Bee was bored.

Lovely green leaves rustled in the sighing breeze, and oaken trunks groaned with sleepy contentment. Their feet made a wet pitter-patter on the muddy road. All else was quiet. Serene.

They’d hardly seen anyone that day except two or three caravans. Apparently, most freshies had no idea about the evil that lurked in Greensby, and would walk right into it. Will had explained that there were merchants whose entire business centered around selling equipment to freshies, then sending scavengers to collect it from their corpses inside Greensby, and repeat the process all over again once they’d cleaned up the bloody goods.

A not-so-small part of her wished their group wasn’t too clever for all that.

Having new friends was nice and all, but it was getting crowded. Too many chefs. She’d never get to fight properly like this.

Will meant well. She was sure of that. Keeping everyone safe by bolstering their numbers. It made sense. It was logical.

Will meant well, but there were some things he just didn’t understand.

Without anything for her to do, it was just walking. A lot of walking. Nothing like what she’d imagined.

She tried her best not to resent him for it. It wasn’t his fault. But it would have been better with less. Maybe even just the two of them. She could think of far worse things than her and Will braving the wilds together.

But it was fine. It was all right. Gug was nice. She liked him. He was a funny fellow. She’d probably come around to Oatmeal eventually.

The Explorer got his first two level-ups from their travels, and Will made him choose a skill called Locate Object. He then had each member of the team give a lock of hair to Oatmeal—or in the bald troll’s case, a few drops of blood on a rag—and supposedly, if any of them got separated from the group, Oatmeal would be able to use that to find them.

How responsible. How safe.

Bee despised it.

Why did I train, again?

*****

It was afternoon when Number Four cried an alarm from the treetops.

A man, sensing that his ruse was up, stepped out from an obscuring thicket and stopped in the middle of the road, thumbs through his belt. A sword swung on his one hip, a dented buckler on the other.

Will called to a halt. He pulsed Detect Life, but he didn’t reach for his weapon. Not yet.

There were ten bandits still hidden all around them. The leader had his sleeve down, but Will confirmed with Identify that he was a Level 9 Builder. A threat to take seriously, at the very least. He couldn’t spare the AP to Identify the others, but he had to assume there were at least one or two decently leveled lifers among them.

“Afternoon,” the bandit leader said. He might have been handsome, if he wasn’t unwashed, unshaven, and malnourished.

“Is this the part where you ask us to pay a toll for the privilege of using your road or some such?” Will asked. He hadn’t drawn his pistol, but he didn’t take his hand off the grip, either.

The bandit smiled. “I would hate to bore you with clichés. Why don’t we stick to the basics? Give us your shit, and you don’t have to die. You’ve got thirty men around you, and they’ve got twitchy fingers, let me tell you.”

There was a fine line between a bold bluffer and a bad liar. Will placed this man firmly in the latter camp.

“Just give the word,” Bee murmured beside him, eyes roving across the treeline. “Thirty’s gonna take some doing—best get started.”

Will glanced over at her, silent.

Even bad liars can find an easy mark, I suppose.

“What’s your name?” Will asked the bandit.

“What’s it to you?”

“If I’m about to die, I’d like to know who killed me.”

“Like I said, you’ve got a chance to go free here.”

Will shrugged. “We’re not taking it.”

The bandit sucked on his teeth and blew out a sharp exhale. “Ugh. Difficult, difficult. Why don’t I ever get the easy ones?”

“If you wanted easy marks, you should have picked a better spot. Further south. Most of the stupid ones die before they get this far”

The bandit shook his head. “Too much competition. I don’t like the mess.” He was quiet a long while. “My name’s Tam. Blind Tam.”

“Friends with Buck, by any chance?”

Tam’s eyes narrowed. “Why? You one of Lord Crispy’s men?”

Will held out his arms and looked down at his sorry self. “Do I look like I’m with Brimstone?”

“No, suppose you don’t. You do look like a pack of freaks, if I’m being honest.”

“Touché.”

Tam slowly nodded. “All right, yeah. We deal with Buck sometimes. A bit of a radicalist, but he’s a decent sort. Why, you know him?”

