Towns and Towers: A New Land

by Shawn Kass

  From the sidelines, Anna and Tezukayoshi watched as the fight raged on. From their perspective, things had seemed like a lost cause as Sam did all he could to avoid being hit without being able to do much in the way of defending or attacking. From anyone’s point of view it would have been clear at this point how the fight would end. The yeti had the advantage in both size and strength, but inexplicably, Sam survived attack after attack, and now it looked like he was starting to dish out some pain of his own. It was no longer a one-sided fight, not by a long shot.

  Facing the yeti now, Sam felt like his body was lighter, and his mind was more clear than it had been a few moments ago. Even as a massive fist passed by his face, he felt like he had some measure of control over how close he was to it and could begin using it to his advantage.

  Seeing that it had missed yet again, the yeti roared in anger, but this time its roar was cut short as it realized the small human before him was yelling back in defiance. It had never hunted prey before who had taken so long to die, and certainly none had ever dared to fight back like this.

  Seeing the effect his yelling had on the yeti, Sam grinned triumphantly and said, “Come on, big boy. Let’s finish this.”

  As the next attack came in, Sam had just enough time to decide on evading or moving forward. This one turned out to be a hammer fist coming from high overhead, and without a fully formed plan, Sam dove forward, bracing the handle of his sword against the ground and pointed the blade straight up.

  Catching sight of the little human as it dove forward, the yeti adjusted its swing so that it would hit a closer target. It had no way of seeing, nor time to react, to what the human had done, and as its fist came smashing down, it found the human’s sword impaling its wrist. Howling in pain, it quickly reared back from its first major injury.

  Clambering to his feet, Sam took notice of the blood and decided to take advantage of the yeti’s injury to use the situation to further balance the fight. Holding up both hands, even though one still held his sword, he aimed for the yeti’s face and called upon his magic. To his surprise, rather than a pair of flaming spheres, only one shot off towards the giant creature. The other one, which should have come from the hand he held his sword in, instead travelled up the length of the sword and ignited the blood which still clung to it.

  Having seen flaming swords in plenty of video games before, Sam understood that either his weapon had leveled up as well, or he was now capable of combining his magic with his physical attacks due to his own level increase. Whichever one it was, it wasn’t as important as the knowledge that he could use this new ability to tip the tides of the battle in his favor.

  Looking back to the yeti, Sam found that the fireball had hit its mark and singed the fur on its right cheek. It wasn’t a life threatening injury, but it certainly did more damage than his previous fireballs had inflicted, and it appeared to have made the yeti even angrier than the last ones had as well. Holding tight to his flaming sword, Sam rose up onto the balls of his feet and readied himself for the attack he knew would be coming. His wait, as it turned out, wasn’t long at all.

  Stepping forward, the giant yeti swung its uninjured fist directly at Sam, attempting to smash him with one final hit, but Sam, ready for the move, dodged to the side and thrust his flaming sword into the creature’s forearm. The wound began to bleed immediately, but Sam made sure to twist the sword a quarter turn to the right before he withdrew it.

  Howling in pain, the yeti pulled its arm back to inspect the damage the puny human had caused it and in doing so, left itself open for another attack.

  Ignoring its screams, Sam laid on a burst of speed and surged forward to take advantage of the yeti’s injury. He knew he was laying it all on the line at this moment and that there would be no way for him to stop or reverse direction if this didn’t work, but he had to take it. If he had been sitting on his couch playing the game, this would probably have been the point where some kind of dramatic button pressing sequence would have to be executed in just a few short seconds, but being here in the game world, everything rested on his shoulders to get it exactly right.

  When Sam finally did come to a stop, he found himself standing only inches away from the yeti with his sword buried so deep in the creature’s stomach that his hands were covered beneath its fur. Not waiting to see whether or not this would be enough to topple the giant beast, Sam called forth his magic and screamed, “America!”, sending a blast of fire through his sword directly into the yeti’s core.

