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Chapter 144: Lucky
🕑 Added 2023-11-17 21:00:05 +0000 UTCCobblestones, Matt decided, were one of the best things about being strong in a society that ran on medieval aesthetics. Or at least they were for someone who was a super-strong mole-enhanced digging specialist trying to make his way quietly under a heavily guarded military weapons storage facility. If the building had been built over concrete, he would have had to bash through it, making enough noise to let every single guard know exactly where and when he was coming up.
As it stood, the only demon who appeared to hear him was the very large, very angry looking lizard who was standing guard inside the depot. Just as Matt exited the tunnel he had dug, it came skidding around a big pile of crates, and its already bugged out eyes stuck out just a bit further once it laid eyes on Matt. It was time to put the old man’s second lesson into play.
“Think about it. In ya head is this picture where the demons will find ya any moment. But think about if ya were in your house and opened a cupboard and a demon was hiding there. Would ya be holding that shovel, ready to fight? Would ya be in a fighting stance? Would ya even know what was happening at first? Ya will appear without warning in the heart of a demon outpost, in the middle of a demon territory. Ya will be the one that’s ready to fight, the demons won’t. Ya earned those seconds of surprise. Use them.”
Matt could see the logic in what the old man said, but he hadn’t fully accepted it as true until he got within striking range of the enraged lizard. Despite seeing the human, the demon was standing with both of its hands at its side, trying desperately but ineffectively to unsheathe its sword. As he swung his shovel, Lucy barely had enough time to let him know that the enemy he faced was a king-level threat. Then, his attack landed, and it toppled to the ground, dead from an unblocked full-force strike to its neck.
To Matt’s relief, the heart really was there in the room with him. To his almost incalculable joy, it was also already loaded up on one of the demon’s floating wagons. It wasn’t covered as he had hoped, and a quick test with his hand showed it had a force-field around. It wasn’t a perfect situation, but not having to figure out how to load the temperamental tactical nuke onto a moving platform without accidentally blowing himself up was a big win in and of itself.
Now things became a little bit more interesting. If his guess was correct, this warehouse was currently surrounded by several hopefully unaware guards. Fighting them while trying to tow the heart was not a good idea, but that didn’t necessarily mean it couldn’t be useful at all.
“If ya want to really get them distracted, find something that matters to them, and toss it around a bit. Shouldn’t be a problem for ya to find something like that there. Ya know the heart won’t blow up from a little bit of jostlin’, but they don’t. Knowin’ things can help just as much as being strong, sometimes.”
The old man was right about the durability of the heart. Matt had seen them get jostled, shaken, and shrug off a fair amount of damage during the battle of the pass. At this point, the group’s working theory on how they were actually supposed to be triggered was that they probably went off after being fired from a catapult or some similar long-range launch. They seemed able to deal with stress and impacts smaller than that just fine.
That meant once Matt had carefully unlocked the front double-doors of the warehouse, there was very little problem kicking the entire heart and wagon assembly hard enough to send the entire assembly careening through. The old man’s prediction proved eerily accurate, as the two guards closest to the door froze, looking back and forth between Matt and the incredibly important wagon. Even as Matt charged toward them, they still lingered indecisively between putting up a fight and chasing after the heart.
A few sweeps of his shovel later, those two guards were dispatched. According to Lucy, these two weren’t nearly the equal of the warehouse’s interior guard, even with the element of surprise factored out.
Matt dropped the second guard just a moment too late to prevent him from calling out for more help, and as the body crumpled to the ground, a half dozen guards hurtled around the corner. But, for better or worse, that appeared to be all of the groups. It wasn’t hundreds of demons, which meant the distraction at the gates had worked.
The demons formed into two groups of three on his left and right. They almost skidded on their heels as they rushed forward, and Matt hadn’t been able to load his charge attack even a little. He immediately leapt into the group on his left, swinging his shovel as he did. The guards turned out to be more coordinated than he liked and already had their weapons in hand, managing to block his attack and force him to dodge in the same transaction.
After that, the whole group of six was on him. Matt was significantly stronger than each of the demons, and his momentum-shifting ability worked well enough that he was able to avoid the vast majority of their strikes. He’d beat them eventually, but as things were going, it looked like it would take several minutes. He didn’t have that kind of time. His friends at the gate were fighting an entire town’s worth of demons, and he had no illusions about them actually being able to defeat so many demons. They were pulling out soon, and then he’d have the entire population of this settlement on his heels.
Rather than be locked in a stalemate that resolved in the other side’s favor, Matt decided to bet on the old man one last time. Leaning out of the way of another batch of attacks from the demons, he flared Spring-Fighter, combined it with a series of two quick direction-shifts to break free and move rapidly towards the heart and wagon, which had settled against a building on the far side of the pavilion.
