Centuria Books · My F-Tier Summons Keep Dying for Me
My F-Tier Summons Keep Dying for Me — Read the First Chapter
Andy Chunking finally gets the fantasy party he always wanted. His F-minus stats might get every one of them killed.
CHAPTER 1 — Midnight at the Better Buy
The launch line for Junior Scrolls 6 started at the doors of the Better Buy and ran the length of the building, and Andy Chunking had been in it since six. In his own head that was called camping the spawn.
He had a folding chair, a battery pack, an H-E-B bag of Takis, and a paper wristband with 41 on it in Sharpie. The wristband was the point. Wristband 41 meant a Collector’s Edition with his name on the reserve list, and the Collector’s Edition was a box, around a disc case, around a printed download code, around a cloth map of the province he had wanted since he was nine.
Two hundred and forty-nine dollars. Whale pricing for a cloth map, and a preorder was a preorder, and he had canceled zero preorders in his life.
“They killed stealth archer this time,” said the guy behind him, Longhorns hoodie, energy drink, a beard that had been a decision. “Patch notes say it. Sneak damage is capped now.”
“They said that about 5.”
“Stealth archer was busted in 5.”
“Stealth archer was the game in 5.” Andy folded the Takis bag shut. “You take away the cheese and people find the next cheese. Same in the cultivation games. The cheese there was always a pill. That’s what the second page of the notes is for. Read the second page.”
“Nobody reads the second page.”
“I read the second page.”
“You would.”
“Somebody has to. It’s where they hide the nerfs.”
In the window a life-size cardboard Godd Howard held a controller and smiled at Interstate 35 with a Sharpie mustache somebody had given him on the way in.
The skybox over the lot went from orange to the flat dark that Austin called night, and the line got up to stretch and sat back down, a raid waiting on a ready check.
Renata joined the line behind the Longhorns guy just after seven with two kids and a phone pressed to her shoulder, an escort quest arriving at the worst possible zone.
“I know,” she said into it. “I know you did. I’m here now, so.” She had scrubs on under a denim jacket. Her hair was in the kind of knot that had been a ponytail twelve hours ago. “Lucía. Hold your brother’s hand. Teo. Hand.”
Lucía was nine, in a puffy pink coat with the hood up. Teo was about five, with a plastic dinosaur in each fist, which left him zero hands for holding.
“He needs a hand,” said Lucía, and tried to take a dinosaur.
Teo screamed. It was a short scream, high and honest.
“Ma’am.” Andy turned in his chair. “Does he want to see a cow?”
Renata looked at him. She was tired enough to be direct about it. “Is the cow on your phone?”
“The cow is on my phone. It’s a farm game. It has a goat with a hat.” He held the phone out with the screen toward the kids, and the cow on it said moo in a voice that was, in fact, his.
Lucía took the phone. Teo let a dinosaur go to reach for it, which settled the hand problem on its own.
“Sitter bailed,” said Renata. “Twenty minutes ago. And the wristband rules say the person on the wristband picks up, so.”
“So they’re in the line.”
“So they’re in the line.” She sat down on the curb beside his chair. “I’ve played since 3. I had the Nine Divines poster. I am buying this game if I have to hold both of them over my head.”
“Andy,” said Andy.
“Renata. Say hi to Andy.”
“Hi, Andy,” said Lucía, into the cow.
“What does the goat say?” said Teo.
“The goat says, ‘I am the goat,’” said Andy, in the goat’s voice, which was lower than the cow’s and had opinions. “That’s all he says. He’s very sure about it.”
Teo laughed so hard he sat down.
The fat man in the windbreaker was two places up, and by the second hour he knew the kids’ names.
Navy windbreaker over a belly, a black beard cut square under the jaw, a lot of eye contact. He came back from the gas station with a box of donuts and worked it down the line. The accent came from a long way east, Lebanon or Syria or the countries past them, Andy could have said which one only by guessing, the vowels round and the consonants careful, English learned off a screen.
“Lucía. Teo. Yes? You two want a donut?”
“Ask your mom,” said Andy.
