‘There he is!’ Thought Karen. She was the leader of the group, though not by any consensus. She had some peculiar skills. One such skill was Beguile; it allowed her to warp the mind of a person, making them subservient to her in the extreme.
This was the skill she had relied on the most, using it to gain allies who would put her life before their own without question. Now, a month or two into the apocalypse, she’d been through several groups. The only galvanized who had survived so far was Michael, her main protector.
She had another skill she’d yet deigned to use, however. Reave; it allowed her to steal a skill from someone she had fatally wounded. But it was a unique skill, once used, it would disappear, replaced by the skill she stole. That’s why she’d been keeping it in her pocket till she found a skill she absolutely had to have.
“Amazing,” she said when she witnessed the Orb skill in use. “That’s it! I have to have it. It’s beautiful, deadly, and stylish. I need it.”
She’d been there when Jose had helped the people in Panama and had been following his trail ever since, hoping to find him and take one of his skills. He’d so far shown the most power and potential from all of the other galvanized she’d met since this all started.
Karen was even more impressed with Jose now that he’d somehow shaken off her Beguile skill. Thus far, no one else had managed the same feat.
She issued commands to her team as Jose fought the alpha dog. “Close in on the remaining dogs, then wait till he defeats the boss, and I’ll take my new skill.”
That is exactly what they did. They unloaded on the remaining dogs until their shields failed, riddled the larger ones with holes, and then moved on to the regular dogs.
By the time they were done, the boss had just fallen, and their savior was facing away from them. Karen ordered the others to hold their fire as she sighted in on him, borrowed a gun, and pulled the trigger.
***
[You have acquired a new skill…
Jose activated Volt-Gen after defeating the Harbinger and was reading his system prompt before going to help the others finish off the remaining monsters when he felt a sharp pain in his chest. He looked down to find six bullet holes exiting his torso, and disbelief clouded his mind.
“What?” He said as he reached for the wounds. Had they been aiming for the monster and shot him instead? Was this really happening? Had he just been shot by the people he risked his life to help?
His breathing was labored, and the pain hit him like a wrecking ball. He coughed out blood as he slowly turned to look at the others. Halfway through the turn he lost strength in his legs and tumbled to the ground.
An unnatural cold ran up his body, stealing his breath and sapping his strength. He was losing blood by the gallon while lying on his side, trying to fight the paralysis that held him fast.
Realization hit him like a wrecking ball as he heard the slow and calm steps approaching him. It was no mistake that he was shot. He’d been betrayed by the people he’d come to help.
A red hot anger rose in his chest, almost counteracting the inevitable cold creeping toward his chest. Why? Why would they do this? Why kill the person who’d just saved you from a terrifying monster? How? How had he gotten himself killed? How did he forget the lessons he’d learned not long ago?
He’d known, known that the world was riddled with shitty people that often did unexplainable things and had been cautious thus far. So why did he forget? Why did he risk himself for people he didn’t even know? Why did he turn his back on strangers while vulnerable?
The footsteps reached him, a blonde woman with blue eyes bent down and spoke. “Thanks for the help sweetie, and for the wonderful skill. This couldn’t have turned out better even if I had planned it myself.” She wore commando boots bloused over by black cargo pants and a white v-neck shirt revealing her ample cleavage.
She had taken something from him, he could feel it. It was like a part of him simply winked out in his soul. It was different from the death that loomed over him. Somehow more profound, something he couldn’t quite grasp, a part of who he was, an intrinsic part of himself just as important as his life.
The woman ruffled his hair like an adult would do to a cute kid and began walking away. “W…hy?” He’d managed to spit out the word between the spurts of blood flowing down his cheek, pooling in the floor around his face.
She stopped and turned on him, kneeling to stare into his eyes. Madness in her eyes and a grin on her face she spoke, “Why what darling?” She asked, almost as if she actually cared about his question. “Why are you dying? Because I shot you silly. Why did I shoot you? I already told you, didn’t I? You had something I needed, and killing you was the only way to get it.”
Stolen story; please report.
“Well, it is a shame really. I could have used a fierce protector like you in my team. But, oh well. Live and learn, I always say… Well, not for you of course silly, you unfortunately have to die. Anyways, nice seeing you again, but I have to get going, need to practice with my new skill and all.” He watched as she slowly walked away and her team followed.
Jose saw the madness in her eyes while she’d spoken. The things she said making no sense whatsoever. Seeing him again? Did he know her? What could he possibly have had that she needed so badly? What had she taken from him? He knew it was true when she said it, but still had no idea what it was he’d lost.
He studied every bit of her face and body, committing it to memory. She would pay for this betrayal, she was a dead woman walking and didn’t know it yet. He didn’t know how - his mind clouded with pain and turmoil over the current events - but he would survive and track her to the ends of the world if he had to.
