Paan’s POV

They sprinted down the tunnel as fast as their legs could carry them, and Paan was a little surprised to find his grandmother keeping up with him, though with an obvious amount of strain.

Through the slight ringing in his ears from his own [Boom Clap], questions flitted through Paan’s head. Who were these people? What did they want? Why were they here?

The answer to the first question was easy of course, one could even say it was obvious. These people, whoever they were, were Others; people from beyond the barren, dangerous island the Seena called home. What they wanted, and why one of them had tried to do... whatever it was she’d tried to do though? Were also very good questions that Paan did not have an answer to. And he was pretty sure that this was one of those moments where his grandma didn’t have those answers either.

Besides, even the one question he felt like he had an answer to was answered rather unsatisfactorily. So these people were Others, from the wider world of the realm. Maybe even beyond the Deran province, which had felt so big when Elder Raad had tried to explain it to him as a child, that he still had trouble comprehending the size of it all (like with Prime when he talked about his Earth places), but where exactly were they from? Where did this Bobo whatever-her-name-was and the people that had followed her into the tunnel come from?

And more importantly, what did [8th Sense] warn him about back then?

*****

Myles’ POV

It was the shouting that woke Myles; a loud voice echoing through the tunnels. “Attack! We’re under attack!”

Atakarr leapt to her feet in the time it took him to open his eyes, and while he was still blearily trying to ask what was going on, she’d taken off from their room.

The screaming voice outside quieted for a few seconds as Atakarr asked questions so fast that Myles didn’t think he would have caught them even if he’d been able to hear the conversation clearly.

Right as he decided to get dressed just in case, Atakarr came dashing back in eyes wide in alarm. “We’re under attack,” she said, but it was her next words that threw him. “By people.”

The first scenario that jumped into Myles’ head was one where a long-lasting portal had opened up on Earth and humans had found their way here somehow, and had decided for whatever reason to attack the Seena. It took him all of two seconds to realise that that wasn’t only unlikely, it was also kinda stupid.

“Which people?” Myles asked.

“I don’t know. Come on.”

Myles tried to put on his pants, only for his foot to be stuck in the pant-leg. “Oh for crying out loud,” he grumbled as he wrestled with the piece of clothing, trying to be careful so as to not ruin his only pair.

As he struggled, Atakarr walked up to him, snatched the pants away, and flung them against the wall with all her might. She turned to him and the expression on her face caused his mouth to wisely snap shut, biting back his protest. “Come on,” she said again, and this time, Myles quietly followed.

The screaming reached Myles long before they got to the junction where the entrance tunnel broke off into the subterranean network.

One of the disadvantages of the Seena’s home was that due to the design of the tunnels they lived in, the tribe had to be spread out pretty thin, ensuring that in a situation such as this, mounting a cohesive response always took time.

Myles and Atakarr had linked up with two others on the way, and when all four of them burst into the rather narrow junction the fighting was taking place in, they all took several precious seconds just to wrap their heads around what, or rather who, they were seeing.

The junction was brightly lit, but also, ironically, swathed in large patches of shadow. [8th Sense] told Myles that there were eighteen hostiles, and that of the seven friendlies, four were unconscious, but even his worry for the downed Seena could not stop him from taking in the new arrivals.

With the glow from a few light-rocks on the ground, as well as the annoyingly bright torches the new arrivals had on their heads, Myles could make out that these people were nothing like him or the Seena.

In fact, no two seemed alike. One was a bug person, with large, dragonfly-like eyes and four arms, and another was an otherwise normal seeming dude who had wriggling tentacles on his chin. But of them all, the person who most caught Myles’ attention was the one [8th Sense] marked as the most dangerous.

They were big, maybe seven feet tall, and heavy with flesh and muscle. Most importantly though, was the fact that they were undeniably a clothed, bipedal rhinoceros.

Also important was that they currently had a meaty fist around Dadaan’s throat, and was choking him out as he kicked and struggled futilely.

