Chapter 23: Surprise


    ke rose with the sun and renewed purpose. Mason was alive. They’d find each other soon enough, he was sure of it, and then they’d take the world by the balls.


    “Come on, underlings, we’re losing daylight!”


    Hank stood withoutint, but Mona grimaced and kicked his foot. They made a fire and ate fish for the ninth time in a row, then made their way down the beach.


    “North is what we told Mason,” ke announced, “so North is where we’ll go!”


    Walking on sand was better for vacations, as it turned out. When one actually had somewhere to be, and miles of the stuff to cross, it became something of a chore.


    “Maybe we should move to the damn forest,” Hankined after a few hours, but ke refused to leave the shore. They kept on and got sand everywhere in their clothes, wary eyes on the water and the trees, mostly silent as they soldiered on in increasing misery. But they managed.


    After what must have been several long, grueling hours of walking, ke was ready to call for a rest. “It must be evening soon,” he said and turned, and found Hank with a raised brow.


    “It’s only been about two hours, kid. It’s not even noon.”


    <em>“What</em>?” ke wiped at the sweat dripping down his brow. “I’m bloody exhausted. There’s no way that was two hours.”


    Mona checked her watch and shrugged, and ke sagged with a groan. Then he turned back and squinted, seeing some kind of strange, narrow cloud just down the beach wafting above a hill. Hank noticed his eyes and looked too, then hunched and lowered his voice.


    “That’s smoke,” he said. “We have to be careful. That could be anyone or anything. Maybe we should move to the woods.”


    “You and the damn woods,” ke snorted, feeling an excitement in his chest. “Smoke means people. And I like people. Hell, it might even be Mason!” ke grinned and picked up his pace, ignoring the more skeptical looks of his less optimisticpanions. Positive thinking changed one’s reality. ke had sworn by the fact all his life. And after another long stretch of cruel, desert suffering, they saw a ring of perfectly nice looking people sitting around a fire, talking andughing on the beach.


    “We should be cautious,” Hank said for the thousandth time. “I agree,” agreed Mona.


    ke rolled his eyes, despite knowing they were basically right. The thing was, he had magic mind powers, and that was on top of his charm. And the reality was things worked out for ke so consistently, so frequently, that he just wasn’t afraid of these people. Or really anything. He had a destiny. He was sure of it. And that destiny was not dying on this nameless beach.


    “Stay here if you like,” he said. “But I’m going down to make new friends.”


    He walked on without waiting to see what hispanions would do. The party ahead spotted him about halfway, a few standing from the ring with weapons ranging from hammers to staves. ke just smiled and walked on, only one nce back to see if the others had followed. They had. He scanned the faces of the new people as he arrived, finding nothing terribly frightening or out of the ordinary.


    “Hello, friends!” he called, and one or two of them kind of waved.


    They were a mix of ages, skin tones, and genders. Most looked neutral to his appearance, or slightly friendly. A few dubious faces however watched him with unpleasant res.


    “Who are you?” said one such face, and ke released a good chunk of mana to st them all with friendly Mental Influence.


    “Name’s ke.” He tapped his chest. “The lovelydy over there is Mona, and the old stodger is Hank. We’ve just been walking the beach and found your fire.”


    “I told you we shouldn’t have lit it,” said a middle aged looking East Asian.


    “You’re not with a group? It’s just you three?” said a young, rather unfortunatelyrge nosed woman.


    ke watched their eyes, letting his intuition warn him of danger. He decided these people were afraid, not predators. “We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still.” He smiled, reasonably certain that was Carl Sagan.


    “You talk funny,” said a man ke decided to call Sourpuss, but ke didn’t drop his smile.


    “I think in this case you mean the revered Carl Sagan talks funny, but I understand your meaning.” It was clear Sourpuss didn’t have a clue what he was saying, so he sighed and moved on. “Would you mind if we shared your fire?”


    “More the merrier,” said a rather more friendly young man in a hoodie.


    “Very kind of you.” ke took a seat next to his benefactor, letting loose another st of friendly thoughts with Mental Influence into the most open minds. It would probably have been wiser to get more names and details first, but first impressions mattered quite a lot when one didn’t want to die. Anyway, he had half his mana left.


    The group went around introducing themselves, and ke forgot most of the names immediately. It was a shoring he’d always intended to work on, but he realized now with Mental Influence he would basically be able to bring up the name of anyone he was looking at and could target. The thought put him in a rather good mood.


    “We came from a nearby tutorial,” he was telling Billy with the hoodie as Hank and Mona took their seats nearby.


