With my pulse roaring in my ears, I reached down, and pulled the sword free with a snarl. The sound of battle around me had dulled to a droning roar. The Hemorrhaging debuff reappeared. I used my last Moss Tincture to stop the bleeding. The tincture brought my HP up out of the gray, but my vision throbbed red as I rolled to the side and picked myself up. The thrill of flight had fled with my health. Now there was only grim determination as I clutched my wounded side with one hand and bashed aside twisted, zombie-like talons with the Spear in the other.
The ghouls were recognizably human, but their flesh had melted on their bones. Some of them were Taltos Guardsmen, some were Mercenary Thugs. They roared and gibbered as they chased their comrades, tearing at them with their fingernails and teeth. One was shambling toward me, hands outstretched.
I braced my spear for impact, but then then an odd, confused expression passed over the ghoul’s face, and its head split in a wet explosion of mana-warped brain matter. It collapsed, an ax buried in what remained of its skull, and I looked past it to see a vision of Valhalla.
Suri flung her second ax at a retreating soldier, hitting him in the shoulder and dropping him to his knees. As he went down, she pulled her huge curved sword from her back and carried it forward in a decapitating blow. The body was still clawing at the stump as she waded in, hacking monsters down with every other step.
She was barely wearing any armor, and I shouted out as a ghoul lunged at her, claws tearing at her midriff. “Suri! Right!”
The monster ripped a long cut in her bare flesh, but Suri didn’t even slow. If anything, she seemed to get faster, stronger, more excited. She slammed the ghoul in the face with the hilt of her sword, grasped the man by the hair and neck, and tore his head from its shoulders.
Holy fuck. Suri was a beast.
“Run! The battle is lost!” The Mercenary Leader yelled.
Suri yelled something in Dakhari, throwing the bloody head at their retreating backs as she ran after them with Karalti and Cutthroat. Cutthroat caught up to the straggler first, and got him by the back of the shirt. It was enough for Suri to catch up. She cut him from shoulder to groin, then whipped around to face the remaining ghouls, who had turned their attention to me. There were four left.
“Karalti! Capture the leader if you can! Don’t kill him!” I spat some red goo, grasped my spear in bloody hands, and charged.
“Okay!”
“Come on!” I drove my weapon through the first ghoul, twisted it, and followed up with a kick to push it back. They attacked in a swarm, like movie zombies. I felt a hand grasp my shoulder, and knocked it away with the butt of my weapon. I didn’t have enough HP to risk Shadow Dance - but the massive damage I’d taken had restored my AP to maximum. I triggered Umbra Blast. Dark power surged through my body, numbing the throbbing pain in my abdomen as it blew out from my skin in a blue-black wave of shattering energy.
The ghouls stumbled away, injured, just as Suri gained on us. She dashed forward in a whirling cloud of red energy, lightning-quick, and swung her sword through the second ghoul’s waist, cutting it in half. The other two ganked her as she drew aggro. I settled for good old-fashioned stabbing, and as soon as I gained enough adrenaline back for Whirlwind Butcher, I used it. The Stranged man fell, bleeding from the back of his skull. The other had gotten through Suri’s guard and was savaging her chest and neck.
“Count to three and push away!” I ran toward them, spear leveled at the ghoul’s back.
The Backstab connected with the man’s spine for a critical hit. Suri cursed as she shoved him off, and before I’d even had a chance to finish him, she flipped one of her axes up with her foot, dropped the sword, and slammed the broad, heavy blade into the back of his neck. The ghoul collapsed like a puppet, twitching through its death throes. I immediately got a waterfall of notifications:
[You earned 410 EXP!]
[Congratulations! You are Level 10! You may now redistribute your Ability Points and take a second Advanced Path. Visit your Paths menu for details.]
[Warning! Your primary weapon is badly damaged! Durability 17/100]
[You have two unspent ability points!]
[You have three unspent skill points!]
[Congratulations! Cutthroat is Level 8!]
[Cutthroat has learned Pack Tactics!]
I gaped at Suri in amazement. “Wow.”
