Dial H for Heroics

Jack waited, watching the recharge arrow on his watch while watching the road. The treasure wagon had moved toward him through the night. He supposed they didn’t want to be around in case he came back.

He wouldn’t if he knew a murderous monster was close by and liked to yeet people to their deaths.

It wouldn’t save them.

While the watch recharged, he decided that he needed to think about how he was going to deal with things. He had to take the wagon mostly unharmed, kill the six guards trying to take it south, and turn everything around and take it back to the women waiting on him.

What was the simplest way to get all that done?

Gravity should work on anybody who couldn’t fly. Throwing the guards into the air should deal with them instantly unless some of them knew how to fly. He could also use Gravity to turn the wagon. All he needed to do after that was get the horses moving in the right direction.

Did Marvel have any heroes with animal control? He couldn’t remember off hand. Did their western heroes count? The Rawhide Kid and Kid Colt were horsemen as well as gunfighters. Did they count for the watch? Maybe the Two Gun Kid did since he was an Avenger once, and worked with the She-Hulk during one of her series.

Did he want to take a chance? Would he be a normal guy with skills and guns, or some kind of armed goat? He frowned as he heard the wagon approaching. He had to do the ambush before he could think about seeing if the Kid was on his watch’s list.

Captain America was a skill horse. He already knew that. Maybe he should stick to what he knew, and experiment when he wasn’t in a haunted woods waiting for a disaster to happen. He could test the cowboy goat thing when he was back in Hawk Ridge.

It should amuse the kids depending on what he got.

The wagon came into sight. Torches had been lit and mounted on the front to warn off night animals and monsters. The horses cantered along, pulling on their traces with a small amount of effort.

They didn’t look that happy, but Jack admitted to himself he didn’t know what a happy horse looked like.

Traveling through the night, cropping grass off the side of the road, pulling weight behind them, might just be their thing.

Jack dialed the glowing form of Gravity. It was time for him to make the horses unhappy.

He seized the guards in invisible embraces, then turned that into a catapult to send them flying up and out of the trees. He spent a second hoping he wasn’t sending bodies falling into villages to scare the residents.

Having an armored thug crash through your roof would be scary as crap.

Jack used Gravity to lift the wagon and horses to turn them around. He placed everything back on the ground before shutting off the effect. He climbed up on the driver’s bench and took the reins. He gave the horses a hi-yah, but they looked at him and refused to move.

Jack frowned. He knew this was going to happen. He didn’t have enough experience with animals to get them to move, or listen to him about anything they weren’t interested in doing. He needed someone who could drive the team back to where the women waited.

He checked the watch. He had time. He called on Captain America. Information flooded his brain. This was enough for him to crack the reins and get the horses moving back to the other wagons.

Jack cut the persona off when the horses accepted they were being driven along. He needed to recharge his watch while he thought about what he could do next. He didn’t know what he had in the back, but he felt like the ladies would need some kind of advisor back in the city.

Maybe Guin knew someone who could help them invest their wealth. Too bad a lot of his customers were bound to start dropping dead when Josie made the time for them. Maybe these ladies could step into the gap and do something to keep the city moving along.

Killing the local nobility was bound to put a crimp in any plans Guin might have. It might be enough to make him turn on them. And he did know where they were.

On the other hand, it might make it easier for him to expand his operations if some of his rivals were fed to the wolves.

Jack’s own read was that Guin would go along as long as he was making something out of the deal. As soon as things looked bad, he would bail and maybe try to keep the partners out of his future business. He might take it to open warfare if pushed to the next level by their insistence on finishing their quests.

He might try to hold the girls hostage against their good behavior. That would cause Josie to start burning down the town, instead of complying to his wishes.

Josie didn’t give in. She pulled things apart until she got what she wanted.

Jack switched to Captain America long enough to pull the coach to a halt and switch back. The ladies lined up to meet him again. He dropped down from the driver’s bench.

“This is your treasure wagon minus the guards,” said Jack. “I need to take another nap and then I will figure a way to get all of you home without too much trouble.”

“What if we don’t want to go back to Hawk Ridge?,” asked one of the women.

“That’s up to you to hash everything out and figure out how you want to divide the money and where you want to go,” said Jack. “I’m just here to find a lair of a monster and try to stop it from coming out and heading south.”

“How big a monster are you talking about?,” asked the first woman he had talked to when he promised to get the wagon back.

“Supposedly human size to start off, then it grabs up anyone in its way and turns them into monsters too,” said Jack. “My friend calls it a Wild Hunt.”

“There are few roads heading out of the path of that if you monster is heading south,” said the woman. “Villages along the way would be devastated if there were no warning.”

