Ruthless: Path of Conquest

Leo DaSilva stepped forward perhaps a little more eagerly than he should have.

He had always enjoyed fighting as a boy. In the neighborhood where he grew up, you had to be good at it. And he rumbled with the worst of them.

He had been in principals’ offices and detention over and over, expelled from the first couple of schools his parents enrolled him in. The same thing happened in his last, subpar school, except that the teachers there had seen boys like Leo a thousand times. They realized it wasn’t going to make any difference to their students—the hard cases—whether they stayed late after school or not. Then they turned a blind eye.

Somehow, he had managed to make it through childhood without killing anyone. Without any arrests, even.

Leo looked for a place where his particular passions and skillset would be rewarded, and he found the Police Academy.

There, knocking heads was a required skill. There were formalities around it, but as he gradually learned, it was actually possible to do some good with violence.

The police force was where he finally found a constructive channel for his youthful energy. People who saw his potential. Mentorship.

Slowly, he shifted from cracking skulls to asking questions. From asking questions to solving puzzles. From officer to detective.

From not knowing the first thing about investigations to trying to do the job properly, the way his mentor, Detective Shelby Young, would have wanted it done.

Leo didn’t mellow immediately. He still had a hell of a temper. He would get into shouting matches with his wife that led to slammed doors or words that couldn’t be un-said or forgotten—and one day, a divorce.

The second marriage ended in much the same way, only quicker.

But his temper cooled with age and maturity.

Without him really knowing it was happening, one day Leo woke to find that he was a little too old to crack skulls. His back hurt more than he remembered.

Remarkably, he had never lost a fight as an adult man. Despite getting into more scraps than he could count. He had suffered broken bones and a concussion. He had even been shot and cracked a couple of ribs. But even when he wound up in the hospital afterward, he always made sure the other guy couldn’t think of it as a win.

As a man of forty-six, however, he had finally started de-escalating situations. It wasn’t a conscious shift. But on an unconscious level, he knew his body wasn’t what it had once been. Brute force wasn’t the only way to resolve a conflict.

When he stood back and looked at himself, Leo liked the middle aged version of the man he had become better than any previous iteration. Some of his past foibles were simply gone—and he knew that he was an improved man.

“Maybe it’s all right getting old,” he had muttered to himself in the mirror one day as he was plucking white hairs from his mustache.

And Leo just about believed it.

Then the System appeared, with its magic and “Medieval Times” look.

Now everything is different, he thought. I have to find a new place in the world.

It wasn’t all bad. With Stats and levels, Leo had found that some of his youthful vigor had returned.

“Thank you for volunteering, sir,” said James, smiling. He threw a quick look at someone in the audience. Leo didn’t have to look to know it would be Mina.

Then James stepped toward Leo and extended a hand. They shook.

“I imagine it will be my pleasure,” Leo said. “I don’t need to put on my armor, do I?”

The Fisher King was not wearing armor, but to Leo’s careful detective’s eye, the man didn’t look like he needed armor. He was more thickly muscled than anyone Leo had ever seen who was not a professional athlete.

“I don’t think you do,” James said evenly. “We won’t fight for real.” He smiled, baring teeth that looked strong enough to bite through rebar. “Unless you decide you want to for some reason.”

“Nah, I think I’m okay,” Leo said, grinning back.

So this is your husband, huh? He looked over at Mina, who was smiling a little nervously.

Then he and James focused on each other.

“I’m James,” said the Fisher King.

“I know,” said Leo. “Your reputation precedes you. Call me Leo.”

“It’s a pleasure,” James said.

Then he shifted to explaining what he wanted Leo to do. If the policeman had expected something fantastical, he might have been slightly disappointed.

Instead, what played out was a scene reminiscent of martial arts experiences Leo had participated in back in the pre-System days. James used him as the dummy—or the attacker—to show a series of martial arts moves and counters.

Leo tried to be useful and move his body the way James needed, and like any skilled martial artist, the Fisher King refrained from accidentally injuring his fake sparring partner.

The only strange quality about the demonstration, for Leo, was that he could not recognize the martial arts at all. There were punches, kicks, and chops, as he would have expected from any striking focused martial art. There was some demonstration of grappling techniques. But there were also moves that Leo could not put a finger on at all.

