RCJoshua
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Chapter 113: Am I a Badass
🕑 Added 2023-10-25 16:22:34 +0000 UTCHaving shambled up to the bar, Matt now stood awkwardly in front of the barstools as the wolf-man bar-owner-slash-demon-class-teacher made his way around to stand beside him. Matt leaned lightly on his shovel, nonchalantly positioning it in such a way that he could sweep it up to bat the wolf away if he needed to make a sudden break for the door.
“I have some things to point out about this particular demon’s technique, which I will do by asking him questions. This does not mean the questions are for him. They are for you. As I ask them, I want you to think about why I’m asking them, and carefully ponder how both you would answer, and how he actually answers them.”
The demons in the audience might have looked thoughtful. Matt thought of himself as a pretty socially aware person, but a lot of those skills were very specialized to reading human faces. He had a much harder time understanding the expressions from, say, an eagle.
“First, sir, if you could tell me. When you were playing spikeys, why did you choose to miss so often?”
Matt shifted uncomfortably. If he was being honest, he had always been bad at games that involved ranged weaponry and fine muscle control. In his old life, he had been joking-but-not-really-joking banned from playing darts in his local bar after the owner got tired of patching little holes in the wall from his misses.
“Well, you see,” Matt said, buying a few seconds to think. “It seems to me that missing is a human thing. And humans, in bars, are having fun. They aren’t always serious about the game. So even if they could hit it if they were trying, they don’t because it's not that important to them.”
The teacher clapped his paws joyfully, his claws clacking together as he did. “Exactly! Exactly! Humans lack focus, even where they possess skill. And as superior as demons might be, trickery demands that sometimes we downplay that superiority.” He turned back to the crowd, even more enthusiastic now. “And notice his hesitation before answering the question, the little shrugs that pretended at not knowing the answer, but trying anyway. Well done, sir. Truly well done.”
In the background, Lucy was cracking up. “This guy… whoo, man. Don’t die still, but I can’t wait to see the look on his face when he finds out you are acting all incompetent because you are just a normal incompetent person. It’s like you have a field around you that makes you suck at things.”
Matt tried to ignore Lucy, standing a bit stiffly while he tried not to attract any of the wrong kind of attention to himself. So far, he wasn’t dead. That was good. He’d take it.
“Now, a question for you.” The wolf teacher pointed to the crab student again. “This ‘human’ bumped into you not once, but twice. You just let him. Why?”
“It seemed right. I didn’t want to draw attention.”
“That’s not wrong, exactly. But while you might not want to start a duel over it, it’s normal to draw attention when someone bumps into you, especially if they spill a drink on you, which he did. And especially when they don’t seem to notice they’ve done it, which he didn’t.” The teacher turned back to Matt. “Why did you choose to bump into him?, without so much as an apology?”
Matt stammered, trying his hardest to ignore Lucy’s cackling. “I just… it seemed to me, I guess, that a human in a crowded bar might not be paying all the attention he should, and might have a bit more beer than he thought he had. Such a human might make that kind of mistake. Innocently. Other humans might understand and expect such behavior.”
“Exactly right! Exactly!” The teacher faced the demon-students, beginning to speak in a wrapping-things-up voice Matt recognized as universal to all teachers. “The lesson here, students, is that humans are flawed. You don’t want to do the wrong thing all the time, but doing the right thing at all times is just as suspicious. None of us are perfect at imitating humans, although some of us come close.” Here he stopped, and nodded at Matt. “Giving the humans little, noticeable mistakes to focus on will keep them from focusing on mistakes that might reveal your identity. By imitating a human’s flaws, your disguise becomes even more perfect.”
He waited for the class to nod back before picking up a plate of food off the table. “Do you want plates just like these, but loaded with human flesh? Do you want to know where they’ve hidden their children before you burn down their settlements, to enjoy an even finer grade of meal? Do you want land of your own, that you can rule over? Mastering these skills is how you get it. You can’t destroy what you don’t know, and this is how we learn.” He turned back to Matt. “And you, sir, are virtually awash in flaws. No human would find you threatening, or even particularly interesting. Well done. Well done.”
Lucy was rolling on the ground now, fully losing her shit.
“Now, sir, may I ask who you are? You aren’t a normal attendee of my classes. What force do you hail from?”
Matt had no idea how to answer this. He took a stab in the dark. “The fifth battalion?”
“The fifth?” The teacher’s lupine forehead creased. “I thought they were deployed to human territory, at the moment.”
“Well, yes. But I was… granted leave? To visit my family.”
“Funny, that. I didn’t think insect types had much in the way of pack affection. And you say your commanding officer granted it?”
“Oh, yes. Took some talking to make it happen. But, you know, as you noticed, I’m pretty persuasive.”
The teacher was not buying it. He suddenly stopped and sniffed the air, then sniffed again. His eyes took on a steely glint, and his hands tensed slightly. He wasn’t armed in the conventional human sense, but Matt assumed his fangs and claws bridged that handicap by quite a bit.
