Bambi disappeared.

Ron started to rotate, “Where’d he go, where’d he go?”

A mess of black wind sliced my way, I couldn’t decide on whether to dodge or use Will to divert it, as I flung myself out of the way in the last second, Ron took a huge direct charge to the back from Bambi. I was sure he was done-zo but the antlers didn’t pierce the sand, at least, that deeply. My tank stabilized himself and straightened back up. Good man.

He coughed, no blood, “Shit, Bambi hits hard.”

“I told you man.” My eyes scanned as my Fortitude continued to return. I had been draining it to empty so often that I had assumed the regeneration rate was slow. Not so when carefully rationed. More full the tank, the faster the regeneration.

I let out small bursts of it into my surroundings and discovered a direct correlation between the smaller I made the Will blasts, the faster I could fire them off. Small enough and I could almost manage rapid-fire and they wouldn’t drain that much when I did so. They weren’t big enough to disrupt Bambi, like at all, but I could feel when they interacted with another person’s Will. Or, at least, a deer’s Will. Still a weird thought but I’d accept anything if it meant I wasn’t going to be gored to death by Bambi in a vineyard.

When I detected his Will, I fired off a larger shot to try and disrupt Bambi’s… whatever-the-fuck-he-was-doing. Something I had figured out from blocking the Mortician’s blast all that time ago. Shit, that was like three or four days ago. Did I mention how much I fucking hated the apocalypse?

Ron took a predictive swing and called it completely right and wasn’t nearly fast enough to do anything about. He took another hit, to his side this time, the antlers pierced deeper and it sent him sprawling to a knee. Bambi was gone just as quick and more black-wind started up.

A phased-mini-boss battle with Bambi. My face crinkled with the thought.

I have an idea, “Can you guard your front and the sides?”

“Yeah, I guess I can take another hit.”

Much less decisive of a response, it had to cost a lot of Fortitude to take a hit like that. I sure wasn’t going to.

“Alright. Stay on defense, I’m going to try and open up an opportunity.”

“How?”

“Just be ready to capitalize, I got your back.”

Back-to-back was… better in theory, but I totally forgot about the blackwind cutters. Ron tanked the cutting blades of wind easily enough, but my knockoff shield was taking a beating to do the same, even with the shield-strengthening skill.

Since we were unmoving now, Bambi wasn’t going for area coverage, he focused on sending fewer, much more powerful cutters. A few of them I could nearly feel them bite into my flesh beneath my protection.

They were fast and kind of ephemeral, incredibly difficult to hit dead on with my own unattuned blasts. Trying to do that while blasting out feelers around us was impossible, worse than the near impossibility of managing all that was the cost to my Fortitude. It was draining it entirely too fast. Worst of all-

I was distracted, trying to push out feelers and a massive cutter headed toward my gut. I blasted out Will and succeeded in redirecting it toward my groin. Shit. I abandoned my feelers and formed Will around my shield, then had it burst on contact to nullify the attack.

A sense of panic shot through as I realized that I had stopped pushing out feelers and I shoved out a nova burst of Will around us and pumped it up with a few points to compensate for the distraction.

Shit. Bambi was back. I snapped my fingers to bring more focus to bear as I forced out a directed stream of Will filled with even more Fortitude. I wasn’t sure if the snap helped but I didn’t have time for A/B testing.

The strain of blasting out back to back full sized bursts left my head reeling and gave me an instant migraine. It also made me slow and tired. I wasn’t a complete nihilist but I was definitely moving slower, I had maybe 4-5 Fortitude left as I barely turned my head as a dark-horned Bambi wrecking ball approached me in a high-speed stumbling heap.

Something slammed me aside and I spun off to the ground. I forced my eyes to stop spinning and saw Ron holding Bambi down. The little monster had slid into Ron and he was pinning it to the ground. In turn, Ron was getting a bit carved up from the shadow horns.

I rushed to my feet and ran over, looking for an opening.

“If you can’t say anything nice… don’t say nothing at all.”

I stabbed Bambi through the chest wound I had inflicted early during his transformation and then again through the eye, just to make sure.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Ron collapsed onto his back with ragged breaths. “You messed it up. It goes, ‘if you can’t say nothing nice… don’t say anything at all.’”

“That’s what I said.” I snapped my fingers and pulled some of the more serious wounds out of him, then immediately used them to heal myself. Damn, the Fortitude drain was definitely tied to the severity of the wounds. I was beat. I still had some leftover healing from the damage to Ron’s back. I chose to use Ron’s ridiculously bad gut wound to heal my own. I disliked carrying those around, it reminded me too much of the blast I had gotten from the Mortician. Made me itch.

“No, you definitely messed it up.”

Running low on Fortitude now, my body felt heavy and the migraine was starting to pick up steam.

“You can say it both ways, does it matter which way I said it?”

“Well, not really, but if you’re gonna quote Bambi while killing Bambi, then yeah, it kind of does.”

Considering we just had a life or death battle together, I decided to not give him shit for knowing proper quotes for Bambi, “I was quoting Bambi? Fuck that’s dark.”

A chuckle forced its way out of him and before I knew it we were both laughing.

______________

I found my kukri very close by and reholstered it before searching for my other weapons-

“What’s so funny over here?”

