James A. Hunter
patreon
Wasteland Warlords Episode 4: Chapter 11 - It’s Raining Men
🕑 Added 2023-08-29 17:00:02 +0000 UTCThe next room may have been a warehouse floor sometime before the Merge, but somewhere along the line, somebody had converted the place into a skate park. It boasted half-pipes, spines, boxes, and drops, all striped with wheel marks, and rails worn shiny from what had undoubtedly been sick grinds. A metal sign on one wall—long since weathered from age and heavily pitted with rust—read, X-Games Dew Tour! Feel the Rush!
The Triple S reinforcements had taken up positions behind as many of the makeshift barricades as possible in preparation for the dancing redneck in mech armor and the unseen shooter.
What they got was a one-wyrm bomber with no fear of bullets, damage spells, or wand blasts, who could fly faster than they could run and rain down gouts of blue fire, poison spray, and ball lightning from any angle.
“Havoc!” the aquamarine kamikaze cried as she swooped across the skate park turned war zone.
Bullets tore through her sinuous undulating body, but dropping the wyrm to zero HP wouldn’t kill her. As a summoned creature, when she ran out of Health, Bacon Bits would return to her ZombiePop form for an eight-hour cooldown period until she could be summoned again.
She belched a potion-induced Spray of Acid at a group of Triple S hunkered down behind a drop. The guards dived out of the way while others bolted for cover, taking refuge behind elevated funboxes and immovable concrete skate pyramids. Despite their best efforts, more than half of them hit the floor screaming. The ones fast enough to avoid the worst of the damage answered the attack with a hail of spells and hot lead.
Using the giant flying distraction, the rest of the Jaeger squad fanned out.
Alex moved like a cruise missile and promptly launched herself off a rail, whipping her new priestly thurible like a smoking flail. The plume of noxious yellow gas it sent out made the Triple S scramble for their gas masks.
The incense dispenser wasn’t just a handy plague delivery system, however. It was made up of a thick chain and a heavy metal ball, incredibly solid in spite of the stamped-out crucifixes and scrollwork it was covered in. A scrambling Triple S agent took that upside the head, and his lights went out like a power outage.
Clay hadn’t expected Griff to have developed many nonlethal attacks surviving out in the wasteland for so long, but the old weed surprised him yet again, switching to a style of combat that would’ve been at home in some kind of weapon-heavy MMA fight. With a buckler on each arm, Griff shield-bashed the distracted agents in Bacon Bits’s wake, getting inside their reach before they could train their rifles on him, smothering their distance game, and stifling every defense they mustered with overwhelming short-range power.
Joe’s mech suit held another new surprise as well—a custom Mountain Dew cannon he lovingly called the Dew-zooka. A fist-sized jet of Purple Thunder roared out, slamming back a squad of guards who had managed to avoid Bacon Bits’s flurry of attacks. Half the guys were flattened immediately in the overpowered spray. The other half Chonk took the assist on. The little mechacoon ran through the battle like a schoolyard bully’s best buddy, slipping behind feet and tangling around ankles at exactly the right moment to send them sprawling onto their asses.
Her acid counter used up, Bacon Bits downed a bottle of Lightning Damage potion, whipped around, and took another pass, crackling arcs of purple electricity spraying from her maw. One hit the only female guard in the chest. The impact of the lightning bolt knocked the woman out of her tightly laced boots, and brilliant tongues of electricity leapt from her into the two closest of her fellow guards, sending them twitching and spasming to the floor.
Clay came in batting cleanup, hitting as many as he could with the Sleep/Transport spelled bullets. As the sample size of those shot grew larger, it became pretty obvious the spell leaned toward Transporting his enemies. At least twice as many disappeared in that puff of green smoke bomb as went down asleep.
When Joe, Alex, or Griff’s health started to dip, he turned his muzzle on them, rattling off bursts of Friendly Fire. As someone who’d grown up with firearms and served in the military, the act felt like an unholy sacrilege. He’d had the weapons safety rules drilled into his head a thousand times over. One, treat every weapon as if it were loaded. Two, keep your finger straight of off the trigger until you intend to fire. Three, never point your weapon at anything you do not intend to shoot. And, four, keep your weapon on safe until you intend to fire.
