“Mageling!” The Pigeon King cooed, welcoming me to the Market Square. “Have you been successful?”

  I pulled the scarf down from around my mouth and grinned up at him. I withdrew my hand from my pocket and then nudged my fists together, a spark flew between them. The pigeons around me squawked in surprise and fluttered away in a torrent of feathers.

  “Oooh fascinating,” the Pigeon King said, only sounding half sarcastic. “You’ve made…”

  “Zap Knucks,” I finished for him. I’d been working on that the whole way here.

  “Zap Knucks? Wonderful!” The Pigeon King practically cackled and shook his head.

  “And I can do this!” I walked over to the pigeon poo covered lamp post, jumped up, and high fived it with my left hand.

  The Magnet Rune activated and I hung there with a stupid grin on my face.

  “It’s like watching a babe flap its wings for the first time,” the Pigeon King said as I tried to unstick myself.

  It took a few seconds of concentration before the Rune deactivated and I fell back to my feet.

  "Are you ready to get serious, mageling? I thought you were in a hurry to save those citizens of your kingdom," the Pigeon King said.

  I straightened up and the stupid grin fell from my face.

  "You said if I take on this creature, I can get armour," I replied to him.

  "Armour that would withstand a blow from a broadsword, let alone the little daggers and knives these thugs wield," the Pigeon King said.

  "And you'll make this armour for me?" I asked.

  The Pigeon King scoffed and rolled his eyes.

  "Do I look like some sort of blacksmith? No, mageling, you will craft your own armour," the Pigeon King said haughtily, "But I will provide you with the raw materials required. You are my follower, and I am a benevolent master, after all.”

  "So what do I have to do?" I asked.

  "You must hunt and kill the Tank Beetle and recover its carapace," the Pigeon King said.

  "It's what?" I asked.

  "Oh dear, I swear mortals get dimmer every century," the Pigeon King muttered. "You must recover its shell," he said to me.

  "Oh, right," I replied. "But why do I have to kill this beetle?" I asked.

  "How else will you get its shell?" the Pigeon King replied.

  "No, I mean it doesn't feel right going and killing a creature that's done no wrong," I said.

  "Done no wrong?" the Pigeon King replied. He flapped his wings and landed on a barrel so he was almost eye to eye with me. "Boy, this is a monster from the in-between worlds. Its very existence in this dimension is an aberration, not to mention the thing could kill a human in seconds. It's a filthy creature that needs to be sent back to where it came from," the Pigeon King spat.

  "Has it hurt anyone?" I asked.

  "How would I know? And furthermore, why would I care?" the Pigeon King replied. "Yours is not to question, mageling. You are to do as I command and you should be grateful that I will be rewarding you."

  I clenched my jaw and bit back a response. The Pigeon King took my silence as acquiescence and continued on, slightly less haughtily.

  "You'll find this monster lurking in the abandoned undergrounds of the city," he said. "Fortunately, it's set up its nest not too far from here. I believe it's just underneath Brixton station. Do you have those spectacles that allow you to see in the dark?”

  I nodded, reached up, and tapped the goggles on my head. I had managed to repair the lens but it was only a temporary fix.

  "Good," the Pigeon King said. "For there will be no light in those tunnels. This is why the Beetle has remained there. It prefers the dark.”

  "What exactly is a Tank Beetle anyway?" I asked.

  "It's a beetle," the Pigeon King replied, "That's roughly the size of a small bear, and its shell is so thick it can withstand blows from the mightiest of hammers. Killing it will be no easy task, mageling, and it will require more than just brute strength.”

  "Good, because I don't have any," I muttered under my breath.

  The Pigeon King continued on as if it hadn't heard me.

  "I will send my feathered followers with you. They will lead you to the station and then they will await your conquest. Should you be successful, they will assist you in retrieving the carapace of the Beetle. Now go, mageling, and do not fail me; it's more than your life is worth." The Pigeon King turned back to his throne chair, dismissing me with a wave of his wing.

