The Rifleman - Bk1 - Ch.19 (Patreon)

Chapter 19

Party of One

Wesley found himself standing on a pillar, all alone. Below him, a thick fog obscured everything from sight. Far in the distance, he saw more pillars, one with a large, hairy form on it that had to be Mace. Hawk Eye showed its value again, allowing him to pick out the others, each on their own pillar. 

The pillars themselves were made of smooth grey and white marble, but other than that, he couldn’t see anything about them. A slight shudder passed through his feet, and the pillar slowly lowered into the rapidly thinning fog. 

He could faintly hear the others yelling at each other, but not exactly what they were saying. 

When his pillar finally vanished into the floor beneath him, the last of the fog dissipated, and he found himself in a corridor with high walls and no roof. Everything was the same grey and white marble as the pillars had been, but he was getting an uneasy feeling. It only grew as he crept to the end of the corridor, seeing the option to go left or right, each side looking nearly identical until it too branched. 

“A maze,” Wesley said. 

Everybody knew how to get out of a maze. You put a hand on one wall and just kept walking until that wall inevitably ended with an exit. As long as you did that, you were fine.

Everybody knew that.

He was currently worried that the people who designed mazes probably knew that, too, which meant it was probably not going to work. Even if they didn’t have some shifting walls or something like that, there would be traps.

Really, if you found yourself in a maze, there was only one smart choice: to cheat.  

Wesley shifted into a wisp and bounced from one wall to another. His head was just passing over the lip of the wall when a wall of force slammed him back down to the ground. 

Being a wisp took a lot of the force out of it. Still, it hurt like hell, and he was forced to trigger a charge of Healing Flare, which disappeared in a horrifically short time.

“No climbing… got it,” Wesley said as he got to his feet and began to glide down the corridor. At the end, he stopped and held out a hand. There was no breeze, but there was something. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the faint feeling. It was almost like pins and needles but very faint. It was only on the right-hand side, so he went left. 

Three steps down the hall and the floor dropped out from under his feet. 

Wesley had plenty of time to grab the edge and pull himself back up. Afterward, he looked down to see a set of spikes far below. He carefully chose a piece of travel bread from his bag and threw it over to the corridor beyond the pit. 

A massive block of stone appeared above and dropped, smashing the entire corridor.

Wesley turned back and went the other way.

The strange, prickly sensation was constant as he crept slowly down the corridor. His current approach would take years, but he did not feel all that confident after watching the stone appear in the other corridor. Even if he survived that, he would be trapped there. 

He threw the leather armor ahead of him again, the rope once again coming in useful. Nothing happened, so he reeled it back in. Another test, and he walked several feet forward and started all over again. This time, the sensation came from the left, and he noticed he could only feel it as a wisp. 

Wesley continued to follow the sensation, finding no traps in the corridors, until he came to a fork at the end of one. This time, both sides held the tingle, but it was slightly stronger on the right. 

The right-hand corridor delivered him to a circular room with a stone statue in the center. The moment he entered, the stone cracked, and the statue began to move. 

A golem presented several problems for Wesley. For a start, this room was barely wider than the polearm this thing had just pulled out of thin air. For another, a stone was pretty damn strong against bullets even before it was infused with magic and walking around. Wesley dove over a mighty sweep from the polearm and tried to play keep away for a while. It quickly became a losing battle, even in wisp form. Everywhere he went, that damn polearm followed. He didn’t dare try and go up, just in case he got slammed again. Narrowly avoiding another lost limb, Wesley decided to move in instead of out.

The moment he moved inside the reach of the polearm’s blade, it vanished. Wesley hesitated as the statue held out its arm and summoned a giant sword instead. A flash on the chest piece caught his eye, and he focused quickly. 

Three carvings showed faintly against the grey and white stone, hidden by the complex coloring of the marble. 

Without taking a moment to think, he stabbed forward with the bayonet on his rifle, stabbing at the carving that flashed. It barely left a scratch as his bayonet snapped in half, the tip flying off and clattering across the floor. 

“Shit!” Wesley ducked the swiping sword, parrying madly as he tried to keep the blank-faced statue at bay. 

