Knives & Levels - Chapter 75

Colt sat outside the warehouse, which was a good way away from New Nashville, tucked in one of the reworked city's more ‘industrial’ patches. A big oak tree sat outside of it, a nice piece of nature compared to what had been some kind of paper packing place. But as with all of Nashville, nature had tried to claim it, wrapping the whole thing in vines as if it wanted to give it a nice firm hug.

He’d been here for a couple of hours, taking his break after they finally dragged the Minotaur the rest of the way to its prison.

Before him was Harry and his father.

“Crazy bastard,” the old man complained, his tattoos taking on a slight glow—they were part of his class. At least, that’s what Nate had told him.

“I did what I said we would do. Nothing more, nothing less,” Colt shrugged. In his hand was a cup of cold water, courtesy of Julia. Conjuring water was broken, too, in a way. It was one of the more valuable talents, aside from healing, when it came down to it.

Everyone needed to drink, and as long as Julia was with them, they would always have water on hand.

“You could’ve waited for us to take down the Minotaur,” the old man said, folding his arms.

“Pa—“ Harry tried to interrupt.

“No, this young’n needs a talking to. Risking yourself aint impressing anyone. You wanna live a long life? You gotta respect the dangers of the world.”

Colt stared at him. All the while he relished the feeling of the cold water sliding down his throat. Soon, he’d be heading to bed; there was a bed set up in the offices of this paper plant. He and the rest of his group would be taking turns watching their ‘prisoner,’ though even the Minotaur had settled down a bit after his threat.

Not sure how to diffuse this particular bomb.

“We’re not in the same world anymore. It was a test that I had to put myself through.” Colt responded.

“Bullshit, you could’ve gone with the rest of us. We showed up to do this, and here you go, taking care of it yourself.” The old man was still gruff.

“Pops, he kept us from danger.” Harry tried to calm him down, placing a hand on the old man’s shoulder, only for it to be shrugged off and for the old man to give him a dark look.

Colt saw how this was going, set his cup down, sighed, and stood straight. The old guy was turning those dark eyes his way.

“You have a death wish?”

“I’m strong.” Colt said, opening his hands and disabling his ‘Hide Status’ again, “Inspect me. I offered it before. I’ll show you what I’ve built. I’m strong by what we’ve seen. I’d fought that thing before. I knew how dangerous it was, and I had felt fear before I dived down to take it out. But when we made our plan, I knew that one of my most important roles was to minimize the risk to others by leveraging my strength. If I couldn’t do it, others could have died. I didn’t want anyone to die, so it was simple.”

The old man didn’t take him up on it, stern eyes still locked on Colt as he worked his jaw. “Are you going to be taking over once you bury Denny?”

This shut Harry up. His son stopped trying to interrupt the conversation and instead turned pale white, eyes flashing between them. There was that fear; Colt saw it plain, now keenly aware of his deficiency. It was odd how the loss of it influenced him now, and let him see it in others.

Now, as he saw those eyes and body language, he could figure out the source.

Obviously, this had been an ongoing conversation in their group. And it was the heart of what the old man was coming up here for. It was a fine question: ' Why replace one dictator with another?’ Colt shook his head and sighed.

“No, I don’t have a need to lead a city. I want to ensure this city protects the people around it and makes Nashville a safe place. But I don’t intend to ‘take over’; I want to get stronger. Getting stuck in a city and caring for constant administrative tasks isn’t for me.” Now, he felt the sensation of the old man Inspecting him. The guy’s eyes widened, his mouth firm, and he shook his head.

“You could just live a nice calm life. It’s not that damn complicated.”

“I did before. A lot of us did. It was death, trapped in the same kitchen every day, doing the same thing. I’m going to explore where this new world leads and see the sights it leads me to.”

The old man spat and shook his head, “It’s fine to come, conquer, and win—but the people you leave behind, I think you should be considering more what happens to them than what happens to you. You’re going to upend a city without a plan for leadership, and then you admit right now that you don’t have a heart in it to govern—and god help us, a man willing to dive into a fight with a beast like that certainly wouldn’t be a cautious leader, so I can’t tell if that’s better or worse.”

The old man was easing off, his words getting softer, his eyes growing less cold. Moreover, he looked worried for Colt. He rubbed at his eyes and sighed. Harry set a hand on his shoulder again, and this time, the old man didn’t shrug it off.

“If it’s what you want, you can go and lead New Nashville. I thought someone from the cop’s group might be good—or we could find the right person in the town itself. Hold a proper election, and develop a system of government like what we had before.”

“Are you going to go and swat down the next dictator that pops up?” The old man asked, turning away, his shoulders hunched.

“Who says there will be a next dictator?”

“Should be something you fear.” The old guy hobbled away, letting the question go unanswered. Harry looked apologetically over his father’s shoulder but didn’t come back to speak anymore. Colt simply watched them go.

He would do what he could to help—Denny, he personally knew was bad. But there was a limit to what one person could do. With what the power he had could do—it was impossible to say what was going to happen completely when their plan went through to completion. But fear of that hadn’t stopped him before, even when he’d been capable of it. So it sure wouldn’t stop him now.

Fear of progress was the fear of change. Some people got paralyzed at the starting line, too afraid to move because they might make the next step.

Maybe then, the cost that Cut had enacted was a blessing and not a sacrifice because now that didn’t sit there. He might move forward, step by step, confident at least that he was moving in a direction and not beholden to that crippling, paralyzing fear that so many tangled with on a daily basis.

It would not stop him.

But it did make him consider the old man’s question.

In his absence, who was the best leader for the town of New Nashville?

