Chapter 175

Gotayi let Luke and Zea into the office, which was lit by a pair of candles set into holders on the wall. It was in most other respects a plain, normal office except for what was obviously a safe tall enough for Luke to climb into sitting in one corner. The metal wasn’t normal steel either, but some sort of pale, lustrous blue thing that caught the reflected light of the candles to make it dazzle.

Gotayi saw Luke looking at it and said, “Gets annoying after a while, actually. Sure it’s pretty, but sometimes I don’t need a giant twinkling box in the corner distracting me.”

He crossed the room, pulled down some sort of sheet that had been piled on top of the safe, and covered it. Then he spun in place, leaned against the side of his desk, and crossed his arms. “Okay. Wow me.”

“It’s a pretty simple concept,” Zea said. “You know he’s not a level 1.”

Gotayi nodded and eyed Luke up. “So what?”

“So, what level is he?”

The fat man froze for just an instant before a grin spread across his face. “I don’t know. And neither will the audience. The betting will be wild.”

“You control the odds, right? So here’s a wild card fighter. Maybe he loses to a level 5 monster, maybe he kills a level 30 monster easily.”

“Can he play the fool in the arena? It doesn’t matter if no one knows his true level if he puts down every monster in one hit.”

“I’ve got a rank in [Deception],” Luke said. “And 2 ranks in [Disguise].”

“Not as good as [Acting],” Gotayi said, “but we can probably make it work. You’ll need to drag the early fights out, make it look like a fluke that you won. What’s your weapon skill at?”

“Rank 5.”

“No shit?” Gotayi’s eyebrows shot up. “You any good at resisting your skills when they try to force you to do something you don’t want to?”

“Decent at it.”

The pit manager gave a noncommittal hum and sized Luke up. “Mace is no good anyway,” he said with a look of disgust. “Don’t know why anyone would use such a barbaric weapon. How’s your [Sword Mastery]?”

“Rank 1,” Luke told him.

“Perfect,” Gotayi said. “You won’t even have to fake being incompetent with it then. That’s barely good enough to avoid stabbing yourself in the foot.”

Luke wasn’t thrilled about the idea of using a sword. He’d done that once with the pair he’d stolen from some goblins, though they’d admittedly been too small for him to comfortably hold. Either way, he’d always found his mace to be more than sufficient to meet his needs. Well, except for that one time he’d broken his original on a giant’s skull after his strength stat had gotten too high.

“Perhaps for the early fights, but then he can switch later,” Zea said. She opened her mouth, frowned, and looked over at Luke. “What is the word for ‘misdirection’ in Consortium Standard?”

After Luke told her, Gotayi started nodding along. “Yes, a bluff. That is a fine idea. But right now this is all hypothetical. It assumed your man here can actually fight. What level is he really?”

Luke toggled [XP Mask] off, just for a second, and met Gotayi’s eyes. Then he turned it back on again. The pit manager looked surprised and suddenly nervous, no doubt just finally realizing that he had a monster in his office. That body guard who’d followed them was far below Luke in strength, and wouldn’t be able to do much of anything to save Gotayi if Luke decided to kill him.

“Relax,” Luke said. “We follow the plan. Everyone benefits. I don’t need to crack your skull and bust open your pretty little safe.”

“Hah, as if you could,” Gotayi said. “Blue Coralite is practically indestructible. You’d need to max out [Blacksmithing] and then take another skill specifically for working with the metal just to shape it.”

“That so?” Luke asked with interest. He glanced over at the safe, covered in the sheet so that only the bottom inch or so was visible. “They make weapons out of that stuff?”

“They do,” Gotayi said. “And, my friend, if this goes as well as we hope it will, you might just be able to afford one. Maybe a nice sword to replace that savage monstrosity strapped to your back right now.”

“Uh, yeah… I’ll think about it.”

“Okay, I think we can make this work. We’ll need to work out the specifics, but before that, there’s one more thing to test,” Gotayi said. “We got to make sure you can put on a good show.”

The fat man gestured for them all to exit the room and then proceeded to lead them farther away from the arena. Luke knew for a fact that his underground navigation skills were utter shit, but he was almost positive they were getting closer to that meat shop he’d gotten hung up on when he started smelling the monsters.

The tunnel curved all the way around the arena, sloping down as it went, until they came to a giant holding area with dozens of enclosures. All sorts of monsters were stuck in the pens, everything from a level 5 steelfang wolf to a level 30 steam surger. That one was trapped in some sort of glass box that was half full of water.

“How do you put that in the arena to fight someone?” Luke asked.

“I don’t,” Gotayi said. “I use it to clean up the blood stains.”

“Ah…”

Someone Luke hadn’t seen yet must have some sort of skill for monster taming or controlling. Luke couldn’t see any other way to make a creature that seemed to be made of nothing more than a cloud of hot water that was constantly condensing on the glass and reforming behave. He wondered how he could even fight such a creature. He could imagine his mace going straight through it without doing anything more than making the mist swish around.

