I avoided tripping as I got down from the wagon avoiding that stupid lip and not bothering to hand her the reins.

I already apologize and give her the number for this loop.

I exchanged the hip pouch for the canteen and began walking towards the front of the train. Jogging was perhaps the better term for it.

As I passed the wagon directly in front of ours, I tipped my hat to Mr. Wellworth in greeting.

Six people wouldn’t drink from my canteen when I offered them water. Five of those would when I offered them water and a few gold coins to tell me if it tasted funny.

It wasn’t hard to get Mr. Wellworth to admit he’d poisoned my canteen as I pushed the barrel of my gun between his legs after dragging him away from the camp.

He fancied Mrs. Kine and thought if I was dead she’d be desperate to marry whomever would have her. He’d heard about her family situation. He’d gone into a whole monologue about how it wasn’t right that I should get a woman when he couldn’t.

It had added up over time. I don’t know if they had autism or the like here, but I was- the previous owner of this body had been different.

Gus said I was bookish when I paid him. That I didn’t fit in with the others in the evenings. I didn’t even have to pay him for that bit of information. Gus told me the say things paid or not. He was honest and blunt with just about everything.

Mr. Wellworth’s issue wasn’t so much with me as with the situation in the New World. Namely that the majority of people that traveled to the newly discovered continent were the single sons of wealthy families.

Young men arrived with wealth, the best education money could afford, cards, looms, and investment capital.

They were looking for business opportunities, power, and wives.

The east coast was hardly colonized, though it was established. There were adult children of marring age born here, but unless their hands were secured as part of business contracts, they almost all exclusively married young men newly arrived to the continent.

Mr. Wellworth was only fifteen, two years older that I was. But here that put him five years past when he was expected to be married. That was a decade of Earth time.

Not so bad when you thought about it, until you realized that women were rarer the farther west you went.

“Good day sir,” I said to him touching the tip of my hat. Another of those stupid coincidences that gave me shivers.

He didn’t sneer but part of the rant had been his hatred of calling ‘all of them’ masters.

Apparently that was a title equivalent of Doctor or Engineer. It was an earned title from some accredited institution of some kind. A title he did not have by way of circumstance, birth, and wealth.

Since I’d used the title sir to address him, he was meant to respond in kind.

“Good day Master Kine,” he said with a smile that completely hid his feeling.

Gus began to pack his pipe when I asked to speak with him.

Dave left the driver’s bench without a word and I climbed up and took his seat. It was odd looking at the open road without a wagon in front of me.

“What I can do for you?” Gus asked.

He was another one who disliked calling me master. Then again it likely had less to do with me and more to do with trying to safely transport the rich, ignorant of the dangers here in the new world, when they rarely wanted to listen to anyone beneath their station.

“As you likely heard, Mrs. Kine hasn’t been traveling well. A small issue with an unsettled stomach. I want to rent a hack to collect medicinal herbs. What would you charge me for something like that?

If I mentioned I was an alchemist, which he already knew the price would go up. If I said it was Mrs. Kine with the problem it was cheaper. If I complemented him in any way the price went up. If we talked about other things first, it cost more.

Since this was the fastest way to get a horse, I’d stuck to the method though I did try variations to see how low I could get the price.

We haggled a bit, except I knew what to say and when.

“Two silver sir? If I may be blunt, that is, well it’s outrageous. I wish to save my legs, not pull a stump or plow a field. It’s light work for the animal, nothing strenuous. Yet I’m not so much a fool as to miss that you’re the only one with animals to rent at all. How about I leave the remained of the mixture with you. If there are others with stomach problems you can charge a few pennies for the remedy?”

He was the one with the stomach problems, which is why he agreed to lower the price to a silver penny.

Gus nodded to Henry who dropped back before bringing Wesley up. The spare horses followed the first wagon on long leads.

“Ah, Henry. Perhaps you could join me. A second set of eyes would do wonders.”

Ironically if I said nothing Gus would tell Henry to ride with me, yet if I asked for help, he kept Henry back.

I needed the horse after we crossed the river, but it was better to rent it now and then again the next day at the same cheap price we’d already established.

Since I’d found the herbs along the road before, I traveled around on Wesley doing my best to practice harvesting them, and learning to ride better.

I claimed I it was light work but twice I took Wesley far enough away from the road to really let him run.

The interesting thing is there was no training Wesley. He was reset just like everything else every loop, but I could train myself.

Twice he’d killed me. Or rather I fell from the saddle and died. Before I learned how to shed Henry I’d asked for riding advice and the man was happy to give it. For a few coins he was willing to let the horses run as well so I could learn to ride them at speed.

