Chapter 193

Luke had an hour left until sunrise, and he still needed 3000 XP. That was pretty much a non-starter by itself, but he also needed to backtrack to the hunting lodge to leave with everyone else, which meant he had about twenty minutes before he was out of time. Unless he got extraordinarily lucky, his push to level up to 46 was a bust.

He’d been trying to find the main nest of the whispersilk crawlers for the last two hours. That was the XP motherlode right there, and he’d targeted them specifically because he’d tested the strength of their threads and found them to be far too weak to seriously threaten him. Unless he went to sleep and let hundreds of them restrain him, there was no conceivable way they’d be able to stop him.

It was too bad they were among the stealthiest of the colonies. Luke had found plenty of evidence of their work, but very few of the spiders themselves. Looking back on it, he’d made the wrong call deciding to go after this particular breed instead of something more aggressive. Unfortunately, aggressive almost always paired with solitary and territorial, and he just didn’t have the hours left in his night to hunt down a bunch of level 10 spiders one at a time.

Luke stopped walking and looked around. There was a smell in the air, something faint and hidden under the rain, but still lingering. He couldn’t quite place what it was, but he knew he should recognize it. Curious and no longer bothering to try to find the main nest since he was basically out of time anyway, Luke sniffed again and turned to follow the scent.

Tracking by nose was difficult, no matter how high his perception got. Human brains just didn’t seem to be wired to do it properly. In this case though, it was pretty easy to figure it out. The smell was burnt wood, and within a minute, he stepped into a hole in the forest filled with nothing but the scorched and charred remains of trees. Nothing higher than Luke’s knee still stood in the field of soot.

As he took a step forward, his foot crunched down on something. Luke glanced down and saw a crusty black spider, curled up from the heat and cooked to death. Once he knew to look, he found dozens more scattered around, half buried in muddy soot.

“Man, what the fuck is this?” he asked out loud. It had been raining for days, sometimes a drizzle and sometimes a real downpour, but never really enough to storm. There was no way a random lightning strike had started a wildfire that had contained itself perfectly to this small area.

[Area Denial] activated itself and Luke’s leg kicked out before he’d even recognized the sound of movement behind him. Something small and lightweight went flying away. It was only a foot tall, not counting a long, thin tail, but it was durable enough that when Luke launched it backward, it rolled with the blow and landed upright twenty feet away.

Dozens more creatures rose up from underneath the blanket of soot and ash covering the clearing, and Luke noticed wickedly hooked stingers on the ends of their tails. His first thought was that maybe he’d get lucky and pull that last level after all, but when [Analyze] refused to trigger on them, he groaned.

“Fucking demons. Of course you are,” he said with a sigh. There’d be no XP here.

Without being able to tell exactly what he was fighting, Luke opted to take a cautious approach to the battle. He started backing toward the edge of the clearing in an attempt to keep the demons from coming at him from every angle. The demons watched him with their coal-black eyes and chittered to each other quietly with voices that sounded like rats running across an attic floor.

Luke thought he had his identification narrowed down to two or three types of demons, but he couldn’t be sure. Though he’d made the effort to pick Hakiro’s brain about the demonic invasions, the swordsman hadn’t known a lot, and nobody else seemed to either. Luke had gotten some information, but nothing definitive. Supposedly, there’d be one of those books with all the information the army had gathered about demons waiting for Luke when he got back to the city. Fat lot of good it did him right now.

But if he had to guess, his money was on imps. It was either that or gremlins, but he was pretty sure gremlins had big floppy ears and no tails. Gremlins probably would have been better since imps were one of those monster types that just kind of came in an endless wave, a wave that was on fire.

These imps, if that’s what they were, had soot-colored skin stretched taut over tiny frames and short, bony limbs. They were proportioned like humans, except their whole body was literally nothing but skin and bones and they stood no taller than Luke’s knee.

On some unknown signal, the imps all launched themselves at Luke at the same time. Their mouths opened to reveal little jagged triangles of rock for teeth that were backlit by flickering flames coming up from their throats, and Luke could feel the heat radiating out of them well before they got close enough to bite.

His mace whipped around him, driven by rank 5 [Mace Mastery] and rank 2 [Tactical Foresight]. Imp after imp exploded into clouds of glowing charcoal dust as they swarmed across the clearing. Only once the horde got coordinated enough to start coming at him from every direction did [Area Denial] kick in.

