Chapter 21: The O’sut Bottleneck (Patreon)

Jeb charged up the stairs, heart hammering as he did. At the top of the spiral staircase, he paused long enough to look left and right, keeping an eye open for homicidal Keegan.

There, on the left, was a room with a splintered open door. Jeb barreled down the hall, his prosthetic foot clacking against the thin carpet until he came to a screeching halt in the doorway.

For an instant, Jeb felt as though he had once again been jettisoned out of his body, watching the event take place from a distance as the fear began to grow inside him.

In the center of the room, the ginger necromancer was bleeding out on a twin-sized bed.

Tyler’s form overlapped Ron’s, looking at him with desperation as the metal beam slowly crushed him further.

Shit, this is it, this is where it starts over again, Jeb though, his heart and lungs seizing in his chest. The recent experience of looping the tragedy reared its ugly head, adding to and enhancing the flavor of Jeb’s suffering.

“This is real,” Jeb whispered, thumbing the scar on his palm. “This is real.”

Do you mean Ron lying there dying or being in a living hell?

Por que no los dos?

Jeb’s breathing spiked as his amygdala skipped from first gear to fifth like a severely fucked up transmission.

That’s what scar tissue in the brain feels like.

“What’s going on? Who’s this guy? The fuck are you doing?” Colt asked, pushing Jeb aside and peering into the room.

Jeb followed the irritating teen’s voice like a rope through a blizzard, tugging himself out of the blinding chaos and slowly focusing on his voice, his face. There wasn’t another person there last time. All Jeb had to do was focus on the differences and keep the fear at bay.

Sure, it sounds easy.

It wasn’t a castle, Tyler wasn’t a ginger in black robes. There’s nothing actually pinning him down.

“Thanks, kid,” Jeb said, grabbing Colt’s shoulder and hauling himself to his foot, aiming for Ron.

The necromancer was paler than usual, lying on the bed with his hands clasped over his chest, covering a deep wound that was oozing blood through his fingers. His breathing came in fits and starts as he glanced over at Jeb.

“Oh hey,” Ron said weakly. “What took you so long?”

“The duel, remember?”

“Oh yeah…did you win?”

“Sort of,” Jeb said, checking Ron’s stab wound. “Think he got you in a lung. You probably shouldn’t be talking. You do realize you’re not vanguard material, right?”

“I thought...they were behind me.” Ron wheezed.

“Colt, c’mere,” Jeb said, motioning for the teen to approach. “Press down on that, but not too hard for him to breathe.”

For all his teenage faults, Colt was willing to get his hands dirty. The kid knelt down beside Ron and pressed down where Jeb had motioned, giving Jeb the opportunity to cut some some bandages out of the necromancer’s stylish robe, using his telekinetic-scissor trick.

“Zanta…silk…” Ron groaned, seeing his robes fall apart.

“Is he gonna live?”

“Eh, people have lived through pierced lungs before, He’s got as good a shot as anyone, what with his Body being as high as it is.” Jeb said. “Heart’s here,” He tapped on Ron’s bloody chest. “Liver’s here, spine down the center. There’s some major vessels somewhere in there, but I’m not a doctor. If they’d been hit, he’d be dead already.”

“I don’t…know if…I’m gonna make it,” Ron whined.

“You better fucking make it,” Jeb growled, “Lift.”

Colt put a palm under the slender man’s shoulder and lifted him up a couple inches, to an agonized groan from Ron and a gush of blood from his back.

Wasting no time, Jeb pressed a huge wad of expensive fabric to the bloody hole, then bound the whole thing around his chest, making the pressure on the wound permanent.

“Ron, you still with us?” Jeb asked, watching the necromancer turn even paler, beginning to shiver.

“Ron?” The man’s eyes were rolling in his head, his eyelids fluttering. “Ron!”

Smartass poked Jeb in the temple.

“There are other ways to get his attention.” Smartass said. Jeb felt a nudge inside him, and decided to follow the Mystic logic as far as it would carry him. If Jeb gave a bit of Impact, could it help Ron survive?

“Ron, how about we make a Deal?” Jeb said, grasping at straws. “You don’t die, and in return I don’t steal your shit?” The deal weighed Impact in Ron’s favor as it restricted Jeb’s behavior in return for nothing more than Ron continuing to breathe.

The necromancer gasped in a breath, a tiny hint of color returning to his face as his eyes refocused on Jeb.

“What the…I felt something…felt like Smartass, trying to latch onto me.”

He frowned, searching his short-term memory.

