Chapter 20: Responsibility (Patreon)

“Jebediah!” Vresh’s voice faded into the wind as Jeb put the pedal to the metal, flinging himself violently through the air on a jet of Telekinetic Myst, heading toward his responsibility.

And if the world blows up in the meantime? Are you responsible for that, too?

Shut up, me. One thing at a time.

As he got closer, Jeb could make out the courtyard, filled with several hundred children, being led in a fighting retreat out onto the street, away from the army-ant frontline.

Zlesk, Ron, Borg and Colt were in the back, while Nancy, Eddie, and the teachers were in the front, leading the march of brats away from the frontline, toward the southeast of the city.

Jeb felt a hint of pride as Colt created a thick coating of zero-friction slime along the street, forcing the mass of insect soldiers to scramble and struggle, expending far more effort than they should’ve to march in tandem up the gentle slope. The teenage Slinger took potshots at their limbs with unnerving accuracy, his sling-bullets knocking the more stable insects off balance, creating small chain-reactions of tangled, flailing limbs.

All this meant only a handful of the monsters were able to approach Zlesk at a time.

The former sheriff of Kalfath was a skilled duelist, and he used his outrageous reach to dismantle one creature at a time with brutal efficiency. A stab to a major muscle group, then use the follow-up flinch to stab the brain before moving on to the next.

Ron, in turn, re-mantled the corpses in a matter of seconds, neon violet Myst threading out of his palms at a fantastic rate, repairing and reanimating corpses just as fast as Zlesk could make them.

Rather than direct the zombies to haphazardly intrude on Zlesk’s combat, he withdrew the slowly accumulated force of corpses, walking them alongside the children as a reserve and extra shielding on the side of the formation.

Borg was wielding a thick steel pickaxe and acting as Colt’s bodyguard, taking a swipe at anything that got too close, pinning the monster down until Zlesk could finish it off.

Eddie was in the front, cowering behind Nancy, despite the girl being nearly two feet shorter than him.

Jeb made to land beside Ron and organize a push into the dungeon, but a moment later, he felt three of his FMO shields pop. His head snapped up and he followed the trajectory of the spinning piece of rubble off into the distance. It should have returned the projectile to sender, but there was no sign of Meyers. Whoever’d thrown the brick at his head had already moved on.

Guerilla tactics, huh?

Jeb’s eyes narrowed. His first instinct was to dive toward Ron and shield their most valuable support caster, but Meyers’ response to that was fairly predictable.

She would drop a frag on the front of the escaping children. Or something to that effect.

That’s what I would do, anyway, Jeb thought, scowling.

The immortal children had a good chance of surviving a little shrapnel, but Eddie and the teachers were nearly base level Body. Not to mention the other kids with no levels at all.

This sucks. If Jeb didn’t alter the situation, Meyers would keep poking at him, forcing him to stay in one place or risk losing someone, effectively neutering Jeb’s ability to do anything besides float there with his thumb up his ass.

Jeb scanned the formation for someone he could use. Colt, Ron and Zlesk were needed where they were, and Jeb didn’t trust Borg after the last one tried to kill him.

He glanced over at Nancy, with the skinny roboticist hiding behind her.

There!

Jeb turned and dove toward the front of the huge line of children, reaching out with a thread of Myst and snagging Eddie. Eddie would work.

The wispy-haired roboticist let out a strangled yelp as he was yanked straight up off the ground and brought into Jeb’s orbit.

Boom!

There was a concussive blast from the back of the line, and Jeb already knew what it meant: Somebody just got killed.

Jeb whipped around and spotted Meyers. The silver-haired woman was standing on Colt’s neck, buried six inches in the street. The teen’s exposed body twitched violently in the distinctive manner of someone who’d just suffered lethal brain trauma.

The ‘general’ gave Jeb a vindictive smile, then shot upward in a blast of air, moving faster than Jeb had ever been able to, vanishing from the eye as Borg’s fist passed through the vacuum she’d left behind.

Their situations had been reversed. She was set loose in Jeb’s home now, killing his people. The irony wasn’t lost on him. Jeb loosened his jaw and buried his self-recriminations beneath a layer of ice, letting Ron and Zlesk’s dismayed shouts flow past him.

Plenty of time for that later.

“Meyers!” Jeb shouted at the top of his lungs, holding Eddie’s mewling form in front of himself. While Eddie was in front of him, Jeb started weaving a trap, carefully containing Heat Myst into a tightly wound packet.

“You wanted to know who made the drone! Here he is! Probably the best human with Myst tech on the planet! And I own him! How much is it gonna take for you to back the fuck off!?”