Some of the plants I collected were for teas and poultices, though most had alchemical uses that were currently beyond me.

When we came to a section of road where I’d yet to find herbs I picked a direction I hadn’t yet searched and spent some time there looked through underbrush for leaves or plants that were growing much more familiar as the loops stacked up.

Even when it was the first time visiting a place I was much better at spotting plants from the book.

When I harvested the plants I did my best to repeat the name and any notes written on the page.

I’d long ago memorized the book but I still went through the process of repeating the information during collection.

That night as we made camp I considered killing Mr. Wellworth. Mostly I poisoned him. It was easy. There were stacks of bowls. Tonight he got the seventh bowl. The poison was already in the bowl when the stew was ladled out.

On the days when I killed him I always pestered Henry about buying some of Mr. Wellsworth’s animals on my behalf. I explained the awkwardness. That Mrs. Kine had caught the man trying to look down her dress, and that she had made me promise to have no dealings with the man.

When Mr. Wellsworth was accusing me of poisoning him while dying from immense abdominal pain, it was Henry that spoke to Gus about the previous incident.

My take away was that Gus knew I’d done it but there was no proof and it wasn’t like I was going to repeat the incident, not unless someone else was leering at my wife.

It did leave me with the problem of being a known killer though on the loop that would matter. It was something to think about. Something else to keep trying variations of.

This loop I let him live and felt charitable for it.

I spoke to Mrs. Kine after dinner, letting her explain the complexities of the corporate system that seemed to be the powers on this world. There were royals and nobles, and old families that mattered, but they mattered because of their ownership stakes, or controlling percentages in different corporations. I tried to discuss different topics every night so that I was better educated about the world.

For her part Mrs. Kine seemed to genuinely enjoy educating me as compared to showing off her knowledge. It was a trait I admired.

When it came time to cross the river I informed Gus I was going to cross with the first set of guards and spend some time in the deep woods while they moved some rocks around making the trip across safe for wagon wheels and onya.

I would return by nightfall.

Once over the river I followed the road, which was more carvings on tree trunks than obvious path here, until we reached the downed trees.

There were smaller trees. I’d seen at least a thousand acres of burned forest from a hilltop on my river vacation. Most trees though were ancient things huge and ungainly.

Two of the trees trunks had to be eight meters wide. They must have used magic or ropes because the trunks were not cut. The trees had fallen over. One was old and dead, but two had their roots up as if they were blown over.

The lookout for the ambushers was down stream of the crossing. When we reached the river crossing he headed back to the main camp.

I tortured him a few times. The ward line was part of his class. He could set two points, no more than forty strides apart and create a plane. If any other human broke the plane, even with a finger, he was alerted.

He rode back to the main camp and alerted Jack Walsh, their leader. I knew him as Hatless the dice roller. They were called the John Walsh Gang but John was Jack’s brother and he was busy with ‘mage business,’ as Bob called it and rarely left the outpost.

I entered the woods near the downed trees. It was the best place to cross the ravine and I had to walk Wesley down and back up. He didn’t handle the steep incline well.

I circled to the north of the road a good distance after I passed the downed trees.

Hatless, only had a certain number of choices, and the wide circling arc took me past every decision his dice helped him with. It was a path that they would never cross.

If they spotted tracks on another route they’d follow it.

I left Wesley tied loosely to a tree near a creek where he could reach both grass and water. I rubbed my face and hair with mud to take the shine out.

Their were thirty people at the main camp. The ambush party of sixteen was already gone when I arrived headed to their temporary camp to plan the attack.

There were six wagons in various states of disrepair and four onya. I don’t know where the other lizards were or if they hooked wagons to wagons or perhaps this was their home base and they never intended to leave.

I crawled around behind the big dead tree and tried not to shit myself when Smoking Man approached an hour later, drunk and arguing with someone in camp. He pissed on the other side of the big tree I was hiding behind.

The man was an absolute unit and destroyed me in every fight I faced him. Fireballs and exploding arrows were proof enough of magic, but a four hundred pound slab of muscle moving around with the speed and grace of a gymnast was just as devastating.

I flexed my hand and took a few deep breaths.

When the singing started I wiped my forehead of sweat and then scrubbed my hands on my thighs.

The arguing picked up, and then the singing stopped.

That was my cue.

The sun was still up but more than a few of them were in their blankets napping in preparation of what came next. Either the ambush party didn’t return, in which case these veterans, the heavy hitters, would go to war. Or the wagons and women were brought to them.

