Jacob had a rare day off. He woke up around 10 and busied himself by picking up a bit around the apartment. He strategically cleaned around Becca’s messes, even though seeing it there annoyed him to no end. She had to learn to pick up after herself.
He made an omelet with mushrooms and tomatoes and ate half, leaving the rest under lid for when Becca deigned to rise. Which turned out to be 02:30 PM. She ate on the couch in her underwear while letting her System screen scroll, blinking tiredly at the feed.
“Did you know the heroes should almost be at Aribel by now?” was the first thing out of her mouth, along with a small piece of egg.
“What?” Jacob asked.
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“I really don’t.”
“You have to keep up with the news, bro. You know how they sent all those top heroes to break the invasion on Aribel?”
“Okay, vaguely.”
“Well, they should almost be there. It’s supposed to take a week through the waylines. We should be getting news any day now about it.”
“Exciting.”
“It is, isn’t it! I bet there’s gonna be great footage of Titaness smashing urgeks. Oh, and Excelerate, too! Apparently they even sent Paragon. They never send her out.”
“What about your beloved Starman? Did you forget about him?”
“Nah, he didn’t go with them. He’s the Beacon of Arcadia—he’d never leave the city unattended.”
“Oh, good. If he left, who’d beat up all the petty criminals? No way the police could handle all that work load.”
“Har har, very funny. I’ll have you know he stopped a villain just the other day who came in from Sun City. Great White. Knocked all his teeth in and locked him up.”
Jacob was loath to admit it, but he actually had done some research on certain heroes to prepare in case he Snapped. Mostly the older ones. He had little respect for the new generation of heroes who were all about popularity and ratings. They put points in Appeal just to look good on camera, as though that was what mattered. Another great photo op. Don’t worry about that burning pediatric hospital over there.
Becca lazed around, still in her underwear, while Jacob did the dishes and forced himself to pick through the dreaded pile of overdue bills. Since he had extra cash to spend on groceries, he was able to knock a few off the list by paying them with the flora he had in his System. The pile was somewhat diminished, but still taunted him from the living room coffee table.
“I got you a gift, by the way,” Becca said as she was finally getting dressed around 4, trying to push her head through the neck of a t-shirt.
“You got me a gift?” Jacob asked incredulously. “Is it paying your half of the bills?”
She waved away his petty concerns. “No no, not that. I’ll get to it eventually. It’s something else.”
“Okay, well, what is it then?”
Becca scrambled to her room while trying to jump into a pair of shorts at the same time and nearly fell on her head in the process. She came back out with a rectangular box. Jacob took it with a moderate amount of suspicion. It was decorated with a little pink ribbon tied into a bow.
“This isn’t some thinly veiled attempt to get me into one of your hero flings, is it?” he asked.
“Nope! Open it!”
“Did you spend an unwise amount of flora on it?”
“Open it! Open it!” She was jumping up and down like a little kid.
He opened it. Inside was a little plush beetle, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. It was patterned like a ladybug, red and black and white, and had a keyring attached to the top. Its eyes were glittering black beads.
“A keychain.”
“It’s a kithraxi keychain!”
“I’m pretty sure you don’t get ladybug kithraxi. They’re aliens, Becca.”
“Creative liberty! It’s cute!”
“It’s very cute. Thank you Becca. But… Why?”
“Take the head off and see.”
Jacob did as instructed. The fuzzy head came right off to reveal a plastic spray nozzle.
“It’s also a pepper spray,” Becca informed him proudly.
“Becca, I’m sorry, but why the fuck would I need pepper spray?”
“Well, you’re always fighting those people and it makes me worry. What if one of them shows up and tries to make trouble?”
“They’re just matches, Becca. It’s not like I’m beating up random people in the street.”
“Still! Gangs or villains might come after you.”
“Do you really think a ladybug pepper spray would help with that?”
Becca gave him a look like he was stupid, so Jacob just put the kithraxi’s head back on and stuck it on his keys. It made them too bulky to fit comfortably in his pocket, but he’d put up with it.
Becca left for work some time later. Jacob was going to enjoy the rest of his day off. He got a beer from the fridge and went out on the balcony to smoke, sitting down in a creaky lawn chair. The weather left something to be desired, gray and overcast and a little too windy, but he refused to let that ruin his mood.
He drank his beer and used the empty can as an ashtray. He settled in, got comfortable, pulled up a movie on his interface that he was already halfway through. He thumbed absently at the soft keychain in his pocket.
Today, he thought. That’s what I told myself. No going back on it now.
