Divinity Rescue Corps
90- Drunken Confessions

The air down here was damp and cool. It smelled distinctly of minerals. That said, I didn’t dislike it. Bones aside, it would’ve made a pretty cool place to chill out. Back on earth, with my busted body, I’d never had a chance to do anything cool like spelunking or jet skis or surfing or anything like that. Now all of a sudden I could leap down fifteen feet and just use a concentrated burst of magic.

It didn’t take long for the metal dragons, the Ferrosaurs, to finish off the meager meal I’d provided for them. They chomped down on the tin cups, the pots, the cook kit, and all my silverware in seconds. In those seconds, though, I’d led Chris around behind the first one and towards where the gorge opened out. It did not provide much in the way of advantages, but at the end of this tear in the dirt and soil, Chris found a place that looked climbable. Treacherous, but climbable.

“You got any Physicality Tokens?” I asked.

“Two,” he groused.

“Free Tokens?”

“One.”

“You got a spell you can use? Invisibility? Flight? Teleport?”

“Um…”

Of course he didn’t. The Guardians hadn’t allowed them to have any of the material components for their spells.

Above us, Nate and his two Guardian buddies continued to not do their jobs. They were shouting at one another to do something while not doing a damned thing, and trying to get us up by sheer force of will.

The one dragon was lumbering in a circle to try to face us again, while the second one merely crawled overtop its mate to get at us.

It was hard to see what this place could possibly give the two metal dragons as a habitat, until you saw the holes in the earth at the bottom of the gorge here. They burrowed tunnels to and fro—in order to feed most likely—and it made a lot more sense for the gorge to be a place where they might hang out, and get a hint of sun now and again.

The second Ferrosaur opened its mouth and darted a tongue out over its chops that scratched and screeched, and created sparks. The tongue had barbs of metal on it, and so did its face.

There was nothing left to do now…

“Heyyyyy you,” I told the gigantic creature, one hand out like that famous Chris in the movies. I kept my tone even and gentle, like I was just about to produce another tasty treat. “You don’t want to do anything you’ll regret.”

The Beast Talker ability gave me a whole lot of goodies in this sort of situation. +4 Likability and +5 Persuaion for non-humanoids like this, plus a stacking bonus of +2 Likability and +2 Persuasion for all Nakamamon. Right now my Likability was on par with Cinzy’s, as far as Nakamamon were concerned.

 Over my shoulder, I said, “Come on, Chris. We need a spell, or you need to start climbing.”

“Uh… uh… right.”

The creatures had several rows of metallic spines on their scales that made them appear practically invulnerable. Likewise their claws could’ve been used by a blacksmith to produce a short sword each. And though their reddish eyes were all fixed on me, and their tongues darted out to get a taste of the air, I thought maybe this was going to work.

“We’re good,” I soothed at it. “We’re all friends here. We’re not the food you like, and we definitely can’t hurt you.”

The first Persuasion check came.

Persuasion check: Normally, you do not have the associated skill for this check, but due to Beast Talker your Persuasion skill is boosted to 7. Your associated attribute, Likability, is likewise boosted, and sits at level 12. This check is Extreme. Would you like to spend 6 Tokens for an automatic success?

Total Tokens: 5 Likability and 6 Free Tokens.

This was not, however, part of my duties as a Healer. No free retry, and no double Token effect. At 19 levels, I could perhaps grab 5 to 7 successes… it was a gamble, but that was life.

I pressed ‘no’ and let the check go about its business.

Success! You have persuaded the Ferrosaurs not to attack.

Both of them stopped and raised their heads, licking out at the air with their metallic, barbed tongues again and again, though the flicking was lazier. My Affinity, and sensing the mana moving through them told me their focus shifted to Nate and his goons.

I breathed a sigh of relief, though the job wasn’t over yet.

“Great,” I cooed at the creatures. “That’s great. You guys are amazing. Boy would I love to be your friend.”

“What did you do?” Chris asked, voice thick with bewilderment and awe. He’d clearly sensed something had happened.

“Would you focus on doing something for once?” I snapped in a hushed whisper. “Come on, man.”

Nate and company had finally decided they were going to do something. If one of them had the power of inflating their bodies to double in size, it wouldn’t help much. Instead, Nate wrapped himself in stone armor, one of the goons wrapped himself in steel armor, and the third one manifested one of those blue magic shields like Isabelle had used.

