“Mighty PAST, tell me about one of the many ways that you safeguard American freedoms!”

  [OF COURSE, PALADIN LAZLO! AS WE ALL KNOW, THE MOST ESSENTIAL AMERICAN FREEDOM IS THE FREEDOM TO BEAR ARMS! I ENSURE THIS SACRED RIGHT FOR ALL AMERICANS BY GIVING THEM A CLASS WEAPON, WHICH MAY NEVER BE TAKEN FROM THEM! THUS, ALL AMERICANS ARE EQUIPPED TO DEFEND THEMSELVES AND THEIR FAMILIES AT ANY TIME, AGAINST ALL THREATS BOTH FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC!]

  - Lazlo Smith, Level 31 Patriotic Paladin, Fireside Chats with PAST

  According to Hassan, we both lost the final round. I remembered Vale mentioning ‘prissy Archers’ and held back a giggle. I wasn’t mad, since I still came out ahead, putting me up 2-1 on Raylan. Before the tall Archer could come up with our next drill, we spotted a group of vultures descending to feed on the sphinx carcass.

  “I thought Mason said that thing was poisonous, don’t the birds know better than to eat it?”

  “Poison doesn’t affect undead,” Raylan noted.

  I nodded, that made – wait, what?! Identify!

  Monster: Undead Vulture

  Level: 2

  “Huh, they are undead… Think they came from the QZ? How’d they get over the mountains?”

  “It’s only about fifty miles to the QZ in a straight line. No more than a hundred to go around. A day’s flight, perhaps less, for these things.” Hassan sounded confident.

  “Then why don’t we see more of them around here? We don’t usually get undead in Sunland.”

  “How much do you know about undead?” he asked me.

  “Well, I know that they don’t get tired, don’t bleed, can’t be poisoned, and are generally hard to kill. But I’ve heard fire works well on them and you can usually smash them apart or cut off their heads to stop them,” I answered.

  He nodded. “Those are the basics. One interesting fact about undead though, they can’t hold their mana.”

  I looked at Raylan and realized he didn’t know what Hassan meant either. Seeing our confusion, the senior Delver explained.

  “You know how different areas have different mana densities?” We both nodded, and he continued. “Generally, you find more dangerous monsters in areas of higher mana concentration, but not always. A living monster – or, for that matter, a person – can easily travel through an area of lower Level mana. It doesn’t really bother a Tier 2 monster to wander around an area where the ambient mana is Tier 1 or 0. It just slows down your mana absorption.

  “Undead can’t do that. If you put a Tier 2 undead down here, it will gradually get weaker until it’s the Level of the ambient mana. If you put it back in a Tier 2 area, it will get stronger again, so the change isn’t permanent. Still, undead usually avoid areas where the mana is weaker than their natural Level.”

  “Hmm, interesting,” I commented, and I meant it. I might not have been very excited about history or politics, but I was fascinated by monsters.

  “So, why do they need to eat?” Raylan brought up a good point.

  “They don’t need to eat,” Hassan said, “but many kinds still do. Maybe these,” he pointed at the birds, “were alive once and still have those instincts. Either way Az, you’ve got your next drill right there. Live – or unalive – target practice.”

  Oh, this should be fun! I debated strategies for a moment, watching in disgusted fascination as the undead vultures started to root around in the corpse, mostly focusing on the cut area. One had claimed the head for itself, and was happily pecking away at the eyes. The other three were attacking the body. That is gross, I am definitely going to enjoy shooting these things!

  I decided to load my gun with my lighter BB rounds, but kept my bandolier full of the heavier 4BKs. I thought the BB rounds might be enough to take out the birds, but if they survived and came after me I wanted the more powerful ammo as a backup. I infused my gun with Force and set it to full choke. Then I started creeping closer.

  The birds saw me coming when I was about thirty yards away, but they continued their pointless feeding, each keeping one of their ugly black eyes trained on me. I took two more steps, then aimed at the closest bird, which had hopped on top of the head possessively and was eyeing me. I got into a good stance and confidently squeezed the trigger.

  Boom! click-click

  My shot smashed into the bird, and a few pellets caught the head as well. Both went flying from the Force. The vulture was hurled back, smashing into the corpse behind it. I felt my mana draining with each shot as I pumped and fired at the next bird, which was just spreading its wings to launch into the air. This one, standing right next to the sphinx’s body, was crushed gruesomely against its scales.

  The other two were now off the ground and heading straight for me. I’m not sure if being undead made them dumb, or if that was just the way vultures were, but neither attempted to evade my shots.

  BoomBOOM! click-click Boom! click-click

  Both shots hit and the monsters were sent tumbling backwards through the air, hideous shrieks emerging from their throats. Amazingly, the first one I’d hit was climbing back to its feet, missing huge chunks of feathers and dripping gore, but apparently unbothered. It tried to take off, but one of its wings was shattered and instead it started hopping towards me with mindless bloodlust.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  I waited until it was five yards away before pulling the trigger. It was so close that my shot struck it at a downward angle and pulped it into the ground, its chest completely crushed. The Wasted thing was still twitching though, so I switched off my Force infusion and carefully drew the spellform for Ignite. Let’s see how you like fire!

  The disgusting thing looked like it had been stepped on by a giant, but it was still moving weakly. I fired directly into its head from point-blank range, feeling the weaker pull on my mana from Ignite. My shot exploded its skull, leaving me unable to tell if Ignite had done anything or not.

