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World 8-1: No Plan Survives First Contact With The Frenemy
Castle Peach. One of the Eight Woes of the World.
In no immediate danger, the kommandos paused belly crawling to take in the sights.
Searchlights pirouetted in lazy circles, setting the underside of the sparse cloud cover ablaze. One of the rays caught a lone wandering nimbus in its eyes. The cloud winced and scudded away, a scowl souring its amorphous face.
Up close the fortress spanned half the horizon. Its bastions and curtain walls shoved back the sky. The Koopas found it hard to resist the impression that the colossal architecture yearned to fall forward and crush them in a tsunami of limestone the instant they let down their guard. The scale of the defenses made plain Bowser's initial plan to scale the walls using grappling vines was so much ludicrous nonsense.
Legend had it that during the castle's construction Peach buried alive seven wizard kings within the foundations of the seven towers which ringed the central keep, dooming their powerful spirits to guard the fortifications from harm until the churn of aeons passing left no stone married to its neighbor.
Another, bleaker yarn held that it was angels and demigods she had immured within the walls. Peach, wielding a bow of black dinosaur ivory and arrows fashioned from the rays of a dying Star, climbed to the peak of a nameless mountain and thereby shot her sacrifices down from the heights of Sky World. Bowser refused to credit this particular tale. Any act of magic powerful enough to penetrate into those celestial realms, pierce the divine flesh of its denizens, and drag such a victim down to the mundane world would be a feat of eldritch might too terrible to contemplate, much less survive. In retaliation, the Stars would've surely struck the queen low with a curse fit to rot the skin off her still living bones. It just didn't seem realistic, really.
Whether any given legend held a speck of truth or not, no one doubted that many sins had been committed in the raising of Peach's abode and that blackest magic warded its every spec of mortar. The queen had burned all records of the fortress's construction. She personally blinded and muted the architects, ordering their fingers and toes sheered.
For all the disputed lore, at least two facts remained uncontested. Castle Peach was strange, and it was deadly. Every flying buttress and steeple and vaulted roof was a few degrees askew from its neighbor, a tangle of demented architecture which cast a nameless dread over the heart of any beholder. Deep shadows roamed the courtyards heedless of the sun's position above. Few visitors of the vast interior were willing to divulge the least detail of what they witnessed in the course of their stay, for fear of befalling unspecified yet certain punishments. The castle incubated many such grim tales, nearly as many as she who dwelt within it.
The fence behind, the castle ahead, the Koopas braced for the worst. Tents and supplies littered the imperial lawn, the outer edge of a sprawling Toad encampment. Peach had mustered an army around the castle. A few soldiers lolled about the tents, drinking and playing cards. The infantry Toads paid too little attention to their surroundings to notice a line of Koopas creeping by in the night, and the raiders didn't press their luck by straying close. The distorted buzzing of a sizable Toad host echoed around the south-east bastion, the very direction Koops was leading them. Cold rocks filled the king's belly. Just how many of the toenail squatters did the queen have posted around the gates?
Knives clenched in beaks, the kommandos scuttled through the end of night on all fours, taking cover along the way behind the occasional shrub and pallets of barrels and other supplies the stupid fungi had carelessly dumped into crucial lines of sight.
The rescuers sweated not at all the occasional guard patrols stumbling and mumbling by, sometimes approaching a mere three strides away from their hiding places. Incompetents and sops, all of them. Solid intelligence held that the Queen's Guard was notoriously corrupt, a type of corruption typical of empires—company commanders filling their days with conspiring against their peers for promotions and skimming the top off of payroll instead of drilling their troops into readiness. After tonight, many of these officers would be executed, messily, for the crime of gross incompetence. This thought warmed Bowser like a well heated napping stone.
Adding to the guard's woes, the castle estate was immense and the graveyard shift was grossly understaffed for the amount of ground they needed to cover. Despite possible reinforcement available from the deployed soldiers, the Koopas saw few infantry Toads riding with the nightwatch on their routes. Captains of the Queen's Guard hadn't even thought to request backup for their patrols.
Bowser smirked at the sight. She could drill the little spore spawn from morning to dusk, train them to kill from the moment they waddled out of the cultivation caverns, it made no difference. A Toad could never match up to a Koopa.
