The Duelist 7, page 26
“Understandable,” I conceded. “Are you the older or younger brother?”
“Yoooounger,” he droned.
“Ah, I see,” I chuckled. Even though Ozzy was quite a bit larger than Arvid by two feet and at least a hundred pounds, it was amusing that he was the younger sibling.
“Arrrrvid issss diiiifferent,” he continued in a pensive tone. “Haaaard tooo uuuunderstaaaand. Slooower.”
“What do you mean?” I cocked my head because to me all of the Omites seemed slow.
“Caaaan’t…” He then clicked his claws together a few times and gestured like he and the Elder were before we left.
“Arvid can’t sign?” I filled in, and Ozzy nodded in confirmation.
Then the sloth-man locked gazes with me in a way that was a bit more intense, and the less I tried to analyze his face for signs of what he was thinking, the easier it was to pick up on what he was trying to convey.
He had difficulty among our kind, his eyes seemed to say.
I blinked when I received his meaning without the utterance of a single word, and I got excited.
It was a type of communication that came almost as easily as breathing, but Madam Morta was right to say this was not telepathy. With telepathy, I could actually hear the voice in my head, whether it was Amaya or even Prosper, my faithful butterfly-pegasus. But speaking with Ozzy was different because instead of hearing a distinct voice, the sloth-man’s words were… felt inside me like a sixth sense.
I kept my gaze locked with him and attempted to send something back through our strange connection.
Can Arvid talk like this? I asked without words and pointed between us.
He cannot. Ozzy shook his head and then gestured with his clawed hand. And so he went away.
Mad? I scowled and bared my teeth for a second before returning my face to neutral, so to speak.
Instead of an answer, he snorted out through his big nostrils, broke eye contact, and busied himself with serving us up some questionable-looking stew from the small pot over the fire.
Apparently, the Omite brothers had a falling out of some sort, but I wasn’t exactly sure why. All I knew was Arvid had never mentioned his family, so I’d been under the impression he had none.
It seemed like a touchy subject, but when I took a bite of the truly awful meal the big guy had prepared, I couldn’t help myself.
“Well, the cooking trait definitely skipped you, didn’t it?” I froze when I realized what I’d just said and wished the ground would swallow me up.
After a moment, a low hissing sound could be heard, and it alarmed me enough my gaze snapped back up to him. The sight I saw made me grin so wide my cheeks hurt, because there was the giant beast of a man with a viciously clawed hand held up to his mouth, and he laughed one of those strange snaky laughs where it was all air hissing through teeth.
It was probably the best thing I’d seen since coming to Om, and when he continued to laugh, I eventually joined in.
“Iiiiittt’s truuuuue,” Ozzy droned and then pointed at himself. “Baaaaaad cooooook.”
We continued to laugh a little longer, and I was pleased to discover the frigid ice between us had finally thawed. I felt a lot more at ease with my traveling companion by the time we hunkered down for the night to catch a few Z’s, but because of all the rest I’d gotten over the past four days from recuperating, I found a rare opportunity to actually get some much-needed meditation in.
However, instead of letting my mind drift about here and there, I focused my will on something specific…
The Dark Realm coalesced around me, and when I pictured that mossy shore and that deep blue lake, the clearing where I had my first encounter with the mysterious Lakuna-woman came into view.
I gazed around for any signs of her, but there was none, so I decided to call out. After all, if she was able to “siren-summon” Rylan and me, then there was a chance it worked the other way around as well.
“Hello?” I said and tried not to feel stupid for talking to nobody. “Hello?”
There was heavy silence all around at first, but after a moment, I caught sight of a ripple in the mirrored surface of the lake, so I approached cautiously and took a seat on a tree stump to wait.
I didn’t have to wait very long, and it seemed as if I’d just made myself comfortable when a figure with deep blue hair slowly rose from the center of the pristine water like she was the Lady of the Lake in a King Arthur tale, and I got to my feet in a dumbstruck fashion when she started to slowly walk toward me on top of the water’s surface.
