by RW Krpoun
“Derek’s gone native, but why are you playing the Lone Ranger?” Jeff asked.
“I’m really not; the kyonshi feeds off the emotional harm it does. If you help you are a potential source of power, whereas I will be partially warded from its feeding ability.”
“So it should just run,” Fred observed. “It has to know you are a warder-the Undead can’t get within three feet of the building.”
“It should, but they hate warders. All the thinking Undead do, it’s a shared obsession.”
“I can see that,” Jeff nodded. “You get on my nerves something awful.”
Shad flipped him off.
“They really don’t like what Shad made,” Derek observed, peering at the Undead milling around in the street. “They keep trying to edge closer, but flinch away.”
“Judging from the way the light in the symbols is fading, it won’t last long,” Jeff sighed.
“Should be long enough for our purposes,” Shad observed as he came up behind them. “Let’s see your blades.”
“Won’t the katari interfere with that?” Derek asked.
“I’m using a different rune; it’ll stack like Derek on a goat.”
The Ronin sighed and shot Shad the bird. “Nothing changes, no matter where we go.”
“Well, you’re wearing a dress and we’ve been pretty tolerant about that,” Shad pointed out.
“Not for long. Let me get back to my gear and it is hakama from now on.”
“Hack-what?”
“Hakama, real baggy pants with two folds in the rear, and five on the front, each one with its own meaning. Basically pants for bushi.”
“Why didn’t you go for them before?”
“I didn’t know they had pants for Samurai.”
“Every day brings new wisdom,” Shad said absently as he drew a glowing rune onto Fred’s club. “That would make a great fortune cookie. Let me go out first, alone. I want to try a new spell combination, and I don’t want to have to worry about bystanders.”
“You can combine spells?” Derek was surprised.
“Maybe. Certain ones, I think. Like I told you, by a singular focus on combat spells I’m more advanced than my level would suggest. And I could be terribly wrong, too,” Shad admitted. “Hence the safe distance for non-hostiles.”
“I should have figured you would run a spellcaster like a nuclear reactor with the safety controls removed.”
“This is completely unnecessary,” Midori snapped as the Black Talons assembled at the barricaded doorway.
“You know, I really hate getting nagged by women I haven’t slept with,” Jeff observed to Fred. “It undermines the entire basis of male-female relationships.”
“You guys ready?” Shad asked, checking the position of the sticks of chalk he had positioned in his pouch-bandolier.
“Born ready,” Derek grinned.
“Follow me after the spell goes off or I self-combust.” Shad gingerly arranged the coins in his hand, squared his shoulders, and clambered over the barricade. He stood for a moment, studying the Undead, and then walked out into the street like the last gunfighter in a Johnny Cash ballad.
“Hooters, All you Zombies,” Fred muttered. “That should be in the soundtrack right now.”
“Thanks, now it’s stuck in my head,” Derek sighed, being prone to musical suggestion.
“I was thinking Peter Shilling, A World of Lust & Crime,” Jeff countered. “But your Undead angle really works.”
As Shad strode into the street the Boneguard gave way uncertainly before him, apparently unsettled by their loathed foe suddenly quitting his place of safety. For a second the street was a frozen tableau of warder and Undead, and then the Boneguard raised their weapons and advanced. Shad let them get almost to within blade reach before flicking the coins in his hand to the bloody cobblestones at his feet.
Instantly a soundless shock wave erupted in a perfect circle, invisible except where it turned
blackish-purple as it brushed the ground, and every Boneguard within ten feet of the warder was shattered into bone fragments. Nodding to himself, the warder pulled a stick of chalk from his harness and strode down the street towards the left of the watching Talons, the Boneguard making way for him.
“That’s my cue,” Derek started climbing the barricade. “The Boneguard aren’t going to get close to him after that.”
“We’ll be on your heels,” Fred assured the Ronin. “Quit with all the kung-fu drama and just kill the damned thing.”