Circumventing the bastion and its tower by a wide margin, Koops led them to the hiding place he'd promised. It was waiting and ready for them. They skidded down into a narrow cement channel that fed into the fortress moat. A four-fold grate barred the way through the culvert at its end. Slime and moisture coated its coarse surfaces. Until recently, the channel had been flooded.
"Someone re-floods this channel tonight we'll be in a fine mess," muttered Koops.
"Then why are we in it?" asked Bowser.
"This is the last viable cover we enjoy before breaching the outer wall, about two hundred meters out. My boys used this spot before to conduct surveys on the castle."
"What about the moat itself?"
A pained grimace from Koops. "It's deep and the things that swim its waters are kept hungry."
Collectively they peeked over the edge. Their goal awaited them dead ahead: the eastern gate. Fashioned from immense square-cut logs of dark red wood, banded and studded with black iron, the gate doors could withstand a prolonged assault from the best breaching teams in the world. Set within the lower-right quarter of the right door was a wicket, a small door sized to admit one person at a time. To reach this unlikely entrance into the castle, they would have to cross a bridge spanning the moat designed to collapse if a certain support was destroyed by its defenders.
Besides all that, the only other obstacle they had to worry about between the cement ditch and their objective was a flat stretch of manicured lawn and an army of Toads.
Before the walls massed the imperial infantry, uniformed in frayed camo fatigues and amber caps with rust brown spots. They lounged in sandbagged Bullet Bill artillery placements and milled in chattering crowds around a phalanx of tanks, the orange cinders of their cigarettes flitting about like malign fireflies. Two companies at the east gate, and Bowser reckoned it was likely the same for the north gate and double for the main gate.
Every few minutes patrols would roll by in trucks and on motorcycles, kicking up a great deal of noise so that one could hear them coming a long ways off.
Red mushroom caps spotted with orange flashed between the merlons cresting the wall, the cap colors signaling it was the royal guard, Second Echelon who held the honor of patrolling the battlements tonight.
Indentured boos floated about, dangling lanterns to supplement the coverage area of roving spotlight beams. In the distance they heard the baying of broggies, pulling their handler nearly off his foot pods as they strained against their leashes, scenting for trouble and something to gnaw on. Bowser could sympathize.
He glanced Karry's way. The magikoopa stared off into a place no one else could see, fingers tracing curling and recursive shapes in the air with the slightest movements, lines of green and gold fire trailing from every stroke only to vanish a moment later. Blood beaded the magikoopa's brow. Simple enchantments to mask the kommandos' scent or muffle the sound of their breathing now required supreme concentration. This close to the castle, authoring a spell could well draw attention they did not want.
Peach expected timely reprisal. Bowser felt flattered she had gone through the trouble and expense on his behalf. Or, perhaps, with the outbreak of hostilities and the resulting anxiety among her troops for a Koopa reprisal that would bring down doom upon their spongy little heads, Peach seized on the chance to put her soft-assed home guard through their paces and get them some much needed battle practice. Either way, Bowser's plan had allowed for this possibility. Counted on it, even.
"What now?" Bowser asked.
Koops touched the bandage on his beak. "If the surprise you arranged draws off the infantry, and if Wario unlocks the gate, and if no one spots us, then we rush the gate. Around three minutes between patrols to work with. In that time, we have to cross that stretch of open ground, clear any remaining sentinels off the bridge before they can raise an alarm, and secure the east gate wicket before our presence here is detected. At least there's no land mines anymore. She lost too many guardstoads that way.
"A lot hinges on if Wario makes good on the deal. That door can eat more punishment than we're equipped to dish out. Magic might pick the lock, but that'll take more time than we got."
"And if Wario doesn't come through?" Bowser asked Koops. He regretted the question, for Koops furrowed his brow and seemed to sink under the weight of his insecurity.
"Uhh, well. You're the king."
"Yeah, and you're the best strategist on my payroll. Strategize already."
Koops stared down into a puddle of stagnate water, face tense. "Right. I guess we could try using filthy language."
Someone snickered, but Bowser didn't catch who. "Don't laugh," he growled low. "I just might make you try it."
"Seriously, my recommendation in that case would be to call this off. Retreat and work out another way we can get inside."
Bowser shook his head. "Then our pretend show of weakness turns genuine. Our fate's sealed the moment you show your belly to the queen. We may survive a while longer, running away, but it's just a slower way to die. Screw that. Somehow, we get in there tonight and blow something up. That's my order as king."
No one spoke out against this edict.
