by David Burke
His muscles swelled as he pushed himself to the limit and beyond. He could feel them cording up like tightly woven bands of iron and then it happened. There was a sickening snapping sound. The creature’s body spasmed as the final nerve impulses fired off and then it went limp.
Jay stood up, kicking the creature hard enough that his enhanced frame sent it flying ten feet to hit a tree. It didn’t so much as move a muscle, so he took it to be safely dead. Dropping his other skills, he sent out a pulse of Life Sense and once sure that they were again alone he dropped to Amelia’s side.
She was hesitant to allow him to inspect the wound but he coaxed her into it while steeling his nerves so that his fear wouldn’t show on his face. Where there had been lust, now all he felt was concern. He ran to his backpack and took out one of the sheets that he had purchased, tearing it into strips to make a bandage. He had no medical training. Heck for that matter he didn’t have much in the way of practical training at all, but he had seen enough episodes of wilderness survival shows to fuddle through it.
Once the wound was bound he helped her dress as much as he could. She didn’t want to wear her shirt since it was the only top she had from home so he let her wear his shirt that he had bought from the shop. It was oversized on her but worked just fine. He helped her get her shorts on and then her shoes. After restoring her modesty he got his own pants and shoes on, but didn’t have a spare shirt so he had to go shirtless. He knew that Amelia was in a bad way because she didn’t even so much as make a remark about him being sans clothing on top.
Since she didn’t have regeneration and he didn’t have any healing skills there wasn’t much more he could do for her other than get her out of the dungeon as quickly as possible. He had to hope that one of the others with a healing ability would be around the ziggurat when he got there. They got her up together and at her insistence tried to see if she was able to walk but she couldn’t as each attempted step caused her excruciating pain that she was barely able to grit her teeth through.
“I’m just going to have to carry you,” Jay said.
“What for the miles back to the cliff door?” Amelia asked.
“Yeah, you don’t weigh much even if I didn’t have enhanced strength, but since it went up to 3 you don’t feel heavier than a tiny child even without spending stamina points.”
“I can’t let you do that, what if something else attacks us. Maybe you should just go back and then bring help here,” Amelia protested.
“Don’t go getting all noble on me or I’m gonna think you are about to die. You know as well as I do that it wouldn’t be safe out here by yourself. As soon as I am gone there wouldn’t be anything to stop some other lizat from grabbing itself a piece of Amelia pie.”
“I still have my abilities. I could hide. I’m not helpless. And what is a lizat?”
Jay placed his hands on either side of her face as she leaned up against a tree. “I know you aren’t helpless. You may be a royal pain in my backside, but you are one of the most competent people I have ever met. You have adapted to this impossible situation and I think maybe you are seeing more clearly than any of the rest of us. But there is no way that I am going to leave you here. This is at least partially my fault after all.”
“There you go being a bone head again. How is this your fault?” Amelia asked.
“Well if I hadn’t let myself get carried away with desire for you then I wouldn’t have dropped my guard. I might have detected the lizat sooner. Oh and it’s part lizard, part cat, so I’m calling it a lizat.”
Amelia just shook her head. “We may have to revoke your naming privileges, but seriously, don’t treat me like I wasn’t there. It was me who wanted you. I don’t even know what came over me. One minute I was all focused on training then you said something about lunch and I started to calm down. It was almost like a switch flipped inside my head and I went from fighting tiger to sex kitten.”
“It has to be whatever is in the water. This is our third day of drinking it and it must be building up in our system,” Jay said.
“If that is what it is then why didn’t I get all hot and bothered when we were training? There were a few times that we were very close together, and I certainly admired your chest when you took your shirt off, but I didn’t have any of the weird thoughts that I had once we sat down and started eating.”
“Weird thoughts? What do you mean?” Jay asked.
At that point Amelia did something Jay had never seen nor expected to see from her, she blushed. “Um, well … never mind. I mean. It’s not a secret but I need to think about it some more. It was not like me at all. Just let me put it like this. I absolutely had to have you inside me that very instant. I don’t even know how you resisted the urge if you were feeling half of what I was feeling. Sorta makes me actually depressed thinking about how you were able to resist it.”
“Now you are really confusing me. Trust me, I wanted you at least as much as you wanted me. This time my body was demanding immediate action, no slow build-up.”
“That doesn’t make it any better. You were still able to resist.”
“I don’t get it.”
“No probably not, and that is part of your charm in a backwards sort of way. Well if you are going to be my chariot, I guess we better get going. Certainly don’t want to be here if and when it gets dark.”
Jay decided to let it drop and just picked her up after strapping his spear to his backpack. He had meant it before, she really didn’t feel heavy at all. As he trotted down the jungle trail sending off a pulse of Life Sense every 15 seconds or so, he got to thinking about what had been going on in his mind immediately prior to the attack. It had been like there were two brains inside him fighting for control. A primal brain that just wanted him to take her and well, um leave his mark on her so to speak and a more cognitive brain that recognized the danger of the situation. He concluded that his new Iron Will skill must have been part of what allowed him to succeed where she had failed.
