by Eddie Patin
The three Nothrix suddenly burst into a weird clicking guffaw, which must have been ... laughing? It was an odd, repetitive mixture of belching and clicking.
Riley stood silently and faced them off then melted into a smirk as Ghrag turned away. The bugs shuddered and clicked before engaging their wings with a rising, low buzz. Then they lifted lazily into the air and hovered slowly away to join the others on the ridge.
Jason’s heart was pounding.
"Okay then," Riley said, suddenly clapping Jason on the arm. "Let’s get this one back home."
"Holy shit," Jason said, breaking his eyes away from the bugs and turning to the dead monster. He took a few deep breaths and took a drink from his CamelBak, trying to calm his nerves. Looking up at the ever-stoic Gliath, Jason saw the leopardwere staring at Riley.
As Jason’s heartbeat calmed, the three of them walked up to the dead beast. It was definitely Jason’s kill, but he'd been sure that the Nothrix were going to attack them over it! Why didn’t they? he wondered. The bug-men had the numbers. Were they afraid of Riley and Gliath perhaps?
Jason pulled up the OCS and crouched next to the body, looking for the coordinates to home.
"Hang on a minute," Riley said, watching the Nothrix depart. Jason looked back and saw eight of them—yep, definitely eight—buzzing away into the yellow sky like shadows armed with long, skinny rifles. "Wait until they’re gone before you rift. "
After a few minutes—long after the low buzzing of the bugs’ wings had died down—Riley motioned for Jason to go ahead, so he did.
Using the OCS to focus on the coordinates, Jason opened the rift easily. As the air fluttered next to the minotaur’s corpse then snapped, a brilliant orange fireball appeared and unfurled into a roaring and bright gateway to the garage.
"Shit—I forgot to try a horizontal one," Jason shouted over the din of the swirling, sputtering rift. "Want me to try again?"
Riley peered through the portal then crossed his arms over his chest and frowned.
"Where’s the other minotaur?" he asked, glaring at the empty concrete floor. "Where’s the first one we killed, Jason?!"
Cold fear flooded Jason’s body.
Oh shit!
He stared through the rift and, low and behold, the garage was empty! Where the hell was the first minotaur? It should have been there!
"I ... I don’t know!" Jason stammered. "Where’d it go?!"
"Close it," Riley snapped.
Jason released his hold, and the rift collapsed into nothing with a pop, leaving them in the uncomfortable silence and the thick light of the yellow sky again. He looked at the coordinates. They were to universe 934. He double-checked. It was! They were set to rift to u934, to the coordinates he’d used before back when Riley had him look backwards in time...
"I don’t—what’s wrong? I don’t get it!" Jason said.
"You sent the minotaur to the wrong world," Riley said, glaring. "The wrong garage!"
Jason felt the fear inside him boil up again. His cheeks and neck grew hot.
Shit!
"I ... I don’t know what I did wrong!" Jason replied. "Honest! I was sure that I used the right coordinates before—I used the same one that I have here; the bookmark from when you had me go back in time to look at myself in—"
"You did something wrong," Riley said, his face just as steely as when he had just been talking to Ghrag. "Shet. There goes one hide. Shet..."
"I’m sorry, Riley!" Jason said, feeling his cheeks turn red. He suddenly felt itchy all over in his Merc armor. "I have no idea what I did wrong. I—"
"Well fruk," the soldier spat. "We’re just wasting time now. We’re even more behind. Let’s move on. It’s fruking gone. We’ll just work harder to catch up. We’ve gotta hit at least ten hides. Open the rift again. Wait—show me your coordinates. Give me the OCS..."
"Okay..."
Jason unstrapped the device and handed it to Riley. Embarrassment flooded through him and he felt a bewildering jumble of anger at him, anger at himself, confusion, and shock. Had he fucked up? He couldn’t believe it! How could he have sent the body to the wrong damned world?!
"It looks okay as far as I can tell," Riley said angrily, then handed the OCS back to Jason. "Open a rift under the body so we don’t have to move it through ... if you can..."
