Luck Stat Broken: Rise of the Khan-Chapter 4 - Three: Luck Favors the Stupid
The scream had come from the hills.
Will was already moving before the echo died, the fractured rib grinding a sharp, white-hot warning into his side with every stride. Khan called directions from behind his sternum, a cold presence sliding across their synaptic bridge.
Left. Follow the dry creek bed, faster than the slope.
Will took the left without breaking stride. He’d stopped asking why three directions ago.
The hills were dense. Real wilderness, a hundred thousand years of doing exactly what it wanted. Roots broke through everywhere. Trees grew at stubborn angles. Will moved fast, reading the ground the way the Tutorial had taught him: weight forward, eyes ahead.
His ash-stained hand shot out and grabbed a branch to haul himself up a steep section. It held. The branch beside it—the one he had almost grabbed—snapped away from the trunk the moment his weight cleared, falling silently into the dark below. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶
Will didn’t notice.
Khan did. The ancient conqueror went quiet for half a beat too long.
Sound before sight, Khan said, the Sovereign’s resonance thrumming in Will’s skull. Tell me what you hear.
Will listened without slowing, fighting through the lingering ringing in his ruptured left eardrum. "Something large. Moving through brush, not around it. And something else. Lower frequency, more deliberate. Different gait."
Two targets.
"Two targets."
Assess before you commit, Khan ordered. A dead hero helps no one.
Will reached the ridge and looked down.
A cul-de-sac. He could see the ghost of a circular road in the tree line. Now it was just broken ground, grass pushing through cracked asphalt, and the foundation outlines of old houses.
Four people. All roughly his age. All post-Tutorial; he could tell from their scavenged gear and the way they held themselves.
[Threat Detected: Mutated Mountain Lion]
[Level: ??? - Uncommon]
The beast stood as tall as a draft horse, its spine ridged with thick bone plating. Its movements had that deliberateness Will had already learned to fear more than speed. It wasn’t rushing. It was deciding.
Two of the survivors were running for a gap between collapsed walls on the far side of the clearing. One guy in patched leather armor hadn’t looked back once. The guy behind him glanced back, then quickly looked away.
The two girls were back-to-back in the center of the clearing.
One of them, small and blonde, watched the mountain lion with flat, focused combat math. The improvised spear in her hands was held correctly. Her feet were set. She’d been in worse spots.
The other girl, dark-haired and unarmed, stayed anyway. Her back was pressed to the blonde’s, her dark eyes tracking the monster with wide, careful attention.
Neither of them called after the boys.
Khan said nothing.
Then, something stepped out of the gap the boys were running toward.
[Threat Detected: Abyssal Stalker-Canine]
It was a lean thing built for ambush, its eyes moving independently. It blocked the exit completely and dropped low. The two boys skidded to a halt.
The boy who had looked back, looked back again.
He looked away again.
Noted, Khan rumbled.
Will was already coming down the slope.
He moved fast and quiet, using the elevation. The hunting bow was across his back and useless at this range, but his hand found it anyway. As he hit the clearing floor, he hurled the heavy wood hard and flat at the mountain lion’s face to buy two seconds.
The weapon caught the creature across the eye socket. The mountain lion flinched left. Will landed between the beast and the girls, his hand slapping his hip out of pure instinct before hitting the empty, melted pouch. The folding knife was gone, snapped off in a coyote’s throat a mile back.
He was empty-handed.
The blonde girl assessed him in exactly one second.
"Move to the wall," Will said. "High ground if you can find it."
She moved without arguing.
Will noted this.
Khan noted that Will noted this.
"Took you long enough," the dark-haired girl said, already falling back with her friend.
The mountain lion finished flinching.
It charged.
Will had six feet of clearance and the footwork to use three. He stepped right. The wall that should have been there wasn’t—a gap in the foundation he hadn’t seen from the ridge. It gave him three extra feet. He used all of them, rolling alongside the creature rather than in front of it. The bone plating rushed past close enough to feel the displaced air.