“They can have a donut,” said Renata, from the phone.
Teo took two. Lucía took one and looked at the man over the top of it.
“Teo. Buddy. You like the trucks?” The man squatted, which took him a second, and put a hand on Teo’s shoulder. “I have a surprise in my van. Around the back. A big one, very big.”
“He likes trucks,” said Teo, about himself.
“I bet you do. I bet.”
“Say thank you for the donut,” said Renata.
“Thank you for the donut,” said Lucía, to the donut.
The hand came off the shoulder. It came off slow.
The man went back to his place in line. He was easy, and he was everywhere, and Andy kept his eyes on a puffy pink hood and a kid with dinosaurs.
Everybody was a creep at midnight; that was a rule of launch lines, the way every starting zone had one mob that looked friendly. This was different, and Andy could have said how, and kept it behind his teeth, because saying it to a stranger’s mother was wrong right up until it was right.
At nine-forty the man came back down the line with a bottle of water for Renata. On him, he said.
“Teo,” he said, on his way past. “You still want to see the surprise? Around the back. Right around the corner, so close.”
A boss tell was a line that repeated. In a game you got a camera push on the second repeat, a sting of music, so that even the guy skipping the dialogue knew. Out here the sting played anyway, in Andy’s chest, where the devs had left a blank.
“He’s fine,” said Renata, to the phone, to the water, to the night. “He’s right here.”
“Hey, man,” Andy said, to the windbreaker’s back. “They’re good. They’ve got a cow.”
“Sure they do,” said the man, and kept walking.
Eleven-fifty-five.
The doors opened a crack and a manager in a blue polo stepped out with a clipboard and a fistful of wristbands, and the front of the line stood up all at once, a whole server logging in the second the maintenance window closes.
“Numbers one through fifty, bring your wristbands to the doors for verification,” the manager called. “Have your ID out. One through fifty.”
“That’s us,” said Renata. She was up and moving, digging in the denim jacket for her wallet. “Lucía. Stay with Andy. Stay right there.”
“I’m on 41,” Andy told her. “I’ll bring them up when they call me.”
“Two minutes.”
“Go. We’re fine. Lucía, you’re in charge of the goat.”
“I’m in charge of the goat,” said Lucía.
The front of the line bunched at the doors. Andy did the math on a man with a clipboard verifying fifty people.
He looked down at his chair.
His phone was on it. The cow on the screen was standing in a field, idling, waiting for somebody to tap it.
The pink hood was gone. The dinosaurs were on the concrete. Two escort targets, despawned, and the objective marker in his chest went from yellow to red.
He looked up the line. The heavy man’s place was empty. His donut box was on the ground where he had stood.
“Hey.” Andy caught the arm of the girl who had been talking weather. “The guy in the windbreaker. Where’d he go?”
“Bathroom? He took the kids to the bathroom, I think. He said their mom said.”
“Their mom is at the doors.”
“Then I don’t know, dude.”
The bathroom was inside. The doors were open a crack, and a manager was standing in them.
Andy went around the building, because in every map he had ever run the loading dock was where the bad thing parked.
The security lights ended at the corner, and behind the store there was one light, and one light was how a map told you the fight was here.
A sodium lamp on a pole turned the dock the color of weak tea and made the dark past it darker. The smell reached him first. Sour milk. Fryer grease.
The van was white and backed up to the corral with its side door open.
Lucía stood beside it. A plastic zip tie was cinched on one of her wrists, the loose end of it hanging down to her knee. She was still, with the stillness children have when they have been told what happens if they move.
Teo was half inside the van. The heavy man had one arm around him and one hand flat over his mouth, and the boy’s feet were off the ground and working.
A roll of silver tape lay on the van floor by the man’s knee.
Andy stopped at the edge of the light.
He had walked into a thousand rooms like this one, and the game always gave you a second before the enemy turned, so that you could open your inventory and confirm it was empty. His was empty.
The man looked at him. He was breathing hard from the carry, and he smiled the donut-box smile, the NPC smile, a texture.
“This is family business, boy,” he said. “Go back around. Go.”