The rumble of a tank engine and the murmur of hushed voices drew near. The Koopas huddled down against the algae slick slope to wait.
Bowser met the eyes of each man, Goomba, and Koopa in turn. Numb determination flattened the kommandos' faces. Each banked the coals of their fear and their fury to await the moment when their heat would do them some good—then they would pile on fresh wood and blaze like demons. Koops only shook his head. Luigi combed his mustache, unhurried, relaxed as he squatted in the heart of an enemy empire. Iggy bobbed in place, giddy to get started. A depraved lunatic at home in a paradise of atrocity. For a horrible second the vigorous bouncing gave Bowser the impression his debauched son was masturbating (such things had happened before under similar circumstances), but Iggy was only rummaging through his utility belt pouches. Bowser suppressed a sigh of disgust. To think such issued from his loins.
The night grew colder. Overhead, a front of dense clouds rolled in to smother the half moon's light. Each feeling anew the fragility of their mortal flesh and bones, they waited.
Koops beaked a silent countdown. Five… four… three…
At zero, the sky above Castle Peach exploded in a furious rainbow inferno. Red and blue and yellow flares burst and blazed and then exploded some more. Stone and air and earth reverberated with the cannonade of deafening booms. Toad infantry and guard alike dove for cover as others ran without direction and purpose, eyes wild and faces broken with fear. The concrete hummed beneath the kommandos. The oily water puddles at their feet rippled into countless concentric circles.
Letters of eldritch blue fire emerged from the chaos, searing a message across the sky for a whole minute. What they spelled out was an ultimatum demanding Mario's release or else suffer trade embargoes. A laughable threat. Made the Koopa Kingdom look like a bunch of sugar shells. Maybe, just maybe, Peach would be fooled into thinking King Koopa had, for tonight at least, played a weak hand.
Thunder rolled away into a distant rumble, the show over, but the fading rhythm of the pyrotechnic assault stirred Bowser's heart to greater vigor than the beating of any war drum.
A fine fireworks display by Kammy's greatest pupil, but not a serious attack. If Bowser commanded magic powerful enough to fell an enchanted fortress wall in a single strike, this war would have ended long ago. Peach wove her protective cantrips deep into stone and buttress and bar. When Queen Toadstool commanded in the Voice of Sorcery that a brick should hold itself together, then you'd best bring an army if you entertained a shadow of a hope of shattering it.
However feeble this exercise of mystic might was against the queen's superior power, it served its purpose. The Toad army stirred like a fly swarm shooed up from a carcass. Reports spread with the rapidity of vicious gossip—out in the shopping district several gangs of masked Koopas had been spotted fleeing through the alleyways and side streets. Thieves in the night rather than a veteran army! Easy prey, in numbers the Toads felt confident they could handle. Killing and prestige awaited! Toad captains scampered back and forth, thrashing their indolent charges to hasten in picking up their gear and begin the march out to answer the audacity of the invaders with shell shattering violence.
It took around twenty minutes for the infantry to fall into a mockery of proper martial formation. Another twenty to clear out of the castle's vicinity. Even the bonded ghosts drifted off in train with their mortal cohorts, their chill presence fading from the vicinity like evaporating mist. Bowser and his Koopas learned to appreciate the sensation of seconds dissolving, one fine grain at a time, from the eroding stones of minutes. By now the eastern sky had lightened to indigo before the approaching sun.
With a startling abruptness, Kammy's protégé zipped overhead, astride her broomstick, a fleeting deep blue shadow against the greater darkness. She dropped something heavy which smacked into the mud at channel bottom. A kommando scrambled over to retrieve it. He brought back a hammer bro's hammer, purple ribbon tied around its handle. "They've committed to the bait. Path ahead is as clear as it's going to get," muttered Koops.
Bowser and several others ventured a peek over the channel's lip.
The wicket remained closed. Eight Toads loitered on the moat bridge. Six carried halberds, lucky number seven had a mini-bullet bill launcher resting business end down beside him, and the eighth wore bandoleers crisscrossed over his sloping chest, each studded with round black bombs. Bowser sucked in a deep breath of night air. No way those were Bob-Ombs. He caught none of their signature smell. The sapient explosives exuded the spicy scent of terror concentrated into physical reality. Safe bet, this guy was a poseur who painted his grenades black. No true aficionado of the walking bomb would show such disrespect as to carry more than three Bob-Ombs on his person at a time. Still, while not as devastating, these mundane grenades could explode a Koopa shell just the same.
