An elf was pointing a bow and arrow at him.

And he wasn’t gonna lie, it was pretty cute. Like a puppy trying to bite. In high-tech, top-of-the-line light armor, he had as much to fear from a primitive propulsion weapon as he did from a fly.

She was covered head to toe in curling tattoos, designs of blue spreading across her sun-tanned skin. Her ears jangled with golden rings all the way up to the points. She would have been beautiful if she had eyes. But there were just flat, slightly concave spaces were those should have been. A blue dot was painted on her forehead between the blank spaces.

As an experiment, he stepped to the left. The arrow followed him.

She was skinny but hard-bodied, muscle flexing under the tattoos of her forearm. Stowing his pistol, he casually raised his hands with the palms out flat, not wanting this to become an incident-

And that must not have been the universal sign for surrender because she fucking shot him.

The arrow went right through his high-tech, top-of-the-line, best-civilization-can-do armor. It punched through the nanoscale like tissue paper. He felt the wave of force from the puncture ripple through his whole body, and his left foot tore a furrow through the earth as he was pushed backwards.

He sank to his knees, clutching the wound and cussing in every language he knew. Which was two.

Not including Elven.

She barked at him with lilting, musical words, nocking another arrow in case he did something dangerous like put his hands in the air. He was really, really considering drawing his gun, but the thought of being the idiot who started a hundred-years war by turning first contact into a gunfight didn’t appeal to him. Something about going down as one of history’s greatest fuckups.

Also he was pretty sure she’d put the next one through his eye before he could blink, if she wanted to.

“Lady, I don’t know what you want, but-” He rolled over onto his side, grasping the arrow and pulling it free. Painkillers were already flooding his system, so it didn’t hurt too much. Tiny tubules built into the underside of the nanoscale deployed a sealant foam across the wound and the breach, sealing to a solid grey in seconds, supergluing his guts together.

Gut-wounds were the worst, because you couldn’t go to the bathroom until you found a medic to take the glue back out of your pipeworks. Marine lore was full of horror stories on the topic.

She was looking at him funny. Head cocked to one side, lips pursed, maybe considering he’d just been trying to say hello and that shooting him, you know, might have been a bit rude. He wasn’t complaining, just putting the thought out there.

She spoke again, softer this time. Less commanding. If he wasn’t completely wrong, she’d switched languages, trying something less musical and more clustered together, a rapidfire burst of hard consonants and growls. He smiled thinly and said, “Hi.”

Shaking her head, she reached forward, grasped the knife in his leg-sheathe, and pulled it free. It was a crystal-weave ceramic dagger with a jet-black, semi-translucent blade, a beautiful thing he’d bought for a birthday present one lonely deployment, with a contained electric current that released naturally on impact. She turned it over in her hands, and then grinned widely.

A mouthful of sharp, yellowed teeth dispelled any fanciful notion that might have been working away in the back of his head about being taken as a captive slave-husband for an amazonian tribe.

He suspected his favorite knife had just become his payment for not being left on the forest floor.

The girl whistled, and an enormous creature like a six-footed, elongated fox curled down from the trees. She stroked its red muzzle, calming it as the wet black nose dipped down to sniff at him, prodding without affection at his wound, lips drawing back in a whiny little growl. Its mom gave it a kiss on the head and put her hand under its jaw, as clear a ‘no-biting’ as he’d ever seen.

With a final sniff, it gave up and dismissed him, turning its head up so she could scratch its fur. Yipping purrs echoed through the forest.

“Laleum ya.” She snapped, pointing to the saddle.

Taking that as his cue, Pike staggered onto his feet, grinned at the beast as it paused its purring to growl at him, and stepped carefully aboard the saddle, finding it had a depressed area for passengers and cargo with a riding seat at the head. He figured he was cargo.

“Ya, laleum!” She leapt aboard the seat, pointing back to the leather straps that dangled from the edges of the bed. He got the message and grabbed hold of them.

And then the fox-ferret started to run, he realized he might want a little more security than that, and tied it around his waist. Because the ferret didn’t just run between the trees- it leapt from one to the next, clever little prehensile claws digging into the bark, leaving him sideways half the time as every jump bucked his stomach up into his throat.

Pike had ridden through an asteroid storm in a mech no grav-engines. He had fought sideways, upside down, gone through every rollercoaster re-entry possible.

But goddamn.

He was not having any of this. Clinging hard to the leather strap until his knuckles went white, Pike held on for dear life and watched the forest fly by.

That was when the next screen blipped into existence.

Learn Skill - ‘Riding’ ?

Class Signature

Riding - Increases balance, reaction-time, and animal companionship while riding.

“Yes dammit!” Pike spat, and the little blue marble plunged into his head.