“I notice you haven’t dropped your disguise yet. Why?” Around the room, various animals began sensing something was wrong and tensing up. Without moving, Matt began to store some energy in his body, hoping he could stall for a moment.
“Well, you see, I figured you’d notice my mastery of the form and ask me to come up…”
It was, of all things, the crab-man that moved first. Matt released his stored arrow-ant tension into the shovel, letting it fly in an upwards arc to intercept the demon as it surged forwards, clacking its claws. The seconds he had spent preparing the attack were apparently fairly effective when combined with the razor-sharp Nullsteel edge of the weapon. His strike cleanly bisected the crab in half. At the same time, the shovel brought splinters up from the floor where the tip had been buried. These projectiles made a cracking sound as they flew through the air and embedded themselves in two unlucky demons who were standing near enough to the crab to catch the flak.
The room paused for a split second as the splinter-riddled demons shrieked in animal rage, and the sides of the crab topped to the ground like something out of an anime samurai duel. By the time the halves actually hit the floor, the fight was on.
Matt’s perception immediately alerted him to attacks coming from three directions. The bar had his back covered, at least for now, but the wolf on one side and two bird-type demons attacking from his front and right sides meant he suddenly had a lot to deal with. Disregarding what the broken glass would do to his back, Matt flared Spring Fighterand jumped backwards, rolling over the bar on his shoulder blades.
Glass mugs and shot glasses exploded into his back under his weight but Matt ignored the cuts into his back. He kept pivoting on his back until his legs hit the ground behind the bar. As his face came back up to face the room, he saw the wolf’s claws come only a fraction of a centimeter to his eye. Without flinching, Matt used the momentum from the flip and brought the shovel back towards himself hard. The motion caught a good portion of the side of the wolf’s rib cage in the process. Whatever armor it was wearing was apparently no match for the combination of movement, STR, and Nullsteel and gave way cleanly ahead of the blade.
Matt wasn’t an expert on wolf-demon anatomy, but the blow apparently clipped something vital on its way into the wolf’s rib cage, and it dropped like a sack of flour.
Is it supposed to be that easy? Matt thought, before realizing that he was still facing down a room full of surging demons, who had only been stopped momentarily in watching their leader drop. He needed to even the odds, or it would very quickly get much less easy than he liked.
Matt took a swipe outwards over the bar with the flat of his shovel, catching the remaining two bird-demons with the flat of the shovel and knocking them off balance to his left. Continuing the shovel's momentum and following the original trajectory, he made a full loop with the shovel. The journey caught every bottle of liquid he could from the shelves behind the bar and continued on in a flinging motion back to the front. The bottles more or less atomized on impact, and let Matt launch a shovelful of broken glass and bottle contents at the rest of the demons. Chaos ensued as the demons were suddenly covered with microscopic cuts on their skin and eyes, burning with the force of a dozen bottles of cheap liquor.
As the demons in the back of the ranks stumbled over the suddenly collapsed frontline, Matt took the few seconds the opportunity afforded to dig his shovel under the bar at a diagonal angle, then store power.
After a few seconds, the demons began to get their shit together in a real way, forming in actual, organized lines and moving forward. Where they had previously seemed content to rely on brute force, several of them now had paws, claws, or mandibles that shone with evil-looking magic.
They charged forward as one, only to be met with an entire dislodged, catapulting bar. Matt was far from figuring out the precise math on the arrow-ant attack, but the multipliers it gave seemed dependent both on time and how much weight he could put behind each attack. He had put his entire back into the motion as he cranked back on his shovel. The wood groaned, the bar lifted, and roughly a ton of finely crafted hardwood launched through the air before crashing into the group.
Matt didn’t wait to see how much damage it did.
By this time, Matt had spent enough time in actual battle with the unveiled demon-kind to see their weaknesses spread out in front of him in the form of skill-driven weak spot indicators. Rather than go for the brightest lights, he prioritized the enemies with the dimmest indicators, assuming they represented either the strongest or least-injured enemies. He swung the shovel wildly back and forth, counting on the wide arcs for crowd control and dedicating most of the attention he wasn’t spending on the attacks to dodging.
By the time the third enemy had fallen from his charge, the demons looked reluctant to attack him. By the time the seventh fell, they looked scared. As he bounced back a fireball and took out a handful of them at once with their own ammunition, they looked terrified. But despite what he expected, they never broke and ran. They fought to the last, driven by some kind of pride or fear of reprisal.
After a surprisingly short time, Matt found himself administering the coup de grâce on the last living demon in the bar, absolutely covered in a variety of shades of demon blood, and not even breathing hard.
“Lucy?”
Lucy was shell shocked.
“Yeah, Matt?”
With a general expression of wonderment and confusion, Matt gestured generally at all the littered corpses and general destruction he had wrought.
“Am I a badass?”
Comments
Jake Holland
I want you to know how disappointed I am with myself that I finally paid to read ahead on somebody's patron.
Lyncher98
Yes yes you are
