The Wyvern in the Wilderlands: Planeswalking Monster Hunters for Hire (Sci-fi Multiverse Adventure Survival / Weird Fantasy) (Monster Hunting for Fun and ... Hunters and Mythical Monsters) Book 1)

by Eddie Patin

  "What the hell is this thing?" he asked no one.

  Jason’s knee was throbbing as he sat up in bed. He should have drunk more water before going to bed. Hell—he should have gone to sleep earlier. He could have played video games all day today if he felt like it.

  Screw it.

  Swinging his legs around, Jason stood with pain, still staring into the crystal, and changed into his walking clothes. He pulled up YouTube on his phone and activated the voice search, speaking clearly into his phone’s mic: "Crystals that make electricity."

  As Jason gathered up his walking gear in the living room, checked his pistol, loaded up on his extra mag and knife, then limped over to the kitchen to top off the bladder of his backpack, he scrolled through many science videos, most of them showing close-ups of crystals of various shapes and sizes.

  Crystal power, one said. How to squeeze electricity out of crystals, another said. Electricity from crystals. Piezoelectric effect. Piezo Power!

  Piezoelectricity? Jason wondered.

  Is that what this crystal was? A piezoelectric crystal? The term sounded familiar to Jason. He was a big dabbler in science and inventing, usually for practical purposes like making his life easier building things like his self-warming knife for butter.

  And as Jason brewed coffee, he skimmed through video after video looking for a crystal like his. Piezoelectric crystals had a special cellular matrix that allowed them to generate their own electricity from sound waves or mechanical stress—just like how Jason’s stone created sparks inside whenever he tapped on it. And apparently, these crystals were super-common, too. It looked like Jason even already owned one of them even though he didn't know it: piezoelectric crystals apparently generated the spark in barbeque grills, like the one on his back patio.

  Despite all of the piezoelectric crystals on YouTube, however, there were major differences between the ones in the videos and the stone that Jason held in his hand. Every single YouTuber showing off their own crystals in a dark room had to hit them hard to make sparks—either with metal tools or with a drill bit in some cases—and those sparks inside their crystals gave off kind of a golden light. Jason’s crystal had blue sparks, and he could activate it with the lightest of taps from the pads of his fingertips! Jason could also create an actual spark outside of the stone—usually in the form of a tiny arc of blue lightning—when he hit the stone against a more solid surface. None of the YouTube videos he saw showed anything near that amount of power...

  Jason’s crystal was different than all of the others he saw on YouTube during the period of time it took him to get his walking gear together, pour fresh coffee, put on his jacket, backpack, and head to the door.

  "You’re special," Jason said to the crystal.

  He’d have to call Ben to see what his friend thought about the strange rock. Ben was very smart and good at research. He’d call him after his walk.

  Taking the first sip of the hot, black coffee and grabbing his cane, Jason stepped out into the morning—er, afternoon. Ridgeview was still coated with several inches of snow, but the sun was out and shining warmly. The roofs around the neighborhood were dripping with snowmelt.

  "Nice day," Jason said to himself, looking up at the blue sky with a smile.

  Stepping off of the concrete walk that would normally lead him to his walking route on Kestrel Drive, Jason trudged through the snow in his front yard, thankful that he was wearing his waterproof hiking boots, and headed out back for a walk along the ridge instead.

  The sky was dark blue and there wasn’t a single cloud in sight. The sun was bright and brilliant, high above Jason, working hard to melt the heavy snowfall that covered the small mountain town during the week.

  Even though his knee was giving him a little more trouble than normal, Jason felt good—energized even—by the fascinating crystal in his pocket. He looked down at the mini compass-thermometer combo on his backpack strap to see the temperature, even though he could feel that it was in the fifties. The compass told him that the ridge was to the east, but he already knew that.

  Following the game trail that passed along the edge of his fenceless backyard, Jason made his way down the slope, using his cane carefully to avoid slipping. He sure didn’t want to go through his whole walk with a wet ass from falling into the melting snow.

