The gun jumps in my hands, but I’m more prepared for it now and my body is physically stronger. Just as it did last time, the thunderous crack-crack-crack of three shots firing in a rapid burst nearly deafens me, and the kick of each shot throws my aim off, but I manage to keep hold of the weapon this time.
None of the shots connect. The hatch is, after all, roughly thirty feet from me, and I’m nearly completely new to the art of using this gun, not to mention the constant shaking of the bus under me.
But it achieves the intended effect. The hand that started reaching out of the opening hatch disappears, and the hatch crashes shut a second later. The man and the woman from the car I’m on are going to be back, I’m sure, but the shots delay them enough that I can focus on the guards climbing up onto the roof of the train car right behind me.
I turn around immediately, and I sprint. The train is going to take a sharp turn up ahead, I can see, which is probably going to make keeping a grip on the roof harder. As it is, it takes all I have to keep the wind and the shaking from knocking me off.
The connection between the two cars is lower than the roof is. In order to get to the open hatch, I need to cross ten feet of open air. If I miss the jump, I’ll dash my brains against the rails below before several dozen tons of machined steel grind me into meat against the ground.
I decide against risking the jump. Instead, I pull on Bloodstep and the world turns red. My gun melds into the blood-form, thankfully, as does the rest of my equipment. I make it across to the opposite car just as the hatch fully opens, the metal circle lifting aside, and as I remanifest myself, two arms appear, grabbing at the final handlebar.
Both of their forearms are armored, black metal with acid-green lines running through it, and I open fire on them.
Once again, aiming is difficult. I use fragments of my inexplicably vast memory to hold the gun in a more comfortable position, nestling the stock into my shoulder and holding the foregrip firmly. I take a half-breath in, then—
Even with this setup, the gun is difficult to control. This guard is not nearly as quick to scare as the last two, and my first burst of three shots miss.
He pulls himself all the way to the surface of the train as I stumble back from the force of the shots, and I realize that the entirety of his body is covered in the same metal. Between the time I exited the train and the time he got here, he’s somehow managed to armor himself.
Objective: Annihilate your enemies
Kill the guards.
Targets killed: [0/8]
Reward: 100 XP/guard, 1000 XP on completion
Interesting. I wasn’t planning on slaying on my enemies before, but the reward is sizeable. I might have to give this a serious shot instead of just trying to play keep-away.
I don’t actually know how strong my enemies are, though. I know some of them have levels that are high enough that my Appraise fails on them, which isn’t promising. I test the skill out on the armored man currently facing me.
Name: Kellen Irisu
Age: 27
Race: Human
Class: Paladin of Vengeance
Level: 11
Last Used Skill: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Surprisingly, the class he possesses doesn’t give me the impression of one that would summon armor like that. Was he just wearing it under his clothes? Are the others wearing armor like that too? It’s fairly close-fitting on their bodies, but…
I toss the thought aside. That may be important later, but for now, my primary priority is different.
Now that he presents a fuller target, I drop to one knee less than ten feet from him and squeeze the trigger once more.
It might just be my imagination, but the recoil feels more manageable this time. My aim is still off, but with him closer and larger in my view, I’m able to land two of my three bullets. I can tell they connect because green lines flare bright in two separate parts of his armor and I barely hear the echo of two cracks of steel against steel over the thunderous report of the gun.
People scream below me, which definitely isn’t helping the “lay low” part of my plan, but oh well. They can’t see me through the steel of the train ceiling.
My new opponent Kellen stumbles back a single step, but from the expression on his half-masked face, I suspect it’s more because he was caught off guard than because my shots actually did anything.
“Did you actually think we’d have no defenses against our own weapons?” he hisses.
I’m already moving, dashing towards him with my enhanced speed. I’m not terribly surprised that he has countermeasures against the gun, and I’m equally unsurprised at my lack of ability to use it. I’m sure that I’ll develop a skill to wield it better eventually, but I’m not exactly a professional yet.
I close the distance between us in less than half a second, taking one hand off the gun to draw one of my knives.
His armor is segmented. It’s not perfect. His joints are exposed, as is his neck and the upper part of his head.
I make the split-second decision to target his neck. In one motion, I throw my gun at his knees, aiming to distract as I leap off the ground knife in hand. At the same time, I Shape Blood to make use of my numerous lacerations, forming a jet of crimson fluid targeting his eyes.
Shape Blood advanced to level 7!
You can now control up to 7 gallons for up to 42 minutes per hour.
It’s a good attack, but I hold no illusions that a level 11 is more capable than I am at my pitiful level 4. I’m proven right when he shouts something incoherently and slams his two arm bracers together. Sickly green energy shoots forth from his body and rapidly coalesces into a rough half-dome in front of him, removing the weak points I targeted.