Actively aiming and shooting at his allies went against the grain. It was just about as counterintuitive as hurting somebody to heal them. Still, he fought through the instinct to pull his muzzle and made sure to line up each shot. Landing a Critical Hit—like a head shot, say—added additional healing bonuses that he couldn’t afford to ignore.
Unfortunately for the other members of the Jaeger squad, Friendly Fire didn’t exactly feel like a happy pat on the back. Griff doubled over as he took a round in the side, but his health bar refilled at an amazing rate. Chonk got a Crit in the back of the head that sent his furry little body cartwheeling through the air.
Joe yelped as a bullet slammed into his butt cheek.
“Easy, bro! That’s my sitting-on butt!”
Alex saw Clay line up a shot on her.
“I’ll regenerate, I promise!” She stuck up her chain-wrapped hands like a bystander in a bank robbery. “Save your ammo.”
Even seeing the good it did, Clay wasn’t sure he could bring himself to blast his wife, so he took her advice and scanned the warehouse turned skate park for an enemy target. He was too late. A vicious shield bash to the chin from Griff knocked out the last of the Triple S, leaving the room oddly quiet.
Joe came over, rubbing where his gunshot wound had been.
“With a healer like Clay, who needs enemies, amiright?”
“Not pleasant, but it sure is handy,” Griff said, trading his bucklers for rope. He cast a calculating eye across the fallen guards. “Doesn’t look like we’ve got enough cordage to restrain ’em all, lad.”
The old weed was right. There at least a dozen guards in here, and probably hundreds more waiting for them in the rest of the Temple. They needed to come up with a different method of taking Cassidy and Rhett’s hired hands out of the fight.
“Joe, can you rig up some kind of handcuffs or shackles out of something?” Clay asked.
“Can I rig up something, he asks.” Joe scoffed. “You’re talking to the guy who rigged up a spark plug harness with nothing but the metal bottle caps and string he found in the state park dumpster. Yes, Clay, I can rig up something. The question is whether I will.”
Alex rolled her eyes. “Is there any reason you need to be a dick in the middle of a dungeon raid?”
“Why yes, Alexandra, yes there is,” Joe said with feigned sincerity. “And that reason is because I think it’s funny.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “So does Chonk. Isn’t that right, Chonkie?”
Hearing his name, the mechacoon chittered in seeming agreement.
“See? Settled,” Joe said. “Now, I need a big ol’ pile of scrap metal. These guys’ rifles will do just fine.” He flicked his hands at them, as if shooing them out into the world. “Let’s go, people. Many hands make bigger piles.”
Clay rolled his eyes, and Alex grumbled a threat to knock Joe’s head off, but they all started gathering weapons from the incapacitated guards and piling them in front of Joe.
With his Arcane Engineer ability, Joe broke them down and twisted them into new shapes. The metal shrieked as it banded around wrists and ankles. It wasn’t going to be comfortable, but it would keep them sidelined at least until Cassidy and Rhett were taken care of.
They’d almost finished when a door slammed open. A wiry guy in baggy jeans, a flat-billed cap, and designer skate shoes stepped out onto the half-pipe’s platform. He had a phone covered in skate stickers pressed to his ear, and he wore a bakedDogs jacket in spite of the ungodly California heat.
“What the fuck is going on here?” The aging skater punk scowled down at them, taking in the weapons and gear and his squad of disabled mercs. The air around him shimmered faintly turquoise.
This was Rhett Cameron, the Madlad Incant, Clay realized. They’d known they were going to face him and Cassidy, too, but he hadn’t expected to run into him so soon. Through the door behind the Madlad was what looked like an office.
Up at the top of the half-pipe, Rhett made a disgusted sound and spoke into the phone.
“I told you these government chodes were a waste of gold.” He paused, listening. “As if. It’s just a bunch of lowbie barfbags rolling for some loot. Get that shipment out. I’ll fix their trucks.”
***
Rhett Cameron tossed his phone back into the office behind him and slammed the door.
“You losers done messed up.” With a stomp of his designer kicks, turquoise light flared and a skateboard appeared out of thin air, tail perched on the edge of the drop.
