Archimedes
After backtracking a little bit, keeping a very large distance between themselves and the hell-cursed army, they started to cut north through the few remaining suburbs on the outskirts of the now mostly destroyed small town that had popped up around the nuclear plant. Between the sporadically placed one-story homes, the still-standing two-story motel, and the Waffle House that had just barely missed the line of destruction that was the stampeding hell-cursed army, there wasn’t much for the group to hide behind. It left everyone feeling a little uneasy as they passed a ransacked gas station with more empty shelves than a pandemic grocery store.
As Archimedes watched the lethargic movements of Chedderfield and Danielle in front of him, the pair carefully creeping past one home after the other on their trek north, he couldn’t help but notice how much the day had worn on them. He was used to these long hours, even before he got the perk that reduced the amount of sleep he needed, because that was how it had been on the other planet. He hadn’t thought that a month had changed him that much, but when he compared himself to the rest of his team, it was painfully obvious. The exhaustion is breaking them, he thought with a sigh.
“What is it?” Nguyen asked when she heard him.
“Nothing. I just . . .” Archimedes stopped himself. He didn’t want to be rude. He didn’t want to say something that might only come off as him saying, “I’m just surprised at how weak you all are without your precious sleep, and I’m thinking about how I was probably that weak too!” But he felt like he still had to point it out.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to come up with anything as Nguyen, who had initially prompted him for his thoughts, cut the conversation off just as quickly, holding up her fist like a movie soldier as she whispered, “hold,” before diving behind the closest pile of rubble. Archimedes and the rest of the group followed suit unquestioningly. They’d long ago learned to trust their scout.
Within seconds, Archimedes could hear the faint clomp of hoofs on asphalt. It became louder as whatever creature made the noise drew closer on the broken road that ran parallel to the one they’d been traveling. Archimedes peeked over the rubble and saw not one creature, but two. They were some kind of undead knights, decked from top to bottom in bone armor as they rode on the backs of bone-armored zebras the size of clydesdales. The knights carried long poles with heavy ax blades at the end of them. As the creatures approached, Archimedes noticed that the shoulder armor of one of the enemies moved, opening up to reveal a large palm-sized yellow eye. The optical organ turned and scanned the road ahead and to the sides and when its gaze turned toward Archimedes, he felt like the eye was staring directly at him, but then, a moment later, the armor closed like a heavy bone-plated eyelid, hiding the monstrous organ behind it.
The wind that had been blowing in from the river changed direction, and one of the bone knights paused its trot down the street. There was enough light from the full moon and stars that Archimedes could see places on the armor opening up, revealing more than just the shoulder eye scanning its surroundings. This forced Archimedes to hide even more, pressing his back against the wall he was hiding behind for a moment to evade the detection of the bone knight’s body full of gazing eyes. After a minute, he peeked out to see if the thing was done, and he saw that both knights had half-turned in their direction, their heads seeming to examine the rubble his group hid behind. Archimedes acted without thought. He activated Leap Rush and flew through the air a moment later. His spear appeared in his hands as he came down on the closest bone knight, the tip of the weapon piercing it through the chest and lungs. The other monster mount whinnied and pranced back, but a blur of a figure crashed into it like a ton of bricks, and the creature went down on its side. Chedderfield appeared next to it, his macuahuitl raised in the air. The black vibrating edge came down on the monstrosity’s neck as an eye appeared, opening where the Adam's apple would be, only moments before Chedderfield’s blade landed, cutting the eye and neck in half even as the creature shouted something.
Archimedes had to charge his spear to pierce through his squirming and wheezing target’s armor to finish it, but it only took a few seconds. As he stabbed the creature through the chest again, exploding his spear, the mount it had been riding on, which had toppled over when Archimedes first attacked, managed to stand back up sans rider, whinnying loudly before running off toward the hell-cursed army. “Damnit!” Archimedes swore as he swiped the bronze card that appeared over the monster’s body and saw Chedderfield do the same. “That’s a timer. We need to get moving.”
“Yeah, if we don’t reach the river soon and get to that base, they’ll probably surround and entrap us. Whoever is running this army seems organized and probably knows how to handle stragglers,” Nguyen commented.
“Where are we crossing again then? How much farther till the fishing boats?” Archimedes asked.
“Should be a mile north, northwest of here,” Nguyen explained.
