Chapter 108

They were both up early the next morning, having only gotten a few hours of sleep. Even that was more than Luke needed, but Zea continued to insist that she was going to sleep every night, regardless of how much stamina she’d gained. He didn’t much see a reason for it, but since they’d paid good money for a room, he guessed it was fine.

The project wasn’t finished, not even close. She’d gotten all the carving done though, which she considered to be the important part. Everything else could be done on the road. With the pieces of antler all packed away and their bags stuffed full once again, they were back on their way.

“It was kind of nice to stop somewhere for the night and not have any problems crop up,” Luke said once the village was well behind them.

“That’s what it’s like for normal people all the time,” she said.

“Hopefully Sicanti won’t be exciting either. How long do you think it’ll take us to get there?”

“Assuming we can stick to the roads the whole way now that we’re nowhere near Valtira? I figure three days at the worst, maybe only two if the weather holds and the roads are good quality.”

Luke suspected he could do it in twenty-four hours, but he didn’t think Zea would be able to maintain that pace for an extended period of time. And since they didn’t have a deadline, it was alright by him if they took it easy. He kind of wanted to take some more time to let her finish her magic whip thing so he could see it in action.

On the other hand, they’d only been jogging down the road for an hour and he’d noticed two different people watching them from a mile away. Both times, they’d been partially hidden. After the second one, he said, “System, can you tell me anything about the people the locals think of as barbarians or savages?”

“I am only able to offer limited information,” he said, appearing next to Luke and gliding through the air to keep pace with him. “The highest level person in that group is level 35, and the lowest is level 18. They are local to the area, though not as a town or village.”

“That’s all?” Luke asked.

“Yes.”

“Sounds like more bandits,” Zea said. “Disturbingly high level bandits.”

“Might be something to ask about next time we find a town. That farmer made it sound like they were just a group of forest dwellers who raided singular farms for food and supplies, but no way is someone level 35 in a group like that.”

“You know how much effort it takes to get up to level 35,” Zea told him. “And not everyone limits themselves to hunting monsters in a forest. Military units are usually pretty good about rotating people off the front lines if their levels start getting too high. Unless things are done really differently up here, I don’t think this is a retired officer.”

“So either a monster hunter or a mass murderer,” Luke said, glancing back towards the bluff he’d spotted the last spy at. Whoever the man was, he was gone now. “I can’t tell if it’s the same person each time, but if it is, he’s got to be pretty high level to keep up with us. We haven’t been taking a leisurely stroll today.”

“Could you see if he was wearing armor like that first one?”

Luke shook his head. “Not sure if they realized I noticed them or if they’re just being cautious, but the last two times, all I spotted was half a face peeking out from behind something.”

“The way I see it, we’ve got two options. We can stay on the road, which means moving faster but being predictable, or we can go cross-country and cut straight north until we find a new road going east. If we’re lucky, we’ll lose them. If not, we might walk right into their arms.”

“So far, I’ve been spotting them all on the south side of the road,” Luke said, but it occurred to him that just because he’d seen three people, or possibly one person three times, didn’t mean that he’d noticed every single time someone was spying on them. The simple fact of the matter was that there was more open ground on the south side of the road. Half a mile to the north, individual trees started to clump together and become a true forest again.

Zea glanced around and said, “The real concern, to me, is that if it’s one person, they’re keeping pace with us despite not being on the road. If it’s multiple people, they’re somehow coordinating over miles and miles of distance. That suggests they’re not barbarians or savages. It feels more like some sort of privatized military group, well-funded and probably well trained, not something we want to be fucking around with.”

Luke looked ahead and saw a wagon about two miles away from them, with one farmer sitting on a wooden box loaded in the back and another holding the reigns. He glanced behind him and saw a cart, one of the small ones that was pushed along by a single person. That hadn’t been there two minutes ago, but maybe it had come from one of the many trails that led off to individual homesteads operated by farmers all over the region.

Then Luke used [Analyze] on all of them, and he started swearing. “You see those two guys ahead of us?” he asked. “We’re going to pass them in another few minutes. One of them is level 23, and the other is 19.”

“Pretty high level for some local farmers on their way to market,” Zea said.

“Yeah, and the guy pushing that hand cart behind us is level 28. Worse, he’s clearly not a farmer. Agility and perception are both over 50, strength and stamina above 30.”

“Fuck.”

That about summed it up, in Luke’s opinion. “Odds that it’s a coincidence?”

“I doubt it.”

