Know Your Roll

by Matthew Siege

  I succeeded in getting under his skin, which was saying something since there was a lot of skin to get under. Furious, he raced at us, roaring with the open mouth of every cadaver present, either strewn on the field or attached to him.

  “Finally…” I revved the Voidsaw to full throttle and triggered the Flame Spewer at the same time, working them around in his midsection.

  Mech Weapon (Melee)

  Roll: 10

  Effectiveness: 50%

  Mech Weapon (Hazardous Emission)

  Roll: 16

  Effectiveness: 80%

  Fire squirted out from between the bonds of the corpses that made up his chest, but the only reason I did as much damage as I did was because Warwick didn’t bother to dodge.

  I was shredding the bodies to chum, but they didn’t need to be whole in order to help him. It was like trying to attack a bowl of jello with a straw; whatever destruction I managed to do closed up as soon as my weapon moved on.

  Warwick grabbed at Mother’s cockpit. With fingers made of the fallen he pried at the seams, struggling to wrench the metal apart and get in at us. Faces, ribcages, gizzards, and butts pressed against the glass as he worked on us.

  “Hang in there!” I shouted, an ode to Mother as I leaned the Mech into the grapple, thumbing the trigger and firing ten rockets center mass.

  KA-BOOOOOM!

  Mech Weapon (Indirect Fire)

  Roll: 20

  Effectiveness: 100%

  They were hard-hitting, high-explosive weapons; at this range they didn’t strike individually so much as give him a full shotgun blast of warhead buckshot straight in the sternum.

  The explosion cooked off the rest of the ammunitions I’d held in reserve, and a secondary blast rocked us on our heels. Even if we did have more rockets, which I was guessing that we didn’t anymore, we wouldn’t be using the Alchemical Storm again.

  The only reason we were still standing at all was because Warwick insisted on holding us up in a desperate attempt to tear us in two. He might yet succeed, but not before I got the chance to watch in open-mouthed fascination as a plethora of magical effects marinated the behemoth.

  Some of his essential parts started dropping away, blissful looks on the ruins of their faces as the Euphoric Philter grabbed them by the temporal lobes and convinced their minds that the ultimate joy was at hand.

  Sentient clothing told everyone within earshot horror stories of the things they’d seen or the sweaty places they’d spent their thankless lives pressed up against, whilst the Ichor of Conspiracy whispered into the ears of the afflicted that they needed to run, that the clothes were out to get them.

  Also, why weren’t they as happy as the rapturous fools who were shirking their duties? And why should they obey Warwick’s command if the others weren’t forced to?

  “That shot alone took our armor all the way down to 9%, and I’m not even sure the arm’s still attached,” Patch warned. “Let’s not do it again.”

  I glanced out the corner of the glassteel, past the picture of little King Raze. “It’s hanging on by a thread. Even if I wanted an encore though, I couldn’t. How tall is he now, Source?”

  “Sixteen feet three inches.”

  Up came the Venomous Goblin, and even though he batted it away with one arm I still got some good strafes in across his face.

  Mech Weapon (Direct Fire) [Indiscriminate]

  Roll: 5

  Effectiveness: 25%

  The bullets weren’t anywhere near as effective as the rockets had been, but I was starting to run out of ways to piss him off. That was okay, because I had one more card to play.

  Or video game, rather…

  When Warwick reared back and punched us square in the cockpit, I didn’t bother to dodge.

  “7%.”

  The next hit came faster than the first, and I cheerfully absorbed it as well.

  “5%. Raze, don’t just stand there and do nothing!”

  “Source, swap my controls over to Killer Instinct,” I said, rotating my chair and grabbing the new joystick. This one had an array of buttons, but would only let me move Mother forward and backward.

