Chapter 153

Two people stepped out of the bushes. Both had the silver-white hair Luke was seeing everywhere now, and both were well-armed. Luke counted four swords between the two of them plus a pair of belt knives. One of them had a sheath strapped to his leg with another knife, and the other had her hair up with a pair of what looked like needle-sharp stilettos.

[Analyze] told him they were levels 37 and 35 with a bunch of combat, survival, and tracking skills, both strong enough to be a threat, names of Ruca and Val. Both of them tracked his hand movement to his mace, and the man held his hands up. He said something that Luke couldn’t understand, then, seeing the look on Luke’s face, tried again in Standard.

“Peace, friend. We’re not here for a fight, not with you.”

“Bandits sure are picky on this side of the world,” Luke said.

“Maybe they’re just smarter over here,” Zea replied.

“Maybe we’re not bandits,” the strange woman said, her voice sharp.

Luke gestured back down the road toward the downed tree he’d moved. “Explain that?”

“That’s not meant to waylay travelers. It’s for a caravan with a load of… human cargo,” the man said.

Luke could see Zea’s sudden scowl in his peripheral vision. “You trust your bowels to a neighbor’s latrine?” she asked incredulously.

The two silver-haired natives blinked at her and then started speaking in rapidly in what Luke assumed was Eledarn. “Uh,” Luke said, switching back to Thalian, “I don’t think you said whatever you were trying to say.”

“I said, ‘You’re pretty trusting to just tell a couple strangers all this.’ Why? What did you hear?” Zea asked.

“Um. Not that. Maybe I should pick up rank 2 of[Consortium Standard] and do the talking for now.”

“Ugh, yeah. Probably a good idea. I’ll have to rank it up again. Wait, what am I saying? You’ve infected me with your XP-based solutions to all your problems.”

Luke took a few seconds to navigate the skill store in his system menu and spent 15 AP on the language upgrade, then said, “Sorry, my friend here is still only at rank 1 with the language. She was trying to ask why you trusted a couple of strangers with this information.”

Val frowned and asked him, “Did you just spend AP on a language skill? That’s ridiculously wasteful.”

Luke shrugged. “I’m in a hurry. I had some AP to spare.”

“The better question is how you have any AP at all,” Ruca said. “You don’t feel like you have any aura at all. I’ve met toddlers with more power than you. That’s actually part of the reason we came out to meet you.”

“To interrogate me about my skill usage?” Luke asked. “We haven’t even been introduced and you think I’m going to share a piece of my build with you?”

“No, no, of course not,” Ruca said. “We came to make sure you aren’t demons.”

“Why would you think we’re demons?”

“Strange monsters have been appearing lately, far to the south. Rumors have just recently reached this province, rumors that say that the creatures that look like monsters, but they are not. They are not part of the system, either. They have no XP, and you are rewarded with none when you kill them.”

Luke glanced over at Zea, who just shrugged back. There’d only been one enemy on the entire planet Luke had encountered that the system hadn’t given him XP for killing, and they were pretty sure that had been the direct result of divine intervention turning Adrevald Lath into a member of the walking dead. Undead and demons weren’t the same thing in Luke’s mind, but it was possible there was a translation problem.

“What do the demons look like?” Luke asked. He assumed they were shaped like people, since the two not-bandits thought he and Zea could be a pair of them.

“All sorts of things, if the stories are to be believed. Some are small, barely the size of your head. Others are big as houses. They come in every shape and size imaginable, and with a lot of strange abilities, things our own skills have no parallels for. The only thing that’s consistent about them is that the system doesn’t acknowledge when they die.”

“What even the fuck is going on over here?” Luke said softly.

“Do you think…” Zea trailed off, but Luke didn’t need her to say it. It was entirely possible this was more bullshit from the Pantheon, but if so, it was really widespread. Their previous approaches had been far more targeted. Then again, all of their attempts to kill Luke on the western continent had failed, so maybe they’d opted for a new strategy this time.

“Well, I hope you’re convinced we’re not demons,” Luke told the two not-bandits. “Good luck with your liberating of the slaves. We’ve got places to be and people to see, so we’ll be going now.”

“Hmm. Yes, we’ve got our own work to see to as well. Someone has moved our tree and we need to put it back. If only that person would be so kind as to put things back the way he found them.”

Luke glanced back at the tree, already a mile behind him. He could go back and put it into position, but that would leave him open to an ambush. More importantly, it would leave Zea vulnerable to an attack, and she was not strong enough to fend off either of these two people. “I’m sure your group can handle it. You got it there once already.”

Val him a scowl, but Ruca nodded. “I understand. Smart of you not to trust strangers. We’ll leave you to your travels. Best of luck.”

“You as well. Thanks for the warning about demons.”

The two pair split there, with the not-bandits going back towards their ambush site while Luke and Zea kept running south. After a few miles had gone by, Luke said, “System, tell me about these demons. Is this the pantheon’s doing?”

