The Bad Guys Chronicles Box Set

by Eric Ugland

  “What the hell?” I shouted.

  “Dodge, boy,” he said, leaning just far enough to the side so an anguid went flying by.

  And then he climbed back up the ladder.

  Let’s be clear about this: it was effective. It also sucked. Quite remarkably. The mud would be totally still, then a head would pop up and launch, with less than a second between the pop up to the surface and the launch. I had that brief window to judge where the creature was aiming, and that moment to fake the anguid out, or I’d get bitten. And get bitten I did. Every time I got bitten, though, Matthew was there, beating the creature with his mace, and watching it drop back into the mud. Never killing the damn things, just giving me a heartbeat to breathe and look around for the next anguid to come along.

  Cool Beans, you learned the skill Dodge. Now you can get out of the way of all those things trying to hurt you. Have you ever considered why so many things want to hurt you? +5% evasion.

  And all of a sudden it became okay. I could enjoy it. At least I could try and enjoy it. It was pretty hard with plenty of creatures aiming for my death. But as soon as I got the notification of the skill upgrade, I noticed that it was easier to make the moves I needed to make. I had a better feeling of where I needed to put my body to avoid the anguids’ attacks. But I also felt my body flagging. And when I checked my stamina bar, I saw it pass below half, and continue to drop steadily.

  I snuck a glance at Matthew. He was watching me but had a slice of apple on his dagger halfway to his mouth. He gestured with my chin that I should turn back around.

  As soon as I did, there was an anguid coming straight at my face. I moved just enough that the creature’s scaly skin slid along my jawline. Reflexively, I got my hands up and smashed my fist into the side of the creature’s neck.

  I was getting angry about the whole thing, so I started punching the creatures away from me, hitting as hard as I could as they launched their necks and heads out of the mud. I then grabbed one of the animals, and I pulled it over my shoulder like I was hauling it.

  Turns out that the anguid had a body. A somewhat sizeable flabby sort of body at the end of its long neck. It looked quite a bit like a miniature plesiosaur, but with stubby little legs instead of flippers. Also, it turns out that the anguid wasn’t keen on being hoisted out of the mud. I was only able to keep the thing out of the mud for the barest of moments because its lower body was seriously substantial. There was gyrating and flouncing about as the creature struggled to free itself. But I didn’t want to let go. I also didn’t really know what to do.

  The other anguids, over, had a good idea, they all attacked their buddy or former buddy, and they tore the poor bastard apart. The speed of the attack was impressive as if the creatures saw the vulnerability and then went into a frenzy, and I found the whole thing a bit shocking. I let go of the remains, backing away.

  “Back on the ladder, boy,” Matthew said, pulling me by the shoulder until I was behind him. He had his mace out in his other hand.

  I climbed up, stopping about ten or fifteen feet in the air to look back at Gallifrey, to see what he was doing.

  He was fighting, and there was a macabre beauty in his brutality. He had an impressive efficiency with his strikes, and his movements were so agile that the creatures didn’t have the slightest chance to hit him. The mace crushed heads left and right, leaving bloody messes, vast swaths of orange nastiness spreading across the mud.

  And before I knew what was going on, it was done.

  He was standing there, breathing hard, but certainly not out of breath, stillness all around him. His mace went back on his belt, and he looked up at the edge of the pit. Then back to the ladder, confusion his face.

  “Boy,” he yelled, “I told you to get up the ladder. We got to start hauling corpses out.”

  Chapter 28

  It wasn’t Miyagi training, least as far as I could tell. It was more like brutal gross heavy labor that could have been done by a trained ape. Which I suppose I was. Except I don’t think elves are descended from apes. I don’t know what they’re descended from. Or, rather, I don’t know what I’m descended from. Ignorance was the way of the new world. Which bothered me. I liked knowing things. Intelligence and sarcasm were my only defenses from middle school on.