  I glowered at his back. It didn’t feel right to kill a creature that had done no wrong to me. Or maybe it was just the fact that I was being sent to the pitch-black underground with no chance of escape to fight a monster that could, by the sounds of it, survive a small explosion. Yeah, definitely one of those things was bothering me.

  *

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  I arrived at Brixton Underground Station, having jogged behind three of the Pigeon King's minions. They flapped their wings and cooed at me bad-temperedly as I struggled to keep up with them. Eventually, I found them perched outside the abandoned underground station. It always boggled my mind that not even that long ago, people used to go down into the deep, dark depths of the underground and travel around on old rusty trains deep under the city. It's such a bizarre way to travel. With the introduction of Electorail and the overpass system that now looped all around the city in the clean, well mostly clean air, the idea of crowding around in the hot, dark underground seemed even more bizarre.

  As I stood outside the arcane building, I felt nerves fluttering in my stomach. I'd never been underground before. I didn't like the thought of having the entire city sitting on top of my head.

  "How far down does it go?" I asked the pigeons, and they just looked at me, nonplussed. "Oh right, you aren't talking ones."

  They cooed at me, and I felt like they were telling me to get on with it.

  I tightened my rucksack on my back, stretched my neck, checked the grip on my Grandad’s bat, and tugged the wrist straps on my gloves. I realised I had run out of ways to waste time. I took a deep breath and walked towards the boarded-up entrance to the underground station. It took me about 20 minutes to even get into the place. It had been shut up with heavy iron welded to the doors that led down. Fortunately, I found a place where the bolts had rusted, and I managed to jimmy them loose enough for me to crawl into.

  I wish I hadn't.

  I don't know if you've ever experienced true darkness… like, I mean real dark, with not even a hint of light anywhere, but this place was pitch black. I couldn't even see my hand in front of my face, and within seconds, it felt like I'd lost complete sense of my entire body. I had no idea where my limbs were, where I was, how big the space around me was. It wasn't a pleasant feeling, and it turned my stomach as much as the smell of rot and damp in the place did. I pulled down my goggles and blinked a few times, allowing my eyes to readjust. The space wasn't big at all. In fact, it wasn't what I was expecting; it was a weird circular room with cracked tiled walls and plastic barricades that had fallen apart.

  I walked towards them and then stepped through carefully, looking at the odd setup with mild fascination. After walking through the barricades, I came to a sight that made my stomach drop. There was a set of steep metal stairs with jagged teeth that seemed to go down forever. So far, in fact, that my goggles couldn't even see all the way to the bottom. I recognized escalators, but these were archaic things that looked like they were more likely to chew me to pieces than take me anywhere.

  I stepped onto the first step going down. There was an awful clang and a rusty screech as I did. I held my breath and listened to the sound echoing around in the silence.

  "This is such a bad idea," I whispered to myself and then regretted it as I heard my own whispered voice echoing around, sounding garbled and strange.

  I took another step and then slowly made my way down the escalator. The further I went, the more I could see, and thankfully, there was nothing waiting down there for me. My overly creative imagination was picturing all sorts of demons and monsters lurking this deep in the darkness. I mean, seriously, who would want to go this far underground just to get to work? Grandad always did say people were a lot tougher back in the day, and I could definitely see why.

  By the time I reached the bottom of the escalator, I was sweating. I was covered in dust, and my hands had this black grime on them from holding on to the rubber belt of the escalator. There was no air down this deep. I felt stifled, almost strangled by the stale air around me. I stepped off at the bottom of the escalator and looked around. There were offshooting tunnels all around me; I had no idea which one to go down or where they led. I read the grimy boards by each tunnel mouth. They had all sorts of names and places on them, but that was of little help to me. The Pigeon King had told me I would be able to hear the beast. So I crouched down, placed my palm on the floor, closed my eyes, and listened.

