Goblin Gigs: Dungeon Dasher Book 1 preview chapters

Chapter

“Everybody ready?” I asked.

I’d just removed the second bar from the basement door after undoing all the locks and bolts.

The girls nodded as I looked them over.

It was two days after we’d returned to Earth from Arctara. I’d wanted to return and speak to Mayor Cartnal the next day, but Heather insisted we drive back to the city and collect the rest of her LARPing gear.

In fact, I was a little jealous. Her leather “archer-armor” was actually better suited to adventuring than my bogu — tougher materials and with enough hardening that it would likely turn a real sword, or at least slow one down.

 I was going to have to find something similar, but decided to wait until we could spend some more time looking. I was planning to check out some Army surplus and sporting goods stores before really digging into life in Arctara. Today we were just going into town to talk to the mayor and get an idea of what we might be facing on one of his “jobs”.

I leaned against the basement wall and watched Heather finish putting her outfit on. It consisted of a lot of leather.

Tight leather pants, snug but supple, which I’d always teased her were more appropriate if she was clubbing and a little anachronistic, but she insisted she had her reasons, despite whining about how hot they were to wear for long periods. On top she wore layers — starting with a loose linen tunic, followed by a leather jerkin with some strategically placed bronze rivets, then a deeply hooded cloak. The cloak was wool but had a leather covering over the hood and shoulders. It attached to her jerkin with clasps at either shoulder.  Next were a pair of leather bracers covering her forearms, the left molded to shield against her bowstring and boots that reached almost to her knees.

Not for the first time I noticed that the pattern of rivets on her jerkin did a lot to outline her boobs.

She looked a little weird with all that topped by the modern backpack we’d picked up to replace the one she’d lost and a compound bow, with an even more modern pistol crossbow dangling from her belt.

I was in jeans, t-shirt, and a flannel button up again, along with my boots, and armed with Heather’s period longbow, another crossbow, and my katana. Heather was better with the longbow than I was, by far, but she was also better than that with the compound bow, so it made sense for her to have the best bow.

The third crossbow was hanging from one of Grimelia’s new belts. She had two of those, with two of the sheathed knives we’d taken from the other goblins at each hip. Above that, she wore her new sports bra and topped the look off with her sunglasses.

The pixie was hovering nearby, wearing, I swear, a purple pantsuit.

Along with her LARPing gear, Heather had retrieved a plastic grocery bag full of old doll clothes from her house and the pixie had gone absolutely batshit over them, spending the entire drive back to the manor trying everything on in the backseat.

When I told Heather that was a nice gesture, she just said, “I’m sick of the fucking thing running around half-naked.” Which was odd, because she didn’t really have an issue with Grimelia running around in just a loincloth and occasional sports bra.

“Ready?” I asked.

Heather nodded.

I picked up the emergency radio and tuned it to a local rock station — it was the oldest, most basic tech I could think of … and it stopped working as soon as I stepped over the threshold. I felt no sensation at all, but the sound immediately cut off, not even changing to static.

I even took the 12-volt battery out and touched my tongue to the contacts with no result.

“Well, that settles that,” I muttered, putting the radio back together and tossing it back through the doorway. Eighties classic rock returned to the basement as soon as it crossed the threshold.

“So no electricity?” Heather asked.

I shook my head. “The little light didn’t even come on and the battery did nothing.”

“Cool — let’s see this town.”

*

“Five star bond for the pixie.”

I looked at the town guard’s outstretched hand and raised an eyebrow.

I hadn’t met him before — not that I thought I should’ve met everyone in the Dunbarrow town guard — so I figured he didn’t know me either. I was a little surprised he wanted a bond for the pixie and not for the goblin, especially when goblins had just killed one of the town’s merchants on the road.

Maybe all of Arctara was racist against pixies? They sure were assholes about goblins.

It was probably cheap of me, but I didn’t really want to hand over five stars just so Livinia could enter town with us for a few minutes of talking to the mayor. Maybe it was worth playing the Lord of the Manor card.

“Even for Lord Mercer?” I asked.

The guard blinked and looked us over — I guess taking in Heather’s compound bow, my jeans and checkered red shirt, and a grinning goblin — and appeared to decide me claiming to be the long-lost lord of the manor was the least weird thing he was dealing with right now.

“Ah, Lord Mercer, you say?”

I nodded.

“The, ah —” He jerked his head toward the forested hills. “That Lord Mercer, is it?”

I nodded.

“Heard you were back, ah, m’lord — I, ah, no bond, I suppose?”

“I’d prefer not.”

“Right, then,” he said, standing aside. “Welcome back to Dunbarrow, Lord Mercer.”

*

Mayor Cartnal’s office was crowded, even with Grimelia being so small and the pixie being even smaller.

Part of that was Livinia flitting from place to place and examining everything in the room while the mayor kept a narrow-eyed gaze on her like he expected chaos to erupt at any moment.

“Ah, welcome, Lord — Lord Mercer,” the mayor said, distracted by the flitting pixie. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon, and with more … companions.” He nodded to Heather. “Lady Mercer?”

