Brace For the Wolves

by Nathan Thompson

  “Parenting,” the new guy answered bitterly, rolling his neck again. “I visited first Dad, and then I visited the dad that just came back. Had to be in two places at once. Not fun.”

  “How are you even able to do that at all?” I demanded. “That's impossible.”

  “Yeah, splitting myself into multiple pieces sure is unprecedented,” FNG snarled sarcastically at me. “Especially if it happens after the wrong-me decides he can't handle a bit of trauma and snaps me right off of him.”

  “Point,” I replied. “And I hate you for it.”

  “You hate me for a lot of things,” FNG replied caustically. “Let's talk about that instead.”

  “Alright then,” I snapped. “For starters? I don't believe you're really me. You just show up out of nowhere, right when I'm at my limit, and try to take over me, right in the middle of a fight. That could have gotten my body killed. And to top it off, you made my body freaking eat a guy's throat. I know he was a monster, I don't care, you don't go around eating every random throat you come across unless you want to get sick. And for the record? Eating throats is definitely going to make that god-damn virgin problem you just mentioned a lot more permanent!”

  His observation on that matter bothered me a lot more than I was willing to admit. Which made it bother me even more.

  He leaned back as he looked at me, incredulous.

  “I almost got us killed? You're ridiculous. You fight like you haven't had over a hundred years of genetic training, and you're too stupid to use our fire magic. In fact, until yesterday you acted like you didn't even know it was there. And don't get me started on your lack of using breath weapons. It's like you're determined to fight with one hand behind your back no matter how desperate or stupid the situation gets! You know what?” he added, pointing an accusatory finger at me. “Maybe you're the fake one. You've been nothing but a whiny brat this whole time. 'Boohoo, my life is so hard! My health and family have suffered, and all the other kids are mean to me! Plus, I've been tortured and murdered too many times! Let me spend every five seconds thinking about my problems so that I can whine some more!' I'm sick of it. There's no way you could possibly be me. And what do you mean eating monsters turns girls away? Everybody needs to eat. If you'd just let me share a kill with a woman she'd fall for us in a heartbeat!”

  “There is so much wrong with that entire statement that I don't even know where to begin,” I said back. “But I'll start with the fact that I have no idea what you are talking about when you brought up genetic training and inherent Fire magic. And up until recently, I've had to punch, kick and claw for every scrap of power I possess. In fact, that's intentional,” I added bitterly. “You can ask Evil Dad about that since he helped keep me locked down. God, if I'd had this power when I battled Rhodes the first time around I might not have had to die.”

  FNG rolled his eyes again.

  “Great. You want to talk about dying. Again.”

  “What? I'm sorry,” I snapped sarcastically. “I couldn't hear you over all of the background free-loading you've been doing for the past eighteen years!”

  “Well, if you would have just let me take charge,” FNG started to shout back.

  “Fuck your taking charge!” I snapped back. “You don't get to just show up one day and tell everyone you're in control now!” I took a deep breath, and then realized I probably didn't need to because we were both in some crazy dream world. “Alright,” I said after a minute. “According to your 'dads,' you can't get rid of me and I can't get rid of you. Yet. So we're stuck with each other, and we're off to a bad start.”

  Freaking New Guy snorted at that.

  “We can keep fighting and not get anywhere,” I continued. “Or we can work together to at least ensure our mutual survival. If we have another ego contest during combat we're probably going to die. Agreed?”

  FNG nodded.

  “Alright,” I continued. “Here's my deal. You start sharing all of this secret genetic knowledge with me about combat and magic and everything else, and I'll let you see the environment around us, both in combat and outside of it. If we can do that without killing ourselves, I'll consider trusting you more.”

  “Why do I have to trust you?” FNG growled. “Why should you control the body?”

  “Seniority,” I growled back. “The fact that you don't even know the names of the people who are with me. The fact that the very planet below us might take issue with your character and stop helping us, or worse, hinder us. The fact that you seem to think saying 'hey gurrrl, I just killed a guy, how ‘bout say you come over here and help me eat his corpse?' is a good pickup line for girls. And quit listening to Evil Dragon Dad when you want advice about women.”

  “Uh.” FNG seemed caught off guard. “You have a point, I guess. Fine. We'll do it that way unless you're about to get us killed. You better listen to me when I tell you about fighting techniques.”

  “Fantastic,” I replied. “It's a deal.”

