by Charles Dean
Crap, did I step on something? He looked down at his feet only to have a bolt from a crossbow strike him in the arm for 25 damage a second later. The sound of laughter echoed from the end of the hall, and Lee glanced up to see Ramon illuminated by the small amount of light that had snuck in from outside.
“I love making traps and setting up plans, but it’s so rare for me to actually get to see them in action . . . to see how the story plays out.” Ramon broke into that awful cackle of his again. “That’s why this is such a pleasure. I had been so worried that you would die in a boring fashion, that the tale they would tell would be this: Two idiots charged the barracks and were stabbed to death. Who would have thought that it’d be so vibrant instead?! Back from the dead, quest for revenge, killed by the friend he trusted! What a perfect twist ending.” Ramon punctuated this final part by firing and missing another bolt at Lee, who was more concerned with searching out the floor for traps at the moment.
It’s too dark, Lee grumbled as he debated making a charge at Ramon. The downstairs layout of the bar had left him wary of booby traps, and unfortunately, Ethan hadn’t managed to make it through the door before the ceiling collapsed. Using the golem would have been an easy solution to both his lack of sight and his need to discover the traps Ramon had set. Still, as a habit, he peered through the rodent’s eyes as soon as he struggled to use his own. What he saw, in great detail, shook him.
David and the young girl who had been buried when the ceiling collapsed were dying. The young woman couldn’t be a day over twenty, yet she held onto David’s hand and simply smiled at the others as if this were a welcome and expected outcome. A few in the group were crying, but she didn’t seem to be bothered by her fate. Instead, she gripped David’s hand and put on the best face she could despite the pain she had to be in from being still buried from the waist down in debris.
Some of the others were trying to remove the debris, but David just shook his head. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve seen a temple of the god with Lee. I know it’s real. It’s all real. They have their own language and everything. He didn’t exaggerate at all,” David continued.
“Just hang in there! You’re not going to die yet!” a woman of roughly the same age as David assured him as she held his other hand. “You’re going to make it. We didn’t put up with all of that together for you to just die on me.”
“You don’t get it,” David continued. “I’m not going to just die. I’m going to the better world, the world where Lee will take care of us. I’m a believer, and he promised.” He coughed a bit of blood then continued. “He promised it’d be a better life than this.”
“Don’t say that! You can go there later,” the dejected old lady insisted. “Come on, Davey, you’ll pull through this.”
“Just . . . promise me.” He coughed again, his eyes starting to droop.
“Yeah?” She answered pleadingly.
“Just promise me that you’ll believe . . . that you’ll be meeting me on the other side when you go too . . .” The light faded out of his eyes, and a part of Lee died along with him.
Lee was torn between the part of him that felt like his con had taken away the man’s will to live, his desire to fight, and the part that was satisfied he had given the old man some small semblance of peace on his deathbed.
The more difficult part was that he was still fighting for his life as he watched David’s death. The entire time, he had been rolling from side to side as he dodged Ramon’s crossbow bolts—bolts that were somehow aimed rather well in the dim light and reloaded at an even more impressive speed.
Ethan, can you understand me? Do you know what you must do? Lee asked the mouse, hoping that this communication between the two wasn’t just words but also intention.
When he felt Ethan nod, he knew that the rat understood, so he switched off his vision through the mouse’s eyes so that he could focus on his struggle against Ramon.
“Come on, oh Herald of the end of times! Proclaim my doom to me! Tell me how this story ends!” Ramon’s cackle wormed its way through Lee’s head as he laughed between each sentence.
Screw it. Lee pushed all of his energy into his feet and charged down the right of the hallway toward the lunatic at its end. Right before he reached him, however, Ramon kicked the wall next to him, and two small ankle-high blades popped out from both walls and started rotating toward Lee.
