Chapter 194: Smart Enough to Stay Dumb (Patreon)

***Baroke, Legendarily Quick Shot***

And I’m spent, Baroke thought with a chuckle as he lowered Betty, Bent dry as a bone. He’d spent a week’s worth of Bent on that, but damned if it wasn’t effective.

Whatever was giving the cannibal lady the suck had been thoroughly nailed. The omnipresent grey that had invaded Baroke’s sight was blown away in an instant, followed by a thrashing sensation in front of him that Baroke could only track by the shifting goosebumps on his skin.

The creature, or whatever it was, withdrew, dropping the woman in midair.

Oops, Baroke lunged forward and caught the woman with one hand, putting his bow away with the other.

Blue light coalesced and drew itself back into her body from all around, her features slowly…un hollowing? So the thing the creature was taking out of her was something she needed to-not…be a monster? Then her breathing stilled.

Whatever. I’m not the weird blue mist expert, Baroke thought, patting the woman’s cheek.

“Hey, you alive?” Baroke asked before gently flicking her nose.

The genosian woman’s eyes opened as she inhaled with a harsh gasp. She immediately began wriggling in his grasp, trying to get away, smacking her elbows and fists into his arms and torso, scratching ineffectually at his eyeballs.

Baroke decided to let her go before she started going for his sensitive bits, dropping her to the loamy forest floor.

She hit the ground and immediately began crabwalking backward, babbling Genosian at a rapid clip. Baroke couldn’t quite make out anything, so he simply assumed she was marveling at how amazing he was for defeating an incorporeal enemy in a single strike.

The first shot doesn’t count. That was a probing shot.

She seemed to get a handle on her emotions then, glancing back and forth with wild eyes as she panted.

“So…You have any idea where my friends went?” Oh right, trade tongue.

“I. Make. Bad…umm…Gravy, Gone.” Baroke said, peering at the woman. “Is any of this getting through to you?”

“Where You, um, Make… Bed?” Baroke asked.

The woman’s eyes lit up with understanding, and she drew herself to her feet.

Well, she tried. Her broken ribs put a stop to that damn quick. She folded over herself, hissing in pain, sending another pang of guilt through Baroke.

Breaking a girl’s ribs then letting her get sucked on by a blue-stuff sucking abomination was not Baroke’s style.

“How about this?” Baroke asked, kneeling down and picking the slight woman up. “Where bed? Show.”

She seemed to get the message, putting her finger over her lips to warn him to be quiet again before pointing off into the distance. Baroke set off that way.

None of his friends were here, so he might as well check in with the locals, see where they might have gone.

They set off into the distance, and after about ten minutes at a light trot, Baroke arrived at the other camp. There were about twenty Genosians sitting around the fire, and they rose to their feet, grabbing their weapons as he approached, only relaxing when the woman in his arms started throwing weird hand-signs at the others like crazy.

It was like they were part of some kind of weird secret club doing air handshakes.

Whatever, if you guys wanna be childish about it. Baroke thought, rolling his eyes.

Shortly after he arrived, a young man came up and took the genosian girl off his hands, giving him a bit of a scowl.

“Sorry about the ribs,” Baroke said halfheartedly in Gadveran, not quite knowing the proper Ilethan terminology.

Everyone in the entire camp glared at him suddenly, putting their hands over their mouths, eyes burning with fury. One of them even drew an obsidian dagger, glancing meaningfully between it and him.

Huh, they want me to stay quiet… Well, when in Uleis, do as the Uleisans do. Baroke shrugged and sat in front of the fire, pointing his muddy feet at the flames.

It was fun to dry out the mud on them and flake it off by wiggling his feet.

Not being able to speak severely limited his options. Baroke didn’t know their gang signs, nor their written language…if they even had one.

This left only one option:

Amusing stick figures drawn in the dirt.

Baroke picked up a stick and drew a campfire, then sketched a group of stick figures with pointy teeth sitting around it.

Then he drew a group of…

Me, Kala, Learner, Ella, Calvin, Umm…Ella’s dad…

Six stick figures, approaching the campfire from the side. baroke was in the lead, his stick figure had big muscles drawn onto it, and a bow. He drew a big mean monster leaning over the campfire and terrorizing the Genosians.