    “Can I get you folks something to drink?” Billy said with a conspiratorial grin and a little pride, and ke made sure to react with high drama.


    “You certainly bloody can! Where the hell did you get this?”


    “I’m a civilian,” said Billy. “A brewer, basically. Can make all kinds of things. Well, I <em>could</em>, if I had some more equipment.”


    ke took the young man’s hand and met his eyes with as much earnestness as he could summon. “Billy, I am exceptionally pleased to make your acquaintance.”


    Billy went a little pink andughed, handing him a metal cup with something very strong. “Enjoy it. Can’t make more without finding some things first.”


    “I can imagine.” ke sipped and did his best not to wince at the moonshine. “The rest of you all yers? Other civilians?” The others mostly stared at the fire or acted like they hadn’t heard, so ke sighed and went first. “Mona and I are yers. Hank there is a fisherman. He’s been keeping us well fed.”


    The others perked up at that, and by the thin, somewhat sallow looks of the group he decided they hadn’t been eating very well.


    “We have a mix,” said Billy. “About half and half.”


    ke smiled and nodded, deciding to leave it at that.


    “You two don’t talk much,” said Braden the sourpuss in Mona and Hank’s direction.


    They exchanged a look, then Hank shrugged. “ke talks enough for everyone,” he said with a wink.


    “I take that as apliment,” ke grinned.


    “You take everything as apliment,” Hank said, and the groupughed, ke included.


    “I find life is better that way.” ke took a swig of moonshine and felt himself rxing a little. “It makes us all friends.”


    “I’m not your friend,” said Sourpuss in a tone that shattered ke’s rxing mood. Several others in the group rolled their eyes, whichforted him, but still. He couldn’t allow too much disrespect if he was going to dominate these people in the long run. The banter was fine, the challenge was not. If it got violent, he decided, the others wouldn’t interfere, and Mona would protect him. Probably.


    “You see?” ke simrly lowered his tone. “I take that as apliment, too. Because I wouldn’t want to be friends with an ugly idiot like you.”


    No oneughed or said a word. ke met the man’s eyes and held them, ready with Telekinesis to throw away his enemy’s sword before he could grab it.


    “But let’s not do anything too rash,” ke added with a friendlier tone. “We’ve only just met.”


    Sourpuss rose to his feet, and Billy held up a hand for calm.


    “Oh sit down, Braden,” he said. “What’s the point of this? It’s a dangerous world and they’ve got a damn fisherman we could really use.”


    “Go ahead,” Mona said in a low voice, her javelin resting against her arm. “See what happens.”


    Sourpuss, aka Braden, didn’t back down, and every civilian around the fire started to back away. Billy tried one more time in something approaching a whine. “Can we please just enjoy a drink by the fire?”


    They stared, and stared.


    Braden moved first. He reached for his sword, and ke tossed it flying away into the sand with Telekinesis. As the older man stared in confusion, Mona leapt over the fire, twirled in the air, and smashed him with a spinning swing straight to the head with the shaft of her javelin.


    He doubled over and groaned, clutching his head on the sand.


    “Oh, he’ll be alright,” ke grinned. “Now if we’re all finished measuring phaces could we possibly just…”


    He stopped speaking as he saw a strange orange light in the woods nearby. Then there was two, then three, wait four…all clustered together, sort of floating from a little patch of…


    The lightsunched out from the trees at high speed, flying drunkenly, like orange willowisps as they streaked across the sand, straight at the group around their fire.


    “Look out!” ke hurled himself away as the flying balls struck.


    Only the yers were hit. The smell of burning hair and flesh filled the air as the orbs exploded into me. People were crying out and screaming in rm. At least two struck Mona. Her clothes and hair lit on fire, and ke stared in something like shock before he lost sight of her in the shes and chaos. People were running and shouting about ‘ambush’ and ‘betrayal’ and saying ‘run for your lives!”


    Mona copsed next to ke with two arrows in her chest, her eyes open in death. He stared at her, mind still nk, as Hank leapt onto him and seemed to cover him with his body.


    “Don’t move, kid,” he whispered. “It’s yers. They can’t hurt me. Maybe you can talk your way out.”


    ke forced his mind back to reality. He gave Hank an affectionate pat, looking away from the almost certainly dead Mona with a sad sigh. She’d been a pleasant distraction, and a useful ally. And he’d wasted a considerable amount of mana on her. But now it was time to focus. To survive.


    He Meditated, and waited for the killing to stop.


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    <strong>Author''s Note:</strong>


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    Enjoy!


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