“Do I know him? I had him at my house not a week ago.” Will made a show of pulling his hand away from his weapon. “You might’ve heard of me. Cancer Ward Will, or Deathbed Will, sometimes.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“There you go! No sense for brothers to be fighting out here. Let’s trade instead. I’ll fix up your wounded if you’ve got any.”

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Tam relaxed a hair, too, an uncertain smile forming. “Well, I—”

Before Will knew what was happening, Bee had snatched the pistol from his holster, aimed, and started firing, letting off loud bangs that had everyone ducking on reflex.

She emptied the whole magazine in Tam’s general direction, hitting him once in the arm and once in the center of his chest. He fell backwards just as she dropped the spent firearm, and reached into her pockets to slip on her brass knuckles while she turned to face the trees.

The first arrow skimmed across her temple, scraping flesh off her skull, and flipped off end over end. With a growl, she broke into a sprint, taking a second arrow in the side without slowing.

“Goddammit,” Will muttered. He pulled down his sleeve. “Amp: Three. Construct.”

A glassy blue half-sphere dropped into place around them, leaving only Bee outside it. Several arrows plinked off its surface, harmless.

Zero whinnied and reared up, nearly throwing off her pack saddle before Mongrel got her under control. Gug was letting out a constant, low whine, hands clapped over his ears and eyes screwed shut.

Bee would have to take care of herself, that maniac. Will had his hands full.

“Matt, get the boys out,” he barked, putting all the authority he could muster into his voice. Once he got a nod, he moved on to the troll, smacked him twice in the belly to get his attention. “Gug, I need your brother.” Gug looked like he was about to object, but Will silenced him with another smack. “Now, Genius.”

Lastly, there was Nix, yawning as she rubbed sleep from her eyes, having been displaced from the horse’s back.

“Will you fight?” he asked.

“I’ll cheer you on,” Nix said cheerily.

Fucking demon. Loves him, she says. Doesn’t mind watching him die, apparently.

“What about me?” Oatmeal asked.

Will shrugged. “The fuck you mean? Get low and try not to die.”

“Yes, boss!” Clearly, those were orders he could get behind.

Will picked up his pistol, wiped off the dirt on his tunic, and reloaded it.

No one was shooting at the shield anymore, but there was still plenty of shouting going on outside. Most of the bandits were focusing their attention on Bee—the rest were biding their time. She was doing fine. Through his still-active Detect Life, he found that the outlaws were missing three of theirs, Tam not included.

“Brainstorm,” Gug whispered. He fell to one knee with a pained groan, hat tumbling off. He shook his head violently, teeth gritted, then staggered back to his feet. Now, Nug was in control. The menace in his eyes made that clear. “Shall I start killing?”

Will nodded. “Please do.”

The boys had piled out of Mongrel and retrieved their hammers from Zero.

“Mongrel, you and yours get the ones on the right. I’ll go after Bee. Nug, you just… do whatever it is you do.”

Will dropped the shield, and everyone scrambled away from the road. An arrow passed right between Oatmeal’s legs, and he laughed with panicked disbelief as he threw himself against a redwood trunk thick as an outhouse, going flat against its surface.

Will ran into the woods on the left. He swore as his useless lump of a prosthetic foot snagged on a root. He yanked it loose and kept going. It wasn’t long before he saw the first of Bee’s victims, a man with his head bashed concave and an eye pushed halfway out of the socket.

She and Number Four were ganging up on the last one on this side, a woman who would have been begging for her life if they weren’t beating her back and forth so bad she could hardly get a word out. A hammer in the back, then a fist to the face that hit just as hard. Over and over until she sank to her knees.

Will strode up to them, ordered Bee aside, and shot the woman dead. She fell back against a rock, empty eyes staring accusingly up at the three of them. No doubt it matched the glare that Will had for Bee.

“That was smart,” he said, words dripping with irony.

Bee shrugged. She yanked the arrow out of her side with a grimace, pulled up her tunic to prod at the oozing wound. “You said I could do whatever I wanted to the next bandits we saw.”

