"Whoa!" Deputy Young looked around, swinging his head around like one of those dashboard bobbleheads.
"What is it? " I tried to follow his gaze, but all I saw was a swamp around me and the remnants of Grandpa’s trailer and yard.
"Everything is glowing," Young said. "It's like I can see the outlines of everything all lit up. and when I look at you, or her." He indicated Delores, who had squelched up onto the nearest bank and was glaring angrily down at us.
"What does it say?" Sage started bouncing up and down in the mucky water. "Tell me everything! Shad, you've got to get me a soul coin as soon as possible.”
“Once I've got mine, the rest of you can do what you like," Delores called back. ”Hurry up. We don't want to be too late. What if someone else gets all of them?"
"Hang on a minute." I turned to Sage. “You stay here and keep Grandpa safe. If there’s a chance a Soul Coin can fix him up like it did the deputy, we’ll try it.”
“We’re level one. That means there’s a level two. I want to go with you and earn XP!”
"What are you talking about?” Deputy Young looked like he didn't have a clue what she was talking about. I did. I'd spent plenty of time as a kid playing video games of various sorts. We didn't get good internet out where Grandpa lived, miles from anything in the Arizona Strip. but there were still plenty of games that didn't need internet connection, and I'd amassed quite a library before going off to basic training. It seemed Sage had inherited my library.
“I’ll explain later. We need to find another soul coin, and I guess that means finding another monster. Maybe we can find something a little smaller than that toad.”
I looked down at my grandfather's revolver, still in my hand. I cracked open the cylinder and double-checked. Three rounds with dimpled primers, three still ready to go. I took the empty brass out and started to toss it away, but Sage grabbed my hand. "Don't do that! They could be useful. We don't throw anything away until we know whether it's got value to us.”
"Spent brass? You think we're gonna find a reloading press out here?”
“You never know." Sage took the brass from me and put them in the pocket of her jeans. She pulled out a speed loader with another six rounds of 44 magnum. “It was under Grandpa’s pillow with the gun.”
"So that's where you found the gun.” I should have known Grandpa wouldn't be far from a firearm, not even bed bound and half incoherent. Actually, he'd always favored traditional weapons like bow and arrow or a good knife, but I knew he appreciated that a firearm in the hands of a sick man is a better choice. I just wished he'd picked something a little more modern, something with a 19 round capacity and a bunch of spare magazines. How he’d expected to use this hand cannon in his frail state was beyond me. “You don't happen to have any spare 44 magnum on you, deputy?”
Deputy Young shook his head. “No. I've got three spare magazines of nine-millimeter, but I don't see where my gun went. "
"Look over there near the toad's body," Sage pointed to where the giant orange polka dotted toad bobbed up and down in a scum of rainbow colored puke and mud.
"No way I'm gonna find anything,” Deputy Young took off his hat and scratched his head before replacing the wide-brimmed fedora. “Besides, that shit’s like acid. I’m not putting my hand in there.”
"You've got that enhanced vision now, maybe you'll be able to spot it.”
Looking dubious, Deputy Young waded over to where we had fought the monster toad. I followed him over. My stirrup hoe still stuck in the toad’s eye. I planted one foot against its side, feeling it give under my boot, and yanked hard. The hoe came free. Its end was all covered in slime, but I felt better having it.
Deputy Young looked around, and I could tell what he was thinking as easily as if I were hearing him speak. No chance. Then, suddenly, he let out a sharp exclamation, bent over, and fished his gun out of the swamp. It was covered in muck, but there it was. He waded back. "You were right! once I got over there, and looked, I could see something in the water glowing. It was highlighted blue, not like all the yellow and white text I'm seeing everywhere else."
"Maybe that's because it belongs to you," Sage said, nodding her head gravely. "We'll know more once the rest of us get our coins.” She held up her hand, palm up, with one of the brass casings on it. "Does this look special to you at all? Any extra text? I wanna know if it's a crafting item, like the toad spleen.”
