Chapter 24: Strike two (Patreon)

Jeb’s ears rang.

The wind whistled past his ears, clawing at his eyes every time he tried to open them.

His skin hurt all over, he could feel the wetness of warm blood oozing into the space between his fingers, the inside of his ears.

Jeb pried his eyes open against the wind, taking in his situation.

He was falling among scattered smoking bits of a jeep.

My jeep,Jeb thought as his brain finally caught up with the order of events. Above, beside and below him was a smorgasboard of bits of burning, shredded metal and plastic that used to be Jeb’s faithful offroad vehicle.

Among the falling debris were Vresh, Kolusk, who looked surprisingly cognizant and unharmed, while Piwaki was unconscious, his expensive clothes ballooning up around him. How much of that was magic and how much was wind, Jeb couldn’t say with a glance.

Beyond and slightly hidden behind the others, Jeb spotted Jeresh and Kol. The thirsty young woman and the professional assassin looked…not great.

What’s the last thing I remember?

A flash of light from below us.

Contrary to popular belief, multiplying a man’s reaction time by five does not allow them to dodge bullets…or in this case, artillery fire.

He’d felt a brief tightening of Vresh’s grip, maybe a syllable, then nothing.

It would’ve had to have been something big, because a handheld RPG would most likely have been stopped by the Jeep’s onboard defensive traps.

Big enough to punch a hole through Jeb’s shields, but the shrapnel wasn’t enough to kill him.

I think I got lucky. Even with his shields, if the shell had decided to pass through his seat, Jeb would have simply ceased to exist.

It kinda looks like the shell got the engine block, based on the type and variety of bits falling along with me. That and none of the team has been turned into a fine red mist.

Vresh mighthave been able to tank an artillery shell, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to test.

Beneath them, the ground rapidly approached, a clearing filled with a multi-species band of obvious mercenaries – or perhaps pirates – with heavy weapons strapped to their backs and thick Classer-slaying swords on their belts.

Well, these guys came prepared.

There was no chance they had pointed their heavy artillery at the sky and simply waited for a flying jeep to pass by. They’d obviously been hired, or perhaps prompted to shoot Jeb et al. out of the sky.

It’s a goddamn setup.

Of coursethe emperor is gonna send some of his best people after the baby when it gets kidnapped.

The thing that took Jeb aback was the undead’s ability to hire and coordinate an ambush by disposables in such a short amount of time. This had to have begun before Casey 3 had even been kidnapped.

Even if Jeb won, it had cost the former emperor nothing in terms of valuable personnel, and Jeb could tell that at the very least, Jeresh was down for the count.

Are we just dancing in the palm of this guy’s hand the entire time?

All these thoughts flashed through Jeb’s mind in about a second after he opened his eyes.

Jeb gritted his teeth and split off five strands of telekinetic Myst, grabbing each of his companions around the waist and slowing their descent.

Vresh flagged Jeb down and shook her head, pointing at herself and Kolusk, then down at the ground.

Jeb couldn’t hear her over the wind and the damaged ear-drums, but he understood what she wanted.

With a mental grunt of effort, Jeb flung the two close combat fighters straight down, increasing their speed from terminal velocity to ‘oh my god!’ velocity.

Vresh landed on a guy’s shoulders and violently snapped him in half, while Kolusk’s impact formed a crater in the earth, which he proceeded to crawl out of, laughing his boney ass off, completely unharmed and ready to throw down.

While they distracted their ambushers, Jeb turned his attention back to the wounded members of the group.

He gently ran his fingers through Piwaki’s feathers, checking for hidden blood or evidence of a broken neck.

Jeb didn’t find any, so he slapped the bird right in the beak.

Piwaki honked in surprise, his eyes snapping open. He began to flail wildly as he noticed their distance above the ground.

“We’re fallin-“

Jeb slapped him again.

“We’re not falling, I have you!” Jeb pointed toward Kol and Jeresh, whose clothes were soaked in an alarming amount of blood. “Heal them! Now!”

“Jeresh!” Piwaki scrambled through the air to his friend, propelling himself almost as much as Jeb did.

The melas regained a bit of her color as a thread of silvery myst with a tinge of pink entered her body. She gasped as he lungs kicked in automatically, but didn’t wake up.

