Misbegotten Memories

Chapter 282

Hector swallowed and turned his gaze forward once more, using his other senses to track where the possible hostiles were.  His touch sense extended only about twenty-five meters, so he was mostly paying attention to his peripheral vision and sense of hearing.  Ahead, they were on approach to a large warehouse that was guarded by a handful of men gambling with dice on a picnic table.  Their hard eyes met the approaching group.

Their pace slowed until they were stopped before the guards.  Fiona and their leader spoke for a minute, coming to some sort of agreement.  Owam chimed in once with a single word that seemed to Hector to be a decisive yes.  A quick glance showed that their followers were now standing in the middle of the road, acting far too casual.

Darius scooped up Fiona’s hand when she made to extract her arm from his.  For the first time since their introduction, the redhead displayed irritation at the attention.  Nevertheless, she let the oblivious eunuch hold her hand.  “We’re allowed inside to shop,” she announced.

“Remember Jerry,” Isabel whispered.

Hector’s eyes darted towards the couple in front of them.  “Darius….”

Dorian’s harsh whisper reached his ears.  “We’re all ready, Hector.”

“He isn’t.”

Isabel spoke quickly.  “Who do you think first spotted the collusion of our two guides?  Just be ready to block.”

At that moment, he wanted to yell at everyone present for this current situation.  If he understood things properly, they’d chosen to walk into a trap.  Worse, no one ever consulted him.  Hector grit his teeth and kept quiet.  Maybe this was karma for the several years he chased risks without any real purpose.

The four guards unlatched the door to the warehouse and stepped inside.

Fiona extracted her hand from Darius and gestured for the group to proceed her.

From behind, a dozen men began to converge on their position.

“Be ready,” Isabel said.

He began to form cables just as Darius seized Fiona by the arm and tossed her through the open door.  One of his hands followed her trajectory, palm first.  A line of purple extended forward.  Before his bolt could explode, thunder sounded from behind.

Eyes wide, Hector turned back to see a headless Owam collapsing before Dorian’s raised fist.  Mei ducked low so that the corpse fell to drape over her shoulder and everyone began sprinting forward.  Isabel shoved Hector to get him moving and he turned forward again to see Darius shooting a second bolt into the warehouse.

The guards had scattered to avoid presenting an easy target and one had his bare chest pointed at the door.  Hector sensed an externality rising there and readied his cables.  The bolt erupted forth, touched cables that converted a portion of the chaos, and exploded less than a foot away from the source.  The man was thrown to the ground, dazed by the violence of his own chaos bolt.  A spear pierced one of his temples and emerged from the other, ensuring he would not be partipating any further in the battle.

Several more chaos bolts sounded.

Hector dove into a roll to avoid something he sensed coming his direction.

Another of their attackers was dead, he saw as he rolled back to his feet in an explosion of cosmic energy.  Hector blocked another bolt, causing a guard to fall onto his ass.  Darius shot the man in the gut, that one to begin clawing at his spilled intestines as if he could put them back into place.

Two more bolts and everything went silent.

“Transit sphere!”

He jerked at the command and began raising his externality.  Meanwhile, Darius ran to the door and began firing bolts at the men outside.  They wisely scattered rather than face the attack head on.  Mei and Isabel were chattering in the Zing language as they dragged corpses together.

Dorian laughed with glee as he dragged over a stack of large baskets woven from reeds.  “They actually do have Fufu flour here!”

Isabel squinted at it.  “Only level seven.”

“Yeah, but as much as we can carry!”

Hector wasted no time inverting his sphere so they could escape.  Bodies and baskets were thrown inside, then everyone piled in.  Without wasting any further time, he sealed shut the weld and escaped Tian.  In the dark between worlds, he let his temper erupt.

“What the hell was that?  All of you decided to run right into a trap?”

“We didn’t know for sure it was a trap,” Dorian explained.

“You always assume I am paranoid,” Darius added.

“Then why couldn’t we just shop in the regular market?  If we suspect our guides are trying to rob us, we don’t turn it around on them!”

Mei huffed.  “Still have money for market.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.  You think I’m going to come back for another visit so we can spend our Bentley money?”

“Sorry,” Dorian said.  “I didn’t expect you to get upset about this.”

“About willingly running into a shoot-out?”

“Hector… you are usually the wild card.”

In the darkness, Hector couldn’t see Dorian’s expression, but he didn’t need to.  This was the result of being half insane for years.  Everyone had calibrated their expectations of his risk tolerance to levels he wanted nothing to do with.  He was still pissed, though.  “And why was all of this left a mystery to me?  Everyone else knew.”

Isabel answered.  “The offer to purchase at wholesale prices could have been legitimate.  We thought it possible they had bad intentions so prepared a plan.”

“I knew their intentions,” Darius insisted.

“You!  Of everyone here, why would you hold this back from me?”

“They started working us on the boat ride.  If we didn’t believe we would fall into their trap, they would come at us some other way.  Better to know where the danger is.”  Darius sighed.  “You are a good man, Hector, so you see good in everyone.  I am not a good man, so I see the bad.  The safest thing to do was kill everyone on that boat before they could mark us for their allies.  You would never believe such a thing necessary.  We would argue and they would use that against us.”

Hector brought the sphere into existence within Tian Tower on Union Central.  “Don’t ever do this again.  Any of you.”

As he dismissed his sphere in a petty gesture, sending people and cargo crashing to the ground, a line of text appeared before his eyes.

You should be automatically fined for trafficking human remains and the bodies confiscated for disposal by law enforcement.  If you verbally express that the remains were donated to you, it goes to review by human agents.  I’ll skip the manual review and you can later claim you had to bribe someone.  Failing to declare your cargo properly would require me to take the typical action to avoid suspicious activity prior to me going public.

“These human remains were donated to us by their owners,” Hector said.  That caused the people in the lobby watching them after their abrupt arrival to stare even harder.  “That should get us a pass on the law for trafficking human remains,” he explained.

Then, still angry, he stormed out the front door of the building.

I take it your trip did not go well?

“My companions decided to have a wild west shootout without giving me any advance notice.  They risked my life.  They didn’t even trust me.  The worst thing, though, is I wonder if maybe I deserve that kind of treatment.  How bad was I during my questing?”

For as long as you have been visiting Union Central, you have demonstrated a high risk tolerance.  If your questing began before your first arrival in universe, then I don’t have any records from before to compare with.  You haven’t spent much time here since achieving your insight, so I also don’t believe I have sufficient data to comment on more recent changes.

He walked around the streets of Promise City for hours, trying to analyze his behavior over time.  It proved quite the challenge.  He wasn’t the most self-aware specimen around.  All the same, he did come to some conclusions.  Obviously, he had been erratic enough that people who knew him didn’t think it was wise to let him in on their plan to mug the muggers for fear that he’d throw a random wrench into the gears.

His insight could be said to have a moral component, but it was tangential to the central thrust of his understanding.  At least now it was.  Before, he’d been completely unable to deviate from whatever seized his attention.  Who knew how he would respond in the past to a situation like they’d just experienced.  There was every possibility that he might decide to have a frank discussion with Fiona to clear the air.  Which could have been a disaster.

Whether or not his battle maniac friends were right to do as they had, Hector could not deny that they were justified to not trust how he might react.  Based on his past behavior, they had no reason to trust him to behave in a reasonable fashion.  So he had to forgive his friends as they had repeatedly forgiven him for his own transgressions.