Chapter 4: Survival skills (Patreon)

“He’s the sheriff,” Jeb blurted, pointing at Zlesk.

Boney Pete glanced over at the skinny keegan while reaching for the bones in his hair.

Jeb took the opportunity to slip under the table.

Whoosh!

A monstrous femur longer than Jeb was tall swept through the back of his seat, treating the heavy wood like Styrofoam. Shrapnel clattered across the surface of the table above him, some of it sprinkling under the lip and peppering his clothes with sharp splinters of wood.

Coulda been my head, Jeb thought, shoving himself out from under the table and rolling in the direction of the lawman. Zlesk would stop the next swing. If not because he wanted to save Jeb’s life, then just because the next swing was now going to be directed towards him.

“Stop!” Jeb got a good look at Zlesk wrestling Boney Pete above him for control of the club before he was back up on his foot and clomping towards the door.

At this point, a stray punch or a careless shove might break Jeb’s spine, so S.O.P. was to get the fuck out of dodge while he still had his head attached to his body. He was about as well equipped to handle this guy right now as a tonka truck was equipped to haul freight.

“Later!” Jeb shouted over his shoulder as he left the door.

That was when he spotted Boney Pete mounted over the keegan. The orange-skinned criminal’s broad muscles were bulging as he forced a skewer of sharpened bone closer and closer to the skull-face’s eye.

Keegan weren’t known for their physical strength, and when two people had similar Body, the one with more actual muscle would come out stronger. Jeb watched the sheriff’s trembling skeletal arms descend a fraction of an inch closer to his face, trembling all the while.

Everyone else in the room was either gawking or had already run off.

”Goddamnit,” Jeb growled, desperately wishing for his gun in storage outside the city. A man’s skull might be stronger than a .44 slug nowadays, but his brain would certainly feel it.

No such luck. Jeb’s gaze caught the empty space behind the bar, where the tender had the presence of mind to fuck off before things went down.

Usually, a bartender in a place like this keeps a weapon under the bar in case things turn sour. Jeb leapt over the bar, and ducked down, looking for anything he could whack with or throw.

The sleazy place didn’t disappoint. There was a solid iron rod about three feet long and sized a bit too big for Jeb’s fingers, resting in a holster that kept it secured to the bottom of the bar.

Jeb dragged it free, grunting at the weight as he leapt back over the wooden bar, doing his best impersonation of an Olympic athlete as he cleared the hurdle.

Unlike an Olympic athlete, Jeb’s wooden pegleg slipped from the sudden torque upon landing, sending him toppling to the ground, beat-stick flailing out ahead of him.

The edge of the iron rod still managed to skim Boney Pete’s ear, partially tearing it off.

“Motherfucker!” Boney Pete shouted, clapping his hand to his ear and glaring at Jeb.

Jeb scrambled to his feet an instant before a sharpened bone hidden in Boney Pete’s clothing violently expanded outward in Jeb’s direction, rebounding off Jed’s beater and missing his liver by a couple inches.

Jeb scrambled backwards, and before Boney Pete could try again, a pale fist caught him in the jaw, scrambling his eggs for a moment as the skinny sheriff slipped out from beneath him, grabbing the outlaw’s arm on the way and twisting it out of its socket.

“Gah!”

Zlesk grabbed Boney Pete’s wrist and slammed it down on the floor, his hands pulsing briefly with Myst as he did so.

Jeb watched, intrigued as the sheriff rolled away from a retaliatory strike with another hidden bone splinter.

Boney pete tried to stand, but his wrist wouldn’t come away from the floor. His inhuman strength made the wood slats under their feet buck for an instant before the pain of the dislocated arm caught up with him, sending him howling back to his knees.

“Club!” Zlesk said, holding his hand out. Jeb obliged, tossing the steel rod to the sheriff, who gave the outlaw one good blow to the head, deftly avoiding the man’s shiny black horns.

Boney Pete’s eyes rolled back into his head, and a moment later, he exploded with dozens of sharpened bones, jutting in every direction like a demon porcupine as his shrinking Ability lapsed.

Jeb was far enough away, but Zlesk caught a couple of the spikes, soaking up the damage with his arms as he backed off.

This seems like as good a time as any to get the fuck outta here, Jeb thought, hopping toward the exit as Zlesk caught his breath, staring at the unconscious outlaw while clutching his bleeding arm, obviously riding that post-battle high. Jeb scooped up his prosthetic on the way out the door.