By some miracle, only one royal guardstoad remained on the battlement above to watch over the eastern approach. Even so, one was enough to sound the alarm, and he was well out of range for every weapon on their person. Bowser looked again at the mini-bullet bill launcher, waiting agleam in the torchlight for someone to wield it.
"How long do we wait?" Bowser whispered to Koops.
"The rest of the night. The rest of our lives... until Wario gets that door open."
Then, for a while, there was silence. The time waste was excruciating. While they waited for a door that might never open, the window of opportunity slid closed with the finality of a tomb's sealing stone grinding into place. The phantoms of sorcerous light summoned by Kammy's understudy had by then evaporated. Within the hour the Toads would return, having found no trace of their quarry.
"Where's the patrol? They should've passed by already." No on responded. The kommandos, feeling the heat of their king's displeasure intensify, had scooched a crucial few inches away. Those not on lookout found something fascinating to stare at.
Bowser took another glance over the edge. The Toads bent in a circle, their focus aimed at the ground where they were playing cards or dice, all pretense of vigilance dropped. One of them would occasionally raise a head for a quick scan. Distracted guards might buy his Koopas a few extra seconds. Big deal. Even someone half asleep couldn't fail to notice a small army charging across the lawn, all those sudden movements and strange little noises where all a moment earlier had been serene, the outlines of shells bucking against the deeper shadows to draw the eye. Camo and charms only got you so far.
Bowser sank down and pounded the cement with his fist, earning a disapproving glare from his captain. The fire within groooowled low. The king's flame yearned for release. Charbroiling the gutter rats an hour back wasn't near enough. Had to get it out, had to let it out.
All this damn waiting. The air scraping in through his nostrils tasted stale on the tongue. He would chew his way through the door to escape this.
Koops hissing in fear, Bowser peeked over the lip of the trench a third time.
The hints were subtle. A slight foreshortening of the metal bracing bands. A thin shadow which had not been there before, pooled where the edge of the door blocked the flickering light.
The wicket stood open. By two, maybe three inches. A narrow gap, through which all hell might ride. A sudden gust of wind might push it closed, and thereby seal the fate of nations.
Bowser gasped for air, throat oven hot. Lights danced in his eyes. Concrete cracked under the squeezing of his claws. Noting how his king had tensed up, Koops took a look for himself. A sharp intake of breath.
"Well shove a Bob-Omb up my ass and twist the key, garlic loaf did it."
"It has to be now," said Bowser. Koops and Luigi nodded.
Coal-oil engines rumbled. Patroltoads mumbled as they trudged alongside the approaching tank. Delayed by laziness, the guards had at last cycled around to the eastern leg of their route. The Koopas ducked back out of sight as the tank and its escort rumbled by, searchlight playing over the mouth of the channel.
Bowser and the kommandos thought they knew the agony of waiting. But there is always another layer beneath the bottom of every hell, which peels back and reveals itself as one gets closer, for in truth there is no bottom. Each imagined hearing the surprised yelling as the wicket's state was discovered. Pictured the priceless security breach rectified by a petulant kick of a boot, slamming closed on their hopes of saving their kingdom. Each, inside the endless minute, envisioned the hollow click the closing portal would make and how they would then sit there, empty of hand and surrounded.
Laughing. The hollow clonking of wooden treads. The groan and sputter of the engine as the tank parked. More laughter, with words exchanged in high cheery voices. Talk of overtime pay. Guards happy the soldiers had gone and they could let their bellies stick out and dice and drink and shoot the shit. Bowser could hardly stand to listen. He bathed in black dreams, swam the blood tide squeezed from all his many, many enemies.
Finally, the voices, the scorched tar stink of tank exhaust, the clump of boots on soil receded. When an eon had passed and the patrol was gone around the corner, a glance confirmed the sentinels remained unaware of the opened door, lost to their games still.
"Now," grated Bowser. He exhaled steam.
"Wait." They turned as one to glare at Iggy.
"I've got something that might help." From the lab coat he produced a brass pocket watch the size of Bowser's clenched fist. Bowser nearly clocked Iggy with said fist, but his son motioned for patience while Koops flailed for quiet.
Bowser compromised with some quality snarling. "Great, we can time how long it takes us to die like Yoshies out in the open."
