Chapter 141

“Everything alright there?” Zea asked as Luke barged back into their camp.

He looked a little wild in the eyes, but whatever he saw must have reassured him since he quickly calmed down. “Sorry, System pointed out to me a little bit ago that we had no evidence that Lath is still being controlled by zombie ants. He could have crawled away to recover under his own power and might have been tracking us.”

“Oh, I see. So you got a little spooked and came running back to me for safety and security,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s exactly it. I was worried he might find us separate and that I wouldn’t have you around to protect me.”

“A perfectly valid concern,” she said, struggling to keep her face straight. “But as you can see, we’ve had no visitors while you were away.”

“Good thing. Otherwise I might have to get jealous,” he said with a grin.

Men, especially young men, were walking balls of hormones. It was a good thing Luke was cute, and that they were both very, very flexible. That shirt he was wearing wasn’t hurting things either with the way it sat on his shoulders.

The looming specter of danger was a bucket of cold water on her, and she shook herself out of her daydream before it could even get started. As much as she liked Luke and enjoyed spending her nights with him, she’d spent a lot of time lately considering whether she wanted to keep traveling with him.

She wasn’t in love with him. Maybe if their situation was different, if they’d had a chance to really get to know each other before running for their lives, she might have grown into that. But that wasn’t what had happened, and they were more like war buddies who liked to fuck than a couple in a committed relationship.

Zea had avoided voicing that thought for a while now, mostly because she suspected Luke might not feel the same way. He was fiercely protective of her, as evidenced by how quickly he’d come charging to her rescue from a theoretical threat, which would have been cute except for the fact that if he’d been right, she would have needed to be rescued.

That right there was the problem. Zea only needed Luke to stay safe because she was getting drawn into his fights. She’d survived for over two decades under level 10, though admittedly she hadn’t exactly been thriving. That was still better than fighting the church or any of the many, many monsters that had crossed their path since they’d left the safety of civilization.

Things just kept escalating. This new shit with the anthills was going to blow up in their faces at some point, but Luke wouldn’t let go of the idea. Even after seeing what had happened to Lath with their last bombing run, she had no doubt he’d be more than happy to go right back to killing them. He just didn’t seem to grasp the potential consequences, for himself or for the rest of the area.

“So I was thinking, after we get things set up, maybe we should drop a few more bombs on the anthills. If I can get like… 6 levels, maybe 7, I’ll have enough AP to pick up [XP Reset] for you, [XP Cycle] for myself, and [Inflict Status] to clear away any future obstacles.”

There it was, right on time. It was her own fault for not stomping down on this harder before he’d gotten a taste of exactly how much XP was sitting in those anthills and how quickly he could claim a chunk of it. Sending him out to wipe any pheromones off their trail had probably put the idea back in his head.

The worst part of it was she could see the logic. Without his unique bloodline skills, it was crazy. But for his situation, it was practically perfect. All he needed was the time and XP to pick up the relevant skills and he could solve any problems created by his actions with a wave of his hand.

Well, maybe not. They’d thought [Stat Assignment] was going to be their answer to Lath, only to find out when he actually went to take the skill that they’d failed to read the fine print. She wasn’t willing to pile on any more XP until she knew for sure that Luke could clear it away.

“No,” she said. “Not until we know that this is actually going to work. We’ve been running down a slope and we’re about to fly off the cliff. I know you don’t get this. You aren’t from this world; you haven’t seen what XP Madness looks like. It’s not just dangerous to you. You could kill a lot of other people in the process. What happens when you get all these levels, the skill doesn’t work like you think it will, again, and you end up going crazy next year?”

“I can buy [XP Cycle] right now,” Luke said. “We can test that before going any further.”

She shook her head. “That’s a solution for you. It only works for me if I follow you around for the rest of my life. Even if I was willing to do that, what about when you go back to your own world? Or what if you die?”

“Well I’m sorry, but I just don’t have the AP for both. That’s why I wanted to hit the ants again. I can’t test them to confirm they’ll work like we think until I actually have them. All we can go on is System’s word until then.”

“My answer is still no. Look, I’ve risked a lot on this scheme already. You understand that I’m not going to live to see forty as it currently stands, right? I may not even make it to thirty, and there will definitely be symptoms well before then. If this idea of yours works, then that’s great. Fantastic. But I’ve hit my limits on grinding out XP.”

Luke started to say something, stopped himself, and sat there in silence while he thought it through. Finally, he said, “We’re getting to that point where we go our separate ways, aren’t we?”

