Bone Breaker by Matt Gilbert

3867.CE

Bruggar sniffed strongly and wiped his brow. Grogging snozbags, it was hot. He was used to heat, but this was something else entirely. It was some kind of boney magic he was sure. Stupid bonies. Something had gotten them all riled up, and now a large army of them were invading his land. He’d worked long and hard to carve out his little domain in the Cracked Lands, far east enough from Glimmer to avoid the nonsense and endless bickering there, and far north enough to be well away from the nasty little elves messing around in the Southern Rift. He’d followed the correct protocols so there were no cries of foul play: by democratically murdering all his potential rivals, and then declaring himself Biggit-in-Chief. Not king. Not just yet. He felt he needed to gather up a few more followers and acquire more assets before he would feel comfortable calling himself king.

Of course, he felt like a king and he snozzing knew he should be one. He just had to bide his time.

And deal with this shambling bunch of idiot dead things that should have stayed dead. Now he had to waste time making them dead again. Except their snozzing grogg-head wiz-things would just make them not dead again at some point. Bruggar imagined if must be very confusing to keep being killed and unkilled and killed again. At least you knew dying didn’t matter so much. The only downside was that you became a puppet for someone else with no control over anything. Bruggar wondered whether he could learn how to do it, so he could raise his own army of alive-again goblins. That would show the upstarts – Grogger, and Groany, and the all the others – who should be the real king. He’d call his army the not-dead-any-more-gobs. Catchy. Maybe that needed more work.

He mentally waved away the fact he had absolutely no talent for any kind of magic whatsoever. That didn’t matter, because he had Frump, his personal Wiz, on hand for all that kind of stuff. Not that Frump was brilliant at it. Behind his back, goblins had started calling him Singe, due to that fact he often set his own clothes alight. Bruggar suspected his original tribe had named him Frump because that was the sound he made when spontaneously bursting into flames. These days, Bruggar employed two luggits to accompany him to battle, armed with buckets of water, in case of emergencies.

Bruggar sauntered over to his artillery crews, who were frantically loading rocks into their lobbers as fast as they could. Far away, Bruggar could just about see the holes being made in the bonies’ ranks as the stones hit home. Of course, the pharaohs were not playing fair and had brought their own catapults with them, planting their missiles with a fair degree of accuracy among the hordes of goblins moving to plug any gaps in the battle line. The scouting sniffs would take care of the boney catapults soon though. Bruggar had sent them west to hook round and take the enemy unaware from the north. Always stab an enemy in the back. Friends too, sometimes.

As a team of goblins strained to winch the arm down of a particularly large machine, Dimwit the troll lumbered over. She was a hulking brute, taller and wider than most of her kind. She plonked herself down on the bucket of the catapult which was now at the perfect height to act as a seat. Frump also joined them, with Harg and Frag the luggits poised nearby, alert and ready for action.

“I think it’s going well,” Bruggar posited. “Nobody has run away yet.”

“Er, boss?” Frump pointed to a new threat hauling itself to its feet in a jerky, staccato manner. It rose and rose, dwarfing the regiments around it. Slowly, as the magic binding it coalesced, it became fluid in its movements and began to stride forward with purpose. Bruggar could sense the fear rippling back through the goblins in its path, and one unit turned and fled. Cowards! Another unit held its ground and suffered as a result. Scores of goblins perished as the bone giant stomped and thumped its way through them.

“Make the big dead thing dead again you grogging drozzers!” Bruggar screamed with rage.

Catapults and sharp-stick throwers were trained on the titan and let loose. The missiles that hit their target merely glanced off the massive construct. A boulder finally hit it square in the chest, chipping bone fragments off before dropping on the goblins below. A sharp-stick bolt flew right through its rib cage and out the other side. The goblins nearest Bruggar were yelling and pointing at Dimwit. One engineer, clearly infuriated that the troll was preventing them winning the day, kicked her viciously in the shin. She idly batted it away, and Bruggar and Frump watched its limp body sail over Frag’s head. Frag didn’t move. It was not an unusual turn of events.

Without warning, there was a terrible screech-hiss from behind, causing them to scramble and spin – only to come face-to-face with a vicious sand wyrm as it emerged from the shadows of a small rocky outcrop, and reared up, preparing to strike. The perfidious bonies also knew how to stab from behind it seemed. Bruggar instinctively rolled out the way, regaining his feet with both weapons in hand. Frump dived the other way, and the snake-thing darted in to bite Dimwit with its snapping jaws and venomous fangs. The troll caught its neck in her massive hands and stopped it inches from her face. Staggering to his feet, Frump uttered something incomprehensible as he pointed his magic-stick at their assailant. As the tip of the stick sparked white, Frump stepped backward onto the prone engineer and fell. There was an almighty flash, a bang, a frump, and then what sounded like a brief shower of intense rainfall.

Bruggar blinked and surveyed the scene. A blackened and drenched Frump sat bewildered and smoking on the floor. Harg and Frag were walking off to refill their buckets. The goblin crew of the catapult were staring open-mouthed at the upright arm of their machine, the charred and broken restraining ropes, and in the distance, the bone titan, now missing its head, slowly crumpling backwards onto the skeletons behind it.

Bruggar strode over and slapped Frump on the shoulder. “Grogging amazing!” he said, then remembered his manners, and kicked the Wiz instead. “Get up. My plan succeeded. I definitely had Dimwit sit there so you could do that.” He glanced into the distance and then back at Frump. “Let’s go and find Dimwit. You need to quickly learn how make dead things not dead. Learn now on the way there!”

It didn’t seem like an unreasonable request. Actually, Dimwit was probably too stupid to die, so it might be fine anyway. However, it was time to take to the field and send the bonies back to where they came from.

He was snozzing Bruggar, and he was going to be a king.

Ready to get started with Kings of War 4th Edition? Click HERE to get your essentials!