The Bathrobe Knight

by Charles Dean

  Darwin tried to break Kass’s concentration with a question. “Do you think it’s actually going to be that tough?” he asked.

  “Normally, I would say no, but in this game . . .” she trailed off for a moment, still not taking her eyes off the text. “In this game, it’s entirely different.”

  “Why is that?” he wondered, still not getting an answer from her.

  “It’s just that between the game designers and the AI system, there is a very real struggle to make the game realistic,” she said.

  “So, when you say ‘realism’ you mean that these things are meant to actually forewarn users about a significant danger?”

  “Yeah, something like that. My Dad said that if I ever saw a sign like this to make sure I was in a full party and comfortable with dying,” she said. “We may have a full party, but are you comfortable with some, if not all, of the villagers dying?”

  Darwin sighed. Some dying? I’m not comfortable with one of them dying, and now there is the possibility of them all dying? I’m supposed to be taking these people away from danger, not leading them right into it.

  “Darwin, we don’t have to do this,” Kass said, seeing his troubled face. “We can always turn back and take the long route around the mountain. It’d probably be a day or two longer at most, and an army of White-Horns might be a lot easier for you to dispatch than whatever’s in this dungeon.”

  “No, we have to go through. We may have to change up the formations a bit, but we can’t lose time,” he said, his words filled with more confidence than he actually had.

  “Well, if you don’t mind taking a death, we could stagger them out a bit and go in with just the two of us. You could do your army building thing and we could go with the original plan, let them and us die instead of the villagers.”

  If I’m comfortable with taking a death? How could anyone uncertain of what happens after they die be comfortable with taking a death? Death for me in this game is as much a step into the unknown as it is in real life--but she doesn’t know that, does she? Darwin suddenly realized that if it was as dangerous and life threatening as she imagined, there was a very real possibility that he might die too. He had considered that one of the others might die, but he hadn’t once humored the possibility in his quick planning sessions that he himself might become a victim. He didn’t even know what could or would happen to the village should he pass away.

  “Well? It’s at least worth considering, and we still have at least fifteen minutes until anyone shows up. Want to just leave them a note and take a head start?” she asked, eyeing him impatiently. “Come on, I really want to kill something.”

  “Didn’t we spend the entire trip here killing stuff?”

  “Yeah, but time is gear, EXP and fun. Don’t even try to pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about,” she said, nudging him. “With how much you play, there is no way you aren’t a hardcore gamer.”

  He wished he still was. When it came to slaying mobs in video games there was no greater feeling, and it definitely catalogued him as a hardcore gamer. He remembered people at the office would always invite him out to clubs and parties, but every party just seemed like 20 bucks and a headache so that he could talk to people.

  “I guess you could say I am hardcore gamer, but aren’t you?” he countered, as if it was a charge or accusation against him.

  “Of course! Though I’m not a fan of the gamers who go around calling everyone a bunch of noobs or garbage. I just love games,” she said, her eyes lighting up while she talked. “I remember when my Dad started me on my first video game, and I wasn’t just a little girl who was constantly talked down to. I was a princess saving the kingdom through magic and guile.”

  Darwin wanted to roll his eyes, it sounded so corny. But he couldn’t--that had been his exact same experience when he first played. “Yeah, I know what you mean. I loved the Command and Conquer style RTS games at first, leading armies into battle and knowing that the strategies I devised would be responsible for crushing nations. I just grew out of it because they weren’t that fun to play alone.”

  “But, back to point. Do you want to leave a note and go ahead without them? I think we could do it. Then none of the NPCs would die,” she said, awkwardly pointing her hand in the air. To a random passerby it might have seemed like she had gone crazy and was just poking imaginary butterflies, but Darwin knew she was accessing her Tipqa Menu. He had noticed that some users still used their hands even though thought alone would suffice.

  “Don’t bother looking for something to write on, we’re not going without them. They have the right to decide how they want to live and where they want to risk dying,” he said, once again mustering up false bravado.

  “Fine, fine,” she answered, putting her finger down, “but if they were my friends and loved ones, I wouldn’t give them the choice at all. It’s a friend’s job to stop their friends from doing stupid things.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Darwin admitted. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a very close friend before.”

  “What? Are you kidding me? How can you not have had a best friend before? You’re . . .” her fumbling questions were cut short by the arrival of more people.

  “Lord Darwin!” Alex called out to them as he came out of the woods. “Everyone is safe and accounted for.”

  “And you’re early,” Darwin complimented him, looking instinctively at a watch that didn’t exist on his wrist. He didn’t need the watch to know what time it was. Tipqa always kept him informed on the ‘in game time,’ but habits couldn’t be broken too easily. “I have to say we’re off to a great start.”

  “I thought this is exactly when you predicted they’d be here,” Kass whispered, her face wearing the same wrinkled brow it always did when she was confused about something.

