Chương 33: Run Boy Run - Woodkid (3:36)

Thomas/Lawless Yay! Violence CrushDaddyXx FINALLY. Maybe now Zeke's gonna write some action. Come on, man. You're not writing a walking simulator here. SteelResolve Damn, Zeke. You're reminding me of something right now. It rhymes with widdle itch. Get out there and kick some ass. I'm getting a little tired of all this unsubstantiated lore dumping. If you've got something like the House of Seasons that is replicable for all us, then drop it. But otherwise, I wanna see you rock some faces.

Z3ke (Original Poster) Yay. Violence. Thrilling. Love that for me. I get why a bunch of you are excited about this. You're all thinking that this is Dragonball Z or something and I'm about to kamehameha something out of existence. But you guys don't really understand what's happening. A FUCKING MOUNTAIN STOOD UP. That's not me using poetic language to try and paint a picture for you all. I'm not saying that the thing felt like a mountain, all ancient and constant.

What I'm saying is that bones and armor and banners and all the dead from a hundred-year-old battlefield got smushed together and reanimated until the ground itself got up and started walking towards us. My first thought wasn't "oh hells yea, let's go punch that." My first thought was "thank god I've been sweating out all the water in my body in the desert for the past few days, because otherwise I would have just pissed myself." CrushDaddyXx But you fought, right? You fought and you lived.

Otherwise your character wouldn't be here updating us about how you kicked the ass of an undead mountain. That's the point we're all making. More violence. We want you to go out there and throw some action at people. It'll make the story so much better. Z3ke (Original Poster) You guys aren't listening and it's like we're just talking past each other at this point.

A lot of you are imagining that this is some kind of action movie where I can get blown up, ragdoll across the screen, bounce off a wall, wipe some blood off my mouth, and toss out a witty one-liner before getting ready for round two. That's not how the real world works. Violence is violent. When I get hit by something, I don't have a giant HP bar over my head that dips a little.

My bones break and my muscles tear and the breath is knocked out of my lungs and I'm on the ground wondering if I'm about to suffocate to death because my body forgot how breathing works. Have you ever taken a hit and had all the air in your lungs stolen and you're just on the ground, legitimately wondering if this is how you die? Blood is seeping out your wounds and panic starts to hit you and the only thought running through your mind is "shit is not good." Because I have. And it's not a fun feeling.

I don't get to right click enemies to death. I don't get to press F and do a cool silent assassination move. If I fuck up out here, that's it. I'm done. I'm dead. This isn't a game to me. I'm not playing a game that you guys all devoted a shit ton of time to. I'm stuck in this world and it's real and it's terrifying and I just want to go home. So when you all say that you're finally happy that I'm out here fighting things, what I hear is "you should be more willing to gamble away your life for our entertainment."

Z3ke (Original Poster) And there's something else I need to say because I feel like nobody is talking about it. I don't want to kill things. The echoes that were in the valley? That's a little different. They were basically skeletons. I don't really know much about magic, but these things didn't feel sapient to me. It was more like they were training dummies that could swing a weapon… but were also exceedingly terrifying. If I "killed" these things, it wasn't like killing something real.

But those Jackal Runners that I fought on our trip into the valley? Those were living things. They were dangerous creatures, but they were alive and thinking and real. They bled and they died. Have none of you ever felt that sickening feeling of killing a living thing? It's not heroic. It's messed up and it stays with you.

You get a little sick and you get a little introspective and, if you're lucky, someone is there to help keep your mind off what you just did until you can forget about it and stop thinking about it. There's a reason that humanity lives in cities and chose to form societies. It's because, for like 95% of humanity, killing something to protect yourself is never supposed to feel good.

We build cities and create communities and societies so we don't have to wake up every day and wonder if we're gonna have to stab a lion or a bear or another person just to keep on living. Craving violence is not a good thing in normal life. I know you all view this as a fanfic, and I can kinda get where you're coming from. I mean, I loved watching John Wick movies and anime and playing video games where I was a paladin bringing justice to the world. But this is real life for me. It's not a movie or a video game.