"This is no ordinary watch. It's a Sub-Conian timepiece, harvested by hand from the queer soils of that half-real land." Iggy caressed the ornate casing with his claws.
"They haven't noticed the door's open yet, but they will," said Koops, snapping his head back and forth from Iggy to the gate.
Bowser turned to the sloped concrete and took the first step to scaling it.
"Wait! This watch will slow time's flow to near zero for ten seconds. We can use it to catch our fungal friends unawares."
"So use it already." Bowser reached the top of the incline and glanced back in time to see Iggy vanish. The instant disappearance created no sound, not even the pop of air rushing in to fill the void. It gave Bowser a kind of mental vertigo, as if Iggy had been an imaginary tormentor never really there to begin with and now willfully erased by his mind.
"Where'd he go?" asked Koops.
"Who cares? It's too much to hope that he's gone for good," said Bowser.
Koops lifted a clenched fist, then drew it down and forwards, the signal to move out. He led the kommandos up and over the lip of the drainage canal. The King of the Koopas vaulted the edge and charged over the lawn, praying the guards did not look their way and that Koops was right about the land mines.
Lock eyes forward. Suck in breath through the mouth and nostrils. Keep hate's heat well fed in its coal bed beneath the lungs, for its fires would soon be needed.
The world bounced and jostled with every stride. Rushing air moaned in his ears. The diminutive figures of the guards grew from mere figurines into the life-sized real things. The royal guard up on the wall was no longer visible. Either luck was kind and he'd wandered off at the crucial minute, or he was already running down the battlements for reinforcements. Nothing to be done either way.
Close enough now Bowser could hear their shroomy chatter above his own panting. And incredibly, impossibly, no one had yet looked up. An insane urge to roar and make them look took hold of Bowser.
They'd trampled over half the distance to the bridge when the problems began. A Toad looked up. The halberdier sprang to his feet and gestured in a frenzy to his mates, indicating they should take an interest in the yonder night shrouded grounds. None of his brothers looked out into the darkness. They watched with eyes and mouths opened in wide circles as the halberdier gurgled blood through a slit throat. Iggy pushed the dying toad over and spat a fireball in the face of the grenadier.
In the same moment, the royal guard plummeted from the battlements above, Karry's multi-colored magic runes already fading from the guard's limbs and mouth. For an instant the guard was free enough from the magikoopa's spell to pipe out a shriek, and then he impacted the moat wall, splattering. The mage had been working intensively so he might accomplish more than just hiding their presence. Bowser made a mental note to promote Karry later.
Koops and the kommandos overran the guards as they lowered their poleaxes to chop Iggy into stew meat. The dawn turned mad with the moist ripping of claw and knife hard at work on soft mushroom flesh. A cry of pain cut off.
Only the bullet bill Toad remained, backing away from the carnage, eyes as round and bright as the searchlights raking the clouds above. Training took hold as he flipped the launcher into a crouching firing stance with one smooth motion. Kommandos closed in. The Toad had time to fire one shell. The Koopa closest to the fungus caught the bullet bill dead center of his under-shell. Bowser felt rather than heard the crunch of bones as the kommando spun off his feet, body limp. His mates fell upon the last guard in a frenzy. Bowser finally arrived, huffing too much to speak, too winded to be disappointed they'd left none for him. He bent over, hands on knees, concentrating on getting out of this shameful state quickly.
"It's not like you to be late to the takedown, Dad," said Iggy. "Good cardio conditioning is key, even when one has a chrono-manipulative device handy. Want me to get you one for your birthday?"
Bowser spat and straightened up. "So that's what it was? Damnit."
"Sorry, I had hoped its effective range extended farther than the personal, but not knowing when I might find a second stopwatch left me hesitant to squander my first on experimentation."
"Shut up, boy. We're on a sneaking mission. Koops?"
The captain stepped up, whipping blood off his claws. "Kollins is gone. Dead before he hit the ground. I don't think anyone knows we're here yet."
Looking around, it was easy enough to believe. No klaxons, no searchlights veering closer to their position. For a minute they were alone. The kommandos had already tumbled the Toad bodies into the moat. The royal guard's corpse finished its slow peel off the wall and plopped into the water to join his kin. Hungry, finned shapes churned the murky waters to green froth as they feasted. For their fallen brother, the kommandos had no choice but to tuck his limbs inside his shell and hide him for later retrieval beneath a small cairn of sandbags.
