“Well, I hope you have a plan for talking a way out of this because you are in no way, shape, or form ready to tackle a two-headed giant.”
“I am keenly aware of that,” Ethan admitted. “If you have any suggestions on how to get out of this, I’m all ears.”
Zoey didn’t get a chance to reply. The guards, who had gone off a few paces to confer with themselves in private, returned, this time with the sergeant at arms in the lead. He was dressed in a similar uniform as those who were posted at the gates; however, he was a half foot taller than the rest, with broad shoulders and a battle-weathered face covered with stubble. “Geoff,” he said, offering a huge hand.
Ethan gave it a shake and tried not to cringe as the man practically crushed his hand in his viselike grip. “Ethan.”
“A pleasure and an honor if what they say about you is true,” the Sergeant at Arms said. “We’ve got a two-headed bastard running loose out in the forest, having its fun ambushing caravans and seeing how far it can punt the pack animals—those it doesn’t straight up eat, that is. Ought to be right up your alley for a giant slayer like you. It’s not even fully grown yet. Barely seven feet tall.”
“Seven feet, huh?”
“No more than eight.”
“Now it’s eight?”
“A few inches shy of ten, I’d say. Eight was a guess.”
Ethan threw a nervous glance at Zoey who couldn’t reply much more than a noncommittal shrug. “Well, that does sound interesting,” he said, desperately trying to figure out a way out of this mess without exposing himself as a total fraud. “But my services are already being employed.”
“Doesn’t matter,” the sergeant said. “I’ll conscript you for the job if I must, but I’d like to keep this cordial if we could. Easier that way, and by the gods, if there’s one thing I hate more than ettins, it’s doing paperwork in triplicate. I mean, at least ettin killing might land you some nice treasure after. What’s paperwork going to land you? A cramped hand, that’s it.”
“But at least not a crushed skull,” said Ethan.
“Unless you botch one of the pages, and the judge is in a bad mood,” he replied. “I swear, I’ve seen him throw his gavel harder than a titan throws bolts of lightning.”
“Point taken,” said Ethan. “If you want to keep things cordial, you best know I’m not cheap. What’s the pay?”
“Twenty crowns when you bring me back either of the ettin’s heads as proof of the deed,” the sergeant replied. “You also get to keep whatever loot he’s got lying around, assuming there is any.”
Ethan had no idea on whether or not he was getting a fair deal out of this, assuming he could do it, but judging on the looks of Zoey’s and Maii’s faces, they both seemed impressed at the bounty. Ecstatic, even, if he didn’t know better.
Still, Ethan had seen enough movies, played enough games, and read enough books to know that the highly sought-after monster slayer never settled for the first offering. “Okay, I’ll consider it,” he said. “But I have questions first, and maybe a counteroffer of my own. If it’s so small, why haven’t you killed it?”
“We have enough issues of our own in town, and I can’t spare the men to go out on a search party,” the sergeant said. “Not to mention, it’s small, but it’s not stupid. Well, not that stupid. It’s all relative, you know? Ettins are dumb. But it won’t get anywhere near a warband. That said, it’ll likely take a jump at the two of you and your dog the moment it picks up your scent.”
“Fair enough. What sort of town problems do you have going on here?”
“I’ve got a nasty infestation of all sorts of horrid creatures in the sewers. They’re bubbling out like a boiling brew from a witch’s cauldron. Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep that in check?”
Ethan nodded and chuckled. “I’ve never had to tackle that personally, but I can imagine. Why do city engineers always build these sewers so big, anyway? Maybe if they weren’t big enough for a dragon to squeeze through, the tunnels wouldn’t be a hotbed for monsters to breed in.”
“Exactly!” the sergeant said, throwing up his hands. “The town proper has less than a thousand people, and yet the idiot designer planned a sewer system for a hundred times that. With such an extensive network, it’s no wonder they keep coming back no matter how many we kill. And don’t get me started on the mines, either.”
“What’s with the mines?”
“I said, don’t get me started. The short, short version: same problem as the sewers, only worse.”
