Chapter 5

  “Well, shit, newbie. Look what you did now,” Belle said, elbowing me in the ribs. We were lying on our stomachs peeking over the edge of the huge crater that used to be our hill.

  Wow, Ryan. Is there a universe you’ve gone to that you haven’t wrecked?

  The far edge of the sinkhole was a few hundred feet away from us, while the bottom looked to be far down enough that I wouldn’t have been keen on jumping even if it wasn’t guaranteed to swallow me up. Speaking of swallowing things, our jump point was gone along with half of the hill next door. Boulders laid strewn about the area in various degrees of stability, some still on a sedate slide down to nowhere.

  More interesting, however, were the things that weren’t slowly being devoured by the ground. Half buried stone archways jutted out of the soil, their open mouths little islands of stability in the otherwise shifting landscape. Pictograms of some kind of vaguely humanoid race zigzagged up the architecture, depicting said figures in various forms of repose, mostly lying down with arms crossed, some with their eyes open, some closed, others with no eyes at all.

  “I said I was sorry,” I repeated, unsure how else to respond. How was I supposed to know there was a whole ancient ruin down there? Honestly, they were lucky this happened now instead of when some poor Exotic drew the short straw and teleported into nowhere one day.

  With that thought, my gaze was drawn up into the air, above the sinkhole, where I estimated we’d jumped into this universe. The clouds above looked angrier now, and the rain was picking up the pace.

  “So, do we need to, I dunno, build a ladder or something for the people that need to get to Proxis?” I asked.

  Gizelle let out a derisive chuckle, while Belle shook her head.

  “Doesn’t work like that,” she said, pointing to the center of the sinkhole. “Think about it. The multiverse is a whole lot of nothing with little clumps of something all floating around inside right?”

  “Yeah. More or less,” I agreed. I’d had it explained to me like a glass of water with a splash of oil inside. It was largely still water (nothing), but now it had little globs of oil (all known realities) floating around and bumping into one another.

  Belle explained further getting to her feet and dusting off her hands. “One of the mistakes people make is thinking of our universe as a thing rubbing up against other things like a balloon animal orgy. It’s not like that. Location, as you know it, means zero.”

  Gizelle was nodding along as if her partner was saying the most obvious thing in the world, then said her bit.

  “Why would a jump point be tied to a point in space?” Gizelle asked. “We live on balls of dirt spinning through the cosmos at thousands of kilometers per hour. If jump points were tied to specific coordinates in space, they’d come and go so fast, we’d never even know they were there in the first place.”

  I felt the gears in my head grinding together. Maybe I did need to put a few points into Mind. “So, where’s the jump point now?” I asked.

  In answer, Belle kicked a rock and watched it tumble down the side of the sinkhole, all the way down to the bottom where it vanished from sight. She sucked in air through her teeth when the thing disappeared.

  Well, that was a problem.

  “I suppose,” Belle sighed. “the next Chosen to come through will record the new-”

  The world exploded in light as a bolt of lightning lanced down and struck the lowest point of the crater. The noise of it was so loud my ears started to ring, and I nearly lost my footing. Once I blinked the tracers out of my eyes, I saw that Belle already had her carbine up to her shoulder and was aiming along the sight at something.

  Exactly where the lightning struck, there was a skeletal hand now clutching Belle’s rock, the dirt around it steaming from having all its moisture flash boiled. The bony fingers flexed slowly, one by one, extending then curling like it was the first time they’d been used in quite some time. Then the hand began to rise until it was joined by a forearm, a shoulder bone.

  Only a few seconds later, the soil seemed to churn, and more skeletal hands burst into the open air, these followed by grinning skulls. They rose from the soil almost as one, shaking dirt out of their cracks and crevices with spasmodic, dog-like shakes of their bodies. In a few heartbeats, the hillside was crawling with them.

  The first of them to get to their feet stretched itself to its full height, its bones clacking as they seemed to be pulled fully into their sockets for the first time in centuries.

  Yes, they were skeletons, but not exactly as I’d pictured them when I was a kid. Where one might expect to find a moldering collection of bones jerkily shambling into a fantasy battle with a rusted sword in one hand and a broken shield in the other, these things were a strange combination of bleached bone and chrome finished metal. The skeletons’ extremities were mostly just bone, while the core of the creature (the skull and spinal cord) were shiny with metal Detect Iron gave at least a partial hit on.

  The skulls were roughly human shaped but with sloped foreheads and a pair of dull tusks that protruded from the bottom jaw, and a pair of glowing white orbs shone in the eye sockets. Below that, everything was where I expected it to be, except it seemed like all the bones were being held together with metal wires that flexed and wound through the skeletal structure, sometimes through the middle of the bones themselves.