Seeing a chance as his battered bayonet forced the stone sword wide again, he fired, the barrel of the rifle less than a foot from one of the carvings. This time, a small crack formed, and the bullet stuck in the thick stone. Still, it didn’t quite destroy the carving. 

Wesley was forced back before trying again. Firing an Improved Flare through his rifle had more effect. The suddenly heated stone shattered as it swelled around the hot bullet. The sword vanished, and he fired three more times before leaping away and shifting into Were-wisp. The carved section fell away, the polearm it had just summoned vanishing. 

He kept retreating as he piled on the damage, using wisp form as he needed to. Without the weapons, it was just a matter of time, but it still took almost five clips before it finally fell.

Wes slid down the wall and panted, watching as the statue disappeared and a new hallway opened in the far wall.  

Wesley gave himself a good fifteen minutes to rest before he moved on. He would have liked a bit longer, but the Wyrd Watchmen were all out there somewhere, and at least one of them was a healer, not a fighter.

The hallway held the same prickle as before, but it was strong enough for him to feel without wisp-form now. 

Still, he kept testing every foot of the hallway before he walked on it. The end of the hallway featured something he had hoped for: a safe room. The words ‘safe room’ were carved above the arch in a dozen languages, which was a first. Up until now, he had always seen them marked with the same chalky writing that the system used for everything else.

“That’s not suspicious at all,” Wesley muttered and threw the leather chest piece through the door. He was using it because the Gorger vest he had won in the dungeon was so much better quality, which meant it would hurt the least to lose.

The leather chest piece landed with a thump on the wooden table in the center of the ‘safe room.’ There was a soft click, and stone spears slammed into the table, pinning the leather in place. 

Wesley yanked hard on the rope, and the cheap leather tore, about half remaining pinned to the table. The moment the remains hit the floor, another click sounded, and Wes reeled the rope in as fast as he could. Every inch of floor it touched was impaled with a stone spear within a second. 

An arch on the far side of the room showed another corridor, but from what he could see, there was no way to get there. Anything he touched would….

This time, the crazy idea he got didn’t seem so ridiculous.

At least, not compared to any of his other options. 

Wesley backtracked down the corridor, stopping at the far end and dropping his wisp form. Then, he started to sprint up the corridor as fast as he could. 

With less than three feet left in the corridor, Wesley hopped once and launched himself into the air. He dove forward, activated Were-wisp, and cast a quick Improved Flare for the added weight reduction.

He sailed through the room, careful to keep his arms and legs as tight to his body as he could, seeing the archway on the other side coming closer and closer as he naturally started to arc toward the floor. 

His arms cleared, then his chest, and suddenly he was clear.

There was one problem, however.

This corridor had no prickle.

//////////////

Wesley pinged off the wall of the corridor and bounced clear, feeling the stone slam down less than an inch from where he had been. As he rocketed forward, the floor vanished beneath his feet, and he grabbed the far side of the gap and yanked as hard as he could, shooting forward again before kicking off a wall and bouncing down the corridor, trying not to touch the floor.

Not that it helped much.

The vast majority of the traps seemed to be triggered in both the walls and the floor. To make matters worse, he had lost that faint sense of something that had guided him this far. 

There had been no sign of the tingling for the last ten hallways, and Wes was beyond lost. At this rate, he didn’t even dare slow down as the seemingly endless series of trapped hallways continued. He shot past a turn, seeing a flash of something before he leaped back over the trap door and dove for the new corridor.

There, at the far end, was a real safe room, at least if the chalky writing over the archway was to be believed. 

The walls behind him began to slam together the moment he passed the halfway point, and he pushed with everything he had to make the last dozen feet or so before he shot through the archway, feeling the burst of air behind him as the walls slammed closed. 

Spinning in the air, Wesley saw the archway now blocked. He gingerly touched the floor and then dodged aside, but no spear slammed down.

After almost five minutes of testing, Wesley dropped out of Were-wisp and collapsed on the floor, gasping and panting.

For the first time, Wesley could really feel the weakness from using the skill, so he stayed right there, lying on his back on the floor while he took sips from his canteen and chewed on some dried strips of what he thought was fruit. 

