DD 302 Ch 10

The dwarves didn’t stop even after Heather’s massive ability had blown the Dwarven Queen away. Instead, they went absolutely wild, rushing in every direction as if they were trying to do as much damage as they possibly could.

Seeing the sudden change, and assuming the queen was still alive, Helen snarled, “Of course you couldn’t fucking finish the job, Mom.” She emphasized the word ‘Mom’ in a way that could only be interpreted as an insult.

But her mother didn’t seem to pay the dig any mind. Her gaze was firmly fixed on her daughter, hesitation in her eyes as Helen readied herself to jump back into danger she’d thought resolved.

My blades quickly found and buried themselves in nearby dwarves before I zipped away, not needing to hear their banter. The brief thought I’d had earlier haunted me: what could a Dwarven Queen do in a city full of non-adventurers, ripe for the killing? Needless to say, a Dwarven Queen could build an army, or perhaps it was more accurate to think of the worm as the threadspawn doing the building. That worm could cause an almost zombie-apocalypse scenario, where the killing spread far faster than anyone could stop. Heck, some of these dwarves could even be carrying threadspawn of their own.

The thought sent an uncontrollable shudder down my spine. More threadspawn would be horrifying, especially if they used this as an opportunity to invade the human population. All of these thoughts happened in a brief moment as I zigzagged through the dwarves pouring out of Central Station, leaving a wake of collapsed dwarves behind me.

I rushed toward the first sign of humans. Police officers had their cars turned sideways, guns out, already firing at the dwarves, but what was really holding the situation at bay was a peppering of fireballs and other simple abilities from a suited-up, pseudo-adventurer looking group of law enforcement. They were the T.A.C.O.S., Tactical Adventurer Compliance and Oversight Specialists. I’d never concerned myself with the TACOS before. But at least they were buying us time for the moment. I had a feeling they would not be able to hold back the masses for long.

Wanting to help, I inserted myself, sliding through the crowd of dwarves and turning them into mincemeat. As I did, I activated [Eyes of Wisdom], scanning each dwarf to check if any carried threadspawn themselves.

***

Kevin had only spent a little time in the dungeon. A buddy had convinced him that adventuring would be a great way to make a little extra cash. His buddy was level fifteen and pretty much carried them around to pick up loot. The extra cash was helpful. Being a cameraman didn’t pay well.

He watched the scene unfolding in front of him, wondering if his situation was about to change with the footage he was capturing. Stations would pay top dollar for this kind of content.

As Kevin looked up from his viewfinder at the devastation inside the station, Ken Nagato zipped out so fast the only thing that came to mind was a freaking lightning bolt.

Ken looked like one of those old super fast heroes with lightning swirling around him and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call him a motherfucking hero.

Kevin checked his viewfinder again to make sure he was getting frames of the guy, even if it was hard to keep the camera tracked on him. Adventurers were fast, but this was insane. For the first time Kevin wondered if he’d missed his shot by not going to an adventurer college if this is what it turned you into.

In the adventurer’s wake were collapsing, dying dwarves. The crew still inside the station were doing cleanup, but that wouldn’t be interesting footage. No, Kevin kept his camera planted on Ken Nagato, eyes struggling to understand what he was seeing.

At times Ken weaved right, carving a path through dwarves only to disappear and reappear on the left, sweeping them out of the way and keeping them back from the crowd.

Kevin couldn’t even understand how I was making decisions and reactions at that speed, much less why he was targeting specific dwarves. The adventurer’s moves were maybe beyond human. Kevin couldn’t shake the feeling he was watching something unbelievable. Was this really the same guy who’d been nervous in the interview? He could’ve zipped over, shredded Carl and sat back down before anyone in the studio would’ve noticed.

Carl would piss himself if he had to sit in a room with Ken again after seeing this ability.

***

I jumped atop a dwarf, sliced my blades through the back of its neck, leapt to the next and cleaved another in two. The drones were too slow to react, and unlike fights I’d had before, they seemed almost easy for me to cut through and end quickly. Once drones had seemed extra tough, but no longer.

So with danger to everyone present, that’s exactly what I did with [Eyes of Wisdom] active. I hunted down any dwarf that had a worm wiggling inside it, which, unfortunately, was more than I would’ve liked to find.

Though in less than a minute, I cleared the field closest to the onlookers. At this point, more than a few were pointing at me and shouting, but I couldn’t stay still for long. Instead I asked [Eyes of Wisdom] where the queen was and shot off after it.

