Adam was getting more than a little pissed off about having weapon problems. He wasn’t certain if it was just a problem for him, or if everyone had difficulties like he did. Either way it was as annoying as it was dangerous in circumstances like the one he found himself in.
Pushing the irritation away, he tried not to think about the fact that he was about to try fighting three adults with a paring knife. The reach disadvantage was significant. Even without taking the weapons into account the only person he might have a reach advantage over was the dwarf, and that short bastard had a crossbow. If reach wasn’t an issue with the elf, the fact that most of his legion of knives looked to be balanced for throwing could be ignored, but the numbers couldn’t. And the human just flat out looked meaner than anyone he’d ever met. Harold included. He also had a sword, but at least it was short.
He got no more time to contemplate the vagaries of weapon reach as the human spoke again.
“That was a mistake. Now we’ll be killing you instead of selling you,” he growled, drawing his sword and a dagger.
Adam shrugged. If the man wanted banter instead of fighting, he could do that. “I’m already a slave, so there’s no difference to me. As for the killing,” he waved a significantly dismissive hand in the dead orc’s direction, “I hope you’ve got something more impressive than this thing.” On second thought, he realized that he had no idea how to do banter, but scorn was amongst his capabilities. The spirit of how bad of an idea it was to poke the bear was living inside his head, but he still couldn’t help himself. The specifics of how bad of an idea it had been was illustrated to him immediately.
“Kill them.”
At the words of their boss, the elf pulled some blades and the dwarf raised his crossbow. Despite expecting nothing less, Adam now found himself in a situation he had no real answer for. Multitask was letting him keep track of all of his foes and their movements, as well as tracking Jay. Mother Knows Best was dumping info on throwing knives and crossbows into his memory, and Mother’s Love was hard at work patching up the last of his puncture wounds from the bristle bush fight. Certainly he could use Shhhh, but with people who had fought together enough it would barely slow their coordination. Heath Call wasn’t a combat ability, and he wanted nothing to do with having these assholes in his family so Instant Family was also a bust. Mama Bear was the only thing he could arguably use to win the fight, but the bear had no way to deal with the crossbow.
Suddenly, the elf disappeared and half of his skills started screaming at the same time.
Adam felt as though time slowed as several things happened at once. Mama Bear triggered without any thought from him, even as his arm was swinging towards his back. Multitask and Mother Knows Best provided him the reason, the first producing the memory of the elf pulling his blades and the second pointing out that they were fighting knives instead of the expected throwing knives. They also pointed out that the dwarf was aiming at Jay, which was why Mama Bear activated.
Or so he thought, until a pair of blades slammed into his arm mid transformation. His body grew as he shifted, pushing the blades away from his bones, but the damage had been done. He could feel the searing pain of something that didn’t belong burning throughout his arm. His size increase had reduced the potency in one location by spreading the poison to a larger area, a result that may or may not have beneficial results if he survived the rest of the fight. To add injury to injury, as he dropped to three legs over the cowering Jay, the dwarf’s crossbow bolt slammed into his hip, breaking the ball joint. He was forced to use the poisoned limb to stay mostly upright.
The bear’s instincts were to curl around her child, but the elf was coming in too fast. With no striking ability remaining, she roared straight in the thin leaf ear’s face. Whether it was the volume, the surprise, the fear, or the stun effect, Adam didn’t know, but the elf staggered backwards for a second. The brief interlude allowed Adam time to start looking for a way to win, or at least survive. Salvation came in the strangest of places, but he still had to get the bear controlling his physical body to listen, something he doubted he could manage under the current circumstances. Instead of trying to bargain with the bear, particularly while the elf was back to stabbing and slashing at it again and the dwarf reloaded, he tried something else.
Focusing his own mind, Adam tried to incorporate a bit of meditation with cancelling the skill. He didn’t want to actually cancel Mama Bear since it was the only thing keeping him alive, but to partially cancel it. He was hoping to use the gap between mostly and full activation to sneak in one particular movement. He couldn’t even be certain any of it would work, but it was the only hope he had. The threat of death was high, but the actual power of his opponents wasn’t high enough to have triggered a higher level of response from Mama Bear, leaving him more vulnerable to both the crossbow and the unexpected poison. On the plus side, if the skill did deactivate he wouldn’t immediately fall into a coma, but he would be more heavily poisoned.