Moments where it was clear the next move was meant to be a bite, a clawing attack, or gouging the opponent’s eyes out. James did not follow through on any of that, of course. But in those moments where James was demonstrating those aspects of the martial art, which he had not named, Leo got the feeling that he was struggling with a wild beast, like a bear or wolf.

He had to steel himself to continue complying with the exercises, rather than reflexively moving to defend himself from what occasionally felt like it could morph into a real attack.

At last, James said that they were done. Leo had caught what looked like a signal from Mina to her husband before James spoke up. She nodded, as if to say that she thought everyone had absorbed all they could from the demonstration.

Leo thought that was probably for the best. They had been at it for almost an hour in the hot sun, and he was covered in sweat. The Fisher King, by contrast, looked like he had been relaxing in air conditioning the whole time.

“Thank you,” Leo mouthed to Mina.

That husband of yours doesn’t know when to stop!

She smiled and looked like she wanted to laugh. Then she shrugged and pointed at Leo, as if saying, You’re the one who volunteered!

Which he supposed was fair enough.

There was a quiet round of applause from the people who had watched through the whole demonstration.

As the crowd began to disperse with the announcement that they were done, Leo couldn’t resist trying to engage with James’s martial arts a little more.

“Would you mind telling me what fighting style we were demonstrating?” he asked. “I used to mess around with martial arts a little, but I didn’t recognize some of those moves.”

A lot of those moves, he thought.

“It’s not a traditional martial art,” James confided quietly. “The System gave me a Skill for fighting. The name is Way of the Predator.”

“Sounds aggressive,” said Leo.

And although he was sweaty and slightly tired, he couldn’t resist what came next.

“Would you be willing to demonstrate how it works with me a little more?” he asked. “I’m curious how it would fare against my more traditional training.”

An unmistakable twinkle shone in the Fisher King’s eye as he replied.

“I would love to.”

—

James almost felt bad about agreeing to fight Leo.

He had heard nothing but positives about him from Mina, and Leo had been a perfect partner for the impromptu martial arts demonstration James ended up giving.

But he could feel there was the caveman part of both of them.

They needed to establish who was stronger and tougher, so that a hierarchy could assert itself. Leo probably already knew where he fell, but there was a difference between knowing something and proving it.

I won’t insult your resolve by saying no to spare your physical well-being, James thought. Just have to hold back enough so that I don’t kill you.

As the two men squared off—and some of those in the crowd stopped walking away, interested in this new spectacle—Yulia rose from where she sat alongside Mina and the young ones.

Yulia quickly marched into the area for fighting, and James immediately put his hands down and stepped away from Leo, to indicate they should not start just yet.

Leo turned and saw her approaching, and a big grin appeared on his broad face.

“What are you two doing?” Yulia asked in a quiet but stern voice, looking back and forth between James and Leo.

She really feels like a teacher right now, James thought. He was pleased to see how her potential for the job she wanted was showing even in an unexpected context.

“We were just demonstrating some martial arts moves,” Leo said in a fake-innocent-not-fooling-anyone tone.

“We’re doing dumb guy stuff,” James said, laughing as he spoke. “Yulia, you need to chill out. Go back to Mina and the kids, and let us shove each other in the mud.”

She opened her mouth to speak, moved the edges of her mouth as if she almost wanted to laugh, then shook her head and looked annoyed.

“What does that even mean?” Yulia snapped, her tone stern again, giving James a look of rebuke.

“It means boys will be boys,” Leo said. “We’re bound to do reckless sh—stuff.”

James snickered quietly at the curse that Leo had disguised at the last second.

Then Yulia turned to Leo. “You know he kills giant monsters every day, right? With his bare hands? I can’t heal you if you break your neck and die!”

James was surprised to see how much emotion showed on her face at the prospect of something happening to Leo. Were those tears pooling at the corners of her eyes?

They really did have a pretty big experience with him. I guess I can’t beat him up too badly…

“Why don’t we forget about this?” James suggested.

He put his hand to his mouth as if he was stroking his beard thoughtfully, then used the edge of one razor sharp tooth to bite into his hand and draw a few drops of blood.

Using Monster Generation, he poured some of his energy into the drops of blood and a few beard hairs he plucked as he moved his hand away.

