Restart Again: Volume 3

by Adam Ladner Scott

  “Uh, there’s a safehouse, that the...uhm,” he stammered, lowering his voice to a whisper before continuing, “the Company used to use. It’s just a few miles off the road, that way.” He pointed off vaguely to the east, through the hill beside us. “You can see it from here, if you’re on the lookout hill.” His voice continued to grow more unsteady as he spoke, and tears began to form in the corners of his eyes. “There’s...there’s not much, uhm, there, right now, b-but you can…”

  The sound of a quiet sob brought Lia out of her introspection, and she looked over the bandit with concern. “What’s wrong?” She punched my shoulder and narrowed her eyes at me. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing!” I said, holding up my hands to intercept any further punches.

  She paused as she read the truth on my face, then leaned closer to the crying youth. “What’s wrong...oh, I never got your name. I’m sorry.”

  He shook his head and scooted away from her. “P-Patrick,” he managed to whimper as he wiped the tears from his face.

  “Patrick,” she repeated quietly. “What’s wrong, Patrick?”

  “It could be that most of his friends are—” My thought was cut short as I swatted away a second punch.

  “Not. Helpful,” she muttered, poking at my chest. I held a hand over my mouth and raised my eyebrows expectantly, and she smiled. “Better.” She turned back to Patrick and folded her hands neatly in her lap. “Patrick, what can I—”

  “Are you going to kill me?!” he shouted suddenly, his whole body trembling.

  Lia recoiled. “What? No! Primes, no! Why would you...well, alright, I can understand why you would think that. But you didn’t try to hurt me, so I don’t have any reason to hurt you, right?” She reached out carefully and put a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve been really helpful, Patrick. I don’t have any more questions for you, so whenever you’re feeling up to it, you can leave and go wherever you want.”

  “You’re still young, Patrick. You’ve got a long life ahead of you,” I added. “If you go find yourself some real, honest work, you’ll get a chance to see it.” I stood up from my place in the grass and brushed off my cloak. “Just make sure you avoid the Company from now on, hmm?”

  He slowly turned to look in my direction, his eyes glassy and uncomprehending. “I’m...uhm, I’m going to sit. Just sit here, for...a while, I think.”

  “Okay,” Lia nodded. “Good luck, Patrick. Be safe.”

  “You...too?” he said, staring straight ahead as we walked by him. We left him behind his small hill as we returned to the road and climbed to the spot where the southern lookout had been hidden. As Patrick had said, a black shingled roof appeared on the horizon, nearly invisible in the lengthening shadows of the evening.

  “I guess that solves the mystery of where the supplies went,” Lia sighed. “Still no lead on the employees, though.”

  “Hopefully, our lead is hidden somewhere in that safehouse,” I said, taking a step towards the building. “If we head there now, we’ll make it before dark. There might even be beds; those bandits had to be sleeping somewhere, right?” She nodded in agreement and followed behind me as we made our way across the hilly expanse.

  I pushed out a wave of energy to scan our destination and our surroundings as we walked. “You know,” I started, grinning, “you did a great job back there. Controlling the conversation, fighting off all of the bandits, the interrogation, everything. I do have to admit, it was difficult not to laugh at the start; hearing you do my bit was definitely—” I hissed as a sudden pain sprouted in my temples, and I staggered to the side as I clutched my head.

  “Lux?” Lia asked, placing a concerned hand on my arm. “Lux, what’s wrong?”

  My head swam as I fought to piece together the source of the pain. There was a strange buzz around the image in my head which seemed to emanate from a point farther down the main road to the south. I sent a fresh scan towards the edge of my mental map and winced as the pain renewed itself. When the mana reached the edge of my current vision, it felt as though it were sucked away beyond the ill-defined border and out of my control. “I...don’t know. Something to the south.”

  I saw a brief flash of amber light as Lia’s own mana raced out along mine, and the audible gasp beside me confirmed that she felt the same interference. “What is that?” she whispered. “Why is that happening?”