“W-what are you doing!?” Eddie asked, his eyes locked on the ground.

“Selling you. Be quiet.”

Meyers appeared in midair, some two hundred feet distant, her body melding into view from the surrounding air, like she’d stepped out from behind a blurring shower curtain.

Active camo. Jeb’s brain put the pieces together, narrowing down her abilities. It was fine, yet powerful control over air of some kind. It allowed her to manipulate sound, move at supersonic speeds, and give herself active camo by making the air thick enough to bend light around her.

Likely she could thicken air around herself to block attacks as well.

Problematic, but not impossible to deal with.

“That’s obviously a trap!” she sneered, her voice clearly audible even at this distance. Jeb could faintly make out her Myst creating a tube that channeled the sound between them.

“Of course it is!” Jeb shouted back. “Doesn’t change who he is or how valuable an asset he could become!” Jeb wiggled Eddie like an attractive worm on a hook.

“Set him down outside the city and tell him to head east, and I’ll let your kids leave.”

Jeb’s eye twitched. In all likelihood, she wanted the kids too.

She’d have to get new soldiers from somewhere.

It was a terrible Deal all ‘round, but it wasn’t like Jeb was planning on letting her have any of them. She knew that, and Jeb knew that.

They were merely negotiating who was off-limits, at this point.

Jeb glanced back down at the crowd of children streaming down the road to the east. Borg had moved from his spot in the back to a position in the front. The undead cyborg was walking backward beside Nancy, his gaze locked on Meyers.

Without Colt’s slime, the marching army ants were moving dramatically faster, forcing Ron to deploy his reserve of undead insects as support for Zlesk, who was hard-pressed to pry apart the creatures’ defenses when they formed a solid shield-wall.

If only you knew how much of a difference you made.

In the handful of seconds since Colt had his spine crushed, the front lines of the insect creatures had pushed forward, burying the teen’s body beneath a wave of chitin.

Jeb looked away.

“Guarantee Eddie’s safety, and include the civilians, and you’ve got a Deal,” Jeb said. “Kids need people to take care of ‘em, after all.”

She glanced down at the grey-haired civilians leading the exodus beneath them.

“Deal,” she said.

“Deal.” Jeb felt the magic click into place inside him.

He whipped up a parachute trap, then spoke.

“Head east,” Jeb said into Eddie’s ear before flinging Eddie off into the distance.

“I hate you!!!!” The wispy-haired inventor’s scream faded into the distance along with his flailing body. Jeb kept an eye on Meyers, watching to see what she would do. Jeb couldn’t risk personally depositing Eddie outside the city, because she wasn’t magically compelled to keep her word.

Chances were good she’d break the agreement the moment it became inconvenient, but Jeb was hoping the civilians were low-value enough that she didn’t care if they got away or not.

Eddie’s tremendous commercial value would hopefully stay her hand, whatever the outcome.

…And if she decided to kill Eddie…

Well, he’s had plenty of time on this earth. Her breaking the Deal would give Jeb an advantage over her, while not netting her any benefit.

Hell, because of the wording, I could blow Eddie up and she’d be reneging on the Deal… Nah, I’m not that much of an asshole. Tempting, but Jeb liked the old man too much to murder him as a catch-22.

Honestly, Jeb would prefer it if she kept her word. It would be great if she didn’t attack his kids, and he’d already filled his side of the bargain.

He couldn’t dismiss pure vindictive rage though, so he kept a close eye on Meyers.

The floating bitch watched him with predatory focus as the civilians continued to stream away from the city, gaining speed as they figured out what was going on.

Jeb studied the state of the city out of the corner of his eye. The natives of Solmnath were resisting, but the army ants seemed to have gained a substantial toehold in the middle of the night, while people were asleep. The two-story insect that he’d seen earlier was being fought by a squad of what appeared to be a half a dozen guards, but they were being pushed back by the creature’s smaller companions.

The cores didn’t make anything that big in Nellis. The core must have maintained its progress toward making bigger and badder bugs, and transferred that to its new home.

Here and there, Jeb could make out some of the remaining nobility of Solmnath cutting their way through the wall of chitin like a hot knife through butter, but their numbers were simply too low to keep up with the weaponized dungeon’s output.

Eh, I wouldn’t wish those child-killers back even if it was to save the city.

With the emperor gone back east with his elite guards, along with a sizable fraction of the upper nobility being culled, the city was more vulnerable than Jeb had realized.

Damnit.

Just like before, it seemed the only way to turn off the dungeon was a blitz straight down the sinkhole.