A shivering cold ran up his bones, freezing his veins and stealing the very air from his lungs. He couldn’t think straight, his mind a whirling storm of questions, pain, anger, and despair. He weakly coughed as blood flooded out of his mouth, darkness encroaching from his peripherals. Slowly, he faded into oblivion.
***
Jose jumped at the sharp pain on his cheek. He opened his eyes to find a crow pecking at him. It was much too large, the size of a bald eagle. He smacked it away and sat up. Where was he? How did he get here? What was he doing?… What was with the feeling of Dejavu?
He sat on the ground rummaging through his brain collecting the scattered bits of memory from before he - blacked out again… Again? When had it happened before?
He had fought a beast and won. Then he met someone? No, not exactly met. More like, saw someone? And heard them speak. It was all hidden behind a fog.
The first memory he could clearly grasp was the hell he’d endured. He’d been shot, several bullets hitting his lungs and heart. Blood, there was so much blood, it had flowed out of his mouth, nose, ears, and the exit wounds on his chest. He reached up and felt the holes in his cuirass.
How had he survived? The more blood he’d lost, the colder he’d gotten. It was a weird kind of cold the kind that cut through the bones, and turned your insides to ice, and would not leave even if one were standing in front of a fire. The closer the feeling got to his heart, the weirder the pain, it was as if someone was pulling his soul away from his body while replacing it with that bitter cold.
At some point it had transitioned into a burning inferno. One second, he was freezing, and the next, he was burning. He felt as if he’d been cremated from the inside out; his bones incinerated, his muscles and inside calcined, and his flesh atomized to dust.
Then came the worst feeling of all, nothingness. It was accompanied by a phantom pain, unplaceable and all-consuming. A sharp pain that was nowhere and everywhere all at once, as he lay in a void. An echo chamber that only reverberated the phantom pain, somehow giving it different levels of agony accompanied by both fire and ice.
How had he survived the torture of it? Had he survived the torture of it? He was alive, of that he was sure. But was he sane? Was all of that real, or some hallucination that had driven him temporarily mad?
No, it was real. The memory of it, both physical and mental, was too strong and fresh to be a hallucination… Volt-Gen! He’d activated it right before he was shot. Did it continue working while he was slowly dying from the wounds? It had to have been that. There was no other explanation for his survival from such fatal wounds.
The woman, yes, he remembered now. There was a woman who’d stopped to do some cheesy villain monologue after shooting him and taking - something from him. What had she taken? He knew something was missing. But what? It couldn’t have been a physical object; she hadn’t even touched him for more than a second after all.
After spending some time racking his brain, Jose looked at his status. Then he froze. There, he found what had been stolen from him, or rather, he found something was missing. It was one of his skills, the most adaptable and useful skill, the one he relied on the most, Orb.
[Health: 280/305 Ether: 10/56
Level: 9
Soul: Ancient
Race: Sapient
Genus: None
Species: None
Strength: 18
Constitution: 20
Endurance: 20
Agility: 23
Dexterity: 17
Awareness: 18
Wisdom: 15
Capacity: 25
Free Points: 4
Skills: Strike, Volt-Gen, Crafting (Beginner), Bolt, Null-Bind]
How had she stolen it? How could anyone steal a skill? Did she use a skill of her own? Maybe a special one? He wasn’t sure. The only thing he knew was that he needed to find a way to track her down and make her pay, make her somehow return his skill.
In all the anger and confusion, he nearly missed the fact that he’d leveled up and had a new skill. The new skill was perfect for what he needed to do, at least, from the description it was.
[Null-Bind: Bind your enemies draining their life force and strength.]
He could feel it in his soul something was different about this skill. Maybe the interference from her stealing his skill at the same time he got a new one? The feeling was pushed to the back of his mind as he activated the new skill.
Two broadhead arrows materialized, one above each shoulder. They each had three expandable blades; he flexed his will, and the arrowheads expanded and detracted. The shafts were six-foot-long chorded lightning that wriggled in the air like flying snakes. The lightning was as black as a void in space. It pulled at the space around it, even sucking in any light near them.
He felt a giddiness at the thought of slowly killing her with that skill after what she’d done to him. Then he stopped short. What was happening to him? He was one to pay back double for any wrong done to him. But he’d never enjoyed it. It felt wrong to feel joy at hurting another person, no matter how much they deserved it.
Suddenly, he remembered the crazy feelings he’d had before fighting the Canis Herald. What was that? Did the she-devil use some type of mind control skill on him? Did those exist?
Of course they did, magic, skills, monsters, anything was possible now. She one hundred percent had used a mind control skill on him, and then she stole one of his skills after thinking she had killed him.
That bitch was much too dangerous to face before protecting his mind against such a skill. He needed to find a way to stop her from turning him into a statue and killing him, or worse, turning him into one of her puppets.