With a reaction speed much faster than he remembered ever having, Lee leapt over the two blades with the grace of a seasoned hurdler before landing and ramming into Ramon shoulder-first. The blow was hard enough to send Ramon through the wall and down a full story onto the ground. Lee quickly pulled out his stashed bow, readied an arrow and shot Ramon in his leg while the other man was still moaning and writhing on the dirt. He had truthfully been aiming for a gut shot, but he was still relatively unpracticed with the bow, and his aim was still a bit off.
“Hey!” he called out toward the front of the bar. “Hey, he’s over here! Restrain him until we get the map!” Quickly, the injured Ramon was surrounded by five of the former slaves grabbing onto his limbs.
“We have him, Lord Lee!” a middle-aged man called up after they successfully managed to restrain the barkeep.
Lee couldn’t help but sigh as he stared at the incredibly poorly-made wooden wall that Ramon went through. Man, they just don’t make walls like . . . Lee paused, his brain wanting to say ‘they used to,’ but at the same time, he remembered that this was technically what his society would count as the ‘used to.’ . . . Like they will? He finished the thought before shaking his head and making his way down the stairs back to the storefront.
The first thing he noticed when he arrived downstairs was that the doorway was mostly cleared. He also felt a good deal of relief when he saw that the legs of a young woman weren’t sticking out of it. Does that mean she made it? Lee realized he was hopeful that she had as his feet stopped and his eyes fixated on the spot where she should have been.
“Victory?” Miller asked Lee, interrupting his thoughts. “I didn’t see a kill message for him. There wasn’t any EXP. Did he run, or did we get him?”
“Yes, did we succeed? Did we get him? Did we make that bastard pay?” Ling asked with a mix of anger and excitement in her rushed words.
“He’s outside on the ground and heavily injured,” Lee answered. “The others have him secured so that he can’t run away, but I don’t want to wait too long.”
Lee checked in with Ethan as he made his way to where Ramon was being held. He intended to have the rat start searching the bar for any traps that they might not have found yet, but he held off on that request as soon as he saw what his mouse was doing. The little, winged mouse was in one of the alleyways with one of its tiny little paws on its chest spitting out tiny pieces of wood. When it noticed that Lee was paying extra special attention to him at that moment, it scowled long enough for Lee to understand before it went back to pushing the pieces of debris out of its body.
The command he had given the mouse while he was fighting off Ramon wasn’t to chew the girl free—rather, it had been to crawl into the pile and help the villagers identify which pieces of debris could be removed safest so that they could excavate her more easily. He hadn’t been happy about having to let Ethan act where others could see, but if it came to a choice between saving the girl’s life and keeping one of his powers and abilities a secret, he wasn’t going to regret his decision.
He didn’t know she was okay, however, until he saw her bandaged up and leaning against the wall next to David’s corpse. He was actually worried that she might be dead at first until he saw her chest rise and fall a few times. Well, with the way this world works, it’s not like she has to worry about a permanent injury so long as she doesn't die, he thought to himself as he rounded the corner and came face to face with the pinned-down and crying Ramon.
“Come on, Ramon. Don’t do this.” Lee frowned when he saw the clever, manipulative villain snot-faced and bawling his eyes out
like a punched baby. “You’re supposed to be tough and defiant. The daring antagonist that laughs in the face of death,” he continued, feeling rather let down by this development. It had felt like a knife to the metaphorical gut as he endeavored to reason the madness behind such a colossal betrayal of his fellow friends and neighbors when he first realized that they had been duped by Ramon. He had subconsciously shifted Ramon from being the jovial information guy into a cold, calculating demon . . . and that image was once shattered again just as quickly as it had been created.
“Let me go, please! Please, let me go,” Ramon begged between tears. “It hurts so much! Just . . . Just let me pull it out! Let me go!”
