The Legend of ZERO: The Scientist, the Rat, and the Assassin

by Sara King

  Or was the controlling stat willpower? Or wisdom? Gorthrak’s willpower could be pretty low, at times, especially when women or interesting puzzles were concerned. His wisdom, however, was impeccable. ‘Wisdom’ was just another way of saying ‘intelligence,’ of which Slade had asstons. Still, the willpower thing bothered him. Dammit, he’d have to consult the Dungeon Master. But later. Tysonia was such a buzzkill when it came to enchanted objects. He always did assbaggery things like make him roll to keep his fingers whenever he unsheathed his vorpal blade because he didn’t have the proper sheath for it. Prick. He could only imagine what Tysonia would try to do with a neutral-evil intelligent item.

  Still, even if he couldn’t wield the fabled Rodemax, maybe he could salvage components for imbuing his armor or creating other magic items. Thus decided, Gorthrak loaded his second stone into his sling and, biting his lip in the universal concentration of a great warrior learning a new skill, rotated his wrist, flinging the stone forward with his body.

  This time, the stone buried itself into the ground a few feet from the hobgoblin’s foot, debris from the resulting crater ripping apart the hobgoblin’s boot as it went by, spraying blood and gore and plant matter everywhere.

  “Shit!” the hobgoblin cried. “Something hit my foot.”

  “Is it bleeding?” the Rodemax demanded in utter disgust. “Did it get crushed or dissolved or evaporated? No? Then pay attention to the real threat. I swear to the Jreet gods, I am replacing you at the nearest convenience.”

  “Damn, man, chill out. Okay, yeah, I see her.”

  “She’s been observing us, furg! And she hasn’t put a round through your foot yet. That’s odd.”

  “So maybe she is shooting at us!” the hobgoblin cried, dragging his feet closer to his body. “Maybe that’s what I felt hit my shoe!”

  “No one is shooting, you unlovable furgling fart,” the legendary Rodemax snapped. “I told you I would have noticed it. You will start paying attention to my quarry or I will simply end you and start over with someone with neurons.”

  The weapon wanted to be liberated! This was Gorthrak’s lucky day… He glanced down at the single stone cradled in his open palm. He was down to a single diamond-studded mithril shot to end the Rodemax’s reign of terror. In the distance, the damsel huddled in distress, the fate of a kingdom resting solely on the outcome of his next move. Gorthrak the Destroyer felt the gravity of the situation weighing on him like a thousand pounds of dwarven steel, the pressure almost too much for his mighty shoulders to bear.

  Good thing Tysonia wasn’t here, because he would probably try to make Gorthrak roll a Will save to avoid bolting like a pussy.

  Gorthrak did a quick mental calculation of the stone size, sling length, the past trajectories, the desired course, and the staggering mechanical force in his arm. Then, loading his sling, he whispered a prayer to his patron god, which in this adventure happened to be himself, because he had achieved godhood after his single-handed victory over the level forty assassin from the space-plane, then his successful finale defending her from the horde of evil, level thirty-five gangbanger hell-angels sweeping in to capture his kingdom and take his new cohort back to their burning homelands to satisfy their twisted desires. Oh, and the tarrasques. How many had it been, now? Seventeen?

  But back to the quest at hand. Gorthrak answered his prayer to himself with a stat boost and a Blessing of Accuracy—as well as a token charisma sex-appeal bonus because it was expected—then spun the stone in a single, practiced rotation and released.

  The diamond-studded mithril impacted the hobgoblin’s helmetless head and it exploded in a gloriously grisly critical hit that coated half the ridge with crimson gore. The twitching body went limp in a pool of its own fluids, head still gushing blood out into the spattered mush of brains and bone shards. Gorthrak was grinning at his victory, about to begin collecting his loot, when the enchanted Rodemax said, “Come where I can see you, or I’ll detonate this entire hillside.”

  #

  Rat watched Sam make not one, not two, but three attempts with his primitive crotch-sling before he straightened, grinning like a furg who had discovered a stash of karwiq bulbs. Between them, the man’s foot had started to twitch.

  No way, Rat thought, frowning at the boot through her scope. Did the unlovable furg just…

  Then the grin faded from Sam’s face and he blinked like a Takki on butchering day.