The Boy was the key to this whole thing. He wasn’t a heavy hitter. He never once did anything except run if the fighting started. But he didn’t drink or smoke and he was more observant than the others combined. This plan only really worked once I started killing him first.

I picked up the three stones from where they always waited and crawled on.

In position I waited for him to turn his head to look over at Fat Man who’d just laughed.

I didn’t watch them, just waited for the laugh.

I tossed the stone and then made sure I was completely hidden. It struck the dead tree some thirty paces away.

There was only so much room behind the tree I was using for cover, and he had spotted me before after throws. If he had magic it was some sort of perception thing. I could hardly hear the stone hit and I was listening for it, but it was enough that he went to check.

I didn’t breathe, my hand on the knife’s hilt.

He passed me, looking to his left when I was to his right.

The trick was not to alert him, more than it was to kill him quietly. It was his struggles or screams that gave me away.

I didn’t watch the ground as I’d already cleared the twigs and sticks away.

Two bent knee, rolling foot steps and the knife went into his neck as I jerked down. I was always surprised how quickly the hot blood washed over my hand.

I grabbed his face with my left hand as I jerked the knife out and pulled him toward me and over my left knee as I dropped my right knee to the ground.

He kicked and thrashed, but bled out quickly. There was nothing more than frothy burbling where there were sometimes screams.

It wasn’t searching the bodies if you knew where the loot was. Left pocket for the small folding knife I’d need later for the sleeping bag. Belt I might need at the ambush site for a tourniquet and left boot- I struggled a bit pulling it off.

On the top of his left foot under a knitted wool sock was a small card. It was no longer bonded after his death and I could rip it in half just like Mrs. Kine had said. It went behind the tree to be picked up later.

I scrubbed my hand on the back of his shirt and then used a bit of dirt to make sure I had no blood.

My hands had slipped on the knife before.

Fat Man and a few others were gambling.

I had the most opportunities to kill him. He went to his low tent twice. First for alcohol, and then for his pipe. Then he went to piss.

The thing was, The Boy was quiet and unimportant. People didn’t notice if he went missing. They noticed if the loudest man in camp wasn’t there or wasn’t being an asshole.

The next two were relatively easy, but I had to wait for the Fat Man to go to his tent.

One of the men in the tents wasn’t actually sleeping, or was a light sleeper. I nicknamed him Sleepy.

If he thought the noise in the other tents was Fat Man he didn’t come out to see what was happening.

Once Fat Man’s head was in the tent I crawled forward. I had time, but I was still worried.

“Where the fuck is it? I swear, if someone put their hands-” I didn’t listen, instead I pulled the knot apart keeping this end of the tent closed. She had tied it in a bow and that fucked with me more than I wanted to admit.

I never named her, it didn’t feel right, and yet, I didn’t hesitate.

Knife in mouth I crawled forward, pressing my back up against the top of the very low tent and putting my hands and feet outside of the smaller sleeping body.

I put the knife horizontally across her throat and then rested my weight on my left hand.

I took a deep breath and then shoved my right hand and the knife forward. The knife bit into her throat and slid up. I never even thought about being right handed any more.

More blood, more struggling, but this time I was clamped down on her making sure she didn’t disturb the tent’s shape by rolling into a side and taking the stakes out.

She was dead as I waited for Fat Man to find his bottle. Everything smelled like blood now. I knew I was covered in it.

I don’t know what her story was. She would shoot to kill with a bow, or charge me with a spear or sword. Once when the fight turned into into hunting men, she had a crossbow.

But she was always in this tent unless the ambush party failed to return. If they did return she stayed in the tent and didn’t partake in any of their- fun.

I assumed it was a story I didn’t want to know. A victim doing what she had to do to survive.

Unlike all but one of the others she had neither cards nor coin, which led me to think I’d killed an innocent person.

Again.

That I’d come here knowing I would do it.

The problem was I couldn’t figure out a way to do this without killing her. She would call out and fight no matter what I did.

“There you are my sneaky bitch,” Fat Man said, bottle found at last.

I waited fifteen seconds and backed out of the tent.

The next tent over didn’t have it’s flaps knotted.

I crawled in, lined the knife up and with both hands cut into his throat.

Whatever magic this one had it was like Kevlar skin or something. The knife never wanted to bite unless I used a steep angle and a lot of force.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He never struggled or kicked, only tried to pull the knife out. I kept my left hand on his face pressing into his eyes and he did his best to get that off, never realizing he only only moments left.

I rolled him to the left, flipped the ground cover away and pulled the thin metal container out of it’s hole in the ground.

