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Chapter 131: Batters Up
🕑 Added 2023-11-02 16:38:52 +0000 UTCThe old man considered this for a moment before turning to Matt again. As he approached, he cleared his throat a bit bashfully.
“So, there, Matt, was it? I’d be pleased to take the commission, if ya is interested. I’ll make something real nice, I think.”
“Thanks, old man. I’d like that.”
“I’ll even throw in a weapon, free of charge. Just provide the materials and I’ll make ya something good. Better’n what you got, anyway.”
“Oh, no, I’m fine on weapons. What I have is probably better than what...” Matt said the words without thinking about how it would be heard, and then immediately regretted it as the old man scooped him up, shovel and all, and physically flung him through the back door.
“Oh, it is, is it?” the old man asked, brandishing a 3 foot bar of steel he had pulled out of nowhere like a staff. “Better get it in front of ya, then. Gonna need it.”
—
Derek was outside and sitting on the wall by the time Matt got up, grinning like an idiot. Matt harbored a suspicion that when Derek had predicted mayhem, he had been prepared to cause it if none was forthcoming.
“Get him, Matt! He won’t know what hit him,” he yelled, using his sword as a cheerleading stick.
“Keep that sword out, boy. If this one doesn’t make things interesting, I’m coming for ya next. With the clubs.”
Whatever the clubs were, they were apparently scary. Derek shut up immediately, watching the fight with far more apparent reserve.
“All right then.” The old man gave the long steel bar a couple of practice swings, somehow moving it like it didn’t weigh anything. “We can get going, just as soon as ya feel ready enough to show me.”
Now, Matt thought, as Survivor’s Reflexes screamed at him to take the initiative before it was too late. He sprung at the old man, who looked genuinely surprised for a moment. Apparently, it had been a while since someone had opened things up with him without some level of caution. Matt had been having decent luck with swinging his shovel from below. So he stuck with that tactic here, converting his stride into a dusty slide along the ground and bringing the point up towards the man in the same uppercut-golf-swing motion that had been catching his other opponents off guard lately.
The old man wasn’t ready, but that didn’t mean Matt caught him absolutely flat-footed either. As the shovel came up, he dropped one end of the bar in a downward sweeping motion, pushing the shovel to the side while allowing most of its momentum to continue upwards. As the end of the bar slid upwards on the shovel’s handle, Matt could anticipate what would happen if he let it hit the handle-side of the blade. He’d be disarmed completely, or at best, knocked off balance with both of his arms already up.
Rather than leave himself open for that hit, Matt began spinning around with the shovel, using as much STR as he could to tuck the shovel off the old man’s bar and in towards himself as he did. With the shovel moving with the combined speed and force both fighters were putting into it and conservation of momentum being what it was, Matt made a full rotation with astonishing speed. He ducked down as he came around again and aimed the blade of the shovel straight at the bigger man’s calf.
This time, the old man made no attempt to redirect the force. Instead, he dropped the bar almost straight down, burying it slightly in the ground directly in the path of the shovel and stopping it cold. The shovel bit into the steel a bit, but even the Nullsteel blade couldn’t cut through inches of solid steel in a single strike. The pole held.
Matt yanked the shovel back at the same time he flared Spring Fighter to get some distance, but all his forward momentum was ruined. It was the old man’s turn now.
The first few blows were surprisingly light. Not actually light, of course, but for how big and strong the old man looked, Matt was surprised that he could stop anything the man threw at all. As easily as the old man handled the bar, it wasn’t the fastest weapon in the world. Matt was jarred by each strike, but he was able to parry or block each of them.
Don’t fall into his rhythm, Matt thought. It was a good thought. Coming out of one of his lighter strikes, the old man took advantage of the split second it was taking for Matt to recover from each blow and pulled back a single giant step, slid down the bar to a double-handed grip, and swung it at him like a three-foot baseball bat.
Matt got his shovel down in defense and fought the reflex to counterattack, figuring that the strike just might shatter every bone in his body if he did. He was gratified to see that the non-conductivity of the shovel seemed to give almost as good as it got. When the skill-augmented blow from the old man landed, the shovel cancelled whatever follow-up plans the old man had and kept him struggling to hold on to his steel bar.
Despite reflecting some force from the blow, Matt was blown off to the side towards the training area’s fence, his feet inches above the ground and helpless to slow him down. Rather than bash into the fence, he pushed the shovel down into the dirt, cutting a deep furrow as the shovel slowly cooled off his momentum. His arms felt like they were going to yank out of his shoulder sockets, but he managed to stop just in time to see the old man regain full control of his weapon, get set, and spring towards him.