  “I don’t know,” I repeated. As I continued to fight against the interference, details of the oddity began to reveal themselves. The mana I sent out had continued to spread in every direction that wasn’t blocked and soon completely encircled the field of darkness. The gap it left in my Detection was nearly two hundred yards wide, and it seemed to be moving in a straight line across the countryside; it stole my extended energy wherever it went, plunging new parts of my vision into darkness while revealing others where it had been moments before. “Whatever it is, it’s moving. Fast.”

  “We should...investigate that, right?” she asked, wincing at the mental pain.

  “Yes. Elise’s boxes can wait. Whatever that is, I don’t want it to get away before we can—” My breath hitched in my throat as a faint echo registered in my still heightened sense: the remnants of a blood-curdling scream in a familiar voice. “Lyn,” I managed to say before my mind emptied and my enhancements flared. Every cell in my body screamed to life as I rocketed away to the south, immediately pushing my body far beyond its normal limits for the first time in months.

  Lia appeared at the corner of my vision a moment later, sprinting full-tilt alongside me. A tight band of energy wove between us as we approached the disturbance, and I felt my consciousness spilling over into hers as our minds connected. As opposed to the normal mental communication we had developed during our training, my messaging to her was wordless and instinctual, imparting multiple concepts simply by feeling them myself. Unknown danger. Civilians. Hold nothing back. A ping of acknowledgement echoed between us, and we drew our weapons in unison.

  The countryside gradually flattened as we moved south, and as we rounded a final hill, the scene hidden from our Detection revealed itself all at once. The wagon that had passed us just minutes before was flipped on its side, with three of its four wheels completely shattered. The massacred bodies of the two horses that had drawn the carriage were spread across the road in multiple pieces, seemingly chopped in half, and the scene was painted in a bright red coat of blood. Nearly a dozen yards from the wreckage were the bodies of the driver and bodyguard who had ridden on the front bench, each with a gaping stab wound through their chests much larger than any traditional blade could make. As we sprinted towards the scene, the carriage groaned and began to tip in our direction.

  We skidded to a stop a dozen yards away as the source of the disturbance began to emerge. A pair of long, bloody scythes appeared from the opposite side of the wagon, crunching against the wooden frame as they pulled against it. The gleaming blades were attached to thin, spindly limbs covered in a sickly orange chitin mottled with dark purple veins, which hauled the full mass of the creature into view atop the wagon. Its body appeared to be an unremarkable ovoid mass of chitin, six feet long and featureless beyond a small ridge that ran along the midline of its back. The hind legs of the creature looked almost wolf-like in nature, with two points of articulation and distended, clawed feet that tapped softly against the wooden door beneath it.

  While the sight of the beast was truly grotesque to behold, the most unsettling aspect of it was the silence. It made nearly no noise as it moved, and it seemed to lack a mouth with which to make sounds that I instinctively associated with a living creature, breathing chief among them. Instead, the monster simply existed in its silence, its central body bobbing gently up and down between its long legs as it observed us with its eyeless, earless form. I felt a wave of horror flood over me through my link with Lia, and I fought it back with an emotionless, empty calm. Fear comes later.

  A piercing shriek echoed out from the upturned cart, and the beast suddenl
y sprang to life. Its curled hind legs kicked off from the wagon, ripping the top third of the structure apart as it launched towards us with both scythes raised. Lia sprang backwards away from the strike, just in time for the massive blade to bury itself in the dirt where she had stood. I sidestepped and caught the attack against my sword to gain an initial estimation of our unknown foe’s strength. The blow pushed my braced feet back through the dirt as we struggled against each other, and I could immediately tell that the monster was far stronger than any natural creature.

  When it became apparent that I wasn’t dead, the beast wrenched its bladed arm backwards. I felt a sudden yank on my sword as it was torn from my grip and thrown to the ground beneath the monster’s bulbous body. As I dodged a second swipe from its opposite arm, I noticed the source of my difficulties: five elongated serrations lined the tip of each scythe, perfectly positioned to catch and shred unsuspecting victims such as myself. My sword flashed back to my hand as I hopped away and confirmed the information with Lia. We regrouped shoulder to shoulder a few yards away from the beast, weapons held out at the ready again.