“Wow yourself.” Suri was covered in blood and looked like she’d just had the best sex of her life. Her lips were full and flushed, her short hair tousled, and her skin glowed like deep burnished copper. She had bite marks on her neck and deep claw wounds on her face, but she showed no sign of pain. “Nice armor.”
“Why thank you.” I smiled back at her.
“What’s your score?”
I checked my HUD. “Eight.”
She licked the corner of her mouth, her eyes hooding. “I got six. Aren’t you just a little one-man army?”
“Hector! We got him!” Karalti’s voice rang through my mind before I could shoot back something in response to the ‘little’ remark. “You better come before Cutthroat eats him!”
“Karalti’s got the leader,” I rasped. My voice was husky from shouting I didn’t remember doing. “You as good at interrogation as you are at ripping guys’ heads off?”
“I’m good at a lot of things.” Suri pursed her lips and bent down to pull her ax from the ghoul’s skull. She hung it on her belt before picking up her sword and swinging it over to rest on her shoulder. I noticed belatedly that she was left-handed.
“Here.” I took my last remaining Bonebreak Poultice from my Inventory and offered it to her.
“Thanks, but you need it more.” Her gaze dropped to the huge soggy red patch on my armor. “They fucked you up. Good fight, though.”
“What’s your Advanced Path?” I asked. “I’ve never seen anyone fight like that without powered armor.”
Suri actually grinned. Like Cutthroat, killing things seemed to put her in a better mood than usual. “Wanna guess?”
“Are you a deadly Kangaroo-Taipan Sausage Dervish?” I replied, lifting my armor up enough that I could apply the poultice. In battle, health items were consumed instantly. Outside of combat, you had to stick them on or drink them like how you would in real life.
“I’m a Berserker, you dimwit.” She rolled her eyes.
“It was either that or Vegemite Assassin.”
Suri got an odd look on her face. Confusion? “Vegemite. I feel like I should know what that is.”
“You should. But don’t worry about it.” The poultice healed me for 50, but that only brought me up to 215 HP, still less than half of my total Hit Points. Even so, the throbbing gut pain and nausea receded. I no longer felt like the contents of my stomach were mingling with my bloodstream.
“Hector! Come on!” Karalti scolded me from down the road. I could hear angry voices – human voices – from that direction now. “The guards are here!”
“We’d better go.” I pressed my hand in against my gut, and started off at a limping run toward the dinosaur and dragon.
We jogged up to find bodies scattered on the road and guards standing back as Karalti and Cutthroat faced off. Some were bleeding, some were deep-fried. Only one man remained, and he was trying to crawl out from under Karalti’s feet as Cutthroat circled her, lunging and nipping to try to savage the mercenary leader. Well, savage him more. He was already in pretty bad shape.
“Okay, ladies! Break it up!” I clapped my hands loudly, striding quickly toward them.
Cutthroat turned to face us with a snarl. Her feathered crests flared as she stood up tall, puffed her chest and throat, and brandished both of her scythe-claws at us.
“Rah!” Suri came up from beside me, and threw her arms in the air as well. “Move it, bird brain!”
Cutthroat reared her head back, crests deflating, and clopped her jaws together in frustration. Suri lunged at her, and the hookwing shrunk back, her feathers folding close to her body.
; “Grrrgh...” The man on the ground made a wet rasping sound. “Help... me...”
As Cutthroat slunk off, the guards closed in. The man leading them eyed Karalti warily, but respectfully. “What in the gods’ names happened here? Your group bears the Mark of the King… Were you attacked?”
“This was a foreign invasion.” I was more shaken than I was willing to reveal to anyone here, least of all Karalti. This wasn’t just a small snatch-and-grab operation. The number of attackers, their gear and the brazen shutdown of the street was an assault force. “These men were here to capture this dragon. Karalti, hold him down by the neck. If he moves, kill him.”
Karalti put her foot down on the Mercenary Leader’s neck, and flexed her killing toe until the huge claw pressed in against his carotid. “Like this?”
“Perfect.” I bent down and began to rifle through the man’s pockets.
“I… won’t tell you... anything!” He tried to spit on me as I worked, but only succeeded in spraying a little more blood on my already-sticky armor.
