“Grab my friends and run!” I shouted at the ollie teenager.
She stared at me, in shock. “Wha--what?”
“Grab them!” I pointed to Big Sid and Erdinand. “Lead the kids away. The soldiers will be back any second. I’ll hold them off.”
“A--a human can’t hold off--“
“Bitch, RUN!”
She shook herself, then yelled at the kids to run. They took off toward the forest. She scooped up Big Sid and spun toward Erdinand and I dove to the side to avoid an arrow that one of the soldiers had shot at me from her bolting horse.
Three more soldiers had leaped from their bolting mounts, and were approaching me in a ragged line. They looked, if I was being honest, not completely friendly. Plus, a bone-white infenti twin was one of them. Level 11. Which, shit.
And, even worse, I felt more danger coming from elsewhere. A hotter, sharper danger. My webtouch was tingling like Spider-man’s head at a Green Goblin Convention. It took a second to localize the threat. It was coming from the wagon: from Miss Kathina, whose blob-like shield had spread ten feet in one direction and was now sparking like a short-circuited power station transformer.
Which was even worse than the elite ollie warrior. Still, I needed to delay these fuckers for at least a minute. Those ollie kids probably couldn’t move that fast despite their size. At least horses wouldn’t help the Sixers much in the thick forest. Though if the soldiers dismounted ... damn.
She yawned in my mind.
Which didn’t make any sense, but I had bigger problems, such as the soldier advancing at me with a sort of bladed spear. A male infenti, level five, with speckled purple skin and frankly majestic backswept horns.
I aimed just below them and threw my hatchet.
I’d only practiced against stationary objects, so didn’t account for his movement. I missed with the blade-edge, but the heavy metal mace-head of the hatchet smacked his forehead. I bamfed my other hatchet from my domain and threw that one at the chest of the soldier behind him as he dropped like a sack of purple potatoes and I recalled the first hatchet into my hand.
Throwing axes was stupid, because you lost your weapon--unless you were me, in which case they returned. So nobody expected a guy with two big hatchets to throw them. I caught the second soldier in the abdomen with the blade. Didn’t kill her but she was out of the fight, and then the third soldier was loping toward me.
The bone-white infenti.
He casually knocked my thrown hatchet aside and behind him I saw Miss Kathina stalking closer, her dress billowing, her faceted face stark and furious, and her electric shield spreading and jutting.
I heard the ollie kids behind me, trampling into the woods. Most of the soldiers were in front of me, getting their horses under control, though a few more had dismounted. The wagons were to my left, on the road that led back the way we’d come, and I felt a moment’s surprise that Miss Kathina wasn’t sticking close to the lord, to protect him. Her shield didn’t seem to have much range. Maybe ten, fifteen feet, if it billowed completely to one side like a sail.
So I braced to meet the twin’s assault and--
Oh!
Oh, the boy. The lordling. Lord Usim.
In a flash, I understood what Princess had meant. I threw my hatchet at the white infenti with the J-name I kept forgetting, then launched myself to my right. Sprinting with everything I had. The twin wasted a second blocking the hatchet as I bust ass in the opposite direction. He was weighed down in armor and already running fast, so it took him a second to turn toward me.
Still, the tip of his blade managed to carve a line across my back.
It hurt but I’d been hurt worse.
I leaped over grassy hummocks and burst through bushes and screamed, “Usim! Usim, if you want to save lives, run! Run back the way we came! Take a horse, take the wagon, run! Or those kids will die! They’ll slaughter them!”
That was Princess’s idea: these guards needed to protect Usim, right? Right. That was their primary purpose. They were focusing on me, but if he fucked off in the other direction, they’d need to chase him, to stay close. They’d have no choice.
And even raising the possibility made the twin and Miss Kathina pause to glance back at the wagon, where the kid was ...
Well, I didn’t know what the kid was doing. I didn’t pause. I didn’t glance back. Either he was running or he wasn’t. Either way, his guards and governess needed to give a shit, but I just need to run like a scared little bunny rabbit.
So that’s exactly what I did.
I scrambled and veered, and heard hoofbeats approaching as the mounted soldiers regained control of their mounts. I vaulted shrubs then raced directly into a thicket with thorns as long as my pinky. The sharp points tore through my clothes but snapped against my skin, just like the ones in the courtyard had. Look at me! Goddamn thornproof! My clothes snagged but I powered forward. Most of the thicket rose over my head, though a few patches were more like shoulder-height, so I crouched as I charged forward.