The demons would have probably followed anyway, but after the split second it took them to realize what Matt was trying to get to, the mood of that pursuit changed drastically. They now not only had to chase Matt before he got to the heart, but had to do it knowing that they were moving toward a source of certain death.
The most immediate practical aspect of this was that their former lock-step coordination was broken, as the few bravest immediately outdistanced the others. Matt let the gap grow for a few moments before shifting his momentum almost completely backwards. He juked the two front-most demons before caving in the ribs of one of the rear demons with a single shovel swing. By the time the group of sprinting demons realized what had happened and turned around, another charged shove strike took two more of them out of the fight. The remaining three managed to put up a fight for a dozen more shovel hits before their wounds began to accumulate, and they fell, one by one, to the combined weight of a shovel and the old man’s deep battle experience.
With the demons down, Matt ran and grabbed the edge of the wagon platform, wheeling it around like a shopping cart before dashing towards the wall of the settlement, almost but not quite entirely the opposite direction of the gate. Within a minute or so, the others should have abandoned their attack and retreated. His job was to get safely to the rendezvous point without getting caught.
Reaching the wall, he charged a shovel strike for several seconds, leveling several feet of the rock wall once he released it. He got the wagon going again, sprinting as fast as he could run towards a relatively distant set of hills he and his team had scouted out the day before.
—
The system instance was not sweating with stress while not sitting in what was not known as “the execution room” of the main system’s estate. He had not, in fact, travelled away from Ra’Zor, to the extent that even made sense relative to the very limited way system instances occupied physical space. But if someone, like Barry, who was capable of understanding the world of systems tried to describe what was happening to a human, he’d use all those terms.
Among the many things the system instance couldn’t do, he was most glad to, as not-quite a sentient AI, be incapable of shitting himself. He still almost did when he was suddenly aware that he was not alone, and that his sudden company was provided not by a higher-up in the system-clone hierarchy but by the main system himself.
“System instance. You made it. I’m pleased to see you can manage at least that much.” There was both sarcasm and steel in the System’s voice as it settled into the metaphoric space.
“Yes, System.” The system instance narrowly avoided doing something very much equivalent to gulping. “I’m… glad to be here.”
“You aren’t. You are terrified of being here. And you should be.” The system diverted his attention in a way visible to the system instance for a moment, apparently referencing notes on the situation. The not-exactly-tension that the system instance felt intensified as he realized the main system had diverted enough attention at some point in the past to have those notes in the first place. As far as he knew, system instances didn’t come back unharmed after making the main system spend that attention.
“That’s true, System.” There was no use in lying. It was debatable whether or not lying was even an option, since the main system was capable of detecting it without fail in its clones. More than that, it could extrapolate the truth just as completely from dishonesty as it could from honest and forthright admissions. “I have failed to eliminate the invader, but not for lack of trying. He has a weapon that nullifies system rules. He has skills which appear to defy the usual skill-generating algorithms. I’ve been unable to trace his planet of origin, both in the system records of the teleport, and even past his death on Earth.”
“And you think these are sufficient excuses?” the system asked. The not-tension in the room tightened.
“No, sir.” The system instance fully committed to honesty here, and took a chance saying something that might backfire on him entirely. “He has also managed to meet the right people to grow stronger. Unlikely allies and formed alliances with them in unlikely ways. And he almost always has a skill on hand suitable for getting him out of trouble.”
The system instance paused, giving the main system a chance to interrupt if he wished. No interruption was forthcoming, and he continued.
“As you know, to become an invader in the first place is a tremendously rare event, relative to any standards but our own. Even on a planet of billions, only a few will achieve it in a single human generation. Most invaders, removed from their equipment and much support, manage to get themselves killed within hours or days of arrival in a new environment.”
“Yes, I know,” the main system said, clearly bored. “That’s part of why we do it. A power imbalance can be created from removing a force from a particular world as well as creating one in the world they are sent to. I’m going to allow you to keep speaking, but…”
The system instance winced as the main system created a pause of a seconds-long eternity in their dialogue. The clone was, in most ways, the same as the main system itself. It knew what it would mean if it had paused in that way. It was on the very thinnest of ice.
“I am aware you know, System,” the system instance said, hurriedly. “It’s just that the combination of those factors and what I’ve observed have led me to a conclusion, one I wouldn’t claim without presenting the entire picture.”
The system instance paused to send a packet of data, exquisitely pruned, so the main system could read it with the barest, most minimal amount of effort possible.
“I fear, System, that Matt Perison is lucky.”
Comments
Ledski
Shouldn’t he have lost the momentum shifting skill when he swapped it for the mole one?
Rainer
He says it as if it's a curse word XD
Lyncher98
Tftc
