Roger skipped through the woods, swinging his heavy combat knife back and forth gleefully. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had this much fun. Then again, he couldn't remember what he'd had for breakfast, his age, or his gender most days without checking his identitag.

He burst into a clearing, surprising two of the black ops. They had been spending the morning working each other up over their travails in the swamp.

One of them screamed a little at the sight of Roger, and they both pointed their rifles at him.

"Hands up!" the screamer commanded.

"Yes!" Roger said, flinging his hands upward.

"What is that?" the screamer frothed. "Is that a lizardman? Are lizardmen real? What is going on out here?"

"Drop the knife!" the other yelled.

"Hahahahaha! No!" Roger answered, with equal enthusiasm.

The screamer opened fire. Roger spun with sudden grace, leaping, swooping, dashing closer as the black op emptied his mag, unable to land a hit on the gyrating Roger. Out of ammo, the rifle locked open. With fluid, practiced motions, the screamer ejected the spent magazine and rammed in a fresh one as the other black op started firing. The screamer pulled the bolt back to chamber the first round when Roger's knifeblade landed with a solid thunk in the receiver, blocking the bolt from closing. Roger's other hand snaked around behind his head.

The other black op stopped firing, as Roger was directly between them.

"Someone," Roger observed quietly, "is frowny day."

The steaming woods fell silent for a long moment as Roger stared at the screamer, the screamer stared at Roger, and the yeller stared at them both.

"You can have a candy! A winner is me!" he crowed. He tore his knife out of the receiver, and darted off into the woods. The two black ops fired after him, but they had no more luck hitting him running away than they did while he was running toward them.

"What was that?" honked the screamer.

"I have no idea. What kind of crazy--"

It was at that point that the grenade that Roger had left behind exploded.

Roger giggled when he heard it.

----------------------------------------

Delirium gripped D'khara. In strange, hypervivid dreams, he saw dead bodies and corpers and blacks ops wheel by on giant white blood cells, shooting and 'yee-haw'ing and lassoing huge piles of credit chits while he sat quietly by trying not to be seen.

A shadow moved in the blazing heat outside the tent. The flap of the tent moved aside, and a man dressed all in black moved in, gun first.

D'khara stirred.

"Oliver?" he croaked.

The man in black froze.

"Yes?" he tried experimentally.

"Oliver, I was having the most terrible dreams," D'khara said, his gummy eyes closed. "We were back in Adler's office, only everything was going wrong. Worse than it actually did."

"Oh, uh huh," the man in black replied, silently drawing a long slim dagger from a sheath on his back.

"And we were shooting at everything and couldn't hit anything and he was just laughing at us."

"Mmm," said the man in black, creeping ever closer to the recumbent dwarf.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Whenever we threw a grenade, it wouldn't go off. When we tried to break through a door, it just bent like rubber."

"Terrible," noted the man in black, now leaning over D'khara, positioning his knife pointing directly toward D'khara's ear canal.

"But we did have one thing," D'khara said.

"Hmm?"

"We weren't stupid."

It has been said that the fastest way to a man's heart is through his stomach, and his stomach is also a good way to get to his brain, if you are firing up through a blanket into his abdomen, across the thoracic cavity, shattering his pericardial sac, skating off the anterior surface of the C5 cervical vertebrae and entering the skull. Which is exactly what D'khara did.

The man in black collapsed on top of him and rolled sloppily onto the floor. Wincing and plugging one ear with his left forefinger, D'khara shook the Nealy .45 Dr. Navarre had left for him loose of the blanket and pointed it down over the edge of the cot, pumping four more rounds into the black-suited body, to be sure.

"That hurt you jerk," he barked.

He stared at the dingy gray vinyl of the tent ceiling. Bright sunlight glared in around the doorway. Thick swamp air, tainted with a faint sewery smell as always, pressed down on him, the humidity and unrelenting heat squeezing out what little energy he had.