*****
Jacob must have dozed off at some point. He woke up to an annoying beeping sound that kept going off. Beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep.
At first he thought it was the fire alarm that needed new batteries, but when he looked down he found it was coming from his interface, an angry red screen floating above his left forearm.
[EMERGENCY ALERT! PLEASE GET INSIDE YOUR HOME OR A SECURE BUILDING. DO NOT LEAVE UNTIL AN EVACUATION TEAM REACHES YOU. AUTHORITIES ARE WORKING WITH THE HEROES’ GUILD TO RESOLVE THE SITUATION.]
A robotic AI voice read out the message at the same time while it scrolled by on-screen.
Jacob stared at the words, reading them over several times. “Oh… That can’t be good.”
When he stood and looked around the surrounding cityscape for the source of this supposed disaster, he couldn’t see anything out of order except people in the street below reading the same message on bright red interface screens. He was about to call out to them. Maybe they knew more than him.
Then he looked up at the sky.
A blocky, black spacecraft descended through the gray cloud cover. Small at first, but growing larger by the second. It was big, Jacob realized. Not a trading vessel from another world. Not a diplomatic envoy.
A warship.
Others joined the first, more and more until there were too many to count. Dozens, at least. They slowed on approach as they neared the city, engines roaring and heaving massive jets of flame and smoke. They pulled their glistening dark hulls around to hover perpendicular against the ground. One settled right overhead, throwing the entire block in deep shadow.
For a moment that seemed to last forever, they just hung there, thrusters pointed at the ground.
Then large slots opened up along the sides of the ships with an overlapping groan of metal on metal, exposing innards pulsing with orange light. Teardrop-shaped pods shot out from there, jetting towards the ground, and blanketed the sky like a rain of meteors.
Jacob ran inside as one hit the roof of the building opposite and tore straight through. A moment later, the balcony was showered with debris, and the glass doors shattered, sending jagged bits of shrapnel everywhere.
Jacob took a shard in the back of his left shoulder, causing him to stumble. He slid inside the kitchenette and was able to reach over to pull it out. The jagged piece of glass came away red, and he threw it aside.
He listened to the sounds of chaos coming in from outside. Rumbling engines. Objects crashing into buildings. People screaming. And booming gunshots, too.
He tried to think.
That’s definitely an urgek war party, he thought, remembering footage he’d seen of the aliens. They were known for their aggression and love of war, so much so that most of their social hierarchy and even their System was modeled after success in battle.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
But why would they be here? I thought they were invading the Aribel colony right now. Isn’t that why they sent all those heroes?
Things clicked into place.
Ah. A distraction to lure strong fighters away so they can hit some soft targets on Earth.
Then the next thought hit him.
Becca.
Fuck. Why couldn’t the aliens have invaded half an hour ago?
I’m gonna need to go get her…
He called her through the interface, but she didn't pick up. Of course. There was no hesitation after that. He got up, fetched a baseball bat from his room that he kept for home defense, and ran out of the apartment. He saw several neighbors going down the stairs. They seemed caught between staying and running. He had no advice to give them, and didn’t answer their pleading looks as he passed them.
He only had one target in sight.
Becca, you dumb bimbo, you better not get yourself killed before I reach you.
Jacob leapt down the last half flight of stairs, tucked into a roll as he landed, and bounced to his feet. More people in the lobby. He pushed past them, ignoring their cries telling him to stop as he threw the doors open, and skidded out into the street.
He jumped back to avoid a car that nearly ran him over. It screeched past with one popped tire, throwing sparks into the air. The driver tried to take a turn up ahead but went too shallow and plowed straight into another parked vehicle. The blaring car alarm joined the cacophony of noise.
The doors of the opposite building crashed open as a huge shape bent to get through it, breaking off pieces of brickwork with its great bulk. The creature straightened, standing at least three meters tall and weighing maybe a ton or more. If Jacob had to guess, he would’ve said it was male. He wore a skirt made of interlocking metal pieces and the rest of his body was completely bare, rolls of fat covering a huge mass of muscle. His skin was dark gray, thick and elephantine, covered in many many scars—large and small ones, old and fresh ones, smooth and puckered ones. His face was flat and ugly, with little beady eyes and a sharp-toothed, lipless mouth spread in a wide grin. He carried a bulky, snub-nosed rifle in one ham fist and a wedge-shaped, rusted cleaver in the other. Both weapons were too large for most humans to be able to even pick up, let alone use.
Jacob had never seen an urgek before. Even at a medium distance, the alien’s overwhelmingly intimidating appearance was enough to stop him dead. Not with fear, exactly, but more like a morbid call of the void. An imminent death he couldn’t bring himself to look away from.