Jeb really didn’t have time to do the paperwork that would no doubt follow the brawl, and he was pretty sure Zlesk wasn’t going to give him the bounty.

No, what he needed to do was move faster than word of Boney Pete’s arrest. Rather than try and pry information out of the guy, it would be easier and faster to simply follow the messenger. Whoever they kept on retainer in town to bring them word of important shit.

Any organized group of outlaws had someone like that who was paid to feed them news, allowing them to dodge large manhunts and get out of town if an Enforcer was dispatched. Their supply mule getting pinched was exactly the sort of thing they’d pay to know about.

It wasn’t like the aliens were the only ones who had invented working outside the law.

But we mastered it, Jeb thought, chuckling to himself as he hopped down the street on one foot, slipping his pegleg back on in a remarkable display of agility before he went back to clomping on both feet.

He needed to get to his stash and get on the road east ASAP, which meant he had no time to play cops and robbers.

Jeb broke into an awkward run.

***Zlesk, Sheriff of Kalfath***

“Whew,” Zlesk let out a long slow breath, fingers shaking as the last dregs of adrenaline left his system. Almost dying was not a pleasant experience. He kept pressure on the arm to slow the bleeding. There wasn’t much, but Keegan didn’t have a lot of blood to begin with.

This was NOT how I wanted my night to go. Now I’ve gotta process this fool. On the other hand, apprehending a dangerous criminal would be a boon for his career, so there was a silver lining to the night.

“Jeb, I’m going to need to take you down to the station and get your witness statement.”

“Jeb?” Zlesk glanced up and realized the one-legged beggar was nowhere to be found. He’d fucked right off as soon as Boney Pete had slumped to the ground.

“Godsdamnit.” Zlesk glanced back at the riot of sharpened bones in the corner of the bar, some of them sticking through the floor, ceiling and tables. He was going to have to clean all this up, too.

At least the Ferravore bones in boney Pete’s collection were worth nearly a bulb apiece. That would help with cleaning up the mess. Already scavengers were trying to make off with the smaller ones, regardless of the sheriff standing right there.

“You there,” Zlesk said, turning to a younger man who’d watched the whole fight go down. He fished out a silver coin from his pocket and tossed it to him. “Fetch Clisk and Bon from the station, would you?”

I’m not dealing with this shit by myself.

***Jebediah Trapper***

Jeb was outside the city, panting from exertion as he’d kept up a light jog with one leg for at least half an hour. Climbing a hill one-legged was not as easy as it sounded.

Finally, he found the specific scraggly piece of brush on the side of the hill. He knelt down beside it and tore it away to reveal the top of the cooler he’d buried his contraband in.

Whistling, Jeb grabbed the dirty harry revolver he’d found in the glovebox of an abandoned car, and strapped it on his hip with the belt that came with it.

Jeb had buried all his gear in an oversized cooler, except for a few things to pawn when he’d first entered Kalfath. He hadn’t wanted to wind up on the wrong side of the law or get mugged in the first five minutes. A few of the item descriptions he’d gotten from the System had convinced him that getting caught carrying the wrong thing could lead to summary execution.

Case in point, Jeb thought, grabbing his self-powered fireball wand and tucking it inside his jacket, out of prying eyes. The aliens would come down on him a lot harder for that than a handgun.

Next he grabbed the Beautiful Revenge. The old-timey four-walled glass lantern was filled with half a dozen black butterflies, with accents of fluorescent blue and purple.

Each one of those babies could carve a hole in something about the size of a golf ball. They weren’t very fast, but they didn’t have a limit to the number that could be summoned, and they were able to be controlled until they delivered their payload of Annihilation Myst.

The best part was that it had been designed to be used by weak Myst users…

Like me, Jeb thought with a scowl, tying the lantern to his right hip.

He grabbed a handful of bullets for the gun and put them in his pocket, along with several of his emergency Snickers looted from a vending machine and some bottled water.

Sweat beading on his brow, Jeb turned toward the east, where the messenger was no doubt leaving the city to inform Svesk and his crew of kidnappers.

Jeb was half a mile west of the city. if he wanted to catch up with word of Boney Pete’s fate, he had to run.

