Ruthless

  I had become quite proud of my abilities, and especially my clever use of my spells over the last few weeks. Zack grabbed me under his arm, and leaped down the town’s walls, let me go and rushed into the enemies screaming with a chain in one hand and a bottle of clear liquid in the other, and my martial allies quickly formed a perimeter around me. And I was quickly reminded that all of my ten-step programs for successful spellcasting were largely imposed by the regrettable necessity of not being torn to shreds before I had the chance to get a debilitating spell off. Now, standing amid my high-level fighter and ranger allies I was quickly reduced to spraying oil, fire and water on the surrounding enemies from the safety of the center of the formation, and didn’t need so much as a single use of my invisible barrier spell.

  Smoke and steam hissed and blew into fireballs, small, vicious ice elementals eviscerated man-sized goat bipeds wielding crude stone weapons and invisible hands distracted others, but in comparison to Zack and Marcus my contribution to the battle was obviously inferior, especially if I compared myself to someone like Anna, who could have rained fire down on the enemy much faster and more intensely.

  Zack laughed as he killed. He took swigs from his drink, threw chains that wrapped around enemies and pulled them towards him. Just as often the chain would detach, pulling strips of skin and hair off the enemies, leaving them screaming and too wounded to advance, but on other occasions the monsters would come flying to Zack, at which point he’d headbutt, high-kick and, on one memorable instance involving an eight-foot tall monster made of what appeared to be slime and algae, suplex the enemies into oblivion.

  Marcus fought in a much more controlled, if equally brutal manner. He used a two-handed warhammer, though to call it that would be an insult to historical martial arts. Its head was four, maybe eight times the size of a sledgehammer, more like a video game paladin weapon than anything resembling a weapon ever used on a field of battle on Earth. He swung it in wide arcs, often stepping towards the enemies so that the later end of the strike crushed enemies that had appeared to be safely out of reach when he started swinging. Nothing dared come near him, and even this caution didn’t save them as enemies had their bodies crushed and thrown to their neighbors.

  And even as those two fought within a couple of feet of me, at no point did a weapon or a body part moved with force came anywhere near enough me to disrupt my concentration.

  Our two ranger companions hadn’t left the wall yet. Both wielded magic-infused recurve bows, firing at speed much greater than I could manage with my spells, and with as much deadliness and precision. Like me, however, they had specializations beyond combat, and so their efficacy was impressive, but nothing like the carnage wrought by Zack and Marcus.

  It took less than a minute for the way ahead to be clear with no wounds on our side, even as we had landed in the midst of a formation getting ready for an attempt to rush the walls. We moved ahead as the enemies from both sides of the breach point started converging on our position and then I did begin throwing up invisible barriers. Our pursuers tripped over and slammed into invisible walls, and soon after that they began moving with too much caution and testing of the path to compare to have any chance to keep up.

  “Nice job. Lead the way,” Marcus said, throwing his giant hammer over his shoulder and falling in an easy jog behind me, as the rangers advanced ahead. I still did not know what ability common to the ranger types it was that allowed them to follow from ahead, but I’d seen it before.

  So as I picked up a comfortable jog towards the scorched ritual site where I’d last seen Jea, the ranger leader and ranger two were ahead of me, switching direction moments after I turned without ever losing sight of the path ahead. Zack was running next to me with no apparent care in the world.

  “Hell yeah, brother,” he said, punctuating with a swig from his drink, “I’m starting to love this shit. Fucking metal.”

  “Watch your defenses and be ready for anything,” Marcus said in an authoritative voice I didn’t quite remember the focused man having the last I saw him.

  “I got hitpoints out my ass, dude. I’ll be fine. Keeping an eye on my buddy Alex here,” Zack said, and I was reminded that the way he got his class and title was by barging into monster-infested halls with no back-up or plan and coming back with enough wounds to kill the average bull three times over.

  “Don’t take it wrong if I don’t talk while I run. Not a lot of physical attributes,” I said, already getting a bit out of breath. The uneven terrain wasn’t great for running, but with enemies both ahead and behind it was clear that we needed to resolve this situation as quickly as possible.

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  We reached the area where we’d last seen Jea in less than an hour. In daylight the scorched earth looked a lot less natural than it had in the night where flame provided the majority of illumination. The burned blades of grass and patches of moss had oil-slick luminescence to them and there were several motes of cinders floating in the air in a way that appeared at first natural, until I came to notice that they weren’t moving.

  “This the spot?” the head ranger said, appearing as was his habit from nowhere I could have seen him from a blind-spot to my left.

  “Yeah. She turned to smoke here,” I said, walking over to the spot that I could best remember, “I blasted the smoke that way, it got at least this far.”