Then he drew himself shooting it with an arrow, indicating their purpose here was to murder the thing.

Now how to tell them I’m looking for the other people…Ah.

Baroke drew an X through Kala, Learner, Ella, Calvin, and Ella’s dad’s stick figures, indicating that they were missing. He glanced up at the Genosians watching his drawing with interest.

The nearest one, a young man, held up his finger, settling closer and taking the stick out of Baroke’s hands.

Maybe he’s gonna tell me where they might be. Or draw a dick. I have no idea if they understood any of that.

The hunter wiped the dirt clean over Baroke’s party and redrew Kala, learner, Ella, Calvin, and Ella’s dad.

That’s weird.

The young man motioned up, caught Baroke’s eyes meaningfully, then drew an X through each and every one of the Genosians around the campfire, then drew an X through Baroke’s muscle-y figure.

Baroke frowned, scowling up at the hunter.

The heck is he trying to say? Pictograms are a shit medium.

The hunter saw Baroke’s confusion and rolled his eyes. Suddenly his expression brightened with inspiration, and he drew a line from the monster Baroke had drawn looming over the camp, to each and every one of the figures with an X.

Including Baroke.

Hmm… Baroke thought, thumbing his chin as he studied the drawing. It seems to imply the monster got them, and me, but it obviously didn’t get me…Hmmm…

Yeah, talking through pictures might be a dead end, Baroke thought giving the guy a helpless shrug.

The young warrior choked back a curse and shook his head before he wiped everything clean and started over.

He redrew the campfire, he redrew the genosians around, it, and added Baroke’s stick figures, muscles and all, sitting next to them, then he redrew the monster looming over them, putting X’s through all of them.

All the same so far. I don’t know how he expects to get any kind of point across.

Then the young man did something Baroke wasn’t expecting. He walked a distance away and squatted down, taking Baroke’s stick with him.

Hey, that was my favorite dirt-drawing stick!

The hunter started drawing, shuffling backwards as he drew…some kind of larger oval, surrounding the entire campsite as the other genosians watched with interest.

The Abyss is he drawing? Baroke thought, standing up and following the guy. He couldn’t quite make sense of it, though, it just looked like some line that occasionally turned from side to side and had a few lumps, generally forming an oval around the camp.

Once the hunter came back to where he was before, he put some finishing touches on the drawing then, in a strange turn of events, immediately jumped onto the nearest tree, climbing up into the canopy.

He waved for Baroke to join him.

Baroke shrugged and climbed up into the lower branches, some fifteen feet off the ground.

Once he was perched on the branch next to the hunter, he glanced down, taking in the scale of the picture.

It was a pretty good recreation of his monster looming over the campfire, only much, much bigger, engulfing the entire campsite, and especially the little drawing of X’ed out people, right in the middle of it’s stomach

Ooooh, we’re inside the damn thing. Duh. Baroke resisted the urge to slap his forehead. That seems obvious now…Kinda.

Did my arrow poke a hole in it? That could explain why the arrow disappeared but still seemed to hurt the damn thing. How does that work? It’s here, but we’re also inside of it?

Baroke shook his head when it started to ache. No sense overthinking things. That was Calvin’s job. His job was to poke holes in stuff until it died.

Baroke unslung his bow and glanced down at the black Bent sloshing around in the reservoir built into the handle.

Maybe I can kill this thing from the inside? He thought, inspecting the enchanted glass bow. The System stepped in and interfaced with the creation.

Betty has 22/22 Bent Stored for User’s activated Abilities.

Baroke did some rough math. Betty saved somewhere around half of all the Bent he used on Abilities, give or take, up to its limit. He’d been saving up for a special occasion.

A full reality-piercing Godslayer Arrow was 8 Bent, Betty would recycle about half of it, reclaiming it through whatever arcane process Jinsei had enchanted into it.

Twenty-two divided by four was just shy of six.

So, five more shots, huh? He thought, hopping back down to the ground and unslinging his bow, aiming it upward.

Let’s poke some holes.

***Calvin, Too smart for Optimism***

Suitably calmed down, Calvin pried himself out of Kala’s grasp despite her protests.

Okay, obviously Baroke is still alive.

Images of his friend being assaulted on all side by nightmarish creatures, or being unable to breathe in the gullet of an interdimensional creature relentlessly tried to creep into his thought-space, but Calvin mentally swiped it away with a scowl.