Purse of coins, two golden dice, four cards, and some other things that didn’t matter.

I put everything in the purse and put the purse just inside the edge of the tent to pick up later.

Skip Wolverine in the next tent for now. He too had the Kevlar skin thing, except I couldn’t punch the knife through his at all. Worse any wounds he suffered healed horribly fast. He could literally out heal a fireball from one of the wands.

Previous to the poison I’d killed him at the end when I had the wands.

Poisoner, his neighbor, had a poison kit in his pouch, which he kept down near his feet.

Knife to the knot, then carefully use the very sharp folding pocket knife I took from the boy to cut into the sleeping bag.

He’d wake if I disturbed him too much.

Slow was best here as I had time.

Eventually I got the leather case free. There were coins and cards and four small vials.

The third one was the one I needed.

I moved back to Wolverine

I used the included hollow glass tube the size of a pencil.

I put it in the vial, put my finger over the end, and then very carefully held it over Wolverine’s mouth.

He licked his lips.

While I waited for him to die I very carefully put the poison vial and the glass tube back in the case.

I’d killed myself twice by trying to carry the poison in the open and then accidentally touching the business end of the glass tube.

Once he was dead I rolled him up and like the other man, though he was much heavier. Beneath him, in a hollow in the ground, he had a metal box the size you might get holiday cookies in.

He had a four pages of poetry from a printed book, a purse of silver and copper coins, and six cards.

He had another purse of silver and copper in his boot but it wasn’t worth the time.

I circled around to the other side of the tents and killed Poisoner and two more sleepers with the poison before Fat Man came back for his pipe.

While Fat Man convinced himself someone must have moved this things around, I kill two more sleeping men and poisoned two bottles of alcohol, each in empty tents.

Wait in this empty tent that smells like BO for far to long for Smoking Man to stumble his drunk ass to the tents.

He crawls in and passes out for a bit. I can kill him now but then I have to roll him over and he has more muscle than any two of the others combined.

Fat Man finds what he’s looking for and heads back to gamble.

Smoking Man hiccups a bit of puke up, crawls out of his tent, projectile vomits like a fire hose.

There it is.

He drops into his own filth for a bit, then pukes again. This wakes him up enough he crawls back into his tent but lays on his back this time, his leather purse tucked between his belt and stomach has his cards and coins.

A bit of poison and he won’t ever wake. I double it though just in case, because I never stay to watch him die. It stinks too bad.

In the the tents that left only one man alive. Sleepy, the man pretending to be asleep, second from the end in the third row, if you could call the haphazard layout of tents, rows.

Loot collected in a pillow case I headed back into the woods to wait. Once people were on fire they didn’t make the same choices. The tents had burned up several times.

It took about twenty minutes for the gambling to break up and the guards to change.

Two of the returning guards went directly to their tents, but both of them had bottles of alcohol hidden there that I’d already poisoned.

Stinky went straight to the privy to shit.

The privy was a bench made of split logs nailed together and sanded down.

There was no back to it and no tarp or walls.

This guy didn’t have the tough skin, but he heard me approach more than half the time.

The sword, like most of the camp’s weapons, was laying around the camp in the open for easy access.

It wasn’t anything I’d have thought a sword would be. Maybe on Earth the swords were super heavy pieces of thick metal just like this. There was nothing fantasy-themed with it. It looked like a sword you’d see in a museum, but holy shit it was heavy. I guess I just didn’t realize how heavy all that metal was.

Every time I held it I worried I wasn’t going to be strong enough. Even though the only time I really fucked up was when I twisted it and hit him in the neck with the flat of the blade.

I started with the sword on my shoulder like a baseball bat. I’d long ago figured out the orientation I needed so that when I swung I’d hit him blade first.

Two sprinting steps, he turns, the swing, he turns to look, and contact.

My arms shook with the impact.

I’d cut his head clean off before, but most times it went like this, with the blade sticking in the bone of the spine after passing through the rest of his neck as he twisted to look at me.

I dragged him backward into the underbrush by way of dragging the weapon he was attached to.

He went still before I stopped.

I never found this guy’s stash of coins or cards. I searched the empty tents when I was done clearing the camp several times. I even took the carts apart with an ax.

Everyone carried their coins and cards on them or near them while they were sleeping. Except this guy.

I’m not sure what made me think to check this time, but I had time, and I doubted he was like the woman. I crawled forward, held my breath and looked into the shit hole beneath the bench.

There was a leather case, like you might set down if you were shitting at you kept it at the small of your back, or tucked into your pants.

Maybe his feet kicked it in as I killed him.