“At least it keeps your skills up.”
“Not really,” the sergeant said. “You can only kill so many rats before you stop getting anything out of it. But that’s nothing you don’t already know. Any other questions, or are you ready to earn your crowns?”
Ethan nodded. “I think that’s all I need.”
After a moment’s silence, the guard cocked his head. “Well, what you waiting for? Get moving and get me an ettin head.”
“Right, sorry,” Ethan said, not wanting to admit why he hadn’t moved. “I was planning my tactics and strategy and stuff.”
Before he could fumble any further, Zoey pulled his arm and led him out of the gatehouse and back toward the forest. “Get our crowns ready,” she said over her shoulder as they left. “We’re going to have an ettin head for you before you know it.”
They traveled a few dozen paces before she elbowed him in the side. “What were you waiting for back there?” she asked. “We both know you weren’t channeling Sun Tzu.”
“I was expecting a little more from accepting my first quest.”
“Huh? Like what?”
Ethan shrugged. “Something. Anything. You know, like a drum roll accompanied by a giant floating question mark.”
“I told you before, this isn’t that kind of game,” Zoey said. “And we’re in hardcore mode, remember? Even if there were such things in normal mode, they wouldn’t be here now. There’s no handholding, so forget about massive, glowing punctuation marks telling you where to go and what to do and—” She stopped in the middle of her mini-lecture and tilted her head, face full of confusion. “What?”
Ethan’s gaze dropped a foot and a half, so it was no longer staring above her head but now ensured that his eyes met with hers. “You’ve got an exclamation mark over your head right now.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. Look!”
Zoey folded her arms, and her brow furrowed. “I’ve been here a hell of a lot longer than you have, Ethan. There are no quest markers here.”
“Well, there are now,” he said. His eyes lit up. “Oh! What if you can’t see it?”
“I can’t see it because it’s not there.”
Ethan gasped. “What if you’re an NPC? That would explain a lot.”
“I’m not an NPC. I’d know if I were.”
“Would you?” Ethan challenged. “I mean, guys running around telling the same old story about taking an arrow to the knee probably have no idea they’re NPCs, repeating the same useless garbage. Why would you?”
Zoey folded her arms over her chest. “You think I’m giving you the same useless advice?”
“No, but who knows? Maybe you’ve got a more complex dialogue tree,” he replied. “Also, how would a player get to be a vampire then? That seems a little OP.”
“How would an NPC talk about the real world?”
Ethan paused as her comment sucked the wind right out of his sails. “Okay, well, yeah,” he stammered. “But what about the vampire bit? I didn’t get that option.”
“I got that option because I negotiated it in my contract before getting drawn into the game,” she said, sounding annoyed. “You’re allowed to do that. I took vampire because I thought I’d be in and out in a flash and not have to deal with the whole blood-cravings part or feeding-off-others-to-stay-alive bit. But that didn’t happen, and now I’m stuck here with an insatiable lust for blood.”
Ethan nodded, and though he was mostly c
onvinced that she was right and he was wrong, he did want to test one last thing. “Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t you try giving me a quest? Surely there’s something bothering you that I could take care of for a handsome reward.”
Zoey’s gaze dropped. She bit her lower lip and toyed with her hair. “There is something,” she said softly. “Something I need someone big and strong for, someone I can trust explicitly with.”
“What?” Ethan said, feeling his heart jump into his throat. Before she answered, however, he shook his head with a heavy sigh. He then briefly shut his eyes, and when he opened them again, Maii was sitting a few feet in front of him while Zoey was several paces down the trail, smirking and shaking her head.
“So close,” the jackal said with some disappointment. “I was too over the top, wasn’t I?”
“I thought I told you not to mess with me,” Ethan said.
“You did,” Maii replied. “I was messing with her. You were inadvertently caught in the fun.”
“Okay, new rule: no messing with either of us.”
“Fine, but you should know, the less happy I am, the less useful, too,” Maii said.
As they continued to walk, Ethan’s brain turned to the task of ettin slaying. “How hard is it to kill a baby ettin?”
