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Chapter 19: Lone Ranger
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Time beyond time ago before the great wars of gods and men, Myra was ruled only by the ancient creatures, beasts, and fiends of untold legends. Dragons and wyverns in the Eyrie, not those grand philosophers we’ve come to know of Daganaan, but vicious, terrible nightmares of scale and wing; Umbras, the midnight panthers of the forests, wardens of darker, more terrible nightmares; Majin and Dream-Terrors, bewitchers of mind and spirit; Mulmuns to crumple mountains underfoot and reshape continents in their fury; and of the great desert deities, feared and worshipped even in the face of true divinity: the Dwellers, fathers of the sand. ~ From “Myra: A Pre-Protectorate History” by Avicus Nividicus Anticellus, 431 A.P.
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The pointed tip of the tall kite shield caught in the ground as Logan leapt, yanking his arm, and causing him to spin and fall to the ground. He felt the heat of the fire as it passed uncomfortably close to his face, a warm tingling that escalated to an alarming burn, then dissipated as the mass of fire flew by, landing on the hard dirt behind him where it sputtered and went out.
“Leave him to me, use the paralytic arrows on the others behind the wagon, don’t kill them!” Logan shouted over his shoulder as he pushed himself to his feet, returning the kite shield to his inventory.
He removed a bundle of the paralytic arrows that Ryan had so conveniently tied together and flung them towards the wagon; his strength stat of four sent them arcing through the air, easily landing in Huck’s outstretched hand. He nodded to Logan, then promptly unwrapped the bundle, split the arrows with Ryan, and ducked into the back of the wagon to deal with the men to the rear.
For all the leader’s pomp, his flame spell wasn’t very impressive. It was magic though, and that worried Logan. He’d been expecting to encounter something of the sort sooner or later, but seeing it firsthand still rattled him.
What other tricks could he have up his sleeve?
Hands free and standing, Logan sprinted towards the man, heart pounding. He’d close the distance before the leader could cast anything else; if the first attack was any indication, then he just had to get there before the man finished the next incantation.
Confident in his Olympic sprinter levels of speed, Logan dashed forwards, palming a throwing knife as he saw the leader’s mouth start moving in another chant. He threw the knife mid stride, causing the leader to dodge, interrupting his cast. The thrill of the fight suffused his mind; fighting monsters in the forest was one thing, but it was dull, repetitive. The rabbits, though they could be dangerous if underestimated, posed little challenge to him now; even the sworps and boars, stronger, tougher, and more complex, lacked the intelligence, the dynamic tactics present in human conflict that lit the fire of competition in his belly.
He wanted to fight, to explore the extent of his newfound power. A bloodlust rose in Logan, one that he hadn’t felt in his forest hunts with Ryan, threatening to overpower his rational mind. It had been building, he realized, since his first encounter with these bandits in the Firestone Inn. He’d stopped Ryan from killing the man who’d hit Huck… but a part of him had wanted to let him do it; or perhaps, he’d wanted to do it himself.
He’d been passive for much of his past life, choosing to avoid confrontation for the most part. There were moments however, when the precarious tether that bound him to the standards of civilized comportment flickered; in those moments, he desired nothing more than to assert his will, to judge and punish. Now that he was here, in a new, seemingly lawless world with a clear enemy before him, a part of him, an ugly, abused, hateful part of him, longed for human violence: to brutalize those who’d hurt him and his friends.
A quiet, calm voice—the voice of reason—echoed in his mind.
Do better. Don’t expose Ryan to this. Preserve him, for as long as you can.
Ryan’s face, smiling as he carelessly ran up to Huck and Logan with his grandfather’s arrows, dripping in boiling Steam Fish blood, flashed in his memory. Ryan’s laughter, pure, and unadulterated by cruelty, slowly recovered over long years from the moment of his mother’s death. Logan remembered the boy surprising him, jumping out at him with arms raised and tackling him to the ground on his first morning staying with the Haydren family. They’d taken him in, made him one of them, given him something to hold on to in the turbulence of losing his entire world.
He remembered Ryan’s face as he glowered at the bandit leader from the wagon’s bench; the pain, the hate, the desire to hurt; that darkness threatened to overwhelm him.
I won’t let him fall into this pit. I’ll show him an alternative to base slaughter and an eye-for-an-eye facsimile of justice.
Finally, Logan was upon the man, barreling towards him with incredible momentum. Mere feet from where the bandit leader stood, sword drawn, face contorted in an angry snarl, Logan leapt several feet into the sky; his figure concealed, silhouetted by the shining sun above at his back. Simultaneously summoning a thick net—which he threw downwards over the man, its weighted corners spreading as it descended—and a broad, tall tower shield, he tucked himself into a ball and fell through the air like a crashing boulder.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
The bandit looked up, blinded, stepping backwards, and cutting at the falling net. There was nothing he could do, however, as Logan slammed into him like a meteor, the weight of the shield and his body crumpling the man’s defense.
Logan released the shield and rolled forwards on his arms, shoulder, and back: a move he’d learned as a kid when he’d tried getting into parkour. He cleared the fallen man who lie in a heap of tangled limbs, rope, and shield, and leapt to his feet. The leader’s sidekick, the one whom they’d initially spotted beside the cart, charged at him with sword raised overhead.
To his credit, he didn’t flee from Logan and his outrageous display of inventory abuse.
“Your conniving ways are finally paying off, Logan! I guess you found a way to exploit usefully, Congrats!”
“You’re lucky that Master Logan’s superior intelligence is enough to compensate for your inadequate salvo of abilities, worm,”
“’paying off,’ that was pretty good actually! Congratulations right back ‘atcha, Mikey; and Susie, pipe down,” Logan thought as he dodged to his right, spawning a white rabid rabbit hide blanket in his left hand, unfurling and throwing it at the oncoming bandit.