“Great, lead the way,” Archimedes replied, following after Nguyen the moment she took off. He looked back to check on the rest of the group. “You guys aren’t too tired to do a one-mile sprint, are you?”
“Fucking hell!” Lucy cursed even as she ran fast enough to keep up with them.
No one else seemed to complain, and they moved at the pace of high school track and field athletes. Chedderfield was surprisingly the slowest one when he wasn’t catching up to the group with his Meat Slam skill.
As they ran, they reached a public storage unit that had remained relatively intact. Its ten-foot concrete-block walls must have been more trouble than it was worth to knock down when the way around them was clear of obstacles. Archimedes could see that someone had tried to force open the orange metal gate that blocked off the entrance. The bars of the gate were bent in places but the gate nevertheless stood tall.
Archimedes glanced back to see if any of the hell-cursed had reached them yet, but then he marveled to himself at how the walls would have presented a real obstacle to him only a week ago, yet now they were no more troublesome than a set of stairs. He Leap-Rushed to the top of the wall and reached down to help the others. Emma and Lucy, to his surprise, easily jumped up the wall with Chedderfield, but Nguyen and Danielle struggled. Archimedes had managed to get in position in time to grab Nguyen’s hands as she attempted to scale the side of the wall, Danielle landed back on the ground flat-footed.
“Come on. You can do it,” Chedderfield encouraged her as he extended his hand down toward Danielle.
“Yeah, you just made a bad strength check. You got this,” Emma said, cheering Danielle on while Nguyen, having gotten her good footing on the wall, jumped down with ease on the other side as if she were a feather floating to the ground. Lucy thudded against the ground next to her a moment later.
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Danielle made it over with Chedderfield’s assistance, and once everyone was inside the walls, it was easy to see where the boats were stored. In a neat line at the back of the lot, behind the three rows of storage garages, there were a variety of watercraft that ranged from medium-sized motorboats to small sailboats and fishing boats. Archimedes could only imagine that anything smaller than a fishing boat would be stored in one of the garages.
“Here, we’ll take this one,” Nguyen ordered, pointing to a beat-up-looking pontoon. It was just large enough that it could probably hold ten people but still small enough that it was easily able to fit on a boat trailer.
“Then let’s go. We don’t have much time before those hell-cursed arrive,” Archimedes said as he and Chedderfield grabbed the ends of the boat trailer and began hauling it toward the river while Lucy, Emma, and Danielle worked the storage facility’s gate.
Archimedes was pleasantly surprised at how flat the ground was leading up to the river. The terrain made it much easier than expected for him and Chedderfield to drag the four-thousand-pound boat and its trailer into the water. The trailer sank to the bottom as he climbed into the floating boat behind it. Once the vessel was in the questionably brown water, Nguyen tried the motor. It coughed a few times before it finally turned over and came to life. She took the wheel.
“Sit tight,” Nguyen said, pushing the throttle as the boat took off. The boat turned as Nguyen maneuvered it so that the engine would fight against the drag of the river.
“Well, that was easy,” Emma said as she flopped down onto the blue cushioned bench of the boat.
“Super easy, barely an inconvenience,” Chedderfield agreed with a nod.
Lucy’s eyes widened and Emma mouthed a “What?” in confusion at Lucy’s expression just as Danielle pointed over the side of the boat.
“What’s that in the water?” Danielle asked.
Lucy shook her head. She looked like she was ready to murder someone. Archimedes turned to see what Danielle had pointed to. There, in the murky brown water, he saw the wakes of four things coming toward them, sharp-looking red barbs sticking out just above the water’s surface. Whatever they were, they got closer at an alarmingly fast rate and more and more of the same objects began to appear in the water. Five, ten, and then twenty started making their way straight toward the boat.
“FUCK!” Lucy yelled in frustration as her laser pistol appeared in her hand. She started to fire into the water. A second, thicker laser followed, and Archimedes saw Danielle firing her laser rifle at the approaching monsters. Unfortunately, the beams of energy only sizzled as they hit the water and ricocheted off the red barbs and whatever they were attached to underwater.
“I got 'em,” Chedderfield said as he threw his hand onto the floor of the pontoon and created a large Ring of Purity. The circle began to expand, creating a large burning flame that lit the top of the water ablaze like a flaming pool of oil, and the brown water that passed through or beneath the circle became transparent, purified of any contaminants. Though the burning ring didn’t do any harm to the creatures emerging from the water, it did give the group a good view of what lay beneath the surface.
