Chapter 121

The ship was called Averast, which maybe meant something, but neither of Luke’s language skills translated it for him. It was one of the big ones he’d spotted earlier, which was somewhat comforting. He wasn’t sure exactly why he wanted the ship to be bigger, other than that bigger meant sturdier, probably, less likely to sink while he was on it. Maybe it also meant less likely to be attacked by sea monsters, which he assumed existed because why wouldn’t they?

Luke made a mental note to question System about the existence of sea monsters later.

At the moment, he was helping Zea lay out her new portable enchanting workstation, which was really just a small foldout lap table with some sort of articulated arm that had a clamp on the end of it. His job was to unpack all her new stuff from her bag and assist as needed while she carved runes into them. It was both tedious and boring, but considering it was his bomb that she was working on, it felt like it would be rude to complain.

“How come you’re doing it the hard way instead of using [Ghost Script]?” he asked.

“Bigger boom this way, plus things I enchant with [Ghost Script] only last a few minutes before the mana drains back out. We can’t really stockpile anything unless I do it the hard way.”

“Oh, right. How many booms are you thinking we’re going to need?”

Zea paused in her carving and considered the question. “One for you, one for me. I’ll make a temporary one when we get to the ant hill. We also need something for scent nullification, or the rest of the colony will be chasing us forever. I’m… Not really sure how to do that. Going to have to experiment a bit, but it’s important. I figure I’ll get it working, try it out, and if you can’t smell me with your perception as high as it is, maybe that’ll be good enough.”

“How many ants do you think three bombs are going to kill?” Luke asked.

“We’re only throwing one bomb in there to start,” Zea said. “The other two are for emergencies. You know that a colony has hundreds of thousands of ants, right? We’re throwing this from as far away as we can, then running for our lives and hoping the ones that survive don’t come chasing after us. If it works, we can consider repeating it. In no way are we to get within a hundred feet of the actual hill itself.”

Luke still thought she was overestimating the danger, but he had to admit that she had so far displayed far better judgment than he had about, well, pretty much everything. The worst he could say was her decision to push deeper into squirrel territory, but even then, she’d had good reasons and they’d thought they’d encountered an enemy they knew they could handle. For all they knew, going around could have meant fighting something that was level 40.

Still, ants were just ants. They were tiny, not really a threat to a human under normal circumstances. He would have to fall into their nest and let them swarm him, and even then, he had 49 stamina. It might be gross to be covered with them, but it was hard to imagine them being able to bite through his skin. If squirrels couldn’t manage it, it seemed unlikely a mere ant could do it, no matter how many friends it brought to the party.

He might have been concerned about system fuckery, except that he knew for a fact that they were all level 1 or 2. System has explicitly stated that there was only a tiny fraction that even made it to level 5. Given everything he’d learned about how things worked on Aros, he just didn’t see the big deal. Maybe to someone who was only level 10 and didn’t have a lot of stamina, they’d be a threat, but not to him or Zea.

But he trusted Zea, and she said the preparations were necessary. Overkill or not, if this was how she wanted to play it, he supported her. Even if it meant days of her fiddling with stuff until she was satisfied.

“I was thinking I might go hunting,” Luke said. “Unless you need my help here.”

“Are you really that bored?”

“I guess. I’m not much for standing around, doing nothing. I’m happy to help if you need me, but just laying here all day doesn’t sound like fun. Now, if you want to take a break and help me test out this bed…”

Zea rolled her eyes and said, “Not now. We’re on a clock before that ship leaves and if this crazy idea of yours actually works, I’ll need to pick up more stuff for rank 2 of [Bloodline Purification Ritual].”

“Yeah, about that. You noticed all the stares you were getting, right?”

“I did. There’s not much I can do about that, though.”

“I know,” Luke said, “But, we know the church here is also going to take a swing at us. They already hired those mercenaries, and I definitely didn’t kill all of them. Maybe we need to think about cutting our time around the city to a minimum. The longer we’re here and the more people see you, the better the odds of them finding us again. And all that is assuming some asshole god doesn’t just point a divine finger at us to tell the church where we are.”

“They aren’t allowed to do that,” Zea muttered. “Fucking cheaters don’t even play by their own rules.”

“So I was thinking that when we leave the city on this exterminator job, we don’t come back until it’s time to get on the boat.”

Zea grimaced. “But… bed. Warm.”

“I know, but we’re not really safe here.”