She stopped on the bank a few feet away from me, and I waited for the suspicious look in her maroon eyes to ebb, but it did not. She just continued to glare at me as if I was the one who had the audacity to disturb her when it was her wailing voice in my head that had been disturbing both me and my kid from getting a good night’s sleep.
Somehow, her standoffish posture irked me a little, and I huffed.
“Look, you’re the one who kept calling out for my son and me, and now that I’m here, you don’t want to talk?” I took a slow step toward her, but she quickly skittered back so she was hovering over the water again.
The gesture was clearly born out of fear of being harmed. It was a learned behavior, one that told me a little more about this mysterious woman, and my earlier frustration faded.
With both of my palms up, I backed away and took a seat back on the stump I was sitting on before.
She watched every one of my movements with laser intensity to make sure I wasn’t a threat to her, but I merely let her take her time and waited patiently with my hands folded in my lap.
Finally, all of my waiting seemed to pay off because the siren-woman left the safety of the lake, walked her light-green feet onto dry land, and stopped in front of me. When she was no longer over the water, the free-floating effect that had her hair waving gently around her face seemed to vanish, and the shimmering dark blue sheet of her straight hair fell to her knees.
I gazed up at her with an open expression on my face, and she looked down at me and searched for whatever she was looking for with those alluring maroon eyes.
“Where is… small one?”
Her speaking voice had a smoky little rasp to it, and the way she accented her words sounded vaguely South African.
“Small one?” I asked her, and she nodded. “You mean Rylan?”
“Small one. Smallest one.” She frowned as she struggled with her broken sentences. “Ry-lan.”
I smirked a little at her over pronunciation of my son’s name, but this seemed to be the wrong thing to do because she huffed through her nose, twirled around, and stomped away like she was going to go back into the depths of the lake.
“Wait!” I said as I jumped to my feet and reached for her wrist.
“Eeeeeyaaaah!” the woman shrieked like she’d been burned, and I let her go.
“Sorry!” I said and backed up to give her space.
“No touch!” she said sternly, but her delicate face was scrunched up rather cutely, so the effect was a little diminished.
“No touch, okay, got it,” I reassured her and took one more step back. “Just don’t leave again. I really am trying to help you.”
“Need Small One,” she said and continued to look around.
“He’s not here,” I told her, and she stopped and cocked her head.
“Yes,” she said with a deadpan look in her eyes that told me she thought I was about as intelligent as a toad. “Ry-lan. He close.”
“I can… call him, if you’d like?” I ventured. If she really wanted, I could probably summon the kid with our Dark Realm code word--
“No.” The woman made a slashing motion through the air with her hand. “He come. With you. He come. But not here. Where?”
I stared at her as a horrifying realization began to dawn on me.
“Fuck,” I groaned as I rubbed my aching head. “He snuck out and followed me again, didn’t he?”
The Lakuna-woman tilted her head this way and that, and a pair of ears fringed like fins around the edges popped out like she was a curious Labrador.
“Ry-lan,” she settled on, and then she followed me when I returned to my stump in order to meditate my way out of the Dark Realm.
“Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be back,” I told her, even though I wasn’t sure how much of my words she understood because she cocked her head to the other side.
“Wait,” she said, and my eyes flew open when I felt the lightest touch on my knee. She was now crouched down in front of me, and she was drawing a shape in the mud at my feet. After a moment, I could see the doodle was a little hut-like structure at the edge of what looked like the forest we were in, based on her rendition of the giant trees. “You and Small One. Find.”
“Find you?” I clarified, and she nodded once. “You’ll be here?”
She nodded again, and before I could ask anything else, she turned tail and dove back into the lake.
I sighed as I closed my eyes so I could return to the real world, and when I opened my eyes to the early misty morning, I was wholly unsurprised to hear a commotion taking place not too far away from our camp.