  “It’s when I expected them to be here, not when they were supposed to have arrived. I just knew from their pace that they would get here early,” Darwin answered. “Kind of like the lines for rides at an amusement park. They say it’ll take you thirty minutes, but you always end up getting on the ride in twenty and feeling like a winner.”

  “What? They really do that? That’s so manipulative!” she exclaimed as best she could in a whisper. “And you are too! If you knew it wasn’t going to take them that long to get here, then you shouldn’t have told them it would.”

  “Let people have their wins, Kass. It’s good for morale,” he whispered back to Kass one last time before turning to Alex who was now almost in earshot of them. “Since we’re early, did you and your group want to take a break? I think we still have plenty of Turtle-Wolf meat available if you want to camp for a minute.”

  “No, sir. Blake and Justin made everyone eat while marching They even said if anyone wanted to take a bathroom break he needed to rush ahead beforehand and catch up quick when finished,” Alex reported, standing as straight as a Marine fresh out of boot camp.

  I always forget to factor in bathroom breaks when I plan trips! Darwin kicked himself mentally. If it wasn’t for their determination, his timing would have been off significantly. On the rare occasion that he had to travel out of town for work, he always forgot to add in time for bathroom breaks and gas stops.

  “Wow, I’m very impressed,” Darwin said, putting an arm on Alex’s shoulder. “Your determination to reach the destination ahead of schedule is admirable.”

  “Thank you, milord,” he said, still standing at attention.

  “Since you all are doing such a great job, I’m going to leave you in charge of troop organization. Kass and I are going to have the rest of them file in proper. Make sure their formations can fit in the tunnel without any issues.

  “Excuse you,” Kass said indignantly.

  Darwin looked at her, wondering what he said wrong. Did I forget something again?

  “It’s Lady Kass to you, Lord Darwin,” she said, throwing her nose in the air with the type of over-exaggerated flair only adopted by bad actors and walked into the entrance of
the cave. “Come along when you’re ready, boys.”

  For some reason, right when she did that, Darwin couldn’t help but think of the girl who called herself his sister.

  “Also, make sure the best-of-the-best group you bring with you is a small one, and make sure Fuzzy Wuzzy is in it,” Darwin said.

  “Yes, milord, it will be done,” Alex responded, before moving so fast he practically vanished in front of Darwin.

  Darwin turned around and chased after Kass. “Hey, where do you think you’re going without me,” he shouted at her back.

  “You were taking too long being all lordly, so I just thought I’d go kill some stuff without you,” she replied without even turning around.

  “Uh oh, has Lady Kass not gotten her due respect?” he said, finally getting a reaction out of her significant enough to make her turn around.

  “No, that’s not it. It’s just we’ve been waiting an hour and a half that we could have spent grinding,” she said as she pulled out her staff.

  “Kass, we haven’t even had a first date yet,” he mocked. “What type of guy do you take me for?”

  Kass’s face turned red. “That’s not what I meant!”

  “Sure sure, that’s what you say now. But we both know that it’s all about the action with you. Anytime we are talking it’s just a waste of time to you, isn’t it?” Darwin decided to try and make her even more flustered.

  Kass stopped walking. She stared at Darwin, blushing even more than before for a minute before finally letting out a few words. “Ugh! You know darn well what I meant.”

  He laughed to himself. He had known since he first introduced her to Elmont that anything referencing the two of them as a couple was a hot button with her. For some reason though, she had run out of ways to call him an old man today. Maybe she is just tired?’

  “Of course it’s not.” He did his best to stifle a laugh but couldn’t wipe the smile off his face. “Kass would never spend the entire day grinding with an old man like me.”

  “Now you’re just twisting words on purpose,” she snapped back.

  “Anyways, I have some good news and some bad,” Darwin said, his face turning instantly from smiling to serious.

  “Oh?” she asked, still turned around and looking at Darwin who had come to a stop too.

  “The good news is we won’t have a lot of dangerous fights,” Darwin said, scratching his chin.

  “What’s the bad news?” she asked.

  “Well, the bad news is I don’t think that sign was lying. I think we’re in for some mortal peril.”

  Kass didn’t even bother asking what he meant; she knew he could see the reason. She turned around and saw what Darwin was staring at. Off in the distance, barely noticeable from where they were, was a giant twenty-five- to thirty-foot tall hydra-like serpent thing. Each step they took closer revealed more and more details about the dreadful beast. It had solid black scales the size of a normal man’s chest, and by the looks of them, they were almost a foot thick.

  It stood tall in the center of a massive chamber on six elephant-sized legs with a tail that shot out like a scorpion’s and hung in the air above its seven heads. Each head had ram’s horns, dark green eyes that shone like lit jades and tell-tale twisting, snake-like tongues that hung almost a foot outside of each long, dragonesque snout, occasionally twisting between its sharp teeth like floss.