Three of the kommandos were parakoopas, possessing the gift of flight. Two plucked up Gep and Garry, the other secured a komrade in a full-body carry, and together they fluttered upwards to the battlements to accomplish some wet work and secure an exit route.
Soft giggling accompanied by even more unsettling noises drifted in on a chilly wind. Over the lawn, against a lightening sky, ghost lamps danced, drawing closer and closer, signaling the approach of indentured Boos. The spirits had discerned, with their supernatural insight, the deception of Kammy's understudy, which the Toads would still be struggling to figure out.
Without further delay the Koopas hustled to the wicket. A veteran of the squad, named Karnac, entered first, alone. Seconds dragged past during which no one could breathe. Fingers of ice traced executioner's guide lines over the backs of each Koopa neck.
Karnac emerged from the doorway and signaled 'clear.'
Within the castle: a stretch of bland sandstone brick hallway, a ponderous silence thickening the cool air like humidity. Lamp flames swayed slow and low in their globes with nary a sizzle, the tongues of fire seeming to lean in for a better view of the uninvited guests. No armed response team stampeding down the corridors to offer the warmest of welcomes, and no screaming guards or eldritch watchdogs to sound the alarm. Was this good luck, or something worse?
As Koops worked out the marching order, Bowser stole a second to reflect. The enduring good fortune they'd enjoyed in reaching this point undetected and with only a single casualty strained Bower's sense of credulity. A certainty that something was off, that they'd had it too good for too long, stole over him. Foreboding trickled down the inside of his carapace like ice water. Nothing he could do about it. The way back was closed. They were committed.
From the east gate the kommandos headed west, then veered off into the first side-corridor they encountered. They glided serpentine through service hallways and seldom accessed storage rooms, quiet as settling dust. Working northward through these obscure passages brought them to a large stairwell, with ascending and descending flights of steps. Koops signaled a halt before the arched opening onto the landing and beckoned Karry forward. Hard won intelligence informed them that castle stairways were treated as checkpoints and thus constantly under watch. Royal guards of the Second and First Echelons stood on lookout here, or such was Koops' deduction.
Karry, still pale and bleeding from the nose because of his exertions outside, shambled to the brickwork wall and pressed his ear hole to the mortar. For a while he listened, eyes squeezed shut. Luigi pressed against one side of the arch, hammer ready, cold eyes gleaming. Iggy settled down for a nap. The rest of the kommandos did their best to imitate stone. Bowser tried not to think about who and what resided on the other side of these walls, and how easily they might hear a scream through them.
Taking the greatest care to ease back from the wall, Karry lifted his hands and worked his claws through a somatic twisting. He summoned a silent hologram, revealing a First Echelon guard in his red spotted white cap, standing alert in an alcove beside the arched entryway where he could watch and hear all traffic.
A moment to rearrange their positions and the kommandos were ready. At a gesture from Koops, a trio of seasoned killers charged the landing while the mage cast a cone of silence. The First Echelon guard made a decent try of it, for a Toad, stabbing Karnac through the arm before the other two twisted his head clean off his shoulders.
A second guard Karry had missed rolled silent from a narrow alcove installed above the arch's capstone. Cold blue steel glinted in its small yet well muscled fist. The ambusher aimed for Koops. Bowser gaped his jaws to cry a warning but the cone of silence muted everyone equally. He lunged forward, knowing it was already too late.
The curved knife scythed in to slit the captain's throat. Then Luigi plucked the guard from the air at the last second and crushed him the way one might crumple up a few leaves of paper.
When they had smashed up the heads enough to make certain the Toads couldn't let rip any postmortem cries of alarm, Bowser and the rest crowded onto the landing.
The heavy quiet remained intact. As they patched up Karnac's punctured bicep, Bowser crept to the stairs for a long sniff and a hard listen. Nothing unexpected. The distant crackle of torch fires and the clammy odor of damp stone and the faint tang of sorcery—the latter a scent that had been present since entering the castle. Footsteps and Toads muttering to one another in other rooms, none of them in a hurry or tense with fear. He breathed deeper, through mouth and snout. There, the faintest acrid note of unwashed bodies, followed up with an earthy trace of stale sewage. Not much to go on, but they had to begin the search somewhere.
"This is where we part ways, captain," Bowser said.