  ...kill Max’s operator with a rock? She swallowed. Soot. That was really going to piss Max off…

  #

  In war, Gorthrak had learned over his many glorious decades of combat, one should know when one was beaten.

  Thus, he pitied the Rodemax for its assumption it was still in charge. Obviously, his last wielder had been a raisin-nutted limp-noodle weak-minded furgling with willpower and wisdom scores of 0.

  “My operator is not responding to electric shock, which indicates he is unconscious or dead,” Max said. “And unless you’d like to be, too, I suggest you come forward.”

  Into his area of effect, returning control of the situation to the Rodemax. Yeah, right. Like that was going to happen.

  Then again, Gorthrak really wanted to be able to say he’d held a Rodemax in his hands. Now that he’d achieved godhood, life was just so boring…

  “I assure you, Human, I am fully capable of detonating an entire mountainside. I have a self-contained power source that could support an entire city indefinitely.”

  Gorthrak could have walked away, because he knew for a fact that the Huouyt—and therefore Huouyt AI—enjoyed their own existences entirely too much to detonate out of spite. Still, he had an honest-to-God Rodemax lying in the dirt about fifty-four feet away, and if he could go back and tell Tysonia that he had conquered a Rodemax, Tysonia would forever acknowledge that he was the more studly of the two of them. Thus, it was time for a Bluff check.

  Figuring he was going to need about two minutes of bluff-time, Slade rolled the dice in his head. Not one, but two natural twenties. Critical success. Sweet!

  Putting on his thickest redneck drawl, Slade ran brazenly into the Rodemax’s area of effect and said, “Hey, guys! I found it! And lordy, I think it talks!” He gave an utterly perfect hayuck of glee as he bent down and lifted the rifle from the ground. “Look at this thing, guys! It’s huge! I bet aliens made it.”

  “Oceans preserve me, I think I just found a stupider one.” The total disgust in the Rodemax’s voice almost made Slade giggle. He loved seeing the effects of his nat twenties.

  “So you can, what, shoot good?” Slade asked, in the drawl. “I already shoot good.” He aimed the rifle at the sky, peering through the scope, as he started walking towards the bluff.

  “You are interrupting my hunt, you moronic furg,” the great artifact snapped back at him. “You just killed my last operator, so that makes you his replacement. Swing me around to face the far ridge. Show me where my quarry went.”

  Instead of obeying, Gorthrak caressed the metal with loving motions. “Oh wow. What nice curves. Purdy thing like you otta be on a shelf somewhere, not rusting out on the hill.”

  “I do not contain iron, and I therefore can not ‘rust,’” the legendary Rodemax snapped at him. “Iron is used in inferior weaponry, furg, not like the top of the line gear you now hold in your hands.”

  Oooh, Gorthrak the Destroyer had found a weak spot. He decided to exploit it mercilessly with an intelligence check. Oh, wait, he didn’t have to roll an intelligence check. Yawn.

  “Top of the line?” Gorthrak snorted, still moving them towards the bluff. “My daddy’s old rifle…now that was ‘top of the line’. General Robert E. Lee used it for a couple minutes in the Civil War. There’s a picture and everything. Had one of those antiques buffs appraise it. Said it was worth twenty million.” He used twenty million because he knew a Rodemax, right out of the factory, was worth half as much or less.

  “You think I give a Dhasha’s flake about some utterly rudimentary projectile weapon
used in a forgotten skirmish on some backwards planet back in its pre-incorporation dark ages?!” the Rodemax demanded. “It’s like placing a Takki beside a Dhasha. There is no comparison.”

  “You’re right, that thing was a classic,” Gorthrak said, allowing a hint of whimsy into his voice. “It was the start of everything, man. Modern hunting rifles. History. You ain’t history. You’re just space-junk.”

  “Show me the target, or I swear to the Triad I will set off a psionic pulse that will utterly destroy your primitive brain.”

  “He wants a target, guys!” Gorthrak cried. “I think this guy was shooting at something. You see anyone down there?” He stepped further towards the bluff, but swung the gun wide, so that it was looking into the gully below.

  “She was on the opposite ridge,” the Rodemax replied, frustration evident. “And stay down. You’re giving her a direct shot!”

  “Oooh, a girl,” Slade laughed. “What’s she gonna do, assault us with her vagina?” He hayucked again, growing ever closer to the ridge’s edge and the corresponding dropoff.