I laid down and reached for it, gagging hard when I had to breathe.

Not even a gold coin, but two cards. Without being awakened and able to bond them I had no idea what they did, but from what I had learned even trash cards were worth ten gold, likely more this far west.

Now I had to make sure no one saw all of Stinky’s blood. Which was impossible if they approached the privy. So I had to keep them away. Which involved crawling over here and waiting for the gamblers to spill the bottle.

“You fucking kidding me!” Fat Man roared.

All the attention on the game I sprinted out and grabbed the barrel hanging from the side of the wagon in a net. I grunted turning the heavy thing upside down.

The compost and kitchen waste was half-way fermented and cause me to gag, which is why I held by breath.

If the onyas weren’t eating when Sideburns came by he’d yell at Cheater One to feed them.

Cheater One would claim he had to shit, to get out of the work. He’d spot the blood and everything went to shit. Sometimes I could kill Cheater One before he raised an alarm. And sometimes I could do it quietly enough Sleepy didn’t come out to see what was happening.

Killing Cheater one made it much harder to kill Cheater Two.

Sideburns got his pouch of- what was that stuff weed? Tobacco? Something else? On the way he saw the lizards were eating.

Now was the tricky bit.

Creep over here, get this hatchet, or ax thing and get set up behind these racks of smoked meat.

Shit! Don’t forget the stone for the next guy.

Now I listen to Fat Man’s dirty joke and the game to break up for a bit.

There’s the joke. Everyone mumbles and the game breaks and then, much closer, Fat Man complains about the stew. Red Shirt comes to piss.

Right.

On.

Time.

Swing.

The hatchet bites into Red Shirt’s skull at the base of his neck.

And-

It came free easy this time on the first jerk. I sprinted to the trunk of the pine tree then dropped to a crawl, then crouched behind the stump and took a deep breath to hold it.

Mumbler. Right on cue. Careful about standing. Watch your step. Line up and toss the stone.

He looks away.

Step and swing.

Again a good hit severing the spine.

Now to circle all the way back around the camp, past the privy pit to get into position behind the Cook Wagon.

Mustache pisses. Then Fat Man. Don’t touch either just wait them out.

Now Tweedledum, a.k.a. Joe.

“You have the deepest luck Joe,” Tweedledee slurred as the two of them came to piss. The man shouldn’t be standing. I fucked up the swing on Tweedledum before, and was pulling the hatchet out of his shoulder while he was screaming and the whole time Tweedledee was staring at me and asking, “who are you?”

Whack.

Whack.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee, leave ‘em where they be.

Set up near the, well apple tree I guess. Crab apples or some sort of horrid sour apple equivalent with seeds three times as big as regular apple seeds.

Need to be quick here.

I tested the knife in the sheath. Took a few deep breaths, reminded myself about slipping on the rotting apples of yesteryear and waited.

I fucking hated waiting.

My body didn’t know this wasn’t life or death. I was on whatever the equivalent of adrenaline was. Or was it epinephrine? One was a trademarked name and one was a chemical right?

Here they were.

Hatchet, then knife, then spear.

Hatchet. Knife. Spear.

“Listen, you can’t be so deeping aggressive. Drunk as they are they are going to notice you’re always fleecing them when I’m rolling.”

“Are you kidding? I could-”

Hatchet.

“What-”

Knife.

Shit. Not a good-

Knife.

Knife.

Knife, knife, knife!

Spear. Where is the fucking- there!

I had it in hand. I ran full tilt adjusting my grip as I went. Of the guards on watch this one was a fucking monster. He got bigger and his hands turned into massive claws and even the fireballs had a hard time killing him.

But only if he changed.

There he was.

Spear was ready, balanced in hand.

Ready to throw.

I didn’t stop running, even as he turned to look, dick in hand as he pissed over the edge of the cliff.

I threw from ten feet away.

He was already changing, shoulders expanding, muscles growing out of his neck as he grinned.

The spear hit and the weight of it had him cartwheeling his arms. But he went over.

I was breathing hard but I dropped down to my stomach and looked over the edge.

It was close to a two hundred foot drop here. I waited there, catching my breath, and making sure he didn’t get up.

Sometimes he did. I should look for a stone to drop on him just in case.

His greatest strength was his greatest weakness. He always changed. Stood still and changed, instead of doing anything else like dodging.

Unless I got close. If I held onto the spear and tried to push him off, sometimes he could grab me or knock the spear aside.

He didn’t fear the thrown spear though.

One of the slimes glurped into the sunlight. Not that glurped was a Kurtish word, but the slimes moved oddly and to me the word that best described that was glurpping.