Kol, well, he always looked like a skeleton, so Jeb wasn’t entirely sure how he was doing, but the rent in his clothes didn’t bode well. Keegan anatomy was strange. They didn’t bleed quite so copiously as humans and melas.

Their blood was concentrated to the thickness of motor oil, and there was only about three pints or so of the dark fluid being pumped around their skeletal frame at any given time.

So when Jeb saw a spot of dark on the keegan’s jacket, he worried.

We might lose track of Casey if he dies, Jeb thought, his concern primarily with the innocent baby and not the amoral butcher.

Jeb created a delicate blade of force and sheared the assassin’s clothes off, from collar to pantleg, unwrapping him in a matter of seconds.

The tear in the keegan’s tailored clothes hid a piece of the engine block. A solid shred of high carbon steel from the crankshaft had managed to lodge itself in the assassin’s torso, right around where a human’s kidney would be.

There were half a dozen other blooming bruises where the keegan’s skin must have shrugged off impacts from other engine shrapnel, either too soft or too slow to penetrate the man’s System-enhanced skin.

Still, lots of internal bleeding. That’s not good.

“I’m going to put us down, make sure they don’t die!”

“O-okay!” Piwaki said, his voice shrill.

Jeb turned his gaze back down beneath them, studying the fight.

Vresh was a whirlwind of death. Her blades vanished and reappeared across the battlefield, slipping into tiny portals long enough to eviscerate her foes before disappearing once again.

Unfortunately she wasn’t able to do it very often. The enemy had pegged her as a high level combatant and were assaulting her with everything they could afford to throw at her. Jeb saw her twist out of the way of Myst, blades, and gunfire with inhuman levels of grace and speed.

Okay, so SHE can dodge bullets, as long as she’s not trapped in a floating car. Jeb wondered if she was dodging the bullets out of principle, or to make the other guys look bad, because he was fairly sure lead would simply shatter on impact with her skin.

I suppose I would use depleted uranium as the new lead. Just get some udium barrels, figure out how to rifle them, then pack maybe three times as many grains into the charge and – focus Jeb!

…I wonder if I could use the repellant effect of faradan stone to create a sort of stringless crossbow by using wafers stacked on top of each other in opposing poles. Something like a magical railgun.

An explosion rocked the clearing as one of the ambushing mercenaries threw what looked like a grenade at Vresh. Sickly red Myst erupted outward just behind a shockwave, lighting everything on fire and spreading the scent of brimstone.

-Put a pin in it -

Jeb shook the distraction off and really focused.

Alright. I’m the heavy artillery, and I’m currently being wasted looking after the wounded. Jeb wasn’t complaining. There wasn’t anyone else available who could keep them safe, but not using jeb in the fight was like running a footrace with one leg. Something that Jeb had copious amounts of experience with.

Jeb found a relatively clear spot and set the three down.

Speaking of my leg..I didn’t like the loaner either, Jeb thought as he pried the uncomfortable, ill-fitting loaner pegleg off his stump.

Ow!Incidentally, the stretching motion alerted him to a bit of shrapnel sticking out of his leg. It was itchy.

Jeb’s heart slammed hard in his chest three times before he confirmed the bit of steel didn’t come anywhere near the femoral artery and therefore was inconsequential.

Even Jeb’s magical new duds had their limitations, it seemed. Thankfully he wasn’t nearly as bruised as Kol.

Or maybe you’re so high on adrenaline you can’t feel anything. It was true. The length of steel in his leg was only a bit itchy.

Jeb cocked the thin wooden peg back and flung it toward the oncoming  mercenaries, the ill-fitting torture device spinning wildly end-over-end.

The hardened criminals seemed just a bit confused before Jeb said the magic words.

“Leg go boom!” Jeb shouted as he put up a manual dome around them.

The leg exploded with one of Jeb’s pre-packaged blasts, warding the rush off long enough to buy some breathing room.

“Hey Piwaki,” Jeb said, barely able to speak as he formed a self-sustaining spell. It was a bit like trying to tie a fly-fishing knot while people were shooting at you.

“What?”

“You like breathing, right?”

“WHAT!?” The healer honked.

“You’ve got about twenty seconds to wake one of them up and get them in the fight, or you’re going to die. Good luck.”