Before Myles, or any of them, could act to help Dadaan, the hostile group noticed their presence, and one of them raised an object that Myles clearly recognised as a gun, though an oddly shaped one, and fired a glowing projectile straight at Myles’ chest.

[8th Sense] blared a warning even as Myles was already moving, his spear moving to intercept before the weapon even finished firing. There was a resounding clang as his stone spear collided with the metal projectile (or was it the other way around?), causing it to rebound.

The glowing bullet flew up and struck the ceiling of the hallway, and, completely coincidentally, rebounded again to strike tentacle-beard-face-person.

Blue arcs of electricity surged from the point of contact and wrapped around tentacle-face as he screamed in pain then slumped to the ground, smoking and unconscious.

In the moment after tentacle-face went down, no one moved, not even Myles. Maybe it was due to astonishment from what Myles had just done, but everyone just stood still, seeming to wait for someone else to make the first move.

And naturally, Atakarr did.

Her spear travelled so fast that it was only after the weapon sank into the rhino person’s chest that they even seemed to notice that someone had thrown a weapon their way.

All hell broke loose right after.

*****

Myles had never been in a fight before.

He’d been in lots of spars with Atakarr of course, and even one with Seeng where he’d learnt just how a wide a gap a dozen plus skill levels created between two people, and he’d certainly risked life and limb against creatures that would make some of the more dangerous wildlife back on Earth look like yapping Chihuahuas.

But an honest-to-god, kill-me-I-kill-you fight? No. Not even close.

It was madness, and if not for Myles and Atakarr, the Seena defence may not have stood a chance.

As the rhino person, who apparently also screamed like a rhino, dropped Dadaan and staggered back in pain, everyone else who had a line of sight to the four of them opened fire.

Well, they tried anyway.

Atakarr moved so fast that she was on the enemy in an instant, a whirlwind with a spear, and people started going down in spurts of their own blood before they could even do more than scream.

It was terrifying, it was horrifying, and Myles really just wanted to curl up in a ball and pretend none of it was real, but instead he swallowed down his fear and charged into the fray.

At its widest, the junction was maybe wide enough to take ten smallish people standing shoulder to shoulder, which meant that with the several bodies on the floor and almost two dozen people currently fighting, one of them being a seven foot tall rhino person, space definitely became an issue, and the Seena reinforcements that showed up after Myles’ group didn’t help matters much.

The crush of bodies was suffocating, even as the fighting began to spread out into the tunnels. Lack of space made the use of spears impractical, so many of the Seena resorted to using light-rocks to attempt to bash open their opponent’s skulls.

Despite Atakarr’s initial [Rush] boosted attack, the battle quickly evened out, for while the Seena certainly had a lot of advantages thanks to their System skills, they had little to no experience of actual combat.

Therefore, while the Seena were fast and strong and had superpowers to bring to bear, the enemy had, in many cases, years of combat experience and most importantly, guns.

There were exceptions to the rule, of course, four of them, split evenly between the two groups. On the Seena’s corner, it was Myles and Atakarr, whose skill levels were so high that not even guns could really faze them. Especially not with non-lethal rounds.

On the enemy’s side, it was the bug and rhino people, both of whom turned out to be female, at least if their voices worked anything like humans’. For the rhino woman, it was her strength and toughness and size, all of which she used to devastating effect, battering through the Seena like bowling pins before a bulldozer. Not even the bleeding wound on her chest that Atakarr had left seemed to be slowing her down.

For the bug woman, it was her speed. Well, that and the annoyingly hard carapace that covered her from head to her booted toes, or whatever it was she had in there. She moved like an arrow, blindingly fast, tanked hits that should by all rights kill her, and seemed to have eyes on the back of her head, leaving her with no blind spots. Worst of all was that unlike most of her comrades, she had resorted to using lethal measures, cutting down the Seena with long, keen-edged protrusions that sprouted from all four of her forearms.