This crevice was an entrance to a cave system. It must take them deep enough that monsters spawned. Likely why they set up here.

Harvest monsters until travelers heading west showed up. Then harvest travelers.

We weren’t the first wagon train that had taken this route since they had set up the trap. I’d found the burn pit where they’d taken the other wagons before burning them. Forty or fifty metal hoops from wagon wheels suggested they likely did this at least twice before as we had ten wagons in our train.

He still wasn’t moving and the slime was on him. The things weren’t acid bath fast at stripping flesh but they were scary fast. If I took the path around and down to get to him, he’s have most of his skin missing by the time I got there.

Next the guards on patrol, three of the four would be sleeping and the fourth would let me get to within twenty paces before he turned around.

I shot him with the other guard’s crossbow at thirty paces.

Then Fat Man, while Skinny works on the stew. Then Skinny, The Reader, Mustache, and Bob.

Then the wands in the lock box Fat Man has the key to.

Then Sleepy.

Sleepy is always a tricky kill. He’s awake this whole time as far as I can tell. He’s hard to hurt with a blade and even poisoning the tip of a crossbow bolt didn’t seem to slow him down. I always had to burn up a wand on him and I hated wasting them.

I checked the sky.

If I was late I was late. It wasn’t like I hadn’t let all the wagon guards clearing the trees die before to test things out.

I did have an idea I wanted to try. Simple if it worked.

There was a chain net hanging on the side of one of the wagons. The purpose was obviously to hold all the other heavy things with hooks.

I took everything off the metal chain the took my trusty hatchet to the top of the wagon to get the eyelets out, and then prepared the alcohol.

They had small casks of very strong alcohol. Like go-blind strong.

I got the chain net down. Tossed a blanket on it, soaked the blanket in alcohol and then drug the big chain grid closer to the tents.

Then I went back for the cask, took the hatchet to one end and soaked a few home made torches in alcohol. They were nothing more than sticks with cloth wrapped around one end.

It didn’t go smooth this time, but it worked.

The advantage I had was he would back out of the tent when there was a weird noise too close to the tents.

If he was alerted and looking for a fight he shot forward at a fast crawl between two other tents.

The heavy chain, then the burning the torches, then the fucking open cask on the cursing man temporarily caught in a bundle of tent and iron.

I burned up half the tents, and had to throw another cask over him, but that’s why I cleared the loot out before.

The sun was low enough the ambush at the down trees was already over. Ten minutes ago the dinner bell at the wagons would have rang and they ambushers would have walked almost all the way into camp to start that attack.

When it was quick and none of them died, they took the most valuable loot and headed back to their main camp before they began hurting the women.

I had the wands on me and I’d fuck up as many as I could when they came back, but I wasn’t surviving this. This was just another trial run.

I could try the chest again.

It wasn’t hidden exactly. There was a blanket over it, but it was on the ground behind a wagon.

Hatless, the leader of the gang and the man who personally planed the ambushes with the help of those blasted dice had the key. At least he did when he was alive.

When I helped with the ambush and we got lucky enough to kill him he never had a key on him. None of them did.

Maybe he buried it at the temporary ambush camp, or fucking ate it, or who knew.

The chest was more trunk you put at the end of a king sized’ bed than chest.

A large wooden handle protruded from each end, three locks, and heavy enough I couldn’t lift it by digging a hole and using one of the axles as a lever-

Which I had to do because the handles were trapped.

Tiny holes opened up and a wet gel appeared. Just enough to make the handle damp. The time I’d tried to drag it I had just enough time to look at my hand before I collapsed.

That had not been a good loop.

They kept me alive for five days. I could feel everything but I couldn’t move for the first-

I couldn’t move at all for what? Six? Eight hours?

And it had worked quickly once I touched it.

How would I harvest it though? A bit of cloth maybe? Some sort of sponge? Maybe just a glove, would that work?

Where were the leather gloves?

I closed my eyes and tried to remember.

In the end I wandered around the camp. There were a few sets of gloves near the cook wagon but I didn’t think I could get to them without being seen by someone at the gambling table or the-

Duh!

I could bring a set of gloves with me. I had like ten pairs in the wagon. They were thin leather and coated with some sort of alchemical stuff.

Which hopefully meant they would work for poison.

I’d have to poison myself first, then try. I was not going to risk getting tortured again without poison already in my system.

I walked back to the tents and stared at her tent. It hadn’t burnt.

Maybe I could get out of killing her.

Right.

Back to work.

I had an hour or two before they arrived.