“Wai-“

Piwaki’s voice was cut off as a three-layer honeycomb shield sprung up around them, held together in the center by a tenuous knot of self-feeding Myst in the center, above the bird’s head.

Jeb placed himself on the outside of the shell. He needed to take the pressure off the combatants.

Jeb caught a glance of kolusk doing his bit. The Daredevil’s hit-and-run tactics worked much better against living humanoids than against the undead. He truly did move a lot like Jessica did.

From Jeb’s understanding, Jessica changed her mass to zero, then launched herself, then raised it back to normal, creating inertia out of nothing.

Kolusk’s Myst, on the other hand, was all about propelling himself at dangerously high speeds, and he’d chosen the Daredevil class because it’s passives mitigated many of the obvious negatives associated with moving at break-neck pace.

In short, Kolusk just liked to go fast.

Jeb made a snap decision, weighing the durability and resistance to heat that Vresh enjoyed relative to the mixed-species mercenaries.

“I’m gonna give you one chance to surrender, and this is it!”  Jeb said, using his vocal cords to scatter telekinetic Myst and make the surroundings vibrate in tune with his voice. It was a handy technique when you needed to intimidate someone.

The battle stilled for a moment.

“Kill him!” someone shouted, and it was back on, with at least half a dozen rounds of hot lead shattering on the shield that snapped into place in front of his outstretched palm.

Jeb eyeballed Kolusk’s zipping around the battlefield, waiting a fraction of a second until the daredevil was behind cover.

“BURN!”

Jeb, trying not to fry himself, repeated the technique he’d looted off a mutated corpse a couple months back. This time, with a bit of an artful flourish. Jeb converted the Myst from kinetic to thermal, but didn’t release it to burn, instead allowing his vocal cords to scatter the Myst along soundwaves, blanketing the battlefield evenly.

In short, anything that could hear Jeb and wasn’t directly behind a shield of some sort, caught fire.

You have gained a level!

Wails of agony erupted across the battlefield as every piece of brush, every exposed piece of bark, clothing or skin, was immediately subjected to thousands of degrees of intense heat over a short period of time, scalding skin and igniting dry tinder.

Dozens of the weaker assailants rolled on the ground, trying to soothe their burns, while Vresh took advantage of the confusion, turning her attention towards the more powerful enemies and battering them onto their back foot. The ex-enforcer looked none the worse for wear, although her clothes appeared to be a bit singed.

Kolusk emerged from behind the rock and skidded to a halt, confusion evident on his face as the entire battlefield had been transformed into a hellscape in a matter of seconds while his view had been blocked.

Jeb wasn’t able to savor it for long as a blistering hail of gunfire came down directly on top of him, forcing him to relocate before his FMO shields got used up.

Jeb ducked behind a rock and manually made an egg of force around himself as he ducked his head out to survey the situation more carefully.

The distribution of bad guys was about six percent kitri, twelve percent human, thirty percent keegan, forty percent melas, and a handful of under-represented species.

The humans were the primary gun-toters, of course, and many of them seemed to have Myst abilities that allowed them to either create bullets from scratch or increase their penetration.

Jeb even noticed a few firearms that sported a hand-crafted look to them, some even with a bluish tint, implying some amount of udium or faradan stone incorporated into the design.

Oh, neat.

It was always cool to see human ingenuity marching forward. It gave him a warm, fuzzy feeling inside when people adapted to the worst the world had to offer, an-.

Vresh winced as a bullet tore through her side.

Jeb marked them for death.

“Pip one. Pip two, pip three,” Jeb dropped the shield and pointed at three of the most suspicious gun-wielders.

Raymond got his chance to shine.

The spell took the form of a double helix of blinding white energy that constantly spun, looped back and fed back into itself in a hypnotic, spinning dance.

Well, if someone could keep their eyes open when they looked at it.

It was about the size of a shotgun shell, so unless someone was wearing a welding mask, they wouldn’t be able to observe it as anything but a blinding streak of light.

The shell-sized streak of light homed in on its target, orienting on the center then accelerating through their torso.

The three men stood there with eyes and mouths wide as the spell passed through them, burning a charred hole through their bodies.

Then the spell turned around and came back, punching a hole through the target’s back.

Rinse and repeat.

You have gained a level!

You have gained a level!

You have gained a level!

