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Chapter Twenty Eight

Ethan's eyes widened to the size of baseballs as his tiny human brain tried to take in the gargantuan, sanity-devouring splendor of Daggum the Y’alldritch Horror.

“Homina homina homina homina homina,” I could hear him muttering, “homina homina homina homina hom—”

“Look away!” Jade yelled, grabbing him by the shoulders and spinning him around. As soon as his eyes weren't locked onto the titanic sea-bumpkin, he gasped in relief and slouched over, hands on his knees. “Staring at an elder god for too long will literally drive you insane!”

I cocked my head. Something about what she'd just said caught my attention, and I glanced over my shoulder towards where Captain Kook was still steering the Jiggly Trombone, grinning and singing a song about how he wanted to marry his socks. Suddenly, Opisthia’s decision to have this loveable nutball bring us here made a lot more sense.

And that wasn't the only thing that was beginning to make sense.

I turned and looked at Daggum again. He was about halfway up the pillar now, and had paused to scratch his fishy butt. He raised his fingers to his nose, sniffed them, let out a belch so loud that it parted the storm clouds for a few seconds, and then continued his climb. He—if a creature like this could even be a he or she—was so catastrophically, unimaginably evil that I could see the evil physically radiating from his body like stink lines…in addition to his actual stink lines, which were plainly visible as well.

Opisthia was right, I realized. There was no way I could kill this thing. It deserved to die, perhaps even needed to die. It was a walking, farting infection on the very fabric of reality. But right now, that didn’t matter. I could have cloned myself a hundred thousand times and led an army of Henries against him, and we still wouldn't have stood a ghost of a chance.

Maybe that was the hidden test in all of this. To see if I could swallow my pride and do what needed to be done, or if I would pointlessly sprint to my own death in pursuit of a noble yet hopeless goal. Well, puppet boy didn't need to worry about that. Even if I thought I had a snowball's chance in H-E-Double Hockey Sticks against that living nightmare (which I didn't) I had too much to lose to risk it. My one and only goal was to climb that tower, get that key, and get the Wombo Combo with extra pickles out of here.

But that left me with the same question that always seemed to ruin my fun: how was I going to pull that off without getting killed?

“They're getting closer!” Ethan yelled, yanking me out of my thoughts.

“Captain, hard to port!” Jade called.

To my surprise, Captain Kook obediently spun the ship's wheel, and the Jiggly Trombone swerved to the left. The floor lurched beneath my feet as a series of dull THUDs came from beneath the water. We were committing an aquatic hit and run, I realized, not sure if I should laugh or throw up.

I ran to the other side of the boat and looked over the edge as, one by one, ugly piranha-shaped heads popped out of the water to stare dumbly back up at me. A lot of them wore trucker hats like the one we had just killed, others had greasy redneck-style haircuts. One was even wearing a giant wedge of cheese. Their gurgly voices rose up like fart fumes to my ears, and I couldn't help but cringe.

“HOLJURRHURZEZ!”

“WULLBUDDERMABIZKUT!”

“THABOIYAINTRAIT!”

My heart sank into my stomach. There were so many of them. After how hard it had been to kill just one of these freaks, fighting this many at once was…

“Henry,” Ethan called, his normally calm voice rising a couple octaves as he fought not to panic, “I hope you have a plan, because I'm drawing blanks over here!”

A scaly, clawed hand rose into view to grab hold of the side of the ship, and Jade slammed her cutlass as hard as she could into it. A gurgly yelp rang out, and a splash came from down below.

“Whatever you're going to do, do it fast!” she shouted as another hand appeared to take its place. “We're running out of time!”

“AIITULLYOOWUD!” a deepneck growled, hoisting itself up on my side of the boat. I whirled around, slammed Splatsy down on its head—it was wearing one of those hats with the straws you put beer cans into—and it plummeted back down into the Sea Betwixt, where at least three dozen more were already lining up to take their turn.

Whipping out my inhaler, I took a couple quick puffs to restore my magic. With power surging once again through my veins, I traded the inhaler for Spazzy Basil and affixed him to Splatsy. I paused for a moment, letting Splazztsy’s anime-style transformation montage play out in my head, and then set to work. Pouring magic into Splatzztsy, I raised her over my head just as another deepneck tried to climb up onto the ship.

ZZZWAP! Splatzztsy roared as she delivered a hundred thousand volt sandwich to its fishy face with a complimentary concussion on the side. It fell back down into the water, stunned but not dead. As long as they didn't actually make it onto the ship, I didn't need to kill them. Of course, I thought with a frown, they would probably repay my kindness by making me knock them off the boat four or five more times before the shockoncussions fried their brains enough to force them to give up. The question was, even with my inhaler, would I have enough magic to last that long?

“Cogito et creo!”

