Book 2: Chapter 8: Well Fighting

  Vrung’s Quarry didn’t have many rules, it was a small town that kept to itself and tried to keep things simple. But it did have some rules, one of which was an unspoken but commonly understood truth: you don’t start fights near the well. So, naturally, that’s exactly where the next one broke out.

  Alex had just started to relax. Garret was arguing with a spice vendor about whether "ghost pepper lizard jerky" was a hate crime. Tom-Tom was trying to trade a spoon for a crystal marble. Everyone else trickled back from their shopping runs, arms full of gear, herbs, or questionable purchases. The mood was good.

  That ended when Bek’s voice cut through the market like an audible brain-splinter.

  “Well, well, well… look who crawled back into town.”

  Alex turned slowly. The meatheads had returned.

  Bek and Metjen stood front and center, still large, still ugly, but now with company. Eight more brutes loomed behind them, six men, two women. All were carrying the same broken-nose bravado and village-wrought weapons. Sledgehammers, axes, brass-knuckles, none were military issue. More… farm-raider chic.

  Alex stepped forward, already reading the angles. “Didn’t get enough last time?”

  Bek sneered, a bruise still faintly visible on one cheek. “This time’s different.” One of their cousins cracked his neck. “This time, we brought the family.” His words appeared to ignite the battle-lust in the rest of them, as all the members of this backwood miner-camp family suddenly postured up like a raccoon angling for a snack.

  “You don’t want to, I’m serious Bek,” he surprised himself a bit by remembering the man’s name. The last time they had met hadn’t really given Alex a whole lot of time for introductions. “Your sister is fine now I assume, or we wouldn’t have gotten this bravado opening.”

  “She is, no thanks to you,” he sneered at Alex and brandished the newly sharpened mining ax that he held in his hands. Alex wasn’t certain if that was all he could afford on a miner’s salary, or if that was all he grabbed on such a short notice. The careful sharpen and polish job that this guy seemed to have performed on the tool suggested to Alex it was the former.

  By this time, the other eight family members of Hobo-chic Quarry had started to advance on the rest of their group. Lance and Allie gave Alex the look a child would give their parents when asking permission to tear apart an old cardboard box after removing their Christmas present from it.

  “Fine, don’t say I didn’t warn you though, okay?” He nodded to Lance and Allie in turn, giving them the go-head to do their thing.

  The following fight, if any self respecting person could ever call what followed as a fight, was swift and brutal. Not even all on Alex’s part either. Allie was rather unforgiving in a very scary, fuck with the platypus and get the bill, sort of way.

  Metjen, the cousin whom Alex had taught a lesson to last time he was in town, attacked first. He went for Allie, maybe because he assumed she was the weak link. She gave off the natural team healer sort of vibes, so it could have been a safe assumption.

  Could have been, but wasn’t.

  The feisty squad medic had already begun drawing a short dagger from under her cloak as the man closed on her. She wasn’t putting a lot of experience points into her physical stats like Garret or Peter was, that didn’t mean she couldn’t mud wrestle with the best of them.

  Her fist flashed forward like a snapping turtle trying to get a leaf of lettuce, the contact was forceful enough though, re-breaking Metjens barely healed nose. He tried to retaliate by swallowing up her torso in a bear hug in one swift motion. He managed to lift her off her feet before the dagger in her hand sank half way up the blade into the man’s shoulder.

  Blood squirted out like a horribly unsightly pimple. Alex thought he saw some of it land in the courtyard well. That’s not exactly sanitary.

  “It’s not. But drinking it might allow one of these villagers to unlock their own special constitution,” Obby provided commentary in Alex’s mind as they both watched. “Coal-heart Inbred Constitution. High tier, at least for you fleshbag mortals.”

  One of the other men, along with one of the women, were closing towards Lance, trying to trap him with a pincer attack. It became a rather pitiful attempt as Lance rushed the man in front of him, throwing a snap kick at the guy’s torso. Cousin-Bob managed to block the kick with his forearms, but he was sent barreling along the dirt for his efforts. The man only stopped rolling once he crashed into the rock ring surrounding the well.

  The woman behind Lance didn’t let this stop her advance, as she brought down a large club affixed with spikes from over her head and toward Lance’s. He sidestepped the swing, and brought his fist into her stomach. She lifted an inch or so off the ground before sinking to the floor on her knees.

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  Her stomach contents accompanied the dirt in front of her shortly thereafter.

  “On your left, Alex,” Allie called out to him while she was dealing with yet another man trying to hit her with a pitchfork, the impromptu weapon’s length giving her a slight bit of trouble.

  Turning just in time, he was able to see that Bek had decided to join the fray. The miner’s axe was already angling towards Alex’s midsection, no doubt trying to extract Alex’s organ contents like an ore rich vein.

  Bek hadn’t increased his stats since their last encounter. Alex on the other hand, he had literally crossed tiers. The quality of his body, and the breadth of his experience, simply no longer sat within the same ballpark. The pickaxe came at Alex painfully slowly. He took a step back and slapped the weapon’s handle flatly with his palm. He didn’t even need to enter a stance of the Demon Asura, Bek was forced to drop the pickaxe regardless.

  The man looked at Alex with shock, not quite comprehending when he had lost his weapon, or where in his life he had gone wrong. That was okay though, Alex would provide that information for him.

