Book Five, Chapter 88: The Soldier

~Michael~

“You sure you’re up for this?” Riley asked.

Was he talking down to me? Why wouldn’t he be? Everyone was doing that nowadays. Maybe they were patronizing. Maybe they were empathizing. All the same to me.

“I know what to do,” I said firmly.

I should never have told them that I dropped my subplot. Riley explained it away—he said that because any one of us had the chance to be the main character in this story, our subplots were larger than usual, so they needed more time devoted to them. Normally, I would have had plenty of room to put off following my character’s plot, but not in this storyline.

I didn’t want to hear that.

Maybe somebody else would want to hear how nothing is ever their fault, but not me.

I should have known. It was on me. Everybody joined in with him and cooed at me like I was a baby, telling me that they had things taken care of, telling me that being a blood sacrifice was as important as anything that could have happened in my subplot.

Yeah, right.

I’ve never worked that way. I want somebody who tells me when I mess up and who holds me to the highest standard. Logan always did that. He would never let me settle for anything less than my best.

Kimberly, Riley, Andrew—they didn’t get it, but Logan did.

If a man can’t take responsibility for when he messes up, then he is no kind of man.

“Remember,” Andrew said, “you have to be the one to argue back against us. We’ll tell you how bad of an idea it is to run into the woods after Antoine, and you have to fire back about how urgent things are. You have to be confident, too.”

I nodded and looked at Hawk Kipling out of the corner of my eye.

He looked right back.

He couldn’t be the one to argue because he had too high of a Savvy stat. I never really understood how stats worked. It wasn’t that no one had told me. I could explain it backward and forward—Adeline had forced me to memorize every part of it—but still, you’re telling me that because some character has a high Savvy stat, you need him to be quiet?

Because if the dumb, suicidal idea is a smart person’s idea, suddenly it won’t be dumb and suicidal?

They needed someone who didn’t have high Savvy to be the one calling the shots when we fell into this trap.

They talked like it was obvious. That was the system. That was the game, don’t you know that?

They thought that if they could understand the system, they could find a path to victory. I still felt they were too trusting.

As long as you think there are rules and that the rules matter, you’ll be willing to give up your edge. You will walk to your death as long as you think the enemy will stick to the rules.

That was something that Isaac understood, even though he always tried to put it in a joke.

I couldn’t help but feel that this was all one big mousetrap, and we were slowly being convinced to put our necks right over the line. Not just this storyline, but everything.

And I would have to go along with it, too—because what other option did we have?

I was the blood sacrifice. I had to keep the nerd alive. It all fell to me.

On-Screen.

“You are going into those woods unprepared,” Riley said. “Why have we been planning this entire campaign if you’re just going to charge off without a thought?”

He was following Hawk and me as we headed into the woods where most of the mercenaries waited for us.

“This is how you kill werewolves,” I said, turning back to him, defiant. “You track them, you find whatever cave or abandoned shack they’re holed up in, and then you shoot them. My people have been doing this for centuries.”

“You don’t even know how many of them there are,” Andrew interjected. “None of our scouts have even been able to find the pack.”

I almost laughed. I was arrogant. I was self-assured. That was my character now.

“I have never known a werewolf pack to grow past a dozen wolves,” I said. “Have any of you? My people have been taking care of these lands and keeping them safe. If there were dozens of wolves in the woods, we would know about it.”

We stood at the edge of the forest, our argument so loud that the birds were fleeing from the trees.

“The trail is growing cold,” I said. “If we catch these wolves, we want to catch them when the sun is up. That’s when we have the advantage. The immature wolves will be sitting ducks. The mature ones will be by themselves. We are burning daylight. You’ve got nearly two dozen guys already in the woods, ready to go. If we lose the trail, we’ll be back here to do it your way. But if we find them, we’re going to end this before it gets ugly.”

I nodded to Hawk Kipling, and we walked into the forest to join the group of mercenaries waiting for us.

I could hear Riley behind me as I stopped being On-Screen, and they continued to be. He explained that if they just waited till nightfall, their little rolling silver trick could be used to suss out any werewolf in our group.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Of course, we couldn’t do that because we needed the reveal to be timed for Second Blood.

That was the most I had spoken in the entire storyline so far, but somebody had to do it. I didn’t know how good my performance was, but if the goal was to make myself look dumb, I had probably succeeded.

Riley said that there was a chance they would still be attacked and that Hawk and I would go unscathed for Second Blood.

If things went that way, it might just come down to me and whoever survived the attack at the fort.

As much as I hated to admit it, I hoped that would be the case. I had to rescue Logan and Avery, and being nothing but a blood sacrifice felt so small and insignificant.

It all came down to whether the film buff actually understood this so-called system. If he was wrong, it would all come down to me—and I would not fail.

But if he was right, and it was my time to go, I was going down swinging.

The mercenaries clearly had training from somewhere, but they weren’t using it.

At times, they would cluster up too close together and fall out of formation when we went On-Screen. Carousel needed its good shot, and that meant we couldn’t be stealthy—not really.

Still, I tried.

I directed them to spread out—not too thin—but to work our way through the brush quietly and methodically. There was a way to move through a forest to minimize your chances of being spotted and to maximize your chances of finding what you were looking for.