So no, I'm never going to be excited about killing things. Maybe I'll get used to it and stop having existential crises every time it happens. But I don't know if that's something I even want. Fogbarrel … yea, that mountain thing sounds a little too brutal for our boy Z3ke. I'd probably run away screaming from that fight too. Maybe just ease into the combat with a bit of goblins first. Z3ke (Original Poster) Thank you. That's all I'm asking for.

Just a little respect for the fact that bone geography isn't normal, and almost pissing yourself when a hill stands up is a reasonable reaction. Now, I'm a little tired and hungry and thirsty, and the cleric is calling me over to do some uncomfortable arm exercises while she heals me. I'm gonna take a quick break and I'll be back to type up some more stuff once I feel my fingers again. Blazer66 Hey Zeke, quick question - why are you typing all this out?

Z3ke (Original Poster) Because that's my payment to you all for giving me advice on how not to die out here. I mean… have you read the beginning of this thing? Story and Mushroom wouldn't help me if I didn't tell my story. Blazer66 No, I know that. I mean, why are you typing all this out? You said you've got a bum arm. When Cole was giving that whole lecture about the Three-Crown Crisis, you mentioned you had text-to-speech on your tech slate. Why not just use that? Z3ke (Original Poster) … SON OF A BITCH!

Z3ke (Original Poster) Okay, I'm back and I'm using the text-to-speech function on my tablet so this next update should go a little faster. Yes. I thought of it all by myself. No. I don't want to hear anything about it. The caravan has stopped for some lunch and I'm over by the side, doing some miserable arm exercises for the cleric. I've still got a cast on and it's itchy as shit, but the pail had dulled down to something pretty manageable. Anyways, back to what happened.

The last we left off that undead hill rose up out of the ground. It was a mound of grey and white in the center of the valley, and it was moving. Whole sections of the ground were peeling upwards, and Corva had just yelled at us to run. Before I could move, I heard a crack to my right. It was way too loud for the muted sound bubble we'd found ourselves in. I glanced over and saw Wren bracing his oversized rifle into his shoulder and taking a shot.

He must have decided it was a good idea to take a potshot at a mountain and it went about as well as you'd expect. There was a puff of dust where the round hit, a single bone fractured sending splinters flying, and nothing else. The hill didn't flinch or fall down screaming. It just stared at us, and then it shifted. It was a subtle adjustment. Bones grinded against bones and armor plates shrieked, and suddenly the thing was much much closer to us.

All of us turned and bolted, trying to retrace our steps and head back through the valley the way we'd come in. That's when we ran smack dab into the echoes. Vash soldiers raced towards us, climbing out of trenches and over shattered ridges like the valley was coughing them up. They weren't full echoes anymore, not like the translucent ghosts that we'd seen earlier, but they also weren't properly alive either. Bones had gathered into them, giving them weight and shape.

Their bodies flickered between two states: one moment ghostly flesh and blood and the next bleached skeletons locked inside cracked armor. It was like watching two versions of the same soldier fighting for control over the same body. Cole, surprisingly, reacted first. He yanked a slip of paper out from his jacket, muttered something under his breath, and slapped it onto the chest of the nearest echo. The thing burst into flames. Bones blackened and cracked and turned to charcoal as the fire tore through it.

A gust of wind caught the ash and scattered it through the air like dirty snow. For a heartbeat, the echo was still there. It swung at Cole, but its arm phased halfway through him. Without the bones to anchor it, the arm passed harmlessly through Cole's body. Then the echo unraveled, peeling apart and dissolving into nothing. Corva was already in motion. He had a knife in one hand and a hand axe in another, and he crashed into the next echo.

Pell was right behind him, his revolver barking in the quiet bubble while his machete flashed in tight, desperate arcs. Me? I was holding a dull knife that suddenly felt very underwhelming. It was short and weak and more like a utensil than a weapon. A very clear and very unhelpful thought flashed in my mind that literally anything would have been better at that moment. A spear or a sword or a sharpened stick. I should've grabbed a weapon back at The MIZ.

Why hadn't Null pointed me to something that I could use to actually defend myself with? Hindsight is great like that. It waits until you're about to die and then it floods you with a slideshow of every bad decision you've ever made in your life. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. The echo that attacked me was a Vash soldier. Or… he'd been a Vash soldier.