  He would be Bek’s nuclear bomb.

  A small crack was opened in the artificial dam which was holding back Alex’s aether. He was managing the oppressive aura that Adept Tier energy gave him, and it seemed to work, but Alex didn’t need to hold all of it right now.

  Azure blue energy flashed as Alex jabbed his fist into Bek’s chest. The cracking of bones that followed wasn’t Alex’s fingers, it was Bek’s ribs. Then it was his arms as his body flailed across the packed dirt and cobblestones. Once he came to a halt in a tangled heap of broken limbs, the man groaned pitfully, letting Alex know that he was still alive. For now.

  Garret, Zach and Eric had rushed in for back up by this time. The brawl around the courtyard had devolved into a knock-out-drag-out of fucked proportions.

  Lance dodged, dipped and ducked around a man that swung a sledgehammer at him in a whirlwind of fury. The woman who was still standing, swung a hefty stick at Zach. Surprisingly, said stick flashed with a yellow light and caused a small gash along Zach’s forearm. The man looked at his wound a moment before his own spell flashed, hitting the woman with a sickly pitch black bolt directly in her face. She was unconscious before she hit the dirt.

  Garret was essentially playing with his food as he jumped in and out of the reach of another man holding a woodcutter’s axe.

  Another man stalked toward Allie with a shovel, and received a flash of light attuned aether to his face. A bulky, heavy-set man wielding a shoddy spear ran at Garret’s back. The last member of the family was headed towards Alex, unperturbed by the fashion in which he had dispatched Bek.

  Alex sighed and rolled his shoulder as he began cycling his aether into a spell pattern. His mouth easily spoke through a three word chant as he cast his [Chain Bind] spell for the first time. The aether within his body moved differently for this spell than either of the two he had cast before. The energy seemed to simply vanish into the ambient space around his body. The next instant, azure ethereal chains sprung from the ground a dozen paces away and slithered over the body of the spear wielder running for Garret.

  That’s fucking cool. Alex felt the amount of energy the spell consumed to be about the same as his [Flare] spell. With his new stats and progress, he could cast it about twenty times before his body would become exhausted.

  “Focus meatsack,” Obby pulled him back on focus.

  A long curved dagger slipped past Alex’s head as he ducked beneath a slash. A quick snap of his leg brought his foot crashing into the man’s upper thigh. Another crack rewarded Alex’s efforts, and a brief flash of dark blue aether slipped into his opponent’s body from the Demon Asura Style’s [Burning Strike] passive.

  He quickly cut off the scream erupting from the man’s lungs with a jab to his head immediately after the kick. Alex wasn’t rough enough to actually kill the man. But he might need a healing potion for some cranium swelling problems in the near future.

  Garret had brought woodcutter-axe-man to a swift nap as well.

  A sledgehammer crashed to the dirt from Lance’s hand after he had liberated and used it against its previous owner, leaving the poor guy a Christopher Reeve fan for life.

  Blood, screams and whimpers all splashed and echoed about around the town’s well as Alex’s friends brought Bek’s family low. People were tossed like dolls into barrels, wagons and stonework. Again, it was far less a fight, and more a pitiful shit-show that no one would subscribe to watch again.

  Silence rolled over the courtyard like an old western movie. Dust floated on a breeze, a tumble weed rolled by painfully slowly.

  One by one, villagers peered out from stalls, behind windows, around door-frames and wagons, alleys and rooftops, like meerkats popping up for a view. They starred, watching as the last thug coughed and curled up on the ground. A boot rolled away. Someone’s gauntlet was on fire. A goat bleated in the distance.

  Tom-Tom clapped once, very slowly.

  Then—

  “What the hell is this?!” it was Celeste.

  She stormed into the courtyard, a bushel of herbs in hand, alchemical residue still streaking her face and clothing from some kind of experiment. Her boots echoed like war drums on the cobblestone during her appraoch.

  Alex took a breath. “They started it.”

  Celeste looked around at the wreckage that they had wrought. The busted barrels, broken carts, moaning idiots. Then she looked pointedly at Allie, like a parent looked at the eldest child after walking in on a destroyed house.

  Allie shrugged. “Tried diplomacy.”

  Celeste’s eyes landed on Garret, Zach and Lance, the last of whom had the decency to look mildly ashamed. She exhaled. “You realize,” she said slowly, “that these villagers are going to be cleaning up after this fight longer than you spent winning it?”

  “Technically true,” Alex said. He looked about at the many faces that still gawked, half hidden, at the scene. He felt a pang of shame in his gut. He hadn’t thought about the annoyance and inconvenience this would cause the rest of the town’s people. “Sorry everyone,” He muttered aloud.

  Celeste stepped forward, staring him down. Then very subtly, barely a flicker, her eyes darted to the still-crackling aether of the Demon Asura Style that slithered around his knuckles. Her gaze softened, just a hair.

  “Hmph,” she muttered. “At least you’re not slow anymore.” And with that, she turned and stomped back toward her shop.

  Alex looked around at the squad, still catching their breath.

  “Anyone else feel like we’re the bad guys in someone else’s town story?”

  Garret wiped blood off his arm. “Absolutely.”

  Tom-Tom raised a hand. “Can we loot bodies or that bad manners? Like the licking?”