“That’s why I have to make sure it stays locked down where it is so it doesn’t come at us and reach the city,” said Jack. “I have no idea how big the army would be by the time it hit the walls of Hawk Ridge. I don’t even know if the Watch could hold it against a force of monsters.”

“They probably wouldn’t be able to hold for long,” said the woman. “The dishonest ones and adventurers would flee at the first sign of major trouble reaching the walls.”

“That’s why I have to get this nap in and recharge so I can get to work,” said Jack. “You guys can figure out what you want to do while I’m resting. Then I’ll help the ones I can, and come back for the rest before I get started looking for the Dark Rider.”

“We should rest too and try to settle all this in the morning when we have daylight to keep everything on an even keel,” said woman.

Jack nodded before he headed into the forest. He needed to get another bottle of elixir from Doctor Druid before resting again. Searching for the Dark Rider in the daylight seemed a lot better idea than trying to find him in the dark.

And finding him in the dark didn’t look that good from Jack’s perspective. He would be dealing with a ghost of some kind rushing out of the ground and riding south on some kind of animal, possibly a horse. Every person he saw on the road would turn into the same kind of ghost and they would recruit more as they went.

The wagon train full of women would be gone under something like that.

He hoped the watch would protect him, but he wasn’t sure and he didn’t want to find out the hard way. Once he ran out of juice, he might be down for the count.

If Josie was able to save him, she would give such a lecture about how he should be better at taking care of his business.

Jack drank the elixir and settled in a bed he made for himself. He made sure to put the concealing wall over his body so he had moments to react to a surprise attack. He told himself to get up in a couple of hours. His mental alarm clock said okay, but he wasn’t sure if it would wake him up.

It was something he had trained himself to do in boot. The D.I.s would come in to wake you up at any time, but most let you sleep for a couple of hours at a time. He had trained himself to get up before they came in and sleep standing up until they started kicking people out of their racks.

The first few times he had been able to startle the sergeants in charge because they hadn’t seen him standing next to his locker before they started shouting at the recruits.

Eventually the training moved from trying to break down the recruits to teaching them things, but Jack still retained his alarm and used it when he needed to sleep and then do other things like watch a perimeter, load ordinance, or shoot at something no one could see.

Jack woke up two hours later like he planned. He took a moment to assess his body before he tried to move. The pain had faded to a slow ache. Everything worked like it should. He was ready to take on a new day.

He dug out of his hiding spot and brushed himself off. He hadn’t trusted the women, but none of them had come into the trees after him according to the signs around his camp site. He gave that a check off for trustworthiness.

He used Hawkeye to check the camp. A couple of the women were on guard, the wagons were circled, someone had freed the horses and tied them to trees where they could graze if they wanted. If there was trouble, he hoped the women were good bareback riders. It would take a lot of time to harness the teams to pull the wagons out of the way.

He didn’t see any threats close by. The local animals tended to move away from a circle marked off where he thought the Dark Rider’s crypt should be. He expected that from old stories he had read.

Animals didn’t like monsters, and ran from them.

He let the watch refill as he worked his way around the camp. He headed up the road. He didn’t want any of his magic to be visible to the ladies.

And he had an idea on how to find the Dark Rider, thanks to remembering what Josie had done to the stone ring. Doctor Druid would be perfect for that.

He just needed a psychic bird to show him the way. Then he could drop the

axe on things, and shepherd the women where they wanted to go.

It sounded like a plan, but he wasn’t sure how well it would go.

He switched to Doctor Druid and asked the plants to show him the way to the crypt. The grass bent in one direction, trees pointed with branches, wild flowers turned their leaves to go with the flow.

“Thanks,” said Jack. He followed the pointing limits until he found a hole in the ground. That didn’t look suspicious.

He switched to Vision and looked around. The hole in the ground led to a cave door at the bottom. There was too much rock to see through from where he stood on the top.

The crypt should be inside the wall somewhere.

Jack switched back to normal to let his watch recharge before he went down and looked around. He wanted to be able to throw spells at full power if the Dark Rider popped out of his coffin.

He hoped he was dealing with something he could beat on his own. That thing at the lake would have ruined him if Josie hadn’t blown the crap out of that rock with her persona. He didn’t know that DC had a hero that could do anything like that.

Maybe he should experiment with some more of the guys he had to see what he could do. The Scarlet Witch had been a winner, Magneto not so much.

He wondered if it would be better just to bury the cave with more rock and then turn everything to steel to prevent people from going down and waking the Dark Rider up.

His quest list said it wanted the monster dealt with permanently. Could he do it on his own?

He decided he could look around as Doctor Druid, or Strange, and try to find a solution on his own. If he couldn’t, he would ask Josie for some advice once he had dealt with the former slaves.

He would definitely close this sinkhole before he left the scene. That would stop the casual explorer from causing problems.