Despite the effort of their two strongest fighters though, the attackers were steadily losing the longer the fight went on. Besides the fact that the Seena outnumbered them, there was the bigger problem of the Seena actually getting stronger as the fight continued due to skill level ups. Against cheats like that, the enemy didn’t really stand a chance.

And they must have realised it.

The intruders began to break and run, trying to retreat. However, they were underground and turned around, so they simply scattered into whatever direction they felt they would be safe in, everyone for themselves.

The Seena gave chase, Atakarr and Myles luckily having the presence of mind to split after the enemy’s two strongest.

Which was how Myles found himself pursuing a seven-foot tall female while naked and covered in blood that was mostly not his.

In different circumstances, he would be able to appreciate just how uniquely insane that scenario was.

The tunnel the rhino woman had run down was wide, ten feet or more across, but it wasn’t deep. It only ran about twenty-five meters before coming to a dead end.

Seeing the dead end, the rhino woman stopped and turned, the torch on her head almost blinding Myles.

There was a light-rock here, just one, but its glow wasn’t enough to counter the glare of the torch, so Myles threw out a few more until the yellow light was bright enough to make the concentrated beam of the torch more bearable.

“That’s a very handy ability you got there,” the woman said in a rumbling voice, as she unhooked the lamp from her head and dropped it. “Kinda wish I had that; could have been useful once or twice.”

Myles said nothing at first, simply watching her. Despite that the fighting since Myles joined had barely lasted two whole minutes, the woman looked worse for wear, her clothes torn in many places and her breathing sounding wet, most likely from the wound Atakarr gave her at the start of the fight. Even with all that though, Myles didn’t lower his guard a single bit, and it wasn’t just because [8th Sense] was still telling him that this woman was the most dangerous thing he had ever fought.

He didn’t need a skill to tell him that, he’d seen it firsthand. He saw it even now in the bit of flesh stuck to the thick, bloody tusk on her face.

Finally, Myles spoke. “Who are you?”

Her response was completely unexpected. “Huh? You’re gonna have to speak up, kid; I can’t hear you. Looks like that clapping thing you guys like so much fucked up my ears.”

Myles’ hand tightened on his spear in anger, but he held himself back and obligingly repeated his question in a higher voice. He really wanted to know. “I said, who are you?”

There was a recognizably cruel smile on the woman’s face despite her irregular features as she answered. “Bobo Toreebo at your service.” She added a mock bow at the end. “Smuggler, buccaneer, assassin, and currently, prospective slaver.”

That last word rang like a gong in Myles’ head; slaver.

“So that’s it?” Myles asked, needing no conscious effort to raise his voice this time around. “You attacked us because you want slaves? All those people dead because want to make some cash!”

“Of course.” Bobo sounded as though she thought he was stupid. “What? You thought we came kicking down your front doors for the hell of it?”

Myles stared at her in silence, unable to frame a coherent sentence at her complete disregard for the enormity of her actions.

He’d known that people like this Bobo Toreebo existed, of course. He’d seen movies with characters like her, people who were so narcissistic they were literally incapable of appreciating the harm they caused others. People to whom everyone else were just bugs to step on. However, actually being face to face with a person like that, and hearing her be so callous about her actions when several people he considered friends laid wounded and dying because of her just made him so...

Angry.

“I am going to kill you,” Myles said, meaning every word.

“Ha! Is that so? Well, I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to beat you to a pulp then take you to someone who would love to get a look at you. And in return, he’ll give me a dozen times the numbers I had, so that when I come back for round two I can give every last one of your friends here some fancy bracelets that are just to die for.

“Who knows? If you’re lucky maybe you’ll even meet some of them again.”

If Bobo’s plan was to make Myles lose his cool, she succeeded, because he threw his spear at her with all his might.