  The skeleton creatures used their naked feet to steady themselves in the loose soil. Then, one by one, they cast their glowing eye sockets up to where we stood.

  We and the undead stared silently at one another, neither group making a move.

  Gizelle was the first to speak. “Everyone back away slowly,” she whispered to the living.

  I didn’t need to be told twice. I hadn’t had the best experience with Undead. I took a slow step backward, away from the lip of the hole, but the closest of the skeleton monsters seemed to lean forward as I did so, reaching out tentatively while following me with their glowing eyes. Others, further down the slope, made more overt moves to follow, taking one or two long steps up from the pit.

  “Uh. Looks like they want to follow us,” I said.

  “They might be territorial. Guardians maybe,” Gizelle replied. “Just keep backing away, and keep your hands visible.”

  Back away we did until we were far enough from the hole that I couldn’t see all the way down inside. However, multiple pairs of glowing eyes rose from the pit after us, and they began to pull themselves out.

  “Definitely following us,” I reiterated.

  “How astute, “ Gizelle replied calmly before raising her voice. “We come in peace and don’t wish to disturb you or your sleep! Leave us be, and we will leave you to rest!”

  The undead didn’t seem interested in listening, though. They kept coming, crawling their way out of their mass grave.

  “Don’t think that’s ever worked,” Belle lamented, sweeping the muzzle of her carbine back and forth from one dead face to another.

  Now that they were within spitting range, it was becoming apparent that they were not human sized skeletons. Fully upright, they were 9 or 10 feet tall, and the bones they were composed of looked thick and textured, like they’d been the victims of a terrible bone disease or maybe altered in some way. No way having bones with grooves and pointy pits could be comfortable to live with… it would be agony all day.

  That was as far as I could speculate before the hybrid metal skeletons made their first move. They charged us.

  I don’t know what it is with me, what about me that attracts flesh hungry hordes of monsters. It happened all the time.

  I mean, sure, as of today, it’d only happened twice, which wasn’t a lot of times on paper, but once you lived it twice was often enough.

  At least these guys were a breath of fresh air in the tactics department. While the scourge had been frothing berserkers, all teeth and claws and angry screaming, these bony guys fought like civilized people. Creepy people with metallic grins but people nonetheless. They even carried themselves in a way I could understand, head down, feet apart, like they wanted to win this fight and maybe live through it too.

  The first to get within striking range, the bravest of the bunch or maybe a leader of some kind, squared up to Belle, its body and feet set like it had some training in melee combat, one foot back, arms together like it was holding a-

  “Look out!” I shouted, just as the skeleton thing swung in an overhead chop down on the red headed Pathfinder. I slid into position in front of her and raised my metal arm to block the incoming strike. Honestly, I was acting on instinct here. None of the monsters had any tools or weapons in their hands, and they were all too far away to make a grab for anyone or throw a punch. I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything about what this monster was currently doing screamed “sword” to me, from its stance to the way it squared its shoulders.

  *CLANG*

  Undying Amalgamation hits you for 0 damage (spirit). [36 base, -36 mitigated]

  Status gained: Stunned.

  Status lost: Stunned.

  Something hard smashed into my forearm with considerable force, enough force for me to feel it all the way in my feet. My leg muscles strained to keep me upright, and my insides vibrated uncomfortably. There was a brief spark at the moment of impact, a tingling that made all the hair on my body stand on end. That was the extent of it, though. I never felt much more than a little discomfort.

  The spark, though brief, revealed a broad blade that rebounded off of my arm before going invisible again.

  Apparently not one to miss a free shot, Belle shouted and thrust forward with the barrel of her las-gun, slamming it hard into the monster’s sternum. Again, there was a sort of spark, and a significant portion of the monster’s body was lit up to reveal ghostly flesh, pale white and semi-transparent.

  “RRAARRGH!” Belle screamed as her body seemed to go stiff all at once, including her trigger finger. Angry red bolts of energy sizzled as they lanced through the spectral body to ionize the bones underneath. The attacks didn’t make it far into the organic matter, but what it did damage ended up blackened and cracked.

  “Agh!” Belle grunted. “Nasty stuns! Resistant to physical too!”