  Behind his backyard just past the edge of the property there was something like a ravine. The yard stopped at the edge of a hill, and the slope led down to a low area before leading to the distant ridge through a forest of dripping pine trees in a steady climb. At the bottom of the slope behind Jason’s yard, the ravine looked like it might have had a creek running through it long ago. But now, it was just a thick tangle of scrub oak bushes.

  At the bottom of the slope, Jason pushed through a narrow game trail splitting the scraggly branches and emerged onto a gravel hiking path that stretched off as far as he could see to the north and south along the forest. Jason knew from years of hiking back there that the trail would continue north following the ridge until it turned to pass around its diminished north slope at the shore of Lake Granby. If he were to head south instead, the trail would follow the ridge until its far end descended into a big open plain where herds of deer and elk tended to congregate during the rut. By now the game would have moved on to higher elevations, except for the odd elk late to mate, or a handful of mule deer here and there. If it was a little earlier in October, Jason would have been wearing a bright orange hat to keep from getting shot by a hunter. But by now, first rifle season was over, and second season had just ended before the weekend. The hunters were gone. If there were any still around for some reason, they’d be up in the high mountains to the east on the other side of the ridge. That was all national parkland. He was pretty sure that elk hunting wasn't allowed in Rocky Mountain National Park, but you never know. Sometimes he heard lone rifle shots from the east in October...

  After listening to the limited amount of information on piezoelectric crystals, Jason went back to his usual videos about success and building passive income. His boots crunched on gravel and splattered slush on the trail when he wasn’t plunging through snow. He sipped his coffee as he walked.

  "The first principle of getting rich is that rich people think in terms of abundance, and poor people think in terms of lacking. The bible says ‘As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.’ The rich understand that constantly thinking in ways that create action will also create results. First within, then without. It's important that you make up your mind that you will not be poor, that you will not go down that path that they have chosen to follow. By changing your mindset to take the path of the—"

  Skip, Jason thought. Boring. He found another.

  "Thanks for watching my video. Here are three ways to get filthy rich this year! That's what this video is about today. Don't forget to subscribe! I'm going to give you the best and easiest three ways you can use to get filthy rich in the—"

  Selling something. Skip.

  His boots crunched through the snow.

  "When you fail, the more you feel bad about what happened, the more you're just wasting your time. Buck up, pick yourself up and dust yourself off, and get in the right mindset. Think about how there's always a way around problems. There's always a solution..."

  Before long, Jason was zoning out and staring at the forest and ridge around him.

  As the videos went on and the cadence of his boots crunching let his imagination flow, Jason was suddenly snapped back into the moment when he saw a big, dark shape moving along the top of a hill not too far away. He paused.

  Then it was gone.

  The day was silent around him.

  Something about the way the shape moved told Jason that it was an animal. He assumed that it was someone’s big, black dog.

  Jason regularly encountered dogs on his walks and wasn’t afraid of them. Still, he was a cautious man and felt himself flexing the cane in his hand. He freed up his right side to draw his Glock 26 if he needed to.
He assumed that there was someone walking around on the other side of the hill, letting their big dog run around off-leash or something. It was big, alright. If it was a dog that might attack him, with Jason’s bad knee, he'd need to fight back hard or he’d be in big trouble...

  This path was long, and Jason could hike as far as he cared to. But instead of heading all the way to Lake Granby, he tended to turn around at a point where his whole walk would last about an hour and a half. It was one of his stretch points; on this route, a concrete barrier near a connection to the hiking trail from a neighborhood to the west. Jason spent a few minutes at that concrete wall stretching his hips, hamstrings, quads, then turned around to head home.

  Eventually Jason finished his coffee, and lashed the robust, metal mug onto his pack with a paracord sling that he always wore.