“Ten feet tall is hardly a baby,” Zoey said. “Their skin is thick, too, making shots from pistol and musket mostly useless. And even with you wielding your Dramgorleg, we’ll need a better plan than ‘tank and spank’ since your tanking experience amounts to precisely one kobold.”
“It’s Glamborleg,” Ethan replied, patting his cutlass.
“Sorry, I didn’t jot your pseudo-artifact’s name down in my journal.”
“Well, you’re a vampire,” Ethan pointed out, thinking where he was headed with it all was pretty obvious. “Can’t you do super vampire things and kill it quickly?”
“I’m not that powerful,” she admitted. “My charms won’t work on him, and I might be able to move fast, but he’ll knock my head off with one hit just the same as you.”
“Speaking of losing heads,” Maii said. “The two of you are making this much harder than it needs to be.”
Ethan turned and saw his own disembodied head lying on the ground, staring back up at him with a bloody smile. He jumped back with a yelp, driving into Zoey as he did. The two tumbled to the ground in a messy heap.
Maii suddenly appeared on Ethan’s chest, grinning from ear to ear. He leaned his head in close so that his nose was only a few inches from Ethan’s. “Need another demonstration?”
“No,” Ethan growled. “Again, stop messing with me.”
“Messing? No. Demonstrating, yes.”
“Demonstrating what, exactly?” Zoey asked as she squirmed out from underneath Ethan.
“I can drive the stupid insane with an illusion of death,” he said. “And ettins are very, very stupid, as the guard said.”
Ethan’s eyes lit up at the possibilities. “That’s handy. Can you do it whenever you want?”
Maii’s ears dropped an inch as he jumped off Ethan’s chest. “No. Not yet. Once per day, and only when I’m rested. It takes a lot out of me to keep it up long enough for someone to go crazy. Also, I have to watch my prey for a while, see how it interacts with the world and others, and most importantly, find out what it fears the most. If I don’t know what it’s afraid of, I can’t tear apart its mind as easily. Or reliably, for that matter.”
Ethan sat up. “How long would you need to watch for?”
“Five or ten minutes for a dumb brute like that if you can work him over,” he said.
“Well, that should be easy enough,” Ethan said. “We’ll just sneak up on it and watch him for a few.”
Maii shook his head. “No, I’ll need you to talk to it so I can get a good idea of how its mind works. Besides, as the sergeant pointed out back there, he’ll smell us coming.”
“That’s a long time to chat up an ettin,” Ethan replied.
“Then I suggest you don’t get drawn into a fight,” Maii said with a grin. “Or if you do, you avoid getting hit. I can’t bring the dead back to life.”
# # #
Four hours or so into their search, a voice—strained, gravely, and failing miserably at sounding feminine—cut through the air.
“Somebody saves me, pleases! He’s so bad!”
Ethan, Zoey, and Maii stopped dead in their tracks and threw perplexed looks at each other.
“Tell me that’s not our ettin,” Ethan said.
Maii wrinkled his nose and shuddered as he took in a good whiff of air. “That voice is coming from the same direction as that stench I’ve been tracking the last twenty minutes.”
“Oh, saves me! Help! Help!” came the cry. “He’s so big!”
Before the trio could confer with each other again, a second voice, close to the first in distance and tone, added, “He’s strong, too.”
“Yes! He’s strong! And handsomeses.”
“So handsomeses! I can’t take it!”
“Well, if he is this noisy and stupid, maybe we have a good shot at this,” Ethan said. “Maybe we could convince the guards to tow some cannons over.”
Zoey shook her head. “He knows we’re here, and I’m sure he’d smell anyone else who tried to creep up on him. Besides, if we don’t chat him up now, I’d wager he’ll skip whatever stupid thing he’s got cooked up and jump us on the road.”
“Only if there were some of my goodest humans to come rescue me from this clever ettin!” came another cry. It, as before, was joined by yet another. “And looks at all the lovelies loots to be had for saving me! Oh, saves me please!”
