11 Teamwork Makes The Dream Work #11

"Huh, that was easier than expected..." I said as I kneeled beside Boden's corpse to check his vitals. "Dead as a rock..." I shrugged as I found no signs of life.

'Did I underestimate myself or overestimate the big guy...?" I couldn't help but wonder as I got up, scratching my head in confusion. At that point, I was confident in killing a dozen armed thugs if I could ambush them.

I wasn't speculating, as I did it twice during the past couple of weeks when I was targeting Nyoka's grunts. I was that confident in my abilities, but Boden was no pushover himself.

I'd seen the man jump into a group of heavily armed thugs and tear them apart with his bare hands before our fight, meaning I couldn't overestimate him even if I wanted to.

Still, he had to spend some energy, and I managed to land the first hit as I took him by surprise, but even with that, he should have lasted much longer in the fight.

'Looks like I'm not giving myself enough credit...' I mused with a shrug, dropping the subject. 'Now to see what's behind the curtain...' I sighed as I turned to the carriage and headed toward it.

I quickly reached my destination and gripped the cloth covering the big box, quickly removing it. "What the fuck...?" I said, my eyes widening at what I found beneath it.

It was a big cage that barely seemed to hold the oversized young man inside. The guy inside was lanky, roughly 6.5 feet (198 cm) tall, as he sat in a fetal position, looking at me with a mobbish expression.

Despite the young man's many noteworthy features, such as the strange black markings on his cheeks, his strange headdress, and the bladed amulet, I noticed the iron collar on his neck before anything else.

"Explosive slave collar...?" I asked as I turned away from the collar and looked the young man in the eye, to which he slowly nodded. "The key...?" I added, and he immediately looked at one of Boden's more gaudily dressed victims.

"Right... give me a moment..." I said as I headed toward the man, unfazed by the blood as I rummaged through his pockets, finding some Beri notes and the two keys.

"This should be it..." I said as I got up and headed to the carriage, quickly opening the cage's door with the first key and unlocking the slave collar with the second. "There you go, big guy..." I said, straining my neck to look at the young man as he exited the cage and instantly towered over me.

"Wire... my name is Wire..." The young man slowly said in a tone that befitted his lethargic, mobbish expression as he introduced himself and stretched his limbs. "Thank you... for helping me..." He added.

"Nice to meet you, pal. The name's Cedric, but you can call me Rick..." I said, trailing off as I watched Wire nod. "I'm guessing you don't have a place to stay...?" I asked, earning another nod for my effort.

"Well then, I guess today's your lucky day..."

...

One week later

"There..." I remarked as I finished changing Vicky's bandages. "You'll still need another month before you recover fully, but you're free to leave the bed and move around as long as you take it slow..." I added, checking my work one last time before I got up.

"Thank you..." Vicky said in a tiny voice, prompting me to stop and raise an eyebrow. "Killer told me what you did to save my life..." She added with a sigh, embarrassedly scratching her head.

"I'm sorry for trying to give you a hard time when you first joined..." She went on. "It seemed to me that you were taking advantage of Killer and Kid, but I was wrong..." She concluded, shaking her head.

"Don't mention. It's all water under the bridge," I said with a smile as I shrugged and headed for the exit. Though I didn't care much for Vicky, she was still part of the gang, and her attitude rarely bothered me.

Ultimately, she was just a kid, like everyone else in our little group. And although I was in the body of a teenager, I was still a friggen adult internally, so her antics rarely bothered me.

Speaking of kids, Wire quickly made himself at home with the other brats, and yes, that 6.5-foot-tall freak of nature was still a kid, only one year older than myself.

In any case, despite his languid appearance and the expression of a dead fish that he had on 24/7, Wire was surprisingly hard-working and damned good at cooking.

Yet somehow, he was even more of a violent psychopath than Kid, Killer, and Heat combined. I saw how easily he could turn from your regular, harmless telephone pole to a murder machine firsthand.

Naturally, I was still pissed off about the money I had to give away and kept going after Nyoka's men, but as it turns out, I wasn't the only one doing that.

Suffice it to say, attacking a group of his men only to find Killer and Kid hiding nearby to ambush them was really awkward, though it didn't stop us from murdering them before sitting down to have a talk.

I learned that they were just as busy as I was, hunting down Nyoka's men and sabotaging his business at every opportunity, and once the cat was out of the bag, we decided to work together.

Eventually, we got Heat (now fully healed, the damned freak) and Wire involved, and that's where I got to see the latter in action for the first time, an experience I won't soon forget.

In any case, everyone was growing stronger with each passing day, the constant battles paying dividends. I dare say we'll be able to take down Nyoka sometime soon.

But until that happens, I'm still stuck here.

...

Four Clover Town

The Grog Box Bar

Gritting his teeth, Nyoka barely resisted the urge to draw his flintlock and shoot his subordinate as the latter reported another group of his men going into the forest and disappearing.

At first, it started as one or two men disappearing after they went to take a leak or something to that effect but slowly escalated to entire groups tasked with transporting drugs, weapons, and other such contraband throughout the island.

Even Boden, his second in command, who was only second in strength to Nyoka himself, disappeared in the damned forest sometime ago, much to the gang boss' frustration.

He couldn't use another route to distribute his goods as a gang from West Clover Town ruled over the waters surrounding the island thanks to their small fleet of sloops.

On one end, the beaten paths within the forest's foliage were the only for him to buy and sell goods, and Nyoka couldn't abandon it without the risk of going broke. On the other, his men were growing restless, and it was only a matter of time before they repelled if he kept sending them to their deaths.

Though not wholly sure, Nyoka suspected Kid and his group of little snot-nosed brats were responsible for the disappearance of his men and the many losses he suffered because of them.

Simply thinking about those little brats was enough to send Nyoka into a rage, especially that blonde kid who had the gall to humiliate him right in the middle of the town, in front of his subordinates.

In all his life, Nyoka would have never expected a teenager to have so much money, nor did he expect one to embarrass and outsmart him like that.

Ultimately, it was all Old Dean's fault. If only that stubborn old fart didn't stick his nose where it didn't belong, then the brats would have been long dead by now, but there was nothing that Nyoka could do about it.

Despite looking like your average elder, wasting what little years he had left drinking away the sorrows of his younger days, Old Dean was a grizzled sea dog.

His name carried weight even amongst Nyoka's men, and the gang boss had no choice but to oblige the old fool or risk mutiny.

"Prepare the next shipment..." Nyoka said, taking a deep breath to calm himself as he raised a hand to cut off his subordinate before the latter could object.

"I will escort it alongside you..."

...

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