“Yes,” Heather said before I could correct the mayor. She stepped forward and offered her hand. “So pleased to meet you, Mayor Cartnal.”

“The same, Lady Mercer.”

I sighed, rolling my eyes at the look Heather gave me.

“What can I do for you, Lord Mercer?” Cartnal asked, not seeming bothered that he hadn’t been introduced to Livinia, but very bothered that she was flitting around a shelf full of loose papers. “Could — Lord Mercer, could you —”

The papers, probably a couple thousand pages, since they were in stacks a few inches high, slid off the shelf, separated in mid-air, and fluttered to the mayor’s office floor.

“Stupid pixie,” Grimelia muttered, earning her a half-nod of agreement from the mayor until he glanced at me and cleared his throat.

“Ah, yes, Lord Mercer, I’m sure you have a great deal to do today, so what might I help —” His eyes widened as he looked over my shoulder and I turned to find Livinia hovering in front of another shelf, this one full of books. “— if — if you might, Lord —”

“Heather?” I asked quickly.

I hated to ask her to wrangle the pixie, but Grimelia would probably just eat her and apologize to Master while still burping.

“Click,” Heather said, sounding suspiciously like a garbage disposal switch.

Livinia gave a little yelp and spun from the shelf to rejoin us, but not before a two-inch spurt of brown liquid soiled Mayor Cartnal’s floor — more of a mist, really, since it first passed through her pantsuit.

At least she wasn’t still over the piles of paper.

“Sorry about that,” I told the mayor, wondering if I should ask Grimelia to clean it up.

I certainly wasn’t going to and Heather already hated the little pixie.

“I’ll have it seen to, Lord Mercer,” Mayor Cartnal said. “Not unexpected with a pixie, after all. Why you’d — never mind, what can I do for you this morning?”

“We’d like to take on one of those jobs you mentioned,” I told him, gratified that seemed to cheer him up a little.

“Oh! Excellent, thank you! I’ll just —” He turned toward the now empty shelf, his eyes trailed down to the piles of drifting paper his neat stacks had become, then sighed. “I’ll just do this from memory, shall I?”

Chapter

Arctaran bandits were kind of gross — at least that’s the judgment I made looking down on their camp.

We were on a brush-covered ledge looking down on the camp, which was nestled into a small box canyon in some cliffs. From our perch about forty feet above them, I counted six tents — or what could charitably be called tents, since they were basically big blankets strung over a rope or just tree branches — but only four men.

I steeled myself again to what we were up to. Killing the goblins in the midst of their looting the wagon of the merchant they’d murdered, or the one that had taken Heather, was one thing — these were men, humans, and we weren’t planning on giving them much of a chance to fight back. None, if I had my way — in fact, I was kind of wishing the damn bullet had worked so I could go back to the Earth side and return with a couple guns. Unfortunately, the powder from a bullet had barely fizzled when I set it on fire, so that wasn’t an option.

At least I had what might pass for armor — we’d gone back out after meeting with the mayor and deciding which of his “jobs” we were going to take.

Nothing came of the surplus stores, but I had a good hockey helmet, a reinforced motorcycle jacket, along with shin pads. I’d done some research on military armor and decided the jacket, once I got some Kevlar fabric to reinforce it more, would do better, while being lighter and more flexible.

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” I asked Heather.

“I heard the mayor, same as you,” she whispered back. “Six farms in the last year? Who knows how many travelers? And what he said they did to the women on those farms?” Heather’s face was hard. “Goddamn right I’m okay with this.”

She hesitated.

“Are you sure we can do this?” she asked.

I nodded — that was how I felt about it too, and I was pretty sure.

“The mayor said even a newly-arrived adventurer could handle a small group of bandits,” I said. “We’re faster and stronger than the locals.”

Grimelia nodded. “Black Mountain tribe never fight you, if know you adventure-man. Just run. Take … two, maybe three hands of goblins to fight adventure-man.”

I thought that was probably an exaggeration, but this was a game, right? Or something like one. It made sense that the PCs would be stronger than the NPCs.

I glanced at Grimelia.

Locals, not NPCs. I had a feeling bad things happened when “adventurers” started treating the locals like NPCs instead of people.

“How did you get captured by just one?” I asked Heather.

“I wasn’t expecting a four-foot tall green asshole with a loaded crossbow.” She glared at me. “Now I’m ready to kill something.”

I wisely kept my mouth shut and nodded toward the camp.

After meeting with the mayor, we’d gone back to the manor and even over to the Earth-side for the night. I wanted us as fresh and prepared as we could be when we faced these guys.

The bandit’s territory was a day’s travel away from the town, one of the reasons the town guard hadn’t been sent to handle it — there weren’t that many of them that they could send enough to deal with the bandits and be away from town for a few days.

The town’s “militia” — basically everyone in town who could swing a stick — hadn’t been mobilized either. The bandit gang was careful enough to keep their depredations just under the level that would encourage the townsfolk to risk confronting them.