“I think so, yeah. Not today, probably not even this month, but soon. I did my part and helped you purify your bloodline. I need some time to get things set up, but once we get across the ocean and I take care of things financially, I think I’m going to ask you to reset me to level 1. Maybe help me get back up to 10 if we can do it quickly and easily.”

“I get it,” Luke said. “Good to know what you want to do in the near future too. We can plan for that.”

Zea hadn’t been expecting him to take the news poorly, but she figured it would hurt him a bit too. He’d gotten some ideas in his head that she was going to keep going with him to the very end, though he hadn’t exactly expressed them out loud. It was better to nip those now rather than let him keep thinking that. As much as she liked him, she was already tired of this lifestyle.

She needed a place to live that was far, far away from where she’d grown up. Without regular maintenance to suppress it, the slave rune tattooed behind her ear would start broadcasting her position. Being on another continent was a great was to let that run itself out of power. No one who cared to track that magic would be able to reach her before the rune faded and broke on its own. In the meantime, she’d have plenty of opportunity to milk her enchanting skills for all they were worth before the reset.

And who knew, she might end up liking life on the eastern continent. She really didn’t know much about it. She’d have to sit down and bash her head against the wall by having a conversation with System. Maybe she could find a place that was perfect for her there. It wasn’t like she had a lot to come back to at home as a runaway slave, and the church had no doubt killed or imprisoned everyone she might have considered a friend back in Valtira.

Fuck those Hestocian assholes anyway. Other than Lath himself, who had followed them from Valtira, she hadn’t heard a peep from the local church. Even Lath had used mercenaries to help him, which told her that the two churches probably weren’t on the friendliest terms. Sicanti wasn’t so bad, except for how cold it was all the time. It was supposed to be the warm time of the year! She couldn’t even imagine what a winter would look like up here.

They didn’t talk much that day. Luke was… Well, she didn’t know if processing his feelings was the right way to call it, but he was doing a lot of thinking about something. He spent a lot of time fidgeting and staring out into the trees, but not a lot of time meeting her eyes. That was fine by her. She had plenty of work to do anyway, and upgrading [Runeforging] by two ranks had opened her mind to a thousand new possibilities. She knew runes now that she hadn’t even considered might exist.

It was going to be her ticket to wealth, as long as she had the time and resources to properly leverage it. It was also a way for her to help keep Luke safe. Money-making enchantments could come later. She was working on a few things for him first.

Just because she wasn’t planning on going all the way to the other side of the world with him didn’t mean she wasn’t invested in him making the trip safely. He wanted armor, but even after only a week or two, the stuff he was wearing had been damaged and he’d been forged to do patchwork repairs. Neither of them were qualified to truly fix it, and it was only a matter of time before the armor was rendered useless.

She’d make him something better, anyway. She just needed a little more time to finish it.

* * *

As dusk fell, the revenant of Adrevald Lath stepped out of the tree line and stared out across the hundreds of acres of farmland that surrounded Sicanti. Somewhere in there was his prey. Finding them was only a matter of time. Before that, he needed a disguise. [Infiltrator] could work with very little, but walking through the city naked without being noticed was beyond even his considerable abilities.

Lath stole up to the nearest farmhouse, confirmed it was empty, and broke the lock on the shutters. Ideally, he’d find a nice set of clothes, some farmer’s church-going outfit, but it wasn’t the end of the world if he had to settle for something shabbier. Unfortunately, it appeared that the owner of the home he’d broken into was a rather rotund man. Lath could have fit two of himself in the shirts he found.

It was better than nothing, and while he wasn’t a tailor, he could do basic stitching. He sliced a chunk of material a foot wide out of it and stitched it back up into something approximately his size. It was still too long, but that didn’t matter. The pants, on the other hand, were a more difficult task. It might have been easier to cut new trousers from cloth and sew them to shape than to alter the ones he’d found. Lath settled for pinning the excess material and holding them up with a length of rope he stole from the farmer’s storeroom.

There were no shoes, but Lath did find a voluminous cloak to steal as well. Whoever this farmer was, he had to be huge. It was to the farmer’s good luck that he was working late tonight, as his size would be no protection against Lath if he should come home too early. Even as Lath finished his work, he heard the sound of someone walking up the path.

Flexing the fingers on one hand, Lath turned towards the noise. Perhaps the farmer wasn’t so lucky after all.