It took him almost an hour to recover from his rush through the corridors, but it was worth it when he stood and noticed that the archway in the far wall did not, in fact, include another corridor. 

“Stairs,” Wesley Lancaster smiled in relief. “I can do stairs.” 

The long, spiraling stairs deposited him onto a dark rock ledge high up on one side of what appeared to be a massive cavern. Several staircases were carved into the rock walls, one of which went past his own ledge. They wound down into the fog below, and he could distantly hear the sound of fighting. 

Wesley checked his rifle, which was still full as he hadn’t had anything to fire at since that stone golem, fixed what remained of his bayonet on the end, and moved carefully onto the stairs. 

The stairs were pretty narrow, but nothing compared to the ones on the cliff walls they had climbed to get here. In less than a single flight of stairs, Wes noticed the fog moved away as he got lower and lower. Looking up, there was a layer of fog up there too.

Moving in the narrow band of clear air between the two, he came to his first enemy in a while. It was a smaller version of the same stone statue he faced upstairs, but size, as they say, matters.

His first shot shattered the thin stone shield, while the second turned half the head to dust. He climbed lower, occasionally taking out one of the statues and seeing several more ledges with their own entrances on them.

Across the cavern from him, he saw a familiar redhead with her arms crossed, sitting on a stair half a flight above a stone statue. 

He whistled, and she looked over and waved.

Wesley took aim, and the statue’s head shattered. 

“Player Two has entered the game,” Wesley grinned to himself and kept climbing down, stopping to take out a statue on either of their staircases every two flights or so. 

Wesley had been climbing down the stairs for hours, so he had stopped to take a rest after whistling to let Pru know. A bear’s roar echoed up the stairs, and he looked over to see Mace fighting his way up the staircase below her, his massive maces smashing a statue to dust in two hits. 

He could see the shock on the big guy's face even from here; no expression was subtle when stretched across a bear’s muzzle when he found Pru a good deal sooner than he had expected. 

Wesley watched as they talked, and then Pru turned and waved before following Mace back down the stairs. 

Wes got to his feet with a sigh and started down as well. He didn’t really want to keep whoever was fighting their way up his staircase waiting, and who knew, maybe there was a nice bed waiting for him at the end of this. 

The lower he got, the more evidence of this party’s passing there was on the other staircases. Shattered, stabbed, or merely broken in half, statues covered the lower staircases on all sides.

Conspicuously missing was any member of his party. 

Minutes turned to hours as he went lower and lower. When he finally saw the base of the shaft, no one was there. 

He did see a couple of broken statues here and there that had been thrown from the steps above, but that was it. 

Stepping over the rubble and searching the outside of the shaft, Wesley finally came to the corridor that led away from it and was pleasantly surprised to see a silver archway waiting for him.

Backtracking, he searched the rest of the base, but this was the only exit he could see. 

With tired steps and sore shoulders, Wesley stepped through the portal into a dark, quiet, safe room.

Sleeping forms here and there showed his party had not, in fact, been all that worried about him, but Wesley shrugged and headed for a free bunk before stopping and looking again. 

At a guess, five wooden bunks had been in the room. Four were occupied by his party members, but the fifth had been turned into firewood. Even now, he could see the shape of one leg burning away merrily in the grate. 

Just for a moment, Wesley looked at Mace's sleeping form and felt his grip tighten on the M1 Garand in his hand. He could see the scene in his head, a flash of inspiration that showed him how easy it would be to raise that rifle and put three in the back of Mace's head.

But that wasn’t Wesley.

The urge passed as quickly as it came, and Wesley chuckled softly to himself. That was some petty, Todd-level shit right there. 

He shook his head once and went to sit with his back to the wall, staying next to the fire for warmth. He put his head back, pulled his helmet down a little to cover his eyes, and dozed. 

Actual sleep was not forthcoming, but he got to rest his tired arms and legs a little. He slipped in and out of the lightest of sleep for a few hours before movement brought him awake. 

Seeing the others starting to rise, Wesley had a quick bite of food and some water, refilling his canteen from one of the waterkins he had before standing, and started to stretch and loosen his muscles. 