It hadn’t taken us much searching to discover where the gang’s hideout was — we’d easily found a faint trail leading off the main road and followed it until we thought we were getting close, then moved farther back into the woods, paralleling the trail as we went on.

“I see four,” Heather whispered. “Do you think that’s it?”

I shook my head. “There are six tents.”

The tents weren’t much, just a piece of canvas draped over a rope between two trees, with the corners staked down to form a sleeping space.

“Storage? A couple of them died? Headed off for greener pastures?”

“I don’t think so.”

Heather shrugged. “So where are the other two?”

I scanned the little pocket of trees below us. “No idea — but if I was hiding out here, I’d set a guard. Maybe back near the entrance where anyone coming through that narrow canyon would be in tight quarters.”

That entrance was a notch cut through the cliffs by a small stream fed by a waterfall farther back in the pocket, and while there were a couple other ways down into the pocket, they were places where the cliffs had collapsed and washed out, leaving a manageable, but still steep, grade with its own steep walls.

“They could go up that far washout there,” I said, pointing, “and take a spot that looks down on the entrance. They’d be able to see anyone coming and defend the place just by dropping rocks on any attackers, while those back at camp prepare.”

“So do you want to hit the camp first or those watchers?” Heather asked, idly spinning one of her arrows between her fingers.

I thought about it for a minute. With six bandits we were outnumbered two-to-one — me, Heather, and Grimelia being the three. I wasn’t counting the pixie.

“They have to change out the guards,” I said, still working it through in my head, “and I doubt the two come back in for the change — the new guys go and relieve them there. Which means, at least for a few minutes, it’s three pairs in separate locations. If we can catch the pair coming back from the guard post, then the two at the guard post, then we’d just have the two back at camp.”

Heather was nodding. “Take each pair out quick — and then we have time between each pair to reload the crossbows.”

The little pistol-gripped crossbows we’d gotten were small, but I’d seen their power earlier when we’d practiced a bit. They were easy to use, accurate, and powerful, but they still took several seconds to reload. Heather and I had our bows, but those shots were more complicated.

“This assumes,” Heather said, “you’re right about there being two guards up there. What if it’s just the four and they stay together all the time? What if there’s more than two guards?”

“Six tents,” I reminded her.

“Maybe they’re gay.”

“What?”

“Six tents, two gay guys each — could be twelve bad guys.”

“Those tents are pretty small.”

“Gay guys like to cuddle, too.”

“Well,” I said, “you’re assuming the bandits are all men — isn’t that a little sexist?”

Heather rolled her eyes. “It’s a game. The bandits will all be men, unless they have a sexy leader you’re supposed to seduce. Hell, they probably have a kidnapped princess in one of those tents.”

The sudden buzz of wings cut off my response.

“I will assist, Lord Mercer the New,” the pixie whispered, then disappeared into the trees.

“Shit.”

“Told, Master — don’t bring pixie. Pixie trouble.”

“Yeah,” Heather said. “I remember Grimmy saying that. Then I remember me saying, ‘Yeah, we shouldn’t bring the stupid fucking pixie.’”

“Maybe she can help,” I said. In fact, it sounded like a good idea to me. “She can fly over there and see if there are two guards, then we’ll know for sure and can plan better.”

“Pixie not help,” Grimelia muttered. “Pixie never help.”

“See? Grimmy is our local expert — she knows pixies are fuckups.”

“Up, down, sideways — pixie all the fucks.”

“We’ll see,” I muttered.

I still figured that there must be something about Livinia that made Uncle Jack keep her around — so she should be useful at something, and sneaking through a forest to spy on the enemy sounded like it would be right up a foot-tall, flower-loving freak’s alley, right?

“Oy! Put me down, yer kudzu-smelling bastard!”

“All the fucks,” Grimelia muttered.

I groaned.

Livinia’s voice had been faint, but clearly coming from the other cliff where I’d suspected the bandits’ guard to be. Still, the four bandits below us heard it as well and looked in that direction.

A few seconds later, two more bandits appeared on the far cliff, waved an upside-down, shrieking Livinia at the four in the camp, and started making their way down the washout.

“Looker what I found!” the one holding Livinia called out.

“That a pixie?” one of the four in camp yelled back.

“Sure is!”

“You gonna share?”

“I’ll trade — five stars’ll get you one go and an arm or leg.”

“What the fuck?” I muttered, turning to Grimelia. “What does that mean?”

The goblin shrugged. “Fuck pixie.”

“No, we can’t just say ‘fuck the pixie’ and let those assholes do whatever they want to her.”

“Why not?” Heather asked.

“Because, no.” I shook my head. “Now, what did he mean?”

“Fuck pixie.”

I took a deep breath. “Grimelia —”

“Master ask what mean. Mean fuck pixie. First all fuck, then cook —” She pointed to the camp below us where one of the bandits was adding wood to their campfire. “— then buyer-men get arm or leg.” She shrugged again. “Capture-man keep body and head … well, not head. Nobody eat head. Pixie brain nasty.”

“Eat?” Heather asked.

“You mean fuck fuck?”