Luke had never gotten that multi-target offensive skill he wanted, but this particular combination was working pretty well. He was basically spinning like a top while adjusting the position of his weapon to blast through dozens of imps. In fact, he was going so fast he was starting to tear a hole in the ground where he stood. Rather than risk hitting a buried rock and throwing his footwork off, Luke shifted a step to the left every few seconds.

Everything seemed to be going fine, but the thing about imps was that they didn’t really run out of numbers. They had a weird and somewhat disgusting ability to unhinge their jaws completely and hack up what looked like a lump of used-up charcoal that would quickly unfold itself into a brand new imp. If the sizes didn’t quite line up, well, Luke chalked that up to a quirk of demon magic.

So while he’d killed probably a hundred imps in the opening minute of the fight, the clearing was quickly filling up with so many new imps that he thought he might actually be behind where he started. If Luke wanted this fight to end anytime soon, he needed to go on the offensive. He burst through a cloud of soot and ash and dashed forward, mace lashing out to smite any imps he ran past.

The ones at the far end of the burnt-out clearing were busy barfing up reinforcements instead of paying attention when Luke crashed into them. Imps died at a rate of four or five a second, but even as Luke worked through that group, the ones who’d been chasing him reversed and started their own summons. By the time Luke had fully killed off the reinforcements, he had a new crop on the other side of the clearing to deal with.

“This is fucking ridiculous,” he growled as he activated [Burst Step].

On the bright side, he was pushing the imps so hard that most of them had stopped trying to kill him. It had become a game of stamina, where Luke rushed to kill them faster than new ones could be created, and if there was one thing he was confident in, it was that he’d keep going for hours after anyone else had run out of steam.

It was going to make him late coming back if he didn’t figure out a way to speed this up, though. It hadn’t escaped his notice that as more and more imps formed, the amount of loose ash on the ground was slowly going down, and he suspected that was making up the difference in mass between a full-sized imp and the lump they barfed up onto the ground when they were summoning a new one. But just by eyeballing the clearing, he could tell that wasn’t going to be a quick solution. There was enough raw material to make hundreds more imps that would keep him occupied for the next hour.

He could always just run away. The imps weren’t that fast, individually, and he had miles of woodlands to lose them in. It wasn’t like he was gaining any XP from them either. All he was doing was clearing out a pocket of demons that seemed to reproduce endlessly anyway. If the imps did follow him back somehow, there’d be other people to help kill them.

Luke made a concentrated effort to kill the spawners near the south side of the clearing so that all the imps would be clustered as far away as possible, then he broke away from the fight and darted into the woods. A high-pitched screeching like metal on metal went up behind him, but he didn’t look back or stop to fight. Any imp that got close to him received a mace moving at high speeds, and within a minute, the cries had faded away and Luke was alone in the forest again.

Well, relatively alone. A random spider launched itself off a branch at face height in an attempt to go for Luke’s eyes, and he swatted it out of the air to splatter against the trunk of a nearby tree. Ignoring the ding in his head, Luke kept running. He was going to be late, but he figured they’d probably forgive him when he told the group about the imps.

The rain had let up sometime while Luke was fighting, but it wasn’t until he stepped out onto a wide trail that he recognized there was smoke mixed in with the overcast clouds. It wasn’t just a single plume, either. He climbed up a tree and took a quick look around to count no less than sixteen more columns of smoke drifting up into the sky.

Luke would have thought it was something he’d done, but he didn’t see how that was possible. It likely meant there were more clusters of imps in the forest, and perhaps they’d just become active with the dawn, or with the change in weather. Demons that burned things down and spawned more of themselves from the ashes were probably sensitive to fluctuating weather.

All that mattered to Luke was getting back and getting everyone out of the woods sooner rather than later. If the weather was starting to clear up had been what kept the imps dormant, then Luke was willing to bet the remaining spider colonies would be going nuts as soon as the imps burned down their homes.

He jumped down from the tree and took off down the trail at a jog, trying to remember exactly where he was and which bisecting trails he needed to follow. Thankfully, his [Survivalist] skill helped with navigation, and he soon found himself back on the main trail that circled around the hunting lodge. Luke picked up his pace, not liking the columns of smoke he was seeing popping up closer and closer.

The lodge came into view, and he froze in shock. The timber walls were smoking, and the enchanted mesh dome across the top was sagging under the weight of hundreds of imps as they tore at it. The sounds of his companions yelling to each other as they fought filled the air, and the doorway that allowed Luke to enter and exit the lodge had been ripped out of the wall and left discarded in the weeds nearby.

The glow of fire lit the interior, and without a second’s hesitation, Luke rushed through the open doorway.