Chedderfield
“Oi! Fuckin’ emus, ey?” a nearly six-foot-tall blonde girl said as she put down her bow and looked over at Chedderfield’s group.
“G’day, mates. What a group of top blocks, saving our arses from those pesky, fuckin’ flippity-flappers,” said a voice with a heavy Australian accent. Chedderfield turned and saw a six-foot-tall bald man with a chest-length beard so blonde it was almost white. He was one of the shield bearers and was dressed in bone plate armor that covered his body from ankle to neck. Chedderfield could tell the man had invested quite a few cards in upgrading the equipment as it had a faint green glow and spikes protruded from several places.
“Oh my god, do they not speak English?” Emma asked.
“We’re speakin’ English right the fuck now, you little Macca’s-gobblin’ goose,” the girl who had spoken earlier shot back.
“Where’s Chip? We need a translator over here ASAP. I can’t understand a single word these guys are saying,” Emma said with a shake of her head. “Archimedes, can your language skill save us here since we left Chip at the base?”
“Why don’t you take a bit of a fuckin’ chill, you little shit. Why I—”
“Easy now, Isla,” interrupted a short, stocky man as he stepped forward out of the formation of shield-bearing warriors. Between his squat stature, his dark hair, and the damaged, scuffed-up lenses on his glasses, he was also the only one in the group that didn’t look like he came out of a Danish fashion commercial. “We’re here to finish the work on our plate, not add more to it.”
“Hey, I know you guys! You're an Australian rugby team aren’t you?” Nguyen said, her voice tinged with a little awe. Then, with the stares from her team, she quickly added, “What? Don’t look at me like that. My ex was Australian, and he wouldn’t stop talking about rugby . . . It’s not like I care about that stuff—”
“Wait . . . you’ve dated?” Archimedes blinked in surprise.
“Wow. I mean, wow. You’re going to act like I’m undateable after that special moment we had in the soda factory?” Nguyen replied, an evil smirk on her face as she stole a glance at Lucy, clearly trying to throw Archimedes under the bus.
“Yeah, we’re that group,” the short, dark-haired man replied. “Or rather, some of the people here are that group. I’m Asim, and that’s Isla, Chris, Heath, Bicky, Hugh and Jack. As for the blokes that aren't bludgers and are picking up cards like they’re supposed to, they can introduce themselves later.”
“So I take it that when you said you were here for work, you mean you’re also on the mission to take out this hell-cursed base?” Danielle asked.
“Aye, got that quest too, I take it?”
“Yup. We got taken out for a bit by a similar group of cavalry units and didn’t want to see the same thing happen to you guys,” Archimedes said.
“Well, thanks again for that, but even if you’re up a point, we still need that reward,” Asim replied.
“You’re not going to fight us right here are you?” Chedderfield asked. Judging by the shift in Asim’s tone as well as the way the others were looking at them, he felt a battle might break out at any moment just because they were working on the same quest.
“What? Fuck, mate, are you crazy? I don’t need it that bad. I just meant that you got a point up on us, but we’re still going to win the match. Ya know?” Asim replied, holding out a hand.
While Chedderfield still didn’t feel comfortable about the whole thing and was debating the issue, Archimedes acted for the whole group without even consulting them, stepping forward and taking Asim’s handshake. “Yeah, we’ll be happy to win this quest fair and square before you even reach the hub.”
“Right then,” Asim smirked as he shook Archimedes’s hand. “Well, clock’s tickin’. See you past the try line mate. We gotta get moving before another merc group shows up wanting a piece of our pie.”
As Asim and the rugby team walked off, chatting and laughing amongst themselves, Chedderfield just stood there for a moment. “Hermano?” he finally said when Archimedes turned around to face the group.
“What’s up?” Archimedes asked, not realizing what he had done.
“You just negotiated with them without even double-checking with us,” Chedderfield replied, voicing his complaint.
Archimedes frowned. “I just wanted to defuse the situation. Sorry, man. I didn’t think about it.”
Chedderfield wanted to press the issue further, to call him out on it more, but he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to word that. What if we didn’t want to compete with them? What if we wanted to try and work something out so we could fight side by side with them? There were options other than the one Archimedes took, but the problem was Chedderfield would have taken the same option Archimedes took too, and sooner, if he hadn’t felt for some reason like he might have gotten ambushed the moment he turned his back on them.
“Yeah, those guys could have totally become our vassals, and then we could have taken the reward,” Emma said. “I’d love to have a few of them serve me . . .”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“Trust me, you don’t want to date a sports guy. They require a lot of upkeep, and you feel like you have to go to the gym so much more. Go for the cuddly, chubby guy instead, a good ol’ Samwise Gamgee with a book and some baked potatoes,” Nguyen suggested.
“You do realize Arc and Danielle were both jocks, right?” Lucy said.
“Yeah, babe, and you’re the cuddly one that I chose,” Archimedes said, giving the blue-haired woman a hug. Then the man grunted as Lucy fisted him in the ribs and then hugged him back.
“Okay, enough of all this gabbing. We have a base to destroy,” Danielle said, “And now we’re competing against these Australians. So we should work out how we’re going to outdo a group of over twenty well-armed and armored people. They’re way better coordinated than we are too.”
“Yeah, Chedderfield was right. Perhaps you shouldn’t have just agreed to a competition and rather tried to negotiate a contract to work together. We definitely could have covered their weak points,” Nguyen remarked to Archimedes.
“The last time we felt comfortable enough to work with others we just met, I almost lost two of you all,” Archimedes responded. “Would you really feel comfortable letting them watch your backs without even knowing them?”