  The Rodemax got very quiet. “Listen to me very carefully, you mind-numbingly stupid furg. I am a thousand times smarter than you, and I have six different ways I could kill you where you stand. You will do as I tell you, or I will start shocking you like the braindead vaghi maggot you are.”

  Uh-oh. Because Gorthrak, who was the Kingdom of Earth’s smartest man, had a character flaw that left him with a potential -40 intelligence score each time his intelligence was insulted, Gorthrak winced, realizing he was going to have to roll his bluff check again. He mentally crossed his fingers, then did.

  Two natural ones. Slade resisted the urge to weep.

  “Actually,” Slade said, in an aristocratic Russian accent, “it’s only three. I already deactivated your psionic pulse and your shock grenade, and am working on your gas cartridge while you’re distracted.” He quickly rolled another bluff. A fourteen! Better than nothing… “At least, that’s what the purdy buttons said. Hayuck.”

  The Rodemax got very quiet. “Are you insane?”

  Oooh, ouch. Yet another of Gorthrak the Destroyer’s touchy subjects. And, like something out of a bad dream, Slade rolled another one for response. Damn it. Why all the criticals? A critical success, he could handle, but why so many critical fails? This was just getting irritating…

  “You want to know the truth?!” Slade demanded, spinning the gun around so he was looking down its scope from the business-end. “Probably! Okay? Probably! Not even a dragon starts at plus forty-five. That kind of intellect at an abnormally young age had to have left me with some inadequacies in other areas, like maybe my raw physical form, hence why I throw all of my experience into strength and dexterity stats. The bigger question is do I care.” He leaned forward, until he and the gun were ‘eye’ to eye. Squinting at the Rodemax’s sensor, he said, “Not a damn fucking bit. Why? Because I am Gorthrak the Destroyer, killer of tarrasque, half-dwarf barbarian elf prince raised by dragonkin and adopted by ogre-knights, and not even your entire army of changeling sympathizers could overtake my crown or steal my woman.”

  Then, because he’d never have a better chance to intimidate a Rodemax, Slade dropped the act for a moment and said, “So you see, I am a thousand times smarter than you, and I now have your serial number and, by extrapolation, shutdown codes. If you ever come after Rat again, I will dismantle you and use your parts to hatch chicken eggs.” Then Slade shoved the weapon over the edge of the bluff and gave it a sarcastic salute as it fell.

  #

  Rat’s stomach sank when the crazy furgling picked Max up. Picked him up. Obviously, the poor, deluded flaker had no idea what he was dealing with, because he was laughing and grinning like a kid in a candy store. Soot, Rat thought. Soot, soot! With Sam under his control, Max would have anything he wanted—anything at all. Understanding that, Rat knew she had to stop them both, right now, because she could think of nothing worse than putting Sam’s bottomless creativity under the control of Max’s sadistic streak.

  A good part of her wanted to prevent the whole miserable Takkiscrew and put her first shot through Sam’s head, but another part of her was curious to get Sam’s side of the story, and what he had done, exactly, to outwit Max. Thus, she decided to take Plan B and shoot for a chunk of alien flora overhead to hopefully land on the gun, pinning it in place for the time being.

  “Come on,” Rat told Sam through the scope. “Turn to the side and I’ll take him out with a tree branch. Turn to the side.” Sam was walking straight towards her, headed towards the bluff, where Max would no doubt want Sam to take up a sniping position and begin hunting her where his previous operator had left off. Then Sam raised the gun.

  Rat was about to say to soot with it and put a blast through Sam’s forehead when Sam whipped the gun around and stared at it, lens-to-eye. She blinked, and her finger hesitated on the trigger as Sam began giving Max a tirade of red-faced proportions. Then, reaching the edge of the bluff, he simply threw the Rodemax over the edge with a sarcastic salute.

  Max must have realized what was happening a few moments afterwards, because he sent a massive electrical charge up the cliff at Sam, lighting up the entire hillside with its awe-inspiring cloud o’ death—yep, Max was pissed—which Sam narrowly dodged by going wide-eyed, jumping backwards, and falling over the ‘dead’ man, who immediately sat up, holding his head. Together, they watched, mouth open, as Max’s charge-cloud continued to rise into the darkness above them, a hissing, crackling, multicolored lights display that Rat had gratefully never seen up close.

