Chapter 80

The bandits were already scrambling to their feet before Luke showed up, but he buried them before they could organize any sort of defense. The first bandit took a mace to his ribs and was smashed backwards into the wall. The second one got kicked in the knee hard enough to cave the joint in and make his knee bend the wrong way. He fell away, howling in pain, and Luke blasted through the pitiful defense his friend put up to put a fist into the man’s face.

[Twitch Reflexes] caught a crossbow bolt coming his way and let him smoothly pivot out of the way. The bolt streaked past him and took the guy with a busted knee right in the chest, just close enough to the heart that Luke was surprised the guy stayed on his feet. Regardless, those three weren’t going to be running any time soon, and he took the second to kill them before turning to the last one.

The fourth bandit was an older man, perhaps in his late fifties judging by the head full of shaggy gray hair, thick beard, and weather-worn face. He reloaded the crossbow in a smooth, steady motion and brought it back up to fire.

Luke crossed the distance before he could, and by the time the old bandit was ready to shoot at him again, it was far too late. He threw himself to the side in a desperate attempt to save himself, but Luke’s range was too great for him to overcome, and the mace cracked down on his arm. The crossbow tumbled across the floor, and Luke struck the man down with his next swing.

[You have slain 4 creatures between levels 10-13. 545 XP awarded.]

With the enemies cleared out, he went over and unbarred the front entrance before venturing deeper into the fort. The crossbow got left behind, but he made a mental note to go back for it later. Luke didn’t trust his own skills with it, but it might be a good weapon for Zea. She could use it to help him kill monsters from a distance, even if it was a little bit too big for her to wield comfortably. As far as he was concerned though, it was nothing but a hindrance for him to carry it into a close-quarters fight right now.

There was at least one more bandit that he knew about from his earlier spying, but he was betting there were more than that somewhere else. If there were more than ten left, he’d be surprised, but stranger things had happened. For now at least, the size of the fort was working in his favor. The bandits were so spread out that he’d gone through two fights without reinforcements showing up.

Luke prowled through the old fort, his senses trained for noise, movement, anything that would give away a bandit’s position. For about twenty minutes, he went up and down old, dusty hallways, empty except for broken furniture and rubble. When he finally did catch a noise, he had to stop and shake his head. It was the sound of snoring.

Luke followed it and found a hallway of rooms, perhaps some sort of servant quarters originally. Half of them had nothing but the rotted remains of doors left and were empty. Of the remaining ones that had escaped the ravages of time and the elements, Luke guessed six of them were occupied. He heard snores coming from three of them, so he targeted those first.

The first door wasn’t locked. Luke opened it and went in, where he found a man snoozing on a straw-stuffed pallet. It would be the work of a moment to kill him, but Luke was hesitant to do it. Killing someone who was attacking him was one thing, but killing someone that he’d attacked was a different story. He’d kind of justified it in his mind because the initial group had attacked him first, and their buddies were obviously hostile.

This guy though… he wasn’t even awake. The smart thing to do, the logical thing to do, was to pull his knife and slit the bandit’s throat. If Luke gave him the chance, he’d try to kill him just like every other bandit in the place. It was hard though, to just do it cold like that. He stood there for close to a minute, his fingers flexing around the hilt of his knife, telling himself if he couldn’t do it, he might as well leave the fort right now.

He hardened his heart, and slashed the blade across the sleeping man’s throat. Blood splattered across the wall, and the man’s eyes flew open. He stared at Luke, confused and in pain, but only for a moment. Then he died.

Of all the kills Luke had made since arriving on Aros, that one was by far the worst. He turned away, took a moment to compose himself, and walked out of the room. When he opened the door to the next one, it was easier to take two long steps up to the pallet and repeat the process.

In a way, it was a relief when the bandits who were still awake noticed him and started making noise. He didn’t feel so guilty about killing them that way.

* * *

He probably shouldn’t have been surprised that the bandits stored all their loot in the jail cells. The metal was still holding strong after however many years, it was in a portion of the fort that hadn’t collapsed and wasn’t showing any signs that it was going to, and, probably most importantly, there was a locked door leading to the jails in a room that the bandit captain had taken over.

As far as Luke was aware, there wasn’t another way in or out of the wing with all the cells, and whatever the room had been used for originally, it held a bed with an actual mattress now. The captain had a wardrobe with different outfits in it, a rack that had five different types of swords mounted on it, and a surprisingly detailed ledger of the loot. Apparently, the man believed in fair distribution of wealth to his fellow outlaws.