He couldn’t afford to panic again.

The burden of being able to vividly imagine every single way things could go wrong was a blessing and a curse. Sometimes he thought Baroke avoided raising his Mind just so he could remain blissfully ignorant.

Thinking of Baroke being smart enough to stay stupid put a wry smile on Calvin’s face. Calvin knelt down in the underbrush and combed his fingers through the flora directly beneath the point Baroke’s arrow had come through, his fingers coming up with slimy residue. The way it felt cold on his skin implied it was rapidly evaporating. in another ten minutes it might not be there anymore at all.

It smelled faintly…fungal. Like those big poppers Karen forced him and Jinnei to eat.

Hmm.

Chained spirit.

38/47 Bent remaining.

Thousands of palm-sized knick-knacks suddenly coated the jungle floor.

Harvest it, Calvin thought, pulling his lab out of his belt. In the past months, Calvin had realized that carrying around an entire wagon full of Warped monster parts and alchemy paraphernalia was tedious. In an effort to remedy that, he’d turned the entire thing into about a tablespoon of densely packed undifferentiated matter.

NASA would have killed to be able to do that. Actually, now that I think about it…they might still kill for that.

His wagon now sloshed around comfortably in an ornate glass vial on his belt with a wagon and a book raised onto the surface by Jinsei, their resident master glass-smith.

Calvin scraped a bit of jungle floor flat with his foot and poured out a drop of clear fluid, mentally selecting his alchemy kit. The Lure membrane embedded in the glass read his desires and triggered his refined Blade Body mutation, similarly baked into the glass.

The glass tubes, filters, scrapers, droppers, and various other tools bloomed out of the ground, bubbling out of a single drop of fluid, building on themselves like magic.

It kind of is magic.

It’s totally magic.

The Knick knacks snatched up all of Calvin’s droppers and scraped with inhuman coordination, carefully scraping up the material from every blade of grass and leaf in the area, running droppers back and forth and depositing it into his choke-necked jar.

Once Calvin was sure they were grabbing the fluid faster than it could disappear, he directed his attention back to the people surrounding him, a plan already starting to form.

Baroke wounded it. Or punched a hole in the dimension so hard that a bit of it turned into slime. Either way, that was exactly what I needed to build a bridge between the two areas. Now I just need someone to poke a hole in both places at exactly the same time and place…

That doesn’t seem too hard.

“What are you going to do with that?” Learner asked, leaning forward curiously, as was her wont.

“This is a piece of the creature, or a piece of where they are from,” Calvin said, pointing at the goop slowly filling up. “With this, we’ve got something to go on. We’re going to have Baroke shoot an arrow through to us at the exact right time and place, and we’re going to use that to build a bridge to wherever the Abyss he is.”

Learner glanced back and forth between Calvin and the greyish fluid accumulating in the jar.

“How?”

Calvin grinned.

“That’s the fun part. If I know Baroke, as soon as he noticed his arrow poked a hole in the monster, he’s going to try to poke some more. He’s not going to be able to help himself. There’s a possibility that something very small and very fast could follow the arrow’s trail before the hole closes up. This goop here had time to come through the hole with the arrow. That implies there’s time to shoot something back through.”

“How are you going to be able to know where he’s going to shoot through the barrier again?” Kala asked with a frown.

“For that, overwhelming manpower.”

“Nadia,” Calvin said, pointing at the nearest chained spirit scout. “That’s your job. You showed an ability in Shadowboxing to sense the creature moving between Dimensions a fraction of a second before it did.”

“I did?” Nadia asked with a frown.

“I’m gonna need to take your eyes out, though. We gotta maximize your sensitivity.”

The foot tall Nadia froze in place, hovering in front of him, her skin turning paler. “What?”

“All right,” Calvin said, clapping his hands together. Thank the gods, Baroke’s flailing gave me a plan better than trying to smash a hole through where he disappeared. “Let’s get started!”

“Now, I’m going to be spending a lot of Bent.” Calvin said, pouring his component wagon out of the vial. “You might wanna stand back.”

Elliot, would you mind designing a Nadia with no eyes?

Sure, I’ll even reroute her visual cortex to process the Spinner finger inputs, which is the intention of what you were going for.

