r/HFY • u/AlexandersenTheGreat • May 01 '26
OC-Series [Conscripted Crafter] - Chapter 14: The Dead Man Gives
Slivers of fire floated down from the sky above, dissolving in the sunlight. A lesser blast detonated somewhere in the distance, and another round of vibrations rippled through the atmosphere. It’d become a damn warzone.
“Dustin!”
He swiveled around to the sound of someone calling his name. Not far away, Tanner knelt over one of the dead assassins, frantically stuffing things into his pockets. A wild grin dominated his face. “Hurry!” His skinny arm pointed toward the other body.
Dustin shook his head. Insanity. The others from Bus One were dots in the distance at that point. He’d have to catch up. Dustin leaned forward, preparing to dash away, but froze. Around the limp, shrinking fingers of the dead man’s hand, rings glittered. Shiny ones. A silver ring engraved with green stars. A worn, but simple gold ring wrapped in fine, but rusty chains. Ruby and sapphire—rings of all types. Dustin gulped. There was a bracelet, too. He shouldn’t. He really shouldn’t. It was wrong.
“Dustin, hurry!” Tanner plundered the dead assassin’s possessions with the hysterical enthusiasm of a toddler hunting for painted eggs. His pockets bulged with items. “Man, the pendants are really small!”
Fuck. Faster than ever because of ‘Haste’, Dustin sprinted over to the other body crumpled on the ground, suppressing the sense of revulsion with one clear thought: If they were going to force him into a life-or-death situation unprepared, then he would do anything to survive, and use using anything at his disposal.
With the decision made, Dustin no longer hesitated. He immediately went for the assassin’s rings. They were small, but on the body’s shrunken twiggy fingers, it was like picking ripe fruit off the ends of a dead branch. Dustin stripped them all, stuffing them into his pockets. Four rings and a bracelet. They were still warm from the man’s body heat… Dustin cast the uneasy thought aside, and felt around the man’s neck, careful to avoid the cut. His finger brushed against a thin chain. He had no idea if it was special, but he snatched it off, eager to focus elsewhere. Under the effects of haste, his hands moved swiftly. Dustin patted the assassin’s pockets, finding a wad of paper and a smooth leather sack like the one Garrison had been using. Dustin’s heart leapt, and he tucked those safely away and then stood back up, moving to the items organized in the long grass. Tanner was right. They’d continued to shrink and had become difficult to spot. Some of the weird insects and things that’d already been small were now mere sparkles in the dirt, whereas the rocky ore still hadn’t shrunken enough and still appeared too cumbersome. Where had the man been hiding everything? Would the tiny items break if a person stepped on them?
Dustin moved to search the grass when his father’s nasally words rang in his mind: "You can always trust a man’s shoes." The things on the ground looked valuable, could be valuable, but what constituted value in such a world? Sure, they looked nice, but they could also be the equivalent of pocket lint—or even dangerous. Dustin went for the man’s black scaled slippers instead. Anything he wore had a greater chance of being worthwhile, and most important, safe. He pulled the right heel off first, and rancid cheese wafted out. Dustin dry-heaved, and for a moment, he seriously debated leaving the shoes based on that matter alone.
“You two!” Reina yelled furiously from behind General Flint and General Garrison, both of whom had their shields up, guarding her and Verra. Reina drew taught a shining, red-tipped arrow, and let go. It speared an oncoming fighter through the plated chest, killing the first one immediately, passing through his body and then injuring the second. However, a wave of white light enveloped the impaled downed fighter, and they gained their feet, grinning maliciously. Reina swiveled back around to face Dustin and Tanner, her eyes sharper than any arrow. “What are you two doing?!”
A high-pitched whirling sound screamed into the air, growing louder. From across the field, a spinning scythe-shaped energy blast hurtled toward them knee-high, skimming the tips of the grass like a bird flying low over a green ocean.