Koops slumped his shoulders, the stoic veneer of a professional soldier slipping. "Sir," he said, agonizing over every word, "fall back. Leave the rest to me and my boys."
"Not a chance. I owe Mario a debt and I'm taking personal responsibility in making sure it gets paid in full."
Koops nodded, having received the expected response and obviously not feeling it. "Yeah. Sure I can't go with you at least? Karnac can handle Team Scuttlebutt."
Bowser gave his retainer a growl with no friendliness in it. "You're cruising for a bruising, little turtle. Stick to the plan. Karnac's job is making sure you don't die."
They heard the posh posh posh of velvet booted feet coming down the stairs, their pace unhurried, but drawing close.
"If the Thwomp hits the shit today then my kids are going to need you. Guide them through whatever comes next. You owe it to me to survive this mission, no matter what." Bowser jabbed a claw into Koops' chest. "Got it, pipsqueak?"
Koops regarded his king for a long moment, hesitating just a second more than was professional. "Yes, sir." He saluted, then turned and led Team Scuttlebutt up the stairs without a backwards glance. Captain of the guard, loyal retainer, dear friend... now that he was gone Bowser felt a premonition of grief for what he might lose tonight. What they all might lose.
Koops he had entrusted with the vital task of locating Peach's secret airshipyard and decommissioning the docked flagship, explosively. If the queen's workshops had cranked out more ships, and if opportunity allowed, Koops was to attempt to scuttle the fleet—in the process wasting as many shipwrights, engineers, and blueprints as possible
Bowser's squad carried the code-name of Marinara Dress Stain, or Marinara for short. Their share of the mission had two steps: rescue Mario; escape. If things went plastron-up, Marinara's fiery last stand would create a distraction to draw the enemy away from Team Scuttlebutt's retreat.
Five kommandos remained to accompany their king. Luigi stayed too, which was fine with Bowser. Luigi would prove mighty useful should this evening's salsa get a little too spicy.
Iggy they dragged along because leaving the brat to his own devices had a strong historical precedent of unleashing just the most unproductive breeds of trouble. If the self-styled mad scientist got up to any of his cute tricks, Bowser wanted him close to claw where he could shut that shit down ASAP.
With soft steps Team Marinara took the stairs down. The stairwell bottomed out into another narrow stone hallway, the end of which opened on a kind of basement foyer. Doors and side passages and more stairwells branched off to various cell blocks. A gaoler's desk sat room center, papers neatly stacked, lamp and candles unlit though smelling recently used. All this they expected, but the sheer visual impact of the place drew Bowser and his troopas up short. For a chamber of such grim purpose, it was lushly furnished: rich red carpet sewn with floral designs, cedar paneling, and stone walls enlivened by frescoes of nature's beauty. The painted walls depicted a vista of the Mushroom Kingdom in its lost, golden past. Hazy green with life, blue as a dream of heaven, a warm and smiling land basking in the love of a kind sun.
Bowser was not a Koopa to get choked up by art, but something in the frescoes snagged at the breath in his throat. What manner of poisonous growth did the queen use in place of a brain that she would be inspired to create a monument to a murdered land down here, where the condemned must pass through on their way to a dank cell to await extinction? What sickness thrived in Peach that she preserved in art a natural world her society of sapient fungus bulldozed under an ever-growing scab of concrete, this very castle ground zero of the spreading blight?
Unfazed by the depraved opulence, Luigi commenced sweeping the reception hall for threats. He paused at intervals and cocked his head, listening for something no one else could hear. At the seventh such halting, after a prolonged minute of supreme concentration, he pointed towards an iron door recessed into an alcove, a few steps below floor level.
The hinges were hidden within the jam, the door itself a bolted slab of black metal. A dank, sewage smelling draft wafted out from around the edges. Kranston, Team Marinara's lock picking expert, lit his hooded thief's lantern and aimed its ray of light into the keyhole to make a thorough inspection. He scowled and harrumphed. "Difficult. It'll take me half an hour just to suss out the first tumbler array. Might be enchanted to sound an alarm if tampered with. Don't like it."
Bowser rolled his eyes and jogged to the opposite side of the foyer. Everyone else stood well back from the alcove. With a chugging growl, Bowser charged. Twisting at the last instant, he left the floor, hurtling spiky shell first. The door never stood a chance. It cracked into jagged, steaming halves.