Deputy Young was too busy looking at his gun. “It says Durability: 9/10. What the hell does that mean?”
“I knew it! 9/10 almost certainly means we can reload these… somehow.”
The deputy stared at Sage like she had two heads. “How do you know all of this?"
Sage shrugged. "It's just a game system. I've played plenty of games. My favorite part is always figuring out the rules, and how to exploit them in ways the developers never intended."
From across the way, Delores the social worker cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled,"I see something moving over there! I'm going to just— " She let out a scream and vanished, toppling backward out of sight.
Deputy Young and I took off running at the same moment, splashing mud and water all around. The speed loader was a comforting weight in my pocket. I should have already reloaded those three missing rounds. No way I could load the cylinder while running.
The drovers coat flapped at my ankles wetly as I squelched up out of the water onto another mud bank. There was no sign of Delores, but I heard a scream from not far off. The deputy was swearing as he ran. "Damn woman's gonna get us all killed."
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I put my head down and concentrated on running, stirrup hoe in one hand, gun in the other. The screaming kept moving farther off, way faster than I thought Delores could have made it through this swamp. Something must have her. A little voice at the back my head warned, maybe you shouldn't be getting so far away from Sage and Grandpa.
I skidded to a halt as we burst through some low-hanging branches, passing a hand across my face to clear the Spanish moss that I'd just run through from my eyes.
There was an open space here between giant spreading oak trees.The ground was muddy, but more or less solid. A ring of knee-high, bright red toadstools that looked for all the world like they'd been painted just now by an overly cheerful forest fairy, stood in the clearing.
The ring was about twenty feet across. In the center of the ring, Delores lay in a crumpled heap. Her pantsuit was completely bedraggled with mud, but I couldn't see any blood from here. She faced away from us. Deputy Young charged past me. “Wait!” I shouted. “It’s a trap!”
I felt something grabbing at my leg and threw myself to the side just in time, tripping over a root and going sprawling. The hoe flew out of my grip and went flying.
[Toadstool Gnomes, Level 2 common humanoid, pack!] The WWE announcer was back, shouting the words in my ears. What the hell was a toadstool gnome? [They’re mean. They’ve got teeth like a shark and an attitude three times bigger than them, and you’re in their house now!]
Too late to stop himself, Deputy Young stumbled into the ring of toadstools. His boot caught the nearest toadstool, knocking it over. Instead of going flying, the toadstool let out a deep booming noise, like a drum.
Then the wave of tiny people poured out of the trees all around us. There must have been a dozen or more of them. They were about two feet tall, wore bright blue caps just like I've seen on every garden gnome statue I've been unfortunate enough to run across. They had long white beards matted down to their knees, and as best I could tell, wore nothing else. They had sharp daggers in each hand. Each of them had a little health bar over his head. Their health all read [4/4].
Young started firing. A couple of the gnomes screamed and fell, as the rest swarmed him. I had my revolver, but even if I made every shot count, there were too many of them. I got back up to one knee, taking up a kneeling shooting stance, one leg forward of the other.
I didn't want to tangle with them up close if I didn't have to. I took careful aim, and shot one of the little men right in the head. It blew up in a cloud of red mist, the body dropping into the muck. “Whoa!” Like with the toad, my bullets were doing 5 points of damage.
I shifted my aim, fired again. This time I winged one in the shoulder. It tumbled away, shrieking, hat and knife flying in opposite directions, but still took 3 damage. One round left.
But I had made myself a target. Four of them turned to face me. I squeezed off my last shot, turning another gnome into a pile of hat and beard bits. The other three came running.
I laid my empty gun aside and snatched up the hoe from where it lay. They came at me in a tight knot. I stepped forward and swung, digging low like a batter chasing a slider.
I hit them all three, low and hard. One went flying. He bounced three times before rolling to a rest in the mud. His health bar vanished. [0/4]. One just went down dead at my feet, while the third must have gotten the least of it, because he bounced right back up and threw himself at me. [2/4].