And it was the familiar sounds of my errant and incorrigible son caught up in some sort of trouble with a capital T.
Chapter 22
The screeching was what reached my consciousness first when I surfaced, and at first I thought I was somehow still asleep and suffering through a nightmare in which Crackers, the obnoxious pest, was involved.
A second later, however, Crackers himself rounded the broad tree trunk Ozzy and I had made camp behind, and he was screeching like someone was trying to skin him alive.
My eyes snapped open fully then, and my travel companion and I were on our feet seconds before Rylan crashed through our camp.
“Ruuuuuuuuun!” he yelled and flew past the sloth-man and me like the Devil himself was on his heels.
Ozzy blinked at me in utter confusion as the frantic kid blurred by us, but we didn’t even get to take a breath to try and sort ourselves before my worst fear rounded the tree by digging its eight clawed legs into the bark of the trunk before it landed down in front of us.
“Hsssssss!” The Giant Fucking Huge Ass Spider the same gray color and pattern as the Okoba tree hissed at us through a mandible packed with a whole mess of needle-like teeth.
“Fuck!” I said, and I barely had the mind to grab my pack as Ozzy and I both took off in the direction Rylan and Crackers did.
The spiny-beast did not like that, and I briefly wondered if the dozen or so eyes on its face aided it in its depth perception, or made it worse.
I hoped worse, but my hopes were dashed when the creature started spitting wads of stringy saliva at us from behind.
“Argh!” Rylan’s voice sounded ahead of me through the mist, and I aimed my trajectory in that direction.
“Come on!” I hauled him back to his feet with a rough hand on the back of his tunic and urged us forward even harder.
“Screech!” Crackers said, and the noise seemed to piss off the spiny-beast judging by the way the fine hairs all over its body trembled.
“Hsssssss!” One of the beast’s legs swiped at the orangish-yellow pest flapping around its face.
“Crackers!” Rylan ordered the screecher to heel, and the three of us were up and running again with Ozzy in the lead.
The sloth-man worked as an awesome bulldozer when it came to things like boulders and fallen branches in our way, especially since Rylan was starting to lag and stumble over his feet.
“Ry, you’ve got to pick up your feet!” I barked when I snatched the back of his tunic yet again and prevented him from face-planting and becoming spiny-beast chow.
“Ugh,” he wheezed harshly, and I briefly considered ditching my pack so I could carry him on my back again, but he dug down deep and kept stride with Ozzy and me.
“Raaaaaaaa!” Ozzy roared, and then in an impressive feat of continuous motion, the large sloth-man scooped up a basketball-sized rock, turned around, and launched the projectile directly at the monster behind us by using his own inertia.
The rock smashed into our pursuer and fractured into about a thousand shards similar to the makeshift dagger I was honing just the night before.
“Eeeeeek!” the spiny-beast squealed, and it was waylaid just enough to give us a bit of much needed distance away from it.
“Aheeeeead!” Ozzy pointed one of his long claws in front of us, and in that moment, the mist became sheer enough to see the edge of the Okoba Forest and where the Tatabo Plains started.
I knew from his meaning somehow that if we could just make it to the forest’s edge, the spiny-beast wouldn’t follow us, but it was still half a football field away, and Rylan picked the perfect moment to have a coughing fit.
“Rylan!” I yelled when he fell behind me and doubled over as the curse racked his young lungs and left drops of blood on his shirt and pants. “Stand up, come on.”
“Can’t!” he forced out before he dissolved into coughing again.
“Screech! Screech!” Crackers said and flapped around Rylan.
“I’m aware, Crackers!” I said, and I hauled Rylan into my arms and started jogging again.
“Hssssss!” The beast had caught up, and to all of our dismay, the commotion we were all making caused him to bring along a few friends.
Super.
“Raaaaaaa!” Ozzy stopped again to lob more of those exploding shrapnel rocks, but it was three of them against us. The sloth-man could also only move so fast, and on his next throw, one of the beasts shot out two wads of webbing to trap both his hands.
