Sponsored Apocalypse 2, ch 6

Even before I'd been attacked, I'd gotten the lay of the land and figured that my greatest threat was that most of Caleb’s group were hunkered behind vehicles. Even though I'd just stolen  Hailey’s the Necromancer’s goblin summon, there were still plenty of potential magical abilities among them, not to mention firearms.

Behind me, the junkyard family was yelling in shock and anger, likely believing that I was dead or dying. But I noticed that none of them had shot yet. Neither had any of the aggressors other than Caleb himself, despite their hard-bitten looks. 

Probably surprisingly plenty of people, not only did I not fall, I reared back to throw the Lindstrom family hammer.  Then I let fly. I timed it such that my Angry Arrows ability was at max charge right before I threw, too. 

It wasn't very hard to hit an SUV at throwing distance, especially with enhanced strength. The hammer struck true. An explosion tore the vehicle apart and almost blew it over, the violence of the reaction causing glass and debris to shatter everywhere. At least two of the would-be attackers on the other side of the vehicle got a face full of hyper-velocity glass and went down screaming. One tried running away, and I lost sight of the other as I suffered from ringing ears and a little bit of disorientation.  I didn't let the pain or confusion slow me down. The crucible of the challenge portal I was beginning to learn had really focused my mental strength.

Sure enough, as I shook my head to clear it, I saw a few system notifications, including:

Congratulations, you have earned one willpower through demonstration. Your hard work continues to pay off.  Please note that natural stat increases are very rare.

Another I closed out said:

Congratulations on your Angry Arrows ability growing stronger. Your understanding and effectiveness deepens. 

I waved those windows and a couple of others away, including one about a stun debuff being countered by Built Different. I guess it wasn't just my armor that helped me deal with the explosion, I thought.  Then instinctively understanding how, I summoned the goblin wraith that I'd stolen with [Entity Domination] and sent it at the undamaged truck.

By this time, the attackers had recovered from their temporary daze.  The would-raiders opened up, and a few bullets ricocheted off the pavement near me. I was not clearly in their line of sight where I was standing in front of the jeep.  The Larsons also finally fired their weapons, but when they did, I winced in frustration. 

My temporary allies had loaded their shotguns with birdshot, and as far away as the attackers' truck was, it wasn't doing a whole lot. The windows shattered, but that was about it. The junkyard family wasn’t  even ranging the target correctly, so most of the pellets were dipping low and hitting the doors or skipping off the pavement. I did hear a yelp, maybe as one of the attackers got some birdshot in the shins. But at that range, and that energy, it probably didn't do much more than draw blood. 

The rifle bullets hitting close by were a great motivator to get off my ass.

I drew Private Malone’s Last Stand and ran forward, lunging at Caleb.  The man barely snapped out of his surprise before my magically elongated bayonet went right through his energy barrier and pierced his chest. He looked down in surprise at the blade before giving me a smile full of malice. "Should have known that when I got a barrier against projectiles, it would be a blade that took me out," he said, voice full of irony.  Then he coughed up blood.

The moment was grim, awful, and bloody. Killing people was nothing like killing monsters. But at the same time, I felt a lot different than I had when I’d seen Aldina kill.  For one, this was self-defense. And for another, I was just…different now. I yanked my blade out of the dying man, smacked away his pistol that he tried bringing to bear on me again, and savagely stabbed him so hard that my blade punched out his back hard enough to penetrate the car door behind him. After that, his eyes rolled up into his head, and I jerked my blade out in time to see my goblin summon jumping right over the top of the truck to attack the raiders on the other side.

With a thought, I recalled the Lindstrom family hammer back to my hand. I noticed now that at least a few of the windows of the jeep  I was behind had been shattered by flying debris from my earlier explosion or from the chaotic gun battle. I peeked around one side of the jeep  to see that the SUV I hit with my exploding hammer had rocked back to four wheels again. Once my hammer was charged enough with [Angry Arrows], I threw it fairly hard but this time, aimed at the ground in front of the SUV. 

My plan had been to cause the explosion to properly flip the vehicle. Instead, the hammer passed right under the first set of wheels and impacted with the back, rear tire. Instead of flipping it backward, the SUV flipped forward, rolling once. The explosion on the other side blew the tire off hard enough to zip all the way across the street and slam through a storefront.

At some point, the first guy that ran away, a middle-aged man with an AC/DC t-shirt, had stopped and fired his rifle at the Larsons or at me. Stopping to take pot shots ended up killing him because the [Angry Arrows] explosion was close enough that he bowled over and stopped moving. A moment later, my new, nasty little goblin summon came sprinting out of nowhere to slam a shard of glass into the man's chest. I blinked at the unexpected violence and realized that if the goblin was attacking the man on the ground, it must have already dealt with the others behind the truck. 

No wonder this group was so confident, I thought. Their spokesman and leader had had a force field, and the goblin summoned by itself had probably been enough to kill all of the Larsons. The Necromancer, Hailey Tindall, was probably already dead.  I didn’t know which woman she’d been, but one of the female raiders had been behind the truck when my first exploding hammer hit it.  If she wasn’t dead, she was wounded.

With a thought, I instructed my goblin summon to check.  If she wasn’t dead yet, I wanted her to be.  I shrugged as I thought through the logic.  Killing people felt terrible, but I wasn’t leaving a murderous caster, or mage, or necromancer lying around to zap me in the ass with poison or something.

The creepy goblin-thing scuttled to the shattered truck and began savagely attacking the bodies on the ground.  Hailey Tindall was likely among them.  Thinking helped me keep down my gorge, so my mind seemed to jump into overdrive.

I wondered what combination of abilities the group's probably necromancer had gotten to have such a strong summoned minion after only a few days. After some math in my head, I realized that maybe she could have pulled it off if she'd gotten some decent stats and was at least level fifteen, especially if her free skill had some sort of synergy. 

Actually, maybe I’m being too arrogant. The thought slowed me down.  After all, I had a fairly high level, but I'd gotten lucky. I didn't think I was particularly talented at leveling in this new world. And Bacon was extremely powerful, but he'd only been active for a few hours the day before. I had no idea how long this woman had had access to a summoned goblin with physical resistance in a world that had very few magical attacks yet. She probably could have just hid, sent in her goblin—my goblin now, I amended—and basically killed anything she wanted within limits.

Suddenly, the realization that the battle was truly over came crashing in on me, and adrenaline I was full of just as suddenly had nowhere to go. I leaned against the car and just breathed deeply for a few minutes. All I could hear behind me was the tinkling of small debris continuing to fall off the SUV that was about fifteen feet closer to me than it had been before, and a sick thumping noise that I couldn't place until I looked up and noticed that my goblin summon was methodically moving to every fallen enemy and hitting their corpses' heads with a rod. The thing was heading towards me, its gaze fixed on the fallen Caleb, when I dismissed it.

The summoned goblin disappeared in a swirl of green smoke that immediately vanished. 

"Holy fuck," I muttered.