Cowboy necromancer 4 nov.., p.23
Cowboy Necromancer 4: Novella Compendium: (A LitRPG Apocalypse), page 23
“Or wherever they put their dead,” he grumbled to himself as he placed his hand on Buster’s head. The dog looked up at him, made a sighing sound with his throat, licked Sterling’s hand, and went back to resting.
The assault would begin soon.
Sterling wasn’t a fan of the Angels of Woe.
He had made it clear before how he felt about banditry, most notably in the way that he handled the Killbillies. If there were bandits, marauders, highway robbers, no good sons of bitches intent on exploiting their mancer powers to take advantage of someone—Sterling usually got involved. It was in his nature, part of who he was.
This was why he was hiding behind enormous sandstone rock formations overlooking a hotel once called Goulding’s Lodge, where the Angels of Woe had set up camp. Bandit extermination was on the menu for the night. It hadn’t been easy getting here either.
To reach their current location, Cedric and Omar had flown southeast from Moab, high enough in the air that the Angels of Woe wouldn’t be able to spot them. Sterling had especially suffered as he felt the air thinning around him.
But he knew it was necessary.
There was always the option of teleporting via Roxie, but Sterling wanted to make sure that the intel they had received didn’t turn out to be a trap. If they teleported, and just appeared out of the blue, there was always the chance for an ambush.
And Sterling wanted to be the one leading the surprise attack.
“You sure you don’t want a piece of the action, Dusty?” Sterling asked the Chronicler, who sat fanning himself with his bucket hat even though it was chilly outside.
“I don’t believe that is a good idea, no. Besides, I still have research to do,” he said, referring to the information that he had jotted down from the interior of the Godwalker they’d discovered.
“In the dark? How are you gonna do it in the dark?”
“I have to think about these things, you know.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” the Sunflower Kid asked. She was posted up next to the Chronicler, seated on a thornless cactus formation she’d conjured. While she wore all white as normal, she’d gone with a low crop haircut, dark, one with lines shaved over her right ear. Her charms, dozens and dozens of them, hung from her arms.
She currently ate an apple.
“I think I’m good.” The Chronicler smiled at her nervously. “Thanks for the invite.”
“Fine by me.” She took a final bite out of her apple and dropped the core to the ground.
Roxie floated closer to him. The miniature Godwalker tilted toward the journal that Dusty was writing in.
She paused.
The Chronicler finally looked up at her. “Yes?”
Sterling laughed so hard that he had to cover his mouth. “Y’all leave him alone. Ain’t got but one feller that can interpret what was written so long ago, and y’all trying to get him killed. Well, suppose I was trying too. Cedric, Omar? What do you boys think? It about time?”
He glanced over to the two pilots, who were playing cards in the bright moonlight. The moon was going to make their little surprise attack difficult. But that didn’t matter. Sterling wasn’t too worried about it. He had been in similar situations before.
He was more interested in wrapping it up so they could go to Chaco Canyon and continue on from there toward New Orleans. That should be exciting. This was the current plan anyway, but only if Quanah agreed to parlay. If he doesn’t, well, I don’t know. Sterling had this feeling that he would be able to talk Quanah into it, and if not him, Zephyr, who now stayed with the Comanche.
If Quanah really was trying to settle and maintain the Comancheria borders he had already established, then a parlay would be the way to go. And it wasn’t like any of them were going to be able to take advantage of one another. The leaders of these three groups—the Hashknife Outfit, the Serpents of Paradise, and the Comanche—all of them were telemancers, unable to warp each other’s minds.
Or so he assumed.
Omar approached. Sterling summoned the rocket launcher from his list and handed it off to the pilot, who was a crack shot. He would be able to do a lot of damage with it. Cedric would help them in other ways considering he was a pyromancer.
Always good to have one of them, Sterling thought as the group set off, leaving the Chronicler behind with Buster the dog, who was supposed to protect the researcher.
The Kid hadn’t been able to use one of her powers that would have allowed her to use the plant life to better understand what they were up against. Some sort of plant telepathy—Sterling couldn’t remember what she had called it.
They weren’t exactly in the dark. After all, the moon was out, a beacon in the night sky. But they were in the dark to some degree when it came to what the Angels of Woe had at the hotel where they had set up shop. There would be mancers, Sterling was certain that. There could be mancer-modified weapons.
No telling, Sterling thought.
Roxie stopped once they came around the side of a towering rock providing cover.
“Shee-it, and here I thought this was going to be easy.”
“Even so, I wish I’d had me another cigarette. What do they got down there, Rox?”
There was no time for her to answer. Omar, who was crouched at the top of a rock formation to give them a wide sweeping view of the compound, fired a rocket.
Feeeeeyooooom!
“What the hell was that for?” Cedric asked as flames rippled down his arms, the pyromancer summoning his power.
It was a question that had an obvious answer.
Omar had seen something.
He had acted, and because Sterling trusted him enough to know that he wouldn’t just go firing missiles for no reason, he was certain Omar’s actions were warranted.
Sterling exploded forward, several times faster than a normal human. He jumped, and as he did he saw exactly what Omar had been targeting. Like the amalgamation bull that Maurice had rigged up in Moab, the Angels of Woe had made a monstrosity of alien technology and bulging muscle.