“No,” Clay replied, voice hard as steel and cold as ice, “you messed up when you enslaved a bunch of human beings, shitbag. And now there’s a reckoning on your doorstep. The only question now is whether you want to lick your wounds and live to see another day or whether me and my family bury your smarmy ass in a shallow grave after we loot your corpse.” He shrugged. “Honestly, I’m fine with it playing out either way. But if you want to walk away from the shitstorm we’re about to bring down on your head, then two things are gonna happen. First, you’re gonna let the people you have enslaved here go free, and then you’re going to tell us what happened to Griff’s daughter, Ella.”
Clay could see the fury build on Rhett’s face with every single word.
“Big talk, Felicia,” Rhett growled, “but then I guess you’re still thinking you’re gnarly shit because you managed to take out Gearhead. Thing is, I’m not Gearhead. There’s a reason he was our errand boy. You and your crew have been fucking around, and now you’re about to find out. Major Delam!”
A gritty wind roared through the warehouse, scouring the Jaeger squad. Clay skidded backward and only managed to keep on his feet with help from his enhanced dexterity.
Beside him, Bacon Bits hunkered down. Alex grabbed onto the wyrm to keep from being blown over. Chonk nearly flipped through the air, but he grabbed onto Alex’s samurai shoulder armor as he was thrown past. The mechacoon hung there, whipping wildly and squalling his disapproval.
Griff wasn’t so lucky. The old weed got his boots tangled in an unconscious Triple S agent and went down hard.
[Warning: Your party’s armor rating has been halved by Sk8spell Major Delamination.]
Clay cussed under his breath. There went everything his Fateslinger passive had done to boost his armor.
“Watch the paint!” Joe yelled, tracing fresh sandblast scuffs in his mech armor.
“Oh, I’ll do more than fuck up your paint job,” Rhett said.
He grabbed the nose of his magical skateboard and dropped into the pipe, trucks whirring. He didn’t ride straight for them, however. He swooped around in a big arc, building up more and more speed with every second.
With the Ace of Spades, Clay led the Incant, keeping his aim just in front of Rhett’s trajectory. He was about to fire when the Madlad yelled, “Fakie Multiplier!”
He lurched, his board rolling suddenly backward. In a blink, he split into nine identical skateboarding Incants. None of them were going the same direction as the first, so there was no way to know which was the original Rhett.
The small army of Madlads cruised toward them from all directions.
Clay thrust his free hand out and cast Sludge Slick. A thin, oily puddle exploded across the smooth concrete, covering a stretch of space in front of the pair of Incants headed straight for him.
“That’s cute, bro,” Rhett sneered. “I remember my first spell.”
With a kick flip, the pair sailed over the slick unaffected. They hit the floor on the other side, then fanned out, flanking Clay from either side so he couldn’t cover them both at the same time.
Clay picked the one on the right and took aim. The bullet slammed center mass into the incoming Madlad, knocking it off its skateboard. There was no way to tell if it was a clone or the original, but shooting it didn’t dispel the copy as he’d hoped for. Its health dropped, but not by much. Either Clay had hit the real Rhett, or all of his Fakies had health out the wazoo.
“Eat Body Jar!”
Wood and steel cracked Clay in the back of the head. Sparks popped at the edges of his vision. He stumbled, a little unsteady on his feet, and grabbed for the hot trickle of blood he felt in his hair. The second Fakie of the pair had jumped over him, whipping Clay with his board as he went.
“Booyah!” he yelled, rolling away with his middle finger raised.
Nearby, three of the evil nonuplets were slicing and sliding around Alex, darting inside her reach and then doing hard pivots to the sound of squealing wheels just before she could land a blow.
The crack in the head that had drawn Clay’s blood, however, triggered her Bloodborne Frenzy. The special class ability was incredibly powerful, but it did have one minor little catch. She couldn’t activate it at will. The only way for her to trigger the effect was if one of her allies’ blood was spilled first. But now that a streak of crimson ran down Clay’s face, all bets were off.