Thankfully, I’ve accounted for this. Before the tip of my knife can even make contact with Kellen’s barrier, I activate Bloodstep. Using the skill twice in a row in quick succession is draining, but I really don’t want to find out what that barrier does the hard way.
I send myself up, arresting my momentum with my blood-form, and I dodge the barrier. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s a skill Kellen possesses or if it originates from his armor, but it looks like bad news.
After an entire night spent grinding out this skill, I’m intimately familiar with it. I send myself up and over him before reversing direction, aiming at the still-exposed back of his neck as I end the skill. Bloodstep provides me momentum, sending me at a forty-five degree angle to the ground so my stab will actually have power.
Just as my knife makes contact with the back of his neck, I hear another set of three air-splitting cracks one after the other and pain blossoms in my abdomen.
My blade bites through flesh and bone, Enhance Bleed adding to the potency but the sudden addition of three bullets to my bloodstream means that I’m momentarily stunned, enough that I’m not able to sever his head like I intended.
I crash to the ground in a heap, my body meeting cold metal as one leg fails me where it was shot, but I muster enough of my facilities to draw on Knifefighting as the near-fatally wounded Paladin of Vengeance wheels on me sword in hand.
With even more wounds slowing me down, I have more blood to draw from, so I manipulate it twice—once to distract Kellen and once to strike back at the second guard to climb up from this hatch.
Even though I didn’t manage to land a decisive killing blow on Kellen, a deep cut to the back of the neck is hurting him, and his strike is sloppy. Even from my half-prone position, I’m able to rise up and parry the slow shortsword blow with my dagger.
I roll to one side immediately, correctly predicting another burst of gunfire, and I manage to get onto one knee.
Blood spills out from Kellen’s injuries and mine, turning grey steel red, and the man himself looks unstable.
I focus on my new enemy.
Strike that. Enemies, plural.
Three more guards have made it to the surface of the train. One stands not fifteen feet from me, a rifle in her hands, and two more from the furthest car have gotten to the roof of theirs. One of them has a bow, the other a sword.
There’s too many of them, and all of them wear the same armor that Kellen possesses. I briefly wonder why the man I killed on my way out of the wall hadn’t been wearing this armor, but I set that concern aside for later.
“Hello there,” I say, and the woman in front of me doesn’t shoot. Idiot. If I were her, I would’ve put an enemy down the moment they were distracted.
She is, however, human, and parts of my pieced-together memory tells me that engaging her in conversation is likely to work.
“The fuck are you?” she asks, her gun pointed straight at my head. Fear tinges her voice, the state of her comrade apparently worrying her, and I stop myself from grinning at the small victory.
Behind me, Kellen wavers, unsteady on his feet, and he nearly falls. Eight feet ahead of me, the other two guards make the jump between cars, growing closer. Both of us are buying time, but she’s buying time for reinforcements while every second that passes is a second closer to Kellen’s death.
It’s all I can do to stop myself from laughing.
Even though I’m severely outnumbered and outleveled, even though she’s put three bullets in me and they fear me.
“Talk!” the gun-wielding woman shouts, and even though I prop myself up further, pushing through the sensation of pain to get my aching body back up, she doesn’t fire.
“It’s simple,” I say, inching ever so slightly backwards.
Kellen is less than three feet behind me now. It’s a wonder he hasn’t fallen yet, dazed as he is.
My Mind (Speed) attribute aids me in looking around at our surroundings. We’re still in the windy mountains, but we’ve been on a relatively straight path for a couple minutes now. The countryside whizzes past us beneath us, but my mind is fast enough to process the scenery.
We’re in a valley of some kind, if not a canyon. While one side of the rails leads simply to the mountain, the other is less than ten feet from a cliff dropping far, far down into a river hundreds of feet below.
“I am Evelyn Carnelian,” I say, tensing up my body, “And you’ll never take me alive.”
As I finish the statement, I jump backwards and place my two remaining stat points into Body (Strength).
With my enhanced speed stat, I’m barely able to scrabble between Kellen’s wobbly legs. My cut was deeper than I thought it was—he’s so out of it that he doesn’t give more than a half-hearted attempt to slash at me. He snarls as he does, but I must’ve hit something critical because he staggers immediately afterwards, grasping at his neck.
Three shots tear the air apart once more, but the combination of our conversation and my proximity to her ally throws her aim off. Two of the shots ping off the metal floor, whistling uncomfortably close to my face as they richochet away. The third catches me in the leg, but I’ve already wrapped my arms around Kellen’s armored leg.
Using my newly improved strength, I jump off the train, preying on Kellen’s dazed state to take him with me.
The two of us tumble into thin air.
Two hundred feet beneath us, the river awaits.
Everything is going according to plan.