  Here, at the top of the pit, I had a rope. I threw the line into the pit where it was snatched by Matthew Gallifrey. He tied a corpse onto the rope. I pulled it up, hauling it up and out of the pit, then untying the rope, tossing it back into the pit. While Gallifrey tied another corpse on the line, I took the other body and stacked it according to species and size. Rinse and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. The stacks of the dead were ridiculously high and varied. There were more parasites than I’d realized, I thought they’d all been the same, but there were definitely some actual variations amongst them. And even among the anguids, there were grey ones and black ones and white ones. Notably, I couldn’t use my identify spell on the corpses because they were no longer creatures. Now they were objects, so I had to use the other spell.

  Somewhere in the depths of the night, I got the skill: hauling.

  Cool Beans, you’ve learned the skill Hauling. Now you can pull a rope with a weight on the end. +5% efficiency

  The game world was messing with me. I wasn’t exactly sure how to take it. How does one deal with a world that has a sense of humor?

  Once all the bodies were brought up, or at least, I figured all the bodies had been brought up, my mentor emerged from the pit, covered in filth, and a big smile on his face.

  “Why are you so damn happy?” I asked.

  “Big payday from this,” he replied.

  “From all this?” I gestured to the piles of corpses behind me.

  “Oh yes,” Matthew said. “Time to earn another skill.”

  “Can I give you an answer and spend my points first?”

  “Definitely,” he said, taking a lean against the stone wall of the cottage and pulling out a flask from the inside.

  “There’s this story,” I started, “that’s, I mean, it’s about a thief who helps the poor out by taking from the rich.”

  “Sounds like a fool.”

  “That’s what I want to do.”

  “Hate the rich do you?”

  “I was always poor, and the rich always made it worse on us. On my family. I had a really nice life, and then it was all taken away from me, and I had a horrible life after that. All because someone else wanted to make money.”

  “And you want to take that money back?”

  “I want to make them hurt the way they made me hurt.”

  “Got to love me some honesty, boy,” he said with a grimace. “Bring hurt to the rich. End of the day, you’re going to be needing to be quick. Rich people have guards. How many points do you have?”

  “Two. Do people get different amounts as they level up?”

  “Some races are different, I expect. One point in agility. One point in luck.”

  “Luck? Really?”

  “Luck’ll be your biggest ally in this world, kid. Don’t discount it.”

  He stood up with a grunt and tossed the flask back into the cottage. I put my points in place.

  Attributes

  Strength: 10

  Agility: 19

  Dexterity: 17

  Constitution: 10

  Wisdom: 10

  Intelligence: 14

  Charisma: 17

  Luck: 14

  Unassigned points: 0

  And then it was time to earn a new skill.

  Butchery.

  And Harvesting - Animal.

  That was a whole new level in disgusting. It seemed that creatures who lived in poop and refuse didn’t exactly have the most beautiful interiors. In fact, their insides were horrid. Lots of blood, lymphatic fluid, acids, and the weirdest stuff I had no names for. Naturally, there were useful bits contained in each and every creature, and it became my job to dig through the gross stuff until the valuable stuff was i
n reach, at which point Matthew would take over, and I’d move on to the next one. My hands were covered liberally in gnarsty gunk of all kinds and all sorts of smells.

  But it wasn’t long before I got the butchering skill. Well, technically, I got a subset of butcher, Butcher (Invertebrates), followed shortly by Butcher (Exotic).

  Cool Beans, you’ve learned the skill Butcher (Invertebrates). Now you can cut apart creatures without spines without ruining their insides! +5% harvesting rates, +2% item quality

  Cool Beans, you’ve learned the skill Butcher (Exotic). Now you can cut apart weird creatures without ruining their insides! +5% harvesting rates, +2% item quality

  And that had to be something pretty cool. The exotics, I mean. And then came:

  Cool Beans, you’ve learned the skill Harvesting (Animal). Now you can harvest the bits and pieces of an animal. You’ll have an antler chandelier in no time! +2% harvesting rates, +5% item quality

  Things inside the corpses started to glow.

