Far Future Snippet - Extended Family

And with 13 votes, Percy wins the Far Future Snippet vote for June.

Guest-starring a flabbergasted Merlin, an MC who failed their physical stat check, and a special appearance from an unexpected guest.

The pavement of the highway briefly crackles beneath your feet. You hurtle through the air, the night breeze of the surrounding scrubland lightly kissing your skin, as you lunge straight towards the shadowy hellhound with the great blade of the ancient Zweihänder extended before you.

The beast's many mouths drop open as it screeches like grinding metal. Rapidly approaching headlights briefly light up the surrounding shrub and bracken. Someone screams in the distance as the keen edge of your sword slices a glancing blow across the eldritch monster's twitching shoulder.

You curse. You tumble to the side. You desperately try to regain your footing as the night becomes a blur of bright lights and honking horns.

You missed!

And then Percy is at your side, half tugging, half dragging, and half carrying you to the pitted shoulder of the road as a tractor-trailer goes blazing past in a blast of diesel exhaust and the deep bellow of an air horn. The eighteen-wheeler crashes headfirst into the much smaller form of the hellhound, its shrieks subsumed beneath the truck's klaxon.

"Remain on your guard!" Merlin warns as he rushes to where the pair of you are slowly straightening up, the tails of his white trench coat rippling behind him in an errant breeze. "We have merely gained a scant handful of time. Something like that could never hope to truly hurt— wait—" The mage does a double-take at the splotch of darkness and steaming fluids currently pinned beneath the front wheels of the tractor. "Tis dead?!"

"Uncle Weimaraner," Percy, seemingly unsurprised and unflappable as ever, calls out a greeting to the cowboy-hat-wearing driver that scrambles out of the cab of the very much totaled semi-truck. He's shortly joined by a long-legged, silvery-brown dog that bound free in glee. "Thought you retired from truckin' a decade ago."

That just brings up even more questions.