“Come on,” Mace growled almost as soon as he woke up, “Let’s get this floor done and move on.”

“Why the hell did you burn the bed?” Pru laughed at Wes as she headed for the exit portal. 

“I didn’t,” Wes said blandly. “It was like that when I got here.”

“What?” Pris looked confused. “It was fine when Mace and Pru went to help you on the stairs….”

“No one came to help me on the stairs,” Wesley said with a sigh. “Everyone was asleep when I got here.” Not wanting to wait for whatever explanation or lies the two had for the rest of their party, Wesley just walked into the portal. 

///////////////

The next area seemed to be underground as well; the floor beneath his feet was dirt, with a few small stones showing here and there. The walls and distant roof were the same brownish-red dirt. Not that it particularly mattered, given the massive mutant rat creature standing on the other side of the large cavern, drool dripping from its mouth.

Six legs, three tails, and a longer-than-usual body made it definitely NOT a rat, but he took one look at it and thought ‘rat’ and so a rat it was. Scanning the cavern showed a few tunnels entering it, but none of them were big enough for people. Did rats live in a burrow? He was pretty sure that they had nests instead, but he somehow doubted that mattered right now. 

The others took a good ten minutes to appear behind him, and he was more than ready for all this to be over. Mace seemed pretty sure this was all that remained between them and the end of the floor, which might mean an exit portal for Wes.

It was clear that Pris wanted to talk, but Wesley put a finger to his lips to quiet them. The rat twitched at any move he made, and he suspected it would attack the moment they made a sound. 

He pointed at the rat and cupped his ear.

Mace and the others nodded and got into position. 

When everyone nodded that they were ready… Mace charged the boss.

The elongated rat may have been the size of a large bear, but it lost out in sheer power against Mace. He hit it like a wrecking ball, sending it reeling with powerful blows to the side of the head. 

Al was only a second behind the tank-like Mace. His arms danced as his daggers bit deep into the side of the creature, flashing back each time it kicked, only to dart in again a moment later. Of all the party, Alber was the one he would hate to fight the most. The man was so quick that he almost seemed to blur as he moved. Wes had no doubt the man could cut his throat a half-dozen times in the time it would take Wes to aim and fire. While the others concentrated on the rat, which was starting to hold its own as it reared back and made darting attacks at Mace and Alber, A sound from one of the tunnels caught his attention.

He turned and aimed; seeing a pair of red eyes in the tunnel, he fired. 

“Pris! Tunnels!” he called a warning as sounds began coming from multiple passages simultaneously. He fired, switched tunnels, and fired again and again. Just when he felt overwhelmed, ghostly backup arrived as Pris got her summons to work guarding some of the tunnels. 

The fight turned again. With the smaller rats penned in and controlled, the others were clear to finish off the boss.

Mace roared and caught the boss under the chin with one mace, snapping the head up and into a wicked smash from the other. Al leaped and landed on the head of the creature, both daggers digging deep into the brain and ending the fight at a stroke.

Just as Wes started to relax, a crack sounded from above and below, and a line of stone wedges dropped from above and smashed the floor below. One of them shattered on a stone, sending shards spraying into Wesley as he raised his rifle to cover his face. 

He was thrown onto his back as the floor began to cave in from the center. Mace and Alber had retreated, and Pris and Pru had pressed themselves into a small alcove that had opened to one side of the cavern. 

Mace and Alber called him, telling him to run to them, but he saw another alcove not too far from him as more and more of the floor fell away. Alber collapsed the moment he joined the others, and Pru started to work on him.

Again, Mace called him to come.

Wesley knew he could make it to them, but instead, he crawled over to the other alcove and rolled inside, casting Emergency Heal twice on himself the moment he was in. 

Beside him, the floor continued to crumble until only a pair of pillars remained whole. One held the boss's body, while the other, much further away, held an exit portal. Wes had to chuckle bitterly at the whole situation. 

He should have known that it was too easy for a boss fight.

More than that, this whole floor had been mazes and traps. It was crazy to think this would have been any different, but they had been distracted and walked merrily into the trap. He noticed the blood starting to pool under him and winced.