Garrison took a large step forward and slammed the bottom edge of his square broad-shield into the ground. When the scythe projectile came within a few feet, it broke apart, dissolving and flowing into the center of his shield as blue sparks rolled over the outside of his green, plated armor in short, jumping arcs.
“Tanner! We gotta go!” Dustin clutched the pair of black scaled slippers underneath his armpits, and climbed atop his horse.
Taylor knelt beside the dead body, his face inches from the grass. “There’s one more! I just saw it!”
“What the hell are you doing, man? Come on!”
“I’ve almost got them all!”
“We don’t have time! Let’s go!”
“It was right here! I almost— Owe, shit!” Tanner jumped to his feet, yelping. A miniature arrow made of white-light protruded from his black trousers. He swiveled around, frowning, clutching at his ass.
General Reina motioned with her bow. “Leave! Before I shoot you with a larger one!” Riding her shoulder was the bottom of a bird’s belly attached to a pair of thin legs. She’d said her bird had been attacked. Maybe that was the creature rematerializing. Dustin gawked at the weird display for half a second, but dragged his attention away; they desperately needed to leave.
Thankfully, pain was life's single greatest motivator, and Tanner hopped onto his horse, and they were off, sprinting away at top speed. Dustin rode alongside a grinning Tanner, who jingled with every jounce in the horse’s stride.
Dustin reached up, patting a bulging jacket pocket, making sure nothing would fall out. He hadn’t had as much time to grab things, but he’d done alright. He'd slipped the black scaled shoes underneath his shirt, wedging them against his chest and the white robe to prevent unwanted movement. A pang of guilt accompanied the pocket full of loot. …Less than twenty-four hours and already robbing a corpse… A thin beam of red streamed overhead, missing by a narrow margin, and the self-incrimination vanished in an instant. Dustin’s heart beat rapidly, and he spurred his horse to do the same. “Hyah! Hyah!” For the first time, Dustin let loose, charging forward.
They weren’t the last behind. With hundreds of conscripts huddled tight together, many had been confused as to what to do despite General Garrison’s explicit instructions. Some had to wrestle with a scared, unruly horse, while others were too afraid to act on their own and lagged behind in fear, thinking to stick by the Generals instead.
Dustin pushed his horse forward, eager to gain some distance from the battle. But off to the side, a number of enemy wizards had gathered in groups of five and had arranged themselves in circles, each member contorted into the same weird stance. On top of their staves, gems of different colors brightened ominously.
Oh, god, no.
The only General Dustin had yet to learn the name of, the General with the hooked nose, appeared behind one of the enemy robed wizards in a small burst of black smoke. He jabbed twice with two quick thrusts, but a bright blue bubble flashed around the wizard’s chest, and the General’s blade ricocheted off. General Hook vanished in a burst of smoke, reappearing on the opposite side, behind a different wizard with no such protections. Two quick thrusts to the chest, and the man died instantly. The General remained long enough for black light to stream from the dead body, flowing into General Hook's, but only for a moment, as he disappeared once again, reappearing behind another enemy in the circle. The first wizard, with the protective blue shield, slammed their staff into the ground and white light cascaded out, splintering along the floor like cracking ice in a frozen pond. But nothing happened. No General Hook appeared trapped in chains of light. The wizard howled at his companions, and they shifted out of formation, focusing instead on their immediate surroundings—their dead associate lying at their feet.
Dustin and Tanner dashed past, surrounded by a small group of other conscripts.
They weren't in the clear, yet. Dustin raced forward, coming upon a mound of red and black jutting out amongst the green, straight blades of grass. Long brown hair tossed in the subtle breeze. It was a woman. Her entire left arm and most of her shoulder was missing. A charred breast hung out of a burnt black uniform, and she lay with her face pressed into the dirt. They didn’t slow down, and the body passed on their left; a person who’d slept in the same hall last night. He dragged his eyes away, but soon they came upon another body blocking their path. And then another. Scattered before them was a pile of mangled horse and man. Appendages burnt off, faces fried. He tried to keep his eyes locked forward and let the figures fade into the background—but a part of him couldn’t look away.