“It’s the Vulkan Keep dungeons for you, foreigner. We’ll find a way to get you squawking,” the guard closest to me said.
I found something small and metal in one of his pockets, and took it out. Then frowned. It was a brooch, some kind of token made of gold… but it was in the shape of the Ryuko corporate logo, sans text. I tried bringing up an item description, but all I got was a blank screen.
“What the hell is this?” I demanded.
The man spat at me again.
When you work in security, there’s one thing you never learn to tolerate: spitting. Brawling? Whatever. Cursing? I’d heard it all. Spitting was my hard limit, so when this guy hawked a third time, I stabbed him in the leg with the pin of the brooch. His eyes flew open, and he spat all over himself instead of me.
“My dragon’s claw only needs to stick in about a quarter of an inch to kill you,” I said, grabbing him by the hair. “Start talking. Who hired you? And what is this?”
“Kill me,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll die before I talk. Whatever you people do to me, my soul will be safe from the Caul. I’ll be reborn by the will of the Architect, and will live forever!”
“What the fuck are you babbling on about?” Suri looked down. “C’mon, Hector. Let’s just have the guards take this joker.”
“By your leave, Kingswoman.” The guardsman close to us saluted and took a pair of manacles off his belt.
I nodded, and let go of the man’s head to stand up. But as I was backing off, he gave me a piercing, defiant look, lunged up against Karalti’s claw, and slashed his artery wide open on the razor-sharp edge.
Chapter 15
Karalti yelped out in surprise, moving her foot away, but it was too late. The pressurized spray of blood burst from his slit carotid and painted her entire belly scarlet. A guard pushed me aside, applying a healing item to his neck, but not in time. The Mercenary Leader burbled and frothed as his eyes rolled back. There was no healing that wound.
Suri grimaced. “Guess he wasn’t so mercenary after all.”
“Fuck!” Cursing, I bent down and retrieved the brooch. “Motherfucker!”
“Is this connected to the Slayer?” The guard looked back up at us, shaken. He was still trying to stop the bleeding by leaning on the saturated bandage he’d pressed down.
I glanced aside at Suri. “Not to my knowledge. These men were Ilian.”
“We’ll search the bodies and report to the Volod’s Castellan.” Another burly guard wandered up. His voice was deep and gravelly, with a thick Eastern European accent. “You are exempted from questioning, because you carry the King’s Mark… but try not to cause more trouble. There was magic used here. We must close the street.”
I swallowed and nodded, looking back at the scattered carnage down along the hill. The bodies were still there. Normally, bodies quickly dissolved and turned into loot sacks that could be gathered, but these bodies had not. I suspected that was because we were in a city.
“C’mon,” Suri said to me. “Let’s go meet with Andrik. You can give him that report on what you found out about the Slayer. It might buy us an extension on the investigation. We need more than two days.”
“Yeah. Sure.” I pocketed the Ryuko logo brooch, and as I did, I brushed against the honeybee pendant on its chain.
There was a chirp from behind us, and I turned to see Cutthroat standing there like a giant black canary. The hookwing had a man’s severed arm hanging from her jaws. When Suri stared at her, Cutthroat trotted up to us and began to plunge and rear her head, her bladed winglets fluttering against her ribs.
“Is she…?” I watched in mild disbelief, reaching out to Karalti as she came up alongside me. “Is she flirting with you?”
Suri eyed her. “Is that what you’re doing? Gonna sexy dance at me?”
“Purrr! Purrr!” Cutthroat wagged her head up and down. The hand at the end of the arm flapped in time with her dance.
“There is no way this is gonna work. We have incompatible genitals, Cutthroat.” Suri chuckled as the hookwing deposited the arm at her feet, and motioned back with her head and hands before stepping in to scratch the hookwing around the edge of her jaw and ear. Cutthroat’s feathers lifted, turning her into a giant black puffball.
“Well, there’s my quote of the day,” I remarked.
Karalti hopped from foot to foot with excitement. “I should do that for you with a burek!”
