Chapter 45: Trump Cards

Breca sneered in disgust as Sean chucked a dart as hard and fast as his STR and DEX would allow. Besides trying to center it on the offworlder, Sean didn’t spend much energy or focus aiming it at any vital point. He doubted he could actually hit Breca with it. If he could dodge one of Breca’s bolts when his opponent was a full ranged class with corresponding projectile skills, there wasn’t much of a chance he’d be able to hit Breca with his cobbled together ranged capabilities. Breca’s audible disdainful sneer as the bolt flew towards him indicated he thought the same thing.

But not every attack was meant to hit. What Sean wanted from the dart wasn’t to actually kill Breca, which he doubted a single dart could do anyway. It was to make his foe dodge. He was closing distance behind the dart as it flew, watching as Breca began to sway out of the dart’s path. It was only when the dart was within a foot or so of Breca that Sean revealed his trump card.

The alley was reasonably dark, and Sean doubted that Breca could see him all that clearly. One thing he had learned was that his time powers were hard to perceive, and unless there was something nearby that gave you a clear reference of the relative speeds, it was nearly impossible to know anything was happening at all. Breca very likely had perceived Sean’s ability to dodge the bolt as either a stroke of luck or the result of normal stats and evasion.

What he couldn’t have anticipated in any case was Sean’s dart changing speed drastically a foot or so from his face, bolstered not only by Hard Time but also by the skill’s increased effect on smaller objects.

And if Breca could be forced to dodge, he could also be forced to over dodge. He might be tough, but Sean believed that virtually anyone was capable of being startled when an inch of space was all that stood between them and being murdered.

Instead of swaying just enough out of the way, Breca jerked to the side, throwing him off balance and limiting the amount he could move from there. By the time he realized what was happening, Sean was already on him, swinging another dart upwards under his chin. The point of the dart didn’t quite find skin. Like everyone in Eike’s crew, Breca was well-equipped, including a lightly-plated collar that not only protected his chin but flared outwards slightly.

As the point of the dart stopped on the armor, Sean saw Breca’s eyes widen with delight. He didn’t blame him. Breca’s hand had already dropped to his belt dagger, and under the conventional rules of combat, he was going to win. As soon as his knife cleared leather, he was fully capable of using his more advanced stats to gut Sean like a fish.

But this wasn’t conventional combat, at least to the extent that Breca understood it. The first sign of that came when, despite catching the armor, the damage behind the dart was projected into his chin and bounced his head back like it had caught an uppercut.

This, in turn, gave Sean just enough time to set up the second indicator of how their fight was going to be unconventional. As Breca’s head came back down, the Trash Compactor was already making contact with the bottom of the dart, driving it upwards like a railroad spike.

The collar was pretty good. Sean had to give it that much credit. Even with the force of a sledgehammer blow behind it, the dart didn’t manage to one-shot Breca. That was okay, since it did at least managed to pierce the flesh above his neck and penetrate the roof of his mouth, gruesomely pinning the whole jaw shut.

Breca tried to pull back and get help, and he tried to scream. But however much noise he was trying to make, it was very much muted by the fact that he now had a dart in his mouth. And as he jerked back to get out of Sean’s attack range, Sean was able to keep up by burning his last charge of Hard Time, bringing Mystereamer up from his belt and straight through the side of Breca’s skull.

Sean didn’t really know how VIT worked with clearly fatal wounds. He assumed a high enough VIT score might let someone survive a nicked jugular, for instance, or some otherwise lethal damage to their brain. But what VIT didn’t do was help Breca out at all when Mystereamer decided that its inaugural stab would be a good time to pierce Breca’s skull with straight-up, old-fashioned lightning.

Notifications that Sean didn’t have time to check went off, and he mentally willed whatever stat points he had gained into MAG. This was the first time Sean had killed something he thought of as human, unless you counted the garbage men. Sean didn’t. In a TV show, this would have been the point where he would have sat around, contemplated what that meant, and perhaps even moped.

Right now, he didn’t have the time. Dropping to Breca’s slumped body, he dragged his dart out of his chin and used his shirt to wipe off his dagger before shoving it back in the scabbard Brett had been kind enough to make him. What little potential loot was visible on Breca’s person was mostly armor that wouldn’t fit him, or weapons he couldn’t use. The only valuables he saw that did seem like they would help were a series of vials sitting in little loops on his belt.

