Pickup Trucks and Dragons

I opened the gun’s cylinder and checked to make sure it was loaded for the fifth time in the last fifteen minutes. As nice as the music was, we had been sitting in an idling truck for the better part of half an hour, and I was getting antsy. Once I confirmed that none of the bullets had squirmed out of their places, I flicked the rifle to return the cylinder to its proper place and gave it a spin, before checking whether the safety was still on.

Looking over, Jonas was giving me a half grin. “You’ve really fallen for the Circuit Judge, ain’tcha?”

I snorted. His accent was getting stronger every day. He used to sound perfectly standard, no trace of a detectable accent in any word he spoke. Lately, though, he’d begun slipping further and further into his native Texan drawl. It was somewhat telling how he was apparently infinitely more comfortable these days than he was when we had, quote unquote, ‘normal lives’.

“I used to be totally against guns. Like, complete banning of guns.”

He let out a short, almost barking laugh. “I know. It’s why I never told ya I kept a small armory hidden in a secret compartment underneath the compartment beneath the back seat.”

“Compartception.”

Looking over, I could tell he was struggling to not laugh. It wouldn’t really mean anything, since if we hadn’t set up a short term silence enchantment around the truck after we parked it, the idling engine would have given us away a while ago. Just having a hemi engine wasn’t enough, he had to modify it to make the damn thing even louder. It was a miracle it didn’t also have a lift kit.

Then again, Jonas’ had maintained that lift kits were clearly compensating for something. Then mentioned how his truck had actually been lowered, if only an inch or so. I immediately stepped off that train before the thought travelled much further down the line.

The radio started playing a new song. I decided to reach forward to check what it was, pulling the amazingly intact smartphone out of its slot. Good thing Jonas had his car charger with him.

Over the Seas – Alestorm.

I glanced at Jonas, who gave me a shrug. “It’s on shuffle.”

“We were just listening to Country Boys can Survive.”

“I’ve also got some electro swing songs, a metric ton of heavy metal, dubstep, glitch hop, thrash metal, rock n’ roll, country, folk music, a few rap songs-“ I stopped listening to him, turning my attentions back to the wanted poster taped to the dashboard.

A wyvern was terrorizing a few nearby villages and farms, so until they got actual soldiers to come from a major city to kill the thing, they were letting mercenaries try their luck in return for a reward. I remembered Jonas asking the townspeople what their local wyvern looked like before he had confirmed that his encyclopedic knowledge of fantasy creatures was still correct, then proceeding to say “Basically, think a dragon with only two legs and a pair of wings, poisonous scorpion tail, and yes, it can still breathe fire.”

Fucking. Brilliant.

“Earth to Gabriel!”

I jumped when Jonas yelled at me. Clearly, he had noticed me getting nervous again.

“I told ya, we’ll be fine. Don’t worry so much.”

“I’m just… gah!” I grabbed my helmet and took it off, desperately trying to ease my breathing. My armor was a real set of armor, which was very nice, but getting actual battle-ready armor in the modern day and age cost a small fortune. I was glad Jonas managed to convince me about it, both for our Historical European Martial Arts practices and for the fact that we’d since ended up in a fantasy world.

It was a Late Italian style, with an armet helmet and complete with a falchion. I hadn’t gone to splurge on something like a poleaxe that would have been used with the armor or even a shield, but the armor itself wasn’t for an everyday practice session. Until recently, I mostly used it as a showpiece or to practice basic motions.

Jonas placed his hand on my shoulder. Even if the sallet resting on his head made his eyes almost impossible to see, I still caught them almost glinting through the helmet. His armor was a Gothic style, blued to help protect it from rust, but the real proof that he had been collecting stuff like this for several years longer than I had was proved by the kite shield and heater shield in the truck’s backseat. The only weapon he had, other than the guns, was a straight-bladed kriegsmesser, but he had customized its creation to the point that it was between an actual kreigsmesser, which was two handed, and a messer, which was a one-handed sword.

To this day, I don’t know why he liked hand-and-a-half swords so much.

“Gabriel. We’ll be fine.”

I took a deep breath. “Yeah… Yeah, okay.” I put my helmet back on, checked the rifle one more time and sat back in my seat.

“Are you boys quite done?”

I sighed. Cellica was probably as bored as I was. While the two shields I mentioned earlier were stacked together behind the passenger seat, the elf was poking her head through the square opening where the back window was slid open. She had probably been checking over the ballista we had set up on the bed of the truck.

Vazzia, the goblin who actually maintained our mechanical equipment (and had somehow managed to accidentally turn the truck into a manual transmission) was back in town with our supply trailer, but Cellica knew enough to tell us if anything was about to break. Working together, the two ladies had actually managed to reverse engineer the various bullets that Jonas had brought with him when we accidentally drove into a portal on our way home from a major HEMA meet slash renaissance fair.

Between that and managing to create fuel for the truck by working backwards from Jonas telling them that the truck might be able to run on moonshine, we had both fuel and long range firepower.

Cellia had managed to take to the guns Jonas had brought, since she had good accuracy with just about anything at range, but didn’t have quite the muscle mass necessary to handle a bow with enough draw strength to do much damage.

