Equalize

by Ryan DeBruyn

  The final reason they were probably so low level was that the military neutered large kills for them, taking a larger percentage of Etherience for those kills than the townsfolk would receive. This did not bode well for his assumptions about what Corsair had planned for the people of Ottawa.

  Rocky’s eyes went distant for a moment as he reflected back on his own ‘luck’ for fighting ‘solo’ for his power. This was another reason he was going to stick to putting points into his Luck stat only at the ten level marks.

  Why fix something that isn’t broken? I don’t think Luck means the same in this world as it did in mine.

  In that moment, he had already formulated a plan for the St. Monika group to help them level faster. The hunters would be put into smaller groups, each led by an influential member, and in these groups, they would hunt for prey in the forest.

  Each group would be made up of at most ten members, and their composition would be as closely linked to gaming conventions for raiding or dungeon groups as possible. That convention being a tank, damage dealers, and healers included in each group.

  This was why Rocky felt his brain freeze when the group chose not to stay in the forest with him, instead wanting to go with the known quantity of the school and the safety it provided. An argument had even ensued about the captured militiamen, which Rocky had flat out refused to allow to return with the survivors.

  It had taken him literally half drawing his sword before the survivors from St. Monika had given up and, as a group, left the clearing. That didn’t mean that the group wouldn’t immediately alert the militant militia to Rocky’s presence, which was incredibly frustrating. Rocky had told them to stick to a story about a shadow attacking their militia guard before absconding with the tank and the three members during the troll fight, but he couldn’t be sure they would stick to that tale.

  Rocky’s four acquaintances stayed behind, however, glancing between him and the departing backs of their trial by fire friends.

  Nick spoke first, “My family is back in that school, Rocky. I need to go back, even if it just means bringing them here. I haven’t decided, but my children’s safety is my first priority. Can you protect them out here?”

  Rocky, who knew where Nick was coming from but also knew that Nick’s children were the same age as Alex at around ten years of age, told him his honest opinion, “No place is safe, Nick. The only thing I think we can do to protect the ones we love is to help them get stronger. This new world isn’t something that has the assured safety we used to take for granted.”

  Rocky took a breath when he saw Nick’s face growing red and fists clenched. He quickly amended his previous comment, “I am not telling you what to do, Nick. It is your family. I am just telling you my opinion.” This at least stopped Nick from verbally attacking him, but it did nothing to unclench his fists or lessen the redness in his face.

  The entire group seemed to sense the pointlessness of trying to wring assurances from each other. Instead, the remaining three said their goodbyes and left. In Rocky’s opinion, it was probably for the best because by the speed of his heart, clenched jaw, and the firm belief that they were doing the wrong thing, he was sure that any discussion would have turned into an argument.

  Rocky felt a lump form in his throat as the men walked away, but he just stared at the two laser rifles they had left on the ground in the silent refusal of any help he was offering.

  Rocky shook his head, then took the hogtied militiamen one by one from the top of the tank where they had been left. He brought their still unconscious forms to the cave, and all the boys joined him when they heard the surprised exclamations a water bottle of water caused to be elicited from the waking men.

  Palms now sweaty and his face showing his disgust with what came next, Rocky deliberated as the boys looked between him and the tied sopping wet men.

  Hoping for the best from the three men, Rocky removed their gags and got to it. Each man, who had already been glaring at Rocky, began yelling at him in a cacophony of verbal threats the instant he took the gags out of their mouths. Catching only parts of it, Rocky grimaced, realizing that this was not going to go very well.

  When the threats finished and the slurs began, Rocky wasn’t surprised. When they crossed the line into slurs about his family, the cave grew cold. Even though the darkness of the cave hid it well, smoke began to form around Rocky’s fist.

  Rocky’s eyes seemed to dull, and two of the three men who now were remembering the moments before their capture silenced instantly. The final man, the hussar and squad leader, hadn’t seen this look and felt he had no reason to fear the cold thousand-yard stare, so he kept stringing curses together, mixing threats and insults.

  With slow, predatory grace Rocky walked towards the squad leader with his hand on his sword hilt. He recalled the words these three men had traded before the troll’s attack. His anger was boiling over and showing in the Dark Cloak partially triggering, completely unbidden.

  A cold smile came to Rocky’s lips, but it didn’t touch his eyes. The hussar was finally clued in when he caught a good glimpse of the man’s smiling face and eyes, the man stopped the insults, very unsure what it was that was making his heart attempt to move sideways in his chest.

  Very quietly, Rocky spoke, but not to the hussar who he crouched in front of, “Alex, Jason, Oliver, I think it is time for you to go practice outside. Feel free to use the rifles and the tank itself as your target.” Each word was commanding but quiet, carrying a weight the hussar associated with power.

  The three boys who heard in it something very different each quickly left the room. As they went, Rocky touched each pelt he had laid out the night before and began recalling them back into his bag of holding. The militiamen’s eyes began to widen, and their mouths moved, but no sound came out for a change.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Exiting the cave to a gentle, cooling breeze off of the water made Rocky’s shoulders lower, and taking a deep breath allowed his brow to finally unfurrow. It had taken an entire hour or more, but Rocky had learned everything the three militiamen had known.