“I’m afraid I don’t have any information on this subject,” System said, appearing out of nothing and floating through the air to keep pace when Luke. “If such creatures do exist, they are not part of the God Machine’s system and thus, I have no authority over them. I can confirm that there have been a high number of deaths on this continent which led to full XP being returned to the God Machine without any going to another creature.”

“Does that happen often?” Zea asked.

“It is not infrequent. Usually it’s seen in accidental deaths, sickness, or old age. The number of creatures dying with no apparent cause has increased a thousandfold in the last two months.”

“Shit. So people are dying in droves, rumors are there’s demons roaming around, and they’ve got no system connection, just like Lath. Divine bullshit again.”

“I am not able to speculate on the actions or motivations of the Pantheon,” System said, for probably the hundredth time. Some things never changed.

“We should assume this demon outbreak is relevant to us,” Zea said. “They could be actively hunting us, either individually or cooperatively.”

“That would suck. How many do you think there are?”

“Hundreds? Thousands? Maybe more.” Zea frowned. “Numbers are less important than individual levels. Or not levels, but whatever their equivalent is. You know what I mean.”

“Right, but we have no way to measure that. [Analyze]didn’t work on Lath after he got disconnected from the system or whatever it was.”

“Other bloodline abilities might not work either. Most of them revolve around controlling the target through its connection to the system,” Zea said.

Luke came to such an abrupt stop that he almost tripped. “Shit. I don’t even have the level reset skill yet and it’s already useless.”

“Not useless. It would work against everything that’s not one of these demon monsters. Who knows how many problems you can just blink away with that skill?”

“200 AP would go a long way towards increasing my stats, maybe putting some skills together into advanced versions, which would probably help a lot more against the demons. Whether they exist outside the system or not, I’m pretty sure if I beat one into a pulp, it’ll still die.”

“We’re getting a little ahead of the cart,” Zea said. “We don’t know how much of a threat these demons are. All we’ve got is some rumors from two people lying about not being bandits. These things might not even be real, and if they are, maybe they’re the equivalent of a level 20 monster.”

“Maybe,” Luke said. “But System did say there were a bunch of dead people, way more than usual. Even if those guys are wrong about the demons, there’s still something going on.”

The two started moving again. Their plan was to cover about a hundred miles on the road before the end of the day, but Luke was secretly hoping to get farther. Now that he knew there was a threat in their way, he was eager to cut their travel time as much as possible. He suspected he was going to need those extra days to hunt monsters.

Without knowing how strong he needed to be, the only solution was to put on as much XP as possible. Some of the AP would need to go to [XP Cycle], but after that, the more he spent on raw stats and skills, the better. For all he knew, the demons out there could kill level 100s.

Actually, now that he thought about it, that was a good question. “System, what’s the highest level person who died without any of their XP going to anyone else?”

“Level 70,” System said immediately.

“Can you tell me how that person died?”

“Apologies, but I cannot.”

“Damn. Well, probably safe to assume it was either XP Madness or a demon,” Luke said.

“How could someone even survive at level 70?” Zea asked.

“I mean, XP Madness doesn’t kill a person,” Luke said. “It just makes them go crazy and then someone else has to kill them. If you made it to level 70, especially if you were a combat specialist, it wouldn’t be easy for anyone to put you down.”

“There’s no use speculating,” Zea said. “We don’t know if their death was demon-related. If it was, then no matter what we do, we’re fucked. Anything strong enough to kill a level 70 is going to be way beyond us. The only thing to do is stay away from it.”

“Not easy to do if we don’t know where- Wait, there’s something on the road.”

They slowed to a stop and Luke peered ahead. The road curved around a screen of trees a mile away, but something long and red moved there. The gaps between the branches were small, making it hard to get a good picture of what he was seeing. It had a bunch of segments, and it wasn’t until the wind blew the smell into his face that he understood what he was seeing.

“Horses. Wagons. People,” Luke said.

“Do you think it’s the caravan our new bandit friends are waiting for?” Zea asked. It wasn’t hard to read her expression and know that she didn’t care for the idea of a slaver wagon train.

“I don’t know. Better question is, if it is, should we do something about it?”

“Can we do anything about it? We’d be legally in the wrong, but let’s say we ignore that. How strong are the guards? Is it physically possible for us to take them out? If we can, do we have the ability to take care of the slaves?”

“Why would we need to take care of them? Luke asked.

“Slaves are usually kept in bad shape when they’re being transported. Dehydrated. Starved. Sometimes deliberately made sick. It reduces the chances of having successful runaways.”

Luke gave her an incredulous look. “Your world is really fucked up, you know that?”

Zea shrugged. “As an escaped slave myself, I’m inclined to agree. But to get back to the question, if it is a slave caravan, what do we do about it?”

“I don’t know. I guess we should get more information first. Let’s go scout it out.”