Andy’s mouth was dry, and his hands had gone cold, and his voice, when it came, came out level. The raid-lead voice, out of a headset for the first time, and this distantly impressed him.
“Lucía,” he said. “Look at me. Take your brother’s hand.”
The girl looked at him.
“Take Teo. Run to the lights. To your mom. To all the people.” He pointed back at the corner, at the glow past it. “Don’t stop for anything. GO.”
“Run,” Andy said again, and she went.
She went for her brother, and the man’s hand came off the boy’s mouth to grab at her, and the boy bit the arm, and for one second both children were on the ground and neither of them was held.
Lucía got a fistful of Teo’s jacket and dragged him. The boy’s shoes scraped, then ran. Two small shapes went out of the light and down the lane, the loose end of the zip tie whipping behind the pink coat.
The man let them go. He put a shoulder against the white steel of the doorframe and crossed one boot over the other and watched them run, and he was smirking. It was the smirk off the cover of one of those books, the dark ones, the abusive control freak leaning in a doorframe that a heroine tames by chapter thirty, the ones that outsold every game Andy had ever preordered. Here was the cover, in the flesh, with a belly.
“They’re kids,” Andy said, and then he was screaming it, and his voice cracked on the second word and he let it crack. “They’re children, you sick fuck. She’s nine. She is nine years old, you gross fat-ass fucko, you sick, you—” He ran out of words and used the same ones again, louder. “She is nine!”
The smirk widened a notch.
“So loud,” the man said. “So brave. Go home, boy.”
Then he came off the doorframe after them.
Andy hit him.
It was the first punch of his life, and it landed in the beard and did white damage. A one, floating up off the hit and gone.
But he was between the man and the lane now. That was the whole of the tank class, in one sentence, from the guy who always took healer.
The man got a fist in his shirt and a hand under his arm and threw him. One motion, a fat man’s strength, and Andy went backward through the side door and landed on the van floor on his shoulder blades, and his head hit the far wall, and the roll of tape skittered away. Knockback, into the arena.
The man climbed in after him. The van dipped on its springs. He was still smiling, and the box cutter was out of his jacket pocket already open, an inch and a half of blade in a fist the size of the donut box.
“You come around the back,” the man said. “You. Nobody asked you, boy.”
Andy got his arms up. That was the whole of his defense, two arms across his face, the block of a man in his first fight, and the man took them apart like a mechanic taking a hose off a fitting. He caught the right wrist, turned it, and drew the blade across the inside of the elbow, deep, one pull, and did the left the same, and let them both drop.
Andy looked at his arms.
The insides of both elbows were open. Then the blood came, and it came from a place with a name, down both forearms in sheets, off the wrists, off the fingertips, onto the ribbed steel floor, where it ran to the low side and pooled. Debuff: BLEED. The timer was blank. The kind you clear with a potion or you die with.
“Now you lie down,” said the man, “and you be quiet, and I go get them back.”
He turned to the door to climb out.
The door.
Andy had played nine hundred hours of a game built on one idea: the environment is the weapon. He had written a paper about it. He had gotten an A.
The sliding door hung open on its track at the man’s shoulder, a steel slab with a steel edge, and Andy got up onto his knees in his own blood and got both hands on the inside handle, and the hands closed. The vessels in the elbows were cut and the hands still closed. The man had gotten that part wrong. Andy hauled the door along its track with everything from the shoulders down, and the leading edge came across the opening at head height and met the man’s skull above the ear.
The sound was a melon dropped on a floor.
The man stopped. Stunned. The little bar over his head, the one only Andy could see, went gray, and a stun window is the first rule any raid teaches: keep hitting. He stood in the door opening with his mouth open in the beard, and the hand with the cutter came up, slow, wrong, reaching for Andy’s face on the instinct of a bully whose victims had all been small.
Andy hauled the door back, and forward again, and the door beat the hand.
The second one landed in the same place, and the sound had a crack in it. The steel edge went into the bone above the ear, and Andy watched the light go out of his eyes. It went the way a monitor goes when the cord is pulled, all at once, and what stayed in the sockets was glass.