  The third shot was a left hook, and I pulled back on the joystick and tapped the ‘block’ button with immaculately perfect timing, easily knocking aside his attack and exposing him for a moment. I didn’t waste the opportunity, jabbing him in the golem’s throat with the chain gun

  Mech Weapon (Improvised Melee)

  Roll: 9

  Effectiveness: 45%

  and supercharging the Ouroboros Caustic Laser Sight

  Mech Weapon (Beam Weapon)

  Roll: 15

  Effectiveness: 75%

  so that it scorched off the side of his face. He was hemorrhaging other people’s organs now, and they flowed from his wounds like an abattoir’s prized slurry.

  Warwick screamed in agony and indignation, a sound like aborted thunder spilling from his too-wide corpse mouth as he kicked, then hit, then uppercut. The attacks were fast, but I was ready for each of them.

  “Hey Patch,” I said nonchalantly, completely at one with the Killer Instinct controls. “You’ve never seen me play this game before, have you?”

  “No,” she breathed, rightfully in awe of my reflexes and Friskiness.

  “That’s because I beat it every damn time I play. Once you get the hang of it and learn the timing of the blocks,” I told her, absently parrying a jab, knocking aside a flurry of kicks, countering a palm strike with a Voidsaw pimp slap and then reaching into Warwick and punching a blaze of Goblin rounds right out the back of him, “you just need to let the Heroes get frustrated and do all of the work for you.

  “Den why are ya still retreatin’?” Bingo demanded. “Stop showin’ off and put ‘im in the ground.”

  I didn’t answer, because he was about to find out. My skilled defense had suckered the Paladin into throwing a wild haymaker, and he telegraphed his punch with all the over-confidence and undeserved pride of a true Hero of the Platform.

  It was as if I could predict exactly what he was going to do. I juked left, and just as the errant punch that would otherwise have caved in my cockpit was at full extension, I reached up with both arms. Thankfully, the right one managed to fight through the catastrophic damage it’d sustained as it valiantly responded to my commands.

  I used what was left of the Voidsaw to latch on to his elbow as I stepped inside his guard, locking the Goblin’s red-hot triple barrel behind his neck with my other arm and pulling him forward on top of me. He didn’t fight it at all, more than happy to let his momentum take the tumble, convinced that he had the upper hand even as I let myself somersault backwards while I held him tight.

  I fed the hungry jump jets beneath Mother’s mismatched feet the rest of our fuel, and their thrust-propelled both of us in a graceful backwards roll.

  C-C-C-C-Combo Breaker!

  I’d planned on throwing him into the magma, but halfway through the motion I saw that the river of lava might be too narrow for that. There was a chance he’d get away, and instead of risking it I simply held on for dear life and let both of us drop over the edge and into the boiling rock together.

  I’d been expecting us to sink beneath the surface, which was why I was so surprised when we hit the bottom with a jolt. The ground here was unstable and capricious, and already some of the river’s bank had fallen in to mix with the fire’s fury.

  I was still trying to grapple him, but it was getting harder by the second as the bodies that made up his form began to cook and crumble.

  Warwick was still strong enough to try and get away from me though, and a moment later we both had our feet underneath us. The river here was only about ten feet deep. All of it was deadly, but my cockpit was just above the lava line and Warwick was able to bob up and down, kicking off the bottom and thrashing away as he attempted to retreat to the relative safety of the other side.

  “Source, let’s see how all those ears attached to all those brains like our Bans
hee Flux once it’s supercharged.”

  “Ready and waiting. I guessed what you were planning.”

  “Gold stars all around, once this is through. Do it.”

  A blinding wave of light and sound blared a landscape-wobbling ripple from our right shoulder as the EMP up there shrieked a blast wave tempest. We were supposed to be protected from it in here, but our hull was so compromised that every battered bolt, screw, seam, and seal we had trembled in sympathetic vibration.

  “La la la,” Patch sang, eye closed and fingers in her ears. “This is totally normal, please don’t tell me otherwise.”

  That did it. Warwick couldn’t hold himself together anymore. The distance from the magic dais giving him his power was too great, and the corpses had either seen the light, argued in vain with a pair of knickers, or given up the ghost in the midst of shouting about how the faked moon landing had exposed the flatness of the earth.

