Chapter 83

Luke had gotten a look at a map before he’d left Valtira when he was preparing to walk, and he hadn’t much cared for what he’d seen. There was a giant blob of mountains blocking off a chunk of the coast, which limited access to the sea so much that Valtira was the northernmost port on the southern side of those mountains.

According to Zea, it also meant that every ship going north was going to stop there for the last resupply before they continued up the coast almost a thousand miles to Sicanti, which was their destination. It functioned as the gateway between the western and eastern continents, and the only ways to get there were a boat that was going to stop in Valtira, or by walking. For obvious reasons, they chose to walk.

The pair quickly settled into a routine, traveling a few miles away from the road and on the lookout for monsters. They foraged for supplies, camped out in their new-to-them tent, and hunted for XP. It wasn’t until a few days that they started to get closer to the mountains, the woods got thick again, and they started finding monsters…

* * *

“Don’t stand there!” Luke yelled as he swatted some sort of hybrid bear-baboon monster in the face. It was mid-charge at Zea when he intercepted it, and she smoothly trained the crossbow over to release a bolt into its gut.

“I couldn’t get a better angle,” she called back.

“Yeah, but there might be more in the cave.”

“Oh shit, yeah. That’s a good point.” She hopped off the rock shelf leading up to the cave and walked over to Luke. “Is that thing going to get back up?”

“I don’t know. It’s not dead yet,” Luke said, eyeing up the monster. It was face-down, ass-up in the dirt, and bleeding from a nasty head wound. He took a long step over towards it and finished it off. “Nope, now it’s dead.”

[You have assisted in slaying Bearboonikan (lvl 17). 149 XP awarded.]

“Oh, that did it,” Zea said. “Level 14 and 22 AP waiting to be used.”

“Nice! I’m still about 1500 XP short.”

Zea peered up at the cave. “Do you want to go poke around in there?”

“Not really,” Luke said. “It would be harder for you to get a clean shot in a tunnel.”

He left unsaid his bad experiences with getting hopelessly lost the last time he went underground. That wasn’t something Zea needed to know about. That thing about having a clear line of sight was totally true anyway, even if it wasn’t exactly a difficult problem to work around.

“Okay, if you’re sure.”

Luke could feel her staring at the back of his head. He resolved to say nothing at all, but caved almost immediately. “I have a bad sense of direction,” he admitted. “It’s best to stay topside.”

Zea snorted. “I knew it. You’re just as human as the rest of them. If that’s all you’re worried about, I can navigate. But I’m also okay with moving on if it’s a deep cave. We might as well end the day a couple miles closer to Kazos if we’re going to be walking that far anyway.”

“I guess. Well, let’s take a quick peek inside and see if there’s anything near the front, then we’ll leave?”

There was not in fact anything of note in the first few hundred feet, at least not counting the leavings of the bearboonikan and signs that there might possibly be as many as four or five more, judging by the strange nest-like beds they found scattered around the cave. That little bit of trivia was all it took for them to decide not to explore further.

“Come on, this place stinks and there’s nothing worth seeing here,” Luke said.

* * *

“Zea.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think that bear-monkey thing could climb trees?”

“I dunno. Maybe, why?”

“There are four more of them coming our way right now. It’s going to be hard to keep you safe.”

Zea scrambled to her feet and scooped up the loaded crossbow next to her. She kind of hated it just because of the size, but it was what she had. There was no arguing that she was safer standing back and taking free shots at monsters while Luke got in their faces and kept them busy. Four at once could be a problem though. If even one decided to ignore him, he’d have a hard time breaking away from the other three to intercept it.

“We knew there were risks,” she said. “Here, help me up into the branches.”

Luke held out his hands in a cup that she stepped into, and he boosted her upwards. It was a constant source of amazement to her how much easier everything was to do with her stats so much higher, and they were a fraction of Luke’s. She couldn’t even imagine a world seen through 39 perception.

Once she was settled in place about ten feet up, she said, “Which direction are they coming from?”

Luke pointed off to her right. “Just past those trees. They’re studying us now and circling around. I’m going to over there to make things noisy. I’ll try to get them out in the open for you to tag, but don’t worry about it if you don’t get a shot. There’s always another monster next time.”

“Are you sure you should be fighting them four at a time?” Zea asked. Rationally, she knew how strong he was. She’d seen his status sheet, and it was all hard stats and combat skills.

“It’ll be fine,” Luke told her. “None of them feel that strong, and I don’t think they’ve got any skills to hide their XP from me.”

“Be careful. Run if you need to.”

“Don’t worry so much. It’s fine. Try not to shoot me please.”

Luke darted off, his movements so fast that she had trouble keeping up with them. Sounds of combat filtered out through the trees, mostly growls and roars from the monsters interspersed with crashes and cracks as the trees were pulverized. One of the bear-monkey things went flying out into the glade they were camped in, and Zea promptly put a crossbow bolt in its face.