  "Being present in there here and now is where you'll have the best control over your choices and the world around you," a new voice was saying from his phone. "It's where you'll feel the most comfortable and confident, and it's where you'll really find happiness. There's a big connection between your happiness and the ability to exist in the present moment. Most regular people think that individual happiness is dependent on the external world—on the things that happen to you—but I'm here to tell you: that's not true at all..."

  Jason scanned up the ridge while he walked back, watching the magpies fly through the trees. He eventually saw Kestrel Drive and his neighborhood materialize on his right again, and he looked over the quiet houses with melting snow on their roofs and watched the occasional car roll past on the distant street.

  When Jason was near his house, he thought he saw the black dog again, but when he stopped and peered at the forest, searching for it, he saw nothing.

  "Not my imagination," he muttered, walking on. "Something over there..."

  Jason gripped the hook of his cane again. It felt strong in his hand. Since he was stuck using a cane to help his knee, Jason had spent a lot of time over the years looking at different canes made of different materials and eventually found his favorite amidst the martial arts weapons stores online. His cane wasn’t made of aluminum like the ones sold commonly in stores, and it wasn’t made of wood either. His cane was molded from polypropylene. It was light, weatherproof, and nearly indestructible. Jason swung it a few times to liven up his shoulder, admiring the low whoosh sound that it made. He peered at the ridge, up and down, looking for the dog again...

  Nothing.

  Shrugging, Jason walked on. With his coffee hand now free, he had taken out the crystal without even realizing it, and tapped on it rhythmically as he strode along the trail, punching the ground with the cane every other step. He felt good, and was speeding up.

  It was bright out, so he wouldn’t be able to see the electricity moving around inside the stone very well, but he could feel it through his fingers, and he knew that there was power in there...

  The YouTube video continued droning on, and Jason realized that he hadn’t been paying attention for a while.

  "Resistance is most commonly expressed in procrastination because it is the easiest to rationalize. I’ll start tomorrow. Resistance’s goal is to have us saying this until our death beds. Indulgence in things like alcohol, food, sex, TV and video games ... is not always a manifestation of resistance, but if you feel hollow and unfulfilled afterwards, it probably was. We subconsciously know that we gave up our long-term goal for instant gratification. Resistance beat us. Resistance expresses itself when you rationalize away why you haven’t started yet. The working artist doesn’t accept this kind of self-destructive behavior in his life, because it prevents him from..."

  Just then, Jason felt that same strange sensation that he’d experienced the night outside the bar with Ben. Something in his stomach—or in his chest, he couldn’t really tell—seemed to lurch in one direction. Jason felt a strong pull—like a magnet drawing him—to his backyard!

  "What the hell?!" he exclaimed, furrowing his brow and staring ahead.

  Jason looked at his house in the distance and the backyard full of snow through the pine trees. The slope ran down from the edge of his yard to the low area full of scrub oak, now out of sight because he was still on the hiking trail.

  The pull happened again like a big ball in his guts pressing against his abdominal wall toward his backyard...

  "What...?!"

  "...This fear means that it is something that we need to do. Something we have a deep love for. If you didn’t love a project that’s terrifying you, you wouldn’t feel anything at all. The more resistance you feel toward a project, the more fulfilled you will—"

  Jason reached down into his pouch and paused the video.

  He listened.

  He tapped on the crystal, nervously. Tap, tap, tap...

  What was happening in his body?!

  Jason waited for a while—waiting to feel the pull again—but nothing happened, so he continued on with caution. There was definitely something weird going on, and seeing his house up ahead, Jason resisted an unexplained, nervous urge to run to get there.

  When the trail brought him to the cut through the bushes, Jason tightened his grip on his cane and delved through the branches to the game trail that would lead him home.

  The pull suddenly happened again, yanking him with such strange force to one side—toward an area of nothing but bushes at the bottom of the slope—that Jason almost slipped in the snow! He didn’t even realize that he was still tapping on the crystal with his left hand, his right holding his cane before him...

  Jason hustled up the slope a little ways before the pull happened again, drawing him back to that same empty spot of snowy ground and bushes. The man knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that something was pulling him toward that spot!