  And then there was the lava, of course. It was already so hot in the cockpit that I wouldn’t be surprised to find two trees fighting over a dog, and we were made of Mechronite. Flesh and blood, holy or not, didn’t stand a chance.

  I watch the grim glue that had once held Warwick D’Havilin together take a vote and unanimously decide to call it quits. Once that happened, the rest joined in. He fell apart, and I watched for his body amongst the burning, ashen, floating cadavers that drifted toward Hallow.

  “Find him,” I told the others. “No mistakes.” I knew how these things went. If you don’t see his corpse, he’s coming back to get you.

  “Dere.”

  Bingo was right. The Paladin was on fire, floating off in the direction of Hallow, what was left of his face still wearing the sneer. If I waded out to get him I didn’t think we’d be able to make it back to solid ground, and none of my guns were working.

  He dipped beneath the surface at last, and I saw parts of the real him go their separate ways.

  The old Gearblin broke the only rule I’d given him and said, “He’s dead, Jim.”

  “Damn it, Bingo. You had one job! Don’t mix those IPs!”

  Just like her namesake, Mother was one tough old bird, and I guess I wasn’t really all that surprised when she let me slog through the magma and up a shallow rise that led to the basin. We were covered in dripping, slowly hardening molten rock, but we were alive.

  And there, mere feet away with her hands on her hips, stood Commandant Sanguine.

  “Stay here,” I told Patch, fed up with this shit. “I’m going to go kick her ass.” Before she could say anything to stop me I dragged my battered butt out of the seat and through the cockpit’s hatch.

  I tried to hop down gracefully,

  Friskiness Roll

  Roll: 1

  Result: Abject Failure

  but there was too much hot metal and I was too hurt to make that happen. I landed on my feet and only twisted one of my ankles, which I suppose was about as much as I could hope for.

  Damage: 1

  Hit Points Remaining: 4

  “Gearblin,” Sanguine said, looking down her nose at me. “I should have known that I was going to have to kill you myself.”

  “Hold that thought…” I found a cut hydraulic hose and sucked as much healing potion-laced fluid as I could from it. The stuff tasted brackish and burnt all the way down, but it seemed to work.

  8 Hit Points restored

  Hit Points Remaining: 12

  “Okay,” I told her wearily, annoyed at myself for not being smart enough to bring a sidearm with me into the cockpit. “I’ve got no issues beating the snot out of a woman that’s more than twice as tall as me, so let’s do this.”

  She smiled warmly, and I was pleased when I didn’t even have to roll to resist her feminine wiles. I knew the Commandant for who she was now, and her prettiness didn’t work on me anymore. “Raze, you surprise me. I expected you to make some ridiculous, cocky demands for me to ignore.”

  I shrugged. Why not? “All right then, you’ve got two options. Surrender, at which point you’ll be interrogated by a Gnoll pal of mine, or walk the length of the Platform.”

  “N-”

  “I’m not done yet. Walk the length of the Platform telling every Hero you see along the way to turn around. Hallow’s gone, Sanguine. Darkwell’s back. Now, which choice is it going to be?” I asked.

  “How about a third option? I propose that I simply watch you squirm on the end of my sword,” she said, drawing a gleaming saber and performing a frankly impressive martial routine with it. A couple of times the edge came close enough to snip some of my hair from my head, but I didn’t give her the satisfaction of budging.

  Behind her, the gates to the mountain were still open. The raid was still going.

  I heard Patch drop lightly to the ground beside me. “What if you make both of us squirm on the end of your sword? How about them apples?”

  Sanguine frowned at her. “Well, I suppose that would be agreeable. By the way Raze, when you’re making threats, you’re supposed to add the ‘or what’ part at the end.”

  I blinked. “Huh?”

  “The threat! For instance, if I don’t select one of your ultimatums I’m assuming you’ll kill me, correct?”

  “Obviously,” I growled.