  Split and flank. Joints are always weakest. The thought echoed through our mental link, though I had lost the sense of self to determine who had thought it. We split in unison, each dashing in opposite directions in tight arcs just outside of slashing range of the beast. It skittered in place like a spider, spinning to keep its blade-side facing in my direction. When Lia and I were in position, I lunged forward with a stab aimed at its center mass, while she dove in for a strike against one of its hind legs.

  The monster knocked my attack off course with a sweep of its scythe, then planted its other bladed arm firmly in the ground between us. I heard a sickening series of snaps as it shifted its entire weight onto the limb, freeing both of its back legs to kick out at Lia with all ten of its razor-sharp claws. She slid beneath the swipe on her knees, rising back to her feet with an arcing slash a moment later. The attack just missed the nearest leg as the beast turned end over end in an unsettling flip, scuttling a few yards away from us to regain its composure. The maneuver left it upside down, with each of its limbs hideously contorted to continue holding its body upright.

  It performed the flip to right itself once again, twisting around on a single scythe while its remaining limbs snapped back into their proper places. The motion was sickening enough on its own, but it revealed a detail of the monster’s body previously hidden from our eyes that made our blood run cold; two circular, fist-sized depressions were situated on the beast’s undercarriage, positioned just above a gaping mouth lined with rows of bloody teeth. Bile rose in the back of our throats, but an echoing thought kept us composed enough to continue fighting: Fear comes later.

  We sprinted out in the same formation a second time, encircling the monster with our blades ready. Catch it when it withdraws. Don’t stop until it’s dead. The monster turned its scythes in Lia’s direction as we charged, and we swapped our roles flawlessly on the fly; she caught its counterattack between her two blades while I slashed at its back legs, spinning out of the way of the kick we knew was coming. I was already advancing as it began its flip, and I hurled my sword over Lia’s shoulder to catch the beast dead center in its chitinous chest. The blade cracked through the hardened shell and buried itself to the hilt, the tip of the blade emerging in a splash of dark purple ichor on the other side.

  Lia dashed ahead while the monster reeled, teetering back and forth on unsteady, twisted limbs. Her swords slashed in a whirlwind of onyx steel, severing both of the beast’s bladed forearms just above the joint where its natural armor was weakest. The momentum of her attacks launched her into a graceful flip over the creature’s body as it collapsed forward in a fountain of thick, purple blood. As she twirled through the air, her blades flashed and merged into a unified greatsword, which she plunged into the beast’s body with both hands as she landed behind it.

  Stepping between the dismembered scythes that remained lodged in the ground before me, I took a firm grip on the handle of my bastard sword. We ripped our blades free with a synchronized flourish, sending a final, violent shake through the beast before it fell to the ground and lay motionless in the expanding pool of dark ichor. As soon as the beast was still, the oppressive force that had held our Detection at bay vanished, and we scanned the surrounding area with a burst of energy that nearly maxed our mental processing capabilities.

  Though the scene around us was filled with death, two dim lights remained apart from our own within the upturned wagon. Lyn was curled up in a corner of the wreckage, weeping silently over Layne’s body in her lap. His chest was torn open in a single, deep cut that ran from his shoulder to his opposite hip. Across from her, Miles lay unmoving beneath a pile of broken wood and shattered glass, shielding his grandmother in his arms. A faint sparkle of dark blue energy in his core and the shallow rise and fall of his chest indicated he was alive, but Josephine’s body was devoid of light beneath him, a single break in her cervical vertebrae the only indication of trauma from the entire ordeal.

  With the landscape around us finally revealed, it was easy to see where the beast had come from. A litany of pockmarks tracked back and forth from the road to a thicket of trees a few miles away, accompanied by multiple rows of long scrapes and wagon wheel tracks. All of the markings led to a large burrow hidden in the side of a hill beneath the shadow of the trees, which clearly served as the monster’s den. The shattered remains of over a dozen wagons lined the burrow, many of which were marked with the Three Barrels insignia. While the trade goods in the wagons remained relatively intact, the passengers did not; a scattering of human bones lined the floor of the space, all entirely cleaned of their flesh and emptied of their marrow.