  The skeleton took another swipe with its sword, but the Pathfinder was ready for it this time, rolling to the side to avoid the overhand chop then firing a pair of shots into the skeleton’s pelvis that made my inner male wince in sympathy despite myself. It doubled over as the laser fire burned through the bone until it split down the middle. Then the lower half of the monster got all wobbly, and it went down on its belly.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Gizelle was a lot better at dodging. She spun to avoid a thrust then slid to get around another overhead chop. Again, a ghostly weapon sparked as it hit the ground, and my hair stood on end. Gizelle then countered with a quick jab with her punch blade. As she did so, an eerie blue light gathered on its tip and sizzled in the humid air. The tip of the dagger jammed into the monster’s collar bone, and ice immediately started to spread through its shoulder and neck joints.

  Contact with the monster took its toll, though. The Pathfinder seized, her body losing all of its coordination before she could follow up with another strike. The one blow might have been enough, though. The ice crackled and popped as it engulfed the monster’s shoulder, neck and ribcage, and when it tried to take another swing at Gizelle, the bones shattered on their own. The monster halted mid-swing and recoiled as it lost nearly a quarter of its usable mass.

  However, another stepped into its place, driving Gizelle back before she could capitalize further on her first opponent’s vulnerability.

  They were protecting each other. They were creating openings for one another too. It also wasn’t lost on me that they waited until they were on even footing with us before they attacked. They were intelligent, maybe even sapient.

  I didn’t like our odds if we had to fight a bunch of these guys.

  With a quick flash of dimensional juju, I had my machine pistol in hand and was taking aim with Death Eye. Instantly, the skeleton monster lit up with dozens of big orange highlighted weak points. For obvious reasons, the metal skull and spinal cord didn’t count. The rest however, was fair game.

  *PRRT* *PRRRRTT*

  I squeezed two bursts of automatic fire into the general area with the greatest number of weak points, specifically the upper left rib cage, the collar bone, and the clavicle. Not every bullet hit (I wasn’t that kind of marksman), but I made up for it in volume. The skeleton’s upper left side disintegrated as about 15 fingertip sized ballistic steel projectiles slammed into moldy old bones. Splinters exploded into the air and spun off into the pit. At least one hit me in the cheek hard enough to draw blood.

  I brought a certain ‘lots-of-bullets’ vibe to all my fights, and that carried with it some drawbacks. No shame in it, though. I knew Trix would have been appalled at the lack of precision and the waste of ammunition, but that was the beauty of leaving your best friend in another universe. He wasn’t around to give you shit for your sub-par aim.

  I must have done damage to something important, because the skeleton pretty much disintegrated, only making a minor effort to keep itself together before the entirety of its body came tumbling down.

  Then, I did the same to skeleton number four that was attacking Belle, shattering its shoulder bones and giving the Pathfinder a little breathing room. Then, in a move that was both ill-advised and extremely badass, Belle jammed her carbine into the monster’s eye and fired a full auto blast into the empty void inside. Her screams of pain and… uh… excitement (?) were going to stay with me for a while.

  Another skeleton swung at me from my left, but I slipped to the side easily. These guys might have been smart enough for tactics, but they weren’t overly fast or strong. The initial hit I’d taken had been a big alpha strike, sure, but I was pretty sure I had their number now.

  Going with that hunch, I stepped into the skeleton’s guard, knocking its sword to the side before it could get any momentum behind its swing, then grabbed its face, my metallic fingers slipping right into its glowing eye sockets.

  Devouring Grasp [5 MP/sec]

  Critical hit! You attack the Undying Amalgamation for 322 damage (crushing).

  You gain knowledge of Geist Iron [1/10]

  You gain knowledge of Betok [1/10]

  You gain knowledge of Igorian Bone [2/10]

  You gain Engine [2 MP/sec]

  You have defeated Undying Amalgamation.

  You gain 0 experience points. [300 base, +150 Near Death Experience, -240 non combat class, +30 group, -240 class restriction]

  Experience rate 0/min.

  The metal skull crumpled like a tin can. Its scream (yes, it was screaming) sounded like steam escaping a kettle, and a greasy feeling white fog billowed out of the top of its now ruined cranium.

  I dropped it as soon as I got the death notification.

  Zero experience? Now, what was wrong with that one, System?

  *PRRRRRRRRT*

  I fanned my machine pistol over the rest of the crowd until my magazine went dry. The gathered throng jerked and crumbled where they’d been hit, but no kill notifications popped up in my feed.

  To my left, Gizelle struck out with her punch dagger once more and took her other opponent in the mouth with another icy strike. The skull froze followed by the spine, and all of its efforts to kill her ceased. Then, after shaking off the initial stun, the Pathfinder retracted her dagger and came down with a wicked slam that shattered all the bones on the thing’s right side, all the way down to its femur. It too collapsed to the floor.

  Then she stood over it, panting, sweating, her body swaying like she’d just lifted a ton and just got a chance to put it down.

  “Down to a quarter MP,” she gasped.