  “Darwin, are you sure you don’t want to go take the long route? We might even be able to sneak through that open area unnoticed,” Kass asked, clearly misreading an expression she had likely never seen before as something akin to dread or fear. But it wasn’t either. It was hunger.

  The closer he got to the beast, the worse it grew. By the time Kass had asked him the question, he was far too mesmerized to respond. His heart was thumping in his chest louder than the bass drum in a marching band. He knew he should have responded to Kass. He should have told her, ‘Hey! We need to put a plan together. We need to think this through.’ But, even as the ‘right thing to do’ entered his mind, the wrong thing to do took hold of his body. It pulled his feet forward. A walk became a jog. A jog became a run, and he found himself with both blades out rapidly closing the distance between him and the Hydra.

  “Darwin! What are you doing!” Kass yelled, now at his back this time. Darwin couldn’t tell if she was following after him or not. “Darwin, don’t go by yourself! Darwin! Darwin, wait!”

  He clinched his eyes closed and tried to wrest control of his thoughts, but they had all faded, and he was left with an empty hunger that drove him towards the Hydra as it would a starving infant towards its mother’s breast. The Hydra, regarding him as a fly, swatted its tail at him. He dodged right without missing a beat, but the Hydra, seeing him dodge, pulled its tail back and swiped at him in a long wide sweep. Just like a Minotaur he thought, remembering how much they loved their long Axe sweeps as he jumped up and landed on the passing tail. Its width wasn’t more than a two or three feet wide, but it was flat enough for him to run on. The most troubling part was that the speed it was moving at forced him to use the Swords to keep his balance, stabbing into the Hydra with each step.

  Three of the Hydra heads watched his climb for a moment, then one of the three watching shot out at its own tail with an open mouth. Darwin jumped and pushed both his blades out, catching the incoming Hydra head right in the nose. He almost lost his grip as the impact with the head threatened to throw him back several feet if he didn’t hold on tight, but he managed to keep his footing. The impacting head was now caught with its teeth sinking into its own tail and its nose skewered by two blades.

  Darwin grunted, pulling himself on top of the snout and ripping his Swords out of the nostril. His heart was beating even faster, and the thumping had gone from just being in his chest to pounding through his head as he dragged his blades across the thick scales covering its snout and pulled back just long enough to stab one in each of the beast’s eyes. He then pulled another Sword out of his inventory, a common iron one, and put it in the right eye’s open wound before using his foot to jam it all the way through.

  The other Hydra heads did nothing, just watching the spectacle. Then, the closest head to him opened its mouth and did the exact same thing. Rinse and repeat. Darwin thought, following through the motions again. Everything went the same, except instead of the head being stuck chewing on a tail, it was stuck mid-bite on another head, its teeth sinking into the dead head’s face.

  As Darwin kicked the Sword through the right eye of the second head, not even having to switch up the strategy at all, he noticed the others weren’t brave enough to try to chomp him like their two predecessors. They watched wide-eyed for a moment, and then lunged full speed at one of the cave’s walls. Darwin pulled out his two original Swords and used them to carve a way down the eight feet of Hydra neck without falling off. When he landed on the beast’s back he crawled towards the middle, doing his best not to fall off as the beast’s charge smashed into the wall. The Hydra, struggling to free its tail with the other heads not brave enough to go for a bite, started throwing its weight side to side.

  Darwin saw what they were doing. They were trying to roll over but the elephant legs were spread too wide to do it normally. As the body finally tipped he scurried to climb around the beast in time, barely avoiding being flattened. The problem for the Hydra now was that it couldn’t turn back over. He then walked over to the center of its chest, where he knelt down and ripped off a scale.

  He took his Swords and began hacking at it over and over again. At first it was bone, but bone gave way and flesh became visible. The five remaining heads did their best to try to roll back over, screaming and howling as he tore through their sternum and into the chest. It was more butchery than battle at that point. One of the remaining heads grabbed rocks with its teeth and tried to throw them at him, but he dodged them easily enough and went back to his hack-and-slash work.

  “Darwin . . .” he barely heard Kass say from a distance over the sou
nds of the five heads screaming in agony, but he couldn’t see her face.

  This is it, he thought, finally having dug far enough into the chest to reach the heart. He took three Turtle-Wolf spears and shoved them into the massive beating thing, silencing the tormented cries of the remaining heads. When it was finally dead, he fell back onto his butt and hands, catching his breath atop the stomach of the fallen Hydra.

  “Darwin . . .” Kass said again, standing at the door. “What was that?”

  “It was a Hydra,” he answered, not understanding how she could ask such an obvious question.

  “That’s not what I meant . . . Actually, you know what, nevermind. We did it! The crossing guard is dead and the rest of the trip should be easy, right?” she said, wearing a smile that Darwin could tell was fake from ten feet away.