“Deal? Wait…was that a fairy Deal?” The necromancer recoiled from Jeb, scowling at him. “Are you trying to rob me?”

“The magic that enforces the Deal could help you survive. Looting your corpse if it doesn’t is just kind of a bonus.” Jeb said with a shrug.

“Fine, Deal.”

For an instant, Jeb got a little lightheaded, while Ron’s breathing began to even out, even more color returning to his cheeks. The necromancer’s eyes began to slide closed again.

“Before you pass out,” Jeb said, fighting through the dizziness. “Where are the kids?”

“I don’t know. They were gone when we got here.” Ron chuckled, then winced. “He was pissed.”

“Where is he now?”

“He went back out the door. Seconds before you showed up.”

Where did he go then? He obviously didn’t came back the way we came.

Jeb’s thoughts were cut off by the shriek of a little girl. Not the ‘I’m having a great time’ shriek, but the ‘this dude is trying to kill me shriek’. Admittedly they were difficult to tease apart. Context helped, here.

“That was Nancy!” Colt said, jumping to his feet.

“You go after me,” Jeb said, grabbing the slimelord by the shoulder and using it to hoist himself to his feet, his battered joints aching.

“Ron, we’re going. Try not to die while we’re gone.”

Ron gave them a thumb’s up, dropping his hand back to his stomach before Jeb and Colt whirled away, making for the hallway.

“Aiii!”

Another shriek, coming from…the end of the hall? Jeb glanced over and spotted the window was open, leading to the roof.

“They’re on the roof!” Colt stated the obvious and broke into a sprint, faster than Jeb could grab him, now in the lead. The teenager slipped through the open window like an eel in the amount of time it took Jeb to reach it.

Goddamnit, you’re tuned for support you stupid- Jeb grunted, shoving himself through the windowsill with one good leg, one recently dislocated arm, and a fair amount of Myst.

Jeb tumbled out onto the sloped roof, barely avoiding falling into the courtyard below, where the former sheriff was holding his own against the servants now that the blood-lady was preoccupied with her shattered ankles.

Jeb pushed himself to his foot, even more ungainly now that he was on a sloping, uneven surface.

I need a staff. Big freaking wizard staff, Jeb thought as he awkwardly hobbled along.

“Aiii!” Another shriek. Jeb zeroed in on the sound and pushed himself hard, aiming for it as he scrambled over the ye olde shingles.

Over the spine of the roof, Jeb made out Colt facing off against a Keegan in…

Is he wearing a three-piece suit? Weird.

There were children scattered all around the roof, some of them less wounded than others. A few…might have been dead. There were maybe six of them still standing, battered, all of them presenting spears toward the towering keegan.

Blame later, fight now.

Colt, the teen whose class ability was enhancing the speed of hand-powered projectiles, and Myst ability involved tripping people up with slime…screamed and charged the keegan like a wild boar.

Maybe he was discouraged with his slime Myst after Jeb and Zlesk found workarounds, but just charging? Jeb felt like throwing his hands up and giving up on teens as a whole.

The kid nearly got a hole in his chest to match Ron’s. The keegan lashed out with a three and a half foot length of silvery steel that looked short in the trafficker’s outrageously long arms, nearly skewering the kid before he even got close.

Colt must have been packing some armor under his clothes, because he knocked the blade aside with his wrist and went for a feral tackle across the man’s midsection.

The tackle was interrupted by an elbow to the teen’s skull, knocking him down the sloping roof. Jeb reached out with a wisp of Myst, preventing Colt from falling off the edge.

Jeb eyed the situation. He wasn’t confident that he could have matched that speed at all. But there was no longer anyone standing between the trafficker and the children.

There are worse reasons to die, Jeb thought, patting his busty bat-signal.

“Yolo!” Jeb shouted, cresting the spine of the roof and rushing down full speed. Do kids still say YOLO? The keegan’s head snapped up, his attention whipping from Colt to Jeb, his expression growing even angrier.

Jeb’s wooden leg picked that exact moment to lose purchase on one of the slippery tiles and forced him to choose between plummeting forward or doing the splits. Jeb chose the former.

Jeb hit his broken arm, flipped over and smashed the back of his head on the unyielding roofing shingles.

The world became a haze of pain that stemmed from his shoulder/arm, which the concussion actually seemed to help.

“Ugh,” Jeb groaned as he slid to a halt, some ten feet away from the child-killer.

Rattle.

His expensive, tricked-out foot slipped off and rolled down the slope, disappearing off the side of the roof with vengeful finality, getting even with him for all the abuse over the last twenty-four hours.