  Scarlet flames erupted from the wound, and the yeti’s voice made a strangled noise, but Sam wasn’t done. He had seen far too many characters in games, TV shows, and movies all suffer from overconfidence, thinking their fight was over, only to be attacked once again as their foe got back up for one last strike. In this case, he wasn’t about to take any chances.

  Squaring his stance, he pushed the sword in a little deeper and sent another blast of smoldering fire into the yeti. This time, rather than spurting back out through the wound he had made, the flames found another route and coursed up through the yeti’s body along its digestive track until they exploded from its open, screaming mouth and showered the ceiling of the cavern in a blaze of brilliant fire.

  Chapter 14

  Rushing over as soon as the yeti fell, Anna asked, “Are you all right?”

  With a nod, Sam answered, “Yeah.”

  “I…I’m sorry,” began Anna after a false start, and then bowing her head, she quietly added, “I should have helped. I should have done something. I was just, I don’t know. I was like paralyzed.”

  Having seen characters in other games suffer from fearinduced paralysis, Sam knew there was little she could have done. Somewhere between the bandits capturing them, threatening both her life as well as the city, and the yeti coming out, she had lost her wits. To tell the truth, pretty much anyone who had faced even half of these things in the real world would crumble. Accepting her apology, Sam said, “It’s okay. I get it. Let’s just get our stuff and get out of here. Peter is still waiting on us.”

  Bringing a hand to her mouth, Anna said, “Oh, that’s right, Peter. We still need to get that flower.”

  Suddenly, the sound of a boot scuff came from somewhere behind them, followed quickly by a gasp. Whether the gasp was from the surprise at finding Sam and Anna standing next to the dead yeti or at the swirling ball of fire which Sam had quickly generated in the palm of his outstretched hand, neither of them knew, but a bandit stepped out of the cave entrance with his hands up in the air.

  Not in the mood to deal with any more nonsense, Sam released the fireball a few feet in front of the bandit, forcing him to stop in his tracks and announced, “If you’ve come back to finish what you started or to steal our stuff, you should have brought more men.”

  “N…n…no, I, um, I came back for her,” said the bandit as he gestured towards Anna with his chin. “I didn’t want anything to happen to her.”

  Sarcastically, Sam said, “That’s funny, because I could swear before this walking carpet showed up, you were all cheering at the idea of throwing us over the edge.”

  Shaking his head, the bandit stuttered, “W, w, we were, but we didn’t want it to happen. I, I, I mean, it was Jeva’s idea to scare you two, n, n, not ours. W, w, we were just going along with him, see?”

  Glaring, Sam asked, “Just going along with someone who plans to murder people? Are you stupid?”

  “N, n, no. He wasn’t really going to hurt you. He was our leader. He saved us.”

  “Saved you? How?” asked Anna.

  “W, w, we are from Cloverdale. We were part of the military there, but General Ranith gave us an order we couldn’t comply with. He wanted us to invade the town of Elmswood. Captain Jeva refused and that night told us he planned to become a deserter. A few guys from the platoon stayed behind, but the rest of us left with him.”

  In an angry tone, Sam asked, “So you went AWOL to protect your morals, and now you’re kidnapping people and threa
tening them? How does that work?”

  Disgraced, the man shook his head and explained, “It didn’t start out that way. I mean, for a while, we were able to live off the land pretty easily, and people in the nearby towns would occasionally give us some stuff, but then the general’s search party started to catch up to us, and we were forced to press on further into the wilderness. Eventually we found ourselves here in the mountains and snow where there’s no food, and wolves attack us from every angle. It was by sheer luck that we found this cave, but with our rations almost completely gone, we were forced to take desperate measures.”

  “So you decided to rob us?” challenged Sam.

  With a sigh, the man admitted, “We needed to make sure you weren’t sent here by General Ranith, and then yes, we did plan to take whatever food or money you had.” Then in a rush to regain some dignity, he explained, “You have to understand, some of us haven’t eaten in days, and two of our men back at camp have bites from wolves which could prove fatal.”