The man knelt, because his knees had quit, and his head stayed in the door.
Andy’s arms were empty. The blood had stopped pouring and started dripping, and the second page of the notes said that was worse. The cold had come up into his shoulders. He got the door back along the track one more time, and brought it forward with all that was left in him, for good measure, one more hit on an empty bar because empty bars had lied to him before, and the edge of it went into the man’s skull and lodged there, a quarter of the way through, and the door quit moving. The man hung in the doorway on his knees with his head held in the door like a part in a vise.
Andy sat back against the wall of the van.
He looked at his hands. They were red to the wrist and the red was black in this light, and the wall beside him was white and bare, and he had one thought left with any blood in it, so he used it.
He wrote with two fingers of the right hand, dipping from the pool in the crook of the left elbow, in capitals, because capitals read. The letters ran. He went over them where they ran.
FUCK YOUR FREE CANDY.
It took a long time. At the mouth of the lane, past the man in the door, phones lifted. Little rectangles of light. Spectator mode. Somebody was going to clip this, and he wanted them to get the caption.
The smell in the van was tape glue and fryer grease and, under it, copper, which was him. His shirt was wet through and the wet was going cold. The cuts had stopped hurting and become facts. The bar was missing, the one time he needed the number, and the shakes had started in his legs, which the notes would have called shock, and the notes were accurate.
Beyond the corner, Renata screamed. He could no longer see the children; he heard her call both their names, heard Teo answer, and heard her sob their names again.
It was a good scream. It had both names in it.
Through the wall, the store speakers came on. A voice, huge and cheerful and muffled by cinderblock. All right, Austin. Are you ready? The line roared, out front, on the other side of the building. Ten. Nine. Eight.
He wanted to hear the end of it. He had wanted that since he was nine years old.
Seven. Six.
His mouth said it for him, quietly, to the roof of the van.
“I never got the map.”
The sodium light went out, or he did.
Then, in the dark, after a while, or after less than a while, there was a line.
It arrived bare, with the dark for a screen. He opened his eyes onto it, or whatever he had now in place of eyes.
I WAS WONDERING WHEN.
[ CHARACTER — CREATED ]
[ ANDY CHUNKING · Human ]
[ RESPAWN — PENDING ]
CHAPTER 2 — Ardnowe
He respawned face-down in a field of turnips with frost on his ear and a dog barking at him from eight feet away.
It was a brown farm dog with a white chest, planted between him and a hedge, working through its vocabulary with a hoarse edge.
Andy got a hand under himself and hauled. Zero death screen. Just turnips, and a dog with a full aggro bar.
His hoodie crackled. It was stiff from the collar to the hem, and dark, and the dark was brown at the edges and black in the middle. He knew the smell. He had been lying in it a night ago on the floor of a van. He sat up in the turnips and pulled the hoodie’s front out from his stomach, and the stiff cloth came away, and under it his stomach was a stomach.
He pressed on it, low and to the left. Skin, and muscle under it, and under the muscle the ordinary furniture of a Takis dinner. Full heal on respawn.
He turned his arms over. The insides of both elbows were pale and smooth. He made two fists. They closed.
The wristband was still on. It said 41 in Sharpie.
“Okay,” he said, to a turnip.
The dog took this for a development and barked harder.
“Wren. Wren. That’s enough.”
The woman who came through the gap in the hedge was fifty or sixty, in a brown wool dress with the sleeves shoved up, and she had a walking stick she was using as a pointer rather than a stick. She pointed it at the dog. The dog sat, and continued to bark, sitting.
She pointed it at Andy.
“You’re in my turnips.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re bleeding in my turnips.”
“I was.” He looked down at the hoodie. “It’s dry. I think it’s all from yesterday.”
She came closer, and her eyes went up past his face to the air a foot above his head, stayed there a two-count, and her face shut.
“Well,” she said. “You’ll want to come in before the others are up.”
He stood. Everything held. He had bled out in a van and loaded in cold and stiff and fine, with a debuff he could feel, iconless.
