Delvers LLC- Surviving Ludus

by Blaise Corvin (ed)

  “WHY ARE YOU IMBECILES DESTROYING THE GUEST LODGE?” snarled Rauli.

  The German managed to roll over and get into a sitting position, rubbing his head. “I brought the American breakfast. Things went downhill from there.”

  Anger filled me as I listened to the German’s lies. “Liar! He took my weapon while I slept!”

  Rauli stormed into the wreckage of the building and dug around in the rubble for a bit. Then she threw something at me. I bent down and picked the item out of the dirt. It was the wooden pistol grip from my former sub-machine gun.

  “That weapon? You stupid rotting Terran! Iron doesn’t last long here on Ludus. He didn’t take anything. It rotted while you slept. Now get up, both of you, you are going to meet the leader of the fort! Furthermore—wait a minute. Why me?”

  She glared at me, somehow looking even more irritated than before. “Earl, get out of that laundry bag and put some clothes on!”

  “Oh shit,” I muttered, looking and realizing I was practically naked except for the stupid laundry bag I was wearing. All around me the beautiful Areva women had gathered and some were openly staring and laughing; others were mad at the ruckus I had caused. I jumped up fast and ran for the wreckage of the building, digging until I found my clothes, which were luckily still in one piece.

  ***

  Captain Rauli had brought us deeper into the fort, which was actually just a small town with really great walls. It reminded me of any other small town we had in the U.S. except with no electricity and a lot of tiny, pointy-eared, beautiful women with no men around. Oh, and some of the beautiful women carried swords and spears which was making them much more attractive, well, at least in my eyes. Everything seemed to have a little less flair than what I was used to. The signs for the stores were just a little more ‘matter-of-fact’ and they lacked something distinctive that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I chalked it up to the Areva being aliens.

  Rauli led us to the finest-looking building I had seen yet. It had a nice stone foundation and bronze or brass highlights all over it meant to draw the eye to the alluring architecture. We were marched inside and I took a deep breath. The air smelled of freshly cut lumber, I even saw wood dust on the ground here and there, and I heard hammering coming from somewhere further back in the building. The place must have still been undergoing construction. After a small entrance room or coat room of sorts, the building opened up into a large chamber with lots of seating. Each side of the room was lined with beautiful wooden pillars that someone had carved sharp angles into. They were jarring in an aesthetically pleasing way.

  At the front of the room sat a matronly-looking Areva, the first one I had seen that didn’t look perpetually young. She actually had grey hair.

  “Grab some chairs there, gather around, I don’t want this to be formal,” said the older Areva female. Years of military service conditioning kicked in and I immediately grabbed three wooden chairs from back behind a few of the pillars and set them around the woman who I assumed to be the leader of the Fort. The natural seating in the room was set up like a courtroom back on Earth, and the leader was sitting in what would be the front row for us. It would have been awkward for us to try to talk to her all sitting beside her in seating like that, hence me placing the free-standing chairs in a semi-circle around her.

  “I like this one. He listens,” she said as she pointed at me while we all sat down.

  Captain Rauli chimed in, “Wait until he says something so stupid that you need to slap him.”

  I reflexively rubbed my cheek that she had last slapped. The old woman stared at me knowingly so I just shrugged my shoulders and grinned. I had a complicated relationship with authority.

  “Yes I see,” said the old woman. “You may address me as May. Now, I brought you two here because you owe this settlement, this community, a great debt. Newcomers to Ludus are normally murdered quickly when they appear in the wilderness, especially those who come in with orbs like you two did. I’ve read Captain Rauli’s full report. She pulled you two out of the fire, helped you with your orbs, put a roof over your heads, fed you, stopped you from murdering one another, and she even saved this one’s life,” said May while pointing at the German.

  “So, you two are going to pay us back. Then we will help you even more and send you on your way. You will leave here in good standing. We are a small fort, but we are connected. We are good people to know, and contacts are all you can really have on this world. Any objections so far?”