The old man had plenty of tricks and an apparent edge in both fighting skills and stats, meaning Matt was fast running out of paths to victory. He needed a change, fast, and something the old man couldn’t have seen before. He dug his shovel into the ground and began charging force.
Now the old man got cautious. Matt didn’t know exactly where his opponent learned to fight, but it was clearly somewhere that taught a variety of interesting lessons. The old man was far from naive enough to run straight into Matt’s attack without something prepared, but unless he had been paying exceptionally close attention, there was no way for him to know what was coming.
But just surprise still wasn’t enough. Matt couldn’t move his body, but that didn’t mean he was out of options. Interdimensional travel might have emptied Trapper Keeper’s single-trap store, but there was always at least one trap that Matt could load up at a moment’s notice with nothing but things he was always guaranteed to have on hand.
As the old man got close, Matt fired an instant, fifteen foot pit trap not in his way, or underneath him, but directly behind the old man at the absolute limit of what the skill would allow. Then, praying he had the angles right, he let loose his digging skill.
Matt couldn’t dig through anything alive, and his skill wouldn’t work as an attack. He and Lucy had worked out a lot of what it couldn’t do over time. But one thing it could do was move a lot of earth, enough that even the biggest objects had to respect it if they were standing in the area it affected. With a charged dig, the old man didn’t stand a chance.
Together with a literal ton of earth, the old man was lifted skyward. As he flew, Matt took a chance and sprung after him, swinging his shovel directly at his opponent’s hands. To avoid being pulped, the old man was forced to drop the bar, which got batted out of the way, and was thus no help whatsoever in keeping him from falling straight down Matt’s hole.
“Holy… Matt, that’s not gonna hold him at all.” Derek yelled. “He’s gonna be pissed! Get ready!”
Instead, Matt dug a little earth down into the hole to slow the old man. He heard the blacksmith sputtering with rage as he coughed and sneezed through the dirt before scratching against the wall as he began to climb out. Matt didn’t care. He had his shovel pulled all the way back towards his shoulder, and was charging up the biggest hit he could manage.
“Oh, Matt,” Lucy said. As the only person who had seen every one of the skills involved, only she could understand what was about to happen. “This is going to be so awesome.”
“Yup.” Matt reached his intent into Trapper Keeper, reloading the pit trap back into storage. As had always been the case with the skill, it reacted by ejecting any objects that had fallen into the hole straight up. That included a good deal of dirt, a whoosh of air, and a very large, very surprised blacksmith. “Batters up.”
Matt scored a home run.
The blacksmith didn’t bounce off the fence, or get stuck in it. After he passed, there simply was no more fence. Behind the blacksmith’s house, there was now nothing but the irreparable wreckage of the divider between his yard and the street, and a fully unconscious smith.
“Whoooo!” Matt yelled, pumping his shovel in victory. “Take that, you old goat! Derek, did you see?”
Turning around, Matt saw Derek, who wasn’t so much rushing to congratulate him as he was sitting on a wall with a slack jaw, absolutely and completely shocked out of conscious thought. He was pale and motionless in a way that actually made Matt concerned for his mental wellbeing.
“Oh, shit, you broke him.” Lucy said, looking up at the stillness. Matt waved his hand in front of Derek’s face, which got no response. Finally, he slapped him just a little, which seemed to pull him out of it.
“Holy hell, Matt. You won.” Derek ran over to the old man and bent over him for a second. “He still has a pulse. That’s… good. Maybe not for you. I have no idea at all what he’s going to do when he wakes up.”
“Is he that sore of a loser?”
“I don’t know, Matt. I don’t think he knows. I don’t think he’s ever lost before. Holy shit.”
—
The old man didn’t stay asleep for long, nor did he wake up normally. After some failed attempts to bring him around didn’t work, Matt and Derek decided to wait until his VIT woke him up naturally. When he did wake up, it was instant and would have been violent, if there was anything there to hit. Matt was standing a full five feet back, and he still couldn’t avoid the wind from the blacksmith’s fist blowing his hair back.
“What in the hell happened?” the blacksmith roared, loud enough to shake the windowpanes on all the houses on the street.
“I sort of knocked you out,” Matt said gently, with no idea what the proper post-fight etiquette for this situation was. “I hope that’s… okay? With you?
“I know you knocked me out, ya jackass. I meant how did you knock me out? I haven’t the foggiest idea what the hell went on there in the last few seconds.”
It turned out that what the blacksmith remembered was the entire world evaporating into dust and dirt around him, before finding himself partially buried alive. Then he experienced involuntary flight, and then flew in another, new direction before everything went black. In retrospect, Matt understood how confusing that experience must have been. The blacksmith described it as being swallowed by an angry planet, which just about fit Matt’s fighting style as anything else.