  The air did that thing again. It changed… pulled at my awareness like a gravity well. This time the sensation stuck around, though.

  “RRRAAAAGH!” Belle yelled. She was down on one knee, the tip of her carbine glowing with red light so intense it cast the woman in bloody monochrome. The world around her darkened visibly, the diffuse light from the sky no longer seeming to be able to reach her. Then a gigantic blast of angry scarlet erupted from her gun, engulfing four separate skeletons entirely and sending two more back down into the hole they’d come from.

  It lasted for only a second, maybe a second and a half, but when it was done, Belle was breathing hard too, sweat soaking her hair along with the rain. “MP down to an eighth here. 90 HP and *huff* bleeding bad too.”

  Already? How much MP did their attack Abilities take? I checked my own.

  MP [284/284]

  “Uh. I’m good here,” I said quietly.

  “Maybe you can craft them to death,” Belle said sarcastically. She reached into her belt, pulled out a loop of black fabric and slipped it over her arm where the skeleton had slashed her. With a *zip* the loop tightened, and her face contorted in pain. The flow of blood from the wound slowed significantly, though.

  “That all of them?” Belle asked.

  “Yeah, they’re down, but I didn’t get any kill notifications. you?” Gizelle replied as she strode over to the crumbled remains of the iced over skeletons she’d had defeated.

  Belle’s eyes scanned through her log. “One. Tough bastards. Looks like they’re vulnerable to-Qoaaaoh! What the hell!?”

  The skeleton nearest her, that we’d taken to be dead, sprang from the ground, only it didn’t use it’s broken and useless bones. While we weren’t watching, the metal tendrils it had used to keep itself together had unwound from its extremities and were now undulating like they were underwater, and the monster was using them for locomotion.

  The thing hissed at her, its glowing eyes flaring in a threat display, and then it… slithered? Crawled? Whatever. It slither-crawled away, back to the lip of the sinkhole, its metal tentacles and wiggling spine pulling it along like the combination of an octopus and a snake. It was fast too. It zipped along the ground, low and erratic. The hasty burst of shots I squeezed off didn’t even come close to hitting the thing. The creepy, weirdness factor may have had something to do with my aim too.

  “Look!” Gizelle shouted, pointing at the others we’d downed. The rest of their skulls were waking up too, their strange tendrils unraveling from their broken bones and dropping them to the ground. Once they got free, they proved quick like the other ones, squirmy too. I tried to grab onto the little tendrils, but they were slick with rain and… wriggly.

  The only ones that seemed to stay dead were Belle’s split skull special and the one I’d Devouring Grasped.

  “We’re not getting paid for this,” Belle said, flexing her arm and running her fingers over her tourniquet.

  “Agreed,” Gizelle replied. “Run?”

  “Run.”

  Loot Undying Amalgamation? Y/N

  My skeleton jellyfish’s crumpled metal form was unpleasantly hot to the touch, hot enough to steam in the humid air and rain, but I powered through.

  That familiar cloud of rainbow light bubbled up in my vision as the corpse in front of me seemed to change, becoming less, somehow, as the System did what it did with things I’d killed. When the light dissipated, the skull sagged down to the floor, no longer supported entirely by its corresponding metal spine, and the shiny tendrils that had been wrapped firmly around its bones, relaxed their hold until I was looking at a few hundred separate pieces of monster. The bones that lay around it, however, weren’t affected at all by the System.

  An item hit the ground with a *clang* and bounced off the ruined skull. When I picked it up, the System gave me what I wanted.

  Igorian Knight Blade: An Igorian Knight’s blade was their entire life and legacy, and the deeds they wrought in life were to be buried with them in death. However, this Knight’s blade was used as his prison, a punishment for valuing blind loyalty over justice.

  Damage: 20 - 44 (slashing, spirit), 20 - 40 (piercing, spirit)

  Quality: Exquisite

  Style: Igorian Iron Age

  “What is it?” Gizelle asked.

  “Nothing good,” I replied, carefully turning the blade over in my hand. It was tingly. Almost uncomfortable to hold, tingly, and that was saying something from an Exotic with over 60 Body. Into the Spatial Storage it went. No way was I going to use it after reading that description.

  I caught more rainbow light out of the corner of my eye as Belle looted her kill. “I’ve got some kind of chisel over here. The System’s mentioning Death Rites and things like that. Probably won’t sell too well.”

  Gizelle was looking into her wrist hologram thing. “Bestiary’s got nothing on them, though, so there’s that.”

  “Guess it’s nice to be paid for your MP,” Belle huffed. “Even if it’s shit pay. We’ll post a bounty at the next outpost, get a full group in here to clear the place out.”