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Instincts were pushing the bear hard, but she couldn’t actually hit the nimble elf. In return he wasn’t doing a lot of damage, but the poison would eventually overwhelm even the bear. More importantly, the dwarf was almost done reloading. Knowing it was time, Adam gave it his best effort to push the skill away only slightly, but knew immediately that he had both succeeded and failed. He had tried to be the rock in a river of rage, a place for the power of the skill to rest briefly, but instead he had become a rising wall that couldn’t be stopped. For better or worse, he was now on a countdown. Mama Bear would be ending soon, but he had control. A wild swing forced the elf back briefly, but as he darted back in the wildly swung paw landed on the orc’s battle axe. A quick turn and an attempted grasping had the same effect on the axe that all of Adam’s previous attempts at grabbing an actual weapon had. The giant axe shot forward out of his grip, not fast enough to do much harm, but it was still enough to trip the elf, leaving an opening. As his second paw began its prepared downward journey to crush the elf as it fell, the fight turned again.
Most of Adam’s understanding of Classes and roles came from children’s stories, but even those held a kernel of truth and lessons to learn. Cool downs were a popular inclusion in those stories in an attempt to make them better understood as people grew into their classes. A common element in many stories was teleportation, and the costs of using it. In particular, the long cool down times. Adam had only barely dared to hope that the elf had a long enough cool down on his teleport to keep him from the deathblow falling on him. He gave himself long odds at actually killing the elf with his plan, but had hoped it would either give Martin a chance to attack, or him and Jay a chance to run. Either was good enough for him.
He got nothing he wanted.
The elf didn’t die. Martin didn’t attack. He and Jay couldn’t run.
Instead of dying like he had hoped, the elf used a second teleportation ability. A different power. A portal.
Portal skills were also covered in those stories that Adam used to love. There were only a couple types in stories. Those used for travel, and those used for summoning something. According to stories, neither type could be trusted. Summoning portals went bad all the time in story land. And travel? Well, Adam was happy the elf apparently never heard those same stories.
Portals could take more than one person, but stories warned that using them near an enemy always resulted in the enemy following you through.
The elf literally fell through his portal, and bounced off the dwarf, disrupting his aim and discharging his shot into the ground. Adam overbalanced when his paw hammered through the portal and didn’t hit the expected ground. As his body tipped forward into the still open portal, the claws of his paw raked the top of the dwarf’s head, tugging it to the side just as the rest of a giant bear tumbled through the portal above him. Maybe the sturdy member of dwarvenkind could have survived being crushed by a bear, but with his head pulled off kilter he instead died of a broken neck.
With time still counting down, but in full control of his bear form, Adam rolled off the dwarf and slammed a paw on the elf’s leg before he could move away. His claws tore through the thin leather armor gashed him badly enough he wouldn’t be running for some time.
As they both struggled to rise, they both collapsed back down at the same time. The elf from a broken tibia and torn arteries that would lead to his death in a short time without major assistance. Adam had a similar issue, with the human having severed the ligaments in his last useful rear paw. He roared in pain, and collapsed on the dwarf again. Pushing with his front paws, he managed to turn himself so that he could see the scarred man.
“What a fucking mess,” the man said shaking his head. He held his short sword in one hand, the blade red for nearly the entire length. He scowled down at Adam as he spoke. “Those three weren’t my best, but I’m still going to sell you to the worst of the fighting pits to recoup the loss, and to watch you suffer.” He watched the elf bleed out and die, then spit on his corpse. “Now I’ll never get the money that piece of shit owed me.”
Adam tried to think of anything he could do to have a chance, but the man was too far away and he couldn’t walk. The human was even keeping his distance, wary of the boy turned bear now. As Adam racked his brain for anything that could help, the man turned his head back toward the dead orc. The smile the spread across his face would have been disturbing before the scars distorted it, but with his disfiguration it was positively evil. Watching the man start walking away, Adam realized that he hadn’t been smiling at the orc. He was smiling at Jay.
The most pleasant voice the man had yet used floated over his shoulder to where Adam lay broken. “You know. In my line of work, there is always a need for children in certain circles. The younger, the-”
Adam didn’t know what had happened. One moment his vision had gone completely red, and the next he was collapsed on the ground as a boy again. His legs were still messed up, and he could feel the poison still in his body. Worse yet, the weakness of using Mama Bear was bearing down on him. It was a huge struggle to let go of the tiny paring knife in his hand so that he could push himself over onto his back. Every inch of his body hurt as the relatively minor wounds the elf had inflicted on his bear form carried over more than the attacks of the wolves and spiders he had fought soon after he had gotten his class.
When he could finally see something other than the ground again, Adam was shocked to see Jay repeatedly kicking the scarred human man in his bloody throat. The man was choking on his own blood while bleeding out, and looked to be in a huge amount of pain. With only a brief thought, Adam decided it wasn’t enough, but it would have to do as he was in no condition to drag it out any more than Jay was already doing. The man wouldn’t live through the abuse, so the boy laid back to take a nap. He had nothing left.