  Getting them to talk hadn’t taken much. In fact, the threat of torture had almost been enough. Rocky’s stomach still roiled from the charade he had put on. The idea had come to him rather spontaneously, and he had to wonder if his increased Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma hadn’t played a significant role in remembering the articles from so long ago.

  The idea had been simple. Rocky had read an article that stated that in a dangerous situation, the most significant stress on the body was the fear of the unknown. The report further mentioned that the loss of control in a perilous situation furthers this stress and will cause an individual to break quickly.

  Rocky had used that knowledge and dragged each of the three captives separately and chosen entirely at random away from the group and into the depths of the cave. The light had quickly dimmed further until they were in total darkness. Once they were in the dark, they had ‘sung’ everything they knew.

  I feel disgusting and dirty even though I avoided hurting any of them. It was a close thing, though.

  Rocky shivered, thinking about the hussar who had been the one who held out the longest and tested Rocky’s patience immensely. The silly man kept trying to assert his importance and insinuate how great a punishment Rocky would receive for killing or even hurting him.

  Why couldn’t he just buckle to the darkness like everyone else?

  Rocky had felt his inner beast chomping on the cage inside him. It would be so easy to just cut off a limb. Who knows, in this world, they might just grow back?

  In that terrifying moment, Rocky had realized that the cage that held his baser nature wasn’t the same as it had been before he let it out. It had only been one single event with Yin-Yang, but he had undone many of the safeguards that had taken thirty-one years to put in place.

  Now that side of him was whispering that these men deserved anything that he did to them. Killing them would
be the most logical action. A cold sweat broke over his entire body, chilling him as the voice repeated itself over and over again. He knew he had to make the opposite decision or fall to the beast forever. He would let these men live.

  Luckily, during his inner struggle the hussar had asked what had become of his squad. Smiling coldly and unseen in the darkness, Rocky used this unknown against the man. He had thrown some bloody rabbit meat at him. The wet plop of meat on stones beside the hussar’s bound hands accompanied by the scent of blood was enough for him to undergo a rapid change in demeanor.

  The downside to this tactic was that Rocky now had to carry the three militiamen’s unconscious bodies out of the dark of the cave. He had barely been able to see in those dark depths, and that was only due to Dark Cloak, but even its aid wasn’t able to completely cut the near pitch blackness. Thus why the rabbit meat had struck the ground near the dark outline of the hussar instead of the man’s face as he had been planning.

  Rocky had come to the surface to light a torch to fully banish the darkness and make locating the unconscious men slightly easier. Igniting one of his few remaining torches, Rocky turned back and entered the dark once again.

  He digested the answers he had been given, feeling nauseous at the absurdity and craziness of it all. The soldiers had all been selected in a similar method by Corsair. It would seem that Corsair was on the lookout for individuals that were overly vocal about their hatred of this new world.

  Many of the individuals had lost their families immediately after the crash and were becoming jaded from seeing all the survivors happy and safe. Corsair would then send a representative to meet with the disgruntled soldier in the form of a disciplinary meeting.

  During this meeting, the individual who was meeting with the soldier would slowly and, to Rocky’s ear, deviously manipulate the conversation to find out how far each soldier was willing to go. It seemed that Corsair wanted only the most depraved individuals in his inner circle.

  If the soldier in question fit the criteria to join the shadow ops and was willing to kill other survivors, they would be inducted into the group at a fundamental level. Each subsequent mission they completed would see them rise in rank within the dark organization.

  After induction, the newly vetted soldier would rejoin the rest of the militia but would have multiple outlets for frustrations in ways that would have horrified anyone else. As Rocky walked out of the darkness with the first soldier’s body, he was left wondering if there was something else at play here.

  Could Corsair have a power that allowed him to manipulate people? Rocky looked at the soldier and wondered. All three had confirmed that there was a relatively large contingent of disgruntled soldiers who now committed atrocities in Corsair’s name. This spoke to Rocky of more than just a few rotten eggs. He wished he had analyzed the man when he had the chance, but unfortunately, his shocked brain hadn’t considered anything but escaping the one time he had seen him.

  It had only been a short time from the crash until now, and for Corsair to have built up such a large group of equally malicious minds spoke of foul play.

  The hussar had been the most knowledgeable and had been the only one of the group who knew the long-term plan. The man had spoken of a small area in the downtown core of old Ottawa and that it had numerous high-level golems and monsters inside. The militia’s goal, on the surface, was to build a large enough army to overpower those creatures and gain control of this region.