“Hah. Hahah.” The keegan chuckled softly, shaking his head at Jeb’s pathetic showing. “I don’t know what the Enforcer was thinking, sending a human. I suppose it’s proof that nobody really cares.” The keegan turned towards the children, who tensed up, their faces streaked with tears.

Forcing his eyes to focus, Jeb siphoned as much Myst as he could without damaging his core, wrapping a telekinetic fist around the killer’s midsection.

“Wha-“

Jeb threw him off the roof.

The Keegan’s eyes widened, flailing as he drew an arc over the edge. Jeb felt his telekinetic grip overpowered by sheer physical force a moment later, but the kidnapper was already flying.

“Ugh,” Jeb groaned, sitting up and crawling down the sloping roof towards Colt as fast as he could.

“Colt!”

“I’m fine, pops,” Colt said, waving him off, a palm on his temple as he pushed himself up.

“Not what I was gonna say,” Jeb said, grabbing Colt’s arm and dragging him off the roof. We got work to do.

Colt’s scream went high pitched as the two of them plummeted downward.

You’ve got just over a second and a half, falling from a four story building.

Jeb used the time to wrap a band of telekinetic force around the both of them and slow their fall to something more reasonable, approaching the ground at half-speed. Thankfully Colt didn’t panic too bad and scratch out his eyes. It shamed Jeb to admit the kid was physically stronger.

Below them, the kidnapper had already gotten to his feet. Rather than go back for the kids, the bastard seemed to have got it through his head that the jig was up. By the time they landed, he was sprinting for the exit, jostling his way through the chaotic melee.

“Slime him.” Jeb said, pointing out the sole keegan wearing human garb.

“On it,” Cole muttered, pushing himself to his feet and holding out both palms.

It was like someone knocked off the cap on a fire-hydrant, only lube instead of water. The slime spread out on its own, forming thick sheets that spread out across the battlefield, covering everyone in a thick layer of zero-friction goop.

Especially their prey, who went down in a tangle of limbs, sliding helplessly until he smacked into the nearby wall outside the front gate.

“Keep him down,” Jeb said, grabbing himself with telekinesis and skiing across the courtyard full of slimed combatants. Across the courtyard, Zlesk was using the opportunity to subdue one combatant after another.

Thankfully, the slime didn’t make objects slippery to Jeb’s telekinesis, and he was able to rip the keegan’s slimed sword from the man’s fingers, holding the tip of the blade against the guy’s neck, causing him to go still.

“Kebos O’sut, I presume. Would you mind answering some questions, maybe rolling on your friends before I kill you?”

The keegan gave an amused eyebrow waggle and snaked a hand up to the middle of the blade and twisted. The sword popped out of Jeb’s control and tumbled to the ground.

“Shit,” Jeb muttered, seeing the dimples in the steel. Faint traces of pale blue Myst retreated from the man’s fingers.

“I hate the nobles passionately. It takes all of my willpower not to empty this city of their mindless arrogance.”

“…and you don’t because you want to join their little club?” Jeb asked, raising a brow. “That seems kinda dumb to me. You get enough Nerve growing up?”

That must have struck a nerve.

“No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t,” Kebos growled, pushing himself to his feet and glaring at Jeb. The slime made his clothes hang loose, unable to support themselves by tension, but for some goddamn reason he was able to stand.

Jeb spotted what looked like pale blue Myst cleats sprouting out of Kebos’ feet.

Yipes. When Jeb made Myst-based additions to his wardrobe, they were completely manual, he had to consciously move them with his body, making everything slow and ponderous. Jeb had the impression that once these pale blue blades were fixed, they moved with the thing they were fixed to.

Jeb funneled Myst straight backwards, obscuring the motion with his own body. He grabbed his back and clothes, ready to yank himself out of the way.

He still almost missed it.

Kebos flickered, and Jeb yanked himself sideways.

There was a line of burning pain along Jeb’s ribs, and he glanced sideways as Kebos came to a sliding halt some twenty feet distant, his cleats throwing up chunks of hard-packed dirt.  He had a pale blue blade emerging from the edge of his palm.

Okay, we’ve got a guy who can make swords with his mind. Mind-swords. Seems a little uncreative, but who am I to judge?

Kebos glanced down at his feet which were still sliding to a halt in the torn up ground. A moment later his cleats turned into skates, and he began to loop back around towards Jeb.

“He’s fucking ignoring my slime. Again!” Colt shouted, his face red.