Jeb sucked in a breath between his teeth as the targets slumped over while Raymond continued to drive in and out of the mutilated bodies with mechanical regularity, like a sewing machine.

That’s gotta be some kind of war crime. It took twenty seconds before the spells blinked out of existence. In battle that was a long-ass time, longer than Jeb could afford to sit there and stare at it like a dumbass.

Well, upgrading pip one was a success, Jeb thought, ducking back behind the rock while Raymond continued to desecrate corpses.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Jeb let out a cry as a bullet popped all his remaining FMO shields and caught him in the back, emerging from his torso and driving itself into the earth in front of him. Jeb was catapulted forward and slid through the blood-slick mud.

He managed to get a glance behind him and spotted the boulder he’d been hiding behind: It had three glowing holes in it, one lining up with his brand-new wound.

So many times, Jeb’s common sense was being proven dangerously wrong: A bigass boulder being decent cover, for example.

Jeb’s internal and external bleeding triggers went off, putting up rough telekinetic patches inside and outside his body, keeping blood loss to a minimum.

At least it wasn’t your head or your liver, Jeb thought, picking himself up with Myst and relocating. But We’re on the clock, now.

The patches were never meant to be a permanent solution, and Jeb had outstanding familiarity with the severity of gunshot wounds and his looked…

Jeb glanced down and lined up the grotesque exit wound with his mental map of internal organs.

Yeah, that’s not a great spot, he thought, but there are no great spots to get shot. At least it’s not a death sentence.

Just keep fighting and worry about it later.

Jeb hated to admit it, but Piwaki the plastic surgeon had suddenly become a VIP.

Jeb swooped back towards Piwaki to check how the healer was doing. He could no longer afford to let him get killed.

The spoiled young man had outperformed Jeb’s expectations, and Jeb was shocked to see both Jeresh and Kol on their feet, warding off attackers with grim determination.

Wait a minute, they’re not fully healed.

Jeresh looked okay, but Kol was still naked, with a crankshaft in his stomach.

Wait, he did say he can only effect minor moods… uppers and downers…so…did he basically give them the equivalent of an adrenaline shot?

“AAAAH!” Kol had bloody froth at the corner of his mouth as he leapt on a swordsman, knocking the blade out of the way and plunging his own through his enemy’s heart. Jeb wasn’t even sure where he got that sword.

Wait, no, that’s someone else’s blood. Keegan blood is a different color. He totally bit somebody.

Yep, Piwaki definitely hit them with a thousand tons of wake-up juice.

Jeb hadn’t really specified how he wanted Piwaki to get the others back into the fight. The kid had figured it out on his own, and done what he had to do to survive. Jeb felt a swirl of pride right next to the burning agony in his torso.

I’m such a good mentor.

“Hey!” Jeb shouted, swooping in towards them, keeping his flight pattern unpredictable. The last thing he needed was to eat another bullet.

Or an arrow,Jeb thought as one of the missiles whizzed past his ear.

Jeb pointed towards a section of the battlefield where the formation surrounding them was weakest.

The encirclement had an amoeba-like quality, and one particular edge was closer than the other. If they could reach it, then smash it, all opposing fire would be coming from the other side, allowing them to establish an actual battle line instead of taking fire from every direction.

“That way!”

“What!?” Piwaki shouted back at him, while Kiol just looked feral, ignoring Jeb completely. Jeresh seemed to understand, but the other two were too out of it to understand what Jeb wanted.

Battlefield miscommunication got more people killed than any other factor in war. You gotta be exceedingly clear and eeasy to understand. To that end…

Jeb decided to take matters into his own hands, roping the three of them with his telekinetic Myst and flinging them in the direction he needed them to go.

Good enough,Jeb thought as they flailed through the air to the east.

Jeb juked out of the way of some more fire.

“Vresh, Kolusk. Regroup!” Jeb shouted, making the ground itself vibrate with the sound of his voice before launching himself after the flying members of the team, softening their landings.

The last thing he needed was for one of them to aggravate their wounds and die of shock.

Jeb smashed down and shoved the nearby enemies to the west, making sure none of them were still behind them before tearing a quick chunk of earth out of the ground, ducking them under the blistering hail of gunfire.

A moment later Vresh arrived with Kolusk, the two of them breathing heavily, clothes shredded and spotted with blood from close calls with both guns and blades.