Grimelia nodded. “Fuck-fuck eat. Pixie good taste — only things pixie good for.”

“But … fuck? How?” I asked.

Heather slapped my arm. “That’s what you want to know right now?”

“I just … I mean, yeah. She’s, like, a foot tall — I’ve seen dicks bigger than her.”

“Really?”

I felt my face heat. “Not in person. Fuck.” I shook my head. “I’m not letting those assholes do either to her.”

Heather groaned. “Ah, shit, me neither.”

She pulled an arrow from her quiver as I did the same.

“Both hit the guy holding the stupid little honey-slut to be sure she gets loose?” Heather asked. “Then sweep — you right, me left?”

“Sounds good. Grimelia, you wait. If they get to the wash and start climbing up here, we’ll back up with you and hit them with all three crossbows at once. Understand?”

“Yes, Master.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

Heather and I crept back to the edge where we’d have a clear shot at the six bandits, and knocked arrows.

“And how much for me?” one of the bandits asked, standing up from where he’d been sitting by the fire.

“Oh, ah, Jaspar,” the one holding Livinia stammered. “For you? Well, nothing, obviously, and, ah, even first go, yeah?”

He held Livinia out to the other bandit, whose hand closed around the pixie’s legs.

“New guy on three?” Heather whispered.

I nodded. “One.”

“Two.”

“Three.”

We let loose our arrows, both aiming for the bandit who now had hold of the pixie’s legs, and was laughing as she threw vicious, yet futile, punches at his midsection. I aimed for his body and figured Heather was going for the headshot. Either way, there was no way either of us could miss at this range.

Even while I tracked my first shot to its target, I was slipping a second arrow from my quiver, nocking it, drawing the bow, and letting loose at a second target — all while my first shot … missed, as the guy holding Livinia twisted in some impossible way that sent our arrows past him and into the bandit who’d captured the pixie in the first place.

I froze, another arrow barely touching the string, as the bandit holding Livinia held her up toward us with a knife at her throat. Our shots in-flight thunked into their targets, driving two of the bandits to the ground, but their leader — Jaspar — was actually holding Livinia’s head up with his knife, arching her back to look up at us, and its blade putting ever more pressure on her throat.

“That’s enough of that, I think!” Jaspar yelled. “Just the tiniest flick of my wrist and the pixie’s head flies — no loss to me, nobody keeps that part anyway.”

His eyes ran over the cliff face, but Heather and I were pretty well hidden.

“Come on out or the pixie gets it!” He started laughing, making Livinia bobble on his knife’s blade more than I liked. “That always cracks me up… Seriously, though, it’s clear she has some value to you — trying to put arrows in me and all, so let’s not make this hard. Come on ou — ow, fuck! Fuck!” He started waving one arm at the two still-standing bandits while his other hand clutched at the crossbow bolt sticking out of his right eye. “Go! Get them! Ow! Fuck! Get them! Get them! Fuck, that stings, mother fucker! Goddamn fucking cooldown!”

The two other bandits grabbed up swords and rushed for the wash that would get them up to where we were, while Heather and I looked at Grimelia.

The little goblin shrugged, starting to reload her crossbow. “What? Is work — see? Stupid pixie loose.”

I shook my head while Heather gave the little goblin a high-five … or tried to. The goblin had no idea what was going on, so Heather had to take her and raise it.

“Heather,” I said, rising and heading to the top of the wash where we’d have a bit of cover to hit the approaching bandits with our crossbows.

“Right.”

We set up and it went pretty much as we’d talked about earlier. The two bandits reached the boulder we’d sighted out earlier, we fired our crossbows, and the bandits dropped — leaving just Jaspar down below, assuming he hadn’t succumbed to the crossbow bolt in his brain.

We didn’t take any chances, though, both of us had an arrow nocked and ready while we crept down the wash from cover to cover.

I really did expect to find Jaspar face-down in the dirt … but, of the other possibilities, sitting on a stump near the fire, smoking what smelled like a joint, and grinning while he watched us … with two eyes? That wasn’t something I’d been expecting.

“Well, well, well,” Jaspar said, grin widening. “Y’all two aren’t from around these parts, are you?” He laughed. “Wasn’t expecting another classed-one out here, much less two. Where y’all from?”

“What?”

“Where y’all from? Where’d ya come through a portal from?” He sighed. “I’m from San Antonio, Texas, that’s on Earth, if ya need to know that.”

I set aside the possible need to specify Earth for wondering if this guy could help us understand this place better — then remembered that he was the leader of bandits we were after and the horrible things they’d done.

This was unexpected — a half-dozen bandits I figured we could take, and we had rather handily, but another adventurer, as the mayor had called us, or “classed-one” as Jaspar had called us, was another story. I had to assume he had higher skills than us, since he’d been here longer and gathered this band together.

Or did he?

Some random dude from Texas?

Maybe if there were firearms here, his skills would be greater than mine, but we were fighting with swords, and that was something I’d been training at for years. Even Heather probably had more formal training than this yahoo had before coming to Arctara — and how much would someone deciding to be a bandit actually practice once he got here?