Chapter 27 - Long Trek Home
The trip home took five hours and was far more perilous than Jay had anticipated. Whether it was because of the scent of blood coming from Amelia’s still-seeping wound or just because the animals were getting more restless as it got closer to nightfall, Jay didn’t know. Either way he had to stop and fight no less than 14 times.
Four times it was to fight solo owlbears. As powerful as those creatures were they were slower and far less aggressive. He was always able to detect them before they attacked and with range he was able to disable them with accelerated rocks. By combining his greater strength which allowed him to throw the rocks harder and faster in the first place with the acceleration he was able to cause far more damage.
The lizats were much worse. Sometimes they came one at a time but just as often they attacked in pairs. They somehow moved close enough, quickly enough to attack between when he sent out pulses of Life Sense. Each time he fought them he had to set Amelia down. Combined with the strain she experienced as he tried running, her wound kept bleeding through the bandages he made from strips of cloth.
The attacks were mostly easy enough to handle. Two of the attacks were bad. The first one was when two came at him in tandem. He speared the one that attacked him from the front, bringing it down quickly enough. Then his back erupted in pain at the same instant his precognition warned him of danger. The second lizat raked both its front and middle pairs of legs down his back, cutting deep furrows into his skin and pinning him face down. If it weren’t for a flash of shadow that blasted out from Amelia, Jay might very well have died there.
Though it saved him, the strain of that attack caused Amelia to lose consciousness. Jay was able to knock the dead creature off of his back and half crawled half stumbled over to Amelia. He couldn’t wake her but he was able to make new bandages and try to bind her abdominal wound as tightly as possible. His wounds could have been every bit as bad but for his hardened body. The claws still dug in painfully but they didn’t slice qui
te as deeply and were able to reach his spine. Since his second awakening his base level of regeneration had gone up substantially. It would still take hours before he was completely healed even if he had been able to rest and push PSI into increasing the self-healing skill.
That simply wasn’t possible in this situation now. He realized that Amelia’s condition was much worse and she couldn’t survive the hours that he would need to be at 100%. So, back torn up, he grabbed his backpack from where he had thrown it when fighting the first lizat and grimaced as he flung it over his raw wounds. Then keeping his spear in his arms he cradled Amelia next to it and started out at a steady jog.
He was forced to feed a steady stream of Stamina points into enhancing his strength to keep going but he couldn’t risk using more than he naturally regenerated. If another attack came he would need it all to have any chance of surviving in his current state.
The saving grace of the next attack was that it came at the very end. This meant that he had another hour to regenerate and that he was within sight of the door in the cliff wall. Just as he was exiting the tree line into the clearing before the doorway he got a stabbing sense of danger and whirled, keeping Amelia in one arm and using the other to hold his spear.
Even though his spear found its target he still got claws and worse, found the lizat’s mouth clamped down on his shoulder. Its teeth were less cat-like and more akin to a set of serrated razor blades all tearing their way into his flesh. He screamed out in what he later felt was a most girly fashion, but it was that cry that alerted the other party to their state.
Jay didn’t remember exactly what happened but Huong and Liam described him as a feral beast. He fought with hardened fingertips and raw fury fueled by rage and determination. In the end he forced his fingers into its eyes and brought the fight to an end as with a final surge of strength he crushed its skull.
Chapter 28- So What’s the Situation?
Jay had no way of knowing how long it was but he woke up to find himself on some blankets on the ground outside the shelter. He sat upright immediately, his first thought, “Amelia?” He looked to one side and then the other and saw her lying on another blanket next to him. Seeing that he had woken up, one of the girls came over to check on him and signaled for Liam to join them.
“We were really worried about you. You were out for three hours or so,” she said. Jay looked up and sure enough the sun was setting. It was that time of day best described as dusk; not the afternoon and not yet fully night time.
“I guess you healed me didn’t you?”
She smiled as she said, “I was the first one there. Our team was hunting close to the entrance to the dungeon and so it was just lucky. But I was glad that I could be there for you.”
“Daphne had to help me with Amelia and even then it was all that we could do to get her wound to heal up properly. In fact if I hadn’t learned as much from healing people today as I had, I don’t think that we would have been able to fix her up. She had lost too much blood for my ability alone to save her.” Huong had a soft, sad look on her face as she spoke.
“Well we all know how Amelia is with thank yous, so let me say ‘Thank you’ to you on her behalf and I will remember to thank Daphne too,” Jay said.
Huong seemed genuinely pleased and blurted out, “I didn’t do it for her. Err… what I mean is that I didn’t do it just for her. Obviously, I would help anyone who was hurt.”
Jay may not have been very savvy when it came to the fairer sex but he could tell there was a mine field here that he wanted to avoid. So he turned to broader subjects. “What happened today? Did others go into the dungeon?”
Huong frowned again at that question. “Everyone who hadn’t completed the quest before went in and at least got the 100 credits. Other than that only Liam, me, and a couple of the other girls that I’m not sure you know were willing to go back in and start hunting for the beryl syrups that the second quest asks for.”