And by chance, the bull had gotten loose, which had caused a ton of commotion.
The former outdoorsy hotel was buzzing with activity as the bull lashed its horns into bandits, the beast charging down the sloped parking lot. Every time one of the bandits got close to stopping it with a superpower, be it a bolt of ice or fire or even wind, the raging bull managed to shoulder through their attacks and shatter any defenses that were cobbled together.
That was why Omar had fired the rocket. It was a perfect distraction. The ambush was on.
Sterling drew his sickle sword as he reached a man who was charging toward the bull. He cut the bandit down from behind and fired a mana-powered bullet into the back of his head.
Bang!
The man’s head splattered bone and blood, and Sterling moved on.
He didn’t like killing people, but it had become second nature. Die or die trying to live. These were generally Sterling’s only two options. An ambush like this wasn’t the kind of thing that he went out of his way to do, but it was a favor to the Oracle up in Saltair.
Sterling knew that if an alliance could be formed, the Southwest could finally begin to rebuild. He didn’t know what the surrounding areas of America looked like, nor who ran them. The Pacific Northwest, east to Colorado, further east to the plains, and south to Texas. Not to mention the entire eastern seaboard.
But he knew if the Southwest could hold, that it would be better for everyone. And getting rid of cutthroats like the Angels of Woe would go a long way for stability.
“Hey—!” One of the bandits spotted Sterling and flew toward him.
Wham!
Sterling kicked him in the face with the heel of his boot, which dislodged some of the man’s teeth, and dislocated his jaw. The bandit twisted off to the side, flipped over, and spat blood onto the ground.
Bang! Bang!
“Not bad,” Sterling said as he fired a few shots at the man, referring to the new leg he had through his Grafting power. He shook the leg out and fired a shot at a woman who had just lunged for him.
Bang!
Something slightly grotesque caught Sterling’s eye. There were bodies here, recent ones. He followed the pale forms around a building and discovered more, some of their skin stripped away.
“What the goddamn hell?”
It was like the Angels of Woe had been collecting them behind one of the buildings.
“Got to be for a necromancer. That, or something else,” Sterling mumbled as he went ahead and animated the bodies.
His animates joined the fight, gnashing their teeth, raging out as they tore into the bandits. The zombies were assisted by large vines, which exploded from the ground and crashed down on people’s heads, whipping feet out from beneath mancers trying to fly, piercing bodies, severing arms, and puncturing lungs.
There had to be at least a hundred of them left. It was hard to tell from where Sterling currently stood. To get a better vantage point he flew up to one of the rooftops, ignoring the sensation in his gut. He saw the rampaging bull amalgamation, which was down on the lower road facing off against a gaiamancer.
Sterling wasn’t ready to get down there yet. He wanted to thin the herd first.
He fired down at an incoming group of bandits.
A few flew up to meet him on the rooftop. Sterling sent his revolver away. He dodged a punch and failed to dodge another one that sent him to the side. Sterling hit the roof, grumbled, and summoned his mana-powered shotgun just as the mancer lunged for him.
Click-click, boom!
He tore the mancer to threads.
It was a lucky shot too. The woman was charged with electricity, seconds away from bringing the heavens down onto Sterling’s head.
“Close one,” he said to himself as he heard Roxie firing below. He came to the edge of the rooftop and looked down. Sterling smiled at the Godwalker, even though he knew she couldn’t see him.
The Sunflower Kid did something he’d only seen her do a few times before. She used her plant constructs to make rapid-fire precision cuts on the bodies of the group of men who had just come around the corner to address her. She swiftly grew the plants inside them until their bodies bloated, flowers and sticks, stems and vines ripping from their skin.
“Goddamn,” Sterling said as he went for his revolver again. He caught someone trying to sneak up on the Sunflower Kid and shot him in the back. This drew her attention. She swiveled quickly, her vine cutting the man’s head off.
Funny things happened in fights with superpowers. Things like a head flying through the air fast enough to knock someone else out. The woman was quickly torched by Cedric.
Like some of the other mancers, Cedric flew above the fight, firing down. Because his entire body was coated in flames, it was hard to discern from the other pyromancers. This was why Sterling wasn’t firing blindly into the air like he usually did in a fight against mancers.
Another superpowered bandit landed, and tossed Sterling off the roof with a blast of wind.
Sterling used his own flying power to shift forward, the cowboy necromancer able to fly into one of the open rooms of the building. The room was a bedlam of post-apocalyptic activity, a stained mattress on the ground, religious spray painting on the wall, broken glass, trash. All of it.
Sterling swiveled just as the aeromancer raced in. Sterling fired at her; she was able to actually catch his bullets in midair and fling them to the side.
The woman laughed as she approached. She was just about to say something, perhaps something pithy, when Sterling dropped his revolvers and conjured a shotgun.
Click-click, boom!
She wasn’t laughing anymore after that.
The aeromancer fell onto her knees, touching her chest, horror on her face once she saw the blood on her fingers. She wasn’t going to heal from a cantaloup-sized wound, even if she tried.
