Lacey drew a dagger into each hand, not that she had a lot of confidence in her ability to use them. She was just hoping she looked half as imposing to those wolves as Colt did as he drew that shiny overcompensating sword that the goblins had looted off of Monty’s bloated body. Colt took a slow step forward and to the side around Lacey so that they stood back-to-back, not that they knew much more about it.
Two wolves dove at Lacey’s right side and she swung the daggers in front of her only to get nipped at from the other side. It didn’t hurt through the leather panels, but she hadn’t even touched the ones she’d swung at on the other side.
When the wolves dove at her again, she gave up swinging and resorted to kicking instead. That was something she’d done before enough times that she didn’t totally suck at it. The wolf on her left yelped from the kick to his teeth, but the one on her right got a nip on her left hip where the leather didn’t cover very well. Lacey was finding a new reason to have leather armor more like what Kat had had. Kat’s leather pants had been enhanced with hardened leather panels, but still decent leather in other places too. Lacey only had her jeans, and they weren’t the armor-level kind of jeans that cowboys wore. They were comfy jeans that stretched when she ate too much at Colt’s mom’s house and back again when she got so busy she forgot to eat.
“Ow,” she winced, but then grit her teeth, ignoring her imaginings of dying out here and losing everything in some fluke between-the-rules rule that meant that if they died out here it was game over. Lacey’s paranoia whispered horrifically in her ear in Kat’s voice, “We’re so sorry. We had no idea how pathetic the two of you really were. We’ll be cancelling those contracts now. Thank you!” Lacey had read those books where the main character got super mad and was suddenly capable of great feats of weapon mastery to defeat a pack of wolves with a stick. This wasn’t one of those fantasy worlds. Lacey heard a yelp from behind her, but it was from Colt, not a wolf.
As the wolves dove at her again, she tried swinging her daggers and kicking. That had not been a good idea. The wolves might have missed her, but she was lucky she hadn’t tossed herself flat on her butt with that maneuver.
“I don’t suppose Kat is near enough to hear us scream for help is she?” Lacey swung at a wolf and got a nip on her shoulder for her efforts. How had it gotten up that high anyway? Was it aiming for her nose or her ears?
“It’s worth a try,” Colt muttered, his own efforts as bad as hers.
“Help!” Lacey screamed out, and while Colt was too proud to join her, he didn’t stop her either. “Heeeeeelllllpppp!!!!!” It turned out that Lacey could scream and swing a dagger or scream and kick at one of the wolves. Neither harmed the wolves at all, but she liked to think it spooked them a little.
“I got one!” Colt yelled out suddenly. “I mean I hit one. It got back up, but I did hit it with the sword!”
A dark spot slithered out of the woods and there was a yelp, followed by snarls that cut off abruptly. Lacey swung randomly, cursing her lack of close-combat training. Every self-respecting geek girl who dreamed of entering another world had taken dagger training or sword training before getting isakaied, right? Then again, Colt hadn’t taken sword classes either. All Lacey had to defend herself was a few self-defense classes where her main takeaway had been to carry mace and use it.
“Did you hit another one?” Lacey asked around gulps for air from screaming for help.
“No, did you?” Colt grunted and she could feel him swing behind her.
“No, but something took out one of the wolves on my side,” Lacey fretted, kicking out at an approaching muzzle.
“Great, something bigger is fighting over us for dinner,” Colt ground out as a blur of a form slid into a hole in the wolves.
“If you’d told me you wanted to get to town, I’d have offered an escort,” came the drawl of Kat’s very welcome voice.
“My hero?” Colt made room for her as they created a triangle out of their backs. It made it easier to focus on a smaller pie shape of snarling muzzles.
“We’re higher level than you, and you didn’t seem worried,” Lacey complained, kicking a muzzle that was aimed at Colt’s thigh.
“It’s not about levels so much as its about skills,” Kat grunted, two daggers flying out at the circling wolves as Kat also drove a dagger down into the skull of a wolf trying to dart between them for Lacey’s juicy bits. “Though I do miss my triple digit dexterity a lot right now.”
Another circling wolf went down in a pile of tumbling fur that ended on a yelp. Lacey was just glad that the yelp didn’t come from her or Colt or even Kat, now that Lacey was starting to like the gal.
“That shadow out there is showing off for you,” Kat grinned at the pile of shadows that was lunging at the next wolf. “I might have been okay with losing levels to try out your dungeon, but Shadow refused to do so. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t bring him into the dungeon with me.”
“That wasn’t my top worry at the moment,” Lacey lunged toward a sound to her left and ended up sitting back on her butt, as it smacked down onto the forest floor.
Stolen story; please report.
The small kitten that had nested in Kat’s hair was not so small anymore. Lacey panted out a bit of panic as the big black cat placed a huge paw between Lacey’s sprawled legs. For a whole second that felt like an eternity, Lacey forgot how to breathe. The next moment, the top of a huge panther head lowered so that it rubbed into her chest. What she thought might be a growl turned into a purr as it pushed its head under her arm.
“Aw, he likes you!” Kat exclaimed. “Now I know that you’re good people, Lacey.”
“I’m good people too,” Colt reached out to pat the massive head and found himself looking at a tail that held a mouth and it wasn’t alone.
“You?” Kat tilted her head at Colt to say, “not so much.”
The cat turned its head, and Lacey could swear Shadow was laughing at her best friend.
“Now see, that isn’t nice, Shadow,” Kat admonished the cat that had to outweigh the tall woman by at least twofold. “Guys can be nice too.”