Jason stared at Riley with his mouth open then felt heat welling up in his brow between his eyes. This was so unfair! How could Riley expect him to suddenly be an expert with this?!
Strapping the OCS back on, Jason focused on the coordinates after double-checking them again, then he visualized opening a portal under the body—flat and horizontal instead of vertical like normal. He imagined opening it under the beast and letting the body fall through into his garage back home...
A rift opened with a flutter and a snap, unfurling in a whirlwind of sputtering sparks and swirling madly with a roar, adding a flaring orange light to their yellow surroundings...
But it was another vertical portal.
"Shit!" Jason cried, feeling another wave of embarrassment but holding on to the rift.
"Come on, Gliath," Riley said, shaking his head and moving to carry the heavy body through.
Jason felt a rush of disappointment and frustration as he watched the two of them grunt and lift up the monster. How could Riley even lift that thing? he wondered. That body must have been ... a thousand pounds of muscle and meat! The monster’s heavy shoulders and massive neck and head dwarfed the soldier who was carrying its upper body. Jason could imagine Gliath carrying his own end—the leopardwere was big and tall and must have been strong as hell—but Riley? Maybe cybernetic strength or something...
With the corpse safely dumped onto Jason’s concrete garage floor, and Riley and Gliath back in Maze World, Jason relaxed his grip on the rift. The roaring, swirling mass of sparks and light collapsed into nothingness with a pop, leaving them all standing in silence again.
The wind blew through the sparse, surrounding trees.
Jason looked at Riley, desperate to make amends, and Riley stared ahead down the path.
"Let's go," the soldier said, leading the way...
Chapter 13
"Any sign of it, Gliath?" Jason asked, compulsively checking the safety of his Rigby Magnum Mauser as they walked down the canyon corridor. He looked back at the leopardwere’s looming form following them. Gliath’s normally yellowish-green feline eyes were ghostly white in the thick canary-yellow ambience of Maze World. His fur was as black as pitch under the odd sky.
"No, Jason Leaper 934," the Krulax replied. "The traces I can detect of the dark one are now faint. The black minotaur is far ahead of us."
Jason looked over at Riley but the soldier only stared grimly ahead, his Gauss rifle shouldered with the muzzle low. Riley constantly scanned the natural sandstone maze before them and its ridges up above the walls. For a while now, they had been following the path going off to the right where that black beast had fled to before they killed minotaur number two. So far, there was no sign of it...
"That big black one spotted us," Jason said. The mood between he and Riley was dark, and Jason hoped to lighten it somehow, but didn't know what to say.
Riley’s eyes darted back to him for an instant, then he looked ahead again. Jason was suddenly worried that the soldier outright hated him.
"Easy for them to do," Riley said. "Minotaurs actually have really keen senses. Down here in these maze canyons, it’s a matter of us spotting them before they start hunting us."
That sent a chill running up Jason’s spine. It felt strange in the mild air.
The three Reality Rifters passed a pile of remains: thick, heavy bones with a broad skull bearing large, carnivorous teeth and wide, sweeping horns—all perfectly bleached and picked absolutely clean. Obviously minotaur bones, Jason thought, but how are they so ... gleaming? Bright and shiny in the yellow atmosphere, Jason figured that polished bones must look bright white under normal light.
"Heh ... no
rmal..." he mused to himself.
"What?" Riley asked, looking back.
Jason chuckled and shook his head. He was so used to being alone that it felt perfectly normal to talk to himself. "Nothing, Riley. Hey—look at those bones. So clean!"
"Yeah," Riley replied, scratching his beard. "It’s the slimes."
"What slimes?" Jason asked. That was the second time that Riley had mentioned it.
"This world mainly has two creatures—three, if you count the sky people. There are the minotaurs and the slimes. There are probably other amoebic and proto-life creatures too small for us to see, off living in the oceans still, but it’s mainly the slimes and minotaurs around here. There are slimes all over this world. They mostly hide during the day; they don’t like the sunlight. But they’ll be all over at night..."
"As in ... bouncing balls of slime? Jumping blobs? Gelatinous cubes?" Jason scanned the empty canyon walls and crevices around them, peering through the scrubby trees. He imagined big bouncing blobs like out of DnD, or from the computer games Terraria or Minecraft.
