CHAPTER 9

  Highway Trouble

  “Travelers! Toll road. Coin or blood.”

  The bandits fanned out across the road in a loose semicircle, blocking their path. Patrick’s grip tightened on his spear. Bash squinted, activating Investigator. Metadata swam at the edge of his vision. And there it was... the divide again.

  One of the ‘bandits’ was an Upload, a real person with a contract tied to an ID, easily discernible from the stock NPCs, now that he knew to look.

  Bash sighed and directed a question to the one Upload. “You don’t really get along with these bots, do you?”

  The Uploaded bandit stood slightly apart from the others on the left flank. He blinked at the question, eyes widening with surprise at being recognized.

  The NPC beside him snarled on cue, “Hand it over, dog!”

  Patrick lowered his spear into guard position and gave a warning, “Careful, friend. They’re not the same as the raiders. These ones want to draw it out.”

  Before he could reply, Overlays snapped into view, signaling the start of conflict. A faint shimmer in the tree line to the right caught his attention as an archer hiding in the shadows drew their bow.

  Bash followed one of the prediction lines, crouched, scooped up a rock, and whipped it sideways without looking. The archer yelped, clutching his temple.

  Patrick took several steps forward, spear spinning in a defensive pattern. The bandits closed in, three from the front, two flanking right.

  Bash darted ahead and to Patrick’s left, weaving through probability strings. He kept his movements unpredictable. A faint left, a sudden crouch right. One bandit lunged at the empty space where Bash had been a heartbeat before. Bash caught his ankle mid-stride and yanked, sending the man sprawling into another bandit’s path. The tangle gave Patrick the perfect opening. His spear flashed, catching the second bandit through the throat.

  One of the Bandits rushed in from the right. Bash shoved him sideways, and the bandit’s own ally buried a blade in his chest. Bash twisted at the last second, making another sword bury itself harmlessly in the dirt.

  The red-scarfed Upload had been edging backward during the chaos, trying to stay out of the carnage. But Patrick, focused on threats, had shifted position and was now closing on him, spear leveled.

  Bash circled back left, clearing space, but kept the Upload in his peripheral. Patrick’s spear was poised for the killing thrust. Bash’s instincts screamed louder than the battle noise. He closed the distance in three quick steps and slammed a hand against the haft, shoving the weapon sideways before it found its mark.

  “Not him!” Bash barked. His eyes cut through the blur of movement, focusing on the red scarf. “That one’s an Upload, not a script.”

  Patrick froze for a split second, shock playing across his face, but Bash was already moving, momentum carrying him into the next target.

  His brass knuckles slammed into the next NPC’s jaw with the force of a falling anvil. Bone and teeth shattered, fragments spraying across the dirt as blood burst outward in a hot mist.

  Another came at him from the right, sword raised high. Probability arcs danced. Bash sidestepped, let the blade whistle past his shoulder, and rammed his fist into the man’s throat. The bandit dropped, choking. Bash grabbed the back of his head and smashed his skull against a rock. No mercy for the scripts, he thought. Not when real lives are on the line.

  The Upload with the red scarf stumbled backward, terror flashing in his eyes. He looked ready to bolt. Bash lunged forward, grabbed him by the back of the collar, and shoved him down to the ground behind Patrick.

  “You want to survive? Stay down and don’t swing,” Bash snarled.

  Something rustled in the trees ahead. Four more bandits burst out from the forest edge, maybe twenty paces out. They had their weapons drawn, formation sloppy but coming in fast. Probability strings spread across his vision once more. “Beautiful,” Bash muttered. His knuckles cracked as he flexed them. “Let’s dance.”

  He moved to the front and shook his arms loose. Behind him, he heard the familiar swoosh of Patrick’s spear cutting air as he readied his position.

  The first bandit reached Bash long before the others. Overeager, the bot took a wild horizontal swing that met only empty air. Bash casually slid to the side and stuck his foot out, tripping the man mid-step.

  The bandit reeled off-balance and stumbled to the ground right in front of Patrick. Bash didn’t even bother to look, trusting the man to finish the job.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Instead, Bash turned back to meet the other three, now only a few steps away.

  The second NPC wasn’t as lucky as the first. No quick death waiting for him. Bash’s brass spikes carved into the man’s gut with a wet, tearing sound. The man shrieked, stumbled off-balance, and Bash grabbed him by the belt, yanking him forward with all the grace of a fisherman reeling in catch. The distance closed in a heartbeat. Bash’s forehead met the man’s skull with a crunch that was part bone, part melon.

  The bandit sagged instantly, eyes rolling back as blood sprayed from his nose, his face partially caved in. His body twitched once and fell lifeless.