I drew my katana as Heather moved to the side, bow ready — she was waiting until he was fully focused on me to take another shot.

“Nah, can’t have that,” Jaspar said.

He raised his left hand, palm out, at Heather. There was some kind of odd glove on his hand, fancier and larger than the one holding his sword.

“Heather!” I yelled as an arc of lighting shot from Jaspar to her, knocking her to the ground where she lay still.

I started for Heather, but Jaspar raised his sword and stepped toward me.

“Grimelia, check on Heather,” I ordered. Heather was twitching, so she wasn’t dead, and we’d all be dead if I didn’t take care of Jaspar.

I moved away from her and Grimelia to gain more room to maneuver and settled into a defensive stance — I wanted Jaspar to make the first attack so I could get some measure of his skill. Though, if that glove came up again, I was going to have to rush him and chop his fucking hand off.

“Yeah,” Jaspar chuckled. “New here.” He nodded at my katana. “Nice sword. Modern work?”

I ignored him, except to turn as he started circling me, short sword weaving idle patterns in front of him, trying to distract me or make me commit to an attack, but he surprised me, stepping back and putting the fire between us for a moment.

Jaspar raised his left hand again, pointing at Grimelia and Heather, but I couldn’t rush with the fire between us.

“That crossbow comes up,” he said, “and the girl gets another shot. Don’t think she’ll survive an —”

“Die, yer creeping-myrtle faced toadstool!”

Livinia dove out of the sky, some kind of pointed stick aimed at the bandit leader, but Jaspar reacted faster. He swung his arm, knocking the pixie across the cleared space of the camp where she rolled across the ground before dropping out of sight into some sort of hole, all without taking his eyes from me.

“Goblins and pixies?” Jaspar asked. “What is that? Some kind of DEI shit you brought over here?” He sighed. “All right let’s get this over with. First of many things you ain’t gonna have time to learn, son, is modern steel … it fucking hates magic.”

His left hand came up again and I got ready to dodge, but the lightning was faster. It shot from Jaspar’s hand toward me, but its arc curved more and struck my katana instead.

Blinding pain shot through my hand as lightning crackled around the blade and I cried out, dropping the sword and cradling my right hand against my chest.

The pain was incredible, maybe the worst I’d ever felt, and my hand was blackened, the skin split in places to show bloody flesh — but I didn’t have time to fully process that, because Jaspar was moving.

The bandit leader raised his short sword and rushed me, then at the last moment, lowered his arm stabbing for my gut.

His form was awkward, not really a form at all, and I thought I’d guessed right that he’d just picked up his sword skills here in Arctara — which did me fuck-all of good, since I now had no sword to counter him.

I twisted, letting his blade go past me, then grabbed his forearm to trap his sword arm and brought my right elbow up between us, aiming for his nose.

Wait, I thought, this is a game-thing — fuck what was the thing called? Master — Master — fuck, Master-hit-thing!

Master Strike Activated

3x Damage from Next Blow

Critical Blow!

I tried to ignore the glowing text in my vision — and there better be a way to turn that shit off in fucking combat. I missed his nose, but got the bottom of his jaw instead, which was even better, knocking his teeth together with an audible, grinding clack and sending him staggering back — but not far, since I had a good hold on his arm.

I took advantage of that and his moment of dazed inaction from my strike, spinning so that he was drawn back toward me and giving him another elbow to the face, ignoring the shot of pain the impact sent through my injured hand, and spun, taking Jaspar along with me.

The thing about MMA is there are rules. There are strikes, holds, targets you’re not allowed to use or hit — but every fight, every spar, those were in my head. Yeah, prefaced with “don’t,” but they were always in my thoughts, always options, even if discarded.

This wasn’t MMA.

As Jaspar went down on his back, I went to my knees on top of him, still holding his sword arm extended, and twisting to lock it in place, but my main focus was the shin I brought down on the bandit leader’s throat with all my weight behind it.

I felt something go beneath me and knew it was over.

The short sword fell from Jaspar’s grip and his free hand went to his throat, clawing at his own skin as I released him and stood up. I kicked the sword away, stomping on his left wrist to pin that fucking glove to the ground, just in case, but it was clearly an unnecessary precaution — Jaspar was clawing at his throat with free hand, eyes wide, and making little “guh-guh-guh” sounds.

Unarmed Combat +1

Chapter

“Heather!”

I rushed from the still bandit leader toward where Heather was now sitting up with Grimelia’s help.

“Are you okay?” I asked sliding to a kneeling stop beside her.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m — what the fuck happened to your hand?”

Heather was on her knees in a moment, holding my forearm so she could examine my burnt and twisted hand. Looking at it brought back the pain I’d somehow managed to ignore — and I almost puked, both from the pain and that my hand now looked like bad BBQ where the heat was way too high and burnt the outside but left the interior raw…

And now that picture was in my head and I had to swallow hard to keep from puking all over Heather and my hand.

“Fuck,” Heather muttered, standing. “We need to get you back across to Earth and get you to a hospital.” She looked around. “Grimmy? Grimelia — come back over here and help me get Alex up!”