Now he was a skeletal thing with a heavy shield fused to his left arm and a massive warhammer clenched in his right. Pale, flickering echo-flesh washed over bleached white bone. He slammed into me with his shield and it felt like I'd been clipped by a truck. All the air was pushed out of my lungs, my teeth snapped together so hard I almost bit my tongue off. My vision went white around the edges and I felt the impact rattle through my bones. And just like that, all the fight drained out of me.

I didn't want to get hurt again. I didn't want to be here. I didn't want to do this. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to fall back and let the people who actually knew how to fight handle everything. Corva, Pell, Wren, or literally anyone would have been better in this situation. If I could just make myself invisible, like a kid who forgot their homework and just sinks lower and lower in their chair, then maybe everything would just ignore me. Maybe the teacher wouldn't call my name.

Maybe the echo wouldn't try to kill me. Maybe I'd survive. I fell to the ground and the echo loomed over me, lifting its warhammer high. The head of the thing caught the light and flickered and I saw the chipped and stained skull peering down at me. I knew, with awful clarity, that this was it. This was how I died. One clean downward swing, my skull would get crushed, and that was the end of my story. You all wouldn't get your updates or any explanation of what happened.

Everyone would assume I got bored and stopped writing. Friends back in New York would think that I flaked and just vanished into the ether. And my life would end in a trench in a world that shouldn't exist. A gunshot rang out and the echo's head snapped sideways as half its rotted skull exploded into fragments. Bone sprayed outwards and the echo staggered. It was Pell. He didn't look my way. He couldn't. He was already turning and firing again as two more echoes rushed him and Corva.

That was all the help he could give me. I scrambled to one knee as the echo recovered and swung its warhammer at me. I barely dodged out of the way and twisted away from the shield bash that followed. All around me the fighting was chaotic. Wren was a blur of motion, his rifle held like a staff. He fired when he had the space, then swung and smashed at echoes when he didn't. Every swipe of his staff crushed bones and dropped echoes into useless heaps. To my left, Corva was locked in battle with a massive echo.

It was carrying a gigantic kite shield, the kind that could cover a person from head to toe, and swinging a sword that looked less like a blade and more like a slab of iron. It was slow, but every swing had a ton of weight behind it. Corva darted in, but the echo clipped him with the sword. Blood sprayed onto the dirt but Corva didn't even slow down. With a grunt, he hooked the edge of the shield with his axe and wrenched it sideways.

The shield was out of place just long enough for Corva to drive a knife straight into the echo's skull. I didn't get to see how it ended because the warhammer echo was on me again. It swung and something clicked in my head. I couldn't tell you what it was, but instead of jumping backwards I was pushed forward. Inside the swing. Close the distance. I lunged. The haft of the warhammer slammed into my arm and pain detonated up through my shoulder, but it wasn't a killing blow.

I'd missed the head of the hammer by inches. My knife slashed out and scraped across the echo's ribcage, carving a deep groove through the bone. But nothing happened. There wasn't any blood and the echo didn't react to my "killing blow." All I got was the awful realization that bones don't bleed and I'd done absolutely nothing. The echo drew its arm back to swing again and I threw myself at it, my left hand snaking up and clamping onto its arm. The shield dug into my side, crushing the air out of me.

My arm was trapped and my body was pressed up close, face-to-face with a skull that screeched at me. I stabbed. I kicked. I thrashed. Everything I did was a desperate and panicked attempt to do something to the echo in front of me. My foot connected with something solid and I heard a snap. The echo staggered and let out a horrible noise. I kicked out again, harder, and felt bones give way. I lashed out with my right hand, breaking ribs and ripping lose anything I could grab.

Something finally snapped and the echo unraveled in front of me. Bones clattered to the ground. The shield fell. The warhammer hit the dirt with a dull, heavy thud. I just stood there for a second. My whole body was shaking as adrenaline was coursing through me. It had taken everything that I had to survive a single fight. One echo. My arm throbbed where the warhammer had hit me and my breathing sounded too loud in my ears. All around me, the others were still fighting.

