Chapter 28

Bang. Bang. Bang. The staccato report of gunfire barked through Vinny's range, only pausing to heel when a target was being pulled back.

Frank had been practicing over and over, desperate to get used to his new rifle. He had already practiced shooting his handgun with the suppressor attached. He wasn't used to the extra weight on the end of his weapon, but he adjusted quickly.

Vinny noticed a certain change in Frank's posture and face when he fired the pistol, a small change most people wouldn't pick up on. But Vinny had seen Frank shoot before, took extra care to observe the details when he and his family had come to shoot at his range. Vinny had seen that change before when he was on active duty. It was the look of someone who had to use their weapon in combat, involuntary signs of their body remembering the stress brought on in the moment.

When Frank had switched to his rifle and emptied the last mag, he went to go reload while Vinny took a look at his shot grouping. The kid was a quick study, Vinny had to give him that. His grouping was tight once he'd made some small adjustments to his sight. Totally zeroed in, Frank had better accuracy than many of his customers.

Maybe that was a part of his strange powers, as well? Earlier Vinny called Frank to let him know his rifle had arrived and that he had already taken the liberty to clean and prepare his rifle. Within moments of ending the call, Harold's son was standing in front of the counter ready for pick up. Vinny knew Frank could teleport, had seen it in person before. But it still hadn't prepared him for Frank to just appear out of thin air from miles away.

Vinny dropped out of his thinking pose and addressed his most mysterious new customer.

"Say kid, have you used your pistol? Like, used it?" Vinny kept things vague to gauge Frank's reaction. The dark haired son of the Lepari family merely smirked and kept reloading his magazines.

"In combat? Does it show?"

"A little. I don't think most people would notice. But I did. Have you told your dad yet?"

"I gave him the gist of it. He was proud of me, and beyond relieved I came out of it okay"

"But you didn't tell him everything. It wouldn't come back like that on your draw, or when you take aim. Not if you talked it through. Not as badly, I mean"

Frank sighed, his first instinct was to get defensive. Then he caught himself. Vinny wasn't accusing him of anything. He was just trying to help. It was true, when Frank drew his pistol and for a split second when he took aim he could still see a row of razor sharp teeth in front of his face. Only for a moment. But if Frank didn't have his [teleport] skill or his gun, he wouldn't have had a chance that night. 

He tried not to let it show when his family was around, or when he was training. But when he was asleep and there wasn't any training on the astral plane he found himself waking up in a cold sweat. Both times he had been given a night off this past week, he was plagued by nightmares of his teleport skill throwing errors and cooldown notifications right as razor sharp teeth took hold of him, only to awaken to the dull echoes of his arms being torn bloody as he was in freefall.

"Okay, you got me. There was this guy. He had powers, just like me but different ones. He kidnapped a girl from behind the Whacko Burger I was parked in. I thought he was a monster at first, but when I followed them I figured out he could speak, and he knew the girl he had taken away. I emptied more than a whole mag into him before he finally went down, but for a moment I-" Frank gripped the underside of the bench he was sitting on so hard that the metal began to bend a little. He didn't want to admit it. Not to himself, not to his family, and certainly never out loud. But he had to. The system already acknowledged it, but he still hadn't come to terms with it himself.

"For a moment in that fight I gave up. I almost let the bastard get me. If he hadn't been slowed down by blood loss by the time my stealth skill gave out, I wouldn't be here right now. I'd be dead, in the ground, crow food. Hell, I wouldn't be preparing to go do it all over again in another world!" Frank laughed out loud at the absurdity of it all. Here he was, still shaken by his first life or death fight and a week later he's taking it up a few steps and walking into enemy territory with precious little information on anything except the certainty that someone or something was going to die when he got there.

"You know I'm- I'm not a fucking video game character, man! In a game you can send your avatar wherever the fuck you want and make them face horror after horror, over and over and over again. But me? I never asked for this. I treat this whole thing like a game, like I just need to pump the numbers on my abilities to get ahead and win. But what does any of that do for me when I fucking freeze up?" Frank's voice was shaking now.

Vinny just sat beside him, taking it all in. A few silent, drawn out moments later Vinny folded his hands and spoke.

"You know. You remind me of someone. Back in the day, on my first deployment. There was this one guy in my unit. A real show off type, he would always joke around and play up how ready he was to fight, how he was gonna stack bodies faster than any of us. It was funny to hear him get chewed out by our CO because he would always crumble in the face of a real killer's glare" Vinny chuckled at the thought, his gaze far away as if he had caught sight of the old memory floating on the wind, then sighed as if letting it go one last time.