“Goddamn it,” Jeb said, wiping the sweat from his brow and taking a swig of water before he resumed jogging again. This time weighed down by about ten extra pounds of gear.

“Smartass, I need a distraction,” Jeb gasped as he ran, tugging out the blackmail letter. “What’s it say?”

Smartass cleared her throat and sat on Jeb’s shoulder to read, to his irritation.

“Grenore. I do not care about your mewling protestations. The situation favors us. The Stitch has dropped a veritable fortress in the form of the Split mountains between you and your beloved mines. A fortress I own.

I know how far you’ve overreached with your new mine. I heard it straight from your foreman’s mouth before I broke his jaw. I have you by the balls, and you can do nothing to change it short of paying us our due. If you want your shiny new mine back, you will give us no less than two thousand bulbs in imperial Marks…

However, I’m nothing if not understanding and generous. If you can convince me to accept collateral of equal value, we will allow your workers to return to the mines, such that you can gather the money needed to appease us.”

Jeb blinked.

“Read that last paragraph again?” He asked as he ran.

Smartass did so without complaint.

“Collateral of equal value? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Jeb asked.

“His daughter,” Smartass said with a shrug.

“His-“ Jeb glanced at the fairy resting on his shoulder. “I forgot how you got your name.”

“We fairies have a knack for this sort of thing,” Smartass said, posing.

“Okay, so I think you’ve given me the kernel of what I need to enact part five of the plan, thanks a bunch.”

“It wasn’t hard,” she said with a shrug before her face brightened. “So how are you going to use the letter to take his Impact?”

Jeb glanced at Smartass. “I feel like if I tell you, you’ll do it yourself and take the whole share. I don’t recall a clause where you have to share with me if you take payment.”

“That wasn’t…the only reason I asked,” Smartass said, avoiding his gaze.

“Hah. Gimmie the letter back.” Smartass reluctantly handed it over. “Now we just have to do the part where we kill a dozen superhuman sand-pirates and rescue Ms. Grenore.”

“Simple.” Smartass said.

“Yeah, but not easy,” Jeb muttered, directing the next batch of butterflies to fly above him, keeping pace with him as they gradually disappeared into the sky, too small to be seen against the curtain of night.

They were passing the city in the dark of night, angling for the eastern road when Jeb had an epiphany that caused him to slow his stride for a moment.

“Smartass, I just realized something.”

“Yeah?”

“We didn’t actually make a deal with Garland Grenore yet.”

“Oohh… That could be a problem. You should go do that. Like, right now.”

Jeb looked back at the city glittering in the dark, a few miles distant now.

“Nope, it’s too late to go back. I’ll miss the messenger, and this will get way harder. I’ll work something out when we get back.”

“Jeb, five percent of nothing is nothing.”

“Relax,” Jeb said. “I’ll figure something out. Rescuing that girl is more important to me, anyway.”

“Ugh! This deal sucks!”

***Mark Jacobs***

Svek is gonna wanna hear about this, Mark thought as he power-walked through the dark of night. He could already feel the heavy weight of the gold coin in his hand, taste the beer it would buy.

Among other things, Mark thought, mind wandering to the friendly ladies on the edge of town.

He’d been tapped to provide information to the pirates a couple months ago, and to be honest, they scared the hell out of him, but he’d made the trek up to the mountains three times now, and twice they’d paid him damn good money for it. The third time they’d said the information was useless to them.

It had rankled, but Mark wasn’t going to argue with men who could casually tear his head off.

The fact that Boney Pete had been caught was way juicier than any news he’d ever brought before. He was definitely getting paid this time.

Mark chuckled to himself, but stopped when he heard a strange noise from behind him.

Clomp, shh, clomp, shh, clomp.

What the? Mark glanced behind him, his hair rising on his neck, heart jumping into overdrive. Monsters were real now, and Mark was level twelve. He didn’t even have a class.

He’d taken the Easy tutorial, wholly uninterested in risking his own life.

And yet, here I am, walking through monster and outlaw infested wilderness. What the hell am I doing out here? Mark’s typically strong sense of self-preservation returned in force, no longer blinded by gold.

Behind him, he made out the faint outline of a man limping towards him. The silhouette was a human, but something was wrong. One of the feet was a slender pole.

“Who are you?” Mark asked, turning to face the silhouette and fingering his sword, widening his eyes to try and make out the figure better.