Corva had finished off the massive echo he'd been facing. He yanked his knife free and shoved the collapsing pile of bones aside. He was bleeding, but he was upright and already looking around for the next threat. Cole was a few paces away, swaying slightly on his feet. He'd burned another echo but it had cost him. There was a dark gash at his hairline and blood ran down the side of his face and into his eyes. He wiped at it, blinked, and then reached for another slip of paper from his jacket. Wren though…

he looked almost untouched. Bones littered the ground all around him. Echoes that weren't fully dead dragged themselves through the dirt, their skulls snapping and their arms clawing uselessly at the air. Their legs had been smashed out from under them, crushed by the swings of Wren's rifle staff. They kept trying to attack, but without their legs and any sort of leverage, they couldn't do anything. Wren stepped over them and crushed what was left with the butt of his rifle. Corva glanced back the way we'd come.

Vash echoes were forming there, half-solid shapes blocking the exit out of the valley. He huffed and pursed his lips, then turned and looked towards the center of the valley, toward the site of Tappal's last stand. The Concordant echoes hadn't reached us yet. They were still picking their way through the broken ground of the valley. I didn't need Corva to say anything. The look on his face told me what the plan was. We weren't going to try and fight our way through the Vash echoes.

There were too many of them and even if we could fight them off, the Concordant would soon hit us in the rear. No. We were going to head deeper into the valley. We were gonna head into the trenches and the furrows and the scars carved into the valley floor by the Resonance Engine explosion. We were headed into that artery-shaped maze of shattered earth. If we were lucky, we'd slip past the Concordant echoes and avoid the walking hill of bones and claw our way out the other side of the valley. If we weren't? Well…

then we were fucked.

"Move! Into the trenches!" Cole and Wren took off, sticking close together. Wren didn't bother reloading his rifle. Gunshots weren't enough to put down these echoes. Pell fell in beside Corva, his revolver already holstered and his machete ready. I forced my legs to move and followed the group down into the broken earth, plunging deeper into the valley and desperately hoping that there was a way out of this hell. We plunged into the trenches and just ran.

There wasn't any clever tactics or heroic last stand or a carefully planned rear-guard action like you'd read about in war books. We didn't slow down and place traps or look for clever ways out or even really think about anything. We just ran. We sprinted across shattered ground and through broken dirt corridors, our lungs burning as we tried to put as much distance as possible between us and the Vash echoes spilling in behind us. Speed was the plan. Speed was the hope. Speed would keep us alive.

I made the mistake of glancing over my shoulder and instantly regretted it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the hill move. The massive thing of bone and fused armor lurched forward. Every step it took cracked the valley floor, and every step it took brought it closer to us. Banners hung from its bulk like dead skin, and skulls rolled free from it only to be reabsorbed as it trudged towards us.

"Don't look at it," I muttered to myself as I forced my attention back to the trench we were running through. Every so often an echo would appear in front of us, almost like the valley was spawning them out of spite. One second the path was clear, the next there was a skeletal soldier stumbling into existence. Wren and Corva handled them. Wren would whip his rifle staff at them, shattering a spine or crushing a skull in one clean motion. Corva's axe would smash into a ribcage and tear it apart.

The echoes barely had time to exist before they were broken into pieces. We burst into a wide intersection where multiple trenches split and rejoined. The place looked like a cracked river delta. That's when everything went wrong. The trench walls rose above us, maybe eight or nine feet tall. It was too high to see over. And it was too high to notice the echoes rushing along the top until it was too late. They dropped down on us from above, tumbling to the ground. Bones hit dirt with dry, snapping cracks.

Some echoes landed badly and their limbs shattered on impact. Others hit their feet and charged at us immediately, swinging weapons and grasping with their skeletal hands. Wren was already there, his rifle-staff whipping around in wide arcs, smashing skulls, breaking legs, and crushing skulls. A few of the echoes had their legs completely shattered by the fall. They crawled towards us, dragging themselves forward, their swords scraping uselessly behind them.

One of them attacked me and I stomped down on its skull and felt it crack under my shoes. For a half second, I thought I won. Then its sword slashed out and pain flared along my leg as the blade caught me. The cut wasn't deep, but it hurt like a bitch. My footing went and I slipped and hit the ground. The echo crawled closer to me, its skull half caved in and its arms reaching out to me. I grabbed a reaching arm and snapped it, the bone breaking with a brittle crunch.