Crossbows were not yet common in this world, which made my attempts at explaining 'a giant crossbow turret, mounted in the back of the truck' as an early idea much more embarrassing in retrospect.

Otherwise, she was very good at sneaking around and swordsmanship, though we kept her out of melee until we could get something resembling armor on her.

Other than the four of us, we only had one more member of our merry little troop.

Vulmar the elf was a mage with a level of magical expertise somewhere between novice and intermediate. He had more than enough skill to not blow any of us up, but he repeatedly made sure that we knew he had more to learn. Of course, he also reminded each of the rest of us that we also had much more to learn. It was nice to have someone driving us to constantly improve, otherwise our main driving force would just be Jonas and his dream of traveling everywhere, fighting everything and experiencing as much of this world as he could.

Anyway, Vulmar. He was also good at scouting and baiting foes, which was the crux of our plan.

With little warning, the back door swung open and Vulmar leapt into the seat. “Drive, drive, drive!”

Jonas was quicker on the uptake than I was. We were already lurching forward with the sound of a roaring engine when I realized that Vulmar probably had a giant monster chasing him. We burst out of the brush we were hiding in, through several dozen meters of rapidly thinning trees before driving into a clear field with only a few trees and rocks dotting the landscape.

As load as the engine was, it was a second roar from our side that sent a chill down my spine. I turned to see a pair of leathery wings and fury diving for us, maw gaping as it tried to bite us, but the wyvern had never gone after something as fast as our vehicle and ended up eating a face full of dirt.

Jonas shifted gears, turning right as the truck picked up speed. I rolled down the window and aimed my rifle, but the wyvern had already recovered and taken flight. For a moment, we were circling each other, a vehicle with enough people, magic and guns to siege a decently sized town and a massive angry beast with enough poison and fire to burn that same town to the ground.

In that instant, I felt all my fears and doubt melt away. Glancing around, I could tell that Jonas, Vulmar and Cellia were all feeling the same thing.

The wyvern sharply turned towards us and Jonas met its challenge.

Vulmar threw some kind of magical heatshield over us to dissipate the incoming fire, while Cellia aimed the ballista. I managed to lean out the window and get a quick shot off, but my bullet only managed to tear a chunk out of the monster’s leg. Cellia’s ballista bolt managed to tear through its left wing, but it still managed to get its fire breath onto us.

Vulmar’s shield held, but I knew he wouldn’t have many more of those.

Jonas managed to get his voice heard over the engine and radio. “I’ll keep our distance. You three knock that thing out of the sky. Once it’s grounded for good, we put it down!”

I nodded, as did Vulmar. Cellia, manning the ballista in the truck bed, couldn’t hear anything, but she’d realize what we were going for. Looking back, I saw her cranking the wheel that pulled the ballista string back into a position that was ready to fire.

Vulmar had already begun firing lightning bolts at the wyvern, which was starting to struggle to stay airborne.

I fired a second shot at it, this time managing to nail it in the stomach. It wouldn’t do much to immediately cripple it, but every little bit counts.

Cellia got her second ballista shot off, but this one was just a little off. Instead of finishing off the wing, it tore through the beast’s tail. The tail was now hanging on by a few strands of sinew and flesh, so dealing with one of us getting stung by it wasn’t as much of a concern. Believe me, I was very happy about that.

Depite its injuries, the wyvern managed to shoot some kind of fireball at us, but Jonas got us out of the way long before it hit.

Several rapid gunshots told me that Cellia had switched to her pistol for the moment. I managed to get two more shots off. Together, we all but crippled the wyvern with a hail of bullets. Vulmar’s next lightning bolt hit the wyvern in its chest.

For what felt like an eternity, it hung motionless in the sky, until it finally dropped straight to the ground and crumpled into a pile.

The four of us glanced at each other, before Jonas downshifted the engine and drove us over to the body.

We all clambered out of the vehicle and put a few more bullets and spells into it, just to make sure it was dead.

Jonas turned to me and grinned. “Like I said, huh?”

I shook my head. “That was insane.”

Approaching the creature, Vulmar gave a thumbs up. “Every day with you humans has been insane, if you ask me. First the basilisk and now—“

Despite our best attempt at double-tapping it, the wyvern lurched forward one last time, teeth glinting as it lunged at Vulmar.

Jonas and I both dove forward. I grabbed Vulmar and heaved him out of the way, while Jonas managed to get under the wyvern’s throat, draw his sword and slash upwards, opening a large gash in its throat.

A spray of blood coated his armor and the wyvern’s head fell to the side, where Jonas immediately took his sword and started chopping away at its neck until he had completely beheaded it.

Now that were triply sure it was dead, we managed to get the head into the back of the truck, along with the ballista.

Jonas laid out a towel so he didn’t get monster blood on his seat, then we started driving back to town. We’d be back with Vazzia to salvage what we could from the corpse, but payday came first.

Another successful hunt down, Jonas and I touched our knuckles together in a brofist motion.

Say what you will about getting trapped in some kind of weird fantasy universe, but I think we were making our way in the world just fine.

Submitted August 07, 2018 at 08:22PM by Chaos_Eclipsed https://ift.tt/2AQcSEN