Chapter 187

Luke was not allowed to take the journals out of the enchanted shrine, not because Valera didn’t trust him, but because the books were old as dirt and outside of the confines of the room, they were afraid that the paper would crumble away to dust.

And probably they didn’t trust him, either. Supposedly, those journals were worth quite a bit of money. Luke wasn’t willing to press any sort of claim of ownership on his father’s writings. If he was honest with himself, he didn’t recognize the man those journals portrayed anyway. There were obviously some secrets his father had kept. The fact that he’d been dying of cancer just like Luke’s mom but hadn’t bothered to tell any of his children was a big one.

Fucking asshole. Luke was going to punch his dad in the face the next time he saw him.

The entries that related to William’s life on Earth were few and far between. Valera pointed them all out for Luke to read, and then he mostly skipped toward the end to look for clues about what to expect besides the big ass dragon apparently squatting on top of the God Machine. That had been close to a thousand years ago, but Luke doubted he was lucky enough that it had died of old age. He wasn’t even sure dragons did that.

No one else seemed to know either, but Luke was betting he could get some general facts out of System as soon as he had some privacy. Speaking of System, it appeared that Luke’s father and his brother were in agreement that trusting the apparition was a bad idea. It wasn’t so much that William had caught him lying about anything, just that System was spectacularly uncooperative with releasing information at the best of times, and whatever rules that determined what he was and was not able to share were a mystery.

William had suspected System was not quite as rule-bound as he tried to come off as, that there was an actual intelligence behind that translucent blue façade that was picking and choosing when to be helpful and when not to. William had tested this and determined that System was most helpful in regards to anything that involved getting William closer to the God Machine, and least helpful involving everything else.

Maybe that was why Luke hadn’t ever noticed anything suspicious. He hadn’t really deviated much from his own goal of reviving his family and getting everyone back home, and System had been consistent about what kind of help he could offer, with behavior changes only coming when Luke managed a bloodline purification.

Or maybe Luke just wasn’t smart enough to catch on.

There was one other thing Luke found in the journal that surprised him. His dad wanted to bring his mom back from the dead, too. He was convinced there had to be a way to do it, despite System repeatedly telling him it was impossible. She hadn’t died on Aros and the system had no record of her. The closest it could get to reviving her was to create some sort of homunculus based off of William’s memories.

“No way that could turn out bad,” Luke muttered to himself when he read that part.

Their belongings arrived from the inn at some point while Luke was going through his father’s writing, but Luke wanted to get everything done in one go. They had a busy schedule to keep if they wanted to meet Fujiko’s imposed deadlines. First thing in the morning, Luke would be escorted to the family’s private training grounds, though he would only be given access to the monster ranch portion of it. Training up his current skills wasn’t a prerequisite to obtaining [XP Cycle] and [XP Reset], so Fujiko was adamant that Luke didn’t need access to those resources.

If he’d wanted it bad enough, he probably could have gotten it as a concession anyway, but he’d told Zea he didn’t care and she’d used that loss of access as a bargaining chip to secure other resources instead. Luke wasn’t entirely sure which particular thing they’d traded away that access for; he just knew that Fujiko looked harried and Zea looked like a cat that had gotten into the cream by the time that meeting had ended.

Sometimes, having high stamina was a curse. Luke returned to the room he’d been given for the night, separate from Zea for whatever reason, got a bath and changed into clean clothes that actually fit. His enchanted clothes were starting to regenerate, but at the moment they looked like a crop top and hot pants, so he was happy to leave them in his backpack for another day or two.

Once he was settled in for the night, Luke found that he couldn’t sleep. Mentally, he was exhausted. Between the hentai demon and the emotional scabs he’d torn open in relation to his father, he was ready to just drop face-first into the bed and hopefully dream about nothing. Physically speaking, however, he was pretty sure he could run four or five laps around the city before he even started to get tired.

Back on Earth, he’d known how to solve this problem. A good run would tire him out, or sometimes a lap around the weight room if his buddy who worked at the local gym was doing the night shift and would let him in for free. Luke would work up a good sweat, get a quick shower, and collapse. That wasn’t a solution anymore. By the time he got tired, the sun would be coming back up again.

So he spent the first half of the night stewing over everything before giving up and walking out of his room. A guard stationed in the hallway, one who wore a mask like so many of the staff did, looked up immediately and said, “Is there anything I can help you with, sir?”