Yes, please.

Calvin threw his hands out and summoned another several thousand knick-knacks,

Calvinian summoning.

37/47 Bent remaining

Trait doctoring.

30/47 Bent remaining.

Calvinian summoning.

Calvin used one of his spare vials of undifferentiated matter to grow a tower-sized lump of Abyssal steel, hundreds of tons of the material. Then he softened it to a clay consistency with several castings of Trait Doctoring, instructing the knick-knacks to create bullets with his message inscribed, along with slingshots sized for a very small person.

Now the part that’s going to take a lot of Bent. You done?

Oh, yeah, it was a simple swap. Elliot said, pushing him a Visualization of the Nadia in question.

The girl looked more than a little spooky with hands where her eyes should’ve been, but Calvin wasn’t going to argue.

Hey, it was the easiest way to reroute it.

I said I wasn’t gonna argue, Calvin thought, holding his hands up above his head.

Calvin dumped every single point of Bent into Calvinian Summoning.

Calvinian summoning

Chimera.

….

0/47 Bent remaining.

Ella yelped and scrambled backward as a cloud of green smoke roiled out of Calvin’s hands, pouring up into the sky and spreading out out in every direction, choking out the sun and drenching them in green-tinted darkness.

Tiny skeletons were wrapped in flesh and clothing as roughly sixty thousand Nadia with fingers for eyes floated out of the cloud of green smoke obscuring the sun. Each one was about the size of a cat, an estimated fifteen pounds.

Ella and her father turned pale and warded themselves with Genosian signs against evil. Kala looked a little green around the gills at the sight of her contemporary so grossly altered.

“Neat! Did you have to change anything to repurpose the visual cortex or is it just kind of doing it on its own through neuroplasticity?” Learner asked with a brilliant smile.

Tell her it’s neuroplasticity, and that was a good guess. It’s like putting on those upside-down goggles for half an hour, your brain just figures out how to interpret it after a few minutes of bumbling.

“This feels really weird,” sixty thousand Nadias murmured, her voice seemingly coming from every direction at once, sending shivers up Calvin’s spine. Whispers on the wind.

“You’ll get used to it.”

Calvinian summoning has reached level 31! 29791 pounds, 16 hours 1 minute.

“Alright Nadia. Each of you take a slingshot and a bullet and spread out. We’re gonna brute force this solution.

Kurawe, if you wouldn’t mind recharging me. I want Nadia focused for this.

Already headed to the brothel, Ravager.

Good man. Tip them extra from the state treasury.

Thy will be done, Kurawe said before he cut contact.

See, having zealots is awesome, Elliot chimed in.

“In the spirit of our errant friend, let’s brute force this solution.” Calvin said with a grin.

Calvin watched the cloud of Nadia-bominations spread across the sky, armed with slingshots.

And now, we wait.

They didn’t have to wait long. Baroke was charmingly predictable, after all.

About half an hour later, a bolt of green shot up into the sky in the distance, about ten minutes jog to the west, disappearing into space like the one before.

You get it? Calvin asked.

Yessir, Nadia said. Four bullets unaccounted for.

“Excellent,” Calvin said, steepling his fingers with an evil grin.

***Baroke***

“Fuck, shit, ass!” Baroke flinched as some kind of backspray nailed him in the forehead and shoulder.

Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best idea. Godsdamn, that stings, Baroke thought, rubbing his aching forehead, something actually hurting him implied it had quite a bit of force behind it. Through watery eyes, he glanced down at the jungle floor, where he’d felt the shrapnel fall.

On the ground were two gleaming marbles of Abyssal Steel.

What the Abyss? Baroke certainly hadn’t made them.

He knelt down and picked up the marble.

Inscribed on the thumb-sized marble was tiny script, so small as to be nearly illegible.

Payback’s a bitch, isn’t it? You almost took out my godsdamned liver with that first shot, you bastard. Tomorrow, high noon, poke another hole at the exact location of our firepit. Advise if possible. One shot for yes, two for no, three shots if in immediate need of assistance.

As far as Baroke was aware, there was no threat left at the original campsite, so that shouldn’t be too hard. One shot it is, then.

Baroke was unslinging Betty when the world went grey, and goosebumps rose across Baroke’s body, warning him that his cursing had attracted the wrong kind of attention.