For just a moment, I felt the first Ferrosaur seeking me out with its mana. The touch wasn’t something I understood well, and it wasn’t crafted expertly as much as it was instinctual to the creature. The thin thread of Affinity or mana leapt out of its mind and crashed into the center of my forehead. And instead of a word, what I got was a questioning in bestial terms: Danger? Friend? Food? It asked all these questions with a single growling noise from its throat.

The other one made the noise for food?

“They’re not our friends,” I told the two creatures, hoping that ‘our’ in this case meant Chris and I… and the two Nakamamon.

It turned out, when Nate and Chris had had their little argument over the ‘feather’ spell that let them float slowly down… Chris had been right. Nate and the Boys took entirely too long to get down, and gave the Ferrosaurs plenty of time to turn around and face the three Guardians.

They also, unlike true Guardians, hadn’t tried to place themselves in between danger and the people that needed saving. Instead they had jumped down behind the Ferrosaurs. Cowardly.

Nate’s eyes widened from inside his stone armor. “Oh fu—”

***

Nobody under the age of eighteen should be reading this accounting, but a lot of people aren’t fans of bloody violence, so I’ll pull that shade over and say that the three creatures left Chris and I alone to climb out of the gorge, and didn’t extend that courtesy to Nate and the other two Guardians.

“That’s Blake down four of his people,” Sarah said, nodding decisively and with a great deal of satisfaction.

“I am assuming,” my father said, “that since several weeks haven’t passed, you’re not done being tied up at nights and healing up near-dead Wizards?”

“You assume correctly!” I declared, from where I was tossing a ball back and forth with Brayden. Mostly he was failing to catch it, but he’d get it once in a while. And he wasn’t terrible at throwing as much as he was wildly inconsistent. He got in plenty of excellent throws… that way. Or that way. And once in a while, in my direction.

“How does this go then?” my mother asked.

“It starts with Blake freaking out.”

***

As the top level Guardian, Blake needed a lot more xp than the others in order to level up. To get that much xp, he needed more people to be in more danger. It also meant he was leagues stronger than any of the other Guardians in the group. If my Physicality seemed impressive, going from a broken kid who couldn’t walk properly, to a person beginning to show abs, Blake had gone from a Chad frat bro who hit the gym every week, to a person who might’ve been able to punch the lights out on a Ferrosaur.

He punched trees to produce firewood. The team didn’t need firewood, as it was stacked up ten feet high and twenty feet long over to that side of the camp, and another ten feet high and ten feet long over on that side of the camp.

So when I say that Blake lost his cool, I mean everything went haywire.

“What do you mean Nate and his fellow Guardians are dead?” he roared.

I had thought it was a pretty self-explanatory sentence, but apparently it needed repeating.

He leapt over to where the firewood was stacked up and punched at it. Several pieces of firewood simply exploded into matchsticks. Other pieces rocketed out toward the camp, where several pieces blasted into their makeshift homes and tents, and tore the place apart.

“They floated down using a feather spell, and coated themselves in metal and stone, to face down a creature that eats metal and stone.”

“But that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!” he shouted. I didn’t disagree with that one bit.

As if it would make his point, he grabbed up the roof of my laboratory shack and collapsed it just by pulling. The whole thing caved in. I was given an Intimidation check and eked out a pass, thanks again to Stalwart. I really needed to thank Ivy and Isabelle for needing a surrogate boner from time to time.

I needed to live through this first.

“That makes five? Five!”

It should’ve made four. One of Nate’s underlings had gone running off. Then again, I noted Drat off to one side, leaning against one of the trees with the firewood pile stacked between them. He shook his mouth side to side just once.

It didn’t take much deduction to figure out that Drat had backstabbed the guy. If one thing Rogues always had in every video game system ever devised, it was an insane backstab ability. It was either a one-hit kill, where you did a cinematic throat slitting or heart stabbing, or a crazy multiplication of regular damage, like quadruple your highest damage with your weapon. Or higher, I couldn’t be sure. I hadn’t played rogues, but I knew that the damage multiplier only got more and more insane as they leveled up.

I could easily imagine Drat waiting in a tree not far from where Nate and his guys were getting ready to dangle Chris down into the gorge, and seeing his opportunity when the first guy booked it. Whether he appeared from behind a tree, leapt out of a tree, or simply became visible before doing his coup-de-grace, it was not difficult to imagine. Nor was it difficult to put out of mind. These people were torturing the Wizards into agreeing to play the victim with dangerous creatures, with no way to properly heal them up.

It also wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Blake had ‘convinced’ the lead Wizard to hand over control over the expedition. Using his fists, obviously. He could easily ignore the xp penalties and keep punching until the leader relented.

