knocking him breathless and turning his vision dangerously dark and fuzzy. He heard his cracked ribs, vulnerable again as the fatigue and strain of Cuppy's temporary patchwork strings coming unraveled again took their toll all together at once, shatter to splinters.

Richie partially blacked out as he was thrown backward from the force of impact, only barely registering his back almost break on the stone floor and his body bounce off into the raging sewer river. Only the shock of the icy cold disgusting wastewater forcing itself into his nostrils from the strength of the riptide-like current brought clarity back, and Richie realized that his exhausted body was caught in the pull of the river, beyond helpless to even hold his breath after having it knocked out of him.

Richie sensed Cuppy's panicked cry and rescue attempt more than he truly saw or heard it through the murk and the roar of the rapids.

Cuppy raced across the bridge to try to intercept Richie further downstream, leaving his back unguarded. O'Gravy wasn't a nice enough guy to pass up the free opportunity attack.

"To Hell, both of ye!" O'Gravy cackled, opening an upturned palm.

A massive conjured rainbow exploded out of O'Gravy's palm, its 2-dimensional shape cleaving through the stone bridge, river, and riverbed like an ax of radiant neon energy dropped from the heavens. The bridge crumbled apart under Cuppy's feet, spilling him into the merciless icy bite and grip of the wastewater current as well.

O'Gravy's belting of victory laughter was cut short as the destabilized ground broke apart under him as well. His cocky decision to ignore Richie's warnings that he could collapse the sewer hadn't factored in danger from below in place of danger from above.

He sputtered once or twice keeping his head above water, before even his enhanced strength and weight wasn't enough to anchor him in place against the unstoppable swift river current. O'Gravy was swept away with his young victims.

As Richie felt the shadows of Cuppy and O'Gravy pass near him, the last thing he noticed before passing out was he and Cuppy being split apart from each other by a fork in the current. Cuppy was swept into one pipe, and Richie and O'Gravy were swept into the other.

Then, only darkness.