Wasteland Warlords Episode 5: Chapter 10 - Outnumbered

A hundred times during weapons training at the dojo, Alex had warned her students about the “dog with a bone” trap—that instinctual urge to get into a tug-of-war with your opponent over a weapon—and she’d sworn to herself a hundred times that she would never get caught by it. But the second Wildflame looped her Lariat around the thurible, human instinct won out, and Alex yanked back, trying to regain control of what was basically a neutralized weapon.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Merciful Shepherd beating in the helmet of Joe’s mech suit with that stupid crook. Joe would’ve rocketed away if he could’ve, but Crawley had cast some kind of area effect spell that was bogging Joe down in a midnight blue puddle of muck, dark tentacles locking him in place.

“Behold, Lumberheads,” Joe was yelling over the fray, “a couple of super-babies too scared to face Lumberjack Joe one-on-one. They had to call in the squid reserves. Ouch! Like and share the feed with five of your closest buddies if you want to see Cap’n Joe kick their kraken!”

“Puns are automatic minus ten,” Alex gritted out between her teeth, still clinging to the chain weapon for all she was worth.

“Worth it!” he yelled just before taking a crook to the face.

Alex’s feet slid in the dirt as Wildflame reeled in her Flaming Lariat. Thanks to Katotes, Alex was ridiculously strong, but Wildflame had been chugging God only knew how many stat potions over the years. The fiery-haired superwoman dragged her across the yard, leaving long ruts in the dust.

A ball of Shadowfire slammed into Alex’s shoulder, knocking her off her feet and taking a meaty chunk out of her health bar. Dark Sentinel had shot her in the back with one of his weird vision attacks.

Her fist tightened on the thurible chain for a split second. Wildflame gave another yank. Finally realizing what an idiot she’d been, Alex let go. The sudden weightlessness on the end of the Lariat caught Wildflame off guard, and she stumbled back.

Taking advantage of the bobble, Alex threw herself to her feet and sprinted forward with all the speed she could muster. She’d been decently fast before becoming an Incant—when you were the littlest martial artist at sparring night, you got fast or you got knocked across the room—but with her Incant- and stat-potion-enhanced speed and the boost from the Warlord of the West’s samurai armor, she was a living missile.

But not one aimed at Wildflame.

Dark Sentinel saw Alex coming and started blasting off those Shadowfire bombs like crazy. Alex ducked and slipped the writhing orbs, even hopping over a couple that sent up geysers of dirt beneath her feet.

From behind Alex came an insulted growl—Wildflame mad at being ignored. The superwoman tried to whip her Lariat up to her side, but it was still tangled in the heavy thurible.

Alex smirked. Two weapons neutralized for the price of one. Not a bad deal, overall.

Ahead of her, Dark Sentinel thrust out a forearm. A black tower shield exploded from his gauntlet. A black blade crawling with Shadowfire shot out of his opposite gauntlet, stabbing forward over his closed fist.

Alex cut the angle opposite Dark Sentinel’s blade arm and brought the edge of her foot screaming down toward his exposed knee. He caught her boot on the tower shield with a thump that rang through the yard.

But the stomp staggered him, and surprise momentarily replaced his ever-present scowl. Obviously, he’d been expecting strength a little more in line with the hundred-and-five-pound body of his opponent. Not the roided-out strength of ten Olympic super lifters.

Hooking around the corner of the shield, Alex slammed a deceptively small fist into his movie-star stubbled chin. His head whipped on his neck, and his eyes rolled like dropped marbles, all without her Bring the Thunder perk even kicking in to give her the critical hit.

Clearly, she wasn’t the only proof here that appearances could be deceiving. Turned out, the DCU’s brooding caped crusader had a glass jaw. Against a run-of-the-mill human he still would’ve had superhuman strength and stamina, but against another Incant? He was a fancy Ranger class, and not a thing more. No wonder he had so many armored gadgets and long-distance vision attacks designed to keep him from taking a hit. She followed with a cross just to make sure, but Dark Sentinel was already unconscious and on his way to the ground.