Should’ve put more points into Nerve, he thought, peering into the dark. It was about twenty feet back and approaching slowly, at a sedate, limping pace.

“Hi there,” The voice belonged to a man, and it sounded a bit on the older side. “Do you have a moment to talk about running information for pirates?”

He knows! Run!

Mark didn’t bother drawing his blade. If the guy knew what he was doing out here, this wasn’t a random meeting, and that meant there was no way he would win in a straight fight.

He turned and ran, putting every ounce of his fifteen Body to work, taking off like a bat out of hell. Professional athletes from Before would have drooled with envy.

Let’s see a one-legged man keep up with that.

Pain erupted in Mark’s legs as something took a bite out of him in the darkness.

“AAAIII!” He would’ve been embarrassed about the shrill scream if he hadn’t been busy tumbling into the dirt road. Once he slid to a stop, he reached down to his thighs and found chunks of flesh just gone from his legs, overwhelming his ability to think from the sheer pain blasting through his body as dirt and grit got into the open wounds.

“Oh god, oh god,” Mark didn’t think of himself as a Christian, but prayers to God just kinda…tumbled out of his mouth as he pressed down on the golf-ball sized holes in his leg, instinctively trying to stop the bleeding.

“Evening,” The one legged man said, grabbing Mark’s shirt and flipping him onto his back before straddling his chest.

Mark froze when he heard the click of a hammer being cocked back. He heard it real good, because the barrel was pressed against his skull, and the sound echoed through his bone.

“Now you might be thinking to yourself,” The man said. “My Body is high enough for my skull to stop bullets, isn’t it? Why should I give a shit?”

“Have you ever heard of a compression wave?”

“N-No?”

“Here’s a good example: The bubble that forms on the other side of something that stops a bullet. Say your skull stops this forty-four. Some of that kinetic force will penetrate, and that makes a compression wave, a little bubble on the other side of your skull. That bubble expands outward at high speed, liquefying brain cells, breaking membranes, popping blood vessels, that sort of thing.”

“Oh, god,” Mark whimpered, his life flashing in front of his eyes. I should’ve went into the hard tutorial with Sara.

“Now, it might kill you, it might put you in a coma, or it might just lobotomize you and make you a simpleton. I don’t know for sure. I’m not a doctor. What I do know, is that it will end life as you know it.”

“So, you gotta ask yourself one question. Is my soft, squishy brain, strong enough to shrug off a compression wave from a point blank forty-four? Well? Is it...punk!?”

“No! It’s not, please, don’t shoot me!” Mark sobbed.

“Okay, back to my original question. Do you have some time to talk about pirates?”

“Yes!”

“Good, umm…” The gun nudged his forehead, making him flinch. “What’s your name?”

“Mark!”

“Mark, I want you to tell me everything you know about Svek Pederson’s crew.”

Mark did so, telling the whole story between sobs. He gave the brown-haired man everything, from the time he’d been hauled into a side-alley by one of the bruisers, up until now. He gave him the password, the location of the meeting point, everything he could think of. Mark didn’t even think to lie to the guy, he was so terrified.

The man digested all of this with a contemplative scowl. “Hmm. And you’ve seen how many of them in person?”

“I only ever meet two, they put a bag over my head and bring me to Svek! It’s in some kind of tent made of leather or something, it smells like cheese sometimes and –”

“That’s plenty,” The man said, raising his other hand. He leaned close, and Mark could smell the beer on the man’s breath. “Mark, before I let you go, I’m going to ask you to do something, and it’s going to sound like a fetish thing, but it’s really not.”

“W-what?” Mark asked, swallowing hard as the man began rummaging around in Mark’s pockets.

“I want you to say some very specific things for me before I get off.”

***Jeb Trapper***

“That stuff about compression waves was all true!?”  Smartass demanded.

“All true.”

“Wow.”

Jeb directed the next three butterflies to emerge from the lantern to join the growing swarm high above him. They were so high and so numerous that they looked like a wisp of cloud floating through the night sky.

And that suited Jeb just fine.

Jeb was at the meeting point, sitting next to the signal fire, just waiting to get himself kidnapped. He’d hidden his lantern and wand

“I hope that kid doesn’t get gangrene and die. I tried to avoid the knees and femoral artery, but those butterflies aren’t exactly precise.”