Fortunately, the bushes didn’t end immediately. In fact, the thicket must’ve covered a half acre at the edge of a meadow.
I couldn’t outrun horses, so I needed to hunker down and pray for a miracle. Like, maybe a band of roving goblins would attack Lord Usim and the soldiers would leave me alone to protect him. Which reminded me that I needed to ask someone if goblins existed.
At least the Sixers couldn’t easily bring the horses into the thicket. I didn’t doubt that some of the higher-level infenti soldiers were as tough-skinned as I was, though. I knew for certain that the two crachen soldiers were tougher. And the rest had armor. Still, I couldn’t think of a better option than surrounding myself in a wall of thorns.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
If I needed, I’d turn to smoke and waft through the worst of the dagger-like spikes. Though I wanted to hold off on using that power for as long as possible. I had to keep my mana in reserve in case I needed to turn to smoke.
So I shoved through the thicket. I zigged, then zagged, then started moving more quietly, trying to stay out of sight. Listening to the shouts of the soldiers, the crash and stomp of pursuit. The horses spread out, surrounding the thicket--surrounding me.
Not all of them, though, I didn’t think.
Maybe the kid had come through, and the rest were chasing him.
Or maybe he hadn’t, and the rest were chasing the ollie kids.
Nothing happened for a few heartbeats, but I heard the soldiers out of sight, plotting and planning. I moved forward, as quietly as possible, staying low and slow. How much time had passed? No idea. A few minutes? If so, maybe those kids--and Erdinand and Big Sid--had a chance of getting away.
The problem was, I didn’t. Basically, I’d jumped in front of another goddamn SUV.
So stupid.
Her sleepy laugh sounded in my mind.
IMPROMPTU QUEST: Help reunite the olifarn children with their families.
SUCCESS! Not much foresight, but still.
REWARD: 1 point and 5 pearl beads
SUPPORT BONUS: Your tier increases at every tenth level. Tiers add gemmed powers and raise attribute maximums. And sometimes more ...
‘Impromptu?’ More like ‘chaotic’ or ‘insane.’ At some point I’d figure what the hell was going on with those notifications. Still, I was pleased with the vote of confidence. Like I’d done the right thing. I appreciated getting a point, too--I needed all the points and all the pearls. Also, it was nice to think that I was smarter than a ladle. Maybe I was as smart as--
The noise outside the thicket changed. The two crachen soldiers started hacking through the thorns, chopping at it with their swords. And, uh, it wasn’t a half acre. It was closer to an eighth of an acre. Which didn’t leave me much room.
I crouched low and tried to sneak around the crachen, but other soldiers had a good view of the thicket from atop their mounts. At a sharp urge from my webtouch, I squirmed to the side, and two arrows missed me by inches. The riders shouted my location, so I backtracked--and two more soldiers barged into the thicket, jabbing ahead of themselves with spears.
The next five minutes felt like an hour. Everywhere I turned, another soldier was advancing, and I needed to stay out of arrow-shot. Without my spider senses, I would’ve been caught in minutes. As it was, I crouched lower and lower until I was almost flat on the ground.
Which kept me from being spotted, but also kept me from moving.
So I turned to smoke and wafted as fast as possible from the thicket. The problem was, ‘wafting’ wasn’t exactly a speedy mode of travel. I moved quicker than if I’d been shoving through the densest sections, but no quicker than a normal walk over open ground. So I didn’t manage to get far.
Still, I slipped past the encircling pursuers. I scanned my surroundings from every edge of my smoky self, then billowed across the grass toward the only spot that the soldiers weren’t covering: a stand of leafy saplings.
I filtered through the narrow trunks a moment before my mana hit zero, then I returned to my body. I lay there, feeling heavy and dense and afraid. The soldiers kept chopping the thicket, closing in around my previous position.
I breathed for a minute, one more precious minute for the kids to escape, then started crawling away through the saplings, praying I wouldn’t be spotted.
“There he is!” one of the soldiers called.
Shit.
I took off like a sprinter from a crouch. Harsh voices shouted behind me. Horse gear jingled, hooves drummed, and despite a ping of arachnoid warning, an arrow caught me in the back of the knee. The arrowhead didn’t pierce deeply, but it was enough to send me stumbling.