  My hands moved quickly as I started reloading my gun. The less-damaged of the two remaining vultures was maybe ten yards away when my heavier shot shredded through it. Sadly, it didn’t catch on fire, though it did tumble to the ground and stop moving. Its buddy met the same fate a moment later, but I didn’t feel any Essence. Frowning, I loaded my four remaining shells in rapid succession as I stalked closer.

  The three I’d shot twice were definitely dead. Re-dead? Extra-dead? Whatever, they weren’t moving. That left the second one. Its body looked like it had been squashed when it smashed into the dead sphinx behind it, but it was trying futilely to move. I ended its efforts with a close-range shot to the head, and finally got a bit of Essence.

  [Congratulations, Gunner! Your Skills: Shotguns and Speed Loading (Shotguns) have both reached Level 2! You have also accumulated enough Essence for an item, would you like to receive it now?!]

  “Yes!”

  What appeared in front of me wasn’t an orb, a gem, or even a pouch containing a medical kit – which reminded me that I should pull mine out of my Inventory and put it on my belt – but instead a small box apparently made of some kind of heavy brown paper. I plucked it out of the air and Identified it.

  Shotshells: 1 oz rifled slug, 1500 fps

  Damage: High

  Penetration: Medium-high

  Quantity: 25

  “Yes!” I whooped with joy. Medium-high penetration! Finally, something that can put a dent in some armor! Sure, there’s only 25 of them, but my Skills went up too!

  I almost tore the box open to get a better look. Interestingly, these shotshells had a clear plastic top, letting me see that inside was a single, huge, bullet. Oh, I can’t wait to try these out! But I should save them since I don’t have very many…

  “Adequately done,” Hassan’s voice came from just behind me. Before I could react, he plucked the shotshell out of my hand, and held it up to examine it. “Finally, some ammunition that you actually need to aim.”

  “Give me that back! Uh, please,” I added, holding out my hand. I decided that I should keep some of the shells easily accessible, so I counted out twelve of the new, precious, shells. I placed them into my empty pouch. I closed up the box, intending to store the rest away, but Hassan stopped me.

  “Don’t put them all away, you need to use a few for practice.”

  “But I only have a few of them!”

  “Better to have 22 shells that you understand than 25 untested ones,” he replied.

  I hate it when he’s right, but at least I get to try them out! Sighing, I pulled three more shells out of the box before storing it.

  “Now that you have ammunition that should actually fly straight instead of indiscriminately bombarding an area, let us see how accurate you can be.”

  Concentrating briefly, he gestured at the sphinx corpse. A small red circle appeared on its scaled side, about six inches in diameter and a few feet off the ground.

  “What is that?” I asked, impressed. Obviously I was supposed to shoot it, but I wanted to know what he’d just done.

  “Just a simple illusion Spell. You can’t destroy it with physical damage. Now, what’s the furthest shot you’ve made so far?”

  “Maybe twenty yards,” I answered, unsure. I definitely need to learn some magic like that!

  “All right, let’s take the first shot from thirty yards then.”

  He showed me where he wanted me to shoot from and I wondered if he had a Skill that showed him the exact distance to a target. That sounded like something a high-Level Archer would have. Not wanting to waste one of my precious new shells, I aimed carefully and gently squeezed the trigger.

  BOOM! click-click

  Wow! That kicked hard!

  “That’s a hit,” Hassan noted. “Just touched the left-upper side of the target.”

  I looked around to find my spent shell. I wanted to go look at the damage my shot had done to the sphinx, but I was so used to trying to collect my brass that I picked up the expended slug and slipped it into one of the empty loops on my bandolier without thinking about it. My eyes opened wide as I felt a huge pull on my mana – more than I’d ever used at once.

  Shit, did that actually work? It restored my shell even though I didn’t conjure it in the first place. Wild!

  Raylan suddenly spoke up – he’d been quietly following Hassan during my fight with the vultures. “Well, that’s mighty convenient, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed,” Hassan agreed, “I’m a bit surprised as well. I’ve gotten quite a few arrows from the System, though I’m not sure I’ve ever tried to return one to my quiver. You’ve made me curious, Az.”

  Hassan’s greatbow appeared in his hands, followed ten seconds later by what looked to be a massive quiver twice the width of a normal one. It was absolutely stuffed with arrows, of multiple different types judging by the fletching. Hassan saw our interested looks and smiled.

  “Emergency ammunition supply – something you’ll want to build up as well, Az, in case you run out of mana. Most of these were System rewards at one time, though I never used them because they were inferior in some way to what I could already conjure. The ones that are useful have almost always been single-use – exploding, fragmentation, acid-tipped, etc. Not something that I’d think to recover.”

  He selected a couple of the arrows, then the quiver vanished back into his Inventory. He handed one to Raylan, then raised his bow and nocked the other. With a fluid motion, he drew the bow back only about a third of the way, before releasing the arrow.

  Even with a partial draw, the arrow flashed through the air faster than I could follow, slamming into a waist-high rock near the sphinx’s corpse. I could see it quivering, the full broadhead embedded into the Wasted stone! Hassan just casually nodded in satisfaction before turning to Raylan as I blew out a surprised breath.

  Fucking Wastes… How long will it take me to get to Tier 3?!

  is totally adorable and worth a look. Do you sometimes need a chaser of cuteness after putting up with PAST for a few chapters? This story has you covered! I binged a dozen chapters today and it was a lot of fun.