The sharp red barbs they’d seen sticking out from the shell of a twisted, hermit-crab-like monstrosity. In addition to the barbs, it had a smooth, spiraling line that ran down to the tip of the conch shell that protected much of its body and a spinning, serrated corkscrew-shaped blade that it used to propel itself forward. Out of the bottom of the conch shell, chitinous parts of the creature protruded with a series of long antennae resting above a massive pair of curved mandibles that were flanked on each side by a pair of pincer-like claws large enough to crush Archimedes’ head. From within the creature’s shell, two beady, glowing saffron-yellow eyes peered out, staring at Archimedes like he was food.
“Are they not hell-cursed? Why isn’t your burny thing doing its . . . burny thing?” Emma asked as she looked around.
“I don’t know. It might not work on water. It might not be undead . . . Damnit, I wasted a skill slot for this,” Chedderfield grumbled.
“Start summoning your turret quick, little runt,” Lucy barked. “We’ll keep you safe for the moment.”
Archimedes looked over to see what Nguyen was doing, only to see that she had abandoned the steering wheel altogether, equipping a spear instead of her usual laser rifle as she ran to the side of the pontoon and kicked the siding with as much might as she could muster. Unfortunately for her, the pontoon was made quite well with a thick steel wall strongly welded to the side of the boat, and her kick did little more than jostle it, causing the boat to rock in the quick current.
At first, it wasn’t clear what she was doing, but then the first conch hit the pontoon. The spikes on the shell scraped against the sides of the boat, jostling it further. Then two large claws burst from the river and gripped onto the side of the boat, bending the metal easily as the monster clamped itself in place. It then extended its mandibles and started to chew on the boat.
The boat rocked again as a second, third, and then fourth conch monster hit it and began to devour parts as well.
“Pry them off, or they’ll eat the boat and then us!” Danielle shouted.
Nguyen was already in motion as she jumped atop one of the benches that lined the inside of the hull and leaned over the side of the boat to give herself a better angle. She stabbed downward with her bone spear.
Archimedes was right next to her in an instant, attacking one of the conch shells as Chedderfield struck the same one with his macuahuitl. Archimedes’ spear glowed with energy before it punched through the shell of one creature, but it got caught on something inside as he tried to pull the weapon back. The haft of the spear bowed as he struggled to use it as a lever, and then with a plop, the hermit crab creature popped off the hull of the ship, its sucker-covered legs wiggling as Archimedes launched it back into the river.
He turned to say that it wasn’t so hard to get the monsters off the boat, but he found the rest of his group doing much more poorly. None of their weapons seemed to be able to pierce the hard shells of the monsters. Lasers, spears, and even Chedderfield’s vibrating blade all did little or nothing to the thick, glistening shells. Only attacking the other parts of the monster seemed to do anything. He saw Chedderfield’s weapon slice through one monster’s claws as they reached for him. Even then, the monster only withdrew inside its shell and remained stuck to the side of the ship like a barnacle.
“Help!” Nguyen shouted, and Archimedes turned just in time to see the woman’s spear yanked from her hands by the spinning saw blade spiraling across a conch shell that whipped out from the water. The butt of the spear smacked her in the face as it was torn from her hands, and the motion pulled her forward and caused her to lose her balance. Archimedes dropped his spear and lunged, catching Nguyen by the waist of her pants and pulling her back. She fell backward into his arms as the two toppled to the floor of the boat, their limbs tangling for a moment.
“Thanks,” Nguyen said as she extricated herself from the tangle and got to her feet. She gave him a look that he didn’t quite understand, and then a bone short sword appeared in her hand. Without another word, she leapt at a new monster that was trying to chew through the side of the vessel.
Before Archimedes could ponder the moment further, he felt a rush of cold water hit him, and someone shouted, “They’ve punctured the hull! We have to get out before we sink, or we’re crabby patties!”
Archimedes scrambled to his feet, feeling the cool liquid already lapping at his ankles. He grabbed his spear and sent it to his inventory. "Chedderfield! What're you doing?"
His friend shot him a mischievous smirk before heaving Danielle and Emma onto his shoulders. "I hope this works on water!" Then Chedderfield blurred and disappeared into the dark.
Archimedes hoped that meant he’d activated Meat Slam. He followed his friend’s lead, grabbed Lucy and Nguyen, activated Leap Rush, and jumped into the air. "This is gonna be one crazy ride!"