Chapter 189

The Shansakun training grounds were about one hundred and fifty miles east of the city. The family owned a huge swath of forested land, one that was rough with hills and valleys, ravines and gullies, and had more than its fair share of monsters. Specifically, it was home to several massive colonies of giant spiders that had invaded at some point. Efforts to exterminate them had been largely unsuccessful; no matter how thorough the humans were, the spiders just kept coming back.

Short of burning down thousands of acres of old wood, most of which the Shansakun family had no claim to, there were really only three choices. They could sell the land, but it wasn’t worth a fraction of what they’d paid for it once the spiders took over. They could hire professional hunters with specific builds designed to search out spider colonies and destroy them, which would no doubt cost a fortune and take years to do the entire forest, even if they could get the families who owned other slices of it to agree.

Or, they could do what they’d done. They bought up huge sections of it on the cheap from other families who wanted nothing to do with it now that it was so much harder to extract resources from it and turned it into a giant XP farm. The spiders could get upwards of level 20 when they were full grown, mostly from fighting and killing other spiders from different colonies, and more importantly, there were hundreds of thousands of them, maybe even millions of them.

They were a group of ten, including Luke and Zea. Hakiro was there, as were the two men who’d been running the obstacle course last night, Sando and Asher. Their own trainer had accompanied the group, as well as two servants, a chef, and a single healer. The servants and trainees all had huge, heavy packs full of supplies. Rich, noble families were not accustomed to roughing it, even on expeditions to hunt giant spiders.

When Hakiro had told them that they were heading to a hunting lodge, Luke had pictured something between a shack in the woods and a log cabin. When he’d seen how many people were coming along, he’d mentally upgraded the log cabin to have at least five or six bedrooms.

The reality was both more and less than Luke had expected. There were four buildings arranged in a square with a thirty-foot wall surrounding them. Mounted above that in a dome that barely rose over the roofs was an extremely fine mesh made of pencil-thin cables. As soon as Zea spotted it, her gaze sharpened and she said, “That’s enchanted.”

“To keep the spiders out,” Hakiro said. “The big ones can’t fit, and the smaller ones are killed by the magic. You can hear it crackling and buzzing at night, like a swarm of angry hornets guarding your rest.”

Luke couldn’t help but snicker at the thought. They’d be sleeping under a magic bug-zapping mosquito curtain. He wondered if Zea could make something similar, like a cape or cloak he could swing around that would shock the shit out of any spiders it touched.

The group stopped at the sole gate in the walls and waited while Hakiro’s partner produced a key to unlock it. Once they were inside, Luke saw a well in the center of the four houses. Hakiro pointed to the building in the northeast corner, moving in a clockwise direction and said, “Kitchen and mess hall, supply storage, trainee barracks and med station, and trainer rooms.”

“So, where do we rate?” Luke asked, glancing back and forth between the trainee building and the trainer building.

“Normally, we come out with fifteen to twenty trainees and a half dozen instructors. We’re a bit light this trip, however. Asher and Sando will have plenty of space in the barracks, the servants have their own quarters in their buildings, and the four of us will each claim a room,” the other trainer said.

Luke tossed a quick [Analyze] his way, just to get his name, which was Jalet. It was kind of a weird name, considering everyone else’s, but so was Asher, now that he thought about it. The two were both paler skin than everyone else, not including Luke, and while they had the standard silver-white hair the rest of the natives did, their features were decidedly not native.

There was no doubt some immigration story in there, and Luke suspected the two were related, but it wasn’t really his business and he couldn’t see it making much of a difference to what he was here to do. Both Jalet and Asher seemed to be well acquainted with the Shansakun household. Luke was not anticipating any drama there.

That cook, on the other hand, had been grumbling under his breath since they left. Luke got the impression that the man would rather be anywhere but here, and appeared to have drawn the short straw in some sort of lottery amongst the staff. If not for the fact that Luke still hadn’t managed to achieve even rank 1 [Cooking] somehow, he would have strongly considered eating his own cooking. There was liable to be less spit in it that way.

The group split up, with the cook and servants heading to the east side of the camp while the healer and trainees walked into the barracks. That left Luke, Zea, Hakiro, and Jalet to enter the final building. Luke wanted to say he was surprised at how luxurious it was, but when he compared it to the main compound, he couldn’t really find the heart.

“It’s a bit rustic, I know,” Hakiro said, misinterpreting the look on Luke’s face.

“Please. He’d sleep under a bush if I let him,” Zea said.

“Wrong,” Luke shot back. “I wouldn’t sleep.”

“Okay, true. You’d push yourself for a week straight, then sleep for three hours under a bush, and then you’d be up and moving again.”

That was a fairly accurate assessment of how Luke’s sleep cycle worked these days. He tried to sleep for a few hours every night, but he wasn’t always successful. Mostly he just acted as a giant body pillow for Zea to snuggle while his mind drifted. It was kind of like dozing but still being aware of the world around him, and it had more or less replaced actual sleep except for a few hours a week.