There were more drones, and plenty that I had left disabled, but that would be for another to clean up. My priority was getting rid of the worms that had come to Earth’s surface.

Thankfully, the queen hadn’t gone far. Though Heather had blasted her through the wall, enough of her must have survived, because she had now revived and was in an office building, putting together a number of dwarves to launch back out into New York.

I did not plan on giving her the chance. I sliced into the side of a building to get to her. As soon as I entered her space, I immediately attacked the queen with a flurry of blows. I hit her hard enough to drive her out of the building and onto the street.

She could do little more than block my attacks and make feeble attempts to drive me off.

I was simply too fast at this point for her to land any meaningful blow, even when she activated an ability and stomped the ground to try and disrupt my footing. It did little more than allow me to slip behind her and stab repeatedly with [Triple Breach] to crack her armor and get at the worm inside.

Even then, it was far harder than I would have liked to get through the dwarven queen’s regeneration and high durability. I punched through only for the worm to wiggle under an unbroken part of the dwarven queen’s carapace of living armor. That forced me to step back and wait for [Triple Breach] to come back off cooldown.

I fell back on [Shadow Arm] and [Mana Burn] which made an effective pair as the incorporeal limb latched onto the queen and began burning what mana it could away. If I couldn’t take her out because of the regeneration, perhaps I could use my own finisher, [Mana Implosion] to kill the queen. But even with [Mana Burn] and my constant slicing, the queen was a healing battery that wasn’t going to crack so easily.

With a wave of her hand, dead dwarves rose up like they were clay to be molded by her mind and threw themselves at me to keep me from going all out on the queen.

Our fight tumbled out into the street and more drones swarmed me, only to enter the area around our fight like jumping into a blender to be diced apart by my blades.

I slid back in a sudden gap in the fighting to assess the situation. [Triple Breach] was back up again, but this time I refused to let that worm wiggle out again.

Jumping close, I activated the second phase of [Liminal Speed], [Liminal Space].

The world around me shattered as if someone had thrown a ball through the glass of reality, beyond which was a dark space of frozen time about ten yards across. But that was plenty for me and the dwarven queen, who was frozen in time as [Triple Breach] cracked her armor again and this time my blades were able to slice straight in before she healed and the worm was frozen like the rest of her.

My blade cleaved it in two, but that wasn’t enough for me to be satisfied. I had more to learn about these worms, and I wanted to make sure this was fully conclusive.

My blades crisscrossed the dwarven queen a hundred ways, tearing her apart and turning the worm inside her into finely minced mush.

A moment later, my stacks bottomed out, causing time and space to stitch itself back together as time resumed.

It had been so quiet in [Liminal Space] that the honking horns and screaming of downtown New York hit me hard, and I stumbled as the queen simply collapsed, as if she had been made of a thousand blocks that suddenly lost cohesion, but that was because my blades had turned her into a thousand pieces.

I stood in front of a chaotic city panting, but at least the fight was done.

***

Kevin had barely managed to stay on Ken as he had rampaged through the town, absolutely destroying the dwarves. But most of all was just how fast there at the end. Kevin had his camera’s digital panel up and was replaying that final fight with the queen over and over. In between a single panel, Ken had teleported about four feet to the side and turned the queen into absolute mincemeat. It was one thing for him to be moving fast, but this high-end camera had eighty frames a second in between a single frame to cut that many times. What kind of insane speed was that?

Kevin could only shake his head. That’s not even the realm of what he considered human anymore.

Ken Nagato was something else. For the first time Kevin realized what he was holding with this footage. It was the truth of what those who delved deep into the dungeon turned into. It was almost laughable that humans on the surface thought their opinions mattered.

Beings like Ken weren’t something they could even comprehend.

***

“No, I don’t need the blanket,” I said, trying to hand the paramedic the crinkly foil blanket he kept trying to give me.

“It’s a shock blanket. After what you’ve gone through, it is important.” He insisted, trying to get me to wear it.

“I’m not in shock,” I said, holding my hand out. “Just trust me, I’m not in shock. This is just another day for me.” I gestured around at the carnage. “Though normally the corpses go up in black smoke. I guess dwarves aren’t monsters of the dungeon now, are they?” I chuckled at the man who was beginning to give me a creepy expression.