She went back through the hedge, and the dog trotted after her, looking back twice to make sure he understood whose field this was.
He followed, and that was when he saw the nameplate.
It hung over her head, small plain text in the font of ten thousand loading screens. A nameplate, on a person, with a class under it.
Human · Cottar
He stopped walking.
She looked back at him. The nameplate came with her, floating an inch above the gray knot of her hair.
“What,” she said.
“Nothing. Sorry.” He caught up. “Ma’am, what’s a cottar?”
“A cottar is a woman with a cottage and a field and a dog and a dead husband, and you may call me Bel, since you’re standing in my turnips.” She said it briskly, a thing she had said before. “And you’ll be hungry.”
“I’m—” He checked. “Yes. I’m starving.”
“Dead men usually are.”
He kept walking.
The lane ran into the village between hedges, a dozen low cottages around a green and a well, a starting hamlet with one vendor and a quest board, and three people were up.
Every one of them wore a nameplate.
A man leading a horse out of a shed: Human · Carter. A girl driving geese with a switch: Human · Gooseherd. An old man on a bench by the well with a pipe, watching the lane: Human · Plowman. The geese were bare above, and the horse, and the dog.
People came with a tag. Animals came plain. The click of it going in, a tutorial that trusted you to read, was so out of place in the morning that he laughed once, out loud, in the lane.
The old man with the pipe looked at him, then up, then at Bel.
“Bel.”
“Hollis.”
“That’s a—”
“He’s hungry, Hollis.” She kept walking. “Mind your pipe.”
Bel’s cottage was the last one before the field, one room with a hearth and a table and a curtained bed in the corner. The dog lay down on a rag by the door like a dog off a full shift.
She pointed the stick at the bench. He sat.
She went to the hearth, and said a word.
A small word, flat and unmusical, a sit said to a dog you trusted, and the kindling caught, all at once, bright yellow.
He watched it burn.
“What did you just do?”
“I lit the fire.” She hung a pot on the hook. “Have you never seen a fire lit?”
“I’ve seen a fire lit.”
She said a word to the lamp on the table, and the lamp lit. She said a word at her own hands, and they came away from the pot clean, the soot gone out of the lines of her knuckles, and she wiped them on her dress anyway, from habit.
Three times, with the attention he gave a light switch. Cantrips. Zero-cost utility techniques, the kind a cultivation game gave every NPC so the world looked lived-in, on a woman whose nameplate said cottar.
“That’s a breath of qi, lad,” said Bel, when she saw him looking. “Every soul’s got a pool of it. Yours is the one that stays shut.”
Qi. He had read the word in forty games and this was the first time he had watched it leave a person. The blue, if it worked as it did in games. He wanted to see how much of it he had.
He looked at the fire, and then, because he was who he was, he looked at the air over the fire and thought stats.
The sheet opened.
[ ANDY CHUNKING · Human · CURSED SUMMONER · Layer 1 · Realm F- ]
[ HP: 32/32 ]
[ QI: 32/32 ]
[ BODY F · SPEED F · WORKING F · SIGHT C · WILL D ]
[ TECHNIQUES: BIND — · TETHER — · RECALL — · SHEET F ]
[ Summoners bind beast, made-thing or person. ]
[ THIS PATH: SENTIENT ONLY. ]
He read it top to bottom in one second. Layer. Realm. Level and tier, with the font changed, and a game that used the word realm for its tiers was a cultivation game, and he had four thousand hours in MMOs and maybe forty in cultivation games, and the forty were about to have to carry him. Then he read the last two lines again, and a third time, with his mouth open.
A restriction line sat under the rule and told you which part you were being denied, and it was there because a dev had nerfed the path for one account, by hand.
Beast, made-thing or person. And then, in caps, the part that had been taken away.
He closed the sheet. He opened it. The line was still there.
“That one,” said Bel.
She stood at his shoulder with a wooden spoon and put its tip against the minus after the F, and the spoon went through it.