Then I started punching it, slamming my fist into its ribcage. My hand screamed in pain but I didn't stop punching until the ribs were crushed into dust and the thing finally went still. I shoved myself upright, my heart pounding and my leg burning from the wound, and looked around. I was alone. The trench behind me was clogged with echoes now. Bodies were piling up as more and more dropped down from above. Through the chaos, I caught sight of Cole about twenty feet away.

His eyes were wide and his face had gone tight with despair as he glanced at where I was. For one horrible second, I wondered if he was going to leave me or if he'd try to fight his way back. I didn't get to find out. A wave of echoes slammed into the trench between us, filling the space with flickering bodies. The ground shook as they forced their way forward and the place where Cole had been vanished behind a wall of ghostly armor and skeletal limbs.

The echoes reached out to me, their skeletal fingers carving scratches into my face and arm and chest. I pushed myself back, trying to get out of their reach. When I finally got to my feet, I stumbled deeper into the trench network, hoping to get away from the pile of echoes behind me. The skeletons closed in on me and I was on my own. So I ran. I ran away from Cole and Corva and the rest, hoping I could meet back up with them in another trench, hoping to get away from the mass of bodies that separated us. I mean…

what the hell else was I supposed to do? I struggled to kill even one of these echoes. An entire undead army wasn't something I was equipped to handle. So I got my feet under me and I ran. My left leg screamed where the sword had caught me, but for the first few seconds of my run I barely felt it. Adrenaline is incredibly like that. It wrapped me up in cotton and urgency and turned all my pain into background noise. Unfortunately, that didn't last long. My arms and legs started to feel wrong.

They were heavy and numb, like I'd pushed them way past their limits at the gym. My steps got rubbery and unsteady. A stitch formed in my side and every breath I took burned. The echoes kept chasing me. I could hear them behind me, their bones and armor scraping together as they raced after me. The sound of it bounced down the trench and multiplied. My mind flashed back to every zombie movie I ever watched, and I felt nothing but despair.

These things didn't breathe and they didn't get tired and they wouldn't quit chasing me. I used to be obsessed with zombies. It was years ago, around the time that the Walking Dead had come out and every movie that came out of Hollywood was about shambling corpses. I spent way too much time daydreaming about what I'd do in a zombie apocalypse, convinced that I'd be absolutely amazing at it. I'd be like Rick, or Woody Harrelson's character in Zombieland. I even called my dad once and asked him a couple questions.

He grew up on a farm, so I figured he'd know how many eggs a hen laid in a week. I remember the long, tired sigh on the other end of the phone when he realized I was asking because I was planning for the zombie apocalypse. I wanted a hen in case society collapsed all around me. I used to annoy my friends with my constant talk about zombies too. We'd head up to the Cloisters and I'd mentally redesign the place into a fortress.

We'd walk around Columbia's campus and I'd point out how the gates could be locked and the whole place turned into a defensible stronghold. In my head, I was always prepared and always ahead of the curve. One time a friend asked me what I'd do if a zombie apocalypse actually broke out while I was at work. I think he expected me to answer with something clever or heroic. Instead, I told him, with complete honesty, that I'd "probably shit myself." Turns out, that's not what I would have done. But it was close to it.

Here I was, actually being chased by the undead, and there was nothing cool and cinematic about it. I wasn't dominating anything. I was running, panicking, desperately trying to stay upright while a tiny, traitorous voice in the back of my head calmly explained how this would all end. I'd get tired. I'd stumble. The cut on my leg would finally draw enough blood that I'd get light headed and couldn't keep going. I'd go down in the dirt of the trench and the echoes would be on me before I could even scream.

There wouldn't be any dramatic last stand or a heroic rescue or a happy ending. I'd just be killed. Corva would get the others out. I knew that. And they wouldn't come back for me, not because they didn't care, but because they couldn't. Nobody could fight their way through that many echoes. This wasn't some storybook adventure. And even if they wanted to try and come back for me, finding a single person in a maze of trenches was impossible. That thought hurt worse than all my bruises and cuts.

I was going to die here, and there was nothing I could do about it. Something dropped into the trench ahead of me. An echo hit the ground and its bones cracked as it rolled. It came up fast anyway, sword already swinging. If the blade hadn't been rusted to hell and barely holding an edge, that would've been it for me. I would have been killed. Impaled on a hundred-year-old piece of garbage in the middle of the fucking Valley of Echoes. A place that I'd been told was safe.