  The German shook his head, but I wasn’t so easily convinced. “You want me to do something dangerous, probably too dangerous for you to do. Why don’t you just have her do it?” I asked while nodding at Rauli.

  “Because if she is out there, then there is no one back here guarding and patrolling the fort. I can’t stretch my forces that thin,” said May.

  I said, “I’m not saying no, but hypothetically what would happen if I walked out of here right now, and left peacefully?”

  “I forbid it. If you managed to get out without catching an arrow in your back or having Captain Rauli throw her spear through you, then you would be hunted. Like I said, this town is connected to a network. I’ve already sent out magic messenger birds explaining who you are, your names, a picture of your likeness, and rough descriptions of your powers. You owe this community a debt and you will pay it back. Run from here if you want but you would be fugitives. Here, let me show you.”

  The woman picked up a binder made of wood with metal rings holding it together and flipped through it until she got to a page written in a language that clearly wasn’t English, but for some reason I could still read. It had my name written across the top and a beautifully drawn picture of me. I could also see my height and a bunch of other information about me.

  “What language is that? Why can I read it? What is a magic messenger bird? And, oh my God, I’m speaking that language right now aren’t I?”

  “You are speaking Luda, the language of this planet. It’s a side effect of the orb you swallowed. I have to ask the both of you, did you choose your powers in your dreams?”

  I said, “I know we are speaking the same language, but I’m just getting more confused. I woke up and I could shoot nifty purple stuff out of my hands.”

  “Same for me, Mrs. May,” said the German. “I woke up and I was stronger.”

  “This is neither good or bad news. You both have non-modular orbs, and you are both first-rank orb-Bonded. This means on the scale for powered individuals on Ludus, you are both still relative weaklings. I’m old for my race, and ancient by the standards of your race. I like to be direct. I wanted you both to hear this directly from me, because it was my idea.” She looked me in the eyes, and her gaze seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. “You guessed correctly, Earl, you are both going on a dangerous mission, but I’ll give you ten days to train for it. Captain Rauli will help you with your training and outfit you for the mission. You are both military men, and now that you both have power, this should be a piece of cake. Isn’t that what you Terrans say, ‘piece of cake?’”

  “Yeah, Americans do, but… wait, what? What’s a magic messenger bird?” I asked.

  The ancient woman I knew as May opened her binder and wrote something on a piece of paper. She ripped it out of her binder and folded it up. Then I couldn’t believe what happened next. What looked like a tiny little person, less than a foot tall with two sets of wings, one on its arms and the other on its back, flew through the window and landed on her knee. Its head was bird-like, and it was colored red and blue.

  May whispered something to it, gave it the note and a small piece of gold from a pouch at her waist, and the creature flew out the window it’d come from. Then the old woman calmly sat back down.

  Seconds later, the weird thing flew right back in, landed on my knee, left the folded-up piece of paper there, and then flew off again. I looked at May and she nodded. I opened the piece of paper and it read:

  Get the rotting hell out of my counc
il chambers. Get to work. And fix my rotting guest house or I will tell Rauli to slap you again.

  I jumped up with a start and shouted: “Yes ma'am!” while resisting the urge to salute her. I grabbed the German by one of his shoulders and said, “Time to go now.” I figured he was strong enough to resist me but instead he rolled his eyes and followed. We headed out to the street and started walking back towards the front gate and the ruined guesthouse, mostly because I didn’t know where else to go. Captain Rauli easily caught up to us and started talking mid-walk.

  “You are to start construction on the new guest house immediately. I’ll have some basic tools brought over, but May would like you to use your abilities to build the house. It will help you learn how to use them. You won’t be given new accommodations, so the faster you build it means the faster you will have a roof over your head. I’ll train you when I can, but my priority is the safety of this fort and patrolling the outlying areas.”

  I had expected this much from her, but obviously I still had questions. “Why didn’t we get any details about the mission?”