I was still in a bit of shock, I could feel the cold waves of it washing over me, but the amount of damage to my hand was pretty obvious.

“I don’t think a hospital’s going to do it, Heather.”

“What do you mean? Fuck that! Come on!”

She pulled me to my feet. Grimelia was at Jaspar’s body going through his pockets and belt pouches.

“Grimelia!” Heather called. “Help me! Forget the fucking loot!”

I was actually on Grimelia’s side of things — I was pretty sure I was going to lose that hand, or at least it was going to be next to useless, so whatever we could take out of Arctara this time was going to be the last of it for a while. Maybe forever.

I gave my hand a glance. That much damage and a day’s ride back to the manor, then probably another hour trying to get to a hospital?

No, it was done.

I intended to loot the whole bandit camp before heading back — copper, silver, gold, whatever, I wanted as much of it as I could get, because it was going to have to last us a while until I could figure out a safer way to make money here one-handed.

The reality of that hadn’t quite set in yet — I was still riding the adrenalin of the fight and relief that Heather wasn’t hurt, as well as whatever shock having your hand turned extra-crispy might have to do with it. Oddly, it didn’t hurt that much — wasn’t there something about burns not hurting when they were really, really bad because all the nerve endings were gone?

“Grimelia!”

“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re going to need the money — let’s help her search.”

“Are you fucking stupid? We need to get you to a doctor!”

I shrugged, but Grimelia was already rushing back to us with a metal, cork-stoppered flask in her hand. She pulled the cork while she ran and sniffed it, nodding.

I glanced at my hand, wondering why the little glimpses of white bone — and, worse, bone charred black — didn’t bother me more. Probably that shock thing.

“Master drink!” she said, holding the flask out to me.

“He needs a doctor, not booze!”

“Not booze,” the little goblin said, shaking her head. “Is potion — drink! Hurry!”

I took the flask from her in my left hand and sniffed it myself — whatever was in it smelled syrupy sweet.

“A potion?” I asked.

Did this place have healing potions? Of course, it would have healing potions — that was probably how Jaspar healed a crossbow bolt through the eye in the time it had taken us to get down the wash. Just like he’d had some skill that let him dodge our first arrows, but the cooldown hadn’t let him use it to avoid Grimelia’s crossbow shot.

Why didn’t I think of looking for a healing potion instead of standing around like a dumbass? Because I’d just had my fucking hand burnt off and wasn’t thinking great.

I raised the flask to my lips and sipped — it’s not like it could make my hand worse, right?

Sweet, cool liquid ran down my throat to my gut, then the feeling spread out, as though searching my body for something, before settling in my right hand.

“Holy shit,” Heather muttered.

I’d been trying to avoid looking at my hand, except for glances, but did now, and saw it visibly healing, with the blackened, burned flesh sloughing off to fall to the ground and new, pink skin coming up from below.

Heather turned away, retching, and I didn’t blame her.

“That’s … grosser than the burns,” she muttered between gagging and spitting.

“Booga-booga,” I said, reaching out for her with my still partly-blackened claw.

“Oh, fuck! Gross! You asshole!” Heather yelled, staggering away from me, then doubling over to retch again.

It was weird to be laughing while my hand regrew, but there wasn’t any pain and I figured the healing potion would complete the job, so why not?

“That is fucking amazing,” I muttered, staring as my hand rebuilt itself while I wiggled my fingers. “Thanks, Grimelia.” The little goblin grinned at me, showing sharp, pointed teeth. I looked around the clearing. “Where’s Livinia? Is she okay?”

I hadn’t seen her since Jaspar had knocked her out of the air.

“Lord Mercer?” a faint, tiny voice sounded from the other side of the bandits’ camp.

“Livinia?” I called, heading in that direction.

“Lord Mercer, help?”

Halfway across the camp I could see there was some kind of pit or trench dug along the far side, and as I drew closer, the stench hit me.

“Gah! What is that?”

Heather reached my side and sniffed. “Ugh!”

“Ah, shit,” I muttered as we got closer and I saw down into the pit. That was another one of Heather’s doll outfits that didn’t last a day.

“Told Master. Pixie all the fucks.”

“Help?”

“Who digs their latrine right at the edge of camp?” Heather demanded.

I looked around the campsite — anywhere, really, except at the soiled pixie stuck in a hip-deep (pixie hips) slurry of bandit shit and piss. Livinia’s wings were covered in it, likely why she didn’t just fly out, and the pit was about three feet deep, with sheer sides so she couldn’t climb out either.

The bandits had a woodpile off to one side with some long branches waiting to be cut down to size, so I retrieved one long enough to reach the bottom of the pit — marveling that my hand was nearly healed already The skin was soft and tender, as though I’d lost every callous I’d built up over the years, but it was whole.

I pushed the branch into the latrine trench so the pixie could grab it, then lifted her out. The branch bent under her weight, and I worried it might break and plunge her back into the cesspool, but it held.