Ozzy roared and immediately started gnawing on the sticky strings, but I could tell it was going to take him a while, so I put Rylan back down next to a rotted log and pulled out the rough dagger I’d made, but my hope at doing any real damage with the things was looking grim.
“Hsssssss!” One of the spiny-beasts snapped at me with its razor-sharp teeth as I tried to divert the giant spiders away from my son, who was still coughing deep racking spasms that had him clutching himself around the torso.
“Hey!” I yelled and kicked a cloud of dirt up to keep their attention on me, which was supremely bad because, again, there were three of the huge spiders now pissed at me for being even more loud. “Come at me!”
“Hssssssss!” The one in the center lunged for me, but I danced away and slashed at one of its smaller pincers that tried to snip my hand off.
My adrenaline was pumping hard, and I didn’t know if the reason was due to my inbred phobia of the eight-legged freaks, but whatever the case, my time-trance was already champing at the bit for me to release it.
Tick.
The beast spat out another web ball, but the velocity slowed almost all the way down to a complete stop. I felt a tenuous tremble like the way a soap bubble shivers right before it pops, and I pulled the reins on my power so it was right on the edge.
If it evolved into a full-fledged time-stop, I knew I would only have a limited amount of time to hold it, and who knew if I was all charged up after being through the wringer. It was safer to rely on my more practiced time-trance, so I held that soap bubble on the edge of breaking for as long as I could…
Tick.
I dodged smoothly out of the path of the web-wad and then dove to the right so I could take out the beast heading straight for Ozzy.
Tick.
One of the beast’s back legs kicked a huge branch directly into my path, and I jumped cleanly over it before it even finished leaving the ground.
Tick.
Using the momentum I had, I ran up the bark-like back of the creature and then plunged the makeshift stone dagger deep into the top of its skull.
Tick.
I didn’t spare a second glance for the wretched thing, back vaulted off its head, and landed in a somersault. The moment I jumped back up to my feet, I was off in the direction of the second spiny-beast charging toward me, even though the beast behind me was still in the middle of its death throes.
Then several things happened all at once.
In typical spider fashion, the first creature I’d maimed flipped over on its back so it could finish dying upside-down with its spiny legs curling up in the air.
But because spiders are such fucking Drama Queens, the spiny-beast was still wailing its head off, and since I was directly in its path, the time-slowed doppler effect of its blood-curdling hissing blasted me like a sonic wave. It was a perfect imitation of Freddy Kreuger going to town in a chalkboard factory combined with the sound of a train derailing in slow motion, and I had no choice but to drop to one knee and cover my ears.
“Ahh!” I couldn’t help but shake my head like a dog as the unpleasant noise burrowed itself through my hands and into my eardrums.
It was torture, for sure, but compared to the freak show that was intent on charging me a moment ago, a little ear pain was nothing.
Then the second spider creature seemed to stumble into the sonic wave’s trajectory, and the spiny-beast stopped dead as if all eight legs were suddenly glued to the ground. Its bark-like exoskeleton began to blister and boil while its body began to tremble and swell, and right at the height of this grotesque expansion, the time-trance slipped from my grasp.
Sna--
Boom.
The recoil from holding that balance of power for so long combined with the sudden vaporization of the spiny-beast knocked me clean off my feet, along with everyone else in the clearing.
Fuck. Had my time-trance turned sound into a bomb?
“Shit,” I groaned and pushed myself up on my hands and knees as quickly as I could, but my hearing and my balance were currently giving me issues.
“… d?” Something muffled came from my left. “D-Dad?”
I tried to focus on Rylan’s pale face, but I had to fight to keep my vision from doubling, and I noticed his lips were starting to turn blue…
“Eeeeek!” The OG and last of the beast pack finally shook off its shock, and it was now looking around for someone to blame for its outrage.
“Fu--” I tried to curse, but before I could finish, another one of those shrapnel-rocks exploded in the spider’s face.