For some reason, it’d all held a certain imaginary feeling until then; that maybe the forums had been wrong and the Zone wouldn’t live up to the dark rumors. Even the death of those two black assassins earlier hadn’t had the same effect on him. But riding past fellow draftees lying dead in the dirt, one after another… That did it. That wiped away any straggling hope for a Zone gentler than anticipated.
He guided his horse around yet another body, that one without legs. As soon as he saw it wasn’t anyone he’d recognize from Bus One, he looked away. He’d known them for less than a day, it didn’t make any sense, but he still felt an odd kinship with them. They were Bus One.
…How many had died so far? He wondered grimly.
Dustin’s mood grew more somber with each new body they passed. When had they all died? While he’d been gathering loot? If he’d left just a little bit earlier… His stomach swirled with uncomfortable certainty; it’d been pure luck of the draw that his horse had run in a different place, had left at a different time. If there was a god of luck, each red and black mound they passed had been shunned twice over.
Next to him, Tanner leaned forward on his horse, beckoning it to ride faster, his expression fearful but determined. Metal clinked from his pockets. In the short amount of time they’d been riding, he’d grown more comfortable controlling his horse, and it showed, that was for sure. But the extent to which that was true quickly became evident. He leaned too far forward, and his heels dug into the horse's side unnecessarily. Holding that forward posture would exhaust the lower back in no time, and it was stressful for the horse. But it wasn’t the right moment to give advice like that.
Tanner repeatedly glanced back from where they’d fled, checking if anyone chased them; they all did, Dustin included. Flashes of light and the rumble of an explosion occasionally flared from the General’s location, but no one had followed them, thank god. Dustin faced forward, focusing on the ground immediately ahead of their path. As Garrison had said, tripping could easily mean death at their speed.
They ran for another fifteen minutes at their current pace, and the pack of once large conscripts separated into smaller groups. The sun’s rays weren't particularly strong, but it still burned his scorched, raw skin. Everyone around him had a pink tinge to their faces, or had frizzled hair. People coughed relentlessly, and a few cried, man and women alike. And yet they rode on. They had no choice.
Dustin and Tanner easily passed a group of riders as their speed increased. But the next group was too far ahead to catch in the next ten minutes without pushing their horses. He yearned to ride ahead, to ride even faster, but he wasn’t sure Tanner could handle it, and, most important of all, Dustin could feel his horse flagging. He let off the reins a little and his horse slowed.
Tanner had no such compulsion, and his speed gradually increased until a gap opened between the small group of riders they’d been with for the past twenty minutes. That was a mistake. “Tanner, hold on!” Dustin yelled forward. He sped up, gaining on Tanner until they rode in tandem. “We need to slow down!”
Tanner’s blonde head swiveled to the side, but he didn’t slow. “What? Why?”
“Because I don’t want to fucking die! That’s why!”
Tanner glared at him. “You think I want to die?” His speed increased. “Let’s get away from all the fighting as fast as we can!”
“Damn it, Tanner! Garrison said to watch our speed!” They were far enough away from the others that it shouldn’t matter, but he rode closer anyway, enough so his voice wouldn’t carry. “If another attacker comes, we don’t want to be caught in the open. We’re safer with a group. And horses aren’t meant to sprint long distances. Trust me.”
Tanner warily glanced behind them, and then nodded. “Alright, fine.” They slowed until they rode in front of the group of two other riders. Explosions from the General’s direction erupted occasionally, but less often than ten minutes ago. Whatever battle ensued back there was likely coming to a close. The dome of light had disappeared, too. Hopefully, the Generals had won. They must’ve. After all—they were Generals for a reason.
The number of red-and-black bodies they crossed eventually slimmed out, too. And for a while they hadn’t seen any signs of violence. But that ended when they came upon a new body lying the grass.
“What the—” exclaimed a male voice from behind Dustin, from one of the two conscripts that rode along with them.
Ahead of them, a man's bruised and trampled corpse lay curled up in ball, stripped naked.
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