Unwillingly Summoned: Chapter 21 – Kill or Be Killed

I know everybody has been waiting a long time for this, but I didn't abandon this story. Here's proof. A chapter. A whole chapter. With words and everything! Enjoy! ~Eric

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In a particularly academic corner of his mind, James noted the difference between getting in a fight and taking a beating. Having been in a few fights and gotten banged up, he thought he understood what the latter meant. He had not understood. Fighting someone left you with a sense of agency, a belief that you could do something. Even if that fight was horribly lopsided, you could act. Defend yourself. Inflict damage on the other person. In the right light, it could even be thought of as empowering. You rise or fall based on your skill, endurance, and that mercurial idea known as a pain threshold.

Taking a beating was an almost precise inversion of that. It was, in James’s humble opinion, one of the most disempowering things a person could go through. You couldn’t act. Odds were good that you couldn’t even stand up. You weren’t defending yourself, just desperately trying to limit the damage to vital organs like your brain. Things like endurance and your pain threshold didn’t matter. Why? Because, even if you reached their limits, the people handing out said beating were probably just going to keep on hitting you.

Not that James particularly cared about those kinds of distinctions at the moment. He cared a lot more about the people who were trying very hard to kick him to death. He was pretty sure that he’d already be dead if not for the armor effects that had been magically baked into his ridiculously dark lord-looking gear. He probably had those to thank for the fact that his ribs hadn’t splintered like kindling and his spine hadn’t been reduced to bone dust already. But even those defenses could only take him so far. The sheer volume of blows meant that he was certainly taking all kinds of soft tissue damage.

He’d coughed up blood already. Although, given how much his face hurt, that might have been bleeding from his mouth rather than internal bleeding. Maybe. If he was very, very lucky. But, since he was still getting kicked around like a ball at a soccer camp, luck didn’t seem to be shining down on him. Parts of his body had started going numb. That left him mildly concerned. That he was only mildly concerned left him very concerned. He wasn’t sure how many blows to the head he’d taken. It was enough that he wasn’t thinking clearly at all. That was probably why it took him several long seconds to realize that he wasn’t getting hit anymore. A voice drifted into his consciousness from somewhere that sounded very distant.

“Still alive? You must be tougher than you look.”

James felt a bizarre sense of displacement. It took him a moment to realize that he’d been hoisted into the air. Something deep inside was screaming at him to do something. To do it now! It even sounded like a good idea, but he couldn’t string enough thoughts together in any sensible order to come up with a plan. There was another jarring sense of displacement followed by a very abrupt stop that sense fresh waves of agony through him. It took too long for his mind to even start putting things together again. By the time he had managed to shake a few of what had to be concussion cobwebs loose, something that felt like a metal vice had wrapped around his throat. He was slammed against the wall again and everything went briefly dark. When consciousness found him again, someone was yelling questions at him.

“How dare you? How dare you, you outworlder piece of trash? How dare you deny the will of the king?”

James could barely crack his eyes open enough to get a look at the loud questioner. He didn’t recognize the man. He did recognize that the beet red shade of the man’s face and the white-hot fury in the man’s eyes weren’t just going to blow over after he’d yelled for a while. When that vice around his throat started to tighten, it finally dawned on James that he might really die here. This man, whoever he was, hadn’t come to beat him up. He’d come to kill James. This wasn’t a spar or practice. This was literally kill or be killed. He reached up and tried to claw at the thing around his throat, but that didn’t get him anywhere. The crazed man just seized his wrist and twisted.

The pain from having the bones in his forearm snapped was enough to cut through all of the other pains wracking his body. James let a choked screamed, but there was one, arguable side benefit. The rush of adrenaline partially jolted him out of the mental stupor that he’d been in. He knew that he had to do something fast before the psychotic attacking him got tired of hurting him and decided to end it. A moment that was fast approaching by the way darkness was closing in around the edges of his vision. There had to be a way out of this. The arm that had been numbed by the first blow had finally started to get some feeling back into it. It was flopping weakly.

Then, his palm landed on the hilt of one of his daggers. He closed his hand around it as hard as he could. The grip still felt weak, but it was getting stronger. This was a race between the blood flow being cut off from his brain and the nerves in that arm restoring function. He clung to consciousness as hard as he could even as a dreadful pounding grew louder and louder in his ears. He thought he heard screaming. Maybe he was screaming. He couldn’t tell anymore. The grip on his throat relaxed just a big, and he managed to drag in tiny gasp of air. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it did stave off unconsciousness for a few more precious seconds. James opened his eyes and saw that the psychotic was looking over his shoulder at something.

This is it, thought James. I won’t get another chance. He summoned every last of willpower he had and tried to shove it into his arm, willing the muscles to become stronger and functional. He pulled the dagger free and plunged it toward the man’s neck. The psychotic must have sense something because looked toward James again. The motion threw off what had already been a shaky aim. Even so, the edge of the dagger ripped open the side of the psychotic’s neck. By the spray of blood, James figured he must have hit an artery.

He wasn’t sure if that was good enough to kill really powerful people in this world, but it must have been dangerous enough. The vice around James’s neck vanished, and he collapsed to the ground, trying to breathe and trying to see what the psychotic was doing. The man did look genuinely panicked as he clamped one hand down on the wound, and scrabbled at a case hanging from his belt. James watched with growing horror as the man pulled out what had to be a healing potion, even if it was glowing a golden green color that James had never seen before. There was a brief whistling sound like something moving through the air very fast. Both men stared as the hand fell off at the wrist, causing another spray of blood.

“I was looking for one of those,” said Seiran, appearing next to the psychotic.

She snatched up the potion and the hand. Examining the hand, she gave the psychotic a bright, cheerful smile.

“Well, well,” she said, holding up the severed hand. “Would you look at that. A signet ring. Should be fun explaining why you don’t have that anymore, Captain.”

“Seiran,” James croaked, but that was all he could get out.

“Hang in there, kid. Don’t drink a healing potion unless you absolutely have to.”

James couldn’t think of a single reason why he wouldn’t drink one. That sounded like terrible advice. He didn’t think he was actually going to die right that minute, though. So, despite every instinct telling him he should do whatever he possible could to make this earth-shattering pain inside of him go away, he held off. Instead, he made himself look around. There were bodies strewn all over the place. James’s eyes bulged when he saw Chrosan pick a man up by the leg and hurl the poor bastard into a nearby wall. Even so, things didn’t look good. There were at least a dozen people, well-armed people, in a loose semi-circle around them. None of them looked eager to rush in, probably because Sig had massive fireballs hovering over each hand.

“You dumb bitch,” snarled the psychotic. “You attacked Royal Guards. You’ll all lose your heads for this.”

James looked at the man. He had another empty potion bottle in his hand. It was both fascinating and grotesque to watch the savage wound on the man’s neck close. The missing hand didn’t regrow. The skin just closed over the wound, leaving a nub. If the threat worried Seiran, it certainly didn’t show. She just laughed.

“Oh, I think you’re confused. You attacked a member of the Adventure’s Guild. A member in good standing. And you did it in broad daylight, you halfwit. The only people who are going to lose their heads for this are you and your lackeys.”

“That only happens if any of you survive,” said the, apparently, captain of the Royal Guards. “These peasants will say anything we tell them to say.”

“Will they now?” said a chipper feminine voice from above.

James tried to look up, but the lightning arcs of pain that shot through, well, everything told him what a monumentally stupid idea that had been. He had a lot of questions he needed to ask, but it seemed that his body was done. He collapsed the rest of the way to the ground as darkness closed in around him. The last thing he heard was the same chipper voice.

“Oh my. That does look painful.”