Then James walked toward Leo, who looked slightly embarrassed by the outcome of the conversation with James and Yulia.

As James approached, the beard hairs and blood combined into a tiny Blood Spider. The small cut in his hand was already closed when he reached over to shake Leo’s hand once more.

The tiny spider leaped from James to Leo, unknown to anyone but the two of them, as they shook hands.

“Next time I see you, I’ll kick your ass,” James said playfully—but entirely sincerely.

“Same to you, Fisher King,” Leo replied.

“Boys,” Yulia said, shaking her head—but looking subtly triumphant in James’s eyes.

She really believed she had stopped them from fighting.

After the demonstrations, James and Mina took the children back to the apartment, ate, and played some games. A number had been salvaged, both from the apartments that James’s people had scavenged from over the last few weeks, and from more widely scattered sources that James’s various flying monsters were now visiting in source of more supplies.

There were cards, for games of “Go Fish” and “War,” board games like “Monopoly”—which James put away for when the children were a little older—and the big favorite of the evening, “Sorry!,” which provided Abhi, James, Yulia, and Mina with hours of amusement long after the younger children had tired and succumbed to sleep.

“Oh, this is the best!” Abhi said giddily.

“I think you picked the lucky color,” James said, pretending to be slightly annoyed about losing.

“I’m going to be lucky every time,” Abhi said.

“Until your little brother and sister are big enough to play with you,” Mina replied. “Maybe they’ll be the lucky ones then.”

Baby James began fussing in the corner, then, and she excused herself from the next round.

Yulia and James entertained Abhi until the little boy was tuckered out and only wanted a story. And then James read to him from Collected Adventures of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, which was clearly a favorite of Abhi’s. As with the previous time James had read from the book, he found Abhi nodding off toward the end.

He’s never going to know what actually happens with the Green Knight, James thought. Or at least not until he’s older. It’s kind of a morbid story for a kids’ book, anyway, honestly. But it's a lot of fun to read!

He bid Yulia a good night, went to his room, and found his wife asleep with the baby.

And he smiled.

Perfect timing.

James and Leo met for their sparring match in the most distant corner of the Fisher Kingdom that they could quickly reach, far from prying eyes.

It was completely unnecessary and perhaps even silly, but they both still wanted to do this.

Remembering how Yulia had worried that he would break Leo’s neck, James took it relatively easy on the older man. He used mainly Leo’s own body weight against him, nerfing his own supernatural strength so that the punches that would have normally burst Leo’s skull instead merely bruised his cheek.

Then Leo surprised him.

Every punch had more weight than James would have expected from a fairly low-level pre-Race Evolution human. The kicks and throws were skillful.

James was no judge of martial arts skill from a pre-System perspective, but from where he was sitting—or, more accurately, from where he had been thrown—Leo was actually a good fighter.

Being good wasn’t enough.

James could dodge any attacks he wanted to, shift his weight from one body part to another with incredible ease and quickness, and use just the right amount of force applied in just the right place to take Leo off balance and put the other man on his ass.

Fighting a normal martial arts spar with Way of the Predator was a bit like taking a test to which he had all the answers.

If I didn’t have that, I’d just have to beat the crap out of him with brute force, James thought. But it feels like kind of a shame that I’m not a real martial artist. Leo has something here. He must have cared about martial arts alongside his police job before all this. If he can refine this into a System-recognized fighting Skill, that would be a pretty special achievement.

Finally, Leo collapsed to the ground in a sweaty heap and didn’t get up again.

“Uncle,” he said breathlessly. “You win.”

“You impressed me, too, Leo,” James said.

“I guess I understand why you’re the King now,” Leo replied, smiling and shaking his head.

“That is my Job,” James replied. “I heard you got a police chief Job, or something along those lines.”

“Yeah. My Status says ‘Chief of Police (Orientation)’ with the word ‘Orientation’ in parentheses. I think a jurisdiction is supposed to go in that space. But being Chief of Police in Orientation is useless now—” He began to laugh quietly—“and the Orlando Police Department is gone! So I don’t even know if it means anything.”

“It means the System recognized you had the experience and ability to do the Job,” James said evenly. “The question is, is that something you might be interested in doing for me?”