by Macronomicon
Jeb’s Myst Core was barely a flicker of the size it had been when he was in the Tutorial, a sad little candle compared to the massive star it had been right before the end.
Jeb pictured his straw siphoning out the faint Myst that hung around the edges of his tiny star, drawing it out in a thread.
The Myst was dull, and slow to react, but Jeb managed to prod it into motion, creating an ultrafine thread of Myst connected to him.
He carefully spooled it out and poked the ring’s outer metal.
The ring shifted slightly.
He poked the Myst hurricane spinning in the center of the ring.
Nothing. The Myst swirling in the center rebuffed his efforts, pushing Jeb’s own Myst away like a fart in a windstorm.
“Well, that’s probably not gonna work,” he said, crossing his arms and glaring at the ring, trying to will it into working.
Reveal your secrets to me!
“He could have left a manual,” Jeb muttered.
“Technically true,” Smartass groaned from Jeb’s pocket.
“What if I shake it really hard….”
Jeb spent the next hour or so fiddling with the magic ring to no avail, until he got bored and jammed the uncomfortable thing back onto his finger. It’ll do something…sooner or later.
Jeb flopped onto his back, making sure not to squish Smartass, and stared at the ceiling.
There’s that crack again.
This ceiling is the same color as the barracks.
No, the barracks was beige. This is taupe.
Is that crack getting bigger?
Is The Spike about to come through the ceiling and crush me?
Has it already?
Jeb took a deep breath and ran his thumb over the scar on his palm, evidence that the past was in the past. He carefully recounted the events leading up to today, and while they were outlandish, they didn’t have the disjointed skipping-about of dying neurons trying to make sense of oxygen deprivation.
They were too cohesive. The narrative was too fluid. It had to be real.
I am alive.
Jeb closed his eyes, taking deep breaths as he began trying to relax in the deathtrap of an inn. Counting breaths, counting sheep, counting Smartass’s toes; counting anything he could to relax and keep his mind off—
Nope, not gonna think about it.
Jeb walled those thoughts off, blockading them before they could even reach those well-trodden roads, letting them wither away in his brain.
His chest began itching.
That’s just my nerves. There’s nothing wrong with my chest.
To prove it wasn’t anything to worry about, Jeb went to scratch the itch. Just scratching an itch. Nothing out of the ordinary here. All fine.
Jeb reached up and tried to scratch his sternum, but something blocked his hand, sending a thrill of panic through him. Is there something on my chest right now? Something in it!?
When he brought his fingers back to his face, they were drenched in blood.
“FUCK!”
Jeb jerked out of sleep, heartbeat pounding in his temples as he sat up. He spotted a pair of feet tumbling away from him in the dark as Smartass was launched off his chest like a stone from a catapult, flailing all the way down to the inn’s wooden floor.
“Ow,” Smartass groaned into the rough-hewn wood.
Jeb struggled to get his jackhammer of a heartbeat under control as he tried to defuse the panic whirling around inside him.
It was just Smartass sleeping on my chest again. I’m fine.
Practically against his will, Jeb’s body got out of bed and began pacing, trying to ride out the adrenaline eating away at his nerves like acid.
Long, slow breaths. It’s not real.
Jeb stopped counting when he reached thirty-seven breaths and his heart finally settled to a near-normal rate.
Maybe I can get back to sleep again. He glanced at the window.
The sun was coming up.
Damnit. It was never this bad in the Tutorial.
Jeb’s jaw dropped.
“Smartass, I think I need something trying to kill me so I don’t kill myself.”
Smartass levered herself up, peering at him in the dim light. “That makes no sense. But you’re telling the truth.”
Chapter 3: Job Hunting
“You wanna run that by me again?” Zlesk asked, twiddling his battered pen between his fingers.
“I said, do you have any dangerous jobs that you outsource to civilian contractors? This is like the Wild West, isn’t it? Where are the ‘dead or alive’ posters?” Jeb asked, glancing around the alien’s office.