“No, it’s slowing him down,” Jeb said, watching Kebos approach. Compared to the burst speed he’d showed earlier, this was-

Kebos crouched low and pushed off the ground, making an explosion of dirt behind him. The child trafficker went from thirty to eighty in a single bound, putting Jeb in a time crunch.

Damnit, Jeb redirected his Myst in front of him, attempting to make a shield that would redirect some of the impact.

Kebos bunched his legs up under him and jumped, sailing over Jeb’s head and heading straight for the wall. Not having anything supporting him anymore, Jeb flailed for a moment before tumbling into the slimy mud beneath him.

He’s still trying to get away! Jeb thought as the keegan drew a perfect arc above their heads, hitting halfway up the stone wall of the courtyard with a dull thud. Rather than fall, the bastard stuck to the side like Spider-Man and began scrambling his way up to the top.

“Shoot him, please,” Jeb growled, trying to redirect his Myst from the wasted shield.

Colt obliged, reaching into a bag of steel pellet and flinging them up at the keegan crawling up the wall. Each throw broke the sound barrier, but none of them did what they were meant to do.

Colt only got three shots off before the man disappeared over the side of the wall. Two embedded themselves in the wall and one bounced off the man’s shoulder. Jeb’s Myst came woefully short of snagging the Keegan’s ankle and tearing him off the wall.

Jeb and Colt had a moment to sit there and silently contemplate failure.

Should’a just stabbed him in the throat.

In Jeb’s mind, if he didn’t get the names of the nobles involved, he’d be missing the root of the problem, and that had given the keegan the extra second he needed to get away.

Fuck. Jeb hadn’t been expecting him to be that tough. It seemed like the trafficker might be dipping into his own supply of kids intended for nobles.

“Did a steel ball that embedded itself into rock just bounce off of him?” Colt asked, rhetorically.

“Go round up your friends, make sure they’re not dead.” Jeb said, pointing over his shoulder toward the fourth story roof where several heads poked over the edge to watch them. “He’s not coming back right this second.”

“You gonna be okay, old man?” Colt asked, glancing down where Jeb sat flat on his ass in lube-mud, one-legged and sans crutch.

Jeb assessed the situation, glancing over at the empty spot where the judge had disappeared from. He heard the rattling of broken-ankle lady’s carriage in the distance. Zlesk looked like he’d been put through a meat-grinder, limping up to them.

He failed to catch the main culprit. He failed to catch any of the people funding him, he had a consolation prize of a dozen or so hapless servants restrained by Zlesk. And he had squishy mud slowly invading every orifice.

“I think I might cry a little.”

“I think I see your foot.” Colt said, pointing to a little dot of white in the hedges under the eaves.

Jeb reached out with telekinesis and grabbed the errant foot, sliding it on and strapping it down good. Welcome back, traitor.

“Grab Ron’s bed on the way down,” Jeb said as Colt turned away. “Don’t carry him directly. And get rid of this damn lube so I can walk.”

Colt complied, and the mud in his ass-crack turned to sand.

Insult to injury, am I right? Jeb thought sourly, climbing to his foot and thinking about what could have gone better.

I was unacceptably sans weapons, Colt needs some boot-camp, Zlesk needs more support. Ron needs a bodyguard…

Jeb glanced up at the castle.

At least we got the kids.

“Are you all right?” Zlesk asked, limping up to them. the former sheriff’s clothes were shredded, and he was leaking trace amounts of keegan blood all over.

“You’re asking me?” Jeb asked, raising a brow. He touched the scrape over his ribs. It burned and oozed a little blood, but it wasn’t bad.

“We should hire a bodyguard. Maybe more than one,” Jeb said, rubbing the blood between his fingers. Injured like this, Jeb and Zlesk wouldn’t be able to stop someone from setting fire to the orphanage. Or worse.

“We angered the wrong people today, didn’t we?” Zlesk asked.

“Pretty much.”

“E’choken’is, Jebediah Trapper, you have some talent for putting me on the wrong side of the wrong people.” Zlesk said, glaring at him.

“Hey look at that, a bunch of children you helped save!” Jeb said, pointing at the front door, where Colt was leading a stream of children between the age of four and ten out into the courtyard.

They were carrying three twin beds between them, with Ron on one, and six wounded children on the other two. Seeing this, Zlesk stood just a little straighter, his chest puffed out, and Jeb knew he’d managed to distract him.

“Good afternoon, children,” he said, wincing as he bowed. “My name is –“

“AIII!” A girl shrieked and dropped the corner of Ron’s bed to hide behind Colt.

“He’s gonna kill us!” another boy shouted.