“There will be no sleeping under bushes here,” Hakiro said. “Go claim a room and then meet back outside. We’re going to do our first walk around the area so I can go over what dangers to look out for, what flavors of monster you can expect to find, and what areas to stay away from.”

* * *

“Alright, this is pretty straight forward,” Jalet said.

Sando muttered something, but not in Consortium Standard. Jalet paused, shot him a look, and said, “Because it’s rude to our guests. Get used to speaking the trade language around foreigners. Most people outside the Beilon Province don’t speak Eledarn.”

They were a few miles outside the ‘hunting lodge,’ as Hakiro called it. Luke would have said it was more like a small fortress. The trail they walked circled around their base with regular intersections. They stood at one such T-junction and Jalet pointed deeper into the woods. “Each of these junctions leads off to a different colony of spiders. For the most part, they’re pretty similar. There’s some variety in size, and the blueshell lurkers are significantly more durable than any other breed, but a giant spider is a giant spider. Most of them are going to die from a single good hit.

“The thing to remember is to watch out above and behind you. These aren’t going to be duels. They won’t wait for you to kill one before another moves forward to challenge you. Mobility and reaction speed are going to be your key defenses as you fight dozens of spiders at once. We’ll avoid the venomous varieties while we’re here—they’re not worth the risk—but we’re still going to go over them so if you do end up facing one down, you’ll know what you’re up against.”

Zea had stayed behind in their room. When Luke left, she was already unpacking some of the raw materials she’d coerced out of Fujoka and plotting out her next creation. It was too bad she didn’t want to gain XP anymore. This was feeling more and more like an express route to higher levels. If the strongest monsters were only level 20, it was almost risk-free, too.

They started down the trail, with Hakiro in the front and Jalet bringing up the rear while Luke and the two trainees took the middle. Jalet made sure to stress that they weren’t safe there, as spiders rarely felt the need to follow trails to begin with. Sando and Asher were both pretty jumpy, but considering they were only level 25, Luke supposed he couldn’t blame them too much.

He considered saying something, but before he could, [Peripheral Awareness] pinged to a threat and [Unarmed Martialist] had him moving before he’d even fully registered it. A spider the size of his fist leaped down from overhead on a silk dragline, fangs gleaming and legs ending in wickedly sharp points.

Luke caught it in his bare hand and squeezed. There was a brief popping sound and some yellowish ichor seeped out of the crushed body. A ding sounded in his mind.

[You have slain Weeping Spinner (lvl 14). 201 XP awarded.]
[This creature has slain 521 other creatures.]
[Total kills for this type of creature: 1.]
[Highest level kill: 14.]

“Hmm. Neat. A weeping spinner,” Luke said.

“It seems the lessons must be put on hold,” Jalet announced. “That breed creates large mobile colonies. The rest will be on us in moments. Prepare yourself.”

“Gods above, protect us,” Asher said, his voice breaking and his hands trembling.

“How did you get to level 25 if you’re afraid to fight?” Luke asked him.

Before he could get his answer, another spider launched itself at the group. Hakiro skewered it with his blade, but in the second it took him to intercept and kill it, another six were in the air. After that, it was like spiders were raining from the sky, and it was all Luke could do to catch and kill them as they poured down on him.

* * *

“Okay. Fuck spiders,” Luke said five minutes later.

[You have slain 142 creatures between levels 11-17. 26,530 XP awarded.]
[Congratulations! You have reached level 44. 44 AP awarded for use.]

“That was an unusual number of fully grown weeping spinners to be migrating,” Hakiro said. “I wonder if something has happened to upset the balance of the colonies.”

“How many did you kill?” Jalet said to his two trainees.

“Twenty-two,” Sando said.

“Ni-Nine,” Asher added.

Luke’s eyebrows shot up. He hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the other two trainees, but he would have expected them to do better than that. With a mental shrug, he dismissed them. That spider swarm had enough XP in it to boost him up a full level. If he was lucky, he’d score a few extra before he had to go back to the city and fulfill his half of the bargain.

After that, well… Luke might just sneak into the woods again and do a little XP grinding on his own. Once he had [XP Cycle] up and running, it wouldn’t matter if he leveled up to 60 or 70. Hell, if his dad’s journals were to be believed, he might need those levels to beat this dragon that was supposedly guarding the God Machine.

“I think that will be enough for today,” Jalet said, sharing a glance with Hakiro. “Until we know what caused this aberrant behavior, it’s too risky to delve any deeper.”

“Better to be safe,” Hakiro agreed.

Well, there was always tomorrow. If every day went like this, he’d be good to go inside a week. In a way, this method was even better than the anthills he’d been using. As far as he could tell, the spiders didn’t spray him with pheromones and chase him around by smell. Even if they did, he was staying in a place with anti-spider enchantments.

As they trudged back, Luke did his best to temper his expectations. The experts on this little trip seemed to think that encounter was weird, so he probably shouldn’t be planning his future as if that was going to be a typical encounter. Still, it would be nice to get the level grind done and over with.