The hairs on the back of Alex’s neck prickled, the warning sign from Ride the Lightning from her Dao of the Dew training. Ride the Lightning only gave her a 10% chance to slip physical attacks, but that was all she needed this time. The thurible streaked past Alex’s ear. She pulled her head and twisted her upper body to avoid the trailing chain, which was still dragging the Lariat behind it.

Blue comets exploded behind Alex’s eyes as Wildflame’s fire-wreathed fist crashed into the back of her skull. The blow knocked Alex to her knees, but didn’t quite put out her lights. The prison yard sparked and popped for a second, but didn’t go black.

Alex shook her head, trying to clear away the stars. She tucked her chin and threw her arms over her head, but Wildflame wasn’t interested in hand-to-hand. With a shouted spell, the fiery-haired superhero called to her Flaming Lariat, wrapping Alex in the burning grip of injustice.

“Crawley!” Wildflame shouted.

“Send it!” the blue-skinned caster yelled.

Wildflame chucked the end of her Lariat into the air. Crawley opened one ring-decked fist. Snaking sludge tentacles leapt from the puddle under Joe and snatched the rope out of the air.

Alex tried to rip and tear her way out of the tangle of rope and chain, but its flames blazed brighter and squeezed until she felt her bones creak. That would be the Lariat’s famous ability to become double the strength of anybody it encircled in combat. Considering that she was now level 18 with a strength of 84—nearly ten times that of a normal adult male—the Lariat was deadly effective.

Crawley’s tentacles encircled her ankles and yanked hard, dragging her kicking and bumping across the yard like a rag doll tied to a rampaging dump truck. That was going to leave a hell of a road rash.

She scraped past the Merciful Shepherd, who had finally battered Joe’s helmet from his head and now had him hooked from behind with the crook around his neck. The Shepherd planted one Gucci boot on the back of Joe’s neck, trying to choke him out.

“Why won’t you just pass out?” Shepherd yelled, face as red as his victim’s.

The idiot didn’t realize you couldn’t choke out somebody with pressure on the front of the throat, you had to cut off the blood flow on the sides. Of course, if he just kept the pressure on Joe’s trachea, he would eventually kill the big redneck—it would just take forever and be ugly and painful as all get-out.

Alex kicked and thrashed, trying to break free of those damn tentacles and ropes and back to her brother-in-law.

“Creatures of the unknowable space deep!” The Merciful Shepherd’s voice resonated with his Herd Animals ability. “Get off your asses and tear these losers apart! Show no mercy!”

“No mercy?” Joe croaked, his face purple with strangulation. “What a phony.” He gurgled and choked out, “Like if you agree with Sixtynine’em in the chat that this guy’s a total dipshi…”

Joe dropped forward, unconscious.

Obeying the Shepherd’s call, the oceanic prison guards broke into a feeding frenzy. With her arms still tangled in the Lariat, Alex kicked and head-butted the swarm the best she could, but her strikes had half the power they would have if she wasn’t lying prone on the ground. She couldn’t hold them off. Katotes’s insane healing ability couldn’t keep up with the bloodthirsty hysteria the “Merciful” Shepherd had whipped them into.

Despite their best efforts, she and Joe were going to die, and Clay was still stuck inside.

Just then the door to the Cellblock One buzzed open, and a tsunami of humans and wasteland creatures in prison jumpsuits flooded out.

***

By the time Clay made it out of the tower, total chaos had taken over. The cellblock boiled like an angry sea of monsters, humanoids, and Incants. Debris lay everywhere, fires licking at some of it, and curls of smoke drifted into the air from the rest. While half the prisoners were slinging magic and fighting their way to the door, the other half were still up in their cells ripping the prison apart one piece at a time. Mattresses, bed frames, chunks of that runic glass, and toilet/sink combos rained down from the higher floors.

A bright cobalt ball of arcane energy crackled across the cellblock, opening a hole in the struggling mass of angry prisoners. Griff was coming out of a side office, his shortsword in one hand, a crackling ball of energy forming in his free hand, and his buckler slung over his back. His beat-up hat was back on his head, and he’d also managed to retrieve his brown leather duster with the enhanced armor rating.