“If you don’t have anything relevant to say, I haven’t had breakfast yet and I’ve got shit to do, sooo…”
“So give me something to do.” Jeb thought for a moment. “Like that stacked lady who killed the blond guy disappearing settlements out on the edge of the Stitch. I could do that: Hunt murderers for fun and profit.”
Zlesk let out a short bark of laughter. “Those are imperial enforcers, hand-picked and sworn to the throne, not mercenaries or bounty hunters. They are level one hundred at least, and they’re sent after the kind of monsters that you couldn’t imagine, not your typical bandit or sand-pirate. They have Myst, meaning they’re aristocrats, too. The idea of you asking for one of their jobs is as ludicrous as walking into Baron Hortz’s office and taking a shit on his desk.”
“…So mercenaries and bounty hunters do exist,” Jeb said. As well as sand-pirates, which sound really fucking cool.
“Ugh.” Zlesk face-palmed. “You’re gonna get yourself killed.”
“I don’t see what you stand to lose by giving me something here. Either way, I won’t be bothering you by begging on the corner anymore.”
Zlesk glared at him for a moment. “I can’t in good conscience help a one-legged, level six civilian perform assisted suicide. I’ll have no part in it.”
“You know I’m just going to ask someone else until someone gives me what I want,” Jeb said, leaning back in the seat.
Zlesk gave him a calculating look before he sighed. “Fine.” He drew out the cabinet drawer and retrieved an official-looking document.
“This is a recommendation for the Hunter’s Association.” He spoke as he filled out the paper. “Their members handle things like bounty and monster hunting.”
“How about gathering herbs or killing rats in cellars?” Jeb asked.
Zlesk cocked an eyebrow. “No. That’s stupid.”
“Just checking.”
Zlesk filled out Jeb’s information and then wrote a short note at the bottom of the page.
“There. You have my official recommendation. You should have no problem joining the Hunter’s Association with that. Go get yourself killed.”
“Much appreciated. I’ll make good use of it,” Jeb said, giving a keegan bow as he took the piece of paper and folded it into the breast pocket of his new clothes.
Jeb clomped his way out of the station, wincing at the early morning sun. He walked down onto the main street and waited until he was out of sight of the station.
Fool me once… Jeb thought, unfolding the paper. He snagged a keegan passing by.
“Excuse me, what’s this say?” Jeb asked, showing him the note on the bottom.
The keegan scanned the script, then gave Jeb a glance, letting out an amused snort before he continued walking.
Yeah, I thought so.
It took a couple more tries before someone actually read it aloud for him instead of laughing.
‘The man you see before you is a simpleton. Please blacklist him from the Hunter’s Association before he gets himself or others killed. —Zlesk Frantell, Sheriff of Kalfath’
“Aw, he really does care about me,” Jeb said as he walked away from the laughing keegan, scanning the indecipherable scribbles. It wasn’t too hard to isolate the signature.
Gonna need a pen, Jeb thought, clinking his remaining stack of ten silver coins together.
After a little shopping around at the Hunter’s Association and eight silvers’ worth of bribes for inscription and translation, Jeb had an identical application paper with a glowing recommendation, minus the sheriff’s signature of course.
Jeb did that part himself, moving ink one iota at a time, stamping out a perfect duplicate of the man’s signature with his telekinesis.
Jeb Trapper is a resourceful former soldier whose accomplishments during the Tutorial more than qualify him for the most difficult jobs. Give him a task and let the results speak for themselves.
—Zlesk Frantell, Sheriff of Kalfath
Text lies counted as well, of course, but none of it was a direct lie, and the only thing Jeb wrote himself was the sheriff’s name and title, oddly close to another statement that was totally true. There must have been enough layers of separation between him and outright lying, because Smartass gave him the go-ahead.
“You’re still good,” Smartass said, giving him a thumbs-up.
“Nice,” Jeb said, inspecting the two papers closely before burning the original.
