CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories by J. Posthumus (read after txt) 📕

But usually the fighting cockerels were of puntable size. If they had come for him, and he had been wandless, he could have kicked them across the barnyard and scored a goal over the irrigation system. Now, it was enormous and coming for him. Sadly, punting was not going to do it. Nor was being an expert duelist any help. Knowing how to wreak havoc with just the right spell did not carry over well into winning a cockfight.

His eyes rested on the deadly beak surrounded by its circular backdrop of black ruff feathers. What was he supposed to do? Peck at it?

That would involve deliberately moving his head, his second favorite body part, toward said deadly, razor-sharp beak.

He could see the battle now. He would flex his neck muscles, throwing his wobbly chicken excuse-for-a head forward, beak first—such a crazy idea. It was like fighting by hitting the other guy with your nose—and, just as he reached some important juncture, his fluffy white crest would flop into his eyes, blinding him, and it would all be over.

Gaius was not a fan of illegal cockfights, the way a few of the local men were. He had never paid much attention to exactly what the birds did when they fought each other. But he had seen roosters battle. The year before he went away to school, a particularly large black and grey Sumatra that had escaped from a nearby farm and gone after one of their motley Easter Eggers. Gaius had a memory of the larger bird leaping into the air and striking the other bird with its feet.

He could do that.

How hard could it be?

Gaius took three large steps backward, charged forward, and leapt. He flew through the air like a martial artist from a Hong Kong action flick, both clawed feet extended.

“Hi-ya!” he shouted as he performed this high-class kung fu move. Only it came out sounding a lot more like: “Coo-doo!”

As if with perfect aim, he struck his broad opponent, pointy talons first. Only now, however, did he remember something important. The Sumatra had also flapped its wings. This had kept it upright, so that its feet snapped out and pulled back with the speed of a snake, while the bird hovered in the air.

Not so Gaius.

Oh, his feet hit the black rooster as planned, but the rest of him did the opposite of hover. Instead, he struck the hard earth with a loud smack.

Headfirst.

As he lay dizzy and disoriented on the ground, Gaius thought that at least he had finally mastered a martial art. Not karate or tai chi, as he had hoped when he was a wee lad, but rather his college roommate’s favorite martial art of squeegee: the art of outwitting one’s enemy by defeating oneself first.

Yeah. He was a first class squeegee master.

Black belt, even.

The pain was intense, especially when the black rooster’s beak carved into his soft chickeny flesh. Luckily, his ridiculous layer of fluffy feathers protected him just a little. A scream escaped him, but even that was not satisfying. Instead, a series of chickeny squawks issued from his throat, producing so many notes that he felt he could have rivaled a bagpipe for truly ghastly music.

Ghastly music! That gave him an idea.

The beak was coming for him again. Gaius rolled to the side and somehow managed to get his crazy, long-toed feet under him and rise. He ran backwards, his head swimming.

As he did so, he began issuing a series of high-pitched chicken sounds, trying to figure out how to make the ones he wanted. Human lips vibrated and tingled if one tried to push magic through them, but a solid chicken beak? It was practically an instrument.

There! He had it! One blue spark!

He could do this!

Sucking in a huge breath, Gaius thought rapidly about what result he wanted and what he wanted to do next, exactly as he would in the midst of a duel. Then, concentrating, he cried out as loudly as he could, making the exact three notes needed for the paralysis hex.

Blue sparks danced though the air and swirled around the black rooster, accompanied by a rush of what Gaius knew was the scent of evergreens, even though it smelled quite different to him as a chicken.

The gigantic black rooster froze. Or, rather, as Gaius had planned, its body froze, absolutely still, but its head still moved, issuing challenges and letting out an earsplitting cock-a-doodle-doo!

Gaius let out his own crow of relief.

He had done it! He had stopped the monster, and he had used the new spell variation he had been trying to perfect. He had now officially mastered focusing the paralysis hex on a single portion of an opponent’s anatomy.

He was a frozen chicken master!

Crowing victoriously, he strutted off in the direction of his dropped bag.

It took him an embarrassingly long amount of time to figure out how to get his head into the bag. Every time he tried to lift one side of the cloth, the other side flopped down again. Finally, however, he got his head inside, to find the Frizzle in there, happily chowing down on the seeds. It let out a squawk and backed up when it saw him. He ignored the little fluffball, searching for…

Ah. There it was.

Gaius’s chicken beak carefully closed around the quartz he had tossed in the bag when he was spying up on the ridge. With a thought, he activated one of the Word of Ending cantrips he had stored in it.

And, just like that, he was himself again.

He lay there for a moment, stretched out on the hard, cold ground—a bit of soft mud under one knee—breathing in relief.

He had never been so happy to just be him.

“What have we ‘ere, me ‘ansome?” cackled an aged woman’s voice from just above him. “Irksome emmet causing trouble among Granny Moorcock’s birds?”

Gaius did not hesitate. He did not even pull his head out of the bag. He just grabbed the quartz and held it