"Gelatinous cubes?" Riley retorted with a cocked eyebrow. "What are you talking about?"
"Oh ... nothing. What do they look like?"
Riley smirked, which made Jason feel a little more at ease. "They’re like crawling blobs. They can be teeny tiny like a coin, or bigger up to the size ... shet ... I reckon as big as your Earth car."
"Holy shit," Jason replied.
"Slimes crawl along and eat anything they can find by absorbing it. That’s why these canyons are so clean. Didn't ya notice that there’s no dead plant matter or organic material anywhere?"
"I did notice. I was wondering—"
"Hey, look at that!" Riley exclaimed suddenly, cutting Jason off and pointing at the sky up ahead with a gloved finger. "It’s a sky city!"
Jason looked and saw something emerging from the maze-patterned cloud cover up ahead as if slowly drifting out of a thick, yellow fog. Up until now, their view of the sky city was blocked by the ridge on their right, but as the three of them continued down the path after the black minotaur, a massive structure slipped into sight. The sky city was huge—a bizarre island floating up there! Jason couldn’t tell if the absurdly huge structure was hovering because of some kind of magic, or if it was held up by technology or what. It looked like a colossal chunk of land—an incomprehensibly huge disc—covered with an impossible network of buildings and tunnels, all hazy from being high up in the yellow sky...
"Good God!" Jason breathed, staring and trying to see more. He followed the maze-like lines of the buildings and connecting structures up there, peering at the towering spires in the center that rose higher and higher, thinner and thinner, until what looked like antennas or something stabbed up into the highest points of twisting straight lines and corners of yellow clouds. "What ... what are they? Who lives there?"
Riley clapped Jason on the shoulder. "I don’t know. It's the dominant civilization of this world, no doubt. Last time we were here, I never saw anyone or anything come out of those cities. We never saw or heard from any of the sky people. They stayed out of sight."
"Weird!"
"Oh, look," Riley added, pointing at the canyon near them. "There’s a small slime."
Jason looked, following Riley’s gesture at a shadowy crevice in the wall. For a moment, the man thought that there was nothing there, but then he saw the background move and shimmer. As he peered closer, Jason could barely make out a form that looked like clear jelly—hard to see in that shadowy area of the yellow world—perhaps the size of a beanbag.
"Holy crap," he said. "That thing’s huge! And hard to see!"
"I can see them fine," Riley said. "They have a higher temperature than their surroundings."
"You can see temperatures?"
"There are humans ahead..." Gliath rumbled suddenly.
Riley snapped his attention forward again, firmly shouldering his Gauss rifle into a low ready position, peering intently onward. Jason looked for other people but didn’t see anything. It appeared that the huge corridor they were in continued for another hundred yards or so then hit a T-intersection.
"Where?" Jason asked.
"Come on," Riley said. "Stay quiet. Hang back..."
The three of them continued without a word. Jason noticed Riley’s boots and Gliath’s padded feet hardly making a sound. He tried hard to keep his own boots quiet—walking on the outside of his soles like he’d learned to do in the woods ages ago—but the rocks and sand still crunched under him. He tried to stick to the sand.
As they approached the intersection, Riley moved on ahead and tensed like a snake ready to strike. He scanned both directions leading away as the Reality Rifters came within sight of the two-way path. Watching the soldier approach on point, Jason felt like Riley could snap his rifle up and take several shots within an instant if he had to.
The soldier visibly relaxed. Jason let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding.
"Rush?" Riley asked an unseen person around the corner.
"Well, Riley Wyatt!" a human male voice replied as if smiling.
Jason closed the distance and as he stepped into the T-intersection, he saw two men down the right path dressed in Merc armor similar to his own. One man was older with white hair, trim and grizzled and wearing some kind of coif headwear that looked like a hood that a Starfighter pilot would wear under a helmet. The other man was Jason’s age or thereabouts, a little thicker, with tan skin and short, dark hair and eyes. They both had long guns on their backs and were hard at work skinning a dead minotaur. Jason expected to see the black beast that had eluded them, but this dead one was brown like the other two they’d already killed. Its shaggy coat had lighter tawny-colored spots.