  Understanding their position, Sam queried him, “I get that you’re saying attacking us was only out of desperation, but what’s your plan now? Are the rest of the men you were with waiting in the caves, ready to try again?”

  Wide-eyed, the man waved his hand and said, “No. Not at all. None of us would dare.”

  “Why the sudden change of heart?” quipped Sam.

  Looking towards a spot behind Sam, the man persisted, “All of us ran from that thing, even the best fighters we have. You, you took it out alone.”

  When the man’s eyes didn’t return to theirs, Sam risked a glance back to see what, aside from the sight of a dead yeti, could be keeping the man’s attention. The view he was rewarded with was that of his familiar tearing off a piece of the yeti’s flesh and quickly gobbling it down. From the smears of blood on the ground, Sam could tell that this hadn’t been Tezukayoshi’s first piece, and the moment he had finished swallowing the piece he had, he went in for yet another.

  Snorting at the little lizard’s appetite, Sam turned back to the man and said, “Don’t mind him. He won’t be able to eat the whole thing.”

  Mouth agape, the man asked, “It’s with you?”

  Grinning, Sam pointed out, “Yep, and if you hadn’t turned tail, you would have seen that he stood up to the yeti, too.”

  Bowing his head once more, the man apologized, “Again, I am sorry. If we had stayed, we would have lost more good men to either injury or death.”

  “It’s okay,” said Anna, letting the man off the hook. “Neither of us were hurt, and we understand you all felt like you were out of options.” Then after a moment’s thought, she added, “If you or your men would like to come to Anozira, I can put in a word for you. I can’t promise much, but you may be able to find jobs and a quiet place to stay.”

  “Really? After all of this?”

  “I’m not saying that you would have a free ride, but it would be a place for you and your men to get some rest, and no one from Cloverdale would be looking for you there.”

  Figuring that this was an NPC conversation, Sam stepped back and let Anna talk to the man for a minute while he checked on Tezukayoshi again. As it turned out, the yeti’s remains had faded away like all of their other kills, and Sam found his now not-so-little familiar sitting up against a small chest on the cavern floor.

  With a smirk, Sam asked, “You really stuffed yourself this time, huh, pal?”

  To his surprise, a simple one word reply came back in his mind, “Yes.”

  “You can talk?”

  “Yes,” came the reply again.

  “Why didn’t you say so earlier?” asked Sam, excitedly.

  Pausing to formulate the words, Tezukayoshi finally answered in broken English, “Not then, just now.”

  Thinking it over, Sam reasoned that his familiar must be getting stronger and leveling up as well, and that in doing so, he must have just learned how to send words through their mental link. Alarmed, he asked, “Does that mean you can read my mind now, too?”

  “No. Only what you send.”

  Relieved, Sam asked, “Okay, is there anything else you can do?”

  “Fight with you.”

  Not surprised after everything Tezukayoshi had done in the caves, Sam asked, “How strong are you now?”

  Unable to quantify his strength with anything as abstract as a number, Tezukayoshi sent Sam a mental image of one of the wild boars from the forest.

  “Are you saying you are as strong as one of those? Like, do you think you could take one out by yourself?”

  Tilting his head to the side while he pondered the question, Tezukayoshi finally answered, “Not alone.”

  Nodding, Sam understood the lizard was telling him he was roughly equal in strength to a wild boar, but in a one-onone fight, the outcome would be a draw. While not as fierce as Sam might have liked, he knew that the fact that Tezukayoshi could help at all in a fight could easily prove to be a decided advantage. Undeniably, he had just seen it moments ago when Tezukayoshi had bought him some time to recover. In the future, however, Sam knew he would like his familiar to get even stronger, and so he made a mental note to make sure they did some level grinding as soon as they could.