The large blanket caught him square in the face, catching his sword and blinding him, providing Logan with the perfect opportunity to produce a heavy wooden club and bludgeon the man over the head, knocking him unconscious.
“Pipe down? Neither of these guys look like pipes… are you referring to your club?” Mikey asked, his joy at properly using an idiom quickly fading at the new, perplexing figure of speech.
“Nope, strike one. You’re a thousand years too early to challenge me, Mikey,” he thought, giving it his best anime-sensei impersonation.
Logan tore the blanket from the man’s collapsed body, returning it to his inventory and replacing it with a cord of rope that he used to bind the bandit’s wrists and ankles. Considering for a moment, he opened the man’s jaws and gagged his mouth with the rope, too. Can’t be too careful.
He moved to the other fallen body—the bandit leader, still pinned beneath his shield—and repeated the process, returning the net and heavy tower shield to his inventory before tying and gagging him. He dragged the bandit leader to the other man, hurrying in an effort to rejoin Huck and Ryan as quickly as possible, and sat them against one another, back-to-back. He tied them together with rope, searched their clothing for concealed knives, then placed their swords in his inventory and stepped back, inspecting his work. They looked like two villains from Scooby Doo, all tied up and de-masked at the end of an episode.
He'd done it; he’d neutralized them without killing or even significantly hurting them… he should be pleased, and for the most part he was, but a part of him itched to do more, to punish them for their insolence: to make them pay.
He pulled his mind away from the thought, and the more reasonable part of him laughed at how edgy he sounded, even to himself. You laugh, but you know that part of you is there; you know it’s real. He shook his head and turned away, taking off at a sprint towards the wagon.
Arriving behind the wagon, Logan saw several men in boiled leather and scrappy animal fur and chainmail armor strewn prone in various positions across the dirt road, arrows protruding from legs, shoulders, and arms. He noted that they each had only one arrow in them, and in nonvital locations at that; the paralysis extract had done its work. There were, however, slightly fewer than he recounted seeing previously. He cast a curious glance up the wagon’s bed at his side.
Huck and Ryan looked down at him, bows lowered at their sides. Huck's expression was surprisingly bright, but Ryan's was dark and stormy.
“We watched what you did ta’ those two, quite the show, kid! You’ve definitely got a’ flare for the dramatic in ya’,” Huck said, hopping off the wagon’s back and clapping Logan on the shoulder.
Ryan stood forlornly, staring at the road.
“Two of ‘em ran off into the trees over there,” he said, gesturing towards the forest on the north side of the road with his bow. “But the rest are waiting for you and the rope. What’re you planning to do with ‘em?”
Logan clasped his forearm, then released it and looked up at Ryan, still gazing over the field of paralyzed bodies.
“I have something in mind,” he said, walking towards then stepping up onto the wagon, positioning himself next to Ryan.
He placed an arm around Ryan’s shoulders, the tail of the boy’s coonskin cap resting in the crook of Logan’s elbow, as Huck began collecting their assailants' weapons.
“You did well, buddy,” he said, and paused for a moment, considering his next words. “I’m about to say something pretty nuts… that mean’s crazy. I have a voice in my head. Well, two actually. They’re something to do with my powers, and the reason that I came here from Earth.”
Ryan looked up at him then, bemused, but curious, the iron curtain of dejection that'd found its insidious perch on his countenance beginning to crack.
Logan smiled, then continued.
“I can even talk to them; their names are Mikey and Susie. Mikey loves westerns, they’re a kind of movie, which is like a story that you can watch, kind of like a performance,” he said, trailing off as he realized that this could only just be confusing Ryan more.
“Anyways, in westerns, there are always heroes and villains. The heroes are called cowboys, and they wear hats like this,” he said, and pulled the Nostets hat from his inventory.
He gently took off Ryan’s coonskin cap, handing it to him, and placed the Nostets hat on his head, pulling it into place.
Ryan felt at its brim, fingers careful and reverent, then looked up at Logan, waiting for him to continue.
“That’s why I bought it; it reminded me of home. But now I have a better reason for it. In situations like these,” Logan swept an arm in front of him, gesturing to the men lying in the dirt, “a true cowboy would be honorable, and teach them a lesson through a creative punishment instead of hurting them worse than they had to.
Logan cocked his head down towards Ryan, who looked up at him, neck craning. A mischievous smile crept onto Logan’s lips, and, like light splitting dark clouds, Ryan smiled back.
This is worth doing the right thing for; be better, for him. A memory flashed in his mind, his brother’s face, warm and smiling, dark chestnut eyes shining. Give him what Alex never had.
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Some time and several holes later, twelve heads in two lines of six protruded from the ground on either side of the road, facing each other. A thick wood shaving, for Logan only carried three spoons and didn’t want to give any of the men an unfair advantage over the others, rested on the dirt under each chin, within biting distance.
Logan clapped his hands together, dusting them off and beaming broadly at their work. Huck and Ryan stood to either side of him. Ryan matched his grin, and Huck shook his head.
“You’re a strange one, alright. I don’t know where you get these ideas, but I’m starting to think you’re worse than the bandits.”
“They’ll be fine, they can dig themselves out… I think. Plus, one of them has magic!”
He’d removed the gags from the two unconscious men but blindfolded all of them. They could see the sticks underneath, he was sure. They’d set the qortle free and added the cart to Logan’s inventory, leaving the road clear save for the human decorations adorning its sides.
“A true cowboy is creative and fair in his justice,” Logan said, slapping Ryan’s back and flicking the brim of his Nostets hat.
“We should be on our way,” Huck said, mounting the wagon, Logan and Ryan following behind.
“Whack-a-mole!” Mikey exclaimed as they boarded the wagon and resumed their long journey back to Woolam.