I took another step and my webtouch twitched in alarm, which felt like a combination of a hunch and a glimpse. I sort of felt and sort of saw someone approaching from behind me. Someone big. I didn’t react except by stopping in place, because I didn’t want reveal my spidery ability.
Instead, I just stood there and watched as Lord Usim reached out a trembling hand for his training sword.
“I’m sorry, Lemmy,” he whispered to the boy on the ground. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” the first infenti snapped at him. “Be competent.”
The person behind me loomed closer, then stepped beside me. And above me. It was the scarred, level eight ollie, and he must’ve been eight feet tall. Which didn’t sound much bigger than my own roughly six feet tall but it was. It was massively bigger, the difference between an adult and a child. And he was muscular, too. He probably weighed four hundred pounds. His skin was gray, but not an ugly lifeless gray. It was a warm gray, with hints of red--far more attractive than he deserved. He had stubby tusks, a short trunk that looked almost like a big nose, and a pretty elaborate beard.
INTUIT: Ollie, Level 8
“The fuck are you looking at?” he growled at me.
I turned as if in surprise, and smiled as if I hadn’t heard the threat in his voice. “Oh, hi there! Wow you’re big. I, uh ...” I pointed to the infenti. “Well, I’m looking at them.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Why?”
“You probably missed it, but those milky-looking infenti were beating up that little kid.”
He growled. “I don’t miss much, human. And if you don’t want to get your arse--”
“I miss pizza,” I told him.
“What?”
“Pizza,” I said. “It’s like, uh, flatbread baked with tomato sauce and cheese? And garlic and pineapple, through some people--“
His backhanded blow came fast for a guy his size, but my new webtouched senses gave me a moment’s warning. So I had a fraction of a second to choose between fighting and rolling over. My instinct was to fight, which surprised me. I was a civilized man, after all. Still, I hadn’t drawn a hatchet in anger in days--well, not including those fucking fleas--and something about me missed the violence. Something about me wanted to catch this asshole in my web and sink my fangs into his veins. On the other hand, I also wanted to reach Ryetown as soon as possible, and with minimal hassle. I wanted to see what a town looked like in this world. I wanted to trade my beads for a room with a feather mattress, to learn about gems, about magic. About summoning.
And about tankards of ale, and spicy kebabs. Oksar had promised me spicy kebabs.
Mostly, I wanted to get my bearings in this new reality, and in the conflict around me. I needed to know how to navigate ... well, everything, if I didn’t want to founder on the rocks and sink to the bottom. Frankly, I even wanted to make a few piles of cash. I mean, everyone else needed to gut monsters to extract beads but I just blipped them immediately, invisibly, effortlessly into my domain. No muss, no fuss--and zero time investment. My Treasure ability sounded pretty valuable to me, as did my Domain. Okay, I couldn’t carry that much yet, but anything I did carry would be impossible to steal, impossible to detect. And it weighed nothing.
To be honest, I wouldn’t mind being rich for a change. I’d laze around eating grilled figs and listening to human music, or whatever rich people did in this world.
My family had been comfortable, but my sister was the only one who’d ever made real money--and she’d spent most of it on a huge house that she didn’t even like. I guess this made me shallow, but I’d like to be so wealthy that I never even thought about money. If I saw something I wanted, I’d just buy it, bang.
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QUEST: Assemble one purple bead’s worth of wealth.
REWARD: One purple bead’s worth of wealth. And a level.
FAILURE: Stay poor and powerless. No grilled figs for you.
Huh. That sounded like a pretty fun quest.
Which was, I had to admit, pretty great advice. Because, if you cast your mind back to a fraction of a moment ago, I’d just detected a huge fucking ollie’s attempt to hit me.
The back of his hand was blurring toward my face like a cast iron frying pan toward a ... well, a face. Which was a weird time to get a quest and have an internal conversation, but my whole life was weird now.
Anyway, I knew that the smart move was not to fight him. Even if I could beat the big ollie, which I was strangely eager to test, I almost certainly couldn’t beat the two elite infenti, not to mention the other soldiers. Or the gemmed lady in the frilly dress.