She dodged, barely, the weapon leaving a bloody line on her neck before embedding into the wall behind her, but it was enough to save her life, and enough to let Myles cover half the space between the two of them, his final spear already in hand.

His first attack was a thrust at her throat and her counter a booted foot at his torso. Neither connected. Bobo rushed him, punches and kicks flying at surprising speed for a woman her size. The rhino woman was not a graceful fighter by any stretch of the imagination, but she had strength and reach and the skill to use both efficiently.

Myles, on the other hand, had precognition, and could move fast enough to make Bruce Lee go green with envy.

The cuts started small; a nick here, a scratch there, barely enough to be noticed by a tank like Bobo, but damage all the same. Damage that was adding to what was already there.

Myles dashed in and out, bobbing and weaving and twisting in ways that would rip a normal human body apart. His spear flashed repeatedly, stabbing nine, ten, sometimes eleven times in a second, all of them connecting hits that drew just a little bit more blood.

The fight was going to Myles and they both knew it.

“Argh! Stop dodging, you little shit,” Bobo screamed as Myles dodged yet another kick from her, leaving three stab wounds on the calf of said leg for her trouble.

She tried again, a punch this time, but her stance was wrong and Myles’ endless assaults did not leave her the room to correct it. That and the growing litany of wounds on all the important parts of her person, left it a pathetic shadow of what it should have been.

Myles could have dodged it in his sleep.

Time to finish this, he decided. Most of the enemy had fallen before they broke, but so had the Seena too, so it would be a good idea to end this now so he could go help mop up the rest of these assholes.

And he knew just the way to do it.

Still off from her poor punch, Bobo was wide open, and Myles spun into position and rammed his spear into her eye socket.

She caught it.

“Got you.”

Three things happened in that moment. The first was Myles realising that Bobo had tricked him, pretending to be weaker than she actually had been, the second was [8th Sense] beginning to sound klaxons in his head to let him know just how screwed he was, and the third was him being unable to realistically do anything as a punch that would dent a bank vault door slammed into his face.

...

..

.

There was darkness. Darkness and, for the first time since the fighting started, silence. And for a second, Myles thought that he was dead.

Before he could even begin to panic or mourn his youthful demise, pain came, alerting him that he was in fact not dead. Because the dead did not feel pain. He hoped.

With the pain came sound, a pounding in his skull that he wasn’t sure if it was from the major blunt force trauma he’d taken to the head, or [8th Sense] telling him that the cause of said blunt force trauma was coming to finish the job.

Maybe it was both.

He heard Bobo laugh, and only then realised that the woman was standing over him. “Fuck, that felt good,” she crowed.

Myles opened his eyes, his vision blurry but clear enough to see Bobo standing over him, a victorious smile on her face.

“Too bad I had to ruin your face though.”

Myles coughed (which caused his head to pound even worse), the blood seeping from his shattered nose choking him a little bit. He tried to turn around to cough it out but Bobo dropped a giant foot on his chest, stopping him.

“Nuh-uh,” she said. “I’m still gloating, you little shit.”

This was it, Myles thought dejectedly, and with more than a little bit of surprise. He had lost. Somehow.

Despite having the System and being the good guy in every sense of the word, he’d lost the fight.

Why couldn’t real life be like movies? He wondered. If this were a movie, this would be the point where he would remember some long forgotten skill he probably only had because Atakarr made him keep it, telling him “it might come in han—holy fucking shit!

How could he have forgotten something like that!?

Reaching up weakly, Myles punched the shinbone of the leg Bobo had on his chest.

Iron Fist_ Lv. MAX

Type: (active)

Makes your arms powerful enough to throw a single punch that packs the power of five hundred of your normal punches.

Notice: use of this skill requires as much physical energy as it would ordinarily cost to throw five hundred normal punches.

Myles felt a sudden drain on his stamina as the leg exploded in a spray of gore and bone shards from the knee to the ankle.

‘Why did I bother with a spear again?’ Myles thought to himself as Bobo screamed, before sitting up and coughing out the blood choking him.

