Chapter 15: Loyal To A Fault

What the state would call a ‘young man’ but is truly just a boy, kneels in his cell. He knows what is coming, he knows he has kicked the hornet’s nest too hard this time, so he prepares.

He wants to be making caltrops, but supplies are rather limited. Instead, he runs a small snapped piece of wood from a rec room chair against the rough concrete floor of his cell, hoping to sharpen it into a shiv in time.

Unfortunately, judging by the hallway light source suddenly becoming obscured, he has run out of time.

The scrawny teenage boy looks up, his one good eye drifting up to see what he has heard described as a “Brick Shithouse” of a man taking up his doorway. The man stands almost casually, bruised-knuckle hands in his pits as his massive arms cross his chest. He doesn’t lean, relaxed, but his stance isn’t aggressive either. Just ready.

His blue juvenile hall scrubs are only a little loose, as they are on everyone here, but it is noticeable on him as he has that deceptive body type where muscles are hidden by a small layer of fat, making him truly take up nearly the entire doorway.

He looks down at the boy, ready, expectant, but not necessarily preparing to do something. Dark brown eyes set in an intentionally hard and neutral face, framed by that chin curtain of a beard most young black men grow as their first facial hair that meets his ‘duke’ styled hair. He just stands, taking in everything.

The boy lets a single errant thought of “how do black guys keep their hair styled in jail?” fly off before he springs into action.

He ditches his unfinished shiv to the side and instead, clumsily coming to his feet, goes for the low blow. His testicle-punch misses as the big guy simply drops his hands to block and shifts his stance. The poorly thrown punch simply impacts the hand and thigh, and so he goes for a punch to the side of the gut, by the kidney. His arm is simply grabbed, wrist engulfed by the black guy’s busted hands. The large boy sounds as if he’s trying to say something, but the feisty little upstart instead tries to swing a leg to kick the side of his guest’s knee. Instead, the larger boy just wraps his arms around the littler one and restrains him in a bear hug.

“Ey— ey— EY! I ain’t— I ain’t gonna hurt you! But if you keep fucking swinging I will!”

He picks the younger boy up and tosses him onto his bed. The one-eyed boy scrambles to right himself, sees the door unblocked and makes a break for it only for his scrub shirt to get grabbed by the other boy and yanked back to the bed.

“Chill man! Chill the fuck out!” The older boy yells out while stepping back, hands raised in the air placatingly.

The younger boy breathes hard on the bed, looking about while frozen stiff in a crumpled position, like a cornered rat.

The big, slightly flustered black guy just stands there, scratching the side of his head as he awkwardly contemplates where to go from here. Conversational skills lacking, he picks a terrible option to start with.

“You punch wrong.”

When nothing follows that statement, the smaller ratty boy asks “What?” to make sure he heard him right.

“You punch wrong. You’re sorta just whipping out from the shoulder. You need more weight behind it or it won't do much.” The big guy begins to take a proper stance, spacing his feet to balance.

“Weight wins fights, so never fight a fat guy. You wanna put the whole body behind your punch so you put one foot slightly back, then rotate from the hip as you straighten out. Like this.”

The big man shadow boxes in front of his captive audience, showcasing a proper punch.

Confused, with survival instincts flaring up in disconnected parts of his brain and garbling his thinking, the younger boy speaks up.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Cuz you punched me and it sucked, barely felt it. You weigh what; 80, 90 pounds? If you’re gonna be throwing hands you don’t got a pound to spare, need all of ‘em behind it.”

“No, I mean, why are you telling me this after isolating me in my cell?”

The big guy looks slightly abashed, awkwardly leaving his boxers stance and says “Oh, uh— ya see I… I just wanted to prove I wasn’t tryna hurt ya?”

The younger boy has unfolded himself from his crumpled pile of limbs and now sits up on his bed, head tilted to the side in an incredulous expression.

The bigger man sucks his teeth before continuing.

“Man, fuck it. I’m here cuz you pissed some people off, alright? No, don’t freak out again! They want me to fuck you up but I ain’t gonna. You just got a big mouth— that don’t mean you should get your ass beat— ya gotta learn but ya don’t gotta learn that way, ya know? I know some guys like you, so… yeah.”

The whole time while the big guy dug himself an ever deeper conversational hole, the other boy’s head just kept tilting in confusion almost to the point of popping it right off his neck.

The big guy drags a hand down his face in exasperation, finally giving up.