I had a feeling I was going to get that reaction a few times before the day was over. It wasn’t every day someone watched me kill hundreds of living creatures. Though I even struggled to call them sentient creatures. Drones are really pretty mindless. But people didn’t really know that and I suppose trying to explain that was only going to make me look like a psychopath, wasn’t it?

Being aware of optics sucked.

I sighed looking up from my own problems to where those who had come here with me were being hounded by all sorts of the city’s emergency response.

There were no less than two dozen vehicles with flashing lights all huddled up around the street. If I had to guess, every cop in the city had been pulled out of bed and told to manage the situation, at least that was my guess based on the way they were all so crankily glaring at me.

They acted like I was personally the one who’d shaken them awake.

“Sir, please wear the shock blanket.” The young paramedic held it out for me again.

“Are you in trouble if I don’t?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.” He swallowed as he looked at me. They’d all been rather nervous, and a group of them had stood over to the side huddled around their phones watching something. I had no idea what to make of any of this.

“He thinks you lost a lot of blood.” Des said, strolling over to join me.

I looked down at myself before looking up at blanket man. “Oh, yeah. Sorry. Most of this isn’t mine.”

“Ken, I don’t think that’s helping,” Des chuckled and she was probably right.

The young paramedic’s face had turned a shade of white that didn’t seem particularly healthy. “If you’d like, I could get you fluids or something,” he offered.

I sighed. “Yeah, sure. Some juice might be nice.” If nothing else, that would give him something to do besides fret over me.

Des sat down on the back of the ambulance with me.

“Did you finish giving your statement?” I asked.

“Eh, close enough.” Des shrugged. “The UG is going to do this all again anyway.”

I followed her gaze to where the mother and daughter pair were still arguing. Helen had her hands thrown up in the air shouting, while Heather stood calmly with her arms crossed and a stern motherly expression on her face. Meanwhile, the police officer that had been asking them questions stood there with his pen limp in his hands, unsure how to continue.

I did not blame the guy. I wouldn’t want to get between the Harem Queen and Helen while they were arguing. One fling of Helen’s arms would probably send that police officer out of his own jurisdiction.

“Do you think they’re gonna be okay?” Des asked, hand on her chin as if she actually cared.

“They’ll be fine. I mean, what’s the worst thing that happens? The UG has to step in because we both know there’s no way they’ll let anything happen to Heather, and she won’t let anything happen to Helen.” I shrugged.

“Fair.” Des grumped. “I liked it more when there was a chance of something going wrong.”

“Yes, well. I think we could all use a little less excitement tonight.” I teased.

My eyes tracked Bellaire as she held her hands up as if she was more firmly asking the officer in front of her to let her go. I paused, watching the interaction a bit longer, narrowing my eyes and wondering what the matter was. Bellaire turned away. She must have seen something in my expression, because she shot me a smile that told me to calm down.

When the officer glanced in my direction, he took an involuntary step back and Bellaire hurried away from him towards us.

“He finally let you go?” I asked as she approached.

She looked over her shoulder at the officer that was slowly trying to trail after her. The officer heard my words and immediately took a step back which, if I was honest, was in his best interest.

“That’s fine.” She waved her hand. “Just, some people need to accept when others give them definitive answers.”

I kept my opinions to myself. Bellaire was a grown woman and could handle whatever that meant on her own. Though, the officer was overly attentive.

“If you’re both done, then perhaps we can get out of here?” Bellaire asked.

“I’m sorry, we would like you to stick around. We may have more questions,” the officer almost shouted.

Unfortunately for him, Heather was close enough to hear his statement and turn to join the discussion. “Are we under arrest, officer?” she asked, clearly knowing the answer already.

“No.” He said dumbly.

“Wonderful. I would ask that you simply contact us if you need any more questions answered. These three are all students of my college and she’s his assistant. I would be remiss if they continued to stay out late after an event like tonight.”

“There will be more questions,” he said pointedly. “It would be best if they stayed nearby.”

“We’re only a call away,” I said, getting up and stretching my arms over my head before reaching out in the air and activating my portal ability for good measure while staring the officer in the eyes as it opened mid air.

I became momentarily distracted as I tried to make my point, because behind the officer, the barricade that they had all erected was now lined with people. Some of them even had cardboard signs that were clearly made in a hurry. It looked like more than a few had been painted with fingers, but what really mattered was the fact that my name was on far too many of them.

“Oh look Ken, you have fans,” Des said, following my gaze.

“Alright, that’s enough for me tonight,” I said, suddenly in a desperate hurry to go anywhere else.