“No. No mating dance. For one thing, you are way underage. For another, I refuse to be known across the realm as Hector Dragonfucker.” I groaned, and then something occurred to me. “But that reminds me. You’re big enough to carry me at a walk now. We can’t fly, but… what do you say to letting me ride you? Platonically.”
“Yeah!” Karalti bobbed her head eagerly. “No more stinky hookwing! What’s ‘platonic’?”
“You know...” I said, watching as Suri caught Cutthroat’s reins with the other hand. “She’s yours, if you want her.”
“What?” Suri turned to look back at me.
I grinned, and gestured at the dinosaur as she began to pant. “That big old bitch has hated me and everyone else who’s ever gone near her, but she’s decided that you’re The One. You’re her waifu. Regardless of the reality, she now fully believes your genitals are compatible. You might as well make your twu love official.”
For a moment, I could tell that Suri was trying to figure out if this was some kind of trap. But then she reached out and absently scritched Cutthroat on the neck.
“What d’ya want for her?” Suri asked.
“Party up with me and work together like an adult doing adulty things,” I replied. “And if it doesn’t suit you, leave.”
Suri gave a testy little sigh. She looked me up and down, and shrugged a shoulder.
“Two rules,” she replied. “You keep your hands to yourself. And I can leave the party when I want, wherever I want, no questions asked. No nagging, no bullshit. Alright?”
“Fine with me.”
She nodded, and pulled herself into the saddle. I took that as a yes.
My Ride skill was high enough that I didn’t need a saddle to stay on Karalti while she was on the ground, but I couldn’t sit astride her like a horse. Her back was a completely different shape than Cutthroat’s: narrower, straighter and harder, with a pronounced spinal ridge that ran from the base of her neck and then grew up into hard, bony plates on her rump. At her current size, neither feature was particularly friendly to male anatomy. I had to ride side-saddle.
“I feel so strong now!” Karalti enthused, jostling me from side to side as she trotted up through the University District. “But you need to eat less bread. You’re fat.”
I nearly retorted with the incredibly mature ‘your mom is fat’, but in light of recent historical events, it was in pretty poor taste. “I’ll eat all the burek I like, Tidbit. Now hang on, I have to distribute some points.”
I’d been waiting to hit Level 10 for a while no
w. Several new combat abilities opened up, plus you had the option to take a second Advanced Path – if you wanted to. More importantly, you got a once-off opportunity to redistribute your Ability Points. This was great, because I’d learned a lot about my Dark Lancer class in the last five levels and gotten a sense of what skills and stats I wanted to focus on. I didn’t have enough time or concentration to sit and redistribute everything properly right now, so I spent my Ability Points on upgrading Umbra Blast and Blood Sprint, my strongest offensive abilities. I would redistribute them later; I had a strategy for my ‘final build’, but would lock it in when I had more time.
“Hey, Hector?” Karalti’s voice intruded into my thoughts. “Aren’t I too big to be a Tidbit now?”
“I don’t care how big you get. When you’re some big shot queen matriarch with a half-dozen boy dragons doing your manicures and feeding you grapes off a plate-”
“Eww!” Karalti broke out in helpless laughter.
“- Old Man Hector is going to tell your boyfriends how he was there wiping half-digested cat poop off your little chin.” I drew out the amulet Kanzo had dropped the night before, getting a good look at it. It was just like Rin’s, which struck me as odd. Maybe I was just a filthy capitalist accustomed to the excess of corporate CEOs, but I didn’t understand why a craftmaster would wear the exact same iron pendant as his students. For a crafting system that had defined ranks, it seemed odd that the ranks weren’t indicated by different pendants, or at least different crafting materials for the same design.
“That poop thing only happened once!”
“Believe me, Karalti. Once was enough for me to remember that smell forever.”
“Hate to tell you, but your dragon’s giggling.” Suri had gotten Cutthroat’s saddle and tack with the animal herself. The Berserker wasn’t a particularly good rider, but she was able to hold her seat, and Cutthroat - while still sullen to have anyone on her back - was far better behaved with Suri than she ever was with me, but she still had to wear her muzzle.
Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset Page 49