“Any idea why they haven’t run away yet?” Jeb asked as the last of the team slid into Jeb’s hastily dug trench.

Hopefully it worked better than a big rock.

“No idea.” Vresh said, shaking her head as she panted. “Pirates and mercenaries do notstick around for fair fights, let alone losing ones.”

“Are we winning?” Jeb asked, glancing out into the wilderness, marking at least fifty humanoids creeping towards them from the west. Fifty he could see. there were probably a lot more hiding in every crevice.

Vresh scanned their team. Not a single one of them wasn’t wounded in some form or other. Her gaze lingered on the bloody hole in Jeb’s torso.

“Eh,” She shrugged. “We’re definitely giving better than we’re getting.”

Jeb used the lull in the fighting to assign all his new levels into Body. It served the dual purpose of making his wound more immediately survivable, and creating a buffer for his next Undead take-down.

Body 49 à 53

A faint ache spread through Jeb’s body as the assigned points of Body took hold.

You are now level 49!

Jeb peeked above the lip of the trench and studied the opponents.

It was going to be a slog to win. Especially because something seemed to be boosting their morale to suicidal levels.

Jeb’s eyes widened as he made the connection.

Ah. Piyiki kupei, dead harem lady number 7, a bubbly, kind soul, whose Myst was capable of inspiring armies to great feats.

She probably wasn’t so bubbly or kind anymore, but her Myst was likely the same, or similar. It would explain why these guys kept pushing when Jeb’s team had killed at least a quarter of them in about ninety seconds.

That meant dead lady number seven was probably nearby somewhere, waiting with a group of elites for the pawns to wear Jeb and Vresh down.

Jeb touched his bloody wound with a wince.

It’s not gonna take much longer for that to happen, either, Jeb thought. His internal bleeding patch couldn’t possibly be perfect, and everyone else looked more or less in the same boat.

“Well, might as well get this slog over with. I wanna meet this lady.” Jeb muttered, eyes narrowed. And re-kill her.

Jeb took a deep breath and went about the business of taking out the rest of them.

“Vresh, Kolusk, use your speed to harry the flanks, I’ll drop blasts in the center. Piwaki, continue healing the other two, and see what you can do about my internal bleeding. We’ll try to buy you time to get us into a better condition.

“You two,” Jeb said, pointing at the wounded teammates. “Rest for now, but if someone gets to the trench, fight like your life depends on it. For obvious reasons.”

They nodded.

“Alright, let’s do this.”

***Twenty minutes later***

Jeb was slumped against a rock, tasting blood with every breath. His head was swimming form blood loss, and he couldn’t lift his arms, not even with Myst.

Piwaki was lying in the trench, missing a large portion of his upper arm, his eyes flickering back and forth in pain-induced shock.

Kolusk was missing.

Jeresh was sharing the trench with Piwaki, their roles reversed as she desperately tried to stop the healer’s bleeding.

Vresh was leaning up against Jeb, her body sporting several bullet holes.

God knew where Kol was. Probably being an evil bastard somewhere.

Surrounding them were over a hundred corpses in various states of destruction, from burning holes to caved in skulls and bloody chunks of flesh.

Jeb’s pip series was empty, along with most of the rest of his offensive and defensive spells. The only ones he had left were the ‘room full of charlies’ triggers, which were inappropriate for the situation. He didn’t want to kill the rest of his team, after all.

Jeb’s Myst core itself was actually dry, gradually refilling itself from the height of the battle, when Jeb nearly went supernova trying to stamp out the last of those persistent bastards.

Clap!

Clap!

Clap!

“God save us from people who feel the need to slow clap,” Jeb groaned turning his head to the south to study the approaching group.

Vresh chuckled against his shoulder before hissing in pain.

Six figures approached from the woods to the south, completely free of mud and blood. Totally fresh and ready to fight.

They also looked tough as hell, bearing fancy weapons, and the scars of numerous previous battles. Previous battles meant extra levels, more strength stacked on top of more experience. In short, these men were far more dangerous than those they’d been fighting.

“You really exceeded my expectations,” The rotting kitri at the center of the formation spoke surveying them with an arrogant superiority. “My master said Pikaku would send his best after the child, but I honestly thought th-“

Jeb angled his right finger towards the undead Kitri.

“Boop.”