I turned for a moment to watch as a giant pacifier made of solid ice rose up out of the ocean on the other side of the ship before surging forward, knocking at least three deepnecks back into the water.

“Atta boy!” I yelled, my heart swelling with pride—and then something grabbed my hair, yanking me backwards with the force of a tow truck.

I hit the railing, managing to hook my knees around it just before I was pulled overboard, and hung upside down with the Sea Betwixt above me and the Jiggly Trombone's sails below. A deepneck was dangling from the water above me like some kind of aquatic bat, its fist wrapped around my hair. What I think was supposed to be an Elvis Presley haircut sat limply on its head, dripping seawater like a drowned rat.

“Ooooooow!” I screamed, shocklobbering him in the face. “Keep your hands to yourself, you mutant sardines!”

As soon as he let go, I threw myself back onto the Jiggly Trombone. There was a brief pause between that deepneck and the next, and I used those precious few seconds to take in the situation.

Ethan and Jade were still holding off the onslaught on their end of the ship, but I could tell by the strained looks on their faces that they were at their limit. I gave them another minute, if that, before they were overwhelmed. Not that I was doing any better. All it would take was one deepneck to get past any of us, and it was all over.

My heart sank into my stomach as I absentmindedly bashed another deepneck’s face in. No matter how hard I thought, or how hard I fought, there was only one word that could describe this situation.

Impossible.

I had learned a long time ago that saying something was impossible was just daring the universe to prove me wrong, but this time there was no doubt in my mind that it was true. This was impossible. There would be no last second burst of inspiration. No miraculously convenient solution. Sometimes reality was just too cold and hard for even someone like me to ignore it, and right now reality was telling me there was no way Ethan, Jade, and I were getting to the top of that tower.

Unless…

I spun and ran toward the back of the boat.

“What are you doing?” Ethan shouted after me.

I ignored him, skidding to a halt in front of Captain Kook. “Captain, turn this ship around!”

“WHAT?” Ethan and Jade exclaimed at the same time.

“Time for tasteball!” the captain agreed. He gave the wheel a spin, and just like before, the Jiggly Trombone turned on a dime, flinging the eight or nine deepnecks that were climbing onboard back into the ocean like freshly picked boogers off a centrifuge. “I'm the human wedgie!”

“What are you doing?” Ethan demanded, sprinting over to me. “You can't be giving up now!”

“Of course I'm not!” I agreed, pulling Globber from my belt again.

“Then why the hell are we turning around?”

Without answering, I threw Globber up to glob on to the sky bucket. Then I began to run circles around the thick wooden pole while the ship swayed, thunder crashed, and deepnecks fought to climb aboard all around me like the world's most chaotic maypole.

Jade managed to keep the foul-smelling fishfaces from getting on the ship, but only barely. She was dashing from one side of the boat to the other without pausing, slicing at every slimy green finger that appeared over the edge.

I kept circling. With every pass, Globber was wound a little tighter. Less than a minute later, he was drawn so taut that it took all my strength to keep my grip.

“Henry?” Ethan asked, confused.

I looked around. It wasn't a sight that inspired boatloads—ha!—of optimism. But still…

“Once you get a certain distance away from the pillar, they should stop attacking you,” I said, wiping strands of my soaking wet hair out of my eyes.

“They should stop attacking us, you mean,” Ethan corrected me.

I smiled sadly at him, and his eyes widened.

“Henry, no!” he yelled. “You can't do this by yourself!”

“I have to!” I argued. “There's no way to get all three of us over there. But if it's just me, then I might have a chance!”

“And then what are you going to do?” he demanded. “Fight Daggum all by yourself?”

“Opisthia knew it would be this way,” I said. “That's the real reason he sent me here. As the Hunter, I can't rely on other people being there to drag my butt through the dirt every time it gets set on fire!”

“Henry…” he protested weakly, but I could tell by the look in his eyes that he knew I was right.

“There are just some things I have to do on my own,” I said.

He hesitated, then glanced over at Jade. She was still holding the deepnecks off, and in no position to try talking sense into me.

“I'm going, Ethan, and that's that!” I said firmly.

He reached out and put his hand on my arm. “Just be careful, okay?”

I smirked. “Aren't I always? How about a kiss goodbye?”

He scowled. “Do you always have to ruin the moment?”

I laughed, and then jumped into the air.

“Tally…”

As soon as I was no longer anchored to the floor, Globber began to retract. Around and around and around the mast we went, so fast that the world around me was reduced to a dark blur. All I could hear was the roar of the wind in my ears, and all I could feel was the wonderful roller coaster sensation that I might puke at any moment. And then…

SNAP!

Globber un-globbed himself from the mast, and I was sent rocketing out across the Sea Betwixt.

Straight toward the pillar.

And straight toward Daggum.

“HOOOOOOOOOO!”

NEXT CHAPTER 1/21/26