The urgek spotted him, and his smile widened. He spoke a few words in own cruel, guttural tongue, and leveled the rifle.
Jacob found his legs and ran. He heard the gun go off with a crack like thunder, felt little stones smatter against him, but he didn’t stop. More shots rang out. He didn’t turn around, jumping over a fallen trash can, weaving between parked cars. He made it to the end of the street, rounded a corner, and pressed himself against the wall, looking left and right.
No more of them in the immediate vicinity. Just humans running. A woman was trapped under a fallen light post, and a man who might have been her husband was trying in vain to lift it off her.
More pods were raining down over the city, endless. Their thrusters belched out enough smoke to slowly turn the sky from gray to black.
Jacob made out a single silver streak coming the other way, rising up towards one of the hulking warships. Barely a speck against all that black metal.
Starman. It had to be. The strongest hero Arcadia had left.
Well, he’s a fucking goner, Jacob thought bitterly. But he didn’t have time to worry about some random hero—he just needed to get to Becca in time. He turned away from the winking light and continued towards his destination, retracing the path he had walked with her last night in the opposite direction.
A cleaner bot, seemingly oblivious to the chaos, swept burning debris into a neat pile as though there was nothing strange about that. The Smile Boy had been reduced to a pile of rubble.
From occasional glimpses, Jacob noticed that the urgeks usually moved in groups of four or five. They went from building to building and shot or cut down anyone they came across. Whenever Jacob saw one, he took a turn onto another street and looped around. There were several detours. He lost precious time. Too much. Eventually he just thought ‘Fuck it’ and started ignoring them, just running past the brutes and hoping he didn’t get shot. No room to play it safe.
He had a few close calls, lost his bat when he fell over a cratered piece of sidewalk, but kept going. The bridge on Union Street was down, so he took the one on Ford Street. Almost there.
His legs burned from all the running, and he could hear his heart thumping in his ears.
He stumbled to a halt when he came to an intersection with several urgeks arrayed about it. One standing atop a car, denting the roof with his weight. Another coming out of a building with a human woman over his shoulder. A third poking at a corpse with the blunt tip of his cleaver. A fourth standing in the very center.
They were all turned away from him, thankfully. Most of them were looking up at a single man perched on a lightpost in a low squat. A tongue as long as an arm drooped from his big mouth, oddly pointy, and drool dripped from it liberally.
The man hardly looked human, but the crest he wore on his shirt marked him as a member of the Heroes’ Guild. The crest was red, meaning he was a C-Rank. Becca would’ve known who he was, but Jacob had no idea.
The hero flipped backwards off the light post, making a full revolution as he fell, and shot out his tongue mid-air like a whip when he faced them again. It extended a good ten meters, catching one of the urgeks in the throat with a violent spray of bluish blood. The hero landed on top of a car and jerked his head back to withdraw his organic weapon, but the urgek he’d impaled reached up and grabbed the tongue, holding it in place even as he bled out.
His compatriots opened fire, putting fist-sized holes in both the hero and the car he stood on as he was unable to escape. He died rather unceremoniously when the top of his head was blown off, his brain scattered across the pavement behind him.
Jacob was able to sneak past while the urgeks gathered around their dying friend, so the hero hadn’t died for nothing, at least.
Taking into a back alley further down the road, he could finally see the Sleeping Cat Bar’s neon sign flash at him. He jogged over, breathing heavy, and froze when he saw that the door had been torn off the hinges and big chunks hacked out of the walls to admit a clearly huge individual.
Fuck… Don’t be dead.
Jacob looked around for a weapon, finding only an old lamp that had been discarded in a pile of trash bags which he tore the shade off of, and descended the stairs. Inside the bar, most of the tables had been tossed aside, some splintered and broken. He immediately spotted the scarred back of an urgek. He had Mr. Beau up on the counter, a hand over his face to pin him down. His screams were muffled against the meaty palm. The urgek had already taken one of his arms off above the elbow with a blunt axe, and he was about to start on the other. Becca had pressed herself into a corner with a bottle in her hands, cowering in terror.
Jacob felt a twinge of compassion at seeing the old man’s suffering, but a bigger part of him was relieved. The alien was distracted. He had no chance in a fight, so he wouldn’t try if given an option. He walked around the taproom, calm, trying not to set the floor creaking, and bent down to pick Becca up by her arm. When she wouldn’t move, he yanked her roughly and got her standing.
When he looked up, he saw a pair of beady black eyes glaring at him from across the room. His axe hung frozen mid-swing, and he retracted it again as he slowly turned to face a new target.