“Only four of you?”
Her frown threatened to turn into tears at that point but she managed to say, “Well there was another group…” but that was all she managed to get out.
About that time, Jasmine walked over with Mia and Kenzie in tow behind her. “I’m pleased to see that you survived, Jay.”
Something about her tone set him on edge. “But maybe I learned my lesson and will listen to the council now?”
Jasmine sighed and shook her head. “Don’t put words in my mouth. I didn’t say that. I, no, we, all are genuinely glad to see you made it out even if you were both very injured. After we get camp set up we can discuss how everyone’s day went. For right now, you need to know that the other party that Huong mentioned didn’t make it back from the dungeon, but their remains were found by Liam’s group.”
“Oh, freak, I’m sorry. That sorta explains why everyone was unwilling to go into the dungeon, but I think I can help with that.”
“We will talk about that, but for now we need to figure out the housing situation tonight,” Jasmine said.
“Uh, okay, what does that have to do with me?”
Mia jumped in at that point. “Well it costs 20 credits per night to rent a bungalow and you have the most credits. We were hoping that you would rent all the bungalows and then let others sleep in them.”
“So wait, you know that won’t work. If I rent a bungalow then I am the only one who can add others to it.” Jay closed his eyes and did some quick math and then said, “That would mean spending 380 credits. I can do that tonight, but I can’t do it every night. Besides, everyone has enough for a night in a bungalow now. It’s almost dark. I’m shocked that they aren’t all rented already.”
Kenzie said, “That is where Liam is right now. Keeping everyone from renting any of the bungalows. And most of us have less than 100 credits so 20 credits is a huge amount of what we have. Until we can figure this beryl syrups thing out we won’t have a reliable means of getting credits.”
Amelia sat up at that point. “It isn’t his responsibility to take care of everyone.” Then to Jay, “You don’t have to pay for all of them. What have they ever done for you?”
“Oh, I suppose he only has to take care of you and we all know what you’ve done for him,” Huong said scathingly.
“Give it a rest. I won. You lost. Learn to live with it,” Amelia said as she stood up and walked up till she was just inches away from the smaller Vietnamese girl.
“Amelia, you should be kind to her. You are only alive because of her. Well her and Daphne worked together to heal you,” Jay said as he moved to intervene between the two lovely ladies.
The two of them glared at one another for a moment longer before Jasmine asked, “So will you do it, at least for tonight?”
As Jay started to answer, Amelia cut him off, saying, “We need to talk about this,” and tugged on his arm, pulling him 20 feet away from the rest of the group.
“You can’t go and spend that many credits on something that doesn’t benefit us.”
“Us, I thought they were my credits. Don’t get me wrong, I want you on my team and I will continue to have your back, but did we become a couple at some point and I didn’t realize it?”
“Arghh, isn’t that what being a team means. We have to use our resources for the benefit of the team. You wanna see the team as everyone here, but that is only gonna get you killed. We have to… no, you have to be smart about this.”
“What and you want the team to only be the 2 of us. Look, you have to trust other people at some point. You needed me to carry you out of the jungle and you needed those girls to save your life once we both collapsed. So don’t go thinking we can do this without others.”
Amelia stood there bristling at him and stomping her foot petulantly. When she didn’t say anything Jay asked, “Why is it so hard for you to say thank you. It doesn’t weaken you to be grateful. God knows I learned that. My dad was one of those who would never thank anyone and said a man takes what he wants and lives by his own strength. Well I
call bullshit. Sometimes we really are stronger together. I’ve already listened to you. I agree that we have to work together as a smaller team than the entire group, but that doesn’t mean I am ready to abandon everyone else either.”
“Fine, thank you for saving my life. I mean, I’m sorry. I really do appreciate what you did for me. Not just anyone would have carried me for miles through a monster-infested jungle. I know I’m not the easiest person to get along with.”
Jay smiled at her. “You are more than welcome, and the truth is you helped save my life when that second lizat ended up on my back. I thought I was a goner, but what about Huong? Don’t you think you owe her some gratitude too?”
Amelia made an expression that creased her forehead and caused her lip to curl up but Jay just kept staring at her, expecting her to answer. “Fine, but it’s just hard with her.”
“Why is it hard with her? She seems very sweet and wants to be helpful. Honestly I probably trust her the most of all those on the council.”
“Of course you do and I already told you why it’s hard to be civil to Huong,” Amelia said, her usual sarcasm having returned.
“What makes you think she has the hots for me or whatever it is you think?”
“Supply and demand. There are only 2 guys here. We are all being loaded up with aphrodisiacs every time we drink the water. It is inevitable but for her, I’ve seen the way she looks at you. It’s sorta the same way that you look at Jasmine.”
Jay didn’t want to open that can of worms so he just said, “Whatever, but I need you to support me on this. We need a show of good faith and we need to get everyone into the dungeon. I can’t shake the feeling that if we don’t beat this thing that we won’t live past the 1000-cycle deadline.”