“Thank you, Zlesk,” Jeb said, folding the recommendation and slipping it into his new vest pocket.
The Hunter’s Association was more...mundane than Jeb expected. It smelled like a boxy office in an abandoned mall, of must and faint cleaning agents.
The lighting was decent, owing to a bright bulb in the ceiling Jeb was fairly sure was magical, but the edges of the carpet were frayed.
From the fantasy novels Jeb had read in the past, he half-expected it to be filled with rough-and-tumble types, drinking beers between missions…
But who the hell would give guys like that an excuse to clump up and start trouble? Let them go to the bar and cause trouble there.
Nope, this place was designed to be somewhat inhospitable. There were a couple chairs next to a desk with a bunch of papers suspended in little wooden cubbies…
That’s it! Jeb thought to himself, snapping his fingers. This place reminds me of the DMV, except less popular.
There was a bored-looking melas woman, somewhat overweight, with snaggleteeth and arms as thick as Jeb’s thighs. Her skin was a more sickly shade of orange than most of the horned folk.
“Bree! You’re still here!” Jeb said, clomping forward. Bree had helped him get a blank application earlier in the day. She was dour, but helpful.
“And you’re back,” she said, sourly. “Whaddya want?”
“Zlesk gave me his recommendation,” Jeb said, handing her the note and not bothering to mention that the one he was handing her was not Zlesk’s recommendation.
“This it?” She grunted, taking it out of his hand.
Shit!
“It’s got his name on it, doesn’t it?” Jeb asked, projecting as much innocence as possible.
Bree raised a brow and scanned the document before pulling out some more paperwork of her own, filling it out in triplicate and then smashing the papers with a giant stamp that rattled her thin-boarded desk.
Jeb was half worried she might punch a hole through it, but the rickety thing held up like a champ.
“You left your bank account information blank,” she said, pointing to it.
“Don’t have one,” Jeb said.
“Your funeral,” Bree muttered, making a note. “Half the stabbings on this block are when some fool walks out of this office with a juicy bounty that they had to receive in person.”
“Sounds like it’d be a good idea to get one,” Jeb said.
Bree grunted and nodded, continuing her work until she finally slid all the papers away under her desk and met his gaze.
“Alright. Paperwork’s done. If you come back with a bounty, we’re authorized to pay you now.”
“Nice,” Jeb said.
She stared at him.
He stared at her.
She stared at him.
“You gonna give me a bounty or something?” Jeb asked.
“What? Lorten’s dick, is that what you’re hanging around for?”
“Let’s just assume I don’t know anything about how the empire’s bounty system works,” Jeb said.
Bree heaved a rumbling sigh and opened the front of her desk, where it lifted up on a cleverly-concealed hinge. She stepped up to him and Jeb realized the melas woman outsized him by half a foot in height and two feet in width.
“C’mere,” she said, motioning him to follow. “There’s the bounties,” she said, pointing to a rack full of stacks of paper with various pictures of people’s faces and drawings of monsters. “You can take one of each for reference. If I catch you emptying out a stack, or hiding one so no one else sees it, I will break you over my knee. When you finish the job, bring back a piece of them and we’ll run it through Old Grindy. Something about the size of a finger should do. If you got the right guy, we’ll pay you the price listed on the paper. If you killed the wrong guy…”
“Will you break me over your knee?”
“Punishment, somewhere between hard labor and execution, depending on whether the person you dropped was a Citizen.”
“Are there normally this many bounties?” Jeb asked, flipping through the hand-drawn images looking for a monster, but they were few and far between. If Jeb could help it, he didn’t really want to walk up and murder some random guy for a paycheck. At least, not yet.
Most of the pictures were of melas men, including the one who’d bumped into him the night before. Jeb could tell by the shape of the face and the little bones woven into his horns and hair.
Jeb briefly considered killing the guy for profit, but decided against it.