  As Jason looked at the nondescript area, the pull happened again, this time pulling his feet out from under him. He landed on the snowy hill with a painful thud on his right hip. His bad knee twinged in agony as Jason immediately leapt to stand then realized with a burst of adrenaline numbing his arms and legs that he was sliding down the hill toward the spot—the unseen magnet calling to him...

  "Shit!" he cried. "What the fuck?!"

  Then something crazy happened that Jason didn’t even register as real until his primitive brain forced him to fight for his life.

  There was a strange fluttering sound like a whipping flag in a gust of wind, then a snap like a .22 rifle firing. In a following confusion of orange light and bending vision, a monstrous spider suddenly appeared before Jason out of thin air! Its eight hairy legs spread and flexed, claws digging into the snow as it prepared to spring at him. It was real, alright. Dark eyes gleamed in the sunlight like obsidian golf balls surrounded by bristly, brown hair on an arachnid face just like the one that Jason had imagined bursting out of the inflated Halloween spider up the street! This real one was less than half the size of the inflated decoration; its body as big as a Rottweiler with legs at least as long as a man! Terror shot through Jason's nerves as he realized that this one was actually there, crouching before him, sleek fangs like curved knives flexing with a hissing sound. It was real, by God, and it was about to leap!

  Without a second thought, Jason dropped his cane to free up his right hand and he swept past his jacket and drew his Glock, extending it toward the beast. The spider sprang at him, launching itself forward with powerful legs. Its front claws splayed out wide to catch the man, but Jason focused on nothing but the bright, tritium dot of his pistol’s front sight. He squeezed the trigger smoothly...

  The spider hissed fiercely just as the Glock 26 barked out a pop that slapped Jason’s ears. Before he knew it, he’d already shot twice more. The big arachnid was hit three times in the face and its attack was thrown off course. Crashing into the ground at Jason’s feet, the creature let out a sick chittering sound, drawing its many legs in close to its body, as its momentum dragged it through the snow and mud.

  Then it stopped, still.

  "Holy sh
it!" Jason exclaimed, his heart hammering in his chest. His vision was dark around the edges and a wild numbing buzz flew through his joints and body. He turned to face the thing and aimed his pistol down at its bristly head, ready to shoot again the instant it moved. When the monster didn’t respond, Jason took a few quick steps sideways until he was able to crouch down and pick up his cane with his left hand that still also held the crystal. "Where the holy hell did ... a giant spider?! A real giant spider?!"

  Did I make this? Jason wondered with a giddy stroke of madness.

  Approaching slowly, ready to shoot again and jump to the moon, Jason cautiously reached out with his cane and prodded the dead spider. The creature was heavy, and its wiry hairs scratched at the tip of his cane with a dry sound. He moved it just a little.

  Jason gasped.

  Then he felt the pull again.

  Jason’s insides lurched to one side, pulling him back to that nothing-spot at the bottom of the ravine. His feet slipped out from under him with a surprise, and Jason slammed into the wet ground. He struggled to keep a hold of his gun, his cane, the crystal...

  He slid toward that spot as if being pulled by a long, invisible arm.

  No! his mind screamed. The spider came from there! Jason's eyes went wide and he was wracked with a fresh wave of horror. He didn’t want to go there; didn’t want to go to a place full of giant spiders! But he was sliding fast and he covered the distance to the spot where the arachnid came from in an instant. There was a snap and the fluttering sounds of wind tearing at curtains. The sounds of spitting fire and sparks filled his ears. He was dazzled by a brilliant burst of orange light.

  "No!" Jason cried. "Shit! No! Shit!"

  The instant before Jason disappeared, he saw a chaotic disc of dark, muddled colors open before him. A swirling ring of sparks—burning bits like you'd see when you cut through metal with a miter saw—flashed and spun around the darkness, just like one of those whirly fireworks, spitting and sputtering in the same clockwise direction...