The kyonshi came at Shad in a dream, or a memory. One second he was walking towards the indistinct figure wrapped in gray mist, drawing slashes of dark blue neon in the air before them, and the next he was back in the Prison, underground and fighting Goblins in a foul-smelling cavern chamber illuminated by burning straw beds.
“We won here,” he reminded himself, hacking a Goblin down, the smoke from the burning straw making his eyes smart and weep. “We saved three young women, girls really, from a life of horror. I don’t mind doing it again.”
The Goblins howled and charged as Shad and his half-seen comrades fought for their lives.
The Boneguard leader was waiting for him, and as the Ronin strode across the street it assumed its customary overhead hiki stance. Derek drew his sword and effortlessly slipped into the aiuchi stance, the blade held horizontally at waist height with his arm extended straight to the side. It was a risky stance, but one with many options, and the sight of it gave the Boneguard leader pause.
Then it swung and Derek moved, darting across its front even as the terrible blade came down, slashing his blade across the exposed ribcage as he moved, snapping two ribs and grooving others.
Abruptly Shad was back in Iraq, racing across the hard packed dirt of a courtyard to slam into a mud brick wall as incoming fire kicked up gouts of dirt and smashed into the other side of the wall. Bobbing up he fired his under barrel M203 grenade launcher at a rooftop a quarter block away; back below the wall he thumped the latch lever and slid the M203’s barrel forward, the alloy casing dropping from the breech. Shoving in a fat HEDP round, he slid the breech closed and bumped the safety into position with the side of his hand.
“We won here, too, asshole,” he muttered. “We stacked bodies and tore the guts out of an entire city.”
The Ronin’s move had ended with him in position slightly behind the Boneguard, and Derek seamlessly flowed into a shomen decapitating strike, but the Boneguard managed to deflect the stroke, losing its right arm at the elbow.
As Derek recovered the Boneguard lashed out with a clumsy thrust that turned the Ronin’s armor charms to dust; Derek riposted with a two-handed cut at the Undead’s legs, clipping the left thigh bone but failed to cut all the way through. Ducking a savage return the Talon thrust and twisted, shattering two ribs on the right side. As the fight sped up and grew more desperate both foes were abandoning the more formal styles and stances in favor for the faster basic strikes.
Fred pulverized a Boneguard’s skull and hopped back to send a healing charm to Jeff, who was performing a weaving, bobbing dance of steel further into the street. The surviving Boneguard were staying out of the duels between Shad and the kyonshi and the blade-brawl between Derek and the Boneguard leader, but they had no compunctions about attacking the remaining Talons. Luckily Shad’s bursting sphere had thinned their already depleted ranks, and the preoccupation of their leaders was reducing their combat efficiency.
Side-stepping a spear-thrust, the big healer swept the Boneguard’s legs out from under it and crushed its skull before it could recover. “I wish those idiots would hurry up.”
The scenes of a wild ‘thunder run’ through Iraqi streets, pounding away at targets of opportunity faded; the kyonshi was trying to invoke negative emotions from his memories, Shad guessed, but it was running into trouble getting a grip on the warder. Shad wasn’t introspective at the best of times, and he was burdened with few regrets.
Then he was back in the Realm, in a maelstrom of gu
nfire, alien howls, and reptilian screams overlaid with the hot cloying stink of black powder gun smoke.
Dropping his empty Colt Shad grabbed up the other Cavalry model and got five hits with six rounds. Taking a glance along the line as he dropped the empty Colt and reached for the Artillery model under his right arm he saw Derek was pounding away like a madman, doing well except that the untidy pile of empty tubes outnumbered the neat line of full ones.
Beyond the Alienist Jeff was firing a Bulldog, his rifle on the ground by his hole with an overheated case jammed in the chamber. Fred was tossing aside his empty Yellowboy and drawing his Remington revolver as beyond him the teamsters were starting to back away from the breastworks.
Cursing bitterly the Shootist vaulted from his hole and raced to his left. “Hold your positions! Face front!”