“Thank you, Lord Mercer, thank you!” Livinia looked around as I stepped away from the latrine toward the stream that ran from the waterfall at the back of the pocket and out through the ravine it had carved in the cliff face. “Ah, m’lord?”

I tossed the branch, pixie and all, into the stream and walked back to the camp, ignoring the outraged shrieks and curses behind me.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s search this place and see what we got.”

*

Grimelia and I started searching the bandits’ bodies, while Heather searched the tents.

I was just gingerly pulling the lightning glove off Jaspar’s body when I heard the hum of wings.

“If there’s a single speck of shit still on you, I’m going to let Grimelia scrub you clean … everywhere.”

The hum receded and the sound of curses filled the clearing, but ended with more splashing and curses, so at least Livinia was obeying. No way was I letting a shit-covered pixie back into my house, no matter how much she disliked water.

I pulled the glove off Jaspar’s hand.

Glove of Lightning

Shock your friends — Stun your enemies

Charges: 3/5

Neither of those things seemed to scream burn-your-hand-off, but, apparently, I had a magic glove now. I wondered if those charge-things could be refilled, and how, because it might come in handy.

I put the glove in my pack — the fact that I’d just picked up a magic glove that shot lightning not really having as much effect as I would have thought. I certainly wasn’t going to put the fucking thing on until I could figure out how magic worked here.

I thought about Heather just being stunned and what had happened to me — based on what Jaspar there had said about modern steel, there must have been some reaction between the magic and my katana, so I guess the glove would just stun somebody under normal circumstances.

Mr. Rawlin had said Uncle Jack bought a lot of pre-World War II steel — special because it was made before the atomic bombs. Steel made after that had some radioactivity or something.

Were magic on Arctara and radioactivity on Earth somehow related?

That made a lot of sense, really, if you thought about each as like the big power source of their world.

I gave my once-very-nice katana a glance.

Like Jaspar said, those two powers do not get along.

Shit! I thought, what else is steel? The rivets in my jeans? The zipper? Are there little nails in my boots? The gear … shit! Those vacuum cups are stainless steel, maybe. What would happen if we got hit by some sort of spell while wearing the backpacks, instead of targeting my sword like Jaspar did?

I gave my katana another glance.

Fuck!

We needed to get out of here and double-check our gear immediately.

I didn’t know for sure what one of those little metal pieces getting hit with magic would do to the surrounding body parts and didn’t want to find out.

“Heather! Grimelia! Pick up the pace. Search everything, but we need to get back to the manor as soon as we can.”

“I thought we were going into town to collect the bounty first?” Heather asked.

“Nope. Change of plan. First to the manor then back over to Earth for a while.”

I certainly wasn’t going to leave all the loot behind — I wanted it all — but I also wanted to figure this out.

I moved through the camp, checking bodies and tents, as well as any bags full of supplies or loot.

There were the coin purses each of the bandits had, but there were also other things — a lot of silver, utensils, cups, that sort of thing, and even some silver hairbrushes and mirrors, along with basically everything else the bandits thought might have value.

We were packing everything we found into bags and slinging them over the back of one of the four new horses we’d acquired.

The plan was — at least now that I knew I wasn’t losing my hand and had half a flask of healing potion in my pocket —we’d be leaving all the stuff, along with a good bit of the coins, with Mayor Cartnal back in town. He had records of the farms and merchants who’d been robbed and could try to reunite them with their owners — or the owners’ heirs. We were taking a percentage of the coins as payment for the job.

On top of that, we’d be getting one gold crown for each bandit we’d killed.

I went back to searching pockets and pouches, as well as going through some baskets of what food the bandits had, to see if anything of value was in there.

“Hey, um, Alex?” Heather called.

“Yeah?”

She was standing next to one of the tents, looking inside.

“Could you come here? I think you should see this.”

Chapter

An elf.

Kind of willowy, pointed ears — you know, an elf.

Not so much expected of an elf was the abject cowering in the dirt under the tent.

“Is she … one of the bandits?” I asked.

I didn’t think she was, but at this point I wouldn’t put anything past Arctara.

“No,” Heather said, “I think the bandits captured her. She’s chained there, but she won’t answer me.”

She knelt down at the tent’s entrance.

“Hey,” Heather said. “You’re safe now — the assholes are all dead.”

The elf’s eyes darted to me, then back to Heather.

“He’s a jerk sometimes, but he’s not an asshole.”

I didn’t object, but was also worried the difference wouldn’t translate well to an Arctaran elf — or if the elf spoke English.

“They are truly dead?” the elf asked in English.

“Very,” Heather assured her. “Alex? Can you find her something else to wear?”

Sure, call me over to see the half-naked elf, then send me away so I wouldn’t see the half-naked elf.

Women.

“My belongings were kept by those men,” the elf said quietly, which gave Heather a chance to send Grimelia and me searching for something containing clothes that seemed elf-like while she knelt down in the tent’s entrance and spoke quietly to the elf.

I first searched Jaspar’s body more thoroughly and, sure enough, I found several keys bound together with wire. I gave those to Heather to try on the shackle around the elf’s leg, then went back to searching for her clothes.