We froze and our eyes searched… creepy fucker, should-have-gone-with-a-shaved-head-already, dual cleaver, grooms minors online, discord-mod, buffalo-bill-looking motherfucker.

Ron stood in a rush that took him a few seconds to stabilize, “And where the fuck were you, Mark? Didn’t you hear us fighting?”

“I heard you fighting. I was busy.”

That smelled like bullshit. A shotgun is pretty loud and I had been fired out pretty close to the start. He didn’t look like he was wounded either. Maybe he had some sort of healing skill, I wouldn’t know.

Though combining the fact that he was completely clean and unwounded with the fact that he smelled like bullshit, I was inclined to go with my first assumption that he was full of shit. I searched and grabbed my pistol. He was standing over my shotgun. I reloaded the pistol and kept it in hand as I walked up to him. He wasn’t moving away from it. My Minimap had him flagged red.

As I approached, I put my finger on the trigger and motioned toward him with it, “You mind? Gotta grab my shotgun.”

He looked like he was thinking, but so was I.

“Why’re you pointing that at me?”

Well, obviously because he was a creepy fuck, but more importantly, he was flagged as hostile. I wasn’t completely sold on my purchase of the minimap, but I sure as hell trusted it more than I did him.

“How about you back the fuck up, I’m a little amped from the fight. Don’t want my finger to slip.”

He raised his blades and chuckled as he stepped back. Still not far enough but he did turn gray again. I eyed him and openly pointed my pistol at him as I slid my foot under the shotgun and kicked it further away from him and to the side.

“You’re a bit unfriendly for a guest, aren’t ya?”

“Mark, knock that shit out. You were next to us, why the hell did it take you so long?”

He shrugged unapologetically as I picked up my shotgun and reloaded it.

Didn’t everyone enter in pairs?

Ron asked my question, good man, “Where’s your partner?”

“Dead. Then I teamed up with Jon and Tracey.”

“Where-”

My first foray into the conversation was cut short as they both entered our little space. They looked relaxed and at ease. They were both red on my minimap. Sincerely, Sir MiniMap, I’m sorry I ever said anything bad about you. Mark went red again after I turned away.

I definitely wasn’t the most popular person in this group. They also all weren’t the Usurper, I needed more information. Now.

I whispered, “Purchase Skill with Feat Points: Enhanced MiniMap v2. Purchase Skill with Feat Points: ‘Technically m’lord’. Purchase Skill with Feat Points: ‘Hold Them to Their Word’.” If I was going to get the Oath-lawyer skill, I might as well get the judge and jury one right along with it. I refused to think about the sheer cost of the Feats I had just purchased.

Ron, next to me and a faint gray-blue on my map, gave me a bit of a look, but thankfully chose to not say anything. I kept my eye on the minimap and idly studied it for any changes, but the shrewdest part of my mind started automatically dissecting my Oaths. I ignored what my intuition said about my Ontiveros Oath with Lena and the one I’d made with Pookie.

I focused on my Oath with Morrigan. Shit, divine or unholy, contracts sucked. A real lawyer’s paradise the apocalypse is. That didn’t really come as a huge shock.

So he couldn’t lie to me, but he could… attack me? A deep sense of ‘correctness’ settled at that thought. He also could have me attacked and as long as it wasn’t a direct mortal threat to my own life, the Oath would remain unbroken. I could also attack him, though a direct mortal threat from me would break it. He had much more leniency on that end than I did.

For him, I would have to be in direct mortal danger before it counted as broken while I would have to just attack him to a legitimate enough degree to break my own side of the Oath. Regarding the deal, I just had to find the Usurper and bring them to him to complete my end of the bargain. He had to personally give me the pauldrons. There wasn’t any specific information on what would happen when breaking an Oath, but it wasn’t anything good, the sense of dread from doing so was much more clear and straightforward about that. I did have the insight that failing my Oath wasn’t a pass/fail thing, it operated on a scale. Failing to find the Usurper would be less punishing than attacking and killing Morrigan.

He could lie to me, just not when it had to directly deal with finding the Usurper. Regarding lying to me, intent didn’t matter in the least, only the letter. That was, unlike my Oath with Pookie, neither Morrigan or myself had specified ‘in Word and Deed’. On that, I probably should make it “in Word, Deed, and Spirit” from now on.

My hunch the other day, on just guessing people. I had two guesses to present to Morrigan, the first would strain the Oath but there wasn’t any leeway on the second guess. Get it or fail. Any more than that and it would count as a ‘breach of duty’. Ugh, more lawyer crap.

I didn’t bother trying to sift through our past conversations. If he was subtle enough to creatively lie to me and I missed it back then, chances were that my memories of the conversations weren’t going to shed any new light on it.

There was only one Usurper, Morrigan hadn’t creatively lied about that fact. There was no obligation to keep our Oath private, and thinking about it more, that seemed like a good way to find out who the Usurper was. Tell people about my Quest and see who bites.

Who said the Usurper didn’t gather their own allies?

As much as it clarified, it brought more questions.

Standing next to an uncertain ally, surrounded by red markers…

“What the hell are you all doing? We need to report this to Jeremy.” Ron looked annoyed at the people surrounding him. Bless him, not the brightest, but maybe that would save me from an ambush.

One red marker went out, two remained.