  She shook her head, clearly disappointed with me. “You’re supposed to say that, though. Otherwise how am I going to tell you that death holds no power over me? The Pantheon gave lowly, try hard Warwick three whole lives. Don’t you think they’ll grant me a lot more than that? I’d be willing to bet that, eventually, I’ll wait you out or wear you down. One of you will get sloppy and I’ll escape, and when I do I’ll lead an army back here the likes of which you horrid little cun-”

  She froze. I took a step to the side, getting in front of Patch in case this was a trick.

  It wasn’t. From my new angle I could see a circular hole straight through her head and right between her eyes.

  Then she flickered, her form jumping to a prior position. “-rrid little cun-”

  The aperture was in her forehead again. I could see the swirl of the Rift die down through the perfectly cauterized halo in her skull before she reset and, once again, said, “-rrid little cun-”

  Bingo chuckled from up above me, and when I turned I saw him straddling the Head Canon like Cher on her battleship’s gun. There were a bunch of wires in his fist. “Bloody pain, loading dis manually. Hot wirin’ it, too…”

  “-rrid little cun-”

  I looked at Sanguine, dying over and over, caught in a loop. “You shot her with the Ring of Regret, didn’t you?”

  He pulled the gas mask away and smiled. “Decided I was ready ta let it go after all. Guess gettin’ it implanted in yer face counts as equippin’ it.”

  “Good thinking,” I told him. This way, no matter how many lives her Gods handed out, she wasn’t going anywhere. “We’ll have to set out some cones and make sure nobody bumps her…”

  “-rrid little cun-”

  Patch leapt into the air and threw her arms around me tight. “That was fun! I think I’m even up for a sequel, after some snuggling of course.”

  I was hanging on to her, trying not to say something stupid. Out it came, anyway. “You kneed me in the balls just now, and you’re still kind of hurting me pretty bad, Patch.”

  “Sorry!” She wiggled her hips and things got a lot better, fast. “Close your eyes, Raze. I’ve got a present for you.”

  Bingo was watching, but I was beyond caring. I figured I’d earned whatever she was offering, and I squeezed my eyes shut and leaned in, puckering up and even grabbing her butt and pulling her closer.

  Patch’s lips were soft against the shell of my ear, and so was her voice. “I’m a questgiver, now.”

  You have been offered the ‘All About That Base’ Quest!

  Patch would like you to aid her in the fortification and improvement of the Rule of Cool headquarters. If you create a safe place for your people to prosper, and thwart the Powers That Be’s ine
vitable counterattack, you can choose from one of the following:

  A somewhat safe life full of fleeting moments of joy and fear

  An opportunity to flee, shirking your new responsibilities

  A continuation of your exploits as you search for a path to Redemption alongside your misfit crew

  I didn’t hesitate.

  Quest Accepted!

  “Hey, Patch?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Wanna Smash?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “-rrid little cun-”

  The End (for now)

  <<<<>>>>

  A Note from the Author – Hello, reader. If you got to the end with me, I truly hope the journey was worth the time you invested.

  I love these little guys, and I’ve got a LOT more in store for them. The next book with Raze and the Gang will be Rule of Cool #2 All About That Base!

  If you enjoyed this book, there’s one VERY important thing you can do. Review it! And when you do, please remember that, in the twisted mind of the almighty Amazon store, anything less than a 4 star rating is considered a negative review. That’s right, according to their (misguided) algorithm, a 5 star review means you loved the book, a 4 star means you liked it and everything else means, well, you didn’t.

  I hate, hate, hate to have to put this in the ‘beg the reader for a review section’, but there, it’s done. If you enjoyed yourself and want Amazon to guide other readers to Raze, Patch and Bingo’s exploits, please rate and review the book accordingly.

  And along the way, accept my undying thanks!

  Now, two more things. If you want to join my Facebook group and take part in book discussions, vote on plot points and hang out with other LitRPG and Gamelit readers, this is the place. It’s new, but it’s shiny!