The first teamster saw him, wavered, and then turned to face the advancing Tek, fumbling a paper cartridge from his pouch. The next in line was a young man, hardly out of his teens, wild-eyed and staring, just in the act of dropping his rifle and turning to run. Without hesitation Shad shot him squarely in the forehead, the heavy bullet sending the youth’s body staggering back to collapse against the rudimentary breastworks.
“Hold your positions!” the Shootist howled. “Stand and fight!”
He couldn’t believe he was standing erect making a prime target out of himself, but he had acted without thinking and now he was stuck. The greasy ball of ice in his stomach was threatening to come up his throat along with his last meal, but he forced himself to keep moving. Most of the teamsters couldn’t actually hear what he was shouting, but none appeared to have any doubts as to what he intended; none moved forward to retake their positions but all faced the enemy and resumed firing.
Then the image flickered and the Colt was bucking in his hand as the tow-headed youth’s head snapped back from the impact of the heavy lead bullet that ripped through his brain pan, dropping his convulsing body to the boot-torn ground.
Another flicker and the boy, no more than seventeen, possibly even sixteen, was hurled back by Shad’s bullet.
Flicker, and the fight was over, and there before him were the rest of the teamsters’ bodies littering the ground where they had formed a skirmish line at Shad’s prompting. Their corpses were intertwined with Tek warriors who had died in deadly close combat.
For a moment the dream setting shimmered and Shad felt his awareness start to flicker as the kyonshi brought its full will to bear.
Then he set his mental feet and pushed back. “If they hadn’t held their portion of the perimeter no one would have survived. The sappers lost nearly all their men, and every one of us were wounded.” The image of a raptor’s jaws clamping down on his shotgun sent a shudder down his spine. “It was everyone fights or everyone dies.”
The image flashed back to the body of the young muleskinner flopping back, blood and brains jetting from his skull, and once again the dreamscape wavered. Then he saw a montage of images flash before his eyes: a tow-headed boy, no more than six, charging across a pasture waving a stick, a mongrel dog at his heels. The boy, nearer to ten, sleeping, his face flushed with a fever and his mother tenderly placing a damp cloth on his forehead. The boy, now looking as the warder knew him, but cleaner and neatly groomed, saying goodbye to his parents as the Expedition formed up in the distance. His mother watched, clearly fearful, as her son trotted to the wagon he had been contracted to drive.
The firmament of the vision wavered more as her face filled the warder’s field of view.
His breath was coming hard as his lungs burned from his body’s desperate demands for oxygen; Derek was hurting the Undead warrior far more than it had hurt him, but it was inexhaustible while he certainly wasn’t. Sooner or later his growing exhaustion would make him falter, and then he would die.
Grimly resolved he stepped in with a suriwaza, binding the Boneguard’s blade with his own; Pivoting before the creature could react he threw everything he had in a single side-kick to the Undead creature’s left thigh. The impact numbed his foot to the ankle, but with a gunshot-like report the skeleton’s thigh snapped, spilling the warrior to the ground.
Staggering because his left foot could barely support his weight, Derek lunged forward in a graceless thrust that drove the point of his sword through the Boneguard’s skull.
In the dreamscape Shad rallied and waved a hand in a single cutting motion. “So he had a mother; everyone on our side did, and the Tek probably did too. He took on a man’s responsibility when he took the job; a man’s responsibilities and a place in the firing line. I don’t know if it was his fault that he broke ranks-he might have just been panicking. But panic is a disease that affects a unit like gangrene, and the only cure for gangrene is amputation. A perimeter is like a chain, only as strong as its weakest link.”
The warder shook his head. “I regret that I had to shoot him, but I wasn’t demanding anything of him that I wasn’t doing myself. In fact, I stood fully exposed to rally his comrades. Whatever suffering I cost his mother, I prevented for the mothers of the survivors of the Expedition. And my own mother’s suffering, too. I did not start the fight nor chose the battle; others did that. What I did was my duty, plain and brutal. But more importantly I made that choice, and while I will have to answer for it, it won’t be to anyone on this third-rate copy of the true world!”