The spell dramatically amped up her speed and evasiveness and maxed out her damage output for two full minutes, while also covering her in Bloodborne Armor. The armor was geared toward mundane weapons, so it wouldn’t do anything against Rhett’s Sk8spell attacks, but it did swap Alex’s Con and Strength stats when calculating her overall health and regen, which shot both through the roof. Red light pulsed around the tiny tank, illuminating the nasty grin spreading across her face.
“Big mistake, douchebag,” she hissed.
With a bloodcurdling scream, she blurred toward the Fakies harrying her. She spun into a kick worthy of a kung fu movie, doubling the first Fakie over. Running up him like a set of stairs, she launched herself at the second and third, lashing out with her thurible and kusarigama at the same time.
“Acid Drop!” The Madlads all yelled in unison.
The thurible cracked one in the jaw, snapping his head back and knocking him off his board. Before he hit the ground, the Fakie split, dividing in two. When the kusarigama chopped into the shoulder of the other, he doubled as well.
The Rhett who’d tail whipped Clay jumped up onto the nearby rail.
“Sick Grind Multiplier,” he yelled, sliding down the rail toward Clay.
Gold numbers flashed in the air as he went, first x4, then x8, x16, x32, shooting up exponentially the farther he slid across the rail. Clay had seen that sort of thing happen before, but only in Tony Hawk 99.
Deciding he didn’t want to be on the receiving end of whatever attack Rhett was multiplying, Clay took aim with the revolver and squeezed off a pair of shots. They hit the grinding Fakie in the face and chest in quick succession.
The first impact divided him into four identical skaters, and the second split each of those four into eight.
Clay cussed.
Rhett cackled. “Man, you doofuses are drowning out here! You shoulda stayed on your side of the wall.”
One of Griff’s arcane fireballs blasted a skater nearly to the ceiling. A rain of Madlads fell to the skate park like they were dropping in on a pipe. Bacon Bits and Joe lined up simultaneous attacks, her with Lightning Breath and him with his arm cannon. Before Clay could warn them, they turned a handful of Fakies into two tons of douchebags on boards.
In seconds, the skate park was overrun. The Madlads threw themselves at the Jaeger squad, chipping away at their health and tearing them down bit by bit. Every time they dealt damage to one, that Rhett multiplied and came at them a hundred times over. He was like a human hydra, and there didn’t seem to be any limit to how many clones he could conjure. But they couldn’t just stand around and do nothing. Clay cast a Shield, but that amounted to trying to stop up an exploding geyser with Scotch tape.
To say this raid had gone sideways was an understatement.
Clay’s mind raced, searching for some kind of solution. Anything. They couldn’t beat Rhett in his natural habitat. They had to change the rules of this game, or they were all going to be killed by the kind of juvenile dickwad who didn’t even round off the bill of his baseball cap.
There was something they were overlooking. Even the most powerful classes had limitations. Alex was strong and fast, but fragile. Joe could tank damage for days, but his damage output was minimal. As a ranged spell caster, Clay was a certifiable glass canon.
The same had to be true of the Madlad.
As his mind worked at the problem, he kept circling back to a single thought: the real Rhett Cameron had to be the key. He was the source of the spell, so if Clay could kill him, the rest of the skater army would vanish. Or—barring that—maybe Clay could transfer Rhett out of this skate park, which would take away his home-field advantage. The problem was, there didn’t seem to be any difference between one Rhett and another. How did you find a needle in a stack of needles?
The answer came in the form of a contemptuous open-hand slap aimed at Clay’s balls.
“Sacktap!”
Clay shot a hand down to block the Fakie’s slap.
“Come in here like The Man tryna fuck with me,” he sneered. “You losers don’t even know the can of shit you opened. I am the law out here, motherfuckers. I am the god of the IZ. Every one of you should be licking my kicks and asking to farm gold for me.”
Clay barely heard the Madlad’s insane rant. He was too busy thinking about the icy hand he’d just smacked away. The limb itself felt real and solid, but the skin was cold and somehow lifeless.
In a blink of his eyes, he switched over to his thermal vision and traded the revolver for his trusty M4 and its Spelled Ammo. The world lit up in a wash of brilliant colors. Alex, Griff, and Chonk all appeared rendered in warm yellows, oranges, and reds. Joe’s head was bright red, but his mech armor was cast in shades of cool blue. Bacon Bits’s flying form hovered somewhere between green and yellow—which made sense because her reptilian body temp was much lower than a mammal’s.