“It’s okay, Mr. Zlesk is a nice bone-head.” Colt said, pointing to the tattered sheriff. “He helped us get to you.”

Try as he might, Colt couldn’t make the children warm up to Zlesk, and they mostly avoided his gaze or hid behind Jeb or Colt when he was near.

Jeb hadn’t ever seen the sheriff look so hurt. Even with all the battle damage, being shunned by children was what got to him.

Jeb found it hilarious.

There were six children who were badly wounded, but they seemed to be stable, so they formed a train and brought the kids back to the orphanage.

The teachers were alarmed and shot Jeb accusatory looks when he made it back with the injured around dusk, as if it was somehow his fault the kids had been hurt. They bundled the children up in bandages and immediately set about making sure they would recover.

They were gonna kill them. How could I have done any better?

Jeb wanted to collapse into a puddle on the floor, but he had some issues that needed addressing. First of all, was the lack of ass-kicking potential around the orphanage. Jeb was wounded, Zlesk was wounded, Colt was a teen, the teachers weren’t fighters, and Eddie wouldn’t come out of his shop except at swordpoint.

Frankly, Jeb didn’t think he’d notice if the orphanage burned down above him.

I need fighters until mine is back on his feet. Which meant Jeb needed gold, which meant a trip down to Eddie’s shop.

Urgh.

Jeb peeled himself off the chair and limped down to where Eddie was working.

The shop smelled like diesel, ozone and motor oil, and Eddie was standing there, staring intently at a drone about three feet wide, hovering in front of him silently.

“Who’s that?” Jeb asked, picking his way through the scrap-laden area over to the gold-processing plant in the corner of the room. It was a permanent structure they’d built around the chip of a gold-laced quartz lens.

“Legolas,” Eddie said. “I stripped some smartphone processors and now I’m working on making them play nice with each other. Once I’m done with that, I’ll be able to work on his AI.”

Jeb glanced over at a pile of smartphone cases that had been torn apart, their exceedingly small microchips scavenged from their circuit boards.

“Is he weapons ready?”

“Not yet,” Eddie glanced at Jeb. “I need another Myst engine for that.”

“They’re military issue as far as I know. I don’t know where we could get more yet,” Jeb said, channeling a thin thread of Myst into the gold refiner. The mechanism split Jeb’s Myst into several parts, threading them into a homemade regulator that allowed a tiny spool of his gold Myst to interact with the chip. The resulting quartz gravel tumbled into the furnace, which got the lion’s share of Jeb’s output. The rest went to stirring the mixture and mechanically separating gold from rock.

The reason Jeb had to do it personally was because Myst Engines were imperfect. The engines shot out the full spectrum of Myst as radiant energy, and a tiny fraction of that spectrum was the antithesis of the lens it was being shoved into. Therefore, lenses fed by Engines would slowly degrade.

They degraded when Jeb used them too, but much, much slower. Jeb imagined the only way to get a lens to last forever was to pour an exact match into it. Eddie was investigating a way to filter Myst, but he said not to get his hopes up.

“I’m gonna need you to set Buddy outside the orphanage as a watchdog until I can come back with some mercs.”

Eddie glanced at Buddy in the corner, and the bomb-robot’s engines rumbled to life before he headed for the stairs.

“That’s spooky.”

Eddie chuckled evilly and continued his work on Legolas, staring at the robot, his eyes flickering from side to side like he was reading something.

By the next morning, Jeb had enough money to hire on a handful of adventurers from the Hunter’s Association willing to defend them for a couple weeks. The mere sight of a half a dozen brutes on the property should convince their enemies to seek legal options rather than violence.

And that would buy time.

After that, Jeb grabbed all the lenses and wands from his room and brought them down to the shop, all the while mulling over the poor showing against Kebos. He had been systematically stripped of every advantage before he’d even met the guy, and Jeb hated it.

I need more, better weapons, Jeb thought, unloading his backpack full of goodies. He never wanted to go into a fight naked again if he could help it.

Click

The cellar wall beyond Jeb resolved into an image.

“Hi there! I’m Amanda Courvar!” His former healer said, bouncing into frame.

“And I’m Brett Courvar.” Brett said, putting an arm around her waist. “And we’re here today to talk to you about choosing the right build for your profession, why balance is important, and why you might want to save some of those Ability points for a rainy day!”

“But first, we’ve got a new segment where we read your fan mail and answer frequently asked questions!” Amanda said.

They get mail? Jeb thought, brow raising. Of course they get mail, they’ve got a fixed address!