Chương 185: Book Five, Chapter 88: The Soldier

~Michael~"You sure you're up for this?" Riley asked. Was he talking down to me? Why wouldn't he be? Everyone was doing that nowadays. Maybe they were patronizing. Maybe they were empathizing. All the same to me.

"I know what to do," I said firmly. I should never have told them that I dropped my subplot. Riley explained it away—he said that because any one of us had the chance to be the main character in this story, our subplots were larger than usual, so they needed more time devoted to them. Normally, I would have had plenty of room to put off following my character's plot, but not in this storyline. I didn't want to hear that. Maybe somebody else would want to hear how nothing is ever their fault, but not me.

I should have known. It was on me. Everybody joined in with him and cooed at me like I was a baby, telling me that they had things taken care of, telling me that being a blood sacrifice was as important as anything that could have happened in my subplot. Yeah, right. I've never worked that way. I want somebody who tells me when I mess up and who holds me to the highest standard. Logan always did that. He would never let me settle for anything less than my best.

Kimberly, Riley, Andrew—they didn't get it, but Logan did. If a man can't take responsibility for when he messes up, then he is no kind of man.

"Remember," Andrew said, "you have to be the one to argue back against us. We'll tell you how bad of an idea it is to run into the woods after Antoine, and you have to fire back about how urgent things are. You have to be confident, too." I nodded and looked at Hawk Kipling out of the corner of my eye. He looked right back. He couldn't be the one to argue because he had too high of a Savvy stat. I never really understood how stats worked. It wasn't that no one had told me.

I could explain it backward and forward—Adeline had forced me to memorize every part of it—but still, you're telling me that because some character has a high Savvy stat, you need him to be quiet? Because if the dumb, suicidal idea is a smart person's idea, suddenly it won't be dumb and suicidal? They needed someone who didn't have high Savvy to be the one calling the shots when we fell into this trap. They talked like it was obvious. That was the system. That was the game, don't you know that?

They thought that if they could understand the system, they could find a path to victory. I still felt they were too trusting. As long as you think there are rules and that the rules matter, you'll be willing to give up your edge. You will walk to your death as long as you think the enemy will stick to the rules. That was something that Isaac understood, even though he always tried to put it in a joke.

I couldn't help but feel that this was all one big mousetrap, and we were slowly being convinced to put our necks right over the line. Not just this storyline, but everything. And I would have to go along with it, too—because what other option did we have? I was the blood sacrifice. I had to keep the nerd alive. It all fell to me. On-Screen.

"You are going into those woods unprepared," Riley said.

"Why have we been planning this entire campaign if you're just going to charge off without a thought?" He was following Hawk and me as we headed into the woods where most of the mercenaries waited for us.

"This is how you kill werewolves," I said, turning back to him, defiant.

"You track them, you find whatever cave or abandoned shack they're holed up in, and then you shoot them. My people have been doing this for centuries."

"You don't even know how many of them there are," Andrew interjected.

"None of our scouts have even been able to find the pack." I almost laughed. I was arrogant. I was self-assured. That was my character now.

"I have never known a werewolf pack to grow past a dozen wolves," I said.

"Have any of you? My people have been taking care of these lands and keeping them safe. If there were dozens of wolves in the woods, we would know about it." We stood at the edge of the forest, our argument so loud that the birds were fleeing from the trees.

"The trail is growing cold," I said.

"If we catch these wolves, we want to catch them when the sun is up. That's when we have the advantage. The immature wolves will be sitting ducks. The mature ones will be by themselves. We are burning daylight. You've got nearly two dozen guys already in the woods, ready to go. If we lose the trail, we'll be back here to do it your way. But if we find them, we're going to end this before it gets ugly." I nodded to Hawk Kipling, and we walked into the forest to join the group of mercenaries waiting for us.

I could hear Riley behind me as I stopped being On-Screen, and they continued to be. He explained that if they just waited till nightfall, their little rolling silver trick could be used to suss out any werewolf in our group. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Of course, we couldn't do that because we needed the reveal to be timed for Second Blood. That was the most I had spoken in the entire storyline so far, but somebody had to do it.

I didn't know how good my performance was, but if the goal was to make myself look dumb, I had probably succeeded. Riley said that there was a chance they would still be attacked and that Hawk and I would go unscathed for Second Blood. If things went that way, it might just come down to me and whoever survived the attack at the fort. As much as I hated to admit it, I hoped that would be the case. I had to rescue Logan and Avery, and being nothing but a blood sacrifice felt so small and insignificant.

It all came down to whether the film buff actually understood this so-called system. If he was wrong, it would all come down to me—and I would not fail. But if he was right, and it was my time to go, I was going down swinging. The mercenaries clearly had training from somewhere, but they weren't using it. At times, they would cluster up too close together and fall out of formation when we went On-Screen. Carousel needed its good shot, and that meant we couldn't be stealthy—not really. Still, I tried.

I directed them to spread out—not too thin—but to work our way through the brush quietly and methodically. There was a way to move through a forest to minimize your chances of being spotted and to maximize your chances of finding what you were looking for. Despite what Carousel had cast me as I wasn't some "Indian tracker" or whatever nonsense you see in the movies. But I was a soldier, and I had common sense.

