We ran. Each of us grabbed our own cart and sped away at a blistering 15mph.

  Aria (Party): This is the lamest car chase ever. I could run this fast.

  Victor (Party): Split up. They can only follow two of us. Whoever’s free can attack the drivers or knock them off the mowers, or whatever.

  We puttered away from the tee toward the fairway the mowers had come from, trying to make them turn to increase our lead. From there we split up. I turned down the fairway, Marko started circling around a nearby green, and Aria headed straight across the fairway toward the next hole. The mowers, moving noticeably faster than our carts, both zipped after Aria.

  Aria (Party): WTF? Why are they both chasing me?

  I jerked my cart to the left, intending to pursue and saw Marko cut across the green to do the same. It didn’t take me long to realize I’d never catch up. Aria was right. I could run faster. I hit the brakes and jumped off the cart while it was still rolling. Marko was still on his cart and taking pot shots at with his Glock. It wasn’t particularly effective and the mowers were getting closer to Aria.

  Victor (Party): They’re going to catch you, Aria. Try using the trees to slow them down.

  Aria turned her cart into the trees and began to slalom through them, weaving back and forth, cutting her turns so close she took bark off one of the trees as she passed. The lead mower hit a sapling full on with one of its upright blades and the baby tree just exploded into a cloud of splinters. It didn’t slow the mower at all. I activated Sanguis Vita and began to sprint toward Aria.

  Aria (Party): Fuck this.

  I saw her reach out with a gesture I’d come to recognize as someone fetching an item from their inventory. Steering with a knee, she used both hands to manipulate whatever she’d retrieved. Aria took a quick look behind her then lobbed the item directly toward the oncoming mower. BOOM! The front of the mower exploded, and the machine flipped, tumbled, and came to rest in a shower of dirt, its blades still spinning madly. The crash forced the second mower to evade, giving Marko and I more time to catch up.

  Marko (Party): Was that a grenade? Where the hell did you get a grenade?

  Aria (Party): I might have shoplifted it from Pops.

  Marko (Party): What? I didn’t see any grenades.

  Aria (Party): That’s cause I stole them. Coming your way, Victor.

  Aria spun the wheel to the right and drove directly toward me. I continued to run full out at her cart, trusting her not to hit me. She winked and swerved at the last moment, the mower no more than ten feet behind her. This is stupid. This is stupid. This is stupid. That’s what I was thinking when I jumped toward the oncoming mower, going for enough height to clear the front of it. The driver saw what I was doing and cut his wheel sharply to the left, putting the mower into a drift and presenting me with a set of whirling mower blades.

  It was very, very close, but I cleared the blades and slammed into the driver. I’d planned for both of us to go flying off the mower, but he just grunted and I felt like I’d collided with a punching bag. The driver’s body was much denser than I’d expected, and I almost bounced right off him. The impact caused a tiny bit of damage and a Health bar appeared above his head. Rabid Greenskeeper (99%).

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  I almost slid off the mower, but grabbed a handful of the driver’s hair, yanking his head to the side, and managed to find a foothold between his seat and the blades. Up close, I could see my initial impression was correct. He was foaming at the mouth. Green foam, like he’d chugged engine coolant. The driver was, or had been, a human, I could tell that much, but his body was partially melded with the mower. His head, shoulders, and arms were completely normal, though incredibly filthy. From the armpits down his body was oil-stained metal, with a profusion of wires and spinning gears. There wasn’t a seat, pedals, levers, or a shift stick, it was machine all the way down.

  He snapped his teeth at my arm, and I fed him my tanto instead. He bit down on it, but he wasn’t Marko and it didn’t break, so I sawed back and forth at his mouth. A black, pungent fluid drooled down his chin. It looked and smelled like burnt motor oil. The driver punched me in the ribs and scratched at my eyes, trying to dislodge me.

  I turned my face to the side and ignored the punches, working my tanto deeper into his face, using the handful of his hair for leverage. I hit bone and pushed harder, feeling it grate through his mandible, into his neck and through his spine. The top of his head came off in a shower of black, viscous gore, and the mower came to a rolling stop as the engine died.

  I dropped the partial head and stepped off the mower, careful of the slowing blades. The half-human abomination was, by far, the most fucked up thing I’d yet seen. I wasn’t even sorry it was dead. Marko and Aria rolled up in their carts, staring at me.

  “Are you al-,“ Marko started to say, when Aria interrupted him.

  “That was metal as fuck!” she said, throwing the horns.

  She tossed me a golf towel, and I started cleaning myself off, hands visibly shaking from the adrenaline rush. Or fear. Maybe both. Marko walked over to inspect the rabid greenskeeper and shook his head.

  “It just keeps getting weirder,” he said, then turned to Aria. “So, grenades. Were you going to tell me?”

  “Probably,” Aria said. “Maybe. I half expected you to dad it up and take me back to pay for them.”

  “Where did you even find them?” he said.

  “There was a crate by the shoes. I was curious what would happen if I just dropped them in my inventory.”

  “There was a crate of grenades by the shoes?” Marko said, incredulous. “What the fuck?”

  “Oooooo,” Aria said. “Marko dropped an F-bomb!”

  Mildly cleaner, I dropped the towel on the ground and checked the message that had minimized earlier. It was an achievement.

  Achievement Unlocked: Handy Man!

  You’ve chopped a hand off at least two different people!

  Maybe the Ring of Inner Peace was on to something!

  I rolled my eyes and dismissed the notification. I wasn’t sure if there was even a point to the achievements. They rarely offered anything as a reward. It was mostly just snark.

  “Grenades could be useful,” I said. “Just try not to blow yourself up. Let’s go over our new abilities while nothing’s trying to kill us.”

  “Good idea,” Marko said.

  “You saw mine,” Aria said. “It’s an AoE ability called Besotted. Anyone it hits goes into a frenzy and attacks people nearby.”

  “Mine’s Blood Mist,” I said. “Nothing can hit me and I might be able to use it to squeeze past locked doors.”

  “I picked Scurry,” Marko said. “It lets me charge up to fifteen feet in a straight line. We’ll need to make a database or spreadsheet with all our abilities and keep it up to date.”

  “Bor-ring,” Aria said. “That’s some nerd shit.”

  “You know every game term ever imagined, and you’re calling me a nerd?” Marko said.

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Let’s find the clubhouse before more of those things find us,” I said.

  “Loot the body,” Aria said. “You always forget.”

  “I’ll get it,” Marko said.

  He touched the partially headless body and grunted with amusement.

  “What?” I said.

  “A John Deere cap. It’s junk.”

  He got into his cart and I joined him, rather than backtrack to mine.

  “I saw a sign that said this was the 15th hole,” Marko said. “If we follow the holes in, we should find the clubhouse.”