Jeb hadn’t been expecting the informant to be human, but it made sense. The authorities wouldn’t think a human was working with alien pirates at first glance. Add that to the fact that humans were fairly expendable, and probably would be for another decade or two until they managed to scrape together some political clout.

“I’ve never heard of a creature with the System dying from any illness other than age.” Smartass said.

“Yeah, high Body would mean the end of disease, wouldn’t it?”

Jeb kicked his foot off the side of the rock as he thought. I wonder if the doctoring profession is crippled from the vast majority of people being totally immune to disease. Add to that, people who can heal injuries with magic, and you’re looking at the end of physicians in general.

Then Jeb imagined what would happen if a modern doctor got a Myst core.

It’d probably be something easily underestimated like a Salt core that he can use to change the ionic bonds of atoms in the enemy’s body and give them an untraceable heart attack…or dissolve, or something. I dunno.

There were bound to be a few of them out there.

Jeb’s musings were cut short by the crunch of dirt underfoot. He stood up on the boulder and scanned the darkness. Despite the rather large signal fire, Jeb was unable to pierce the darkness with his regular human eyes.

Jeb, on the other hand, was lit up like a Christmas tree, standing so close to the pyre.

“E’Nak Chuman!” Jeb shouted the password into the wilderness.

Silence reigned for a good minute, and Jeb was starting to think he’d simply heard some wildlife rummaging around, when the crunch of dirt sounded again, much closer this time. Two rather large Melas men morphed out of the darkness, like the firelight had scoured away some dark shroud wrapped around them.

“Evening,” Jeb said, hand near his gun in case these weren’t the fellows he was looking for. “Mark told me – MMPH!” Jeb’s well-crafted excuse was cut short when the two thugs lunged forward, moving in between Jeb’s thoughts like a jumping spider, practically teleporting to either side of him.

One shoved a gag in Jeb’s mouth, the other wrenched his arms behind his back. A moment later a hood snuffed out Jeb’s sight, and he felt the men going through his pockets.

Jeb had buried anything a messenger wasn’t supposed to have a little ways away, including the wand, the lantern, and the letter from Svek.

Those were no-nos that would probably get him summarily executed.

They fished out Jeb’s last silver coin, a bit of his change from the bar, took his revolver, pegleg and shoe. Aww come on, why the shoes, man!? Jeb tried to protest through the gag, but it came out as a surly groan.

Jeb tensed up when the inquisitive fingers seized on his ring.

Oh, shit, I forgot about that. Goddamnit!

Plan, meet First Contact.

A moment later, they pried it off his finger before muttering to each other in hushed tones. Jeb could picture them using their fancy-shmancy System to identify his magical ring and wonder why an informant was wearing bling that could likely be traded for a mansion.

“Enough. Svek will decide what to do with him.” A rumbling voice cut the other off, and Jeb felt himself being slung over someone’s shoulder before they began moving across the mountainside at roller-coaster speeds, making his stomach distinctly uneasy.

They must have been going somewhere around forty miles an hour judging by the feel in his gut when they made a turn, and generally the movement was more upward than downward.

Ten minutes later, Jeb heard other voices, and they set him down on some kind of rug made of coarse fur.

Ten minutes at forty miles an hour, so somewhere between five and seven miles away from the meeting point, generally uphill.

That described a fairly large swath of the mountainside.

Oh, god, the walk back is going to be murder on my feet - foot -, if I don’t get my shoe back. Maybe the girl can carry me.

Without warning, Jeb’s hood and gag were ripped from his face, nearly taking his lips with them. He was kneeling with his hands tied behind his back in some kind of yurt made of animal hide. Dim firelight peeked through the seams of the door flap, and Jeb could hear raucous laughter coming from beyond.

More concerning, however, was the melas man sitting on a hide-covered throne, contemplatively turning Jeb’s ring over in his hand. He was a foot taller than any Melas he’d seen so far, and those people were big.

The titanic melas’ horns were huge and shiny, curving up and around in a way that made Jeb think of Tim Curry in Legend. Slightly oranger, but still.

He dominated the yurt, making the large leather construction appear small and confined. There was nowhere in the room Jeb could go that the pirate captain couldn’t reach by leaning a bit.

“Jebediah Trapper, I presume?” He rumbled, glancing up from the ring.

Oh, goddamnit, it’s got my name on it. That son of a bitch god is gonna get me killed!