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[43] Am I... Overpowered?

  Bobby stared at the shadow in the chair with the glowing red eye and it stared back at him. Why is their eye glowing, is it some sort of smart glasses or an AR headset with an inbuilt display? The red eye stopped looking at him and seemed to pan around the room, staring in confusion at the skeletons as if it had only just noticed them.

  Then the shadow spoke in a slightly youthful but oxymoronically mature male voice, the sort of voice you’d expect from someone around their thirties who sang for a living. “How’d you get past my brother and are those some kind of hologram to confuse me?”

  “Derek wasn’t hard to apprehend,” Bobby shrugged, but then decided to lean into the persons lie to see if he could use it to catch them off guard. “And the skeletons are one hundred percent real, I am genuinely surrounded by an army of the walking dead.”

  “Thanks for bringing Derek back, but I meant my other brother. Also you must have some insane projectors hidden on you.” The man stepped into the dim light cast by the windows and Bobby forgot his reply as he took in their appearance.

  They were around Bobby’s height (so pretty average) and for the most part seemed normal, not even wearing a cloak or anything. An embellished metal mask coveredhalf their face vertically, emitting a dim red glow from a lens level with the other eye.

  Not a mask, he realised as it seemed to run under the flesh, attached to the mans very skull, although it seemed to skip the jaw and instead ran backwards until it met the side of his neck. The lens of the eye was also set back deeply, occupying where the mans eye socket would be and as Bobby watched some lenses moved around. He continued examining the cybernetic implant, his jaw flopping open at some point. There were self inflicted great welts where the mask met the mans neck like he was trying to itch something under his skin.

  Bobby hastily stepped back into his crowd of skeletons as the man began approaching, drawing out the sword he had stolen. He could have cast the spell but he knew without practice that spell was as much of a danger to him as it was to his oponent.

  “Damn, they look so real.” The man stopped just before he reached the skeletons, then there was a flash as one of his hands unfolded, each finger hissing as split in half from the end, unfolding once and then twice revealing gleaming finger knives with a final length of thrice his original fingers. The man flexed the horrifying construct once or twice before trying to leap through the skeletons at Bobby.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  There was an amazing moment when the mans claw got tangled in the ribs of a skeleton and with a priceless expression he realised that they were indeed real before a hundred skeletons piled on top of him, punching and biting him as he was buried under constantly shifting ivory.

  For about five minutes Bobby tapped his foot as he heard the man shrieking in the sea of bone. The skeletons didn’t kill him because they were trained to attempt to incapacitate instead, but that didn’t stop them giving him the full body treatment and unhappy ending.

  When the man stopped shrieking and went quiet, Bobby told the skeletons to withdraw. The boney minions extricated themselves one at a time, being careful to not rip bits off each other from where their rib cages had caught other skeletons bones. That particular bit of training was one which Gary had been most proud to successfully teach, before he’d done it the skeletons had torn each other to shreds whenever they extracted themselves from a pile of others. This also had allowed them to store the minions much more compactly in the mausoleums.

  When the last skeleton pulled back, the man was left collapsed on the floor groaning faintly, in fact Bobby was kind of disappointed at how easy the fight had been. Although I guess it wasn’t me fighting.

  He kept his sword up as he went over to inspect the man, his clothes were all torn and bruises were blooming on every patch of his skin. The skeletons had mostly left the cybernetics alone, but one of the finger blades had been bent out of position and was trying and failing to retract back.

  Bobby went over and grabbed a fist full of the collapsed mans hair and using it to lift his head. “You attacked me unprovoked before even telling me your name, very uncouth.”

  The man only moaned in response.

  “Look you either tell me your name or I put you under that pile of skeletons again.”

  “…James Jameson.” The man mumbled

  Bobby grinned wickedly, “Nice to meet you, I’m Bobby, I’ve decided to recruit you into my army. The position has twenty four/seven work hours and you will be paid in the knowledge that you are working for a worthy cause.”

  The man groaned again. “That’s not a very fair.”

  “Tough luck, you harassing my hostess wasn’t very fair.”

  Then without further ado Bobby tore off a piece of his soul and inserted it into the mans ego. James shrieked with a pain that seemed to aptly reflect the very act of his identity being shattered and commandeered, the chilling sound made some internal part of Bobby shiver, like the scraping of a broken pencil on paper or the sound a fork make when scratching a plate. Then he went silent as Bobby pushed magic into his soul and stepped back, hands slightly trembling.

  That’s the reason why the procedure specified a dead or unconscious subject.

  +++++

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