The Human In The King

My name is Marcus Francowski, and this is not the story of how I died. This is the story of what came after.

Christ, it sounds even more insane when I put it like that. And believe me, there’s plenty of insanity to go around here, so let’s start with a picture of the situation: I’m trying to swallow the massive, ball-shriveling lumps of fear in my throat while hundreds, if not thousands, of voices boom in the air, blasting me with name-calling and insults that would make my retired Marine of an uncle wince. I have a couple nations and a few sapient species relying on me to keep them from falling back into insanity and rape at the weird, clawed hands of the evil shitlord in front of me. All nine feet of him.

The Caribou Lord grins down at me, a feral look of rage and hatred gazing over my puny, squishy, and far-too-small form. He looks like he could crush my head like a grape with a single swipe of his clawed hands. Or hell, he could just grip my head in his palm and squeeze really hard. His beady eyes glare down at me from behind a distended muzzle packed full of yellowed chompers that could easily take my hand off if he so willed it. He raises his arms, and the parts of the crowd that aren’t busy calling me a little cuck cheer while he flexes a rippling set of biceps that look like grapefruits tacked to his arms.

And I’m supposed to fight him. All 220 pounds of me.

Yeah, sounds like a Robot Chicken sketch. “The World’s Most One-Sided Fist Fights,” to be precise. Thing is, I’m it. In my sensible, business-casual wear, with my beginner’s beer gut and two-day-old stubble, I am the only thing standing between this monster and everything he needs to plunge an entire planet into a murder-rape-fest straight out of Ted Bundy’s finest wet dreams.

But no pressure or anything, right?

“Now is the time!” He announces to the crowd, his voice magically amplified to echo over the constant roar within the stadium. “Now is the time where the males take their rightful place! Now is the time when the myth of female strength is destroyed forever, and males can rise up and take their rightful place as the true rulers of this world!”

He throws his head back in practical ecstasy from his own words. “NOW IS THE TIME FOR WOMEN TO REALIZE THEIR PLACE AS OUR COCKSLEEVES! NOW IS THE TIME FOR MALE SUPERIORITY!”

His words boom over the crowd, the roar intensifying. Unfortunately for him, I also have voice-amplifying magic, and an ability to keep my voice steady despite my trembling body and terror-spawned pants-wetting. With his fists raised and his gaze off me, I find it easier to use both: “Jesus Christ dude, you done jerkin’ yourself off yet? I’d like to get this fight started sometime before the heat death of the Universe. Or whenever you manage a decent boner, whatever happens first.”

The crowd doesn’t fall silent, but it sure as hell gets a little quieter. I hear a snicker from behind me, and turn to flash a wide grin at the gorgeous line of anthro mares arrayed behind me. Rainbow Dash, the light-blue honey on the far left with the muscular body of an Amazon and the booty of a goddess suppresses her chortle, then raises a thumb and winks at me. Beside her, a caribou spearman grinds his teeth, his grip tightening around his spear, and even still I can see the lust in his eyes, the way he’s trying to angle himself to peer down her shirt at her admittedly-lackluster but still firm rack. I could rip his eyes out of his skull for the way he’s looking at her. Of course, given how short I am compared to everyone else here, he’d have to kneel in front of me first.

Right, the fight.

I turn back to the tower of muscle in front of me. The bastard glowers down upon my form, his shoulders heaving, his breath wheezing. His fists tense and untense. He looks ready to tear my legs off for daring to interrupt his little speech. Finally, a nice, placid grin crosses his face. “I’m going to enjoy using that smart little mouth of yours later on, monkey.”

I swallow, but like I’ve been getting used to doing these past few weeks, I force the fear down and raise my fists, grateful that they don’t tremble as I do so. “Hmph,” I shrug.

After a few moments, he sneers. “What’s this? No more smart words?”

“Dude, if you want my comeback, you can just wipe it off your chin when I’m finished.” And thank God my voice didn’t tremble then, either.

The caribou’s eyes blaze with fury. He lifts his shaggy head to straight-up roar at the crowd. He raises his fists high over my head, and my balls pull right back up into my ribcage from shriveling in fear. So this is it. This is how I die. Again.

So, if this were a movie, this would be where we'd get the freeze frame and record scratch, and I'd say you were probably wondering how I found myself in this situation. How does a semi-alcoholic engineer from our world wind up fighting a demigod in another one, all while trying to earn the affections of a super-hot, bird-horse-woman thing? Especially when, just a month ago, the most I had to worry about was a bitch supervisor that made it her mission to ensure the misery of every man in her life and the squeakers infesting the Call of Duty servers? Well, to answer that, we're gonna have to go back a ways, to a little clearing in the middle of nowhere, where I woke up already in way over my head and only getting deeper...