That must be where they were keeping the confiscated loot from the incoming prisoners. Clay headed that way, ducking and weaving through the madness. He almost took a chair leg to the face at one point, and he had to juke his way around some kind of bright purple glitter bomb that dropped right in front of him. He heard it explode with a tinkling puff. Without his usual kit, Clay wasn’t as fast or as strong as he’d gotten used to being, but luckily nearly all of his dexterity came from his Incant abilities and stat potions, so he was able to dodge whatever the prison riot threw his way.

Finally, he made it to Griff.

“Glad to see ya, lad!” The old weed cast his good eye over Clay, inspecting the bright glow coming from his skin. “No worse for the wear?”

Clay checked the Soul Overload timer. 13:42 and dropping…

“No, but we need to get moving,” he said. “Have you spotted your daughter?”

“Not yet.” Griff held out a familiar piece of scale mail. “Didn’t know if you’d make it to the locker here, so I grabbed this.”

He tossed Cinderscale to Clay along with his cross-body mag bandolier. It would’ve been suspicious if they’d come into the Supermax with no magical items at all on them, but neither he nor Griff had wanted to take the chance they wouldn’t be able to recover their best stuff, so Griff had worn his second-best hat and jacket while Clay had left his cowled Obsidian Glass mail behind in favor of Cinderscale. Still, he felt a hell of a lot better with the reassuring weight of the scale mail hanging on his shoulders.

“Much appreciated.”

“If you want to thank me, lad,” Griff replied, “help get us out of here in one piece.”

They turned their attention back to the prison riot just as another pale purple glitter bomb exploded.

A smile quirked up the corner of Griff’s mouth. “There’s my lass.”

The old man took off at a run, and Clay chased after him. Griff seemed oblivious to anything but the bursts of pale purple magic at the center of the melee, so clearing the way was left to Clay. He didn’t want to kill any prisoners he didn’t have to—they were ostensibly on the same side for now—but most of them were doing as much damage to one another as they had to the ICSOs.

Clay used Tether Shot when he could and Haphazard Cast when he couldn’t. A weird little creature with a horn instead of a nose who tried to take Griff out at the legs went sliding backward across the floor, yanked by a tether. A net of sparkling humanoid creatures blocked the old weed’s path, then disappeared in a puff of smoke as Clay hit them with Haphazard Cast.

Finally, a hole opened in the riot, and they got eyes on Griff’s daughter.

She had just conjured a magical bubble around herself, catching a golden comet that exploded on impact, and her purple pigtails were floating around her face as if she were experiencing the world’s worst static electricity.

“Ella!” Griff hollered.

Her head snapped around. When she saw him, she dropped the shield. The static electricity in her hair discharged in one crackling zapof purple, which slammed into the guy who’d been throwing around those comets.

A few paces away, Ella suddenly stopped, hesitant. “Dad?” she asked. The single word was filled with disbelief and suspicion in equal measure. “I was starting to think I was hallucinating. But it’s really you. You’re here.” She frowned. “What are you doing here?”

Griff didn’t answer. Instead, he made up the distance between them in half a blink and pulled her into a big, rough squeeze. She resisted for a moment, then seemed to melt into his wiry frame.

Clay stopped nearby, keeping an eye on the surrounding area for threats.

She buried her face into his stubbly neck for a long beat before finally pulling away.

“I’m glad you came,” she admitted begrudgingly, “but you shouldn’t have. This place is dangerous.”

“You don’t say,” Griff replied, sidestepping an errant ray of disintegration magic.

“Besides, I was totally getting ready to bust out on my own. I had this whole plan worked out. One of the seahorse guards is a huge BLS fan, and we were going to watch their live performance together, which is when I was going to shank him with this shiv I made from a piece of crustacean shell and steal his pass card.” She paused, glanced away for a second, then looked back at him. “Still, I am glad you came.” Another pause, followed by a short sigh. “And I probably should’ve listened about Cassidy and his asshole friends. Turns out they were even bigger douchebags than anyone knew.”

“Don’t even think about it, honey,” the old weed said in a choked voice, smoothing down her hair, which was still floating and staticky in places. “I got you back. That’s all I ever cared about. And, if it makes you feel any better, me and my new friends killed Rhett and Gearhead with extreme prejudice.”

She smiled. “It does actually. Did they suffer?” she asked hopefully.