As it was, the sword slashed my arm and pain flared bright and hot. I screamed in anger and slammed into the echo, my adrenaline giving me the strength to shove its skull into the dirt wall of the trench and crush it between my hands, feeling the bone give way. Then I went for the ribs, swinging wildly until they were nothing but dust. I snapped the arm holding the sword and yanked the weapon free as the echo fell apart into dust. I went back to running.

The sword I now carried was heavy and awkward, but I figured that it was better than my stupid, useless knife. Anything was better than that thing. I kept running until the trench bent sharply… and then stopped. Dead end. The path narrowed away to nothing but packed dirt and stone. Behind me the echoes shuffled closer. The first one reached me. It was a Vash soldier in chainmail and wearing a metal helmet that was dented so badly that one side of its skull was completely gone.

I swung my rusted piece-of-shit sword and hit the helmet, crushing it further and tearing away what was left of the skull. The echo dropped and I swung at the next one. It caught the armor of an echo and the blade snapped. Because of fucking course it did. What did I expect from a weapon that had been rusting in the open for a century? That was it. I had a broken sword in one hand and a dull knife in the other. My chest was heaving and my limbs were shaking and my vision started to narrow.

I wanted to lay down and accept my fate. I wanted to stand and scream at the world in defiance. I wanted to give up. I wanted to fight. And I didn't know how to do any of that. Something inside me just… broke. It gave up pretending it could hold all of this together. The fear hit first, heavy and crushing and sending my thoughts spinning uselessly. Then came the rage all hot and directionless and wild and unfair. And beneath it all was the helplessness, pressing down on me until I was crushed into a ball. Cornered.

Bleeding. And alone. My thoughts turned to the forum. To all you guys. I wondered what the reactions would be. I could already picture how it would go. I'd be dead and my body would be rotting in some forgotten ditch in that valley. Binary would claim I got bored of "writing a fanfic." Venerated would say I'd bent canon or ignored lore and eventually wrote myself into a corner. Mushroom and Story would just laugh it all off and claim the whole thing was fun while it lasted.

Everyone else would just go about their day. Maybe, once in a while, someone would remember that weird "fanfic" that didn't get a good ending. And all of that because I died in a ditch. I wanted to scream at you all. Why did you tell me this valley was safe? Why did you let me come here? Why did you convince me to spend all my money on a tech slate with promises that it would help me to survive, and then let me walk into a nightmare that none of you actually understood?

Why make me burn all my credits on something so useless? I should have bought armor or a weapon or literally anything else that could have kept me alive. Instead, I was standing there with a broken sword, backed into a dead end like a wounded animal, waiting to be torn apart by weird zombie creatures. The echoes closed in and their hands reached for me and I screamed. It was a big FUCK YOU that I screamed out at them. At the world.

At the forum that gave me poor advice and at whatever dropped me in this world and at my own ineptitude that led me to this ending. It was a scream that carried every ounce of my fear and pain and anger and rage and rebellion and defiance and a refusal to quietly disappear into the dirt. The scream stretched and vibrated and pushed as it tore its way out of me. The air around me rippled, like I'd thrown a rock straight into reality. A pressure wave blasted out of my mouth and tore its way through the trench.

The echoes closest to me staggered and were shoved back by the wave… and then they unraveled. Armor peeled away and their ghastly echo skin was ripped free. Skulls and arms and ribs and legs collapsed into powder as if the thing holding them together had just… let go. Dust filled the air. My throat felt like it had been flayed raw. My ears rang and I was convinced that I'd just gone deaf. A coppery taste flooded my mouth, letting me know that I was bleeding and I should be worried about that.

But what scared me more was what I'd just done. There weren't any echoes left. The trench was empty. All of the skeletal creatures had been erased by my scream. And I had no clue what just happened. Blinking lights in the corner of my vision caught my attention, allowing me to slightly ignore the pounding headache that was blooming in my skull. The lights hovered in the upper right hand corner. Skill Increase: Simple Melee Weapons - Rank 2 [Class Unlocked: Rockstar]