“Name’s Demarcus, I’m tryna look out for you man.”

He holds out his hand for the kid. Gingerly, his caution overshadowed by his confusion, he takes it and Demarcus daps him up.

“Horatio.”

“Really?” Demarcus asks, then rescinds when he sees Horatio’s falling expression. “Nah, cool name. When ya get out Horatio?”

“I’ve got 6 more months.” Horatio replies.

“A’ight, I’ve got 4. I’ll help you out for a bit but you gotta not cause me trouble, yeah?”

Cautiously, not intending to listen to this guy and knowing all too well about the concept of a ‘prison bitch’, Horatio nods.

“You got folks outside waiting on you?” Demarcus asks.

Horatio shakes his head, trying to go for cold, hard, criminal but fails to hide the meekness and fundamental fear behind it.

“Yeah, I didn’t neither. But I know a guy— Higgy. Scams the foster system to let him take in specific kids and let’s us do whatever while he gets paid for it. If you’re cool, don’t give me any shit, I might be able to set you up. I’ll give you a phone number before I leave.” Demarcus offers.

A small, scrawny bit of desperate hope is kicked to his knees in the gutter of Horatio’s mind.

“Now, I gotta make it look like I hurt ya otherwise someone’ll do it instead. So, I gotta cut your lip a bit.”

***

“I thought I lost you.” Demarcus repeats, whispering into the top of my head. His body reeks of sweat and hemalymph, soaked even through the chainmail pressing uncomfortably into my cheek, but I couldn’t care less.

“Hrmphagurmphuma” I mutter into his chest, attempting to speak with squished lips.

A floor slowly giving up beneath us, and the violent kick of a telephone pole of a spider leg sends me and Demarcus sprawling.

“We gotta go! The stairs!” Mato yells, grabbing me by the crook of my arm and yanking me to my feet.

“C’mon!” I yell to Demarcus, holding out my hand to help him up— more as a formality as I definitely can’t lift him.

With a genuine smile, the smile of a man who doesn’t care about anything else anymore now that he’s found what matters, Demarcus slaps a gauntleted hand into my own, grabbing something off the ground as he stands and we both take off for the spiral stairs down.

Our voices rattle as we sprint down the stairs after Mato, I keep stumbling as I have my head nearly completely turned around to look at him. I can feel the smile pushing its way across my face.

Demarcus looks like absolute shit. One eye is nearly swollen shut from a spiderbite, and he’s covered with all kinds of gunk, but despite that, he’s happy.

He has a chainmail shirt and hood with a black cloth shirt over the front of it, he keeps the chainmail hood down. For once, his Duke hairstyle is actually ruffled and flat. No hairpicks in the Game of Gods it seems. His hands are safely covered in tarnished metal gauntlets and his pants and boots look to be black leather with metal plating at strategic points.

“Holy hell man, nice save! How’d’ya find me?” I yell to Demarcus as we run down the stairs, the sound of crashing stone followed by a cloud of dust above us.

“I started with a skill! [Loyal To A Fault]. As soon as I popped into these woods I could feel you were here somewhere, then I just followed it!” He replies.

“This way!” Mato yells from a landing that I nearly trip and miss the step-off to.

Demarcus and I quickly pivot into a stone hallway and see spiders coming in from the windows lining it. Mato is already firing off bolts, and I pull back and cancel a [Magic Missile] as Demarcus charges in. Fearless of the spiders, he begins brutally bludgeoning them with a long, cane shaped hunk of metal with a notch in it.

Not wanting to hit him with a spell, I draw the shortsword, but by the time I make the several strides to join the fray I already see the spiders fleeing as Demarcus screams and shit-talks while he smashes their comrades to pieces. “Come on! You can’t hurt me now!”

“Fuck yeah! Is that a god damn crowbar?” I yell to Demarcus.

He tosses the stained crowbar into the air, spinning, and catches it.

“Yeah, when I picked [Warrior] the white guy let me pick a weapon to start with. Went with a crowbar cuz I’ve got experience with it and figured it’d also be a useful tool.”

“That’s sick dude!” I yell back, absolutely elated at having someone I thought I had left for dead actually still with me. I guess I did actually leave him for dead though, technically. The thought twists in my gut, but thankfully life-and-death fights are great excuses to not deal with your emotions.

“Y’all can catch up and explain to me who this guy is later. We gotta—” Mato’s reprimand is cut off as a massive spider leg pierces through the stone wall, making his point and nearly separating us before Demarcus leaps over it back to us.