Beyond stretched an ugly gallery of cell doors rotting in darkness and kept purposefully filthy. The stench that uncurled from the dungeon turned the stomach, and for some of those present, summoned up bad memories.
In response to the racket a scratchy voice began calling from a cell further down the throat of slime slick stone. "Is anyone there? I need water! Please, help."
"Mario, that you?" Bowser answered back. No point in maintaining silence. If crashing down the door didn't call the guards running then a bit of chatter made no difference either way.
"Thank the Stars! Get me outta here, Bowser. They're starving me to death."
"Hold tight and keep it down. When I knock at your door, respond with our secret knock." Bowser had changed his mind. Less noise the better. No telling who or what else might be languishing in those cells.
They lit more hooded lanterns and headed in, leaving a kommando behind to watch the foyer. "Here, here..." Mario kept whispering, somewhere far down the gallery. The exact cell proved hard to find. Sound sailed in strange directions. Mario's voice would rasp close enough to startle the listener, yet sometimes echo so faint with distance it strained credulity to believe one had heard it at all.
There seemed to be no end to the dungeon passage. Fear stole over Bowser that he trekked down the closed coil of an infinite loop. Turning around, the entrance was a square of light shrunk to postage stamp size. Shouldn't it be larger—they hadn't gone that deep inside, had they? When Mario's repeated calls sounded consistently close by, Bowser started tapping on doors. For most, he was answered with silence. At another, a deep, scratchy voice purred, "Hello there, stranger." Bowser moved on.
Luigi tried a cell door blanketed in spider webs and was answered by a chitinous scratching which grew louder and closer as whatever he had awoken stirred from its nest to investigate. They ran past that door, pressing against the opposite side of the hall, doing their best not to peek inside the barred window slot.
"Fellas, please, it's this one," said Mario from a few doors down. A hand gloved in soiled white satin waggled its fingers through the window slot. Bowser frowned. He wanted the certainty of hearing the coded response he'd had Mario memorize for just such occasions, but time for a clean escape had run out like an hour ago and this place gave him triple-A grade creeps. If it sounded like Mario, and wore his gloves...
Kranston had an easy time solving the cell's lock, no dramas.
Darkness, reluctant to part before the cutting rays of the hooded lanterns, filled the cell like a nebula of coal dust.
Bowser then made a decision he would never forgive himself for. He sent three of the four kommandos into the cell. Luigi he held back. As that oak-hard chest smacked off the immense hand baring the way in, Luigi looked up, a rarely seen heat warming those cold black glass eyes. In a moment of frustration, and yes, fear, Luigi let slip a vulnerability terrible to behold. Perhaps he glimpsed the same fear mirrored in King Koopa's eyes. Whatever they shared between them in that moment, it touched the human enough that Luigi didn't immediately set to ripping his arm off its shoulder.
Inside the cell, the kommandos had cornered their objective. The Toad posturing as Mario capered about in the filth, flapping its gloved hands, eyes rolling, tongue lolling. It shrieked in delight, no longer sounding anything like Mario.
Bowser heaved a heavy sigh. "Of course. Ain't nothing ever easy." But it had all been too easy, the whole way in. That had been the warning. And he'd ignored it.
"Sorry," the decoy shrilled. "Your prince is in another part of the castle."
Iron plates in the ceiling scraped open. Grotesque lengths of soft, segmented, undulating gray bodies thorny with convulsing black claw stalks wriggled through the murder holes. Wigglers, bred and raised for generations in darkness until they evolved into sightless killers. Pale flesh blushed red as the pulsating monsters flooded over the kommandos like overfilled rivers of thrashing legs, mandibles clacking rapid fire, each worm insane with hunger for the blood of the sighted.
Discretion for the rescuers was at an end. The screaming began.
Nostrils buzzing with the sickly sweet stench of Wiggler ichor, Bowser spun and ran towards where he hoped the exit would still exist. Clomping footfalls let him know Luigi kept pace just behind. Iggy had ghosted, and Bowser couldn't remember when he'd seen his son last.
The far end of the corridor was dark, as if someone had replaced the broken door while no one was looking. Lights blinked on over head. The gloomy, cramped space of the gallery had given a false impression of a low ceiling, but it was really a high one, concealing nooks swarming with Toads. Bowser looked up in time to glimpse a shadow hurtling down towards his face.
A jarring thud. An instant of searing agony as the lights went out. It was Bowser's turn to disappear.