  At first, all I could hear was my own breathing, but once I managed to tune past that into the echoing silence, I felt a distant rumble under my hand. I heard maybe a grunting or a grinding noise somewhere deep in the distance. I stood up and chose the tunnel to my right, which led shortly to a platform. I looked up and down the platform, cocking my ears like a wolf in the woods, and I heard the grinding again. It was coming from deep in one of the tunnels. I swallowed and then hopped off the platform, down onto the tracks, and began walking.

  I have no idea how long I walked. There was no air, no sound other than the bizarre grinding and the odd thud and thump. There was no possible way for me to tell which direction I was traveling in, how far I'd gone, or even if I was going anywhere. It was all just the same ubiquitous stretch of tunnel: filthy and unused, the tracks rusting, and the walls crumbling. I felt like I was slowly making my way into my own sarcophagus. But the grinding, thudding, and thumping were getting louder, so I knew I was moving in the right direction.

  I vaguely knew the story of how the underground was abandoned after the last Great American War. How the bombings had created cracks in these ancient tunnels that made them unstable. Looking around now, I could see fissures in the tunnel walls and suddenly had the panic inducing sensation of the whole city sitting on top of my head. I swallowed dryly and almost choked on the cloying dust in the air. It was that same bombing campaign and the country’s completely unprepared response that had been the catalyst for the Great Change in England. I barely remembered the facts, let alone understood the nuances, but New London had eventually seceded from the rest of the country and democracy had been supplanted with Tecnho Oligarchy… hell I wasn’t even sure what a Techno Oligarchy was. For as long as I had been alive, the corporations ran New London and normal people just got on with their lives. I couldn’t imagine it any other way.

  After another 100 yards or so, I came upon another platform, which I guessed was probably the next stop on the train line. I really wish I'd paid attention to that poster; maybe I would be able to guess where I was. Oh well, if I lived through this, I could learn that lesson.

  I stopped and listened again for the creature, and I realized now that the odd grinding, buzzing sound was coming from within the station. I looked around, picked which side of the platform I thought it was on, and then hauled myself up off the tracks. I gave myself a perfunctory dusting down, which did little, and then began walking through a short tunnel. This tunnel had loads of plastic boxes stuck to the wall, with what I assumed were posters in them. I couldn't tell what they had on them because they'd long ago rotted, the colour bleached, and the paper was falling apart. But I guessed it must have been something important since they were everywhere.

  I walked down the tunnel, the thumping and the grinding growing louder, and then spotted, at about rib height, grooves scratched into the walls. They ran all the way down the tunnel on either side, and they were so deep I could place my fingertips in them. There were also scratches going across the floor and more deep grooves leading further in.

  "Oh, this is such a bad idea," I muttered to myself again in a barely audible whisper. I stilled my nerves and pushed forward.

  The tunnel ended abruptly in what I thought was probably the main foyer for the station. I gazed around at the other tunnels, and then motion in my peripheral vision caught my attention. I turned and then wished I hadn't. I'd found the Tank Beetle, and I don't know what kind of small bears the Pigeon King had been around, but that thing looked more like a rhinoceros. It was a wet black, all carapace, horns, and legs. It had two massive horns sticking out of what I assumed was its head, that were as long as my arms. It might have had six legs; I couldn't tell from where I was. The weird buzzing, grinding sound turned out to be the thing's wings. Intermittently, the carapace would split open, and fine silken insectile wings would buzz. There was no way that thing could fly, was there?

  The Tank Beetle thumped and grinded in a little nest it had hollowed out of the tiles and concrete in the foyer's floor. It twitched and slammed its shell against the sides of the nest, trying to widen it, I guessed. The thing already seemed agitated. Even from here, I could see that its shell was as thick as my palm sideways, and it looked strong. The way it was turning that concrete to dust made me imagine what it could do to my bones. As the thing twitched, it threw its horned head towards me. I took an unconscious step back, accidentally stepping on one of the fallen plastic boxes with the posters in them. The desiccated plastic crunched and warped under my feet. My heart froze and my blood ran ice-cold. The Tank Beetle spun and roared at me. I’m not exaggerating, that thing actually roared.

  I’m so dead.