The gun jumps in my hands, but I’m more prepared for it now and my body is physically stronger. Just as it did last time, the thunderous crack-crack-crack of three shots firing in a rapid burst nearly deafens me, and the kick of each shot throws my aim off, but I manage to keep hold of the weapon this time.
None of the shots connect. The hatch is, after all, roughly thirty feet from me, and I’m nearly completely new to the art of using this gun, not to mention the constant shaking of the bus under me.
But it achieves the intended effect. The hand that started reaching out of the opening hatch disappears, and the hatch crashes shut a second later. The man and the woman from the car I’m on are going to be back, I’m sure, but the shots delay them enough that I can focus on the guards climbing up onto the roof of the train car right behind me.
I turn around immediately, and I sprint. The train is going to take a sharp turn up ahead, I can see, which is probably going to make keeping a grip on the roof harder. As it is, it takes all I have to keep the wind and the shaking from knocking me off.
The connection between the two cars is lower than the roof is. In order to get to the open hatch, I need to cross ten feet of open air. If I miss the jump, I’ll dash my brains against the rails below before several dozen tons of machined steel grind me into meat against the ground.
I decide against risking the jump. Instead, I pull on Bloodstep and the world turns red. My gun melds into the blood-form, thankfully, as does the rest of my equipment. I make it across to the opposite car just as the hatch fully opens, the metal circle lifting aside, and as I remanifest myself, two arms appear, grabbing at the final handlebar.
Both of their forearms are armored, black metal with acid-green lines running through it, and I open fire on them.
Once again, aiming is difficult. I use fragments of my inexplicably vast memory to hold the gun in a more comfortable position, nestling the stock into my shoulder and holding the foregrip firmly. I take a half-breath in, then—
Even with this setup, the gun is difficult to control. This guard is not nearly as quick to scare as the last two, and my first burst of three shots miss.
He pulls himself all the way to the surface of the train as I stumble back from the force of the shots, and I realize that the entirety of his body is covered in the same metal. Between the time I exited the train and the time he got here, he’s somehow managed to armor himself.
Objective: Annihilate your enemies
Kill the guards.
Targets killed: [0/8]
Reward: 100 XP/guard, 1000 XP on completion
Interesting. I wasn’t planning on slaying on my enemies before, but the reward is sizeable. I might have to give this a serious shot instead of just trying to play keep-away.
I don’t actually know how strong my enemies are, though. I know some of them have levels that are high enough that my Appraise fails on them, which isn’t promising. I test the skill out on the armored man currently facing me.
Name: Kellen Irisu
Age: 27
Race: Human
Class: Paladin of Vengeance
Level: 11
Last Used Skill: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Surprisingly, the class he possesses doesn’t give me the impression of one that would summon armor like that. Was he just wearing it under his clothes? Are the others wearing armor like that too? It’s fairly close-fitting on their bodies, but…
I toss the thought aside. That may be important later, but for now, my primary priority is different.
Now that he presents a fuller target, I drop to one knee less than ten feet from him and squeeze the trigger once more.
It might just be my imagination, but the recoil feels more manageable this time. My aim is still off, but with him closer and larger in my view, I’m able to land two of my three bullets. I can tell they connect because green lines flare bright in two separate parts of his armor and I barely hear the echo of two cracks of steel against steel over the thunderous report of the gun.
People scream below me, which definitely isn’t helping the “lay low” part of my plan, but oh well. They can’t see me through the steel of the train ceiling.
My new opponent Kellen stumbles back a single step, but from the expression on his half-masked face, I suspect it’s more because he was caught off guard than because my shots actually did anything.
“Did you actually think we’d have no defenses against our own weapons?” he hisses.
I’m already moving, dashing towards him with my enhanced speed. I’m not terribly surprised that he has countermeasures against the gun, and I’m equally unsurprised at my lack of ability to use it. I’m sure that I’ll develop a skill to wield it better eventually, but I’m not exactly a professional yet.
I close the distance between us in less than half a second, taking one hand off the gun to draw one of my knives.
His armor is segmented. It’s not perfect. His joints are exposed, as is his neck and the upper part of his head.
I make the split-second decision to target his neck. In one motion, I throw my gun at his knees, aiming to distract as I leap off the ground knife in hand. At the same time, I Shape Blood to make use of my numerous lacerations, forming a jet of crimson fluid targeting his eyes.
Shape Blood advanced to level 7!
You can now control up to 7 gallons for up to 42 minutes per hour.
It’s a good attack, but I hold no illusions that a level 11 is more capable than I am at my pitiful level 4. I’m proven right when he shouts something incoherently and slams his two arm bracers together. Sickly green energy shoots forth from his body and rapidly coalesces into a rough half-dome in front of him, removing the weak points I targeted.