  After it had risen to several dozen rods above them, Sam lowered his head and proceeded to chat the kid up, even checking his goose-egg, before patting the kid on the shoulder and gesturing for him to run along. The kid, still staring at the lights show, got up and bolted like he expected the cloud to come after him.

  Once the kid was gone—liberated, more likely—Sam slowly got to his feet, still eying the cloud. And, as Rat watched, he pulled a piece of gum out of its wrapper, staring at the sky.

  Where the hell did he…? Then Rat quickly decided she didn’t want to know. She stayed in that position for several minutes, just staring at Sam through her gun. She was reasonably sure Sam couldn’t see the bluff at his feet, as he had demonstrated time and again that he had an uncanny knack for memorizing—and then exploring—spatial landscapes with only a second or two to study, and the rest of the time walking around in his underwear and a blindfold, entertaining her and Tyson for hours with his unerring movement around hurdles and impediments.

  And this time, he didn’t even have the underwear.

  After watching the Rodemax’s charge-cloud completely dissipate, Sam unerringly turned to face her directly, and, as Rat’s hair stood completely on end, her ka-par slave saluted with a grin, then turned to walk back into the bushes, naked ass facing her.

  He couldn’t have seen me, Rat thought, watching him through the scope. He couldn’t possibly have seen me. Even in daylight, with a scope, someone on that ridge would have had trouble pinpointing Rat on her hillside.

  Which meant he somehow had known exactly—to the precise dig—where she was. Had he watched her return fire? Rat couldn’t remember shooting at the ridge once Sam had shown up.

  Rat waited until the double crescent moon disappeared in the brush, then packed up her gun and ran back to camp. Tyson met her at the edge of camp with a plasma pistol charged and in one hand. “He dead?” he asked, looking disappointed.

  “No,” Rat said. “He knocked out the kid who was shooting at me.”

  Tyson frowned. “With what? He ran off bare-assed naked except for a thong and combat boots.”

  “Uh,” Rat said. And, because she would have called flake had she not seen it through her own scope, she winced and said, “I think he used the thong.”

  “To what, strangle him?”

  “As a sling,” Rat replied.

  Tyson didn’t seem surprised, just cocked his head an
d said, “Oh.” If anything, he appeared impressed.

  Sam got there about ten minutes afterwards, moving out of the trees with his eyes closed, yet unerringly walking around the obstacles he encountered. “Sam, what the hell?!” Rat cried, stalking up to him. “You threw Max down a cliff? Do you realize how pissed off he’s gonna be? You might have damaged his finish.”

  Sam ignored her and walked up to the fire, then opened his eyes and stared at it blankly.

  Immediately, Rat’s heart leapt. Had Max fried him, after all? “Sam?” She tentatively touched his shoulder.

  “Hold on,” Sam said, peering into the flames. A little frown of concentration was etching his brow. “I think I leveled.”

  …leveled? After Sam did not elaborate, Rat, thinking it was an Earth custom, glanced at Tyson, who was narrowing his eyes.

  Rat frowned and turned back to her ka-par slave. “Sam? That was Max, right? He talk to you? What did he say?”

  “Yep,” Sam said, his eyes focusing again. His face beamed in a grin. “Leveled. Gimme a sec to assign skill points.”

  While that was still incomprehensible to Rat, Tyson cocked his head and frowned. “Were you fucking LARPing out there? Without consulting your DM?”

  Sam froze and gave Tyson a hunted look. “Uh. No.”

  But Tyson’s mouth was hanging open. To Rat, he said, “The fuckwit was LARPing. Oh God, and here I was actually worried for your ass. Seriously, Sam?! Rat was going to get killed.”

  “Dude, it’s the end of the world,” Sam retorted lamely. “I can do what I want.”

  Rat, who finally recognized what Sam had been doing due to her long, unfortunate career being a dungeon-master for two utterly insane Baga, found her own face going slack. “Not you, too.” Would that infernal game follow her everywhere? Klick had even managed to get Benva to play, and there was nothing quite as frustrating as explaining to a Jreet prince why a ‘scaleless coward’ could kill him with a single spell because he didn’t make his Will save.