“Normally? No,” Bree said. “But public order sank like a rock ever since the Stitching. The bonanza to the east made fortune hunters crawl out of the woodwork, and wherever fortune hunters go, they bring lawlessness with them. The Split Mountains are practically honeycombed with outlaws.”
“The Split Mountains?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what they were called in your world, but when they got Stitched onto Pharos, they got cut apart and split up, leaving great slices of bare rock hundreds of miles long, ore veins exposed to air like a wench with her skirt blown up and a tattoo showing where to stick it.”
“That’s descriptive,” Jeb said, frowning. He had been in Oregon, so to the east was…
“Oh, I think they were called the Rocky Mountains,” Jeb said.
“That’s a stupid name. Like calling it the ‘dirty dirt’.”
“Not much worse than ‘Split Mountains’, in my opinion,” Jeb fired back. “If there are so many bounties in those mountains, where are all the hunters?”
“Most of ‘em are dead or run off.”
“Umm…”
“The people in those mountains ain’t stupid. You show up on their doorstep, they know either you’re a rival prospector, an outlaw looking to rob their claim, or a bounty hunter looking to claim their head. Sometimes more than one of those things. In any case, the reception ain’t gonna be friendly. Some of ‘em will attack you on sight. Not like there’s any lawmen out there.”
“Oh… I could see how that could be a challenge,” Jeb said, flipping out one of the few monster bounties.
“How about this one?” Jeb said, pointing to the writhing monstrosity depicted on the paper.
“Ah, sand-worm knot. Acting up because the Split Mountains disrupted its territory and now it’s moving its range farther west, into populated towns.” Bree glanced over the paper and shrugged. “It’s not a particularly well-paying job, but somebody’s gotta do it. And you look like you could use a warm-up. Just try not to get eaten.”
“I’ll take i—”
“Bree!” A keegan woman, identifiable by the fanciful tassels on her shoulderpads, swept into the one-room office like a bouncy dynamo. “Bree, we’ve got a new posting!” the skull-faced girl said, shoving a piece of paper that smelled vaguely of ink into the clerk’s hands.
There was no picture on the front, just more of those scribbles that J
eb couldn’t read.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Bree muttered to herself, scanning the bounty.
“What doesn’t?” Jeb asked.
“This!” Bree said, shoving the paper under his nose. “The reward listed here is criminally low! No one in their right mind would take this offer!”
“Maybe that’s the point?” the newcomer asked, peering around Bree’s meaty arms to read the script. “Maybe he doesn’t want her back?”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Bree responded, shaking her head. “It’s not as though he’s got any other heirs. Maybe he’s putting up a bounty so low in order to buy time to negotiate himself.”
“Or he doesn’t care and this is his way of showing everyone ‘he tried’,” the keegan woman said, making quotation marks in a rather human fashion.
I hate not being able to read, Jeb thought to himself.
“So, umm… What’s the job?” Jeb asked.
Bree gave him a strange look. “This.” She pointed at the paper. “This is the job. What do you not get?”
“What if I told you I can’t read?” Jeb asked.
“Oh, you poor thing! All the humans we’ve dealt with over the last four months have been able to read, so we just assumed—” The keegan woman clicked her tongue and snatched the bounty out of Bree’s hand.
The melas woman grunted and went back to her desk as the newcomer began to read.
“On the eighth of Grent, Seraine Grenore was kidnapped by the outlaw Svek Pederson and company. The reward for the safe return of Seraine will be no less than five imperial gold marks.”
“And that’s low?”
“Svek Pederson is a sand-pirate captain. Works with a crew of at least a dozen men. Like so many other animals, his territory got broken up by the Stitching, and he’s moving into new territory. Causes friction. The man’s at least level thirty, and his crew isn’t far behind. You’d need a half a dozen hunters with a level of, oh, forty or higher to safely claim that bounty. And no level forty would do a job as delicate and unpredictable as a rescue mission for less than a bulb.”
“I get it,” Jeb muttered, rubbing his chin.