Still ‘smart’ was sometime ‘boring.’ And that predatory urge sang in my blood: the opportunity to show these smug assholes that a human could fight was pretty tempting.
I almost threw down. It was so close ... but I resisted the urge. I decided to indulge in stupidity another time. Instead, I moved with the ollie’s blow as it landed. He wasn’t trying to do any real damage; he was only cuffing my head, but goddamn, an ollie cuffing you felt like getting smacked in the eyeball by a deploying airbag. It probably would’ve knocked me out if I hadn’t raised my Fortitude beyond any human standard.
Even with my buffs, the back of his hand hit me hard enough to ring my bell. I stumbled a few steps then sat on my ass on the ground.
“Fucking humans,” another soldier called. “Leave him be, Dordor. He’s a waste of space.”
A third one tossed a twig at me. “Singing their little songs. Weak as day-old calves.”
“Never take that tone with me again,” the level 8 ollie named Dordor snarled at me. “In fact, don’t even look at me. If I so much as see your eyes? I will break you, human, into hundred pieces. Now get the fuck out of my sight.”
The third one tossed another twig at me as I stood, then told his buddies, “The sooner we’re done on this catshit island, the better. Kill everyone not in a settlement. Drag the spires to the Port. Then say goodbye to Waldhill and hello to Six Coves.”
“Eightcoves, once this place chains up.”
Another one of them barked a laugh. “By that reckoning we should be eleven coves already with...”
I didn’t hear the rest as I slunk off, rubbing my head, pretending that the blow had hurt more than it had. Thinking about what I’d just learned. ‘Kill everyone outside of a settlement? ‘Despite Erdinand’s rather accommodating words about the soldiers, that didn’t sound so friendly. That sounded genocidal.
And speaking of unfriendly, I was also thinking that I’d kick that Dordor guy’s ass later, when I found him alone. Level eight? Literally twice my size? I didn’t give a shit. Which was strange. I mean, I didn’t hate him. He seemed like an asshole, but I honestly didn’t care enough about him to even dislike him. He meant nothing to me personally, yet ... hmm. Yet I was definitely going to kick his ass. I’d always been a pretty live-and-let-live guy; I never exactly turned the other cheek, but I didn’t dwell on things, either. Except that had been on Earth.
But this new me? The one living in a violent fantasy world? This new Alex was eager to hit back, to hit back harder. The new Alex figured that letting shit like that pass would lead to bigger problems in the future. The new Alex wasn’t afraid of bleeding--or drawing blood.
Hell, he enjoyed mixing it up a little. There was a hunger in him.
I was thinking about that, about the changes in me, when my extended senses pinpointed another person stepped toward me, a much, much smaller one.
“That’s his job,” Big Sid told me, looking toward the soldiers, her eyes furious. “Lemmy’s job.”
“He’s the blue kid who got beat?”
“Yeah. He’s the whipping boy. If they want the little lord to do something, they beat the snot out of his friend Lemmy until he agrees.”
I heard the clack of a training sword behind us. “I guess it works.”
“They’re animals,” she said.
“Animals with gems?”
For once, she didn’t snarl at me. She sighed. “Yeah.”
“What did they mean, kill everyone not in a settlement?”
Her red forehead knit. “How much clearer can that get? They need to round everyone up--well, not everyone, but close enough--into towns before they chain our island to theirs.”
“And by chain you mean link or merge?”
“Yes, you hornless dolt. Of course that’s what I mean.” She kicked the ground with a pretty slipper. “If they find you hiding in the woods or in some shithole unspired hamlet or something? They’ll either make you join the crowd in the towns or they’ll kill you.”
I almost asked what she meant by ‘unspired,’ but instead said, “I thought they weren’t so bad.”
“Sure, because they probably won’t kill you if you do what they want.”
“Sweet of them.”
“They don’t need to be sweet, they’re strong. Is your head okay?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“Thick skull like a crachen.”
“Ha.”
As we kept walking in silence, Princess roused in my mind.