Wes changed into wisp form and was relieved to see that he couldn’t bleed in that form. He cast a Healing Flare and settled in to wait.

About ten minutes later, a whistle got his attention; he must have been dozing. 

He held up a hand and changed out of wisp form since the red glow was gone. Wesley checked himself over, seeing wounds closing slowly. At least he wasn’t bleeding any more. 

“Why the hell didn’t you come over here?” Mace yelled, despite them being only a couple of dozen feet apart. 

“This was closer,” Wesley said with a shrug.

“I can’t heal you from here,” Pru said, meaningfully pointing out his injuries. You could if you had come over here.”

“I’m good,” Wesley said quickly. “I have enough healing to get me through.”

“I’m faster,” Pru said with a sigh.

“He didn’t trust us to heal him,” Pris said simply.

“What?” Mace glared at her.

“I’m fine,” Wes said with a heavy sigh. “We need to figure out how we get out of here.”

“Is that true?” Mace asked acusingly.

“Can we move on?” Wesley said, trying to avoid the inevitable argument.

“Can you blame him?” Alber shrugged. “You denied him healing once for no reason.”

“Because I didn’t want him to join our group, not because I wanted him dead,” Mace protested. 

“What I don’t get,” Wesley called since they were apparently doing this anyway, “Is why the bed?”

“What?” Mace frowned.

“Why burn my bed,” Wesley clarified. “That was some petty shit, Mace. I’d already said I wanted to leave. So what was the point?”

“I’m really sorry about that,” Pris called. “I honestly didn’t know.”

“Still, crawling off away from the healer because of one party member is a little crazy,” Alber said.

“It’s not just one,” Wes said angrily. “When Mace denied me healing, Pru and Alber, did you protest? Do it anyway?” He pulled himself up to a sitting position, wanting to see them clearly. “What about not coming to help me on the stairs?”

“Look, we have to listen to Mace,” Pru said awkwardly. “I mean, you’re just–”

“The new guy,” Wes said with a smile. “I know. Here’s the thing, though. You lot want someone to join your merry band and go get those better contracts for you? You have to let someone in some time.”

“And you think that will be you?” Mace sneered.

“Absolutely not,” Wesley laughed. “I didn’t even trust you lot to heal me when I was bleeding out.” he smiled sadly. “I think that ship has sailed.”

“I wouldn’t have let you die,” Mace said after a moment.

“And I do not believe that,” Wesley said honestly. “As far as I am concerned, any trust is gone. I’ll look after myself in here, and when we are done, I’ll shake hands and be on my way.”

Things got real quiet after that. 

Personally, Wesley was past the point of worrying about their feelings on the matter, so he turned his attention to getting out of the trap. The floor below them was full of smaller rats—a veritable swarm of them, each the size of a dog, and every eye searching for them. 

It didn’t take him long to figure out that he could use Were-wisp and Improved Flare to cross the gaps between him and the boss and the boss and the exit. In short, he could leave whenever he wanted. It would be nice to say he wasn’t tempted to do exactly that, but he was. Wes wasn’t some bastion of good or anything like that, but he did believe in acting according to who he was rather than who the other people were.

So, in the end, he tried to figure out how to get them all out.

He took an experimental shot at a rat chosen randomly, and the others began to tear into it the moment it dropped. He shot a couple more times, and the frenzy grew. Wesley crawled to the edge of the alcove and kept firing, popping in a new clip a couple of times before he stopped. The feeding frenzy below was doing more than consuming the ones he shot… they were killing each other. 

Three full clips later, the entire floor was littered with the dead. Barely any of the swarm remained, and they were dazed and slow. 

He saw the others preparing to jump down and told them to wait, just in case. In wisp form, he would be able to get back up, but they would be stuck down there, and he was getting low on bullets. 

Wesley rolled off the alcove, shifting into wisp form and drifting to the ground before changing back and taking out the over-stuffed and sluggish rats with his axe and broken bayonet. 

When the last one fell, the columns lowered, and the party was finally able to pass through the portal and out of the second floor.