Riley lowered his weapon with a broad smile and approached strongly, lunging in for a handshake. The older man took Riley’s hand and they both laughed and grinned.
"Good to see you, ya mercenary, you!" the older man exclaimed. "What are you doing here? Hunting minotaurs, I suppose?" The man looked over Jason and Gliath and grinned. "Gliath! Good to see you, kid! And Jason? You look ... different!"
Riley smirked. "This is a different Jason, Rush. Jason 113 is no more, unfortunately. We ran into some trouble with a bad universe."
Rush’s smile vanished, replaced with an animated look of concern. "Oh—that’s too bad, Riley. Too bad..." The two of them released their vigorous handshake and Riley’s eyes traveled to the other man, then back to Rush.
"Yeah. Bad shet," Riley said. "Only Gliath and I made it out of there. The base is gone too. That was a terrible day. This..." Riley paused, reaching out with a grin and grasping Jason by the shoulder. "...is Jason Leaper 934. He’s the new guy. This is his first mission for the Bounty Boards." Riley looked Jason in the eye. "Jason, this is an old friend of mine, Rush Watson. He’s another monster hunter. We see each other in the Market a lot."
Rush smiled like a firm man and extended a hand. Jason shook it, his hand pumped in a grip of iron. "Good to meet you, Jason 934! How’s the monster hunting life?"
"Uh ... it’s interesting so far..."
Riley cut in again with a laugh. "Jason got his start by getting stuck in a dinosaur world for two weeks. I caught up to him while he was going face to face with a fruking wyvern, fighting with nothing more than rope snares and a damned spear!"
Rush laughed. He pointed to the other man, who stood, pausing his bloody work skinning the dead beast. "This is my second, Tommy Whisper. Tommy, Riley and Gliath here are monster hunter friends of mine."
"Good to meet you," Tommy said with a forced smile, then went back to work.
"So how’s hunting?" Riley asked.
Rush crossed his arms over his chest, wiping some blood off from one hand onto his shirt, then he smiled. His white hair looked almost the same color as his skin under the yellow sky. "This is our fourth hide," he replied. "Good hunting. These minotaurs are roaming around all over. We’re camped up on the ridge there..." He poin
ted up to the eroded top of a maze canyon wall where Jason could make out the silhouette of a distant structure.
"How long have you been here?" Riley said. "We’ve just been here for a few hours. Killed two of them so far."
"We’ve been here for two days."
"Are you sleeping here at night?"
Rush nodded, then turned serious. "Watch out for the damned bugs. Those Nothrix Reapers are here too making a mess of things. They can’t hunt for shit, but they’ve interfered with our prey a few times already."
"Yeah," Riley replied. "We’ve already had a run in with Ghrag and his group. What a bastard. If you guys are sleeping here, how do you deal with the slimes? How do you keep ‘em out of your camp? Dangerous..."
"Well, they don’t get up to the ridge much," Rush replied, "but when they do, we’ve got an oscillating field generator. Puts out vibrations that the slimes don’t like, so they stay away. It would cost a hell of a lot to rift back every night with our portable gate..."
Jason suddenly remembered Riley mentioning what an advantage it was being with a Jason Leaper. Without his ability to rift with his mind and the OCS, they’d be stuck using gate technology, which was apparently very difficult to program and resource-intensive. He supposed that when the sun finally went down—whenever that would be—he would just rift them home for the night. They'd be able to sleep in real beds. Jason looked up and watched the distant sky city as Rush and Riley chatted more about the hunt and the death of Jason 113.
"Have you ever seen the sky people, Rush?" Jason asked at one point when the hunters’ conversation reached a lull.
The older man looked at Jason after a quick glance up to the floating city.
"No, Jason," he said. "And I hope I never do. I reckon they’re so advanced that we’re like insects to them. They’re probably very dangerous." He looked at Riley. "Did you know that the minotaurs aren’t from here?"
The soldier shook his head. "Nope."