Even then, I don’t know where there’s enough gold to wrap the damn thing up. That was a key feature of being in Vegas. Now Jeb had no idea where he was going to find the materials to make the damn thing stop drilling into the heart of the city.

Jeb stifled a gasp of realization.

He didn’t have to fix anything. He could employ his favorite method of conflict resolution: Dump the problem in someone else’s lap, then sucker punch them.

Jeb began to float toward the back of the line where Ron and Zlesk were fighting, maintaining eye contact with Meyers

Meyers tilted in midair and floated further that direction as well, matching his pace, a subtle head nod indicating they’d both leave the civilians to their own devices.

I hope.

Jeb took off, aiming for Ron and Zlesk.

Jeb’s max speed was about highway cruising speed, between sixty and eighty miles an hour, while Meyers’ put his to shame, at somewhere easily above two hundred miles an hour.

The Formula One to his Honda Civic.

Meyers beat Jeb to Ron and Zlesk, aiming a sonic-empowered kick to the back of Ron’s head.

Zlesk’s outrageously long legs flashed out and swept Ron off his feet. Jeb saw a flurry of ginger hair fly up into the air as Meyers flew directly over Ron’s head, accompanied by an explosion of compressed air.

It wasn’t a sonic boom; she wasn’t going that fast. The boom that echoed through the streets was the side effect of whatever attack she used to turn people inside out.

Meyers sailed past Ron faster than Zlesk could counter, and was long gone before Jeb made it to the necromancer, disappearing in a flurry of wind.

For understandable reasons, she refused to allow Jeb within a hundred feet of her. I understand it, but it pisses me off tremendously, Jeb thought as he snagged Ron and Zlesk.

“Leave your zombies there!” Jeb shouted. Ron had accumulated enough zombies to act as a shield wall for the fleeing children.

Ron had gotten manhandled like this before, so he simply nodded and tucked his limbs in, going along for the ride. Zlesk, on the other hand, flailed for a moment before he realized Jeb was the one who’d yanked him off the ground.

When he finally stopped thrashing, Jeb saw tears in the keegan’s eyes. It was more emotion than Jeb had expected, but Zlesk had actually spent more time at the orphanage than Jeb at this point. He’d grown attached to the young man over the last few months.

“I couldn’t save him. One moment he was there, I looked away for an instant and…” Zlesk stared into the distance.

“It’s not your fault. She was looking for the easiest kill with the most devastating effect,” Jeb said, keeping a tight lid on his emotions. Sure, Jeb played a part in Colt’s death, but he didn’t force Meyers to kill the kid. She’d done that part on her own.

Jeb was going to make damn sure she regretted that decision, before the end.

“We’re going to the center of the dungeon! We’re going to make this disaster work for us!” Jeb shouted over the wind as he scanned the city for Meyers.

“Who was that bitch, and why is she trying to kill us?” Ron shot back, a bit of blood running down the side of his scalp.

“She’s—”

A building in their path exploded, sending shrapnel flinging in their direction. Jeb’s FMO shield popped and protected him, but several chunks of rock hit Ron, bouncing off the necromancer’s unnaturally tough body. Zlesk deftly knocked the stone out of the air, suffering no damage.

She knows Ron doesn’t have protection.

“Ouch, damni—”

“One sec,” Jeb said, yanking Ron backwards.

The necromancer suffered a bit of whiplash as he was tugged backward a fraction of a second before an RPG sizzled through the air where his torso had been. Jeb saw Meyers for a fraction of a second before she faded behind a building, her body already beginning to fuzz away as she raised her active camo.

It’s a little disgusting how similar we think, Jeb thought, eyes narrowed.

“I’ll tell you who she is later. Right now, we’re going to the dungeon core! When we get there, I want every ounce of necromancy you can squeeze out!”

“O-okay,” Ron said, looking a little queasy.

Jeb changed their path to be less predictable, ducking and swooping randomly from side to side. It succeeded in preventing another ambush, and Jeb picked up a flaming bit of rubble on the way past, flinging it deep into the sinkhole ahead of them.

He’d learned his lesson last time.

Jeb and his two passengers dove straight into the sinkhole, following the flaming chunk of suburban housing straight into the gullet of the beast.

***Meyers***

He doesn’t have any gold, so what is his game here? Meyers thought, eyes narrowed as she watched Jeb disappear into the hole. He can’t stop the core, and moving it is going to be suicide.

Ah, it’s a trap. It’s a desperate bid to get close enough to hit me. Never give the enemy what they want.

Meyers reloaded the RPG and dug through her bag of goodies, hoisting it over her shoulder.