The face of the boy’s mother hung before him trying to shame the Texan, but Shad snarled back. Then he was on his knees in the street, a blaze of blue symbols hanging in the air around him in a thick belt and the Kyonshi was a pillar of screaming blue flame a dozen yards away. Blood was pouring from his nose and filling his mouth and his head was swimming, but he was alive.
The chalk stick in his hand was worn to a nub and cracked from how hard he had been gripping it; slowly stretching his cramped fingers he dropped it and fumbled for a bandage as he spat clotting blood onto the filthy cobblestones. Then the children were surrounding him to hold him upright, and Four was mopping the blood from his face with a wet rag.
“I thought you were staying put,” the warder muttered, but without any heat. “Thanks.”
“Shad? You OK?” Fred asked from behind him.
“No,” the warder admitted. “Get me inside.”
“You got it.” The big healer lifted Shad to his feet. “Where is the kyonshi?”
“Fried. We both misjudged the situation, but his mistake was fatal.”
“What about yours?”
“Damn close to fatal. How are the others?”
“Cut up a bit but OK. Derek chopped down the Boneguard leader like a lumberjack going after a redwood.” Fred helped Shad back into the inn. “The Undead that survived withdrew when their leaders went down. I didn’t think Undead worked like that.”
“Boneguard are special.”
“I’m sick of being special. I liked it better when we were killing Goblins for loot.”
“I liked it better too.”
Patched up, the battered and bloody Black Talons slumped around a table listlessly eating fried rice and drinking hard cider.
“That was rougher than I expected,” Shad noted. “The kyonshi read my level and acted upon assumptions. If I hadn’t been an outlander I don’t think I would have made it.”
“As a duel it didn’t look like much,” Jeff commented.
“The kyonshi tries to swamp you with negative emotions, usually guilt. Break your concentration enough and that is it.”
“Guilt?” the Shop teacher grinned. “You? Really bad choice.”
“Yeah.” Shad shrugged, forcing down the memory. “But it also creates a connection. As it died I saw something; a local wouldn’t have, but since we’re still within the first lunar cycle here…anyway, I was wrong: they aren’t interested in us. The kyonshi knew about us, but we don’t rate with the Death Lords. It saw us as nothing more than exceptionally tasty meat snacks. Midori was the only target, and they wanted her alive.”
“They don’t
care about us?” Derek frowned. “But we’re drawing daily XP.”
“I can’t explain it, but they really don’t care. I imagine Cecil does, but he’s not calling the shots. The Death Lords are unleashing the Wind of Souls, and we are just ants in the way of their steamroller.”
“I have to admit, I feel a little rejected by that,” Jeff rubbed his jaw. “It‘s like when you are about to dump a girl, only to find out she is ready to dump you.”
“It works to our advantage,” Fred pointed out. “We’re below their radar.”
“Do they know we hooked up with Midori?” Derek asked.
“Not now,” Shad rubbed his face tiredly. “Maybe if they investigate, they might pull aura traces off the street. I don’t know if they would care in any case.”
“We caught a break,” Fred shrugged. “About time. Pass the cider. You kids getting enough?” he asked the four orphans who were a quiet huddle at the short end of the table. Four heads bobbed in response.
“If you have a moment you can spare?” Midori inquired icily as she straightened from where she had been tracing designs in a foot-wide belt of flour she had drawn around the table.
“I don’t recognize your class specifics,” Derek waved a spoon at the flour.
“That is because we have to be born into it,” the young woman snapped. “Is there anything else I might do for you before we discuss the fate of a very large number of people?”
“We’re good,” Shad ignored the acidic sarcasm in her voice. “Speak your piece.”
“You were told we need you to oppose the World Stone with what was once the Bone Lance. I am to advise you on how that is to be accomplished. As you complete each step you will be contacted with a meeting place where I will explain the next step.”