Luke didn’t want to say she needed to be locked in their room for the next two weeks, but at the same time, they were already distinctive as a human and dwifkin couple. This far north, where there were practically no other dwifkin at all, it was even worse. With [XP Mask]hiding his level from everyone, Luke was actually the less noticeable of the pair now, especially since he now had two sets of clothes done in the local fashion.

It was still obvious he was foreign to anyone who talked to him, but he only looked a little pale compared to Sicanti’s native population. As long as he kept his mouth shut, he felt like he could move around freely without drawing attention. Zea didn’t have that option.

“So you’re going hunting?” she said, not looking up from her project.

“It seemed like a good way to spend my time.”

“See if you can find another one of those moose. My project exploded when I fought that mercenary and I’d like to take another crack at it.”

“I can do that,” Luke said with a smile. He knelt down next to her for a kiss and added, “I’ll be back tonight. If anything goes wrong, get the fuck out of here and I’ll find you?”

“Duh. I’m not going to stick around to trade punches with an inquisitor or five.”

“Good girl.”

Zea just rolled her eyes and kissed him back.

* * *

Luke stood at the edge of the woods, about twenty miles from Sicanti. The trees weren’t nearly as big as what they’d found in the deep forests, and with them being nicely spaced out and little underbrush, it was actually kind of nice to just walk around. But he had a job to do. “Moose, huh. Hey System, can you point me in the direction of the nearest moose?”

“I am sorry, but I am not able to give information about specific individuals,” System said.

“Right, of course not. That’s my mistake forgetting that,” Luke said. “Oh! By the way, do sea monsters exist on this world?”

“What do you mean by ‘sea monster?’ There are many aquatic monsters, but it sounds like you might be thinking of something in particular.”

“I don’t know. Giant squids and sea serpents and shit. Things big enough to sink a boat.”

“In that case, the answer to your question is yes, there are several dozen species of aquatic monsters powerful enough to successfully attack and destroy a sea-faring vessel.”

That was pretty much what Luke had expected to hear. Then again, there had been two reasons they’d had to travel to Sicanti. One was that the landmasses were simply closer up here, but the other… “How many of them live in cold water?”

“Only two, and both are numerically insignificant,” System said. “The first is a great black and white creature known as the flesh grinder. It looks like a fish, only hundreds of times bigger. The real danger from this sea monster is that they tend to travel in groups.”

“Uh, that just sounds like an orca to me,” Luke said.

“I am unfamiliar with the term.”

“A killer whale?”

“That species is not known to me either.”

“Do you guys not have whales here?” Luke asked. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find them with extra fins or armor plating or shooting lasers out of their eyes or something, but to not have them at all seemed unlikely.

“There are many species of whales, and though the flesh grinder shares some characteristics, they are most definitely not whales.”

Now Luke almost wanted to see one, just because he couldn’t picture anything other than an orca based off System’s description. Of course, seeing one would probably mean the ship was getting attacked, so maybe he’d be better off not sating his curiosity there. “What’s the other monster? Please don’t say kraken.”

“Not in the frigid cold waters of the northern ocean,” System said with a shake of his head. “The other type of ‘sea monster’ is known as a xashim. There has never been a case of XP being exchanged between any land-dwelling species and a xashim. I can only assume this is because the two species never come in contact. Xashim live exclusively on the ocean floor, and resemble a great glowing orb a thousand feet wide with many thousands of tentacles each up to a mile long that it uses to catch prey and drag itself around.”

“Some sort of deep sea mega jellyfish? Well, as long as they never come to the surface, I guess that’s fine. So the only things I need to be concerned about are these not-whales, the flesh grinders.”

“In terms of monsters native to the sailing routes used by humans to move between continents, that is correct.”

Luke didn’t like the way System phrased that. “Are there other concerns?”

“Elementals are statistically more likely to cause problems than monsters,” System told him. “And they are generally harder to destroy.”

Luke stopped walking and glanced over at the pale blue apparition. That was the problem with getting information out of System. He never knew when he was missing something because he hadn’t thought to ask a specific question. Zea was far better than him about prying those little nuggets of information out of their conversations, partially because she had a better base of knowledge to compare against, and partly because she was just all sorts of clever. At least, she was when she didn’t have dollar signs in her eyes.

“Okay, I think we need to have a longer conversation about every possible danger and the likelihood that the ship will run into them. I have a feeling I’m going to need to do some preparations here.”

Before System could reply, Luke heard the sound of something snorting and tearing at the ground nearby. He peered through the trees and spotted some sort of wild boar a few hundred yards away.

“Hold that thought,” he told System as he pulled his mace off his back. “I’ve got some hunting to do.”