“That one isn’t on the thing, lad,” she said. “Somebody wrote that for you. Mortal realm. Most working folk are in the middle stage. I tempered eleven winters to get there, and I’m a cottar, and a sect wouldn’t have me at the gate. You’ve an early-stage minus on yours, lad. You’re starting behind the people who’ll sell you bread.”
Her face was closed, and behind it she was watching him with care.
“Bel. Why did Hollis stop talking?”
“Hollis is old.”
“He looked over my head, and he stopped talking. You looked over my head in the field. Why does everybody in this village change the subject at the word summoner?”
She went back to the pot and stirred it.
“Because I’d tell you,” she said. “And then you’d know.”
Breakfast was porridge with salt in it, and a cup of hot milk, and the best meal of his life so far, which said less about the porridge than about the night.
He ate with the sheet closed and his eyes on the fire.
Cursed Summoner. Realm F minus. Mortal, early stage, she had called it, and F minus was a grade a teacher gave you when F was too kind, and somebody had gone to the trouble. Cursed fit him hoodie-badly, and he set it on the pile for later, and the pile was getting tall.
Layer 1. Thirty-two of each, and the scale said you are the farmhand. WILL D. SIGHT C. Everything else F, and the F was generous.
He had rolled worse in a character creator, on purpose, for the challenge run. The difference was the re-roll button at the bottom, and the bottom of this sheet had a restriction line where the button should have been.
When the bowl was empty he set it on the table and looked at the hearth, at the fire she had made with a word, and he said the word.
He said it flat and unmusical, in her voice as near as he could get it. A voice command to a console that heard him one time in five.
The fire went on burning and kept its opinion to itself. Wrong path, grayed out on his bar, and he had pressed it anyway.
He tried it at the lamp, already lit. He tried it at his own hands, gray with dried blood in the creases, and they stayed gray, and the dog raised its head and looked at him with what he would have called pity in a person.
“You’ll want to wash those in the trough,” said Bel, from the bed corner, folding a blanket. “Not in here.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you’ll stop talking to my fire. It’s a good fire. It doesn’t need the encouragement.”
“I was trying to—”
“I know what you were trying. So does the dog.”
Then he thought at the sheet, and it opened, and he put his eyes on BIND and the dash beside it and thought open at that.
The panel unfolded downward, past the table, past where the floor should have stopped it.
[ BIND · Realm F- ]
[ CANDIDATES — WILL ANSWER A CALL AT THIS REALM: ]
Under the second line the list began, and kept beginning, and had a scroll bar.
CHAPTER 3 — The Threshing Floor
“A summoner with nothing bound is dead by first snow,” said Bel.
She said it in her weather voice. Andy sat on the bench with the list still open and his hands washed, finally, gray water drying in the lines of them.
“Dead how?”
“Dead the ordinary way. The path eats its own, lad. It’s a hungry path, and it doesn’t feed on turnips. A sect would burn it out of you, and I’ve no sect.” She set the pot down. “A bound summoner has a thing standing between him and the world. An unbound one has a label over his head and nothing else, and there are people who read labels for a living.”
“How long till first snow?”
“A month, if the year’s kind.”
He looked at the list. A menu with a scroll bar is a menu with a bottom, and he had yet to find it.
“Then I’d better get on with it.”
“You’ll want a floor.” She was drying her hands on her dress. “I saw it ask. The threshing floor’s flat and it’s swept and it’s mine, and nobody threshes till the barley’s in. Use that.”
“Bel. Why are you helping me?”
She looked at him a while, with the stick under her hand.
“Because my husband was a summoner,” she said. “And he died the ordinary way. Come on.”
The barn stood behind the cottage with a door at each end for the wind to carry the chaff through, the floor beaten earth, swept, twelve feet across, the barley in sheaves at the far end. A summoning circle’s worth of flat ground.
He walked to the middle, and the list came with him, and he hauled it to the top with a thought and started down it properly, reading.
Two hundred beasts, wolves and oxen and bears and a thing called a bog-eel, every one grayed out with the same dash, and by the fiftieth he had stopped reading the words and started reading the dash.
“It’s the whole bestiary,” he said, to the barn. “It’s the whole bestiary, and it’s grayed out. This is a tutorial where they show you the shop and then take your wallet.”