Bob was the only one of these monsters with a name because he looked exactly like my high school bully Bob.

I got him on the table and then cut the clothing off from him.

“Sorry about this,” I said as I closed his eyes, “But it’s science.”

I’d begun cutting into the dead bodies when I learned the organs were different from human organs. Some had the same names and did the same things, like the heart.

In humans kidneys had blood pass through them, and then they produced urine and were attached to the bladder.

In the diagrams in one of the books, the kidneys were also attached to the intestinal track. Which actually split instead of being a straight path it had a sort of loop.

It went mouth, throat, stomach, gizzard sort of muscle sack thing, large intestine, small intestine, colon, and asshole. But there was another shorter, thicker intestine I was calling medium intestine even though it was shorter than the small intestine.

It connected to the colon and the gizzard muscle sack thing just below the stomach.

There were also odd nodules in some of the men. They were sort of organic check valves for blood.

Femurs were shaped differently than I remembered from every Halloween plastic skeleton, not as round and more sort of oblong cross section.

I think the forearm bones were thicker too, but I couldn’t be sure.

The shoulder muscles were much larger on everyone. More flesh, like everyone was an Olympic ring gymnast.

Jaws didn’t seem to have wisdom teeth. Seeing the remains of a burned skull had shown that even adults had teeth above their teeth. Like those creepy pictures of baby skulls with two sets of teeth we had to look at in science class in 5th grade.

I think I had nightmares for a week.

There were no dentists here. If you had a tooth problem you just pulled it out and waited for the one behind it to replace it. Mrs. Kine said it took only a few days, but that the itch of another one growing about it lasted two months or more.

The teeth weren’t the only things different with the skulls. Our brains were different as well. Humans had two lobes. I think everyone knew that from zombie movies and TV shows where the hot friendly female zombie has to eat all the brains all the time. So they end up with these like perfect jello-mold brains on set.

I knew dolphins had four lobes and sort of floated up, breathed and then sank while sleeping.

I knew about folds in the brain being linked to intelligence because of smooth-brained apes talking about buying gamestop stock on reddit.

The bodies here had bone inside the skull. Like a walnut had that sort of paper-stuff inside the shell and coating the nut.

The skulls here had thin walls of bone that extended inward separating the brain into seven lobes. Seven. Each lobe was twisted and folded far more than anything a human every had. That much I was sure of.

One thing about life on earth was it’s symmetry. Sure there were five sided things like sea urchins and star fish, but we didn’t have three legged things.

Pick an animal and you could chop it in half in such a way that you split it like a mirror image.

Of all the changes so far, the seven lobes struck me as the most important difference.

That being said I had no idea what it could mean and no way to test anything out that was semi-ethical enough I’d be willing to do it.

I’ll kill these people, even a preemptive strike, but that’s because they would kill me. No ifs, no predictive models, I knew they would kill me because they have. They killed me, over and over when I failed to kill them. The idea though of tying one up and poking his brain to see if he goes blind or hears colors didn’t appeal to me in the least. This desecration of the dead was bad enough.

I scraped the skin back away from the front of the skull. He had a lot of hair so I hadn’t noticed but the lumps above his temples were more pronounced, like mine were.

Mrs. Kine had spoken about them only after I realized her issue with me taking my hat off was that she didn’t want people to see the pronounced bumps on my skull.

Apparently one of the closest genetic relatives to the humans was called a Sendi. I took them to be apes or monkeys. They had horns.

A skull without bumps was considered the ideal of beauty, and an indicator of intelligence.

I’d taken Poisoner’s head, and Cheater Two’s head and compared the brains. They looked similar even though Poisoner had no visible bumps and Cheater Two had the largest most produced bumps of all the dead.

I still didn’t know if the rumor about bumps was one of those ‘rumors hide a bit of truth’ deals, or a Phrenology quack-science thing like vaccines causing autism.

The lungs had two big sacks and six lobes. I couldn’t remember if humans had lobes in the lungs or not?

The heart was slightly offset but much larger, and the ribcage was much more wall than cage. There was no separation in the bones until about half way down and then when their was, they were still wide and curved in such a way they overlapped like shingles.

You could stab up and under the rib cage to reach the heart, but not from the side or back. At least not easily.

The spine also seemed far more robust, both the skeleton and the musculature attached to it.

The sun had set completely. I had a half hour to half the night, depending on how the man’s dice rolled.

I used the gloves from the cook wagon to grab the chest handle.

I touched one of the onya.

It turned it’s head to look and me and then dropped.

