I looked down at a trio orienting themselves at my feet. Each was the size of a baseball and an exact copy of Gunmar: glistening red body, six little arms, a cape of quills flexing experimentally along its back. Worse, each of the beasties appeared to grow larger with each breath, as if the smell of so much human meat were enough to fortify their young bodies.

Gunmar shook his torso so that a few more babies fell to the field, and he grinned down like a proud papa. Perhaps that was what he’d been learning those forty-five years in the dark: how to replicate himself and safely carry an army of voracious carnivores into the human world. Emptied, he roared and leapt back into battle with ARRRGH!!!, Blinky, and a very dazed Jack Sturges.

Pain blazed up my leg. One of the baby Gunmars had bitten through my shoe, right into my toe, and I kicked my leg to dislodge it. But the tiny troll held fast, its arms flapping as if enjoying the ride. At last I stomped my foot back onto the forty-yard line, took up Claireblade, and drove it downward. The little red creature dodged right and the point embedded in the turf. I tried again, and this time it dodged left. Finally I reared back and booted it. The onside kick went bouncing across the grass, while blood from my bitten toe began soaking the leather of my shoe.

I scanned the football field and saw hundreds of these fiends, stretching their toothy mouths in newborn yawns and shaking off mucus as a dog shakes off the rain. They were teetering toward the bleachers, learning to walk on their way to their first meal. Several kids rescued from Gunmar’s lair were doing their part, stomping these babies to death with their shoes—a courageous effort, though not nearly enough. Even if we had twice the trollhunters, we were outnumbered. Despair overwhelmed me and I looked to the sidelines for some sort of help.

Instead I saw Professor Lempke near the end zone, breathless from having just run from the museum. The fastidious fellow had become an agglomeration of sores. His face and arms were an irritated pink crusted over with dried pus. Like a toddler at a birthday party, he jumped up and down, giggling and clapping his hands. With each clap, wet strings of sickness extended between palms. The entire brutal scenario of battle had him overjoyed, but what held his particular attention at that moment was the kid he hated most in the world: Tobias “Tubby” D.