The hurricane of Rhett Camerons swirling around the skatepark were all icy purple.
All but one.
In the same hot colors as the other humans, the real Madlad Incant watched the melee from the top of the half-pipe.
Weird. Clay didn’t remember seeing one of them up there. He flipped off the thermal vision. No one was on the half-pipe. With a thought, he blinked it back on. Sure enough, there was a bright red skater standing there watching, arms folded across his chest. Rhett must have some kind of Invisibility spell.
A Fakie ollied at Clay, racking up points for whatever damage combo he planned to blast Clay with on impact. Clay shot him out of the air, then dodged out of the way of the now empty skateboard sailing toward his head. The board hit the jump behind him and exploded, sending out a wave of flame and skateboard shrapnel.
Slipping on the Monocle of True Seeing, Clay skirted around a rain of lightning from Bacon Bits. The Fakies she hit multiplied like a fast-forward clip of mitosis gone horribly awry. Clay had to juke and weave his way through the tsunami of false Madlads.
As he did, he inspected the real Rhett’s character sheet. The dude had almost no health-regen or Magicka—all of it was being funneled into his Fakies until Acid Drop 720 ended. That was his weakness. In some sense, these clones were real, but they were also tethered to his life force. They probably all shared from one large collective pool—the more Fakies there were, the less health and mana each one would have. The spell left the Madlad as weak as a newborn kitten.
Well, that wasn’t exactly true. He was level thirty, so weak was a relative term. Truth be told, Clay wasn’t sure he’d be able to kill the enemy Incant even in his weakened state. But taking away his home-field advantage was still an option on the table.
Clay cast Beguiling Call. “Joe, I need something that’ll make a bullet ricochet.”
“All I’ve got is scrap from the rifles. Long, but nothing very wide.”
“It’ll work.” Clay sized up the heat signature. “Block off the door above the half-pipe.”
“On it like a bonnet, broham!” Joe’s rockets kicked on, flaring brilliant white in Clay’s thermal vision. He soared over the battle, his Everyman Tool shifting to a welding gun in one hand while he clutched a piece of scrap metal in his other.
Clay couldn’t see the real Rhett Cameron’s facial expression through the thermal vision, but when Joe shot straight for him, the guy’s heat signature flinched. The Incant turned and sprinted for the office.
Joe got to the door first. Completely unaware of the Magicka- and regen-less Incant skidding to a stop next to him, Joe spot welded the strip of scrap metal across the doorway.
Rhett’s heat signature looked from the weld job to Joe in disbelief. The office door opened inward; a piece of metal on the outside wasn’t going to keep him from going in. He must have thought the big mech-suited redneck was about half a dozen rolls short of a baker’s dozen. And he’d be right if the point was just to keep him out of the office.
“All right, get out of there,” Clay told Joe.
With a roar of rockets, Joe zipped out of Clay’s line of fire, leaving the puzzled Incant behind.
Clay vaulted over a Fakie trying to shark bite his ankles. He jammed his M4 into his shoulder pocket, figured the angle, took aim faster than the human eye could focus, and squeezed off a shot, all without breaking stride. Silently he prayed the Spelled Ammo would keep up its skew toward Transportation.
The bullet burst through Rhett’s left arm in a spray of red, pinged off the scrap metal, and with a high-pitched spiraling whine, shot back toward Clay. He’d miscalculated. The ricochet wasn’t quite going to hit him.
With the enhanced speed and dexterity from his class, Clay kicked off the half-pipe wall and threw out his hand like a fielder snatching a homer before it could exit the park.
The bullet sliced through the webbing between his thumb and first finger—what Joe liked to call the “thumb gooch.”
A strange line of text flashed before his eyes. Time seemed to stop, his body hanging in the air mid-jump.
Congratulations, Fateslinger. Your prayer has knocked the wyrd of this day cockeyed.
As soon as he read them, the words disappeared. His boots hit the curved wood of the half-pipe, and his ankle folded awkwardly under him.
A green cloud exploded around the Madlad Incant, and a millisecond later, Clay.