  Making sure his familiar understood his intentions, Sam said, “Gotcha, well, we’ll make sure you get stronger then. I want you to become the strongest familiar in the world. To that end, do you know what you need to become stronger?”

  The one word answer Tezukayoshi gave seemed obvious in hindsight. “Food.”

  Smiling, Sam said, “Okay, I can get that. What kind?”

  As if his human should have known, Tezukayoshi sent another one word answer, “Kills.”

  Thinking back through their recent adventures, Sam realized that the little guy had in fact been helping himself to many of the bodies they had left behind. He had eaten everything from the spiders and snakes to the yeti Sam had just dispatched. On top of that, the lizard seemed to have quite an affinity for anything considered to be poisonous like the Devil Cap mushrooms and the Daphne berries. Unsure if this meant he needed a variety in order to grow, or if it was just a sheer numbers game of how much he could eat, Sam asked, “Do you just need a lot, or do you need different kinds?”

  “Both.”

  Smirking, Sam accepted the answer and said, “Okay. Then I’ll get you both.” Then glancing behind the lizard, he added, “Now, let’s see what’s in the chest.”

  Taking a second to look behind him, Tezukayoshi stood up and gave him some room. As he did so, Sam noticed that his size had nearly doubled since they had first met, and he grinned at the possibilities of having a lizard the size of a German shepherd or even a mastiff by his side. Surely by then Tezukayoshi would be able to do some serious damage of his own.

  As Sam stepped over to the chest musing over the possibilities, he realized that there was no way Tezukayoshi would be able to fit back into his pocket for the trip back down the mountain. That meant he would either have to walk on his own, or Sam would be forced to carry him. Either way, it probably wouldn’t be fun. Shaking his head, he set the thought aside for a moment and checked out his prize.

  Lifting the lid, he discovered an item which looked like a large swath of the yeti’s fur along with a substantial number of gold coins. He wasn’t going to stand there and count them all, but estimating the size of the trunk versus the size of each coin, he figured there had to be over a thousand inside. Satisfied, Sam closed the lid and dropped the whole trunk in his sack figuring that he could share out the loot from this kill, along with that which they had picked up from the wolves and boars with Anna when they returned to town.

  Turning around, it looked like Anna and the man were just finishing their talk, and he gestured for Tezukayoshi to join him as he went back over to hear what they had decided. The lizard complied, but he got the distinct impression that his familiar would much rather find a dark quiet place to sleep off his latest meal.

  The man took a step back upon seeing the
lizard approach, but Sam ignored it, figuring that it was better to keep him a little wary and asked Anna, “So what did you two decide?”

  “Mal here is going to act as an intermediary for us. He says that he can return to his group and let them know we’re coming so that no one tries anything.”

  Unconvinced of the man’s sincerity, Sam gave him a pointed stare as he asked her, “And what’s to keep them from doing the exact opposite? He could just be running back to give the rest of them some advance notice and time to set up an ambush.”

  “I know that we just met him, and trust me when I say that the idea of being thrown over the cavern’s edge is still fresh in my mind, but I believe his story, Sam. I think they genuinely want a better life, and I’ve offered to speak to the mayor of Anozira about getting them work and a place to live.”

  Unsatisfied but unwilling to contradict her, Sam said, “Okay, but I promise that the first man to draw a blade or nock his bow will be met with a fireball so big it will consume the whole cave.” Then with a purposeful look down to Tezukayoshi who stood at his side, Sam added, “And then my friend here will strip their bones clean.”

  Gulping audibly, Mal waved his hands in front of himself and said, “I promise you, no one will do anything of the sort.”

  Nodding, Sam said, “We’ll see.” Then pointing to where they had entered the cavern, he finished with, “You can lead the way.”

  Not waiting for any further instructions, Mal ran back into the caves and headed for his group, leaving Sam and Anna to follow him at their own pace. As he did, Anna looked at Sam and said, “You didn’t have to threaten him, you know.”