Company Unknown 4, page 22
It was impossible to tell if the Old Man bought it or whether he was even paying attention to me or had just pooped his pants. We sat and waited for what seemed like an eternity. Even I wasn’t sure if my stubbornness or impatience would win the day, but I was saved from deciding when a trio of riders moved to barely fifty feet away. There were only a couple dozen Fahrkini between me and Warham, and none of them had any idea I was there.
I didn’t hesitate to leap up and run straight at her. My hope was that the Old Man would have to follow. Hard to complete your cryptic mentoring when your mentee was dead. Or gloat at how right you were to a dead body. Even if he didn’t, I was confident I could take Warham.
The Fahrkini didn’t know what hit them. Invisibility tends to do that to people. I crashed into them like a berserker. Or like I’d been woken up from a hangover. Or . . . let’s just say there wouldn’t be much point sending in any healers. Unabashed violence was my nature, and this was it in its purest form.
Even such perfect kills take at least a little time, however. And they used those brief seconds between making new corpses well. Reinforcements were coming, and for once Warham wasn’t shooing them away so she could try and fail to take me on by herself again. It occurred to me a bit too late that she couldn’t tell who I was. A few too many people were between us, and I had a feeling some of whatever power the Old Man used to obscure me was still in effect.
There was a very easy way for me to change that, though, and I had the perfect abilities for that. Not even she would have trouble when I appeared right next to her—well, maybe if I hit her in the head before she could turn. Whatever. Swap!
Nothing happened, so I tried again and then again. “Stupid magic-blocker thingies,” I said to a Fahrkini who wouldn’t be hearing anything ever again after I took half his face off.
Undeterred, I switched to Dimensional Trip instead.
Nothing.
“Fine, twist my arm,” I said to another new corpse. “I’ll just have to slaughter my way there myself.”
I swung and killed like never before. The Fahrkini tried to fight back, but they were no match for my speed and skill. Swing, slash, bash, or parry, it didn’t matter. I evaded or forced my way through all of them.
After I’d slain my second dozen, I met one of their mages. Being very squishy and having seen what I’d done to his heartier brethren, he wisely chose a position behind a protective wall of shields. Their coordination and placement were airtight. His spell looked deadly. None of it mattered in the slightest. One second a Fireball was in dead center, a few feet in front of me with a wall of soldiers behind it, the next I was standing in the middle of a mound of charred corpses. Before I could figure out if the Fireball had hit them or if I had, I was burying my hammer in the mage’s skull. My body tingled with warmth, my mind with pleasure.
Did my Swap finally go off or had the Old Man had a hand it in it? I didn’t care.
The crack of the hammer, the crack of the skull, the tingle it brings to my crack—all things that add up to awesome. It was like my birthday, Christmas, and all the holidays rolled into one for me . . . at first.
A dozen bodies later I realized something was wrong. My body was practically humming, and that was exactly the problem. The humming and warmth were not metaphorical. They weren’t even from me. They were controlling me, pushing me—pushing me away from Warham and away from the Fahrkini army—and I had no control over any of it.
The last glimpse at the area behind me showed a small yellow head. The Old Man hadn’t followed me, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or bad. It was at least ten minutes later when control of my body returned and he wasn’t there to resume the spell or whatever he’d put on me—I think. The guy could go invisible after all.
Oh, well. “Focus on what’s in front of you and not what isn’t.”
A very easy thing to do when it’s a giant black castle in the middle of nowhere. At the very least, I wouldn’t have to feel bad about breaking everything inside.
“Vampire, necromancer, or old lady with an obsession for cats?” I asked.
Looking around did not get me an answer from anyone, invisible or not.
“Only one way to find out.”
With a whistle on my lips and a hammer in my hand, I stepped toward the open drawbridge. This world had its flaws, but an abundance of fun was not one of them.
HIDE & SEEK
For a castle that looked all dark and foreboding on the outside, it was, well, not quite the opposite inside, but it was nowhere near any of the three possibilities I’d not so jokingly suggested earlier. No furniture and decorations from a few hundred years ago (vampire), no smells of death and rotting “servants” there to greet me (necromancer), and no bright pink furniture and pictures of kittens (cat lady). This building was every bit the normal, boring castle it appeared to be: weapon racks on the far side of the courtyard, functional furniture inside the keep, and a few tapestries with a family crest spread liberally throughout. Now, of course, that didn’t mean it wasn’t the opposite of what it appeared. If I were going to fake an enemy out, this was exactly how I’d make the building look.
It wasn’t what I’d pictured a Fahrkini stronghold to look like, but I’d never seen one, so that didn’t exactly mean a whole lot. I assumed that if it were, I would see guards well before I entered, and certainly would have seen them after thirty minutes of walking around in the open. They could have also pulled everyone out for a final assault on the Gaelkini capital, though.
Given how close the capital was to that place, it was more likely to have been constructed by the Gaelkini themselves. If they’d abandoned it or it had been captured, there would have been battle scars or it would just have been destroyed by one side to prevent it from being used by the other. The lack of murals pointed to it not having been theirs unless the enemy had scrubbed them off.