The bandit captain also believed in keeping his keys on his person, which was probably a smart move, but which Luke found incredibly annoying. Unlike the rest of the keep, the jail was in good condition. Luke had battered the door down, only to find stone and steel blocking him from accessing the goods. He could get through, given enough time and effort, but it would be much, much easier to just unlock the cell doors.

Unfortunately, he had no idea where the captain was. Luke was confident that he’d gone over the entire fort, but there was no sign of the man. Either he wasn’t there, or he was well hidden. The cook had been the only real challenge, even compared to when he’d been fighting five or six bandits at a time.

“I bet there’s some sort of lock picking skill that would make this easy,” Luke muttered to himself. Technically, he had some spare AP still. He was sure he could afford it, but it just didn’t seem worth it for this one specific use, not when he knew he could get through those bars on sheer strength alone.

The only question was whether it would be better to smash the locks with his mace and hope that broke the doors open or if he should just skip straight to trying to bend the bars. He had the time to experiment, so he found an empty cell with a closed door and smashed it as hard as he could. The metal deformed, but held.

Two more blows broke the locking mechanism, and the cell rolled open, albeit with a lot of muscle power on his end. Nothing really fit right anymore, and he had to fight to get it to slide over, but it wasn’t too terribly difficult. Experiment complete, he went back to the cells that had the good stuff behind them and repeated his attacks against the locks.

Luke wasn’t sure what he was going to find inside all the boxes, chests, crates, and trunks piled up in the cell, but he was eager to find out. He cracked open the first one, then stopped, confused. It was… dresses? Frowning, he pulled them out one at a time until he’d emptied the whole trunk and held eight dresses in his arms.

“What?” he asked. Shrugging, he stuffed them back into the trunk and slid it to the side. They were probably worth something, or maybe the bandits had just taken them as part of the luggage of some travelers they’d robbed.

The next box had a bunch of wooden masks in it. He even recognized a few of them, like the goblin mask on the top and a boar’s mask he found near the bottom. After that was a crate with a small army of taxidermied squirrels and the remains of a broken mop, followed quickly by another trunk of clothes, men’s this time, and a box that was literally filled with rocks. And not the good, shiny rocks either! Boring, plain, flat river rocks.

“What kind of shit tier loot is this?” Luke demanded.

There were more containers to open, and Luke stubbornly sorted through them, trying to find something that wasn’t garbage. There was none to be found though, and he eventually gave up in disgust. Why anyone would bother to lock up this kind of stuff was utterly beyond him.

Hoping against hope that the next cell would have something a bit more valuable, Luke busted the lock and started sorting through it. His mood brightened immediately when he found a set of pewter goblets with silver rims. Those weren’t all that valuable, but at least they weren’t worthless. There was a small case with several sets of earrings, bracelets, and rings, all copper or silver, and a few books packed tightly in a leather satchel.

Luke took his time going through it all. He didn’t have a keen eye for value, and he knew there was too much stuff to take it all. He needed to decide what he was going to take and what would get left behind, with an emphasis on small and lightweight high value goods. The jewelry was a good start. There was some silverware that he figured was worth something as well in another chest. After that, it got harder to figure out what was worth the effort.

He spent nearly an hour in the cells, tearing apart the accumulated spoils of banditry, all the while desperate to find something that would cover the expenses he expected to take on. And then he found the Holy Grail, buried all the way in the back, hidden under at least a thousand pounds of other stuff.

It was a little metal lockbox, about a foot wide and half that deep. The lock was broken on it already, and it opened easily. Inside was a hundred or more coins, mostly silver, but with a few gold mixed in. “Ka-ching,” Luke said. That went right into the win pile.

If he never found anything else, that one box alone made it worth all the effort. He was still going to go through the rest of it, but he’d been gone long enough that he probably needed to haul what he’d already found back to Zea. No doubt, she’d cycled right past worried and gone on to being pissed at him.

“What in the fuck happened here?” a voice said from down the hall. Luke’s head snapped up and he saw a human-shaped shadow flicker across the floor as something filled the doorway leading from the captain’s room into the prison area itself.

“Ah, I see,” the voice continued. “That’s annoying. It’ll take me months to rebuild all this, but at least I get to kill the son of a bitch who fucked up my operation.”

If Luke had learned anything in his time on Aros, it was that the guys who had no XP at all were the most dangerous. He scrambled to his feet and grabbed his mace.