“This guy right here,” Gotayi said, stopping near a pit that had some sort of big lizard with a frill going down its spine in it. Luke quickly threw an [Analyze] out to see what he was dealing with.

[Name: Sunspot Monitor]
[Level: 8]
[XP: 1722/2059]
[AP: 0]
[Strength: 3]
[Agility: 9]
[Stamina: 5]
[Perception: 8]
[Skills:]
[Solar Fin (3)]
[Blinding Flash (1)]
[Venomous Bite (2)]

That was a long way away from being a threat. “What about him?” Luke asked.

“These are a local monster. Not too hard to find, not too hard to catch. They’re good warm up fights for new challengers. Now I’m sure you could drop in there and kill it in a second, but that’s not a good show. If this scam is going to work, I need to know if you can let it chase you around for twenty minutes and make it look realistic. Can you kill it in a convincing way to make it look like a fluke so people will bet against you in the next round too?”

Luke wasn’t worried about its bite. With a strength that low, it wouldn’t be able to puncture his skin. Unless it could also spit the venom into his eyes or something, he was probably safe. He wasn’t sure what the deal with that fin was, though. [Blinding Flash] sounded obvious enough, but Luke was well past the point of relying solely on his eyes, especially against such an inferior opponent.

“You want me to fight it now?” Luke asked.

“I want you to put on a good show. Hop in there and make me believe that you’re really a level 1 with no aura of power about you.”

Luke was about to hop into the enclosure when the fat man added, “And leave that weapon behind. Use a sword, like a real warrior.”

With a sigh, Luke pulled his mace off the harness and held it out to Zea. She took it from him, then nearly dropped it in surprise. “Fuck, that’s heavy!” she swore as the head clanked against the stone.

“I keep telling you to put more points in strength,” Luke said. Then he switched back to Standard and asked, “Any other requests before I go in?”

“I’d prefer you don’t kill it. No big loss if you have to, but it’s a waste of money. Just survive.”

The monitor lizard looked up from where it was laying when Luke dropped into its pen. A tongue flicked out from between its teeth, and it lumbered to its feet. “Looks hungry,” Luke muttered to himself.

Perhaps they’d been starving it, or maybe it was just territorial and aggressive, but either way, the lizard charged at him with no hesitation at all. Luke slipped to one side as it rushed past, easily dodging snapping teeth. He resisted the urge [Unarmed Martialist] gave him to lash out with a foot and break the knee on the lizard’s back leg.

“No good,” Gotiya said. “Looked too easy. Cut it closer and look more desperate, like you’re having a hard time keeping up with it.”

Easier said than done. Luke had no problem cutting it so close that the monitor’s snout touched him before dodging out of the way, but it took a lot more work to make it look anything other than deliberate. It was a conscious effort to force himself to slow down, to put himself in positions where he’d be off-balance and had to scramble—slowly—out of the way.

“Better,” the pit manager called down to him. “Maybe let it nip you a bit. Not too much, just to get a bit of blood on the floor. It’ll poison you if you let it, so be careful.”

“That’s a bad idea,” Luke told him. He blurred back over the railing to stand next to Zea and handed her one of his gauntlets. “Here, hold this.”

With his arm bare up to his elbow, Luke jumped back in and wagged it around to get the lizard’s attention. It lunged for Luke immediately and sunk its teeth into the exposed flesh, only for exactly what Luke had expected to happen. It could chew, but it couldn’t puncture through.

“Oh, yeah. That’s no good. We could probably get you some blood packets to crush and make it look like you’re wounded, but you’ll have to be careful about palming them. You got any ranks in [Sleight of Hand]?” Gotiya said.

“I do not, no,” Luke said.

The pit manager didn’t look happy about it, but he nodded. “Not a deal breaker,” he told Zea. “Maybe we can get him rank 1 with a bit of practice. He’s got enough agility for it. Gods above, look at him go.”

Luke pried the monitor lizard’s jaw open, then blinked his eyes rapidly when a bright light started shining from its frill. He shoved the lizard away and leaped back, but at the last second made it look like a stumble. He could hear the lizard’s claws ticking against the stone as it scrambled back in to attack him.

“Watch out,” Zea called down.

“Oh, I’m fine,” Luke said. “Figured I should practice reacting to this, right?”

He sidestepped the rush with a long, deliberate dodge that took him much farther out of harm’s way than he needed to, and it was so poorly timed that the lizard had the space to readjust its course. As it closed in, Luke hopped over it and said, “You want me to keep going?”

Gotiya considered it for a second, then said, “No, I think we’re good. Let’s head back to my office and we’ll discuss the hard numbers. I’m thinking five or so easy fights, nothing over level 15, just to get people interested and betting. Once they realize you’re not a pushover, we’ll start bringing the bigger monsters out in a succession of increasingly difficult fights.”

“Sounds like there’s a lot of money to be made in the bets on that,” Zea said, her grin predatory.

Gotiya matched it, easily. “Yes, yes there is.”

“Great. I can’t wait to talk about how big our cut is going to be.”