  “I’ll give you the details in three days. I don’t want them to derail you, for now focus on learning your abilities and building the guest house. Oh, and one other thing, May specifically said that the new house needs to be better than the last one. Use the same layout, one entrance that faces the main road, and if it has windows they need to be hard for someone my size or bigger to get out of quietly.”

  “I don’t know how to build a house. I can explode one for you though if you want!” I said with a wide grin on my face.

  “I think I can,” the German said quietly next to me.

  “You don’t talk much do you, Sour Kraut?”

  “My name is Otto, and I guess I just got used to not talking.”

  “You are probably upset that there aren’t any puppies around for you to kill,” I said, only half joking.

  “I’m upset because I will never see my family again.”

  “Who, your daddy, Hitler?”

  “I’m no fan of Hitler,” he said resolutely.

  “You are literally wearing his uniform right now.”

  “I was drafted,” he said in Luda, then in English he said, “remember this? I speak English. I’m from Ohio originally, my family moved to Germany for better work opportunities when I was a child. If I hadn’t complied with my draft orders then Nazis would have killed my loved ones. You are stupid and crass, and you would have broken if you were in my place.”

  “Excuses, excuses, excuses, I would have found a way to not work for Hitler. You have to draw the line somewhere, you can’t just roll over like a dog and follow the orders of a lunatic. There is no excuse for wearing that uniform.”

  Otto frowned. “You are right, maybe there is a way I could have gotten out of this. Maybe if I had seen the signs sooner I could have escaped with my family before things got bad in Germany, but that’s not what happened and I had to do my best to make sure the members of my family, the children in my family, weren’t brutally murdered.” The way he spoke made it seem like he was living in memories, thinking of better times. For a second I had felt bad there for judging him, then that feeling went away when I remembered all of the dead U.S. soldiers I had helped carry off of the battlefield.

  “Your excuses are bullshit. Fuck you, and fuck that uniform. If you make a wrong move around me, I’ll blast your fucking face off. I don’t care how strong you are now, it won’t stop me.”

  “Earl,” he said, using my name for the first time, “the war is behind both of us now. I hold no animosity towards you and I never have. You do what you need to do, but I won’t attack you unprovoked.”

  Captain Rauli interrupted us, “Men are such children sometimes.” The rest of the walk back was quiet after that, each of us in our own thoughts I supposed. Once we got to the site of the destroyed building Captain Rauli gave us the last of our directions.

  She explained, “You can use the wood from the destruction there. If you need more, just alert the gate guards and they will let you out of the fort and you can collect it from the nearby forest. Ah, look here are your supplies now,” she said as a runner delivered basic tools and some paper with charcoal pieces to draw on it with. I couldn’t help but notice a distinct lack of nails.

  “Wait a minute, I never claimed to be a master builder, but won’t we need nails?”

  “You have magic powers, dummy, figure it out,” said Rauli, then she walked off.

  I considered asking another question, but I think I understood what she was trying to do. I looked at the German, and he looked at me, and we got to work without speaking. The first thing we did was drag off the wreckage of the old building. Some of the beds were still usable so we set those aside. The German stopped at some point and set up a small table using some of the debris. Then he started drawing and he kept at it, so I just kept clearing.

  The former guesthouse hadn’t had a proper foundation; it had relied on the weight of the walls to stay in place so there was really no part left of the last house that needed to stay as-was. When a piece of the structure was too large for me to pull off the site, I blasted it with one of my energy beams, which of course left me with a giant smile on my face. I quickly learned that I had to temper how much energy I put into each blast or the results would be too destructive. I also learned that my magic had limits; not only was it physically taxing but I could also feel myself “running out,” so to speak. If I rested for a bit I could feel some of it come back but it was clear that my blasts weren’t unlimited.

  The last thing I learned was that my energy was pretty customizable. I could make anything from a pure destructive blast that seemed to be a perfect mix of heat and force, or I could make the blasts lean hard toward force or towards heat. I couldn’t filter it one-hundred-percent one way or the other, but I could get close.