How about I just add some shrapnel to the mix? Maybe some C-4 to seal the deal. Pressure wave should do some damage with or without those automatic protections he’s got.

She hadn’t forgotten the dungeon core birthing several smaller ones when she’d hit it with an explosion last time, either. If it did so again, it could only be to her benefit.

Dropping explosives down the hole without going in there personally gave her the most bang for her buck.

Kill Jeb, make sure nobody interrupts the purging of Solmnath. Two birds, one rocket-launcher.

***Jeb***

Jeb dropped into the sticky brown mud and immediately cast his Myst into the floor.

It was a little idea he’d been working on ever since he’d been stuck in an elevator with Vresh: telekinetic imaging.

Jeb flattened his string of myst and sent it a hundred feet through the floor, gently tugging on the solid stone beyond the floor, looking for a gap in his awareness.

Nope, nope, there!

About twenty feet ahead at a slight slant, Jeb felt something other than plain stone. It was flat and shrugged off his Myst like water off a duck.

There’s my bitch.

Jeb turned back and studied the scene. The Army ants hadn’t quite responded to the incursion yet, but it was only a matter of time. Dozens of various inanimate objects littered the ground, like street lamps, bycicles, and newsboxes, all semi-submerged in the brown mud that was birthing the monsters.

Jeb frowned.

“What’s the plan?” Ron shouted into his ear over the harsh scream of offended army ants.

“We’re going to put that!” Jeb said, pointing at the core. “Over there!” He pointed at the corner of the small room closest to the man-made tunnel.

I.E. Vex’s tunnel.

“That’s it!?”

“Thats it.” Jeb confirmed.

“Send me over there!” Ron shouted.

Jeb didn’t have time to question it, so he simply picked up the necromancer and flung him toward the core. Jeb was assuming the ginger had some kind of clever plan to transport the dungeon core in a case made of –

His fingers. He’s touching it.

Jeb shook his head and reeled the kid back in.

“I thought touching it was dangerous!” Jeb shouted.

“Not if you’re alive!” Ron said. “The radiation doesn’t convert living things! You would know that if you went dungeon mining with me and Eddie!” Ron’s sleeves, on the other hand, seemed to be beginning to slough apart.

Jeb glanced at the well-preserved non-living objects lying haphazardly in the muck, a sneaking suspicion nagging at the back of his mind.

No time.

“Put it there and get ready to make zombies like your life depends on it!” Jeb said, pointing.

Ron lobbed the dungeon core into its new position and turned back to the fight at hand.

The strange towering insect creatures seemed to be desperate to reach the core and for that, they broke ranks, charging at them with reckless abandon the moment they got close enough to do so.

There was one bearing down on Jeb, raising its shielding forelimbs to crush him into paste.

Jeb didn’t have time to get fancy. He needed to kill a few and get blockers right now.

“Alpha strike,” he said, holding out his palm.

A flurry of telekinetic blades, spears and shrapnel erupted from his palm, each of them stored in Jeb’s down time.

Recharging your finishing move: part of a healthy lifestyle, like brushing your teeth.

The Alpha strike caught the monster in front of Jeb and bowled it backwards, simultaneously dismantling it into dozens of bloody chunks. The telekinetic barrage went on to damage half a dozen more creatures further back in a cone.

“Don’t chunk them! It’s not worth the time to repair if you chunk them!” Ron shouted, aiming his neon-purple Myst at a twitching corpse Zlesk had made with a precise stab to the brain.

The newly formed zombie lurched to its feet and staggered over to the left, providing Ron with more solid cover.

“Roger!”

A few moments of frantic stabbing later, Jeb risked a glance behind himself and saw that the core was already starting to burrow through the ground in the direction of his choosing.

Jeb consulted his mental map, then sprinted up to the core and booted the priceless supernatural sphere further down the new side tunnel it was creating.

“Pull back a bit, set up a choke point!”  Jeb shouted above the shrieks of angry monsters.

Now that they had a bit of a dip in the wall, they could start thinking about defending it rather than taking on attackers from all directions.

Ron glanced over his shoulder at the new tunnel forming behind him.

“Okay, once we’ve got a decent wall up, I can start-“

The world went white, and Jeb felt several FMO shields pop, as well as a couple ribs.

When he opened his eyes, Jeb was staring straight up at the brown gunk ceiling. Right in the middle of his field of view was a black splotch where he’d probably gotten some mild retinal scarring.

No time to dick around. Jeb thought, using his elbows to lever himself to a seated position.

Jeb scanned the battlefield.