“There’s only one way to solve a mystery,” I said to cut through the silence. “OK, fine, three: poke, stab, and slash, but my hammer’s only good for one of those.”
Before going past the first room in the keep, I decided to duck back out and close the gate. The Fahrkini army was probably still looking for me, so best to keep them from sneaking up behind me.
Getting a good lookout for the Old Man from the walls was a good idea too. He obviously wanted me here. Normally, that would send me the other way, but there was something about a mysterious castle in an absurd place that made me want to figure it out. Was it desire for more magic from the Old Man, or was it a lifetime of experience that said places like this always had cool stuff to steal?
Cryptic though he was, the Old Man had already given me more cool options for my hammer in a day than I’d gained in two months. My nature was to make people who wronged me pay, though, and few things were more wrong than giving vague answers when a straightforward one was so easy. Cool stuff versus revenge . . . I mulled it over as I searched the distance from the walls before finally coming up with a brilliant solution: get all the cool stuff I could out of the annoying bastard, then use it to get revenge on him.
Seeing nothing from the walls after a complete circuit, I hopped down the steps and yanked on the big wheel to close the gates. They closed with a satisfying crash. Despite the noise, no one came to complain. If anything, the place grew quieter once the noise faded away.
I vowed to make up for that by bashing everything in sight once I made it back into the keep, but destroying someone else’s stuff eventually got old, and I decided to be more practical. “Quiet as a mouse and stealthy as a cat” I wasn’t, but at least no one in the far corners of the building would know exactly where I was anymore. Not with their ears, anyway. The place was having more and more of a necromancer or ritualist feel to it. The stuff they could summon or bring into existence didn’t use the normal senses.
My bravado began to fade as I traveled from the bottom floor of the keep to the top and then back down without finding a sign of anyone. There was only one place left, and it went down. Basement, dungeon, or murder/basement/dungeon?
“No, probably a vault,” I said to myself. “A vault full of bodies. Maybe I can add a few?”
No one laughed. No one groaned. No one answered. It was me against my worst enemy: silence. I needed an audience to be me. If no one was there to groan at my awesome jokes, to stare openmouthed at my deeds or reckless daring what was the point?
There was an audience here somewhere, and I would make them pay for not being closer to the entrance to greet me. And then take all the much more valuable stuff they had in their murder vault. Even make the Old Man happy and proud of me . . .
OK, not that last one. He just had that aura of never being happy no matter how perfect what you did was—like my mom, or dad in this case.
Was he my dad? He was mentoring me for no discernible reason. My father had disappeared for mysterious reasons. The Old Man was the definition of mysterious. They said Dad was powerful, and so was the Old Man. Sure, he didn’t look anything like a Gaelkini, but if he could summon monsters at will, what was a little illusion? As king he probably had dozens of magic items at his disposal if he didn’t have outright magic power himself. Hell, the phrase “Old Man” was a synonym for Dad.
I nearly fell over at the implication. This would be exactly the kind of thing a father who had made no effort to find his son in nineteen years would do to try and reconnect. Too embarrassed to show his face and flail around awkwardly as a way to contribute to his son’s growth. Then, when that son got the awesome thing at the end, pop out and reveal himself. “Surprise! It was me all along. And we worked on teaching you that thing together, just like a normal dad and son. You can think of me and how not terrible I am every time you fly too! We built a memory to make up for those decades we spent not building any.”
The whole thought made me not want to unlock Flight for the first time. Turn around, not discover this castle’s mysteries too. Spit in that Old Man’s face and tell him to beat up whatever was in this place’s depths himself. Shove his cryptic lessons up his ass. “Remember that, Old Man!”
For the first time, something answered me. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t my dad. It wasn’t a person at all.
In my introspective rage, I’d wandered into a long room that would have been perfect for a banquet hall, though in an odd location for one. A large double door creaked open at the end to reveal no one. At first.
Ten Fahrkini in battle-damaged armor faced me. They would have looked more menacing if they hadn’t been as surprised to see me as I was to see them. Unlike them, I didn’t wait to get my bearings, nor did I have a need to attempt a formation. I swapped into their midst as soon as I saw them, channeling all the rage about my dad and the Old Man into every blow.
Still, they might have won the day by unleashing their fiery abilities, had not my bracers reduced that damage by half and the building itself not counteracted the advantage of the one who turned into a fire elemental. Being fifteen-feet tall under a ten-foot ceiling was more hinderance than advantage, especially when you stumbled into allies at every step. The fire elemental could have moved out of the entranceway where there was more room but since I was in the other direction, she never noticed it and I certainly wasn’t going to point that out.
Looking at the experience gains in the status screen afterward showed them to have been worth a decent chunk of experience per kill, but having leveled recently left me a long way away from having enough experience for another one. That sadness evaporated when I found more Fahrkini to kill once inside the newly opened door. Slow and steady wasn’t ever what I wanted, but it was better than nothing. This castle was promising lots of such little gains. Eventually there’d have to be something bigger, right?