His hand found the shoulder joint.
The gap where the plating ended. The one soft spot, small as a fist. His fingers locked around a jagged, fossilized piece of masonry protruding from the dirt. He ripped it free and shoved hard, his fractured rib flaring with blinding heat before the makeshift stone blade sank deep.
The mountain lion let out a multi-toned scream, and its front leg buckled. The blunt-force trauma of the beast’s thrashing nearly tore the stone from his grip, kicking him half off-balance.
Grounded. Again, Khan ordered. Same spot. Finish the commitment.
Will went back in without hesitation, fighting through the nausea of his cracked rib. The second strike went deeper, twisting on the way out. The creature went down on its side.
Still moving. Still dangerous. But earthbound.
Will pulled back and heard the Stalker-Canine hit the ground running behind him.
He didn’t see it coming.
His boot caught a chunk of broken concrete. His weight shifted wrong—forward and down—and he dropped below the canine’s lunge completely by accident. He felt the wind of its jaws snap shut right over his head.
It landed directly on the wounded mountain lion.
Bone plating cracked under the combined weight. The feline went still beneath the canine’s scrambling legs as the smaller creature tried to find its footing.
Will was standing before it recovered.
One of the boys, backing away from the collision with wide eyes, forgot to watch his feet. He tripped on the edge of a foundation and went down hard. His boot caught a length of rusted, broken rebar, kicking it free.
The metal bar skidded across the clearing.
It stopped exactly at Will’s feet.
Will looked down at it.
He looked up.
He picked it up.
"Did you plan that?" the dark-haired girl called from the wall.
"Obviously," Will said.
I have commanded armies for thirty years, Khan said softly in Will’s mind. I have never in my life seen a battlefield make concessions to one man.
Will tightened his grip on the rebar. Don’t get used to it.
...I am beginning to think I might have to.
The canine finally found its footing on the ruined lion, its independent eyes snapping toward Will. It lunged.
Will didn’t dodge. He planted his boots, ignoring the agonizing pull in his chest, and swung the rebar like a baseball bat. The rusted iron connected with the beast’s skull. The sheer displacement of the strike sent a concussive shockwave straight up Will’s forearms, leaving his hands completely numb as the canine’s skull caved in. The beast dropped like a stone.
The clearing fell quiet, save for the settling dust and the sickeningly sweet smell of ancient rot.
The aftermath was chaotic.
The boy in the patched leather armor dropped his weapon, his hands shaking so violently he couldn’t even unbuckle his own straps. He just stared at the dead monsters, his knees visibly giving out as he slumped against the fossilized concrete foundation.
The dark-haired girl climbed down from the wall, her dark eyes wide. She masked her absolute terror with immediate, aggressive sarcasm.
"Nice swing with the pipe," she said, her voice tight but loud enough to command the space. "Do you usually interrupt maulings with random plumbing, or is today a special occasion?"
The boy on the ground, still failing to undo his buckles, stared at her in disbelief. "I was wearing khaki shorts twenty minutes ago. Now I’m dodging prehistoric cats. If someone asks me for my insurance details, I’m going to start biting people."
"Bite the cats next time, Don," the dark-haired girl shot back, though she immediately walked over to help steady his shaking hands. "It’s Maddie, by the way. This is Don. The track star over there is Curtis."
The blonde girl stepped forward, using her improvised spear as a walking stick to keep her weight off a badly bruised ankle. "Allison," she said, her voice steady but laced with the same adrenaline-fueled grit.
Will adjusted his grip on the rebar, waiting for the feeling to return to his fingers. "Will."
Maddie looked from the crushed skull of the canine, to the dead mountain lion, to Will’s ash-stained, battered appearance, and then to the rusted piece of rebar.
She evaluated his messy, desperate intervention with a flat stare.
"Seven out of ten."