As the leg begins to peel back the wall like a cheese-stick, we all run back to the spiral staircase and silently agree to shoot for the ground floor.

“You with this guy?” Demarcus asks me.

“Mato. [Ranger]. Explain later.” I reply, huffing as I stumble down the stairs, trying to pull out a healing potion for Demarcus.

We reach the ground floor and go spilling into a hall full of carnage.

“Cleared this room earlier, we’re good.” Demarcus says as I toss him a healing potion.

He throws it back like a shot, his face curdling in disgust before tossing the bottle aside.

“That’s not how you… whatever” I say, as we race further down the hallway.

Safe— or safer— in a sturdy ground floor room, looking like a dining room of some kind, we dispatch two juvenile spinner spiders and Mato yells to us.

“That thing's got an obvious weak spot by now, I can keep tryna fire bolts into it but they’re barely splinters in comparison. If all I’ve got is the crossbow I can try to take out its eyes but we need more firepower!”

The castle shakes and Demarcus bats back a jumping spider leaping from the rafters as I think:

Firepower eh?

Desperately fast, I begin unwinding the leather cord from around my waist.

I can’t cast [Flaming Whip], I don’t know [Flame Jet]— I can fire a [Firebolt] through it and hope it amplifies correctly but I still haven’t figured out a solution to keep the whip from flailing around once it’s cast. Can’t exactly keep it stable and use it as a whip, so can’t just tie it down—

Holy shit that’s exactly what I can do.

“I need time!” I yell to them. “Then imma need a clean shot!”

“Heard. I gotchu man.” Demarcus nods to me.

“You better not be makin’ a bomb!” Mato yells back, eliciting a laugh from Demarcus and an eyeroll from me.

I take my Pokin’ Stick from my back and quickly begin lashing the leather cord to each end of it, carefully identifying which end is “front” on this thing.

I’m still untwisting it and making sure the gemstones all line up correctly when the spider queen finishes its unscheduled demolition of the castle and finally pops open the roof to the room we are currently in.

Demarcus rolls out of the way of falling stone and wooden beams as Mato times his shot, popping the 4th out of 8 eyes, causing the spider queen to recoil and more stone to cascade down. I have to quickly run out of the way of the falling debris.

I lift the Pokin’ Stick and begin aiming down the gemstones like an ironsight. I need one hand free to do the somatic movements necessary to properly form the forceball required for a [Firebolt], so the Pokin’ Stick drifts with its weight unsupported as I try to get a clean shot.

A leg descends from the sky. Demarcus runs to it and gives a full grand slam baseball swing into it, cracking the chitin, and is thrown to the wall when that leg flinches into him.

I run to where Demarcus is picking himself up off the stone floor as the face of our doom begins to descend, blotting out the sun as Mato rushes to reposition from his high ground and get a shot at the eyes.

Demarcus coughs. “I’m good, I’m good.”

I let out a breath in relief, then turn to see the mandibles opening. The cracked head of the spider queen finally passes fully through the threshold in the ceiling and I can see where its head has almost completely caved in.

“Fuck it. Demarcus, get to kneeling. I need your help.”

Without even a second thought he kneels on one leg and I slap the Pokin’ Stick against his shoulder to stabilize. I begin pivoting him by the shoulder to get proper aim, and when the bleeding center of the spiderweb of cracked chitin is obscured by the red gemstones going up the length of the stick, I urge Demarcus:

“Lean your head away, this might burn!”

“What?—”

“Kill it with fire!”

I yell as I form a simple [Firebolt], a tier 1 spell, the first stepping stone any pyromancer takes to greater magic. I fire it into the first gemstone, having it ignite on impact.

The spell explodes out the end of the leather like a lit stick of dynamite.

When my vision returns I see the spider queen having completely crushed the far wall with its weight, as well as its bubbling, boiling crater of a head.

I also see Demarcus’ head completely covered in flames as he rolls around on the ground, smacking at it with his hands.

“Oh shit!” I run to him, hold him still, then strip and smother the flames with my dress. When Demarcus sits up, I begin pouring one of my last healing potions liberally over the side of his face. His shoulder is blackened by soot as his skin regrows— but not his hair. Sorry Demarcus.

Breathing hard and making sure we’re both okay, Demarcus looks around, then back at me and says

“Dude, is that a dress?”

Our laughter echoes in the afterlife.