“Keep scrolling,” said Bel.
Then three made-thing entries, iron and clay and rope, with the same dash. Then, at last, people.
Corlan, for hire. Ashki, for scraps. The Widow Mere, for company: either the saddest line on the list or the most dangerous.
And then a line that read like a person in trouble.
Archangel sat beside Human and Kobold with the flat equality of a database sorted by name. Unclaimed was a status. An execution post was where she was, right now, while he stood in a barn and read about her. A legendary on a starter vendor’s list. A bug, or a hook.
“There’s an angel on the list,” he said.
“There’s all sorts on the list,” said Bel, from the west door. She had stayed at the door. “Pick one that’ll live.”
“She’s at an execution post.”
“Then pick quick.”
He put his eyes on the line and thought her.
The list folded shut on the rest and left the tail standing, with two lines under it he had yet to see.
[ BIND · Realm F- ]
[ CANDIDATES — WILL ANSWER A CALL AT THIS REALM: ]
[ MARSH WOLF · Beast · — (SENTIENT ONLY) ]
[ IRON HOUND · Made-thing · — (SENTIENT ONLY) ]
[ CORLAN · Human · Sellsword · [for hire] ]
[ ASHKI · Kobold · Scavenger · [for scraps] ]
[ THE WIDOW MERE · Human · Hedge-witch · [for company] ]
[ SARAFAEL · Archangel · Instrument of Judgment · [unclaimed] · location: an execution post ]
[ SELECTED: SARAFAEL ]
[ PRICE — SUMMONER’S BLOOD + 24 QI · SIGIL SITE: THIS FLOOR (ACCEPTED) ]
“It wants blood,” he said. “And twenty-four. Out of thirty-two. That’s three-quarters of the bar on one cast. Bel, in every game I’ve ever played, that’s the tooltip that says ultimate. That’s the one you save for the boss.”
“Then she’d better be the boss,” said Bel, and came across the floor and put her paring knife in his hand, handle first, and went back to the door. “Yours. Mind you give it enough.”
He turned the knife over, a small knife with a worn wooden handle that had done onions.
“How much is enough?”
“You’ll know,” said Bel. “It’ll take what it wants.”
It took his hand first.
His right hand, with the knife in it, moved, and he watched it move. An animation lock; his hand was in a cast and he was along for it. It turned the blade inward and laid the edge against the inside of his left forearm, the soft side, and drew it down toward the wrist in one unhurried line, deeper than he would have dared. The skin parted. Blood came up dark and fast and ran down his hand and off his fingers onto the swept earth, and his hand did it easily, with the boredom of long practice. He had done it zero times. The practice was in the hand anyway.
Then it took his mouth.
“Laghú ídim, crú ím-ur — ngaím.”
The words came out of him in one piece, long and low, shapes his tongue was meeting for the first time and making anyway, and he listened to himself speak a language with the specific horror of a man hearing his own voice on a recording. The cast had a voice line, and the tooltip had left it out.
The blood on the floor moved.
It ran out from the drops in thread-thin lines, and the lines turned corners and joined, and in two breaths there was a figure on the swept earth around his feet, a ring inside a ring with marks between them in a hand he could have studied for a year and failed to learn. The blood was dry the instant it stopped moving, brown, then black, then a color that was less a color than a place where light was thinner.
The air over the ring folded.
A sheet shaken out flat folds so, hanging a second at the top of its arc. It hung. Twenty-four points went out of his chest toward it, the qi bar dumping in one tick, and his knees went soft, and he grabbed his own bleeding arm to stay up.
[ SARAFAEL · Archangel · Instrument of Judgment ]
[ TRUE EXPRESSED ]
[ BODY SSS F- ]
[ SPEED SSS F- ]
[ WORKING SS F- ]
[ SIGHT B F- ]
[ WILL SS F- ]
[ JUDGMENT SSS F- FLIGHT — ]
[ HP: 219/219 QI: 170/170 ]
[ ANDY QI 8/32 ]
The sheet arrived before she did, by about a second. The stat block loaded before the model.