I rolled into a crouch and called my hatchets into my hands and three horses galloped closer. Two of the soldiers pointed bows at me and the third was one of the infenti twins.
“Hold!” he snapped to the archers.
They didn’t loose their arrows.
“My name is Lieutenant Jikon,” he told me, dismounting.
“I’m Alex,” I said, pulling the arrow from the back of my knee. “It’s great to meet you. We should grab a drink sometime.”
“You killed Dordor.”
“Yeah, I remember. It was like ten minutes ago.”
“Come try that with me,” he said, drawing his scimitar.
I scanned him quickly and yeah, I was screwed: Infenti, Level 11. “Are going to give me a free hit, too?”
“No.”
“Aw, c’mon.” I popped a pearl bead into my mouth to heal my knee, and kept talking to give my mana a chance to recover. “Isn’t that the best way to honor Dordor? Fighting me straight, that’s an insult to his memory.”
“He wouldn’t care. He’d be happy to watch you bleed out.”
“Not a sophisticated thinker, our Dordor,” I said.
“He was a brute,” Jikon agreed, drawing a long dagger into his off-hand from his thigh-sheath. “But he was our brute.”
“Do you stain?” I asked, and checked my mana. Still zero.
Jikon frowned. “What the plague are you talking about?”
“Do you stain? I mean, you’re so white. I just thought, if you spill wine on yourself you must look purple for a week.”
“Don’t worry,” he told me, stalking closer. “I’ll scrub your blood off and throw the rags in the same latrine where I toss your body.”
“Damn,” I said, backing away. “I walked into that one. How about--“
I flicked a hatchet toward his face. Not hard enough to do any damage, but enough to distract him, to put him on the defensive while I lunged and slashed with my other weapon.
He dodged the throw hatchet without breaking stride then caught my slash with his scimitar and stabbed at me with his off-hand dagger.
I pivoted and his blade only caught me a glancing blow, too weak to break my crachen-hard skin, so I moved closer, trying to get inside his range, and punched at him with the top of the hatchet that was still entangled with his blade.
At least, I tried to.
He was strong, stronger than I was, and better-trained. He moved with my punch for a second, then redirected me, shoved me sideways, and struck harder with his dagger. That time he pierced my skin. He opened a deep cut in my side while slashing at my face with the curving blade of his scimitar.
My webtouch sensitivity saved me again.
I threw myself backward, ignoring the pain in my ribs as the smoky shape of my thrown hatchet reformed in my hand.
He said, “Huh.”
We circled each other, probing for weaknesses. Well, he must’ve been probing for mine: I couldn’t find any weaknesses, though. This guy knew how to move, how to defend, how to fight. Which wasn’t a surprise. He was tier two, and he’d probably been training his whole life. Whereas instead of training, what I had was a snarky mental voice talking about attributes and tiers.
On the other hand, he wasn’t gemmed--and all those attributes and boons worked.
He’d never fought anyone like me before.
So after three quick exploratory exchanges, during which he scratched me three times and I didn’t touch him once, I faked a throw at him, then followed up with an overhead chop that he easily blocked.
He sunk his dagger into me, hitting me for so much damage that it would’ve killed me when I first arrived in this world. Enough damage to drop any human--and probably any non-warrior infenti, too.
Health: 36/55
Goddamn. Not good. Still, I faked another throw and tried another overhead chop.
It still didn’t work, but that time I only took five points of damage from his dagger. What a wonderful improvement.
I figured that he’d think I was trying to establish a pattern by my fake throws, so when I really threw that hatchet, I’d catch him unaware. I figured he’d expect that because it was the first thing that had occurred to me, before I realized that it was probably ‘feinting 101,’ exactly the kind of thing any competent fighter would expect.
I needed to properly surprise him. He was far better than me with a weapon. No contest. So yeah, I faked another throw, then tried another overhead chop--but that time, I just dropped the overhead-chopping hatchet onto his head.
It was such a dumbass move. You didn’t release your weapon in the middle of a fight, not without actually hurting your opponent. You certainly didn’t just ... drop it with hardly any force behind it.
And for a fraction of a second, he startled.
I grabbed his scimitar blade with now-free hand. If he wasn’t swinging it, the edge could barely cut through my hardened skin. I pulled him close and head-butted him, the dome of my skull slamming into his nose.