“Well test one is a success.” I’d still have to test with the thin gloves and not these gloves meant to protect hands from the heat of hooking fires or hot pots.

Getting one of the onya to move was a feat, but I got it into a yoke. Instead of a wagon I had the yoke chained to the chest.

It pulled the chest down the path towards the ambushers. There was an open space where I left it, letting the onya wander back toward the others and the place where it was fed.

I climbed the tree, familiar with the branches and waited. This was my most used ambush spot, though it was my first time using the chest in this way.

I was already an hour past the fastest possible return time.

They had light spells. I assumed they were spells because they were globes of light that floated over the same two people all the time, Neck Tattoo and Nine Fingers.

Hatless shook things up with his dice so it was hard to know who the most dangerous people were. He issued the wands and the scrolls around to different people depending on the dice roll. If the lights were something other people could use I would have expected to see that by now.

Then again, they only lit up on the way back. Maybe he didn’t roll the dice for-

They spotted the chest.

The one in front all looked in the same direction as voices rose and people began to panic.

And there he was.

Wands were weird. I had to take a cycle off. It took me thirteen days to figure out. During one of the cycles I tore my own wagon apart looking for cards. I didn’t find any, but I did find a wand hidden inside the driver’s bench with a small hole I could reach a finger through to touch.

I assumed cards reached out in the same way wands did, because it felt like they were reaching toward me, wanting me to join them.

When I did connect with them they suddenly shone as bright as the the sun, though Mrs. Kine said she saw nothing. She also said no one could see the trace, their word, not mine.

If they couldn’t see the trace how did they aim it? She told me, practice. It was why only the rich used wands. Someone who hadn’t trained with them for a long period of time was like painting a red circle on a ball and then giving it at a blind person and asking them to aim the painted circle at an enemy.

To me the wands lit up, and there was a long thin hair of light that stretched out and sort of floated in the air. It would go where you wanted so long as you didn’t exceed the hundred paces. Some wands had longer traces, some shorter.

Instead of ending the trace at Hatless I made a loop of it and tightened it around his neck. It had no feeling that I could feel. Even when I knotted the trace around my own arm.

I couldn’t untie it though, not without backing away until it pulled itself free.

Hatless got his because he was the most dangerous even if he didn’t do the most damage. Beard got one, because fuck that guy.

The other three traces I put near the chest.

Hatless did his thing.

He didn’t handle panics well. He never rolled the dice here. I’d used bodies before but only some. If I made a pile of heads or hearts he’d count them, conclude enough people were dead and take his group and flee. Then they’d scatter and I could never track and kill them all before one of them found and killed me.

His quick search of the area didn’t always go the same though, on account of all the chaos before this point.

Sometimes I was spotted if someone with the globe got to close and someone else thought to look up.

It was rare though.

Hatless stalked the woods for a bit. He had more than enough time to find the camp and everyone in it dead.

The women and four men from the wagon’s were still kneeling or laying where they’d been thrown and told to stay. Hatless had to come back, and often he opened the chest to check the contents.

I had yet to survive to see what was in it.

I had to retie the trace around Hatless’s neck.

The key went into the center lock this time. Sometimes it was center other times right, other times left. I didn’t keep track but it felt like it was truely random.

He lifted the lid and as he reached in I activated the wands.

The word people used to describe it was triggering, because the spell had a trigger.

Like a gun it was just a small squeeze. Unlike a gun the squeeze was a mental thing.

If the wand’s magic reached out to me, and it only lit up when I reached back, and that connection was a hand shake, the trigger was squeezing the other hand.

The wands were wands of greater fireball or whatever.

The wand in my bench was a ball of light and heat about the size of a basketball that raced down it’s trace and exploded.

When I used it in front of Gus and Henry, both of whom had experience with wands in the military, they said it was a standard fireball spell.

When I asked Mrs. Kine she was unable to help. Gus and Henry thought these spells, when I described them, might be modified or meta-magic spells.

The person to really ask would have been me, or the previous occupant of this body. He was an enchanter and enchanters made wands, although Mrs. Kine said I did not. In fact she claimed that most enchanters couldn’t make wands.

These balls were only slightly larger than a basketball. More beach ball sized. Which was perhaps twice the diameter. And yet they were far more destructive.

It was impossible to hide the origin as the balls shot from the walls and raced down the tracers, and while I was sure to kill the targets the rest of the ambushers were spread out.

I got off all eleven shots in my pistol before I was shot in the back, by what I assume was an arrow or crossbow bolt, as I seemed to be pinned to the trunk.

The thing that never faded, never got old and boring, was the pain.

Thankfully the shooter finished the job.