“Figured. What do you want to do?”

Zea gave the wagon ahead of them an appraising glance. “You think you could take both of them before the guy behind us catches up?”

Luke glanced over his shoulder to see that, despite them keeping up their jogging pace, the cart handler had closed the gap. “Not a chance. This asshole is already closing the distance. If anything, we’d be better off pivoting back to take him out first.”

Neither of them said it, but they were both thinking it. Their battle plan assumed there were only three enemies. It was entirely possible that a whole war band would pop out of the trees and descend on them while they were fighting the first three.

Worse, a man at level 28 with stats almost as high as Luke’s were now would likely have a lot of combat skills, and probably at higher ranks than his too. If his time at the Bloody Harbor had taught him anything, it was that just because people were a lower level than him didn’t mean they were pushovers. He wasn’t all that confident that he’d win the fight cleanly, let alone so quickly that the other two men couldn’t arrive fast enough to help.

“Well, we could always make a break for it into the woods,” Luke said. “The one following us is going to catch up, but if we can kill him, it shouldn’t be hard to lose the two on the wagon. Plus if there are more of them, their numbers won’t mean as much with all the trees.”

“You’ll have to carry me to there,” Zea said.

Luke shrugged off his backpack and sped up a bit so that he was in front of her. “Whenever you’re ready.”

She jumped onto his back mid-step and wrapped her arms around him. Luke immediately changed direction with a hard left and took off into the field next to the road. He made it all of forty feet before the man with the hand cart started bellowing. He abandoned the cart and sprinted across the grass on an intercept course, but he was still too far back. There was no way he’d catch up before they hit the trees, and the two on the wagon had barely gotten their feet on the ground.

The first arrow to come out of the trees was hard to see on account of how it came straight at him. It was barely more than a brown flash he noticed as it arced up and then down to give it the extra range it needed to reach him. Then [Twitch Reflexes] started screaming at him and before he’d even made a conscious decision to do so, Luke had stepped smoothly to the right. Zea yelped in surprise as she nearly fell free from the unexpected move, then yelped again when the arrow zipped past her.

“I guess we know if there’s more in the forest!” Luke said.

Hopefully it would just be one though. He could handle just one if he was quick enough. As soon as they were through the treeline, he’d let Zea down and take out the archer. By the time Cartman caught up to them, it would still be one-on-one.

Two more arrows came out from between the trees, one a hundred feet to the left and the other twenty feet to the right. Luke’s eye twitched in annoyance. It was like God was mocking him for his optimism.

He leaped straight up and over, his hands snaking back to grab hold of Zea as he rose into the air. “Now’s not really the time to be copping a feel, don’t you think?” she yelled.

“No time like the present,” he told her as he landed, both arrows behind him. Normally, he would have rolled once and been back on his feet, but with Zea still clinging to his back, that wasn’t really feasible. Instead, he just flexed his legs to absorb the impact, then darted forward again. Another barrage of arrows came out of the woods at him, and now he was close enough to see the archers, two women and a man with a chinstrap beard hugging his jawline.

Luke dodged again, a feat which was actually easier despite the closer range due to [Tactical Foresight] helping him figure out the angles before the arrows were even released from their strings. Then he ghosted through the trees, skidded to a stop on one knee, and snapped out “Get to cover. I’m going after the archers first.”

Luke rushed through the trees, which were still far enough apart and with thick enough canopies that there was almost nothing in the way of leafy underbrush. He leaped a snarled tangle of roots rather than try to navigate through it, pulled his mace free, and came around a tree to find the chinstrap archer discarding his bow and drawing a sword with a two-foot blade.

The mace struck Chinstrap right on his chinstrap, literally ripping the man’s head off as Luke went by. He didn’t even slow down to confirm the kill, trusting instead that the attack was fatal. A fraction of a second later, when Luke was already ten feet past the body, he got the notification ding. Normally, he wouldn’t bother checking the messages in the middle of a fight, but he wanted to know who the hell these assholes were.

[You have slain Blacktongue Human Mercenary (lvl 20). 415 XP awarded.]
[This creature has slain 514 other creatures.]
[Total kills for this type of creature: 6.]
[Highest level kill: 24.]

“Aw, shit,” Luke swore.

Bandits wanted whatever anyone passing by had on them. They were opportunists. Mercenaries were so much worse. They were professionals. Somebody was still looking for Luke, somebody who had money and connections, if mercenaries had found them over a thousand miles away. It didn’t take too much thinking to come up with an idea of who.