Lacey dared to scratch behind one of Shadow’s ears, the awe of the experience outweighing the terror of facing wolves. Shadow purred but seemed to glare at Colt over Lacey’s shoulder.
“That’s true,” Kat frowned.
“You talk to each other?” Colt said, very carefully.
“Sure, he’s my familiar and probably my best friend,” Kat explained, pulling her backpack off her shoulder to pull out a wad of fabric that she then used to wipe the blood from her knives.
“That must be why he likes Lacey. She’s my best friend,” Colt reasoned, perhaps a bit irrationally.
“Good thing Lacey has a good scream,” Kat said, bumping her hip against Shadow as he continued to rub against Lacey. “We weren’t far away when we heard it. I wouldn’t worry about it though. You aren’t expected to have skills and stats like a normal adventurer should. You have a different skillset that is just as important.” Then Kat paused and cocked her head to the side. “Though maybe less important outside the dungeon. We should make sure you have escorts during day passes, okay?”
“Yeah,” Colt scowled in a way that almost looked like he was trying to smile. “Different skills. That almost sounds like it’s not the size that matters but the skill to wield the sword.”
“Oh, size matters,” Kat sent a knowing look to Lacey, who heroically suppressed a grin. “Don’t kid yourself on that one.”
“We’re talking about swords, right?” Colt squinted at Kat like he couldn’t believe she’d had the nerve to insult him. Then he curled his lip like he was wondering if she had insulted him or was just innocent.
“Yep!” Kat gave him a thumbs up with a perfectly straight face until she turned her back to him and gave Lacey a look that crumbled Lacey’s determination to be a good friend.
Lacey sat in the woods, an oversized black panther with three mouthy tails in her lap begging for scritches as her charming best friend got schooled by a tall girl with a mouth to match her familiar and then some. Lacey’s howling laughter should have brought more predators, but the panther in her lap was more than enough to discourage anything out there.
“Where have you been all my life, Kat?” Lacey wiped away tears to say.
“That’s my line,” Colt complained, but he didn’t mean it. Probably.
“Probably being tortured by all the people not like us at all, who don’t get my sense of humor,” Kat replied with a deadpan look that turned into a sweet smile for Colt. It turned right back into her deadpan look when she thought he wasn’t looking.
“How far is this town?” Colt tried to change the subject.
“You were almost there,” Kat patted his shoulder consolingly. “They probably heard the screams, but since players respawn when they die, the town doesn’t rush to their rescue as much as you might think.”
“Great,” Colt licked his lips and pressed them together for a frown.
“If you want to grab an ale, we can stop by the pub,” Kat offered.
“We were headed for a store or maybe somewhere we could hire someone to make some signs for our dungeon entrances?” Lacey explained.
“Oh good,” Kat sighed out, reaching out a hand to help Lacey to her feet. “I’m not fond of one of the guys in the pub who keeps calling me Kitty Kat. Shadow wants to eat him, but that’s really bad for morale and you just never know how stories can warp and change and then all of a sudden there’s witch hunts and we have to reset servers…. But stores? That I can do.”
“Some guy calls you Kitty Kat?” Colt bristled.
Kat thought for a moment, then looked Colt up and down and shook her head. “Nope, don’t know what I was talking about. We don’t need ale, right?”
“Uh,” Colt stuttered, a look on his face like he wondered if he should be offended.
Kat took Lacey’s shoulder and steered her down the trail with a whisper, “Like I need another male wanting to start a war because someone called me funny names.”
“That happen to you often?” Lacey tried to stay serious, but it was hard.
“More often than you’d think, but then with my name maybe not,” Kat confided. “It’s short for Kattrianna, not Katherine, so it’s not like I was going to go by Kathy or something. Still I’m glad for it since it could have been worse. I could have been a boy and been named after some studly animal or something.”
“Like Colt?” he gawked at her.
“Yeah!” she snapped her fingers like it had just occurred to her, but Lacey was getting suspicious of her innocent act. “So you’d know what it was like, right? Not that my mom ever let anyone tease me about my name. My mom is great, by the way.”
“Mine too,” Colt crowed, grasping at the commonality that normally made girls swoon over him.
“Uh-huh,” she cast a glance back at him, then ducked her head to Lacey. “Dad’s going to hate him on sight, but I’m running out of ways to turn him off. Is he always this persistent?”
“Mostly, but this is dogged even for him,” Lacey mused out loud, caught in the storm that was Kat.
“Dogged,” Kat huffed a nervous laugh. “Get it? Cats and Dogs? No?”
“No,” Lacey frowned.
“It’s just that my dad is a level 75 assassin and he’s been pretty power-mad with how he’s been testing new assassins on their ability to camp any guy I start to like and I’m pretty sure that poor Colt is a goner a hundred times over if we can’t turn off his amazing charm,” Kat whispered desperately to Lacey.
“Oh,” Lacey’s mirth dulled quickly, wondering how serious Kat really was. “Wait, really?”
“Oh yeah.” Kat fanned her face. “And your best friend is charming enough to melt an iceberg, which I am definitely not. Tell me he’s just a flirt and you two are a thing so I can turn this gusher off.”
Lacey gave Kat a look that was all she needed to groan out. Lacey looked back over her shoulder to find Colt being stalked by Shadow who changed back and forth between the cutest little kitten you could ever see to the displacer beast that had saved them from a pack of wolves. And Kat was worried about her dad? The big version of the cat caught Lacey’s eye and there was that mirth again, like it could understand everything she was thinking.