He had been raised in a cool, dark mine. Dwarves were not made for the heat, or the light, or the open air. Nor for being sick.

He thought of a hospital. Clean white walls, smiling nurses, and a nearly total lack of mosquitoes. He missed hospitals. He missed technology. He missed the urban sprawl, the steady, deadly background bustle of too much life in too little space. For all that he'd spent most of his life in a mine, he had taken right to city life, and he wanted to be there.

His head thrummed with deep staticky pain as he rolled his eyes around the roomy tent. Unkempt cots, rolls of rumpled clothing, two cans of ammo on the table. Nobody else here. Dr. Navarre had gone. It made sense, he had to do work. He couldn't just play nursemaid to D'khara.

The staccato rattle of distant gunfire suggested that he'd found work to do, or that Little Timmy had.

D'khara wished Dr. Navarre would show up more often. Dr. Navarre was so kind, and patient, and while D'khara did not generally approve of being pampered, it was awfully nice to have a glass of water just handed to him without having to get up.

Clearly, though, that wasn't going to happen right now.

He was so thirsty.

D'khara slowly fought his way clear of the blankets, shoving limbs out from under the covers in fits and starts. The heavy, thick wool of the blanket clung to his brown-and-gray uniform, bogging down his movements. Giving up on decorum, he simply rolled off his cot, away from the body on the floor. As he did, the light aluminum frame flipped over on top of him.

Groaning, he flailed the tumbled cot off his back, and forced himself to his feet.

Weaving, he stumped over to the table on which sat a battered, reclaimed milk jug. A lovely, lovely jug of lukewarm, oxygen-flat water sat out, waiting for him. With a practiced flick of his thick thumbnail, he popped the lid off and chugged half the contents in a proper dwarven quaff, the kind that leaves the outside of the body nearly as wet as the inside.

Slightly refreshed, he scrubbed his eyes to clear them up, and looked at the table. His kit was still laid out, so he fumbled his watch close enough to his face to read the time through his blear.

"17:15"

He felt around on the table, accidentally running his hand through the pile of Pillpaks left for him.

"One every 6 hours at most," Dr. Navarre had said, quite firmly. "No more, unless you want me to try and spackle up the hole where your liver used to be."

How long ago had his last pill been? 10:00? He couldn't remember. He stared mindlessly at the sickly amber cellophane Pillpak in his hand. Had it been 12:00? No, that was yesterday. He remembered a 10:00 for sure. Didn't he?

Dropping the Pillpak back on the table, he reeled back to his cot, kicking a pair of legs out of his way. Seeing the cot capsized, he groaned heavily. He stood swaying for a moment, then, gathering every scrap of motivation he could muster, he leaned over to right it. As he did so, the throbbing in his head swelled to a powerful rush of pain, the whoosh whoosh of his heartbeat filling his head with fresh agony.

He rattled the cot upright, and rolled heavily into it. It rocked alarmingly under his weight, threatening to turn over again, then settled back, sparing him the indignity of another fall.

He sighed heavily, trying to convince himself that he was comfortable enough in the thick heat to get back to sleep. He hated being sick.

The distant, merry rattle of Little Timmy's Kealans reached his ears. D'khara grimaced. It sounded like he'd found another--

Little Timmy's Kealans were drowned out by the flat roar of autofire. That was Oliver, with his new twin-barrel Strauss machine gun.

D'khara sat bolt upright, wincing at the sudden movement. Oliver's firing was a long, rattling expulsion, the panicked emptying of a gun, not the crisp, controlled bursts of a coordinated firefight. Something was wrong.

Grunting, D'khara rolled back off his cot and repeated his trip to the table. This time, instead of reaching for pills, he reached for his shotgun, which he was able to grab on the second try.

His thumb brushed the by-now familiar rune carved into the receiver. He muzzily looked down at it. Goodlove. The rune seemed appropriate now. His friends-- his family-- needed his help.

He cradled his weapon. Leaving behind his armor and gear, he fell out the door of the tent.