  “And uh.” FNG looked uncomfortable, scratching the back of his neck. “That was actually Good Dragon Dad's advice. It was how he met the love of his life. Or one of them, I think.”

  “One of...” I shook my head. “Definitely wait and watch some non-dragon women, so you can see how wrong that advice is.”

  “Well okay,” the new me agreed reluctantly. “But you should at least give the idea some thought. Your frustrations are my frustrations.”

  “Ha ha ha,” I laughed dryly.

  “And I worked out what FNG stands for, and I’m tired of being called the Freaking New Guy.”

  “Sorry to hear,” I replied grimly. “Too bad it still fits.”

  “No it doesn’t,” FNG argued. “My creation has been centuries in the making. Yours? Fifteen minutes of celebrating Human Dad’s birthday.”

  “On that asinine note,” I growled. “Your current name stands. Though the F part of the acronym just changed to mean something else.”

  “Teeth,” Dragon-Wes growled back. “I’m your teeth and claws. I came out because of your teeth. Call me Teeth.”

  “That’s a stupid name,” I snorted. “Let’s go with it for you.”

  “While we're on the subject,” Teeth continued. “Why are you dreaming about the past?”

  I tilted my head at him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean while you are talking to me, you are also having a dream about your past.”

  “That's impossible,” I replied. “I can't be having two dreams at once.”

  “We're a conversation, not a dream,” Dragon-Wes said smugly. “If you walk away you'll go back to your dream.” Then he looked confused and uncomfortable again. “But seriously. Why do you bother with this experience?”

  I sighed. “Since I have no way to avoid whatever it is I'm dreaming about, except to continue talking to you, I'd better just go see what it is.”

  I was so exasperated from talking to Dragon-Me that I didn't stop to consider just how awful my dream was going to be.

  If I had though, I'd have begged him to stay.

  … I was back in Rhodes' dungeon. Two large, burly men taller than even I was and almost twice as thick held my legs. And they were dragging me to yet another death.

  “No!” I screamed as they dragged me by the leg. “Stop! What is wrong with you?”

  Right, I realized. If I was panicking this much it must have been one of the later deaths.

  There was a reason, I knew.

  “No!” I called out again as I futilely clawed at the floor. “Don't do this again! Don't do this again!”

  The reason is because, despite the fact that surviving—no, that's the wrong word for it, I died every single time no matter what I did. Despite the fact preserving some of my sanity, or refusing to give up, counted as overcoming a Challenge, I could still tell that this death was after I crossed the point of giving up.

  “Heart rate is elevated,” the man said walking behind me, giving me a bored glance every few moments while he scr
ibbled in notes about me. “Subject appears to be slightly more frightened than normal.”

  This was the point where I did everything I could to try and convince them to murder me for good.

  “What is wrong with you?” I screamed, trying to shake my legs out of the grip of the two men in front of me. It didn't work. They had begun their Descents and I had lost all of my power from Rising somehow. I think the torture just broke it because no other Challenger had died more than a handful of times. But this was one of my last deaths, if I remember correctly. It was at least my seventieth. Maybe even my ninetieth.

  “You don't need this!” I screamed, my body shaking all over, tired and exhausted, but too terrified for anyone to notice. “You've already done this! Just kill me for good! Just kill me for good!”

  “Great,” one of the men dragging my legs said. “He's whining again.”

  “He always whines,” the other one pointed out. “This isn't anything new.”

  They were both right. In the beginning, when they were torturing others, and I was angry about them for framing and murdering John Malcolm, my father, I had hatched a particularly stupid plan. I had known that I wasn't their only captive and I knew that they would try to use the other prisoners to break me further. I also knew that when they weren't torturing me, they were probably abusing the other prisoners. So I had decided to do what I could to get their attention. When I thought that they wanted to see defiance, I taunted them, insulted them, did my best to look like they weren't getting to me. When I thought seeing me suffer would hold their attention, I put on a show of crying out in pain, making it obvious that I was in agony. I don't think they ever figured out when I was acting, because as far as I could eventually tell, my idea worked at first. They spent most of their time with me. Took their notes. Did their torture. Shouted their insults. Ended my life. But I told myself I was fine, because I could just come back from the dead like I had when Cavus killed me. And I did. Again. And again. And again.

  And then I realized that I was not as strong as I thought I was.