Bigger, it turned out, was more in the metaphorical sense. The castle’s passages were like a maze, and as confusing to the other occupants as to me. Just like in the first encounter, most of the Fahrkini were disoriented and easy pickings when I swapped into their center to add more confusion to the mix. The ceiling was even lower in the maze, and several of them took themselves out of the fight before I landed a blow by activating their ultimate ability from whatever their fire-based skill was called. It was almost the perfect metaphor for Mask’s warning about tier-five Swap. Was she what I’d find at the bottom? I kind of hoped she was.
If I thought twists and turns were the only surprises I’d find in the maze, I would have been disappointed. Thirty minutes later, I found my first group of Gaelkini. It had become so routine to use Swap as soon as I sighted another person that before realizing who they were I was in their midst. Fortunately, the target of my ability had the same idea and reverted both of us to our original position before I made that mistake.
While the group didn’t recognize me as their prince, they couldn’t help but notice my use of their racial ability. After a bit of tense negotiation, we decided not to kill each other, but my initial attack had left them too untrusting. Unlike me, they were looking for the entrance and not the exit anyway. Whatever had drawn me to enter this place had done the same to them, but in their case, the appeal had faded; they had no desire to see the bottom anymore. They’d been in here for days and were running out of food. Not having planned on such an excursion, I hadn’t brought much either, but I had looted a bit from my kills and I shared half of that with them. They were grateful but it didn’t change their minds about a destination, so we parted ways.
With them on my mind, I was a little more hesitant to attack immediately when I located other groups. My reluctance did make things more difficult when I encountered more Fahrkini, but it paid off thirty minutes later when I found another group of Gaelkini. Not attacking them on sight smoothed things over considerably, and they agreed to go with me. Two hours later, I had gathered twenty-six of my half-brothers and half-sisters to my band. Their teamwork and precision didn’t compare to my true squads’, but they were still a lot better than a bunch of new recruits back home.
Either in answer to my success or as a coincidence, we came to a large door that had to mark the exit. Someone was waiting. Several someones. And they did not look friendly. I made sure that once they got to know me, they’d find me even less so. My new soldiers agreed. This was going to be fun.
JOHNSON, PARK, & ASSOCIATES
If it weren’t for his garishly decorated armor and that he was at their center, I would have never guessed the thin person who addressed us was their leader. The lack of confidence in his movements and voice suggested he wouldn’t have either—and that was only counting the second try, after he remembered to pull back his helmet’s visor so we could understand him.
“We’ve been”—he fumbled for a pouch before pulling forth a scroll—“anticipating your arrival for quite some time, Prince Owen Park. But the wait has not been in vain. We’ve amused ourselves greatly with your father. I’m sure he’d thank you for that if he were still able to streak.”
My confusion was mirrored on the face of his own soldiers. One of them finally leaned in and whispered in his ear.
“—speak. If he were able to speak. Because of all the torture my fath—we’ve done to him. A pity he passed out, not that it stopped us.”
The squaring of his shoulders was probably supposed to convey confidence. Instead, they made him look like a mannequin. Too stiff, too forced. This kid just had “fifth son trying to impress a father who’d forgotten him as soon as he was born” written all over him. That dad probably hadn’t sent him to intercept me; the kid had rushed out on his own.
Anyone else would have found it easy to manipulate him, but as someone who had a bit too much experience with an absentee father, and a mother I mostly wished had been absent, I could push all his buttons in my sleep. The only question was which order would be the most fun.
I squinted to get a closer look at the little bits now visible beneath the visor and the answer came. Teenager in the middle of the worst part of puberty? Gee, where to go with that?
“Horns and tusks?” I gasped. “That’s just pointy overkill. Which ones do you accidentally pop the most of your pimples with?”
Junior blinked a few times before looking around for an answer. The beefy soldier next to him who had whispered in his ear elbowed him in the gut gently.
“It’s a tie, but I pop much more of them by . . . Oh, this is that pre-fight banter my tutors told me about. Well, it won’t matter after I pop you, varlet.”
His reach for his sword would have been perfect if he’d remembered to drop the scroll first. After a bit of rubbing and crumbling, he managed to slide the weapon from the sheath at his waist. Elaborate decorations like this usually were for show, but the blade was well enchanted. Either dad did care about him or he’d stolen it when his father wasn’t looking. Pulling it forth and seeing the expressions on our faces had returned some of his confidence. Time to push that down where it belonged.
Back-to-back insults were great for forcing a fight, but since I didn’t want that yet, I’d have to go for my other verbal weapon.
“I’ll have you know, I do not accept sex for money. It’s all free here.” I wiggled my waist provocatively.
It caused the effect I wanted: Junior lowered his blade while he scratched his forehead with his free hand. His dozen soldiers followed suit. Most of mine did too.
“He, uh, said varlet, not harlot,” my newly appointed sergeant said.
Without missing a beat, I stomped forward. The enemy only recoiled a step defensively, but otherwise did not react. “Then you think you’re smarter than me? Using words I don’t know to confuse me. Well, I’ll have you know, good sir, that I am already confused. Confused is my default state, so your actions have had no effect on me. The real question is, do you like mayonnaise on your sandwiches and do gold cufflinks go with brown shoes?”
“That’s actually two questions.” My sergeant’s reply was barely audible over the murmurs from the enemy line.
