Page 23 of Killer of the Bells
There’s no prize for winning our stupid game, but it comes with the title Bell-killer, and you get to rub it in everyone’s faces for an entire year. Oh, and you get to be pretentious about it for the rest of your life.
So, when I marched to my closet holding my bell hunter gear, it was with the grim determination of a man who planned to win because it might be his last chance. Vale owed me, and I was going to collect after I’d fucked those stupid bells up.
After a few days of basking in the glow of winning at Bells, that is.
I opened my closet and uncovered the floor so I could reach my secret hideaway. It was common practice to keep being a participant in the game a secret. Only after you win was it appropriate to admit it, though very few people did.
The bell hunt was a badly kept secret in our town. Everyone talked about it, but no one admitted to being a bell hunter. Instead, like me, everyone would hide all evidence of what they were doing. Hunters only go by their hunter tag and enjoy their bragging rights on the Bells forum. People generally only reveal their IRL identity after retiring from the hunt completely.
Yeah… it sounds less lame if you’re actually involved in the game, so just pretend like you are, so I can keep going, okay?
Okay, excellent.
My gear setup was pretty decent. Just because I couldn’t spend more than a hundred dollars didn’t mean I couldn’t save stuff that had worked in the past and build on it every year.
Why would I need to keep adding to my gear?
It’s simple. The biggest hurdle to disabling the bells isn’t getting past security; it’s the other players. We have from sunset to sunrise to get the job done, and we all do everything in our power to stop other bell hunters from getting there first.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten injured from going after those fucking bells, but I doubt the number would surprise you, knowing what you do about me.
The competition is brutal, and I honestly can’t believe the law hasn’t gotten involved, but I have a feeling it has to do with the staggering amount of magic that flies around during a battle. People in this town are incredibly unobservant when it comes to magic.
No one ever mentions the magic on the forums. I’m not even sure people know magic is flying around, because it’s always referred to as minmaxing or hacks. The minmaxers almost always win, by the way. But sometimes a lucky, humble, non-magic person will win. Some minmaxer named Deadlynightshade won five years straight until being dethroned last year. The winner was a simple hunter named Musicofthenight, who had gotten lucky and was pleased aspunch about it, making sure everyone knew as often as they could.
Deadlynightshade had refused to comment on the matter.
And as I sat there looking at my gear, I’d decided that I was going to be one of those humble non-magic people.
I had an edge that a lot of people didn’t have due to my profession. I’d studied countless trapped burial tombs, so I had an in-depth knowledge of recognizing traps and creating them. If I set a trap, it almost always caught someone.
If my students ever paid attention to my lectures and were bell hunters, I’d know in a heartbeat because they’d be using my traps. Well, notmytraps, but the ones I mention during lectures.
I’m obsessed with them.
This is how I know my students don’t pay attention in my lectures. If they did, then my identity as a hunter would be known immediately. Said realization doesn’t bother me, though. In fact, it helps me.
You see, I can speak freely if the information is memorized. Especially if it doesn’t really matter if people care when I’m talking. Fortunately for me, my memory is excellent. I can write a lecture one evening, memorize it, and then spend the next day monologuing for as long as necessary.
It doesn’t work outside of classes, though. You can’t memorize a conversation. People are simply too unpredictable.
So, anyway, happy in the knowledge that my identity was a secret, I dug out my gear bag and carried it out to my car.
It was only after I stowed my bag in the trunk, got into the driver's seat, and found my keys in the ignition that I realized that my car shouldn’t have been there. It should have been parked on a lonely, winding dirt road in the middle of the forest.
Aw, my deadbeat not-murderer rescued my car for me. It would have been sweet if I wasn’t so pissed off at him. If he waslucky, I’d get myself killed tonight during the hunt. If not, I was so going to find him tomorrow and get compensation.
Unless, of course, I came to my senses and went back to living in a fog ofmeh, I can just wait for death to find me when he’s ready.Whatever Apple had done to me had really made me make a hard U-turn in the direction of Crazypantstown.
Whatever the case may be, I was going all out on the first bell hunt of the season. Nothing was going to get between me and success.
I had to park a mile away from the church and lug my gear the rest of the way on foot. It wasn’t fun, but protecting my identity was vital, or else I’d be disqualified.
And potentially in jail, but that was far down the list of concerns for me.
It was daytime, so I had to employ some trickery to make it to the churchyard unseen. I slipped into the bushes and put on a hospital mask to cover my features, then pulled up my hood. It wasn’t uncommon for people to mask in the wintertime, so it was a decent disguise.
I spent the next two hours hiding from security while setting traps. The Patron of the Bells didn’t want to make it easy on us, so they hired security to make sure no one broke the rules.