  Once I had the debris removed from the site I could tell that we wouldn’t have enough building materials for a new guest house—too much had been damaged beyond repair. The German was still drafting what I assumed to be blueprints for a new guest house so I headed out the front gate without him. The tree line was about a three-minute jog from the front gate, but while I was jogging I had a very dumb idea. I put my hands behind me and let off a small burst of mostly force energy and was immediately blasted explosively forward. I lost control of my run, couldn’t catch myself, and rolled in the dirt, hard. I hopped back up quick hoping that the beautiful women manning the fort wall hadn’t seen my embarrassing tumble.

  I gave up on that maneuver for now and made it to the woodline. Then I looked around, realizing I had no fucking idea what I was doing, no experience woodworking, or cutting down trees. The only thing I was good at cutting down was Nazis, and I’d used a Tommy Gun for that, not superpowers. I picked a strong-looking tree at random and approached it, put my hand on the trunk, and let out the barest amount of a heat blast.

  All my effort did was make a little burn mark on the wood. So I tried my best to focus the blast into a thin line of just heat, emanating out of the tip of my pointer finger. This result was better but the cut it was making after a few seconds was very shallow. Without cutting the beam off, I enhanced the heat by about five percent and I added about ten percent force to it and was immediately rewarded.

  The beam coming from my finger pushed me back a bit but I braced my hand with my nonfiring arm and kept cutting. The added force was working to blast off the burnt portions where my heat beam was landing. Now I was cutting through the tree at about one inch every few seconds. In short order I had made a clean slice from one side of the tree to the other. Then the tree started making terrible cracking noises, almost as loud as gunshots.

  “Oh shit.”

  I wasn’t sure which way to run. On one side of me was a dense monster-infested forest, the other was the open field that led to the fort, and the tree might just as easily fall that way and crush me. There was also my pride to consider. The women at the Fort were almos
t all entirely beautiful. Between tripping, getting constantly slapped, and being seen in homemade underwear, I was a little tired of being embarrassed in front of them. I also didn’t want to get speared by any low-hanging branches as the tree fell. With all this in mind, I settled with backing up about fifteen feet and rotating around the trunk as it began to stagger and groan in different directions.

  It started falling towards the woods and I realized how shitty that would be trying to pull it out of other trees it got all tangled up with, creating hours more work. So I did something dumb. I let off a large blast of kinetic force, maybe about ninety-percent force and ten-percent heat, as high up on the tree as I dared. It had the intended consequence of redirecting the falling tree toward the empty field in front of the fort, but it also blew me backwards so fast that it knocked me unconscious.

  I must not have been out for long because when I woke the sun was in the same position in the sky and my back was to a tree trunk. The vision out of one of my eyes was tinged pink and I couldn’t blink it out, then I realized it was because blood was running from my hairline into the eye. I used leaves to mop it up the best I could, but I’m sure I still looked horrid. My back was pounding something fierce as well, but after rubbing my hands around my chest and back I decided that I most likely didn’t have any broken ribs. I limped away from the tree I had crashed into to find the tree I had cut down lightly smoking from my blast. Oh well, isn’t wood supposed to be dried out when you build with it anyway? I thought.

  After kicking my own ass with my own power twice, I had a lot more respect for it. I also realized that it would be insanely stupid for me to try to move a tree that probably weighed ten tons. The branches would most likely make it harder to move as well. I carefully went around the tree cutting and blasting off branches as fast as I could without injuring myself or setting anything on fire. I also realized that I was on limited time and couldn’t pussy-foot around, so I worked fast.

  Then I cut the entire tree right across the middle, width-wise. It was more than double the length of the former guest house anyway, so even halving it meant the planks we could create from it would still be too long. The problem was I had no way to get the pieces apart from each other. Even though I had cleanly separated the two halves, my cut was only maybe a centimeter in width. I needed to move the top half away from the bottom half so I would have room to push it. I knew if I used enough force to roll the tree a few feet away that it would blast me backwards, at least that’s what I figured with how heavy the tree was. I was always terrible at science class but some kind of quote about every action having an equal reaction went through my head.