“Ramon. Ramon, Ramon, Ramon. This is just pathetic. It’s disheartening to see you embarrass yourself like this. It’s just plain cruel.” Lee’s frown turned into a scowl. “These people . . . You betrayed them and sold their lives away like livestock, but you can’t even act like a man about it. You can’t even accept any responsibility for your failure. What happened to your laughter?” he asked as he walked closer. “I guess that all the edgy, life-doesn’t-matter crap falls out the window when it’s your life on the line, doesn’t it?” Lee knew his speech was probably stupid, but he felt he deserved at least one monologue. He had taken a bolt in the arm and had been forced to reveal one of his trump cards, so the least he could get out of this was a moment to feel like the cool guy while he ranted on.
“But I’ll tell you what,” Lee continued, now close enough to kick Ramon’s face without moving his foot more than a few inches. “Why don’t you help me out? You see, like you said, I’m stupid. I’m the unimaginative idiot who relies on technology to create complacency. So, I need your help after all. I need a professional storyteller: someone who can help me figure out an end to this story where I don’t kill you slowly. As slowly as possible. Can you do that for me, Ramon? Can you tell me an end to this story where I don’t chop off one of your fingers every few minutes? Followed by your toes, your legs, and your arms? Can you stop me from having to whittle away until you’re nothing but a stump? Can you do that for me, Ramon? Because, right now, I think everyone here kind of wants to see that ending. It’s their happily ever after. Am I right, guys?” He turned to the group and addressed the last question to them. It was met by a series of emphatic affirmatives. There wasn’t a single person who didn’t sound excited about that ending.
“I . . .” Ramon paused to suck the snot and drool back up his nose and mouth respectively. “I don’t know. Please, just let me go.”
Lee almost felt some bit of pity for him, but then he remembered the condition that he had found the villagers in, and it instantly vanished. He took a moment to look at Ramon’s injuries, making sure that he could survive what he had planned, before leaning over and pulling one of his swords out. “I was really hoping you’d say that.”
“Wait! Wait! No, what are you going to do?!” Ramon pleaded, his voice passing any metric that might be used to gauge a scream by a mile as it pierced the air. But Lee ignored it. He blocked it out of his head and did his best to keep his stomach down as he used his sword to follow through on his promise, slicing one of Ramon’s pinkies right off of his hand.
“GODS, NO!!” Ramon’s scream reached a decibel level that made the stomach-churning act of taking off a man’s finger feel that much worse. The only thing that helped Lee follow through with the action was when he thought about what type of hell on earth this monster of a person had put so many people through.
How is killing so easy when torturing is like hell on me? Lee didn’t understand himself at all, but he still had to do his best to steel his nerves. He needed Ramon to be afraid. Terrified. I got to look up more about this. This can’t be the best way to do this. Lee closed his eyes and put the act out of his head for a second. “Alright,” he began again after calming himself enough. “Now, you’ve only got nine digits left on your hands before I have to start moving to the toes. Why don’t you tell me that story? You told me that you love stories. Surely you weren’t lying to me. You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?” Lee asked.
“No, no of course not,” Ramon insisted over and over again. “I can tell you a story! I can tell you a story!”
“Well, good. Now, why don’t you tell me the story I want to hear, or I will have to make sure your right hand matches your left.”
“The . . . The valley in the east. His temple is in the east,” Ramon said, pausing to suck more snot back into his nose. “If you follow the path toward Middlefart, just . . .” He paused again, devolving back into a whimpering mess.
“Ramon!” Lee slapped him after a minute. “Stick with me. Where is it off the path?”
“T-take a left after the first signpost. The trail is easy to find. Follow the trail . . . I-It’s in the valley,” he finished.
Wait, how can I trust him? Lee suddenly realized the error of this method. The chances of Ramon handing over accurate information were just as high as the chances of him leading them into another trap. This sad sack routine could be another ploy to make him more believable. He could just be wearing another mask. “Okay, Ramon, do you have a map in the bar?”
“I . . .” He paused. He paused long and hard.
“Ramon, my blade is getting antsy. Do you have a map, or do I have another finger? I can’t trust you without a map, can I?” Lee asked, levying his blade against Ramon’s next pinky.