  Their attention, their torture and murders, became too much. I don't know when. I'd like to think that I held out for most of the deaths. That I endured dozens and dozens of deaths, overcame the Challenge time and time again, and only broke near the end. But It's entirely possible I broke after the first handful of deaths, that after a dozen or so I had snapped and just tried to escape from the pain whenever I could. I can't say for sure because at some point in the middle of it all a large part of my brain had run off to someplace the rest of me couldn't find, and I was forced to try and deal with everything without it. That may have been part of what created Dragon-Me. I may never know. At any rate, the result was that most of that time just hazed together, and I couldn't remember many details beyond a haze of pain.

  But I did remember that no later than after my first death from the gibber-kin, I had broken and yielded full on to my cowardice, clawing at the floor and throwing a scene every time they dragged me down the halls for another execution.

  So they were both right, the torturer on the right, who thought I had always tried to put on a show, and the one dragging my left leg, who realized that I was now seeking any escape I could find.

  “Just kill me for good!” I screamed again. “Just kill me for good! You're not learning anything new! I can't give you anything more! Just kill me for good!”

  They were not listening. My craven mind grew even more desperate.

  “Just kill me!”

  “Ugh,” the one on the left said. “He has a point. It's not like we've learned anything new in a while. Why are we dragging him all the way down this long-ass hall just to kill him in the exact same way we killed him before?”

  “Just kill me for good!” I screamed, desperate to get them to listen to me. “Just kill me! Just kill me!”

  “Because ending him now would waste funding. Do you want Rhodes to realize he can cut our department's funding, right now with entire new worlds to experiment on? And we don't want to start our next experiments with a smaller budget,” the note-taking man in the back said, then went back to scribbling his notes, reading them out loud as he did so. “Still exhibiting awareness of impending death. No new skills developing. Body appears to still be deteriorating between deaths.”

  Apparently that was a thing, too. Stell didn't spend a lot of time talking about it, but apparently killing myself dozens of times in a row, or even a half-dozen times in a row, was a bad idea for my projected body's health. The last deterioration happened dozens and dozens of deaths ago.

  “So you're still not learning anything,” the man holding my right leg grumbled.

  “On the contrary, we are learning that nothing has changed. That is still useful for many of our studies.”

  “Just-kill-me-just-kill-me-just—”

  “For Christ's sake, shut up!” the burly oaf on the right said. “Jesus! A man can't even hear himself think.”

  “Ignore him,” the scientist in the back said. “He's just trying to get you to throw the test.”

  They went back to dragging me along in silence. Well, they were silent. I was screaming and sobbing as loudly as I could. Somehow, they just drowned me out and started talking about other things.

  We passed a couple hallways, and the man on the right complained that the trip to whichever room they were terminating me in today was always too far away. The man on the left just chuckled, mentioning that there were some good things down this hall, the other guy just wasn't looking hard enough. The guard on the right gave him a weird look, but didn't say anything.

  Then we turned a corner, and I heard a young girl's voice.

  I remembered thinking I was delirious, because the voice had sounded exactly like Val's. But Val couldn't have been there, I thought at the time, because she was supposed to be safe, protected by the state. She was supposed to have numerous caseworkers and lawyers and therapists and other officials looking after her. I had thought it more likely that I was imagining things, that it was just a girl from one of Avalon's worlds, that they must have taken in a raid.

  But she still shouldn't be out of her cell.

  “What?” the guard on my right leg asked. “Why are you bringing her here?”

  “Taking care of a favor,” a third guard's voice said. “You got an hour with her. She's going to be revenue, so don't leave any signs that you did anything.”

  “I'll be careful,” the guard on the left said. “You can take him for me now. He's harmless, but he puts up a bigger racket than any of the natives.”

  No, I thought looking over and see a girl that looked exactly like Val, a barely-adolescent girl with a beautiful face and Asian-like features, except there was no Asia in Avalon's worlds, so she likely came from the Spirit Kingdoms. But she was a dead-ringer for the oldest of the three girls that had almost joined our family. One all of us had mentored and supported until that day when my father died and she came forward with allegations against him. No, I thought again, not like this. Not this indignity as well.

  Val didn't deserve this. Her lookalike didn't deserve this.

  I didn't deserve this. To be this weak again, and not be able to stop someone this young and innocent from suffering this horribly.

  This was a bigger humiliation than what my disability had done to me. A bigger mockery. A bigger shaming than even when Cavus tore me limb from limb, showing me just how little I could help Stell. Now I would have to either watch or hear a little girl suffer exactly what everyone had claimed my father had done, and done to a girl that looked just like this one.

  “Wait, can you really do this?” the thug on the right asked. “I thought she was...”