It didn’t get back up, but it was still twitching. It would be nice to be able to adjust her system menus like Luke claimed he had to get that instant feedback that let her know something was dead, but that wasn’t an option for her. Hopefully, once he was able to modify other people’s status, he could tweak some of the things that had always annoyed her. It would be worth all of it just to have legible handwriting on her status. If he could reorganize her skills for her, that’d just be a bonus.

A bellow caught her attention while she was reloading her crossbow, and her head snapped up. The one she’d shot was still done, with no other enemies in sight, but one of the trees was bending forward into the glade. With a thunderous crack, the tree broke low on the trunk and it crashed down into the empty space. Tangled up in it was another of the monsters, with Luke standing on top of it.

He leaped free just as the tree impacted the ground and rushed back into the forest. The bear-monkey thing lay sprawled out in the branches, its throat crushed and pitiful wheezing sounds coming from its mouth. Zea finished reloading and shot that one too.

The other two didn’t make it out of the trees before Luke killed them, which was fine by Zea. The notifications popped up telling her how much XP she got, not that she felt like she’d done anything to earn it.

[You have assisted in slaying Bearboonikan (lvl 14). 100 XP awarded.]
[You have assisted in slaying Bearboonikan (lvl 16). 132 XP awarded.]

Luke appeared, mace in hand and drenched with blood. “That was… annoying,” he said with a scowl. “I’m going to go get cleaned up in that stream we passed a mile back. You want to pack everything up and we’ll find a new place to camp?”

She didn’t really want to keep walking, but sleeping next to monster corpses was a terrible idea. They would attract scavengers before the night was through, and some of those scavengers might not be picky about whether their meal was already dead. It would be hard enough to get a good night’s sleep without worrying about what was sniffing around the bodies.

At least they didn’t have the tent set up yet. She had no idea how Luke kept track of which piece of the frame went where, but somehow he always set it up perfectly on the first try. But since it was still waiting to be put together, she didn’t have to worry about tearing it back apart. It only took a few minutes to gather everything up, pack away their supplies, and wait for him to come back.

He was clean when he did, kind of, but his clothes were soaked through. There were still going to be stains when he dried out, but she guessed it was better than nothing. “Ready to go?” she asked.

“Yeah, might as well. No point in hanging around here now, not unless you want to spend the night killing everything that wanders by for a snack.”

“No thanks.”

* * *

[You have assisted in slaying Thornripper Vine (lvl 21). 230 XP awarded.]
[Congratulations! You have reached level 15. 15 AP awarded for use.]

“37 AP now,” Zea said. “One more level to go.”

* * *

[You have assisted in slaying Ten Ton Raccoon (lvl 18). 177 XP awarded.]
[You have assisted in slaying Bloodfeather Falcon (lvl 16). 132 XP awarded.]
[You have assisted in slaying Titan’s Fang Spider (lvl 19). 187 XP awarded.]
[Congratulations! You have reached level 16. 16 AP awarded for use.]

“That’s it. 53 AP. I can take the first rank of [Bloodline Purification Ritual] now.”

Three days of hard travel and a lot of slaughter had taken their toll, and if not for Luke’s [Woodcarving] skill, she wouldn’t have any ammunition left for her crossbow. He freely admitted that his replacements weren’t as good as the ones she’d had originally, but those had all broken one at a time, and he’d managed to make decent replacements.

“Huh… wow. It kind of doesn’t feel real,” Luke said. “I know we’ve been working towards it, but… wow.”

He’d leveled once too, but hadn’t quite had enough AP to take both skills he’d wanted thanks to his little stunt with the bandits. Then he’d decided to hold off completely on even ranking up [Unarmed Martialist]until they figured out what skills would unlock when they purified his bloodline.

“Let’s do this,” Zea said. She added the skill to her status, then staggered back a step and dropped onto her butt. “Holy shit, that’s a lot of technical information.”

It took her a few minutes to get stuff sorted. Luke hovered around her the whole time, which was kind of endearing but also kind of annoying. Finally, she shooed him off and sat down to process things. There was a lot to it, and she was no longer sure that her current skill set was going to be enough. [Cadence] had been a solid choice, but she’d assumed [Mana Manipulation] at rank 1 would suffice. All of her enchanting projects had been easy enough to do, and getting a rank up would only have increased her production speed.

Now it felt like it might be necessary just to handle the sheer amount of mana the ritual required, not to mention some sort of mental fortitude skill. It would take three hours from the time she started to the time it took hold, if and only if she didn’t make any mistakes. If she did, some of the reagents used in the ritual would be wasted and need to be replaced, which they didn’t even have to begin with.

“Well? Can we do it?” Luke asked.

Zea shook her head. “I need to get some supplies before we can even try.”

“Oh.” Luke heaved a sigh. “That’s okay. We’ll keep chipping away at it. What do we need?”