Griff chuckled. “You’re just like your mama.”

“Guys,” Clay said apologetically, “I hate to break you up, but we need to get a move on if we’re going to get out of here.” The Soul Overload timer in the corner of his vision was ticking toward zero, and Alex and Joe were still out there, fighting for their lives against some of the most powerful Incants in the world. They didn’t stand a chance for long, not on their own.

“Yeah, no duh.” Ella straightened up and rolled her bright violet eyes. “Good thing you have me along for the ride. Like I said before, I was already planning my own early release, so I know right where we need to go.”

With an overhand lob, she tossed a glitter bomb into the melee. The rioters closest to the sparkly blast stumbled back, coughing and clawing twinkling debris from their skin, eyes, and mouths. It would’ve been a hell of a mess to clean up, but it cleared the way to the cellblock door in no time.

A couple steps from the threshold, a glowing arrow zinged toward Griff’s back.

If Clay hadn’t been bringing up the rear, he would never have seen the shot. It would have pierced Griff right in the spine—maybe even finished the old weed off—but with his enhanced speed and dexterity, Clay tracked it from the sniper’s nest in Watchtower 2. Under normal circumstances, his Fast Hands ability was meant to be used for supernaturally fast reloading in the heat of combat. But in his experience, rules were meant to be broken. This time, he triggered it with a slightly different goal in mind.

Time seemed to lurch and slow all around him. The arrow crawled through the air, its insane wobbling visible to his enhanced senses, along with the brilliant strands of deadly magic powering its path.

Clay, still moving at regular speed, raised his confiscated M4 and took aim. The arrow crept toward to Griff, who had frozen in place. Clay squeezed the trigger. In less than an eyeblink, the arrow blew apart in midair, still a yard from the old weed’s back.

Just before Fast Hands ran out, Clay spotted half a dozen more arrows raining down from the watchtower. Whoever was up there covering the door to the yard must be firing them off one right after the other.

“Split the doorway!” Clay yelled, giving Griff and Ella a shove to either side of the arrows’ trajectory. “Make him have to choose a single target. He’s covering the exit so nobody gets out.”

Clay tried to head up the middle, but within two paces of the doorway, sharp pains lanced through his heart and down his left arm. He dropped and skidded on his knees in the dust, clutching his chest.

[Warning: You are skirting the edges of your Oath of the Binding Vine! If you take another step toward the exit of Supermax Conglomerated Inquiries and Prison unaccompanied by Shifty Shagbark, the Hickory Stick Druid, the vines binding you to your oath will tighten until they slice through your treacherous, lying heart, dicing it into tiny pieces. See if you ever betray somebody again.]

“What’s wrong, lad?” Griff called. He’d found cover behind a dead elephantine prisoner, taken out by the watchtower sniper. “Are you hit?”

Gritting his teeth against the pain, Clay shook his head. “Shifty’s Oath. Can’t go any farther.”

“What’re you going to do?” Ella called.

For one crazy second, Clay thought the kid was pulling a Mack McPike from back at the Camp Liberty General Goods Store, throwing out that rhetorical “Well, what’re ya gonna do?” as the catch-all stoic response to good and bad luck alike. Then he caught the wide-eyed look on her face and knew her question was anything but apathetic. Beneath the tough façade was a young girl who was scared to death and worried her dad’s friend was about to die. She wanted real answers.

“Get Shifty,” Clay growled. It was the only way he was going to get back to Alex alive.

A few steps behind Clay, a fleeing tortle prisoner was downed by one of those golden arrows. Luckily, that was closer to the central tower, where Shifty was still holed up. Clay crawled over to it, putting distance between himself and the exit. With every inch, the pressure in his chest released.

When he made it to the dead tortle, he turned the beast’s massive shell on its side to use as cover and began to return fire.

That broke up the sniper’s endless shooting just long enough for Griff and Ella to get through. Clay scanned the Soul Index as he fired.

“Pick your moment, then you and Ella get through that door,” Clay yelled to Griff. There! The Treefrog Shinobi Essence was exactly what he needed.

“What about you?” Griff demanded.

“I’ll meet you out there,” Clay said. “I’ve got an Oath to keep—whether Shifty’s ready to hold up his end or not.”