Solomon's Crucible 56. The Rest Stop (1) (Patreon)

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The Motel Six itself was nothing unusual. An H-shaped building with each room's entrance directly leading outside, the front desk clearly marked by a sign. A few cars were scattered in the parking lot. Solomon had slept in similar places on many a long road trip. Just seeing it brought back memories of enduring the faint smell that gave the lie to the claim that his room had always been non-smoking.

Two things set this motel apart from any that he had visited before. First, all the lights were off. Understandable under the circumstances and hardly a cause for alarm. The second anomaly, though, was that the glass door to the front desk had been smashed in. There was a pool of blood by the door itself and a vivid trail of blood leading through the driveway and across the street before disappearing into the tall grass of a vacant lot.

Solomon carefully dismounted from his horse and strapped his shield to his arm. Kanmi leapt to the ground and deactivated his mount in one motion, tucking the token into his pocket. Solomon followed suit, then stepped forward to take a peek through the door.

The room looked like it had been hit by a whirlwind, but at the moment all was still. Now that he was closer, he was pretty sure that the blood trail was the result of someone being dragged out of the room. He turned around and looked across the street.

The vacant lot never would have drawn a second glance from him before the system arrived. It was about the size of a football field, covered in knee-high grass. The blood trail leading into the grass gave it an ominous cast.

Out in the middle of the field, the grass rippled. It could have been caused by a breeze.

"You want to check it out?" Kanmi asked.

"Not really," Solomon said. "But I don't want to go to sleep with a killer lurking across the street."

The motel rooms were secured by card readers. Thanks to the system, there was no way they'd get inside without breaking a door down. Solomon would probably try and drag some furniture in front of the door regardless, but he doubted that whatever had killed the poor bastard working the front desk was going to be held off by improvised fortifications.

Kanmi just nodded in response. He pulled his helmet off his belt and put it on before drawing his sword and taking point. 

Solomon drew his pistol and thumbed the safety plate out of the way. This would be his first time trying out his improvised trigger design. He followed a few steps behind Kanmi, happy to have the guy in plate armor out in front.

The twilight gloom did funny things to his depth perception. He couldn't see anything distinct through the grass, but he kept catching motion out of the corner of his eye. He stopped and turned to look, trying to see what had moved. He was still peering through the murk when a muffled curse and the screeching of metal on metal yanked his attention back to Kanmi.

He had his flexible sword moving, weaving a blurry net of steel around himself. Another blur kept circling him, occasionally moving forward and back, punctuated by another metallic clang. Whatever was attacking him didn't seem to have any trouble avoiding the sword. Solomon was just barely following the action. There was no way he could aim and fire into such a fast-moving close-range fight.

The creature finally jumped back and stopped moving for a moment, snarling at Kanmi while pawing at the ground. Solomon brought his gun to bear as he finally got a good look at the thing. It looked like a house cat.

Albeit, a house cat that had been expanded to the size of a big dog and then forced into a steady diet of red meat and heavy lifting. Still, the basic shape of it was unmistakable. Any thoughts of mercy were driven from Solomon's mind when he saw how easily its paws shredded the hard packed earth. He could only hope it wasn't bulletproof.

It moved before he could line up a shot, almost vanishing from sight as it accelerated with unbelievable speed. Strong and agile as it might be, that kind of movement had to have been granted by the system. There was another clang. The cat came into view once more, balanced for an instant on Kanmi's back after slamming into him. Then it blurred into motion again, straight towards Solomon.

He cursed his single shot limitation as he tried and failed to draw a bead on the charging monster. The cat angled itself to pass around him instead of crashing straight into him. Solomon had just started to turn when a painful blow to the side of his knee set him tumbling to the ground. He barely managed to angle himself to fall onto his back.

Sheer instinct had him bring his shield up in front of his face just in time to catch fifty pounds of angry cat. The impact forced the shield back. The cat tried to keep moving with its momentum, poking its head up and past the shield as it looked for a soft target. It found instead the barrel of his gun as he finally brought it to bear.

The trigger worked.

The thunder of gunpowder drove every other thought from Solomon's mind. He watched blankly as blood poured from its ruined throat. It staggered back away from him. After several steps it stopped and gathered itself. Solomon forced himself to sit up, all too aware of the unnatural vitality the system had on offer.

Kanmi moved first. There was a flicker of motion Solomon could barely follow. A moment later, the cat's head slid from its shoulders with a thump.

Solomon stared at the mortal remains of what might have been somebody's pet. Something about fighting such a monster next to a silent highway and across the street from an abandoned motel felt much more unsettling than anything he had gone through in the system-provided dungeon.

A mailed hand interrupted his line of sight. He reached up and accepted the hand up. Kanmi patted him on the shoulder after helping haul him to his feet.

"The System starts out with little critters and tweaks to native fauna," Kanmi said. "We have a few weeks before things start getting wild."

"Wonderful," Solomon said.

Considering the trail of blood and the strength the monster had been putting into its attacks, it seemed pointless to continue searching the lot. Solomon's conscience wouldn't let him just turn and leave, though, so with a sigh he tried to track the cat's trail back to where it had come from.

A dozen steps later, he would have walked right by the man if not for the light reflecting off the whites of his eyes. A closer look revealed a young man in a corporate-issue polo shirt, clothes torn to shreds and soaked in blood, rocking back and forth while whispering something to himself.

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