Calm down. Think. I just got my new Class Ability last week.
Chris’s C-ranked Class, Ranger, didn’t mesh well with his Myst Core, but the Class itself was good at surviving, and that was exactly what he needed to do right now.
His Class had given him the Decoy Ability at level fifty. All he needed to do was break line of sight.
Chris glanced at the alley behind him, then back to the melas sitting on the well, seemingly lost in her book.
In order to break line of sight, he needed a distraction.
Chris took a deep breath and funneled the Myst out of the flaming pit in the center of his soul. He reached in and grabbed the hand of the biggest badass he could find, tearing the creature through the barrier between worlds and into existence.
Directly between the two of them.
“Who dares summon—”
Decoy.
Chris leapt straight back, leaving a live-action decoy of himself standing right where he had been, picture-perfect down to the thick blond hair and cocky grin, and landed directly behind the newly summoned hellspawn.
Predictably, Chris felt the jabbing sensation in his heart when the demon was slaughtered, but he was already turning the corner of the alley.
At this rate, she wouldn’t even know where he’d—
“Hurk!” Chris’s breathing ended in a pained grunt as something snatched him by the collar.
Desperate, Chris swung the machete behind him wildly, aiming to catch the alien with the blade and force her to let him go.
Instead, something caught his arm. Chris didn’t have any time to think before his arm snapped the wrong way, wrenching a scream out of his lungs.
Something kicked his knees out, and dragged his other arm behind him, breaking that in the process, too.
“Come on then.” The melas’s rich voice spoke from directly behind him. “Let’s get this over with.”
Steely fingers clamped around Chris’s skull, and he tried to fight them off, but he did little more than flop his arms and scrape dirt up with his boots as the alien dragged him to the center of town.
“Here we go. Try not to be a little bitch. This is for posterity.”
“Wha—” Chris couldn’t quite follow the creature’s meaning, glancing up at her in confusion as she produced a little sphere on a tripod and set it on the edge of the well, fiddling with it like a cameraman trying to get the best angle.
Suddenly a picture of her appeared on the wall of every building, directly in front of the cowering citizens of the town. Those who hadn’t take the opportunity to fuck off yet, anyway.
Directly in front of him, deformed by the shoddy craftsmanship of the well, Chris could make out his own face, eyes widening.
“Ah, there we go,” she said, straightening in front of what was presumably a magical camera.
“Greetings citizens, this is Imperial Enforcer Vresh Tekalis, dispatched to the west reaches of the empire upon reports of a reaper.
“Reaping is defined as the systematic murder of sapient individuals in order to gain levels at an accelerated pace. It is an intolerable cancer on our society, a direct violation of the Sacarus Accord, and the punishment is death.”
Chris watched his own eyes go wide.
“I, Vresh Tekalis, have found this human guilty of reaping and will now carry out his sentence.” The orange-skinned woman brandished Chris’s machete.
“Please, please!” Chris babbled, eyes watering as his heart began pounding, drowning out the woman’s response.
Chris felt the rough, notched blade rest against his neck, dull from the hundreds of people he’d executed that very afternoon.
Then he felt her start sawing.
Chris Acker watched himself get decapitated.
***Vresh Tekalis***
Vresh grimaced as she worked. She deliberately sawed the man’s head off his twitching body. Slowly. Not because she enjoyed it, but because it had to be horrific. The video had been shared to every man and woman above the age of majority, and it was meant to be seen as a stiff reminder:
Yes, we are watching.
Yes, we will find you.
Gross, Vresh thought, tossing the head aside, and continuing with her rote lines.
“The sentence has been carried out,” Vresh said, swallowing the urge to puke. She couldn’t be seen to be unwilling to perform her duties, despite how little joy she took in them. Appearances mattered. “Ending transmission.”
She reached out to tap the button on the top of the spherical camera, but the blood on her fingers caused it to slip, sending the camera toppling backwards into the well.
“Eep!” She lunged forward and nearly caught it, but the little sphere slipped out of its tripod and fell downward, spinning as it receded down the well.
“Phooey!”
I’m gonna have to buy another one out of pocket, she thought sourly. That made this her third lost empire-wide transmitter. Those things didn’t grow on trees, and her quartermaster was sure to give her a merciless reaming.
***Jebediah Trapper***
“She seems cute,” Jeb said, moments after the video feed hit the water and abruptly cut off. The image of the horned woman’s pouty face flickering in front of the camera as it receded down the well lingered with him.
“In a…just-killed-a-guy kind of way?” Smartass asked, raising a tiny brow.
“Kind of?” Jeb said, waggling his fingers. The contrast between the woman who’d literally sawed a man’s head off and the girl fumbling and giving a frustrated ‘phooey’ was highly amusing to him.
Smartass opened her mouth to say something, but was cut off by Jeb’s stomach, growling ominously in displeasure.
“Breakfast?” Jeb asked, pushing himself to his foot, leaning against the alleyway’s walls to stabilize himself. Jeb stifled a yawn as he slipped on his pegleg with a bleary grumble before using it to nudge his trash camouflage over his valuables.
People usually weren’t interested in digging through trash.