Her mouth moved like she wanted to say something but she never did.
She fell to the side; Sterling stepped over her body and moved on.
The fight was far from over, but it looked like it was heading in the right direction. They were making quick work of the Angels of Woe, but there was something else that was clearly going to be an issue, a wildcard of sorts.
The amalgamation bull had finally noticed Sterling’s group.
What the hell? Sterling thought as he steeled himself.
That was fine. He had taken out an amalgamation like this before. But then the bull, which had a mechanical skull head and red eyes, did something the cowboy necromancer wasn’t expecting.
Its eyes flared with power and it fired a concentrated blast of energy at Cedric as he was flying overhead, just about to ignite the bull. The pyromancer spiraled into a brick wall and crashed through it.
The bull turned its laser on Roxie and fired on her as well.
This sent the miniature Godwalker spinning through the air. She struck a car, flipped over it, and landed on the other side, the clank! making Sterling’s ears ring.
“You handle what’s left of the bandits,” he told the Sunflower Kid, who stood off to his left, plant constructs writhing around her. “I’ll deal with the goddamn bull.”
.Chapter Two.
Omar landed on the nearest rooftop. The pilot gave Sterling a thumbs up, indicating that the rocket launcher was charged and ready to go.
Sterling rushed toward the bull with his shotgun, which he figured would pack the most punch. He squeezed the trigger and his first round struck the beast. The bull kicked its legs back, and sent a flectomancer-modified golf cart tumbling. It snorted with fury as it continued kicking its back legs out.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Sterling fired slug after slug at it, just to keep the bull agitated, the cowboy necromancer waiting for Omar to get into position so he could hit it with a rocket. Cautiously as ever, now with his sickle blade drawn, his shotgun back in his inventory list, revolver in his other hand, Sterling approached the angry bull. It shook its head, a bit wobbly as shrugged off his shotgun blasts.
“You ugly sonofabitch,” Sterling said as he finally got a look at what the Angels of Woe had done to the amalgamation.
Some of its flesh had been matted over with what he assumed was human skin, which explained the dead bodies he’d found. Its body was black and covered in thick scars, the bovine beast even larger than Sterling had first thought it was. The bull’s metal face was grafted onto the overly muscled body, a merging of flesh and machinery. It also had a sharpened pair of razor horns that looked more like the pincers of a crab.
Nearly twice my size? Damn near, Sterling thought as he stared the monstrosity down. “Well, get on with it,” he told the bull. “You want me to get out a red cape or something?”
Sterling was proud of his banter even though it wasn’t exactly an appropriate time for it. He’d seen pictures of matadors before, and knew that what he had said fit the bill here.
The crazy, red-eyed half mechanical bull did its version of a snort, which sounded like a low rumbling engine.
“Come on, then,” Sterling said, daring it to charge at him.
The amalgamation put its head down, kicked a leg back, and took off in Sterling’s direction.
The cowboy necromancer leaped out of the way and used his flying power to send him up and over the bull, just as the rocket landed at the creature’s feet.
The explosion that followed sent bits of parking lot, bovine viscera, and dust into the air.
As it cleared, Sterling found the bull struggling to get to its two front hooves, which had been shattered by the blast. The beast was on fire as well courtesy of the rocket and a sudden boost from pyromancer Cedric, who was now back on the scene.
Sterling was just about to make his move when the bull’s eyes glowed red. It staggered forward and lowered its head.
Sterling might have lost an arm, a leg, or both had it not been for Roxie, who slammed into him and took the brunt of the bull’s laser attack.
This did little to scratch the surface of her strange alien craft, but it did send her tumbling backward, where she ricocheted off the dumpster and hit another parked car, causing an alarm to go off.
Sterling wanted to check on Roxie, but he knew that she would survive the attack. Instead, he used the distraction to bolt toward the bull. Sterling shifted right, pulled his arm back, and sent everything he had into his sickle sword.
The mechanical bull’s head fell to the asphalt of the parking lot and the bull’s body, which was basically held up by its back legs, shifted forward and to the side.
There was blood. There were sparks of electricity. There was the distinct smell of burning flesh. There was also this hum in the air that died down, one that Sterling knew was something electronic that the flectomancer had rigged up inside the amalgamation.
He all but expected this same mancer to come running out from somewhere, scolding Sterling for killing the amalgamation. But no one came.
Cedric landed next to him, the flames disappearing from his body. He was back in his flight suit, which had been custom-designed for him to allow him to take his fiery form. Cedric shook his arms out. “I hate these things.”
“You ain’t the only one. Rox? You good?”
“Well, if you’re good, and you’re good,” Sterling told Cedric, “then all’s well. Let’s see what the Kid got herself into.”
Sterling felt a momentary panic at these words. He wondered if it had been a mistake to send the Sunflower Kid to gather what was left of the Angels of Woe. After all, some of them were mancers.
But then they came down a dirt road that led up to the lodge, where they found bodies littered about, many split in half, others with flowers and cactus growing out of them. The Sunflower Kid stood at the apex of all this biological carnage, her hands at her sides, her gaze fixed in the direction of Monument Valley.
