CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
Jake raised the Arrant-4 to his shoulder and fired in one smooth motion, and the precise laser bolt whirred out of the barrel and slammed into the tree trunk with all the love of an industrialist weapon, burning a thin hole through the bark and into the sensitive wood of the bumbarkh tree. For a Mudokon shaman, he surmised he was a lot different than most in that he was willing to try out one of the industrialist weapons rather than stick to either the native magic or the powerful rapid-fire Spoocebow.
He lowered the gun stock to the ground and blew the smoke from the tip of the barrel, not because he wanted to clean the barrel but because he’d seen it in a couple Slig war movies and wanted to act out the cliché and see if it was worth seeing. The smoke smelled bad when it wafted into his nostrils, so he privately wondered why it would be so interesting to blow smoke out of the gun barrel when it did nothing good for the lungs.
Jake turned to Chief Andy, who was sitting across the small campfire from him. “I think I’ll keep this gun.”
“Fine,” the chieftain grunted in his guttural tones, stirring at the fire with his stick. “Spoocebow, me.”
Jake cast a glance around the Mudokon camp. Campfires gleamed brightly in the night air, warming the crisp cold with thin black smoke. Warriors sat around campfires and inside their tents, eating or sleeping to rest up from their victory today over the enormous Slig force King Fragg had sent out to destroy them.
The shaman shook his head. Victory? If it really had been a victory – which it had, since they had wiped out every single Slig on the field with their Spoocebows and tomahawks – it had been a costly one. Many Sligs had been armed with these powerful Arrant-4 precision rifles, capable of mass destruction when pointed at anything. More Mudokons had died than Sligs on the charred and smoking battlefield some miles behind them.
If that had been a victory, then they could keep on winning victories and wipe themselves out by doing so. There were so many Sligs, armed with such deadly industrialist weapons, and armored, too.
Jake returned his attention to the ever-grumpy Mudokon chief. “Do you have anything we could use as armor?”
Andy looked up. “Huh?”
“Armor.”
The chief’s simple reply was “No.”
Jake rapped his knuckles against the gun barrel. “Too bad. We need more protection from Slig lasers…”
“Others be here soon.” Andy sent up a shower of sparks from the fire pit with a jab of his staff. “Then no need armor.”
Jake sighed. “I hope so. We need as many warriors as we can get.”
He switched off the Arrant-4’s power pack and laid it on the ground, then set himself on the ground nearby, shaking his head. “At least Abe’s not in any real trouble. If he were, I would be teleporting to him right —”
The world blurred around him, and suddenly he was having that familiar feeling of vertigo that announced one of his sudden teleportations to Abe’s side.
“—now,” he finished.
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