Chương 971: Day Nine Hundred And Sixty-Nine

Dear Diary, I'd like to say I'm proud of myself, but that remains to be seen. Despite some serious tests to my calm, I've managed to not kill anyone who didn't deserve it. I have yet to rip anyone's head off and shove it up their or anyone else's ass. Today. I know I've done that in the past. Tomorrow's not looking real good either. But for today, I've managed to avoid that. I've even managed to do good things despite my urgent desire to do mostly unrelated extremely violent things. Maybe not the best things.

Maybe not. So yesterday at the end of the day, after a very brief discussion, the trackers turned to Lemmy and I. Mackenzie said, "about a day." I nodded. Then had a thought and asked, "how do you know?" She shrugged.

"Lots of things. How much the snow they tracked through melted. How much the grass has recovered from being stepped on."

"Scent Density." Marie chimed in. Mackenzie nodded to Marie, then said, "none of it gives us an exact time, but if you put it all together, you get a rough idea." Her mouth twisted into a wry grin.

"Then you check it against somebody else, and hope they're not making the same mistakes you are."

"Or that your mistakes cancel each other out," added Panther. I nodded.

"Okay. We've been catching up to them over the past couple days. I dunno if that's entirely because we're moving faster, or if they wound up having to slow down, or what, but I expect to catch them within the next day or so." They all growled out quiet curses, the kind of thing I'd heard folks say when they really did intend to hurt somebody.

"Okay, couple things, which is why I stopped us." They all looked up, intent on me.

"Whoever sees them first, signal for everybody to stop." I held up one hand, clenched into a fist.

"Like this. Nobody jump in." I glared at Lemmy.

"Nobody. Hear me?" He opened his mouth, closed it again, then nodded before saying, "you are the leader of this little band. May I ask why?" I nodded.

"Sure. Couple reasons. First of all, some of you guys aren't really combatants." As all of them bristled. I shook my head.

"Okay, yeah, none of you are useless in a fight. You three," I nodded to the Heroes, "have been trained to fight at the Academy. I've seen you fight against the Dire Bears. If you had a Unit of Volunteers each, especially one armed with Crossbows, I'd put any one of you against one of the Spartans and know you would at least give as good as you got. But only if I had to, because fair fights are for fun, not for real." Lemmy opened his mouth, and I glared at him.

"Yeah, I know you love a good brawl, but how often are you really tryna kill somebody over beer?"

"Beer? Never. A woman, maybe." I rolled my eyes.

"Okay, whatever, but my point is that in this kind of fight, we're not here to show off how tough we are."

"Maybe you're not," he muttered.

"Look, I get that you're tryna maybe get something else out of this, but my main goal is to stop these motherfuckers before they hurt anybody else. Part of that is making sure that the odds are stacked against them in every way possible." I paused. Thought. Then decided fuck it, if he left, he left.

"Which is more important to you, and think carefully on this, saving your people, my people, our people, from any more grief, or your ego." Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Yeah, I saw on his face that it cost him something to say, "the people. Of course." I smiled at him as Marie draped herself over him, claws very imperfectly showing his reaction to sudden Marie intimacy, then growled out, "Good Answer."

"That brings me to another reason. These fuckers have been killing people, but we really don't know if they've kidnapped any. They might have hostages." Chloros sucked her teeth, and Marie had a bit of a look, so I paused and asked, "what?"

"They're not likely to use those hostages as bartering chips."

"Yeah. I know. They're more likely to just kill them right away if they realize we're about to attack them." Both of them nodded.

"So if they do have hostages, we need to have the hostages away before they realize they're under attack." I didn't have to wait more than a breath before Lemmy said, "how..." He trailed off as I, who had been standing more or less right in front of him, pushed my Blend up. Not all the way, I didn't want people to forget I existed, but definitely enough that he shook his head, blinked, and said, "I guess that would do." I dropped Blend back down to normal and nodded while everyone else kinda chuckled.

Okay, Marie un-Blended her own self with her big old tiger tongue in Lemmy's ear. Think she might have been whispering bribes at him, because after a very abortive flinch, his expression turned speculative.

"So whoever spots them, signal everybody with that fist up gesture. Do not call out, they might hear that, because while I can hide you all a little, it doesn't work nearly as well when you're tryna be heard.

Once we get eyes on them, I'll knock together more specifics, but the short version is gonna be you three," I pointed at the Heroes, "guarding you three," this time I pointed at the hunters, "and the six of you sticking together and watching for any hostages or other noncombatants who show up after the fighting starts, while the three of us," I nodded to where Marie still had herself draped over Lemmy, "will take them down."

"Kill Them." growled Marie. I shook my head, prompting some real surprise from everybody.

"Don't get me wrong. I want these fuckers dead. But two disabled is better than one dead and one escaped. Focus on legs if you need to. Ankles and knees. We can execute any who survive once we're sure we've taken them all down." I half expected the Heroes, at least, to say something about war crimes. Maybe Lemmy, too. Then I remembered, those weren't really a thing here and now.

As for plain vanilla crimes, these guys had already committed capital ones, and part of a Hero's duty was acting as judge, jury, and executioner sometimes. Might need to do something about that in the future. Tribunals, day in court, something. But for now the law, such as it was, not to mention custom, was totally on my side.

"Everybody got the plan?"

"It's simple enough even I understand it," quipped Lemmy as everyone else nodded.

"Okay then. Let's go." We ran through the night. With the Spartans only a day ahead of us, the trail was wide and deep enough for us to follow easily even via wireframe vision. I recharged everybody at dawn, and if anybody felt some kinda way about me picking each of them up with a tentacle around the waist and Stabilizing them while everybody else ran, nobody said anything. Saving it all for the Spartans, at a guess. As the day wore on, I worried that we'd wind up losing ground during the day.

Then I worried about Lemmy going rogue when we found them. Then I worried about Marie doing the same. Then I worried about me snapping and going berserk because the Spartans had made more bodies or some shit like that. Mostly I just worried. Anxiety's a bitch. As the sun approached the horizon, we crested a ridge and spotted smoke rising to our south, downstream in the next valley.

Any hope I'd had for catching the Spartans out in the middle of nowhere with no civilians around wound up dashed when the trail we'd been following turned straight downhill when we hit the stream. A few moments later, Ryan's hand shot up. Everybody froze, and I saw what she'd seen. Not just the one Spartan staring in our general direction, but beyond him, over his shoulder, the bloodied edge of a farmstead courtyard.