The old man wouldn’t want to lead; with an attitude like that, people would want him to lead even less. Harry was much too demure for a position in charge of a city during an apocalypse. The cops, maybe? They had the discipline and understood the law, but did that make them capable of rebuilding society? Some kind of coalition maybe?

Colt mulled the question over, sitting back down and sipping his water—eyes to the sky. His sleep had been messed up lately. He’d needed less than ever, but keeping wrecking his sleep cycle was still not good, especially when his biggest fight was coming soon. As much as he loathed it, sleep was a sacrifice he’d need to make.

Just like he’d made with Cut, though he felt the lack of fear now, and the implications were still dawning on him, he’d become stronger. Which is what he needed.

If he was their greatest weapon, he needed to make sure that his blade stayed as sharp as possible.

###

Sarah sat with crossed legs on the roof of the warehouse. Down below was the cut-up massacre of a monster that Colt had butchered the day before. Luckily, their group didn’t have to do much today other than keep guard in case Denny had some way of tracking his monster down.

That thought was scary and would send their plan to hell in a quick few seconds—but so far, it hadn’t happened. So she tried not to worry about it.

Instead, she kept trying to meditate.

And getting nowhere. Every minute she focused on her breath and worked on that damn skill, another thought popped into her skull, another thing to worry about and dwell on instead of focusing on this annoying ephemeral thing known as Edict.

She trained hard. She understood the importance of following a training regimen—she got the concept of trusting the process—but these Edicts weren’t rigid; they were a wishy-washy surreal grasp of reality. Quite unreasonable. She’d rather be punching a bag to practice her form and see the results that way than this bullshit.

She yearned for the days of taking to the mats and having a simple spar under the eyes of a mentor. That was straightforward then this hippe-dippie universal garbage.

There was a noise of someone climbing up, and she opened her eyes—squinting in the sunlight as she saw Nate there. The soldier walked up carefully and settled in next to her.

“Still working on it?”

“Can’t get anywhere. I’m annoyed, man. How do you all have this down already—I’m the same level as Julia; I only have ten points less in Soul than you, yet somehow you’re already walking around with an Edict, and here I am holding us all behind.”

Nate rubbed at his chin, and stubble started to form there. The guy hadn’t put too much of a priority on his appearance since the world ended; Sarah didn’t blame him. Who gave a shit about looking their best when you’d spent a good couple of weeks thinking you were to starve to death and have your corpse gnawed on by little knee-goblins.

Just the thought of it started to get her blood boiling.

“Here—I’ll let my Edict out, see if you can feel it,” Nate said, pulling out a metal pipe he’d stolen from the building below.

So the guy had come up here with an objective.

Sarah snorted. On the one hand, she felt touched he went through the effort to come and try to help her; really, that gesture meant a lot. “You could be helping them contact our allies and setting the plan up.”

“Time tomorrow for that. You could be getting rest if we’re going there.” Nate said, rolling the pipe around in his hand. Both of them knew that neither of them was likely to do so. Their cop friends were happily running courier now, getting everyone together to come and see the captured Bull—tomorrow would be a big day, too.

They would be sending Denny a personal message, and how he received it would dictate everything about their coming battle.

At most, if he gathered all his soldiers and tried to mow them down—it would be a bloody affair in the streets of Nashville, and she wasn’t sure if they’d win. The idea of leading all these people to a bloody death for war for a city she didn’t even care about left a bad taste in her mouth, but leaving Jimmy in the hands of that bastard left an equally bad taste in her mouth.

Then there was the matter of Nick.

She wanted to punch his nose in and crack a rib or two—how dare he betray them. Just the thought of him got her worked up and wanting to punch something. The moment she’d heard Colt say the light archer shot him—her vision had went red.

“Focus,” Nate instructed, still rolling the piece of metal in his hand. However, somehow, when Sarah was in her head, that metal pipe morphed into a ball of metal along the way. Which he still rolled. “Can you feel my Edict? I’m not controlling it very well, and in applying it, it’s thicker in the air than the rest of the background ones, those that always exist, but we can’t feel.”

Sarah stared at his hands, mesmerized by how the metal had become a type of putty now. She felt a little heat coming off it, but it didn’t glow red like she would figure liquid metal should.

But no, there was no mystical mumbo-jumbo in the air. Wait—she felt a hint of something; it was like a whisper in the wind. Something that might’ve been there but could’ve been her imagination. Then it was gone again.

It annoyed her. She felt a fire of anger rise at her own inability. If it wasn’t for everyone else in her group saying the same kind of lines, she’d have thought she was going crazy. That and seeing Colt throw around golden lines of death now and knowing he wasn’t invested in magic at all.

“Nothing.”

Nate shook his head. 

“That is fine. Don’t beat yourself up about it; keep on trying to focus. I have the next couple of hours to kill, so I’ll work on my Edict here with you. See if you can feel it. If not, don’t worry; we can always try again.”

Like that, Nate went right back to silence, working on the metal in his hand, shaping it into something. First, it took the form of a dagger. Not unlike that piece of metal he’d been working on for a week. Only that one had taken forever to change shape—this one was a little more or less like clay in his hands, bending, curving, twisting how he wanted.

She watched.

And as she watched, she only felt the annoyance at herself grow. Felt that lack of where she was compared to everyone else around her—wondering what was wrong with her.

That morning wasn’t very productive.

But it was what it was. The next morning, when she rose bright and early, she knew it was going to be a hell of a day.

They were going to deliver a letter to Denny requesting an exchange of hostages. He would bring Jimmy, and they would bring the Minotaur—and then they would rid the world of both the Minotaur and Denny in one fell swoop.