32.

  “Trevor, trigger the ambush. Santiago will be right behind and will protect you. Bo, you stick tight with Dexter. This is the only passage through this section, but after this I think we will be clear of this dungeon. Just don’t accidentally stab each other.” Duncan looked at each of them until he got an acknowledgement.

  Santi was still irritated after their last verbal sparring and having to follow the Apostate’s orders did little to relieve that irritation. He nodded and let the morph turn into a short sword, the tight confines of the canyon calling for something a bit easier to use. Trevor shrugged off his pack, rolling his shoulders and shaking his arms out. He grabbed his club and slowly inched his way into the canyon.

  Nothing happened.

  He kept moving slowly. Cautious step by cautious step, eyes sweeping about as he moved in a crouch. Santi could see the nervous energy radiating off of him as he walked. Santi followed after, walking more confidently than the other man as he looked from the corner of his eyes at the cracks and crevices that the ambushers would be hiding in.

  The rock face was covered in cracks and gullies, shadowed and hard to see through, but Santi saw the gleam of eyes. Not often or in great numbers, but they were there and it set him on edge. He couldn’t get a close enough look to [Identify] the monsters, but he had to assume they were stronger than the elementals were but weaker than the boss they had fought.

  Bo and Tank followed after, Duncan nowhere to be seen. Santi hated to admit that the Apostate was good enough to move without him sensing him now. Dunan had managed to become a Champion and it showed. Santi had taken him off guard with his spell sense, but he had quickly adapted and was now invisible to him.

  The first of the attacks happened swiftly, an albino lizard scampered out of the crevice and leapt at Trevor. Its six legs pumped the air as it crossed the gap in the flash of leathery skin. Dagger teeth opened and Trevor was spinning with his club coming to intercept the gecko.

  Canyon Gecko lvl. 58

  Trevor was too slow. The level disparity was too much for the man to close the gap. Santi crossed the distance in a heartbeat, shoving off hard and extending his sword and turning it into a lance. The tip of the lance caught the gecko between the second and third pair of legs and pierced through its skin with ease.

  It gave a sharp cry, wide mouth open fully as its scream echoed down the canyon walls. Santi hefted it up high and let it bleed out across the ground as he looked around the canyon walls. Geckos crawled out of the crevices, eyes blinking slowly as they lined the walls.

  “I think we just fucked up,” Tank whispered behind him. Santi had to agree with that assessment. They probably should have sneaked through the canyon. Without lifting a dying gecko up and letting it bleed out while its family watched. Santi shrank the lance and flicked the dying gecko towards the wall. It splattered with bone crushing force and fell limp.

  “They’re fast and probably have a good bite strength. Low durability and no types of special attacks. Just crush the fuckers,” Santi said. His eyes were stuck on the blood pooled on the rocks. The curse rose like a dark tide inside of him, starved for hours now, and its hunger was painful.

  “Oh, that’s not good,” Tank’s whisper was loud enough everyone heard.

  “Run,” Santi said, voice strained. Trevor and Bo listened immediately, breaking into sprints and rushing past him. Tank hesitated a moment before he followed after them. Santi followed behind, blade flashing and carving through geckos as they leapt at him.

  The fast bastards scurried and clung to the walls with ease, moving fast enough that it was a challenge for Santi to keep up. The first kill hadn’t been indicative of how hard the animals were to kill. They were fast and changed direction with violence, their six legs finding traction with ease as they scuttled all around him.

  A leg was lost here, a tail there, a foot here. Still he wasn’t able to pin them down and the frustration mingled with the iron scents of blood in the air as Santi panted heavily, his willpower straining to keep the curse under control.

  [Crosscurrent-Orb] blew apart a group of them, sending the geckos scattering across the canyon. Trevor made it to the end of the canyon and ran right outside of it without looking back. Bo was a half second behind him and then Tank. As Santi got to the end of the canyon pain flared through his ankle and he looked down to see one of the squat geckos biting down on his ankle.

  “FUCKER!” Santi screamed, pain and rage mingling as he cut the gecko in half. Blood pulsed, pressure building behind his eyes as he warred against the power of the curse. Bo and Tank were only half way through the canyon and Santi whirled about to look down the canyon. The walls were covered with the scurrying geckos and [Gust] howled down the canyon.

  The lizards grabbed to the walls, their sticky feet holding tight as the burst wind swept by. Santi slashed at two of the closes, the morph extending into whip form to slash them apart with a flick of his wrist. They were incredibly squishy, but their speed was impressive. The bite on his ankle was throbbing, blood pooling into his boot as he grunted and limped backward.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Duncan materialized behind the rows of hunkered down geckos. He massacred the closest lizards, burst damage skills flashing in waves as the lizards died all around him. The man was using Santi as a bait trap, collecting experience to level with ease as the slippery geckos were just beginning to move again after Santi’s spell.

  “Get through the canyon,” Santi yelled, slashing another of the geckos and watching as its blood pulsed out of its missing limbs.