"Anyway, we get called out to clear an insurgent compound far away from base. We were tipped off by a friendly local, he takes us close and then fucks off to safety. Nothing terribly unusual, the treatment for being an informant was almost worse than being caught as an enemy soldier. We wait, get in position, breach, clear, bang bang bang. Done. The whole thing was over in about a half hour, a record pace for the size of the place. The only injury we had was that the lieutenant who came along with us took a shot to his plate carrier but he was otherwise okay. The trouble comes after we report the operation complete"

Vinny's face suddenly gets dark, his eyes go wide and his hands, neatly folded before, are now curled balls of tension. Frank could see the old man squeeze his hands so tight they were turning red.

"Turned out, our informant was a double agent. As soon as we left him to go assault the compound, his real friends were already gearing up and taking trucks to follow us. We were surrounded, and by an enemy force that knew every little nook and cranny in this compound. They came at us hard, but we weren't going down easy. We had 2 units when we took the compound, but by the end of the night it was myself, Private Show-off, and a couple of the guys from our unit. The other unit got blindsided by secret tunnels we hadn't found. By the time we realized we had to retreat, I'd already taken a couple rounds in my plates and had shrapnel deep in my leg"

Vinny massaged a phantom pain along his lower leg, trying to pull himself out from the deep well of that memory as he continued to retell it for Frank.

"After a while we're holed up in some small bedroom, I'm trying to keep a lid on the pain as I'm getting bandaged up, and Private Show-off is sitting in the corner, frozen except when we hear another gunshot go off. He turns to me and he says 'Vin, I can't do this man. I can't take it, it wasn't supposed to go down like this'. I'm sitting there, my leg running red through thick bandages and thinking this can't be the same guy that I rode in with. Just the other day he'd been talking about how he was going to fold these guys like laundry, only to now realize we were moments away from getting packed up ourselves. I had to say something to him, I couldn't let him keep muttering to himself in the corner. I asked him what his wife would do if she knew he just froze and let the enemy take him out, how his kid would feel growing up not knowing whether their old man fought to the bitter end or if he gave up"

The old man took a breath, once again showing his age. He cleared his throat while he silently apologized for being so tough on his brother-in-arms back then. Then he continued.

"After that, he went silent for a little while. The thousand yard stare he'd had on his face suddenly tightened up, the fighting spirit lit like a fire in his eyes. He hauled me up by my chest harness and told our ragtag group to get ready. He was going to get us out of there. Over the next few hours, I remember being dragged through the dirt while biting down on a small towel to keep from crying out. It was a mad dash to get out of the compound, but somehow we fought our way through, even while they had to drag my ass out, pistol in hand to cover our six. Eventually, friendly helicopters found us and we got our evac back to base"

Frank looked up, tears in his eyes.

"Vinny, why are you telling me this?" He asked

"Because Frank, your father found his resolve and saved my life that day, and every man he led out of that compound. Because he wanted to come home a proud warrior for his son"

"What?" Frank blinked away the tears and his eyes went wide, "What do you mean?"

"The showboating private in that story? That was your dad. He visited me when I woke up in the hospital days later and told me he found the double crossing informant. Official word was the double crosser was killed as an example by the insurgency for informing. But we knew the truth. Your dad and the other guys from our unit, as well as a few motivated helpers, went house to house trying to find the guy. The villagers found him hanging by the village gate in pieces the next morning" Vinny banged his fist gently on the table, unsure what to say next.

"I guess what I'm trying to say is... we all carry our demons, some better than others. But at the end of the day, we face the horror so our family and friends don't have to stare at it helplessly down the barrel of a gun. I don't know exactly what type of shit you're going to face, I don't think anyone does. But when you come back, I'll be here to listen to your story when you're ready to tell it. We'll call it even then, a story for a story. Deal?" The old man held up his leathered paw to the young man beside him. The fresh cut warrior took it in his, and they shook on it.

"You've got a deal, old timer. Story for a story. I'll make it a good one you won't be able to believe"

Frank smiled genuinely for the first time since he'd got the notification for his portal raid quest. He could feel it now, deep within his heart under the nerves and the fear. The very feeling Vinny spoke about, the feeling etched deep into Lauren's knife, the feeling he got when he watched Sir Granspier move with calculated purpose during training. He could feel the embers of his fighting spirit ignite within his soul.