  “Things are glowing,” I said.

  “Are they really glowing, or are you seeing them highlighted?” he asked, not stopping his work.

  “Uh, glowing?”

  “Highlighted,” he said. “Think about removing it.”

  I did, and the glowing stopped.

  “Oh,” I said. “Highlighted. That’s from the harvesting skill?”

  “Likely,” he replied.

  “Why does it happen? Or how does it happen, rather.”

  “Don’t know.”

  “But you’ve a theory?”

  A slight smile, “Course I do. Might be wrong, probably wrong, but my guess is it’s you tying into the collective Whatever. People have been harvesting the insides of the anguid for a lifetime or more, always picking the same things out, the things they feel have value. Gold or otherwise. That happens enough, there’s a global sense of what is worth pulling out of these beasts. Don’t mean the anguid aorta is worthless, just means no one found a use for it yet. So don’t go thinking the highlights are the only things worth taking. And, don’t go thinking you’ll find everything glowing inside some creature that’s never been harvested before. I imagine the inside of dragon is full of useful goodies, but doubt enough folk have been in there to cause a highlight to happen.”

  We went back to work. To be honest, Matthew had never stopped, so it’s more like I went back to work. And I could do it better now, I knew how and where to cut things open, did less damage to items. And Matthew started having me pull the various bits and bobs out as well, until I finally did the full harvest on a cymothoa, all by myself.

  First, you get off the chitin, essentially skinning the beast. Leave the head alone, it’s just going to wind up cracked. But there are panels in other places, and you can cut around and pop them off. We had a huge stack going. Then, the legs come off.

  “Sell those for a pretty penny uptown,” Gallifrey said. “Get all that leg meat you can.”

  “Tastes good?” I asked.

  “Never tried it, I know where it’s been. But rich folk seem to think so.”

  Antennae are next, carving out the base and keeping them as whole as can be. Mandibles can come out if they’re unbroken. You have to be careful with them, though, because they’ve got acidic venom inside, and the venom sac is fragile as paper. Any crack, it’s not worth it, the sac will rupture and leak out. And then you’ve got a problem on your hands. Or your feet. Or really on any surface. It wasn’t quite as bad as xenomorph blood from Alien, but not far off. They also had a stinger. Different venom. More stable sac. More venomous, less acid. The stinger itself was useful as a needle for large animal veterinary work.

  The venom was another gross thing alchemists and wizards wanted. Finally, you had to get down into the gullet of the cymothoa. Heavy acid caused a lot of stuff to get burned down to nothing inside the digestive tract, but some stuff remained. And the gullet held all sorts of small random treasures. In the case of the one I did myself, three golden teeth, twenty-two copper coins, a square nail made out of a metal called silverthorn, and six small diamonds. And that wasn’t the best of the gullets we went through that night. There was a ton of just totally random stuff in them.

  As I got the goods out of the bodies, or as we did, Matthew’d take them, wash them, and pack them into labeled crates. Once a crate was full, it went into the cottage.

  “Funny to think Titus and I are out, and here you are connecting us again,” he said out of nowhere.

  “Out of what, exactly?”

  “You looking for my life story?”

  “Might make this work go faster.”

  “Can’t say it’s that interesting.”

  “That’s because you lived it, man. I bet it’s interesting as all hell.”

  He paused and popped a crack out of his neck, then shrugged.

  “Mayhap,” he said. “I used to say that all the time. Now I don’t. Why you think that is?”

  “You realized mayhap is a stupid word.”

  “Mayhap it is.”

  “Healing potions are a thing here, right?”

  “Can be.”

  “Can be?”

  “If you have the coin and know the right person. You hurt?”

  “I’m getting a few more burns than I’d like.”

  He walked over to the gate and peered through. Looked left, right, and all around. Then, he nonchalantly strolled back my way and bent his head close to mine.