“A bit of a heads-up would have been nice.”

“You would’ve just told me not to.”

“Yeah, because you’re being a fucking idiot!” He hadn’t meant to yell quite that hard, but that was how it came out. He ran his tongue over his teeth, stepped back with a sigh. “Whatever. Go make sure Mongrel’s safe on the other side. You’re faster’n me. Hey, maybe there’s still someone left to murder.”

She took off with just a nod, working the bloody brass knuckles on her fists. He watched her go, fairly confident that she wouldn’t need his help, but mostly wanting a minute to himself to cool off, afraid he might say something he’d regret later.

Detect Life expired, and he pulsed it again, bringing him down to 7 AP. One of the bandits was still alive, thrashing weakly in the underbrush. Will went over to him and put him out of his misery with a quick poke to the neck with his belt knife, not wanting to waste the bullet.

Blind Tam was alive too, he sensed, and trying to stand back up. Will wandered to the edge of the treeline, watching the Builder look down at his bloody shirt in disbelief, like he expected this was all a bad dream.

Will took his time to line up the shot. He caught him in the leg, blowing out his knee, and the man fell right back down with a long, wailing scream that petered out into weak sobbing.

Number Four found a nice big root near Will, perched himself up there, and pulled a cigarette out of his vest, striking a match against the rough bark to light it. Sensing that the last bandit on the right side had already fallen, Will got out a happy puff of his own and had Number Four light it against his.

“Another stellar performance,” he muttered to himself, followed by a calming lungful of smoke.

Number Four replied with something in sign language.

He stood around for a minute, then figured with a sigh that it was best to get some answers out of Tam before blood loss or shock took him out. Seeing Bee strut down towards the bandit leader from the opposite side, Will waved her aside before she could make an even bigger fool out of herself.

She’d gotten all bloody, spattered with it all over. Her clothes, her arms, her face. Even her hair had blood and bits of bone stuck in it. He couldn’t be sure how much of it was hers.

“I want to ask him some questions,” he said, seeing the annoyance writ large on her face.

She stood back, pocketing her brass knuckles, and crossed her arms over her chest. “He lied about there being thirty of them.”

“Obviously.”

Will crouched before Blind Tam. He could tell at a glance that the man was dying. He was losing a lot of blood, and his face had gone all chalk white. The bandit didn’t need to know that, though.

Will had him drink a healing potion. He spluttered, spat up some bloody saliva, but choked down most of it. “There. That’ll help set you right. Now, I have one question for you. If you answer truthfully, I’ll fix you up the rest of the way. Deal?”

Pain, suspicion, and hope warred on the man’s face. “If I say anything… you’ll kill me anyway.”

Will chuckled. “Tell that to Big Deal. He’d be dead now if it wasn’t for my bleeding heart.”

Tam’s eyes widened a little. “That was you that caught him out?”

“Mmhmm. Sure was.”

He let Tam have the rest of his cigarette, and the Builder puffed gratefully on it, his lips trembling with shock.

“And you’ll spare me?” he asked.

“Swear on Era’s tits. Just answer me this one thing.”

“What?”

“Where are the rest of your people?”

Will honestly didn’t think the man would be desperate enough to believe him, but he was quick to sell out his comrades. Will had one of the boys fetch their map of the local area, and Tam pointed out their encampment, just a short way into the woods, maybe a half hour trek.

“Thank you, Tam.” Will nodded and folded the map away into his pocket. “If I see Buck, I’ll tell him you said hi.”

Then he gave Tam the same knife-edged mercy he had shown his friend. It only took a few gargling breaths before his body gave out on him and his eyes fell shut.

Will wiped the knife on Tam’s coat and straightened out, glancing at Bee. “You feel proud of that one, babe?”

Her dark mood melted away as she smiled her cheerful smile, all the innocent excitement of a kid showing their mom a drawing. “A little. I got four by myself.”

“Wow, did you now?” Will matched her tone in kind, putting on a patronizing, parental voice.

As long as someone’s happy, I guess.