And when Antoine had fled into the forest, he had been bleeding all over the place from a wound that would never heal because it was kept open by a silver caltrop. Somehow, Hawk had figured out that Antoine was the werewolf before anyone else. Even though he didn't tell me what we were doing, I figured it out pretty quickly—we needed to set up traps around the manor property while Antoine was gone so he wouldn't know where they were. Pretty clever. I caught on pretty quickly, too.

It turned out that the film buff did as well, but his reasoning was something else. I kept hearing twigs snapping in the distance. I would signal for everyone to stop so I could listen, and they would obey. Carousel must have been angling for a very particular shot because it kept doing that. When it had gotten its shot of me taking command of the mercenaries, finally, the twig snapping stopped. I didn't show it, but I was downright spooked. Was it trying to get to me? I knew what was coming.

There was no avoiding it. And if I tried to avoid it, it would be worse for everyone. But I was going to do my best. I lost the trail twice, but Hawk had a trope for tracking monsters, and he never managed to lose it. He would point me toward it with his eyes when we were On-Screen, almost like he wanted me to get the credit—because I needed charity. We walked forward, and those damn mercenaries kept bunching up again. This wasn't just them going against their training—something was happening.

I could see it in the way the Monster Hunter paragon kept looking at them like he knew what was going on. How much of the script could Paragons see? The wolves were about to attack. Second Blood was upon us, and the needle on the plot cycle confirmed it for me. Riley was right. He found a way to survive even with his pathetic Plot Armor. Hats off to him. I expected a roar. I expected screams. But what I heard instead was a loud bang. I looked behind me.

All the mercenaries had been bunched up because, as it turns out, the wolves weren't attacking in wolf form. No. Someone had just let off a grenade. A flashbang, from the sound—but that couldn't have been it. Body parts were flying. Movies never get ordnance right. I started screaming commands into the air—instincts at this point—but my words were falling on deaf ears. I couldn't even hear them coming out of my own mouth.

All I heard was a bright, piercing sound in my ear that seemed to grow like a balloon filling up until my head wanted to explode. And then there was nothing. No sound could get near me. I was nearly deaf at times; the sound was coming in and out. I dropped back into the woods, into the thick brush away from the clearing where the mercenaries had just been torn apart. I looked for my target, and it didn't take long to find him. The others were right—it was the blonde mercenary.

He stood there, not as a wolf, but as a man with a gun. He had been far away from the others. Then he pulled out his sidearm and started leveling it at the screaming mercenaries, silencing them one shot at a time with a devilish smile on his face—like he'd tricked us. And I had to play along because I drew the short straw. Hell, I'd volunteered for the short straw. And I always would. But I was gonna kill that damn wolf. I leveled my rifle at him, but before I could fire, I finally saw a flash of fur.

But it wasn't from him. There was another wolf—a big one with long arms. I screamed loudly and stupidly because I wasn't supposed to believe they'd come out in the daylight like this. That was only mature wolves—one in a thousand, right? But here they were—no less than a dozen. No less than two dozen. Three dozen. They were pulling in from all sides. I was going to die. And as the numbers increased, I realized the other players would, too. How had we never talked about numbers when it came to the wolf pack?

Why had we just assumed it would be twelve? Where did we even get that number from? A book? Some random lore insight? Important questions asked too late. I grabbed my side piece and dropped the wolf that had thrashed my rifle. He didn't even get a scratch on me. Another shot into another wolf. And it continued like that. Most of the mercenaries were shredded, but one of them—whose name I had never learned—actually managed to kill a werewolf. It was almost funny.

These NPCs were tough—they were supposed to be—but in this slaughter, they were torn apart like toilet paper. Except for that one NPC with the big mustache, gunning down wolves left and right. Had he even had speaking parts? I couldn't remember. Still, I couldn't hear much. But I was on a swivel, gun in each hand, waiting for the wolves to charge, to get close. They dropped like clay pigeons. I heard Hawk yelling, asking how there could be so many wolves during daylight hours. Couldn't understand him exactly.

He sounded like he was in disbelief, like the possibility that he misunderstood the enemy was nonexistent. And yet, here we were. He was playing dumb, and I was playing dumber. Where was that blonde mercenary? Had he already shifted? I shot wolf after wolf, and they all fell. I knew how to make a fight look good. I dropped to the ground and crawled. When a wolf came on top of me, I shot up, got it through the roof of the mouth, then another into the heart.

These wolves could only be defeated in the zenith of battle during a climactic moment. That meant Carousel saw my death as a climactic moment. I wondered if Riley had understood that. The way he explained it, it sounded like the wolves had to be killed in a climactic way. But as I mowed down these sick dogs, I realized there was more than one way to make a climactic moment. Not just with some science experiment or a trap. But by giving it all. One wolf down, then another.

I called out Hawk's name, but I couldn't say if he responded. I jumped into the underbrush and climbed through to the other side of the vegetation, and there he was—getting hollowed out by a wolf with unusually light fur. I double-barreled into it, but I was too late. I didn't even see what it was that got me. I was out before the pain even came. But that was pretty normal with my Grit.

The lights went out, and all I focused on was continuing to pull the triggers on my guns like some die-hard chicken with its head cut off. I'd like to think I killed another wolf in those final moments, but I knew I couldn't get the one. Not the one I wanted. Everything went dark, and I wondered if it would be the last time.