Book 3, Side Chapter: Guard Duty

Necromancer and Co., Book 3: The Underearth

Side Chapter: Guard Duty

[Jamal]

Jamal was a relatively tall person. His skin was a chocolate brown, and his curly black hair was cut neatly around his head. Over his body, he wore a suit of armor—standard issue. Chain under a long, studded leather coat. A helmet covered his head and obstructed his vision, but it was nothing he couldn’t handle. He held nothing in his hands, but anyone who saw the two four-inch rods of metal sheathed to the belt on his hips would know to stay clear of pissing him off. Not that anyone would do that, of course. There was nobody anywhere close to him for a couple kilometers, after all.

He was on guard duty. He wasn’t sure why he was guarding a door that led to nowhere in the wilderness, or what exactly was behind the door, but he knew two things. One, the door literally led to nowhere. And secondly, it led to nowhere. It was a frame. A literal door frame in the middle of the woods—something he’d see in a show about monsters in corporate hell scaring the fuck out of kids—but something he had to take seriously nonetheless.

He was over half of the time he promised to spend in the army, and his threshold, resting just above the fourteenth, would undoubtedly rise higher during that time. He sighed.

Why was he even out here? His division was supposed to be in charge of hunting monsters around the cities and patrolling through the surrounding villages, goddamn it. Now, instead of doing anything productive, he was standing in the woods, doing nothing. Jamal pursed his lips. Surely, if he did something to relive his boredom, no one would reprimand him. He looked around at the peaceful sea of sycamores.

Yup. He was alone in the woods, after all.

Jamal reached into the bag on his hip and brought out a small slap of wood, about as large as a middle-aged man’s foot, and drew his dagger. Silently, he pressed the tip to the grain of the wood and began carving.

He’d always liked woodworking. It had been his hobby back before he had been taken to this new world. He’d watched TV shows of the same happening to people, but he never thought it would happen to him, of all people. He was caught off guard the first time he woke up in the mess hall of an army’s barracks, that was for sure. From there on, he didn’t really know what happened. One important-looking person after the other talked to him, and all ended up shrugging or some variation of it.

A day later, he found himself in the same uniform he was wearing now, being taught how to kill the monsters that lurked outside of the city. He was quite dazed the entire time. Maybe even suffering from a mental concussion. That didn’t matter to the trainers, though. They still beat him black and blue to get the message across.

He liked it.

Not in that way, of course. No way. It had just reminded him of his days practicing martial arts. He’d tried a lot of them. Judo, Aikido, Karate, Taekwondo, even ineffectual flailing. Having those reflexes brought back into shape by experienced trainers revived the thrill he had missed for so long. 

He looked down at the sculpture forming in his hands and gave it a scrutinizing glare. He shook his head and shaved off a piece of wood from the staff the sculpture held. Much better. He looked down on it and let the satisfaction show on his face. Jamal shaved a few more layers off the wood, added some detail, and stuffed the completed sculpture back into his pouch. What did he sculpt? His instructor, of course. He wasn’t making sculptures of himself. That was egotistical. A gentleman like himself wasn’t like that.

Jamal shook his head and looked up at the sky. The sky was beginning to darken. It looked like he’d spent too much time carving again. He shook his head once more and prepared to set up camp.

Just as he was about to do that, however, the sounds of footsteps began to ring out from behind him.

Jamal frowned and looked back. The door was there, standing innocently. The footsteps kept ringing out—the sound of steel boots clacking about against cobbled stone floors. Jamal raised a brow and reached out for the door handle, ready to check if the door needed—

It opened outwards. Abruptly.

The wood struck him across the face and he stumbled back, his face showing no sign that it had just been smashed by a door. A bright, shining vortex of light shone out from the door, and three figures tumbled out. A young woman with a large hammer on her back barreled through, falling and rolling across the ground, and a young man rolled through the portal, his body covered in plate armor. Two shields were strapped to both of his arms, and in his hands, he held the wailing form of what looked like… a cat?

Jamal frowned at the figures, but kept his mouth shut. He narrowed his eyes in the darkness as the two people stood up, cursing.

“Fuck, Anne, break the door!” The young man covered in plate armor shouted.

The girl, Anne, responded by swinging the hammer on her back at the door. Right before the hammer reached the frame, however, a large, scaled hand reached out through the portal and grabbed it mid-flight. Anne grunted, pushing the hand back at the cost of her strike being deflected.

The young man cursed and suddenly, his eyes glowed a bright teal in the dark. Immediately, from the man-sized bag on his back, three large metal balls flew out, surrounded in a telekinetic power. The scaled hand reached out again with a roar of rage, but before it could attack, the three balls bombarded the door’s frame, destroying it and sending splinters everywhere.

The portal blinked out of existence and severed the hand reaching past it. The roar of rage from the other side was abruptly cut off as well.

Jamal stared at the scene, stunned. The two people and the cat who left the portal panted, before giving each other panicked looks. The young woman, the one with a hammer on her back, pulled on her hair and began cursing.

“Shit, fuck! Bernard, what do we do!?”

“Why do you think I’d know!? He turned James into a motherfucking cat!” He turned the cat over and had it face him. “James, do you know how we can turn you back into a person with a normal di—“

The cat swiped at his face and forced the young man to let go. It hissed at him. The three continued to shout and scream at each other until Jamal raised a hand and spoke.

“Uh… long time no see?”

Bernard blinked. He, the cat, and Anne slowly turned towards him in shock.

“Jamal!?”