I saw wild dark eyes filled with rage, teeth barred, and a knife heading straight for my nether regions. Oh fuck. I didn't have time to think. I just reacted. I kicked out as hard as I could, and I punted that gnome like a football. He flew twenty feet, landed in a heap inside the toadstool ring next to Delores. [0/4].
Deputy Young was fighting off three of them. Each had taken a point or two of damage but were still biting and kicking furiously. More gnome bodies littered the forest floor.
I charged toward Deputy Young, holding the stirrup hoe high. I brought it down hard on the gnome that had wrapped itself around his legs.
The hoe gave a satisfying thunk, taking the gnome’s remaining 3 HP off along with its head. These guys certainly a lot more fragile than that giant toad had been.
One gnome was wrapped around Deputy Young's head. It had apparently lost its dagger, and was gnawing at the deputy’s ear. I grabbed for it but ended up with a handful of hat. Instead of coming free, the hat stayed firmly attached to the tiny head. I yanked, snapping the gnome’s head back, and threw the little asshole away from the deputy. It bounced off a cypress tree and landed in a heap nearby. I stood over the dazed creature and swung the stirrup hoe in a blow that would’ve uprooted the most stubborn sagebrush. Overkill, since it only had 1 HP left.
The gnome exploded in yellow and red fragments of gore. It splattered all over my legs, and coated Deputy Young in gnome guts.
Deputy Young had gotten both his hands around the neck of the final gnome. He screamed as he throttled the creature. I waited until it went still, breathing hard as I watched. The deputy slumped over, shaking.
A [Victory!] message popped up. The system announcer wound down his spiel and fell silent. More notifications scrolled past, including a progress update on my “damage an enemy with a firearm”, which was now at 5/100.
First thing I did was walk over to the middle of the circle to check on Delores. She was a crumpled heap on the ground, her head a mass of gore. I knew she was dead without even touching her, since her health bar was gone and a [0/20] floated over her head, but I knelt at her side and checked her pulse anyway. Nothing. Her body had even started to cool. I bowed my head. I hadn't liked the woman, hadn't liked any social worker. She'd been trying to take my sister away from me and my Grandpa. But she hadn't deserved this. Ripped away from her home, thrown into some sort of sick twisted game, and then murdered by these creepy little gnomes.
"Is she?"
I stood up and stepped away from her body. "Yeah.”
Deputy Young didn't have anything else to say. He turned to look at the gnomes we had killed. "Where the hell did these things come from?"
He kicked one of them with the toe of his leather boots.
Next thing I knew, another one of those boxes appeared, this one again with a list of loot. Right at the top, it said:
[ Twelve Toadstool Gnomes
Killed by: Shad Williams and Frank Young
Kills apportioned according to contribution.
Result:
Seven gnomes allocated to Frank Young, five allocated to Shad Williams.
Do you want to change default loot options now?]
Then there was a list of items below. A total of 12 common soul coins, some gnome hats, something called Toadstool Elixir.
“Holy —” Young exclaimed. “It's offering me all sorts of things I don't understand. All about loot. What's all this mean?"
I had a pretty good idea, but I wasn't going to go into it right now. "Let's get back to Sage and Grandpa and talk about it there." I mentally focused on the default option in the box, and next thing I knew there was a chime of music playing in my head and a little bag in my hand. The bag was a little smaller than my fist. It looked like leather dyed dark blue. It was heavy. I hefted it, and it clinked. I peered inside. Shining silver tokens stared back at me. "Are these soul coins?” Young asked. He didn’t have a bag of his own
“This isn't what it looked like when you got one before?"
"It appeared in my hand then. But it just sort of sank in as soon as I touched it. It says I got loot but I don’t see any. Says looted to inventory.”
“We’ll figure that out in a minute. Let's get back to Grandpa and Sage before something happens to them.”