“Well, the first thing to do is scout out the hell-cursed base. Information is key in any battle plan,” Chedderfield said, turning to look at Nguyen.
“Oh, sure. Ask the sneaky Asian girl to risk her life to check out the base,” Nguyen scoffed.
“No, I just meant . . . I . . .” Chedderfield began, stammering out a defense.
“Just screwing with you, Queso. Of course, I’m the only one with the skills to do the scouting properly. If I left the job up to you or Arc, you’d just jump the hell over there and bring the entire base down on your heads and then somehow magically survive but bring everything back like an MMO train,” Nguyen responded as she tapped the air in front of her. Then, with a wink, she disappeared like the Cheshire Cat, a soft giggle fading away towards the hell-cursed base.
“You know, now that she mentions it . . .” Archimedes began.
“You want to go Leap Rush over there now, don’t you?” Danielle predicted.
“It’s not the worst plan,” Chedderfield said, backing up his buddy. “I mean, fighting them here, outside of their base . . . It might actually be a much easier fight.”
Danielle looked flabbergasted. “Dear?! How are you taking his side on a plan that is literally just ‘jump over and attract monsters toward us’?”
“I don’t see the issue. I think Arc is onto something,” Lucy said.
“Nope. Nope. You guys are not allowed to strategize without Nguyen here,” Danielle objected, shutting the idea down quickly before Emma could add her support as well.
“Well, we can at least look at the base from a safe distance, can’t we? No harm in climbing some of those houses and seeing what the base looks like,” Chedderfield offered. “It’ll be from a totally safe distance.”
Before anyone, or specifically Danielle, could put up a reasonable argument, Chedderfield gave Archimedes a grin, and the two zipped away using their movement skills. Archimedes took to the air, and Chedderfield ran as fast as he could, like he was trying out for the role of the brown flash in DC’s next reboot. Archimedes reached a group of roofs before Chedderfield. Out of all the roofs to pick from, Archimedes had chosen the only one that was a cafe instead of a residential house. It was three stories up and flat, unlike the others, and as Chedderfield climbed the pillars on the outside to reach the top, he saw that the building also had an easily accessible stairwell door in the middle of the roof.
Once atop the building, Chedderfield had a wide view of the surrounding neighborhood, including their target, the zoo. From the number of desiccated trees, blackened bushes, brown grass across the street, he could tell the zoo was once surrounded by once lush parkland that had been transformed into a pit of death and despair. It wasn’t hyperbole either. While a thick fog surrounded the zoo like a rolling protective scarf, and it would be hard to see through from ground level, at forty feet above ground, Chedderfield could see over the fog and into the compound. There were strange buildings made of bone and flesh, odd moving figures, and twisted and transformed animals.
Dead center of the zoo was a massive pit that seemed to suck in the light around it. He couldn’t see the details of what was happening inside the pit, but there was one thing that was obvious: it was where all the body parts that the undead were carrying were going. He could see a long line of zombies walking into the pit, carrying bits of corpses over their shoulders or in front of them and then walking out without them. Then, as he watched there was a green flash of light from within, and a new horrific undead climbed out. The creature looked like a brute except that it had four mismatched arms and after climbing out of the pit, it grabbed a hellhound and tore it apart and took the creature’s leg bones as clubs.
As Chedderfield continued to watch, other more familiar creatures like hellcats, bone archers, and run of the mill zombies would walk out as well. Moreover, damaged hell spawn would voluntarily drop into the pit and a few minutes after they walked out, their skin would smooth over, and they’d slowly heal the large cuts from where their bodies had been assembled piecemeal until they blended in perfectly with the other zombies and creatures.
“Fuck,” Chedderfield let the word escape his mouth as he watched the process. “Is that . . .”
“Yeah. That’s a zombie factory,” Archimedes replied.
“Well, I guess now we know what they’re doing with the body parts . . .”
“So even if we kill one, it won’t matter if they can just bring the parts back to that pit.” Archimedes sighed. “We need to tell the other people about this and start burning the bodies.”
Chedderfield nodded. “Yeah, I guess we’ll have to make places to process the bodies and turn them into cores, or they will just be recycled into other hell creatures.”
“You know . . . I know that we said we wouldn’t start crap, that we would just be scouting . . . but . . .” Archimedes sighed as he lifted his hand and began activating a skill. “How good are you at running and jumping off tall buildings?”
“You just can’t stand to let those Aussies get a point over on us, can you?” Chedderfield sighed.
Archimedes shrugged as the turret began to finish forming in front of him. “I just thought, hey, might as well grind class levels while we’re up here.”
“You’re a bastard sometimes, you know that?” Chedderfield chuckled as he checked his class quest. He was about halfway to the twenty-five kills he needed to level up his Purgator class once. “Wait, how are you summoning the turret again?”
“I’m not building it from scratch. It didn’t get destroyed in the last fight, I’m just summoning it to me. I can’t do it more than once an hour though, so this’ll be it,” Archimedes explained as Chedderfield checked his loadout. He had Meat Slam, Acid Breath, and Undead Delight, which normally wouldn’t be good for fighting the potential horde of monsters that would be coming at them, but given there was only one set of stairs up to the roof of the building, he figured he could at least block the entrance and cover the stairs with Acid Breath if he needed to.
Pulling out his laser pistol and opening the door to the roof so he could get a head start on anything coming up, he gave a thumbs up signal to Archimedes. “Just remember this was your idea when Danielle finds out,” Chedderfield said with a grin.