  “When we finish this work tonight,” he whispered, “I’ll teach you the first of the spells I know. It’ll help you heal. But no more talk like that out loud. Magic is the darkest of everything in this Empire. Got it?”

  “I do,” I said.

  Then we went back to our gruesome duty.

  Chapter 29

  We carved up bodies all night long, working at an increasingly breakneck pace. I was pushing up against exhaustion, even going past the point I should have, with my stamina wholly drained, which caused hp loss. It was very possible to work myself to death in this world. The pain wasn’t that bad. I could push thought it, at least at first. The more I pushed, the worse the pain got. And it was a weird pain, like a full-body sort of ache.

  “Take a break,” Matthew finally said, pulling me off the body I was butchering, and steering me towards the cottage. He went inside and pulled a stool out, setting it next to the door outside.

  I stumbled to a seated position, looking up at the sky. It was brighter in the east, the morning was just around the proverbial corner. My breath came in gulps.

  “Workin’ too hard,” he said, back at work himself, though. “I appreciate the effort. But you got to watch out for yourself. No one else will.”

  “You just did,” I said softly.

  “That’s because there’s a responsibility, trainer-trainee nonsense and all. My job to make sure you make it out of here alive. Or at least, to do due diligence.”

  “Ha.”

  “You’d oddly be good in the Legion. You ever think of giving it a shot?”

  “The Legion? No. And how would you know?”

  “I did my time.”

  “In the Legion?”

  “The Imperial Legion,” he said, pulling his coveralls open to show his chest, where a tattoo of the Imperial Sigil appeared. “Ten years.”

  “I thought you had to do twenty or something, did you go AWOL?”

  “AWOL? Did I desert?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. Twenty years is full term. There’s more than just full term. Everyone says they’ll go full term, but you only sign up for five years at a time. You do five years, you get out, you get the sigil, you get to say you were in the Legion. Ten years, you get out, you get half the money you put into pension, you get to say you were in the Legion. Fifteen, you get a spot in LegionHome if you need it. You get the money you put into pension. Full term, you get a full pension, and you get a plot of land. Place in LegionHome if you want. But the big dogs go Full Term plus. Plus five and you get more land. P
lus ten, more. Some fools will go thirty or more years with the Legion. And they’ll come out with the ability to alter the course of their bloodline. Maybe even become nobility.”

  “Why’d you leave if it’s so good?”

  “Don’t like someone else lording over me, telling me what to do, who to kill.”

  “Why do you think I’d like it?”

  “Didn’t say you’d like it, said you might be good at it. Oddly.”

  “Not where I want to go,” I said

  “I’m getting that.”

  My stamina was restoring, just slowly. I made a mental note to get a canteen or some means of carrying water with me, maybe try to eat on a more regular basis. I closed my eyes and did a little breathing, then got to my feet, shook my leaden limbs, and got back into the mess.

  When dawn came, I realized why we’d been working so hard. Wagons arrived at the gate, multiple. A gruff looking man rapped his club against the metal gate.

  “Ho there, Gallifrey,” the man said. “Busy night.”

  “Got a good pit, Wildingham,” Matthew replied, opening the gate. “You here for the waste?”

  “I am,” Gruff replied, driving his wagons into the open area between stacks of bodies. “What have you got?”

  “Cymothoa mostly. Also, some Anguids.”

  “Cymothoa? Lucky dog.”

  “Right? Heard Constance Heath hit trollspawn. That true?”

  Wildingham nodded and pulled a flask out from under his seat as his underlings started loading the corpses into the wagons. “Legion had to step in.”

  “Heath make it out?”

  Wildingham shook his gruff head. “Kept the spawn from spreading, but she couldn’t hold out. Only one left alive, new girl.”

  “Bad business,” Matthew said, staring into the pit.

  “Aye, it is that. But it must be done.”

  Matthew nodded. Wildingham hopped down from the wagon and pushed the flask into Matthew’s hand. Matthew took a sip, then made a face