Blech. Writing this down and telling my family have both left a bad taste in my mouth.

“All this started once you got here,” Blake shouted, and whirled on me. “First Todd, now Nate, Belter, Reebok, and Big Willy.”

Big Willy? Was there bound to be an innuendo name at every level? I shouldn’t have had the thought, given that the guy was dead, but jeez louise.

I held up my hands. “Hey, man, you brought me here to heal people, I healed people. I haven’t raised a hand to anyone.”

“Cinzy!” Blake snarled.

“Huh?”

“Get your ass over here.”

I considered telling him he couldn’t talk to her like that, but Blake seemed likely to punch a hole in my chest, and I was pretty sure there was no surviving that. Cinzy sauntered over, still managing to look like she’d just left a mani-pedi after shopping at some luxury boutiques.

“What do you need, Blake?” She asked.

“You make him tell the truth,” he said.

I took a deep breath and sighed it out. There wasn’t really anything she or I could do to stop him.

“I have to do it the sexy way,” she said.

“What?” both Blake and I asked simultaneously.

“His abilities from his bonded Nakamamon make him hard to hypnotize and persuade,” she lied smoothly. “So I have to use my own ability, and it’s… not pretty.”

Blake’s face twitched with fury. “I don’t care! Make it happen.”

So Cinzy did the Cinzy saunter: she started to strut and shake her hips, flipping her skirt up to show off a bit more leg, holding her hands together before her and enhancing her cleavage, or holding her hands behind her back and shoving her boobs out extra bigly. All the while, she put on a cutesy smile and batted her eyelashes, and talked to me like I was the guy at the bar she’d picked for tonight’s one night stand.

“Well there Fletcher,” she practically moaned, strutting slowly around me. “What really happened, eh? I know you want to tell us.” She reached out and raked a single finger from my collar bone to my shoulder, then across my back to the other shoulder as she made her way around.

You are under the influence of a special ability! The UI informed me, adopting the guise of Captain Obvious.

And though she had to spend two Tokens on account of Fierce—thank you so much Ivy—I didn’t bother to try and counter it with the use of Tokens. Cinzy had me convinced that she was on my side. Even though we were in front of the whole group of Blake’s remaining Boys, she wouldn’t go so far as to get me punched into paste.

I hoped.

“You want to tell us all about what went down, when you… invaded that hole.”

The feeling of being under the influence of the special ability was… literal drunkenness. I felt goofy and good and like maybe I’d had one too many, but that was okay! One too many wasn’t ten too many, right?

“Invaded… the hole…” I muttered.

“Yes… what happened?”

And, because it was totally cool and there was no pressure whatsoever, I told him exactly what happened: the four guys getting the feather spell, Chris the Wizard floating down into the jaws of certain death, the appearance of the Ferrosaurs, one of Nate’s bros running off—apparently to his death?—and then the other three dithering while I got shit done. I told him happily, smile on my face, how I listened to Nate and his bros get crunched up.

And this was how Blake grabbed up another Wizard, took off for the gorge immediately, and almost killed the Wizard with his own two hands. Half of the remaining Guardians sped in pursuit, while the remainder had the unenviable—but funny—task of rebuilding the camp after Blake’s tantrum. They didn’t remake my laboratory structure, but instead built a lean-to. Not an improvement over the original.

“What really happened?” Cinzy asked. Drat hovered nearby, and I gave him a dopey thumbs up.

“Whaddaya mean?” I asked.

“How did you get down there and then keep those things from tearing you apart?”

“Oh!” I said. “Easy. I burned a bunch of Tokens to get down there, and then talked the dragons into not eating us.”

Cinzy and Drat both stared at me.

“I think somebody’s been naughty,” I said, giving Drat an exaggerated wink. He rolled his eyes and left before I blew his cover as a secret helper.

“Is that what happened? You didn’t resist my ability, did you?”

I waved a floppy hand at her in dismissal. “No waaaaay,” I slurred. “That’s how it went down. I’m very persuasive when it comes to the wild Nakamamon. They like me.”

Cinzy stared at me, searching my face for the lie. When there wasn’t any to be found, she shook her head and muttered something I couldn’t hear. I didn’t mind, and instead inspected several trees for their fascinating bark textures. That was, until one of Blake’s Boys came back, hoisted me over his shoulder, and took off for the gorge.

“Byeeeeeeee!” I told Cinzy, waving. A confused Cinzy waved back.

This is Christopher drunkenly keeping her, her brother, and Drat safe from the Big Bad.

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