Sean grabbed a handful, tossing them into his pouch with his spikes and hoping they’d hold up as he ran. If they didn’t, he guessed the next enemy he had to fight would get a fun surprise. Then, he recovered the first dart that had flown off into the distance.

Weapons recovered and loot acquired, he stood up and prepared to run just one second too late. Eike, apparently realizing that Breca was up to mischief, had come back just seconds too late to save him. Towering above Sean, he looked down in horror at Breca’s corpse, then up to Sean with eyes filled with hate and rage.

He roared. Not a human roar in a human voice, but a full lion’s roar, one so loud it seemed to rattle the entire alley.

By the time Eike had a chance to bring out his swords, Sean had already bolted.

—

In Sean’s time, the part of town that the chronological research studies building had stood was on the outskirts, more of an annexed area meant to contain the research complex and a few neighborhoods and stores supporting it. And that town was next to a city.

Since his very first day in the future, he had tried not to look too hard at the city proper, and to focus on the parts near him where the people he had met lived. The reason for that was simple, really. The city looked like it had been bombed out, left to rot, and bombed again.

Later on, Brett, Estesia and some of the more practical parts of the guide had all warned him against going there. Reasons included were that it contained so many enclosed spaces that it was a minefield of system bullshit where a single trip or stumble might send you into an endless, thematic deathscape.

But he didn’t need the wise counsel of apocalypse veterans to do that. He would have stayed away all on his own because the place terrified him. And it wasn’t wholly because it was dangerous, or even because it looked dangerous. Mostly it scared him because it just wouldn’t psychologically parse. In terms of his personal experience, a week ago, it was a living, breathing city. It wasn’t perfect. Traffic sucked. He had lost several bikes to it over the years, coming back to clipped locks and a life that sucked that much more. But it was there, it was real, and it was part of his everyday life.

The fact that it was gone wasn’t just weird. It shocked his soul on a very basic level that he had never been able to come to terms with.

Having taken out what was likely the highest-DEX member of Eike’s team meant the rest of the team didn’t catch up to him immediately. After a few minutes of running, Sean realized the entire crew had slowed to the pace of their slowest member, and were still moving at a speed comparable to his. He couldn’t shake them with pure distance. He needed cover. And despite the city still scaring him, there would be no better cover than losing them and then disappearing into a system space. It was his best shot.

But it wasn’t meant to be. The better part of the gap was eaten up as a group of several gigantic worms popped out of the ground at him. They were level 15, and his recently enhanced stats meant he could dual wield them into oblivion, seconds after the first grabbed at his foot. But it was an enemy he had to fight that the group behind didn’t, and it cost him precious seconds of time.

He gained some time by burning one of his recharged Hard Time charges to get underneath a flock of pterodactyls diving from the top of a nearby big-box store. He was lucky enough that it turned out they weren’t picky and didn’t want to go to the trouble of turning around when there was another group of prey in front of them. The deaths of the diminutive dinosaurs were short and ugly, but not so short they didn’t buy him some amount of time.

Eventually, he got to the city, which Sean was thankful for. But only for a moment, when he realized that a maze is only a good way to lose people if they have a worse understanding of the maze than you. But if they were familiar with the maze and had been using it as their hunting grounds, they could influence the way you ran. They could head you off at the pass. They could avoid dangers you didn’t even know were there until you made a mistake.

And eventually Sean did find himself in an alley with walls high enough he couldn’t jump, doors strong enough he couldn’t break, and his enemy so close he didn’t have time to try anyway.

“You killed Breca.” It wasn’t a question. Eike didn’t seem to be the cooling-off type, except in the sense that his anger became a more condensed, frigid sort of thing.

“I did,” Sean said in defiance. “He was going to kill me.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Shouldn’t it?”

“No. He worked for me. He was useful to me.”

“And I’m just some kind of bumpkin that shouldn’t get in your way? I should have let myself get killed over that?”

Sean didn’t really need to wait for the answer to know what it would be. He had a good guess exactly how much a person like Eike cared for people like him. Or, hell, for anyone. One of the reasons most shitty jobs were bad was because of managers with exactly the same look in their eye that Eike had. They wanted certain things, and nothing would stop them. It was as simple as that, to some people. Eike was apparently one of them.

“Yes, you should have. Because now I have to make it painful, so the rest of your people understand not to get in my way.”