It took a few minutes of looking, but we located a bag of elf-clothes in what seemed to be the bandits’ miscellaneous loot pile and I brought it to Heather. I figured they were elf-clothes because they were really silky and looked expensive.

The elf confirmed they were hers and exited the tent to stand up.

She looked like an elf straight out of Central Casting — except she really was blonde and her eyebrows weren’t brown. Almost as tall as me, at least six feet, and thin, looking like she’d sway back and forth in a stiff breeze. Long, pale hair hung to below her butt cheeks, but it was a tangled mess, filled with leaves and twigs. She was almost as dirty as the bandits were, with smears of mud and dirt covering her pale, exposed skin — and there was a lot of that, because whatever kind of dress she’d started out in, it was nothing but torn, dirty rags now, barely covering her.

Heather cleared her throat. “A little privacy?”

I flushed and turned around while the elf changed. The tents were pretty small and it would have been hard for her to even sit up straight inside one.

A few minutes later, Heather said it was okay for me to turn around.

“Alex, this is Sylwen — Sylwen, Alex. He’s the leader of our group. That’s Grimelia over there searching … Grimmy, I don’t think he hid anything up his butt — and if he did, have the pixie look for it!”

“Not butt, crotch,” Grimelia said. She held up a pouch. “Bandit hide loot from leader. Can’t trust.”

I deferred to Grimelia on whether we needed to search the bandits’ underwear, but agreed with Heather that searching there was something we should task to the pixie — whenever she finished playing in the creek. I could still hear splashes and curses.

“I thank you for your assistance,” Sylwen said, giving me a little half-bow.

Even with the dirty face and hands, with leaves and twigs still sticking out of her hair, she was attractive, and, though the new clothes covered everything, the silk was thin and clung to her curves.

I kept my eyes on her face, figuring whatever she’d been through with the bandits, she didn’t need some random guy ogling her.

“You’re welcome,” I told her. “Happy to help. Do you mind telling us how you wound up with these assholes?”

“My family’s caravan was ambushed.” She shrugged as though that should have been self-evident, and it probably should have been. “The guards were killed and I was taken captive.”

Sylwen rummaged through her bag again as though searching for something.

“Here, Master.”

I looked down to find Grimelia at my side, holding out a leather pouch. I took the bag and opened it, then reached in and pulled out a couple of colored pebbles. Like misshapen glass marbles.

“What are these?”

Grimelia cocked her head. “Gems, Master.”

I rolled the stones over in my hand. “I thought gems had a bunch of flat sides and everything.”

“Faceting is pretty recent,” Heather said. “Polished was where it was at for a long time.”

She plucked one out of my hand and looked it over.

“Nice.”

“Thank you,” Sylwen said, ignoring her bag now and focused on the pouch. “My family is well-known for the quality of their gems.”

“These are yours?” I asked hefting the bag.

“I was to deliver them to the buyer … I suppose he’s moved on.” She sighed. “Father will be furious.”

I poured my handful of gems back into the pouch and held it out to her. “Here.”

Sylwen stared, then reached out tentatively. “You would return these to me?”

“They’re yours, aren’t they?”

“Most would call them the spoils of battle.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not most, I guess.” I released the gem pouch, and she almost dropped it, then I gestured at the bag-laden horses. “I’m hoping the mayor can find who most of that was stolen from, so you just saved us some time figuring out who the jewels belonged to.”

Sylwen’s brow furrowed. “You intend to return it all?”

“Not the coins — not all of them, at least — we’re keeping some of those and the mayor’s paying us, as well. He’ll sell whatever he can’t find the original owners for and we’ll split it with the town.”

“I see.”

“I think we’ve found everything,” Heather said, coming up to us. “Grimelia has the pixie searching for hidden caches and stuff.”

I looked around the camp, not really relishing what would come next. “Okay, why don’t you and the rest start leading the horses away while I take care of the ‘proof’ Mayor Cartnal needs.”

Heather nodded and gathered up the others to take care of the horses.

“Do you want one of the horses?” I asked Sylwen. “To get home faster or something?”

Sylwen stared at me for a moment.

“No, thank you. The passes will be closed soon, so I must remain here until next trading season when the caravans resume.”

I nodded. “Okay, well, we’ll escort you to town, at least — but we’re going to be stopping for an hour or two near it.”

“I would be grateful, thank you.”

“Um, you might want to wait with the others — I just need to finish up a couple things here.”

I pulled one of the tent canvases loose from its stakes — they were oiled so probably wouldn’t leak too much.

“Finish?” Sylwen looked around the thoroughly looted camp.

“The mayor wants proof of how many bandits were disposed of.”

“Proof?”

I nodded, picking up Jaspar’s dropped shortsword. “Yeah, um … heads.”

Sylwen nodded back and picked up another bandit’s sword.

“I will assist you.”

 Thoughts on human death

“I thought we were going into town to collect the bounty first?” Heather asked.

“Nope. Change of plan. First to the manor then back over to Earth for a while.”