“Can’t sleep,” Luke told him. “Is there somewhere I can go to burn off some energy?”

“Of course, sir.”

Luke thought there was some hesitation in the man’s voice, but it was hard to judge with the mask hiding everything except his eyes. Either way, the guard beckoned for Luke to follow and led him outside the building, where he was handed off to another person, this time with a mask that only covered two-thirds of her face. She led Luke the long way around the garden and down a stone path set into the grass.

“So what’s with the mask thing?” Luke asked as they walked.

“It denotes how far we are from the main branch of the family,” she said. “I would be considered a third cousin to the current heir.”

“I see. So the smaller the mask is, the closer the person is? What about the ones who have full masks?”

“Those people are employed by the family, but not a part of it,” the woman told him.

Luke wasn’t really sure what to think about such an odd tradition, but lots of things were done differently here and he wrote it off as just one more case of culture shock. Nobody else seemed to care about it anyway.

As they walked, Luke started hearing the sound of flesh smacking against wood. All he could picture was a guy beating on a wooden training dummy, but he knew that wasn’t right. That would be more of a cracking sound, and it would be faster-paced. Instead, it was kind of a hollow drumming sound that had a few different tones.

The woman led the way to what appeared to be a giant wooden obstacle course a few hundred feet long. It curled around, following the curve of the outer wall, and there were three people in the middle of it while two more watched. The only one Luke recognized was Hakiro. He’d placed his unique masquerade mask with no eye holes back on his face. There were no straps to hold it in place, so Luke assumed it had been enchanted in some way.

The people running the course were hopping through like ninjas, bouncing off posts and sprinting across balance beams barely an inch wide that wobbled with every step, then scaling a forty-foot-high wall that only had a handhold once every ten feet, and only a single handhold at that.

Even as Luke watched, one of them came to a rope bridge that had no planks and took a flying leap over the edge. The guy caught the rope about thirty feet out and started crossing hand over hand. He was making good progress until one of the other participants reached the beginning of the bridge. Instead of leaping after him, the second guy seized the rope and gave it a hard shake. It whipped wildly back and forth, so much so that the man crossing it lost his grip with one hand and had to perform some acrobatics to swing around and catch his ankles on the rope he was hanging from.

“Huh. Yeah, that’d be good for burning off some energy,” Luke said. “Thanks for showing me where to go.”

“It was my pleasure,” the guard told him. She smiled and added, “Good luck.”

Luke made a beeline Hakiro, who stood there staring up at the third person. She’d gotten stuck on the wall with almost no handholds and was trying to position herself like some sort of awkward spider with her hand and her foot on the same nub.

“Come on, you know that’s not going to work,” Hakiro called out. “Sando and Asher have been fighting each other the whole way and they’re both still ahead of you.”

The girl let her foot swing free, braced herself with both hands on the nubby handhold, and threw herself up as far as she could. She fell two feet short of grabbing onto the next handhold and scrambled against the bare wood as she fell back down. There was no saving herself, and she landed heavily on the ground at the base of the wall, fully twenty feet below where she’d started.

“Oof,” Luke said when she hit the ground. “That sounded like it hurt.”

Hakiro glanced over and shook his head. “Working through the pain is a good lesson too,” he said before raising his voice again. “Start back over from the front.”

“You mind if I give it a go?” Luke asked.

“If you want. Give me a minute to let them get to the end and you can take a turn,” Hakiro told him. He turned to face Luke fully. “Let me guess, couldn’t sleep?”

“Not even a little bit,” Luke confirmed.

“Yes, that happens to the warriors here a lot. Once your stamina gets high enough, your body stops needing it but your mind still does. That’s why we have stuff like this in use all night.”

Luke watched the two men struggle to throw each other off a series of rope swings that were nothing more than a wooden disc with a hole in the center that the rope was threaded through and knotted on the bottom, then move on to a spinning platform that started moving right before they got to it as an operator standing below got the signal. The operator ran around the base pillar, pushing it with a handle to make the whole thing rotate.

One of the men was knocked off shortly after landing, having failed to compensate for the spin properly and being sabotaged by his opponent before he could regain his balance. The lone man cleared the remaining obstacles in under thirty seconds, and the girl at the front failed again when she reached the wall.

“Your turn,” Hakiro said, gesturing towards the starting position.

Luke headed over, looked at Hakiro for permission to start, and took off like a rocket as soon as the man’s hand went down.