  I walked over to the lip of the hole and looked down. The skeletons were gone, though they’d left some bones behind. My guess was that the real monster was the metal skull jellyfish things anyway. They’d fully gone to ground after taking a couple losses, meaning they were capable of fear.

  “They’re going to ambush the next person to come through the jump, aren’t they?” I asked.

  Belle stuffed the bone chisel she’d looted into her pack and slipped her arms back into the straps. “We work for a living, Kotes. If we aren’t getting paid to clear out a monster nest, we’ll leave it to somebody else. We don’t have the MP to do it anyway.”

  I frowned at her. “Anyone could come through there and get killed, though. Aren’t you guys all about keeping the multiverse open?”

  “Not doing that if we’re dead, are we? The way this works is that we post a bounty at the next outpost, and a group of fighters will come along to clear it out. Either that, or the next cargo group blunders into them, and they send word back through the jump. Either way, this point is closed until this gets sorted, and we’re not the ones to do it. We’re not fit.”

  I didn’t like the idea of some hapless Exotic jumping into this universe only to get swarmed by a ton of monsters. I’d kicked this particular hornet’s nest, and I wasn’t about to get anyone else killed for wandering into the ensuing shit storm.

  The best option would be to clear the place out to make the jump safe or jump back to Proxis and tell them about the danger to let them respond accordingly. To do that, though, I’d have to go down there, something my Pathfinders weren’t willing to do. Oh, and I was probably a fugitive on Proxis by now. There was that. Any moment now, the Marshals would probably send someone through the jump point to find me and bring me back to my cell. It wouldn’t do for me to make their job that much easier by just… throwing myself into their arms.

  There had to be a way.

  “Pardon me,” a high but distinctly male voice said from behind me. I spun, shocked to find someone when there definitely wasn’t anyone there before. He was slim, wiry, and tall with form fitting athletic clothes under a camouflaged and hooded cloak. Steam rose from his shoulders, and his chest rose and fell as if he’d just been running full out.

  Belle let the muzzle of her carbine droop just a little so she was no longer aiming at the guy’s face. If he took offense at having a weapon pointed at him, he didn’t show it. His plain features showed no fear or strain other than his heavy breathing. His clear eyed stare openly evaluated the three of us and the hole that used to be a hill beyond.

  “I’m a courier on official business, and I need to get back to Proxis. Priority one,” he said, frowning at the empty air above the hole. “Where the hell did the jump point go?”

  “‘Evening, mister,” Belle said carefully as she finally let her carbine dangle from its strap. Whether the courier cared that the weapon was just pointed at his face, I didn’t know. He seemed quite unfazed, maybe even a little amused.

  Gizelle similarly relaxed and retracted her punch dagger into its sheath. “Sorry. You snuck up on us. We just had a spot of trouble, and we’re a bit on edge.”

  The man raised an eyebrow. “Trouble? What kind of trouble?”

  Belle indicated the yawning mouth of the sinkhole with her head. “No contamination. Just monsters. Point’s closed, though, ‘less you wanna shimmy down there and find the jump yourself.”

  The courier almost looked like he wanted to do just that. “Very well. I won’t trouble you further. Thank you for the information. I’ll carry the word through the jump.” He said it like it was the most natural thing in the world. He was going to dive down into a dungeon and slip through to another universe. Just another day at the office.

  Belle looked shocked. “No way you want to go down there and tangle with a bunch of unknowns for some message.”

  It was just then that I got an idea. I got a wonderfully awful idea.

  “Doesn’t matter what I want. It’s Priority 1. Besides, I have a very high Stealth skill,” the courier assured her with a tiny smirk. He rolled his neck, bent down in a brief runner’s stretch, then took off toward the lip of the sinkhole.

  “Hey! Wait!” I called after him. There must have been something in my tone that drew him up, stopped him almost mid-jump at the edge of the hole. He turned around and tilted his head at me questioningly.

  Obviously, this was the Marshals’ courier. This man was carrying a message that would make me a fugitive in at least one star system, and he was right there, staring me in the face.

  Let’s make lemonade, Ryan.

  “The way you- uh- spoke… Priority 1 and all that.” I looked at both of the Pathfinders meaningfully, with all the charm I could muster, bringing them right into what I was about to set in motion.

  “It sounds like you could use an escort.”

  Deception is now level 10.

  Upgrade paths available:

  False Confidence

  Deflection

  Hidden Strength

  Hey. Thanks for giving In my Defense a chance. New chapters will be posted Tuesdays and Thursdays, eventually ramping up depending on the amount of interest we can generate here.

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