  The third bandit, wielding a short spear, lunged from Bash’s left. Probability flashed a warning red. Bash stepped inside the thrust, caught the shaft under his arm, twisted hard, and redirected the point sideways into the eye socket of the fourth bandit charging from the right.

  That man dropped his sword and fell, shrieking as blood poured down his face. Bash wrenched the spear back, pulling its wielder off-balance, and Patrick was there to stab the man through with his own weapon.

  Out of the nine NPCs, only two remained standing. Both flanked Bash from either side, trying to coordinate an attack. Prediction lit up with options. His favorite involved using the one-eyed screaming bandit as a mobile shield.

  Bash grabbed the shrieking man under the arms and yanked him up just as a blade descended toward Patrick from the left. He has already calculated which body part would absorb the most damage as steel hacked into flesh, spraying Bash in gore. He whipped the now dead body to the right, slamming it into the second flanker and knocking him down, pinning him under dead weight.

  Bash walked forward, wondering when he had started thinking about scripts like furniture. Standing over the trapped man, Bash stomped. Once. Twice. Three times, until the skull caved with a wet crunch.

  The last NPC scrambled backward, trembling blade raised in a pathetic guard.

  Bash could have left that one for Patrick, but his blood was still running hot. He launched himself forward, fist slamming upward, tearing through the man’s lower jaw, teeth, tongue, and bone. The strike was so hard the spikes burst through the back of his head, sticking through the man’s spine. Bash lifted his boot and kicked the body backward, his hand yanking free with a sucking pop.

  He stood panting, brass knuckles slick, blood pooling at his feet. Around him, bodies lay broken: guts tangled like rope, jaws shattered, skulls cracked wide. The air stank of iron and piss.

  Minutes, or maybe seconds, it was impossible to tell through the haze of adrenaline, the road went quiet.

  As the overlays fizzled out and numbers faded, Bash was left alone in the mess he had made. He staggered, knucklers dripping, and only then realized how red his arms were, how thick the gore clung.

  Bash bent over and retched, bile burning his throat. “Jesus... I...” Another heave, more dry than wet. The heaving felt mechanical, his body running a script disconnected from him in some way.

  Still bent over, he wiped his mouth with a shaking hand, smearing blood and spit together. “Damn… I went full on psycho, huh?”

  Patrick loomed steady beside him. “It was us, or them,” he said, no judgment in his voice. “Though you probably could have kept it a bit neater.”

  Bash spat again and straightened with effort. His eyes fell on the lone survivor. An Upload, not a script, was sitting on the ground, horror painted clearly on his face.

  The system chimed in, cruelly clinical.

  Bash drew a ragged breath, chest heaving. He lifted his gore-slick knuckles and pointed at the Upload trembling in the dirt. “We’re not killing him. Scripts? Fine. They’re just colorful targets to show off my artistic flair. But him,” he jabbed a finger, “he’s a person. A used-to-breathe person.”

  Patrick’s jaw worked as he considered. “I’m not sure we have a choice if we want to finish the quest,” Patrick said quietly, almost matter of fact.

  Bash’s breathing rasped loudly in his ears, each inhale dragging the stink of copper and bile deeper into his lungs. His vision still jittered with afterimages of probability arcs, but they were fading now, leaving only gore-slick ground and the groaning Upload.

  He forced himself to focus. “Come on,” he muttered. “Give me something.” With a thought, Investigator opened and cast a net of data across the battlefield.

  The word “defeat” pulsed brighter than the rest, hanging in his vision. Bash narrowed his eyes, lips curling. “Not killed.” His mind rolled the word around, searching for the catch. What did the system actually count?

  Bash dug deeper, and with an effort of will, he peeled the lines back just enough that he could glimpse the lattice underneath. Definitions scrolled past his vision until he found the one he wanted.

  The text hung there, cold and absolute.

  Bash’s shoulders slumped. Relief cut through the bloodlust. His stomach still churned, his knuckles dripped gore, but his voice came steady enough. “We don’t have to kill him.” He whispered it, more to himself than Patrick. “Not dead. Not deleted. Just... beaten. We just have to make him quit.”

  For the first time since the ambush began, his grin wasn’t savage. It was thin, humorless, but alive. “The Shard writes the rules, and I find the loopholes.”

  He crouched beside the Upload, whose clothes were matted with blood, panic etched in every line of his face. “You want to live? Say the words.”

  The man blinked up at him, confused. “What... what words?”

  Bash’s voice hardened. “Say that you surrender. Out loud.”

  For an instant, the man just stared at Bash. Then understanding dawned, followed by hope. The words tumbled out. “I surrender.”

  The system chimed instantly, cold and mechanical.

  Patrick staggered back, staring as if Bash had just bent the laws of the world with his bare hands. “You tricked the system.”

  Bash’s answer was humorless. “I didn’t trick it. I just read the fine print for once.”