  According to the man, Corsair truly believed that he would be helping the people in Ottawa. He had also discovered the existence of Territories and the power they conveyed to their owners through somebody in the shop. He was currently building an army to conquer the Ottawa Territory, and he planned on using the survivors to hunt and build his future Territory. He wasn’t specifically planning on enslaving them, but…

  The way Corsair saw it, he was the only one who could protect the survivors. In the most bizarre thought process Rocky had ever heard, Corsair was trying to prevent the waste of Etherience. He believed that anyone who left would inevitably die to the monsters outside of Ottawa so was sending a squadron of men to farm the humans’ Etherience before the monsters killed them and took it for themselves.

  Remembering that moment made Rocky’s mouth twist and his stomach knot as he tried to imagine the twisted choices a man capable of such evils would make after gaining more power. It was like watching some emotionless individual with a checks and balance sheet making decisions without any humanity.

  The good news, in Rocky’s point of view, was that the army hadn’t had any success against the creatures in the area of downtown. Each attack was rebuffed quickly, and if it wasn’t for the tank's mobility, the hussar believed that there would have been massive losses. From this new knowledge, Rocky assumed that the creatures were similar in Strength to that of the monsters that had been fighting over Algonquin.

  Unfortunately, all three of the men didn’t know of any list of survivors. They didn’t believe one had ever been attempted. Upon hearing this piece of news for the third time, Rocky was silent. The quiet made the hussar panic, and he babbled incoherently for a while.

  Rocky was thinking, however, and tuned him out. The creatures of downtown Ottawa, unlike the ones in Algonquin, sounded like they were playing nice or had already established some degree of equilibrium. The massive golem everyone was talking about was considered to be the major-domo of the region, but Rocky wondered if this gigantic albino crocodile, which used the Ottawa river as its nest, was the real threat.

  The threat of golems, while very real and deadly, had clearly drawn boundaries. Not entering schools, hospitals, and libraries was a clear example of this. Looking back at the group from Pembroke, Rocky now realized that the golems must have captured one of them and forced the others to come out to save that individual.

  It was probably the child.

  His mood soured thinking about the young boy and the woman who had died at the hands of the Yin-Yang golem. The hussar, who he was currently carrying, groaned, and Rocky realized he was no longer being very gentle with the man’s unconscious body. Unclenching his fist from the man’s ropes, he continued his train of thoughts as he tried to brainstorm a method to end Corsair.

  In truth, Rocky had already come up with assassination as the easiest and surest method for eliminating the threat Corsair represented, but he really wanted to find some other way out of this situation. While he had watched vigilante movies, read the comic books, and saw in them the need and reasoning for the character, none of those movies or books really conveyed the emotions he felt.

  What if he killed Corsair just to become him? That question made shivers crawl up and down his spine. Looking at it with pure logic, it was easy to see that if you cut the head off the snake, you removed the problem. Emotionally, Rocky was in turmoil, and he wasn’t sure he could be so cold and calculating. His only option, in that case, would be to begin removing the shackles of his baser nature. He knew that piece of him wasn’t evil, but he also knew it had no place in a civilized society.

  Could this world be considered civilized, though?

  Dropping off the third and final soldier, Rocky called for Jason, Alex, and Oliver to join him. Looking at the soldiers while waiting, he was quickly able to spot bumps, bruises, and scrapes which were apparently from him dragging them through the cave.

  Rocky smiled slightly at the marks. It was the least they deserved, and he knew it could have been much worse. They had played a part in countless deaths and atrocities over the past few weeks, right?

  He took a moment to consider if should try to add any more deception. During the questioning Rocky had done his best to throw in ‘accidental’ falsehoods that would steer the men away from the St. Monika survivors and instead think that this was a kidnapping of opportunity. Thinking back, he realized that he had done all he could to sell his tale and adding more might make it more suspicious. He sighed tiredly.

  Unfortunately, as much as
he needed sleep, his day was far from over. When the boys arrived at the tank, Rocky explained why they had to move to another camp.

  Jason and Alex stayed where they were, both glaring daggers at the unconscious figures, probably attributing all of the horrors committed upon them on to the slumped militiamen. Rocky could understand, but when Jason’s hand began to flare with fire, he intervened and escorted the three boys, physically in Jason’s case, away from the tank.

  Rocky glanced back at the three men one last time, and he could still feel that uncertainty telling him he was making a mistake. He tore his gaze away and walked over to the slightly damaged tank, attempting to sweep it into his inventory.

  A moment later, a wide-eyed Rocky was sitting flat on his ass, staring back at the empty place the tank had been. He attempted to stand up and almost lost his pants as they refused to lift with him. He blinked once and then remembered that the bag of holding only had a weight reduction quality, and the tank plus everything else stored must weigh enough that his muscles and frame couldn’t support the excess. He was probably lucky he hadn’t broken his armor’s straps where the bag hung.

  Once he had removed the tank from his inventory, he destroyed it more thoroughly with a few slashes of his Soul Blade and walked with the boys. As they walked, the boys mentioned that the weapons had stopped working after a few shots, and they couldn’t figure out how to make them work again. The three had mentioned it in a way that let Rocky know they were worried they had broken it, and they were currently trying to casually mention the problem while separating themselves from having any part of it.