  Duncan rolled his eyes, but danced past the scurrying monsters. He was graceful, avoiding attacks by the barest of margins, every slash of his long knife killing another lizard. Santi didn’t want to admit how good the man was, but his skill was showing as his levels had crept up since their encounter.

  Duncan dashed past Santi and Santi reactivated [Gust] to pin down the other lizards before he retreated through the gap of the canyon. The lizards kept scurrying out, dozens of them filling the small canyon like a tsunami but they stopped at the edge of the gulley and ran around hissing and growling before retreating back into the crevices they had been hiding in.

  “That was the most fun I’ve had since coming back,” Duncan said. Santi looked around and realized it was just the two of them.

  “And what have you been doing back since we’ve come back?” Santi asked.

  “Dalton Fage, Amanda Johnson, Julia Harden, and Nicholas Spatz.”

  “All of them are Champions. Were Champions,” Santi said, though he could feel the beginning edges of horror creeping in to chill his blood. Duncan looked at him and smiled grimly.

  “I was an accountant. Didn’t do much in my life before this. Work, home, gym, repeat. Boring life, but it allows you to save money. I can’t tell you how long we planned this out. Figuring out who needs to be where and when. Tracking down and finding out where people were right before the integration. Years of planning and you damn near ruined it all.” Duncan looked over his shoulder and down the narrow passage where the others had disappeared down.

  “It’s an intricate plan with redundancy after redundancy. Silas not making the jump hurt. He had a list longer than you are tall to do, we all do. We made contact after the jump, amazing that we could remember our phone numbers after nearly a decade. Changed things about, covered some of Silas’s duties. Some of the secondary objectives had to be dropped.”

  “So you just came back in time and talked on the phone?” Santi whispered. He couldn’t muster his normal sarcasm. He knew what was coming.

  “For the first day. About six hours of planning had to be done to accommodate your little stunt. Six valuable hours. When I knifed Dalton outside of his house it was strange. Never killed anyone without the System. Was half expecting a notice to still pop up in my feed. Instead he just gurgled at me, so confused and scared. He didn’t look like he did, you know. He was pudgy and had a bad combover. His wife screamed as I stabbed him, over and over. Never felt more alive than I did escaping after that. No skills or spells or overpowered stats. Just my brain and planning.”

  Santi remembered Dalton as a serious bald man who looked carved from stone. A titan of muscle and strength that had stood against the tides of cultists, invaders, and monsters without hesitation. He had been one of the most prominent of the Champions who had persecuted the war against the Apostates with a fervor that was impossible to match. He had killed two Apostates in personal combat during the war over the span of three years.

  “Amanda was easy. She was a literal layover stop for me. Left the airport and went to her job. Walked right into the back and got her as her coworkers screamed. I can understand now frontline fighters. The spray of blood and the look of them falling to the ground at my feet. It’s intoxicating. I enjoy killing a person when they don’t know i’m even in the same room as them, but this isn’t a bad way to do it.”

  Santi wanted to be sick. Amanda had been a healer. Thousands owed their lives to her. She had stopped plagues with a wave of her hand, swept down onto battlefields and simply stopped death for minutes at a time.

  “I tried for her twice back in the original timeline. Nearly got her the second time, but her protector was too good. They were a good duo. It felt good to see her go down and her wounds to not just seal over. Julia was day two. Broke into her house and used her service weapon on her. She never even heard me.” Duncan paused and looked at Santi and he finally saw the gleam in his normally flat eyes.

  “Nicholas was right as the System activated. I thought I’d get a title for that, but I missed it. Someone must have killed someone in the first moments. Took me five minutes to get to him.” Duncan smiled widely.

  “Then there were goals during the opening days. Establishing alcoves of survivors who give tribute to the Patron. Eliminating leadership in groups. Leveling, lots and lots of leveling. Then there was you. You’re just a box for us to tick off. That was a mistake. Should have gotten to you before the System activated. I knew where you were and everything.”

  “Daphne,” Santi murmured, a picture of the woman’s face flashing through his mind. The picture was blurry, her features twisted and changing until she was literally nothing more than a blur in his mind.

  “Yes. She gave us a whole rundown on you. Only took ten minutes. You didn’t accomplish much and spent so much time just hiding. I really thought you’d be cowering around, maybe a bit stronger or that’d you’d run. We were all wrong about you. And it cost me,” Duncan whispered those last words as he stared down at the ground.

  “Fuck you. Fuck you for taking them away. They were heroes. They save lives, and you…you,” Santi choked on his rage and sorrow. He hadn’t been close to any of them, all four of the Champions so far above him socially that he’d only ever met them a few times.

  But he’d known of them.

  “Tyrants. Murderers. Sociopaths. All four of them. Twisted by the world until there was nothing left inside of them resembling humanity. There were more, so many more names I could have taken. But those were the four worst.”

  Santi was trembling in rage. He wanted to kill this vile creature. This shadow assassin with his dead eyes that only showed life when he spoke about his victims.

  “Come on, we have the rest of this dungeon to clear,” Duncan said softly, turning and heading toward the others, leaving Santi behind.