“Aw, fuck.”
The urgek was on top of him in two great, floor-shaking strides. There was no time to move out of the way. The axe caught him in the chest and sent him flying. He landed against a wall and sank to the floor, the weapon still buried in him.
There was no pain. He felt nothing. Numb. Maybe a little hot. He couldn’t breathe. Liquid filled his lungs, his throat, his mouth. It dribbled out from between his lips. The urgek laughed—an odious, mocking sound. His vision was going blurry, but he could still just about make out Becca looking back at him in horror, hands clapped over her mouth.
Jacob wanted to tell her to run, but he only managed to splutter incomprehensibly, producing a red foam at the corners of his mouth.
Everything went blurrier, duller, darker. His improvised weapon rolled free of his hand.
Then there was only black.
Jacob Sorenson died.
*****
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[PRIME CANDIDATE AUTHORIZED]
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[INITIALIZING ADVANCED INTERFACE…]
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[BLESSING UNLOCKED]
[CHEAT THE HANGMAN]
*****
Jacob opened his eyes. He blinked at the strange text flashing before him, but it didn’t make it go away. It was inside his head. Eventually it faded on its own.
Cheat the Hangman. Funny name.
He shouldn’t have been awake. He shouldn’t have been alive. He’d died, hadn’t he? It was hard to remember. He still couldn’t breathe, so he tipped forward, letting blood spill out of his mouth. Eventually he was able to suck in a wet, rattling breath.
It hurt. But only a little. The pain was a distant thing, barely worth noticing.
The axe was still in him. He yanked it out. Heavy in his hand, but lighter than he’d expected. Or maybe he was stronger than he’d expected. Using the axe as a crutch, he worked his way up from the floor and took in the bar.
The urgek stood over him with a curious expression on his dumb stone slab of a face. He probably couldn’t believe Jacob was still alive either. Then he shrugged, and reached for a broad knife stuck through a metal ring welded to the top of his battle skirt.
Jacob swung the axe in a wide, sweeping arc. The urgek’s hand came off at the wrist, and the alien followed its arc through the air, mouth agape, before it landed on the floor a ways off.
Then he got mad.
Jacob tried to get off another swing, but the urgek threw his entire weight against him and pressed him up against the wall, trapping him in a wall of blubbery fat. With no room to maneuver, Jacob was forced to drop the axe. He wriggled and squirmed and bucked, but didn’t make any progress. With a deep growl and all the strength he could muster he just barely managed to work an arm free and grasped at the urgek for anything to grab hold of. His fingers bit into the alien’s thick skin and sank into his flesh easily with what felt like barely any resistance.
The urgek roared and pulled back, grabbing Jacob by his head and tossing him aside. He landed against a pile of tables, felt bones crack as the wood splintered beneath him. There was only a small alarm of pain. He was still functional. His right arm wouldn’t quite do what he told it to, though, and kept giving way when he put weight on it to stand. Instead he heaved his whole body forward and bounced up on the balls of his feet.
The urgek charged at him. He tried to sidestep, but his movements were too sluggish, and he got caught with a low haymaker that snapped his head back and rang his skull like a bell.
Jacob fell backward. The urgek stood over him, drew his knife. He said something in his language, then nodded almost respectfully.
A bottle smashed against the back of his head, spraying glass shards and clear alcohol. The urgek turned halfway and glanced down at Becca standing there, staring defiantly up at him with tears in her eyes and her lower lip quivering.
She flicked the head off a little plush keychain and held it up, shooting out a fine mist.
The urgek stumbled back with a stream of sharp alien syllables that might have been curses. He rubbed at his eyes to clear them.
Jacob got to his feet, popped his arm back into place with a sharp tug, and plunged his hands into the urgek’s back. Climbing up with one leap, he sank his teeth in his thick, muscled throat and tore out a bloody chunk. It tasted like rotten fish. He spat it out.
The urgek clamped a hand over the gaping wound and tried to shake Jacob off, but his grip could not be shaken. He tore gouges into his flesh with his fingers, again and again. Blue blood poured down the alien’s back. Slowly his strength went out of him. He went down on one knee, then fell forward, and Jacob stumbled off of him.
The body spasmed once, then went still. Jacob kicked at one fat gray arm. Nothing.
He looked up, saw Becca hugging herself, and went over to her.
“Are you… all right?” he asked. His voice sounded strange. Coarse. Raspy.
She just looked at him, then gave a small nod, barely perceptible.
“Good.”
Jacob wobbled, then fell over. His consciousness left him before he hit the floor.