It had been a long hike; nearly two dozen klicks had been covered since the nasty business involving the giant and the ensuing nonsense. JT grunted as he approached the foothills of the mountain range, his eyes scanning the horizon for any anything that might provide some form of exit from this really screwed up computer game. 

Scampering along, scrambling up some rocks following a barely discernible trial, JT paused a moment, he thought he heard…something. Dropping behind a rock outcropping he glanced around trying to get an idea of what he heard and from where
. 
There…it was voices, distant, but clearly voices and if that were the case it meant combatants. Sighing softly JT glanced skyward, the sun or whatever it was, appeared to be moving slowly westward. He had no idea how much time he had left but he sure as hell didn’t want to be caught outside when night fell. 
 
Turning his attention to the voices he listened, straining to get a fix on where they were. If nothing else he might be able to move into the area where they were and hopefully they would have moved on. If not, well that would be decided then wouldn’t it.

Adjusting his grip on his rifle, and letting the ectoplasma loose, JT stood in a half-crouch and began moving along the trail again as the billowy mass of goo slowly flowed and clung to his body and weapons. Every sense straining as he tried to locate the owners of the voices when a shadow moved, he caught it out of the corner of his eye. It was ahead of him and it vanished beyond some boulders. 
 
Licking his lips he moved quickly where the shadow had been and edged up slowly to get a glimpse of what he saw. 

“Holy shit…” 
 
Before him were two…well what else could they be called by beast men. The first and most noticeable stood nearly 9 feet tall, a bulky and heavily muscled creature to say the least. The second was much smaller, perhaps three feet smaller. But he, not sure why JT though that, but the impression was that it was a ‘he’, was carrying a translucent staff weapon. 
 
The other one was…a human gladiator? After a second of examining the man, he judged the gladiator to be of similar height and build as himself. Then it was on, the large beast thingy moved closer to the man and did some kind of rather silly looking gung-fu like gesture with his hands, similar to bad Chinese movies.
 
“Oh hell brother, the minute you tried that shit, you’d be eating some rounds.” JT muttered as he watched in morbid fascination. Then not only did the beast do something with his hands he managed to do another action, avoiding the gladiators attack and performing a secondary attack from what JT saw as it, for anything that big had to be called an ‘it’ pulled some kinda muck and molded it into a ball and threw it at the human. Gawd damn that beast thingy is fast as hell.... he thought as he calculated the distance it covered in a fraction of a second.. 

“Jesus man do something; duck, dodge or drop to the ground do anything to break up his attacks…oh no… yeah don’t do that!” The man had done something, and was running at the larger beast man, except that there were no tactics, no movement other than a head long rush; “This could be bad…”

The catman that was ahead of JT took this opportunity to attack, and just rushed forward in a wild, uncoordinated action. The catman looked unfamiliar with combat, unfamiliar with attack or even defense. At this distance there was nothing JT could do to stop the cat from being hit, even if he managed to throw a ball of goo he doubted he could move the cat in time, he was too close. 

Hefting his rifle he took a snap shot that targeted the left leg of the cat person, if he hit him there was a chance…slim but better than none that the cat would fall and the wind thingy would sail over him. Better a leg wound than dead. But that would give away his position, a scant 40 yards, 120 feet from where the gladiator and giant freaking, what the hell was it with this place and the oversized, steroid freaks anyway, beast man were at.

The shot, hopefully would work. If it didn’t, it didn’t matter as he swung rifle over to cover the two melee combats, one of them was the black hat, he’d have to watch to see which one that was.