Most of the bugs were discombobulated, staggering back to their feet. Ron was pushing one of his zombies off himself with a groan, having been sheltered from the blast by his minions.

Zlesk was still on his feet, but the keegan was holding a hand over his face, bleeding heavily from the eye.

“Did someone just bomb us?” Ron asked, his voice turning shrill.

“Yep, get on your feet, we’re not quite done yet,” Jeb said, leaning forward and helping to drag him out from under his zombie.

Consulting the afterimage of the blast, and how little time there had been to react, Jeb had to assume it was an RPG. If they hadn’t been partially sheltered by the new hole and all the bodies between them, they might’ve been torn to shreds.

Jeb glanced over at Zlesk. The former sheriff was bleeding from an empty eye socket, his face frozen into a rictus of pain and anger.

Well, more torn to shreds.

Jeb glanced behind himself and spotted a flat plane starting to manifest in the rounded tunnel. The first sign they were butting up against a man-made structure.

Almost there.

*** Abigail Meyers, level 79 Ace***

Abbie watched for a full two minutes, but the bugs kept marching inward rather than outward.

There was still something alive in there.

That won’t do at all, she thought, eyeing the native Solmnath population, able to push the weaker numbers back and form a more effective resistance.

“Time to break out the big guns,” she muttered, grabbing the two kilos of C-4 out of her backpack, hovering a thousand feet above the city.

*** Kol, Level 60 courier***

Vex paced back and forth in front of the kneeling enforcers, seemingly…vexed.

Kol briefly locked eyes with the melas woman who’d nearly decapitated him a month ago. A small part of Kol enjoyed seeing her humbled, but that was mostly drowned out by the knowledge that they were both gnats hovering around an irate giant.

Kol focused on fading into the wallpaper, relieved he even had that option.

“What did you think was going to happen?” Vex asked, waving a hand. “Every hundred years or so, a new ruler tries to kill me as some kind of macho…” he searched for the word a moment.

“Publicity stunt.” Lien supplied his master.

“Publicity stunt!” Vex shouted. “And then I kill them and scatter their empire to ashes, and it resets the clock, but it takes years of my valuable time. I thought this empire was different. The current emperor and his dad sent me gift baskets! I thought ‘oh, here’s someone who knows not to fuck with me. but no, it just took a little longer.”

“I mean, the emperor’s gotta know this is gonna turn out poorly for him…You pale imitations of a bygone era couldn’t spell your way out of a moist paper bag.”

“Unless the emperor was culling you?” Vex asked, turning toward the lead Enforcer, an older melas man with thick greying hair and long horns that nearly touched each other. The prisoner was restrained by invisible bands that dug into his wrists, legs, and neck.

“Did you embezzle or support the wrong political faction perhaps?” he asked, stooping down to look the melas in the eyes.

“I’d wager the emperor’s motivation was the fact that you’re toying with magic that could destroy the fabric of the world.” The melas said, directing his gaze past Vex towards the massive steel bomb. It was nearly as tall as Kol and three times as long.

Vex followed the man’s gaze to the massive nuclear bomb, then shrugged.

“I guess that’s fair,” Vex said, drawing himself up to his full height. “Assuming the world continues to exist after my experiment, I’m going to need your full names and home addresses so I can bill the emperor your ransom and the damages. If you don’t believe you are valuable enough to ransom, line up on the left side of the room for summary execution.”

Rumble….

The ceiling above them rained a tiny bit of dust downwards as the underground room shook.

“And which one of you chuckleheads dropped a Fech’na on the city?” He asked, hands on his hips.

Vex scanned the eight kneeling enforcers for a minute, watching them glance at each other in confusion with their range of movement.

“Really? No one knows who did it? It’s not like they’re making them anymore, so it should have caught someone’s attention. It’s a drastic decision to pull one out of the…imperial…vault.”

Vex thumbed his chin.

“Huh. Maybe it’s one of mine.”

Boom!

This time the explosion rocked through the underground lair, loud and close by. Kol could feel the shockwave travel through his chest as the ceiling cracked above them.

There was a moment of stillness, then the entire dungeon bucked like a Tarruk that had been bitten by a particularly painful bloodsucking insect.

“Now that feels like a dungeon schism.” He turned to Lien. “Lien, could you go take care of that?”

The sindio’s butler nodded and headed toward the source of the blast.

Vex clapped his hands together. “In the meantime, who wants to see if the Mythos of humanity’s most powerful weapon can be harnessed in the Fate dimension? Show of hands.”

The invisible bands around the enforcer’s wrists forced them to raise their hands. More than one of them were making rude gestures.

“Excellent. Let’s get started.”