“It’s . . .” Ramon had stopped crying. It was evident that his earlier assumptions of him were wrong. This was a ploy. Ramon knew exactly what he’d ask for. “It’s in the dark liquor bottle labeled Quester’s Fury under the bar. There isn’t anything in the bottle. I just painted the inside so it would look like it’s full,” Ramon finally said.
There. “Ramon, I’m going to let you in on a secret. I have a method of scouting, one that lets me see a place without ever having to go there. I can know if you’re lying to me before any traps are sprung,” Lee said, referencing Ethan as indirectly as possible. “If I use this method, by the end of the night, I’ll know if you’re lying. If you are . . . Well, I can’t help you then. But if you’re not, then I’ll let you live in this town without fear of death for the rest of your life—until you die of something other than beating or stabbing or general weapon- and fist-related injuries.”
Ramon stayed frozen for a long time. “There is a trap on the way. You have to spin the signpost to disarm it.”
Lee patted his head patronizingly. “That’s good, Ramon. That’s good.”
“Are you going to keep your word?” The now-once-more arrogant face of the villain was back, much to Lee’s actual joy. He couldn’t take the crying. Ramon’s face was still mucus-covered from his play earlier, however, destroying any ability to take him seriously or treat him like the actually ominous, evil character he was.
Ethan, can you fly over there and check it out for me? We’re going to need to do some planning. He sent the directions to his little mouse friend who had just finished heaving the last piece of wood out of his gut.
“Just take this scum into the main room, get the map, and we’ll deal with him in a bit,” Lee ordered the villagers. Between all the murdering, the torture, and the bossing around of villagers that now somehow felt like henchmen in the back of his head, he was really starting to feel less like a prophet, demigod, savior, hero or whatever else and much more like the wicked, evil boss. The only thing he was missing was a permanent base.
Though, I do now own a tavern . . . Lee looked up at the building, only to see the hole Ramon had left. He spent so much time installing trap after trap in his bar, but in the end, he was done in by cheap corner-cutting during the building process. That wall might as well have been thatch the wood was so thin. He let out a hollow laugh at the irony.
“Umm . . .” The lady Lee had seen holding David’s hand at his last moments came up just then to Lee and meekly lowered her head.
“I’m sorry about David. We’ll do everything we can to make sure he�
��s buried and treated properly,” Lee said as soon as he realized who she was. “He’s gone to a better place now,” he said with certainty, even though he had no idea if David actually made it to the upstairs or the downstairs of his own conceptions of the afterlife. He wasn’t even sure this world was connected or watched over by the god he actually believed in, but saying that wouldn’t matter now. Lee was going straight to the worst punishment imaginable for all this blasphemy and paganist teaching as far as his own personal religion was concerned, so he might as well at least do it right and console people and make them feel better along the way.
“Will . . . Will we be together there when I die?” she asked with a level of love and determination he had not come face to face with before. It wasn’t just her voice or her near-mute-but-determined words that confronted him with a level of adoration he was unfamiliar with. It was in her every gesture: her eyes were swollen and sparkled from as-yet-unfallen tears, and her lips were pressed together so tightly after she spoke that they vanished into each other. It was visible, and it was touching, and it made Lee feel all the more awful that David had died because of him.
“Of course you will. And it’ll be a much better life than this one was,” he assured her, placing a hand on her shoulder and trying not to be a creep while he comforted her—a talent he had no experience with. She looked him straight in the eye, wiped her eyes dry with her arms, and then pulled out a knife.
“If you live a good and full life,” Lee quickly added as he stopped her blade. What the hell?! You can’t do that! There’s a difference between faith and stupidity here! “If you live a good, honest and long life, you’ll definitely be with him in the afterlife. As one of the first true believers, he was so determined and faithful, going so far as to die in battle for a cause within such a short period of time, that I promise he’ll have one of the highest positions in the afterlife. You need to work hard and earn a seat next to him.”