Thankfully, I’ve accounted for this. Before the tip of my knife can even make contact with Kellen’s barrier, I activate Bloodstep. Using the skill twice in a row in quick succession is draining, but I really don’t want to find out what that barrier does the hard way.
I send myself up, arresting my momentum with my blood-form, and I dodge the barrier. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s a skill Kellen possesses or if it originates from his armor, but it looks like bad news.
After an entire night spent grinding out this skill, I’m intimately familiar with it. I send myself up and over him before reversing direction, aiming at the still-exposed back of his neck as I end the skill. Bloodstep provides me momentum, sending me at a forty-five degree angle to the ground so my stab will actually have power.
Just as my knife makes contact with the back of his neck, I hear another set of three air-splitting cracks one after the other and pain blossoms in my abdomen.
My blade bites through flesh and bone, Enhance Bleed adding to the potency but the sudden addition of three bullets to my bloodstream means that I’m momentarily stunned, enough that I’m not able to sever his head like I intended.
I crash to the ground in a heap, my body meeting cold metal as one leg fails me where it was shot, but I muster enough of my facilities to draw on Knifefighting as the near-fatally wounded Paladin of Vengeance wheels on me sword in hand.
With even more wounds slowing me down, I have more blood to draw from, so I manipulate it twice—once to distract Kellen and once to strike back at the second guard to climb up from this hatch.
Even though I didn’t manage to land a decisive killing blow on Kellen, a deep cut to the back of the neck is hurting him, and his strike is sloppy. Even from my half-prone position, I’m able to rise up and parry the slow shortsword blow with my dagger.
I roll to one side immediately, correctly predicting another burst of gunfire, and I manage to get onto one knee.
Blood spills out from Kellen’s injuries and mine, turning grey steel red, and the man himself looks unstable.
I focus on my new enemy.
Strike that. Enemies, plural.
Three more guards have made it to the surface of the train. One stands not fifteen feet from me, a rifle in her hands, and two more from the furthest car have gotten to the roof of theirs. One of them has a bow, the other a sword.
There’s too many of them, and all of them wear the same armor that Kellen possesses. I briefly wonder why the man I killed on my way out of the wall hadn’t been wearing this armor, but I set that concern aside for later.
“Hello there,” I say, and the woman in front of me doesn’t shoot. Idiot. If I were her, I would’ve put an enemy down the moment they were distracted.
She is, however, human, and parts of my pieced-together memory tells me that engaging her in conversation is likely to work.
“The fuck are you?” she asks, her gun pointed straight at my head. Fear tinges her voice, the state of her comrade apparently worrying her, and I stop myself from grinning at the small victory.
Behind me, Kellen wavers, unsteady on his feet, and he nearly falls. Eight feet ahead of me, the other two guards make the jump between cars, growing closer. Both of us are buying time, but she’s buying time for reinforcements while every second that passes is a second closer to Kellen’s death.
It’s all I can do to stop myself from laughing.
Even though I’m severely outnumbered and outleveled, even though she’s put three bullets in me and they fear me.
“Talk!” the gun-wielding woman shouts, and even though I prop myself up further, pushing through the sensation of pain to get my aching body back up, she doesn’t fire.
“It’s simple,” I say, inching ever so slightly backwards.
Kellen is less than three feet behind me now. It’s a wonder he hasn’t fallen yet, dazed as he is.
My Mind (Speed) attribute aids me in looking around at our surroundings. We’re still in the windy mountains, but we’ve been on a relatively straight path for a couple minutes now. The countryside whizzes past us beneath us, but my mind is fast enough to process the scenery.
We’re in a valley of some kind, if not a canyon. While one side of the rails leads simply to the mountain, the other is less than ten feet from a cliff dropping far, far down into a river hundreds of feet below.
“I am Evelyn Carnelian,” I say, tensing up my body, “And you’ll never take me alive.”
As I finish the statement, I jump backwards and place my two remaining stat points into Body (Strength).
With my enhanced speed stat, I’m barely able to scrabble between Kellen’s wobbly legs. My cut was deeper than I thought it was—he’s so out of it that he doesn’t give more than a half-hearted attempt to slash at me. He snarls as he does, but I must’ve hit something critical because he staggers immediately afterwards, grasping at his neck.
Three shots tear the air apart once more, but the combination of our conversation and my proximity to her ally throws her aim off. Two of the shots ping off the metal floor, whistling uncomfortably close to my face as they richochet away. The third catches me in the leg, but I’ve already wrapped my arms around Kellen’s armored leg.
Using my newly improved strength, I jump off the train, preying on Kellen’s dazed state to take him with me.
The two of us tumble into thin air.
Two hundred feet beneath us, the river awaits.
Everything is going according to plan.