Then the fold fell, and she was on her knees at his feet.
She was on her knees on his blood in the center of the ring, head down, a gray cloak over her from the shoulders to the earth, heavy and wet along the hem. Under it her back was wrong, too broad at the shoulder blades and too still, a great deal folded there with effort.
Her hair had come loose from the hood, orange-red, long and waved, faintly lit from inside the way embers are, so that the shadows near it had color.
Her wrists were bare below the cloak, and raw where iron had been a long time, and where it had rubbed through they bled, and the blood was gold.
He looked at that for a while.
Then her right hand turned palm up on the earth. It was empty when he looked and full when he looked again, the change unseen between, and the thing in it was a sword. A long straight blade, pale, translucent, ice-thick, light going through it and coming out slightly changed. Her fingers closed on the grip with the ease of a hand made for it.
She lifted her head.
Her eyes were gold, edge to edge, the color of the blood on her wrists, and they came up to his face and stayed, and he had been looked at before, by people, and this was a different verb. This was being targeted.
“What is the date?” she said.
Her voice was low and level and unhurried. British, or the local equivalent of British, every word set down separately like a coin on a counter.
“I—” His voice cracked. “I don’t know. I got here this morning. I don’t know what year it is, or what world. Sorry.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“Then we shall have to ask,” she said. “Very well.”
She stayed on her knees, waiting to be told to rise, and she would wait as long as it took, with a sword in her hand and SSS in her sheet, True Immortal, a cultivation base he had read and would carry from here on. A summon in its idle pose, and the command was his.
“You can— please get up,” he said. “Please. You don’t have to kneel.”
“I do,” she said, and rose anyway, in one motion, the cloak falling straight. “You hold me at Mortal, early stage. I am suppressed to your realm, and my cultivation with me, and I shall stand in it until you leave it. Note that; it will matter at the first blade.” She was taller than him by an inch. The sword stayed in her hand, point down, the tip an inch off the earth.
She looked at him for a moment longer, top to bottom, the ring’s own look, turned on him.
“You are younger than I supposed,” she said. “And you looked at me for a long time before you spoke. You may go on looking. I have been looked at by worse, and for worse reasons, and yours is a reason I recognize, and I find I do not mind it. Note that.”
He went red to the ears and looked at the ring instead. In the back of his head a nineteen-year-old on a headset said dude, the summon is hitting on you, and he told the nineteen-year-old to shut up, and the nineteen-year-old declined.
She had said it to the man who had just paid blood to pull her off a post. He heard that under the heat in his face, and it stayed down for about a breath.
Her eyes went to his arm, and the blood running off his fingers.
“You are bleeding,” she said.
“Yeah. It’s— the thing took what it wanted. Bel said it would.”
“Then it has had its portion. Hold still.”
A strip of the cloak’s hem tore away with a page-tearing sound, and she bound his forearm from wrist to elbow in three turns, tight, tucking the end, her fingers cool and dry and certain. The bleeding slowed under the cloth.
“That will hold until it is seen to,” she said, and stepped back the one pace, and was still.
At the west door, Bel had gone quiet.
She looked at the woman in her barn, and the gold on the swept floor, and the boy with the knife still in his hand. Then she looked at the air over the woman’s head, and whatever the nameplate said, she kept it to herself.
“I’ll see to the pot,” Bel said, and went out through the west door into the light, and left them there, the two of them and the ring and the dash.
CHAPTER 4 — What She Is For
By noon the village knew. Word travels in a starting zone at the speed of one old man with a pipe.
Hollis knew first, because Hollis read the lane for a living, and when Sara came down it behind Andy in her gray cloak with the sword gone and her hair under the hood, the old man took the pipe out of his mouth and forgot to put it back.
Andy looked at the nameplate over her head. He had looked nine times since the barn and it said the same thing every time.
Archangel · Instrument of Judgment
“They can all see that,” he said, low. “Right? Everybody can see that.”
“Yes.”
“Does it bother you?”
“I have been read since before there were readers.” She said it with her head still forward. “It is a face. Disregard it.”