Staggering to his feet, Myles stared at the pirate where she sat in a growing pool of her own blood, her left leg ending just after the knee in a bleeding wreck.

This was why Elder Raad had banned this skill. One argument taken too far and it’d be like Translucent’s murder scene in The Boys. Myles couldn’t even celebrate his victory now, all he just felt was weary and revolted.

Forcing herself to breathe through the pain, Bobo laughed. It was a strained, pathetic attempt. “Looks like you got me, kid. Guess you win this round, huh?”

Somehow, Myles knew she was lying. Bobo wouldn’t surrender. He didn’t think it was something she was even capable of. Therefore, when the pirate rushed him, still impressively fast in spite of her pain and missing limb, Myles was ready.

The second punch hit her chest.

*****

Four died.

Cott, Beero, Daas, and Ooeem.

They say it would have been more if not for the System. Myles was mostly just sad that the System hadn’t been able to save those four.

Unlike Myles who had suffered a broken nose and a squashed face (but fortunately no missing teeth), Atakarr was fine, despite that she’d arguably faced the tougher opponent, and according to her, it was because she’d been smart enough to use [Iron Fist] from the get-go.

Oh well, live and learn.

The pirates were all killed. Their bodies taken out and dumped in the forest as food for the animals. And their ship? Well, Myles and Atakarr liked the colour.

*****

Epilogue

Six weeks later

Atakarr’s POV

The ship can’t take everyone. And even if it can, many of the tribe aren’t really eager to leave, and Atakarr can’t blame them.

The world out there is clearly dangerous. More so than even the upper island can ever be, and everyone still remembers the four lessons dangers from the outside world taught them.

There had been a vote; for whether the Deran government they’d learnt of in the ship’s computer should be alerted of the Tribe’s existence, and for now the vote is largely against it.

Atakarr suspects it will be this way for some time.

Myles though wants to leave. In an attempt to escape the hero worship that has only gotten worse since the attack, and also because he wants to “see what this crazy dimension is like.”

She feels the same. So they are leaving, she and him, out to see if any of the old stories are true. No one is against it. No one cares if they take the ship; many even seem eager to see it gone. No one who will miss her tells her not to go, and they have prepared a means of communication and can always return when they please.

Yet, Atakarr feels guilty for wanting to leave.

She feels like she is betraying her family, turning her back on them.

So on the night before they leave, while Myles sleeps contentedly, she gets up and goes to the pool she’s known her whole life just to watch the shimmering water pour.

She finds Elder Raad there.

Atakarr has come here to be alone with her thoughts, so she considers leaving, but the older woman bids Atakarr to join her by the pool.

Atakarr sighs. Of course, she thinks.

They sit quietly for a long time, so long, in fact, that Atakarr can’t take the silence anymore and speaks. “I think I’ll miss this place most of all.”

“Why?” The older woman asks in return.

Atakarr almost sighs again. She really isn’t in the mood for one of Elder Raad’s lessons right now.

Almost as though the other woman has read her mind, Elder Raad says, “this isn’t me trying to teach you a lesson, I’m actually genuinely curious why you would miss this place most of all. Children have drowned in that pool.”

Atakarr gives the Elder a dubious look. “So, you’re not trying to teach me a lesson about how I’m being stupid for feeling bad about leaving tomorrow?”

“Whatever for?” Elder Raad asks. “You already know your worry is baseless. Besides, I know nothing I say will stop you from feeling bad about leaving tomorrow. And I also know that no matter how bad you feel about it, you will still leave tomorrow. And there is no doubt in my mind that no matter how great the life you find out there is, you will never forget your family. This is fact. Saying anything is pointless.”

Atakarr stares at the woman in bewilderment for several seconds, then she smiles.

Elder Raad smiles too. “Now tell me,” she says, going back to the important matter at hand. “Why will you miss this pool the most?”

The End