“We better get moving,” Zoey said. “He sounds anxious.”
Ethan nodded, and the group pressed on for a few minutes before they reached a small clearing in the woods. In the center of the clearing was an old stump about four feet high. On it sat a pumpkin with a crudely painted face on its front and a handful of straw stuck on top. Wrapped around its “torso” were a few pieces of old rope that had been used to tie mismatched clothes to the stump. Directly in front of it was a pit, poorly concealed with a dozen thin branches and some leaves thrown on for good measure.
“Oh, good sir knight man! Will you be my truester loves and rescue me? We could marry the morrows if you’s likes.”
Ethan followed the sound of the voice and spied a good-sized boulder about twenty yards from the damsel. Good-sized, however, was all relative, because Ethan could easily see the giant huddling behind it. It had its two balding heads ducked low, and judging by the creature’s short, erratic movements in its rag-covered body, it looked like it was trying to hold back from bursting into laughter.
“Alrighty, then,” Ethan said, smirking at the scene before him. “This is going to be easy.”
Zoey shook her head and nudged him forward. “Be careful. Stupid can still be strong.”
“Will do,” he said. “And Maii, think you can drive him crazy enough to fall into that pit?”
“I can do much better than that,” he said, giving a devilish grin. “You stay alive and keep him talking, and I’ll take care of our friend.”
Ethan nodded before stepping free of the tree line. Immediately, the ettin grew quiet—for a few seconds, that is. Ethan had barely made three strides before the creature was giggling to itself like a couple of grade school kids about to bring down the teacher’s wrath for not paying attention.
“He’s going to falls right in!” one head whispered.
“I bets he gets all squishy splitty on them spikes,” replied the other.
Ethan stopped, deciding that his spot was as good a place as any to entertain the giant. Well, at the very least, he would be the one being entertained. The ettin, he guessed, might not be, especially when Maii did whatever it was he planned on doing. “Whatever has happened to you, my fair damsel?” Ethan called out, hand over his heart, and milking his performance for as much over-the-top drama as he could.
Out of th
e corner of his eye, Ethan saw the ettin hunker down even more before raising a hand to one of its heads and issuing its reply. “This big, mean ogre took me aways, he did!”
“Ettin!” the other chimed in, trying unsuccessfully to match the first’s voice.
“I meant ettin!”
“That’s terrible!” Ethan said. “What does he look like so I can watch out for him?”
“Big!”
“Very big!”
“And strong.”
“So strong.”
Ethan shook his head out of pity for the giant. This was too easy. “He sounds enormous. I bet he had lots of muscles.”
“Oooo! So many muscles!” the two said together, voices quivering. Then one hand bopped one of the heads, and only one voice sounded next. “Come untie me, and I’ll gives you’s kissy as rewards.”
“Yers so handsomeses.”
Ethan chuckled, but had the presence of mind to recompose himself quickly before the giant brute took notice. “Why did he tie you up, my fair maiden?”
“’Cuz he’s mean!”
“I mean, shouldn’t he have eaten you?”
“Oh! Yes, he did. I means, he says he wills! Keeping us fresh for later.”
“Me! Not us!”
“Yes, yes. I meant me! Now hurry and unties us!”
The tone in the giant’s voice hinted at impatience, and so Ethan decided to give in a little to his damsel’s demands. “Of course, my sweet, fair maiden!”
Ethan glanced at the ettin. The two-headed giant was now peeking over the boulder like a giant Kilroy. His eyes were filled with excitement, and it was probably all the not-so-little ettin could do not to jump over the boulder and charge.
When he was only a half step from the edge of the poorly concealed pit, Ethan stopped. “You won’t trick me, foul witch!”
“Huh? I’s no witch!”
“Not one bit. I’s a sweet maidens, I is.”
“That’s what you’d like me to think,” Ethan said, crossing his arms. He then decided to draw on one of his favorite movies to confuse the creature further. “You are clearly made of wood, and everyone knows that’s what witches are made of.”
The Pirate (Captains & Cannons Book 1) Page 12