  Between the abhorrent fate of Elise’s men and the deaths of Layne and Josephine, the information our Detection relayed to us from the corpse of the monster at our feet took an extra moment to process. When our consciousness shifted to the beast’s remains, a horrible feeling of revulsion churned in our guts, and I found myself falling to my knees and vomiting as Lia’s visceral reaction bled over into my body as well. I fought back against the terror in our mental link as I stumbled to Lia’s side and held her braid away from her face as she continued to retch up bile.

  Beneath the horrible mutations and thick layers of chitin, it was unmistakably clear that the monster had, at some point, been a human. The central body was actually much smaller than it had initially appeared, with massively thick layers of natural armor making up the majority of the bulk and protecting a leathery layer of skin underneath. A roughly humanoid torso sat at the center of the beast, housing a normal suite of organs in their usual places. The five serrated razors at the end of each scythe still held traces of knuckle bones, now barbed and ossified in place. Above everything, the skull was the most telling of the monster’s origins: apart from the distended jaw and slightly larger size, it was nearly unchanged from that of a normal person. The two strange indentations above its mouth were the vestigial remnants of the skull's eye sockets, long abandoned in favor of whatever form of perception the creature had used.

  “Lia...look at me, Lia...please,” I panted, fighting back both of our panic responses at once. Her shoulders trembled beneath my hands as she swayed perilously back and forth.

  “Lux,” she whispered, still staring at the ground. “Why is...how did…? Lux, I don’t understand…” I looped my hands under her arms and helped her up to a sitting position, then knelt in the dirt in front of her. Her eyes stared vacantly past my head to the bloodied, broken corpse behind us. “It’s...that thing, it’s—”

  “Look at me, Lia,” I repeated, more firmly than before. Her head turned suddenly to meet my gaze as my voice snapped her out of her stupor. “Our fight isn’t over yet. Lyn still needs our help. Miles still needs our help. We can’t do that if we let our emotions take over.” As I spoke, I felt a fresh wave of terror and revulsion wash over us as the distorted form of the monster flashed in perfect det
ail behind my eyes. “Fear comes later. Right now, we have to act.” I struggled against the tide of emotions, pushing as much down into the deeper layers of my psyche and away from Lia’s consciousness as I could. “I can’t do this alone, Lia.”

  There was a long moment of silence as she stared into my eyes, struggling to process the entirety of our situation. She began to take a series of deep breaths in through her nose, exhaling sharply through her mouth after a second of hesitation. The shaking in her shoulders gradually grew still, and her face relaxed until it had shed every sign of the fear that had gripped us. “You’re not alone,” she said eventually, giving me a weak smile. I’m here with you. Her voice in my head spoke more confidently than the one that reached my ears.

  “I know,” I answered. I brushed my hand gently along her cheek, experiencing the gesture from both of our perspectives at once. I’m here with you, too. The strength of our shared connection was more apparent than ever as our adrenaline receded, and without the intense focus of battle driving us, I found it momentarily difficult to control my own body without also influencing Lia’s movements as I tried to stand. “I’m going to clean up out here,” I said while we stumbled to our feet. “Can you look after Lyn and Miles?”

  She nodded, turning her gaze to the upturned wagon and the scene waiting inside. I gave her a reassuring pat on the shoulder as I turned to go, but she grabbed my arm and stopped me in place. Her hand wrapped up to the back of my head as she pulled my head down towards hers, knocking our foreheads together. Her free hand twined its fingers between mine as she held my head tightly against hers. There were no words shared through our mental link, but I saw a quick series of memories flash in my head. Eating dinner with Elise. Walking with our new friends. Sparring together with Marin. My sleeping head in her lap. Our home in the woods.

  I gave her a single word in reply. Forever. She gave my neck a final squeeze before she released me and slipped around my side, glancing at the beast behind us one final time. Her nose wrinkled, and she shook her head and looked away back towards the wagon. I moved to the front of the beast and gathered its dismembered scythes, jammed them into the armored midsection for safekeeping, then returned to its rear to grab its remaining legs and haul it off the road. As I began my jog, I noted with some discomfort that the beast was significantly heavier than it appeared to be, at least three times my own weight. The armored leg felt like plate armor through my gloves, apart from a slightly sticky substance that seemed to cover the entirety of the monster’s shell.