  I walked over to where I could remember her dissipating into almost imperceptible haze.

  “She must have come back together not too far from here. And hopefully she met back up with her mount,” I said.

  “The animal would have run this direction,” the junior ranger said, standing up from having leaned down to the ground at the edge of the scorched field.

  “You follow that, I’ll see if I can divine which way the smoke went,” the head ranger said.

  “No way you can do that,” Zack said. He’d sat down by a tree, opened up a paper-wrapped sub sandwich and held out a half of it to me. I took it. It was chicken and mayo. He ate most of it before I’d taken a bite.

  “It’s a challenge. But I have my abilities. Worth a shot,” the ranger leader said.

  “Should he try to take her if he sees her?” Marcus asked me.

  I had to think about it. On the one hand, I had no doubt that our best ranger had the stopping power to kill most enemies in an ambush. But I thought about the disappearing trick she’d pulled last time. There was a good chance she couldn’t do the same if she was unaware of her attacker, but I wasn’t sure.

  “If you think you’re going to lose her, go for it. I’d like to have her really fucking cornered though,” I said. The ranger nodded and disappeared into the woods, while we followed his subordinate.

  I was, needless to say, impressed. We hardly slowed down in comparison to when I’d led them by memory- to a brisk walk from a slow jog- and even then it was primarily a function of the denser undergrowth and less even footing in this portion of the woods. We’d come a bit closer to the mountains and the terrain had begun changing, with more rock outcroppings and steeper slopes. I readied my staff-form spellrod once again, as I felt that we were getting closer to our destination.

  “Chum, look for portals from above,” I said to the imp. He seemed to be struggling to keep up, but I knew that his physical stats were a lot better than mine and he could deal with it.

  “Fine, boss, but you’re gonna want to think of some incentives for me,” he said, fluttering above.

  “What do you want a pizza party?” I called after him.

  “Not a bad idea, boss,” he said as he disappeared into the canopy.

  Less than a minute later there was ruffling of branches as the imp was coming back down the trees. Then, I heard a split second of a whistling noise, followed by a thunk as a pure white arrow hit a tree just in front of me.

  “Duck!” I shouted, but then saw that no other attacks were following. I threw my HUD up and saw that the arrow itself wasn’t magical. Still could be poisoned or explosive, but that seemed unlikely. I walked up to the arrow, still crouched and saw that there was a thin piece of paper wrapped around it. I unwrapped and read it.

  “Fuck,” I said, “stop!”

  I read the message out loud. It said: “She found me. 1123ft from you. Arrow direction.”

  We all looked at each other with faces of stern fear. Even Zack wiped his mouth on his wrist and looked serious. Then he took off sprinting in the exact direction that the arrow had flown from.

  “Halt! Fuck,” Marcus called running after him, and then I and the junior ranger followed he fighters through the woods. A thousand feet was close. I got ready, a dozen spells on my lips. I was safe with my spellrod staff, but the rest of them- I needed to be close enough to activate the anti-magic field if things got bad. So I ran as hard as I could through the awful terrain, trying desperately to keep within a hundred feet of my friends and allies.

  It didn’t take long. We also didn’t have to look very hard. We found all three of them- the elk, Jea and the ranger by an ancient-looking oak tree.

  He was still alive, stripped to his pants and bloodied. His face was limp, gaze vacant, but he was mouthing something, as his lips were moving. He was in a sitting position. And he was nailed to the oak, hands palm-out, wrapped half-way around the large tree. Blood was flowing out of the wounds on his hands and head, and up into the air, and towards Jea in three helixing rivulets. She was weaving a spell with her hands and his blood.

  The elk stood between us and her. It was still charred black by last night’s fire and when it snorted smoke came out of its nostrils. It was larger than I remembered, standing in a defensive position ready to intercept either of the fighters.

  “Come no closer, newbies. Alex will be fine, but do you really think his little mind could take him surviving while all of his friends die again?” she said. Zack and Marcus stood a couple of dozen feet away from her, just as I arrived panting.

  “She still needs to chant. The ranger is dead if we don’t hit her hard and fast,” I started. I was going to finish with some variation of ‘charge!’, when she turned to Zack and raised he atheme casting implement towards Zack and began a quick, two-syllable at a guess, chant. I used up one of my spells stored in my staff to cast Stasis Field. Time froze.

  Tock

  Time unfroze immediately after. Jea smiled and looked at me. She undid the top button on her dress, which came away with a pop and revealed an amulet of clicking clockwork upon her bosom.

  “Have you been dabbling in artifice too, dear?” Jea said.