Chapter 78

The bandit snarled and tried to punch the side of Luke’s knee, but he was too injured and at too awkward of an angle to take a serious swing. Luke smacked the fist away with his mace anyway, shattering the bones in the bandit’s hand in the process.

“Like I was saying, this camp seems kind of half-assed to me. I was thinking maybe you guys had some base farther away from the road where you keep all the shit you stole. I mean, it’s either that or you all suck ass as bandits, because it can’t be worth sharing a tent with another dude for… what?”

He looked around the camp. The bandits weren’t wearing fancy clothes. They didn’t have expensive gear. The tents were serviceable, but not extravagant. Not even the leader’s tent was anything special. There were no crates full of loot to be found. The firepit had a single wooden box next to it, left open and exposed to the elements, which had some wooden plates and cutlery in it. Luke could have whittled better with his rank 1 [Woodcarving]skill using any random piece of wood he found lying around.

“Zixin take you,” the bandit said. “You ain’t walking away from this just because you got the drop on a few of us out here.”

“Well, duh. I’m not trying to walk away. I am literally asking you where the rest of your band of merry men are hiding.”

“You’ll never see them coming,” the bandit told him.

“Look, I’m going to find them anyway. You’ve got a trail leading deeper into the woods right there.” Luke gestured towards a spot on the west side of the clearing that had clearly been worn down and led farther away from the road. “I’m pretty sure the rest of your buddies are at the end of it. So, am I right? How many are there?”

The bandit didn’t answer, didn’t do anything but glare at him despite being belly-down in the mud. His leg was fucked up, his arm was fucked up, his hand was broken, and Luke was pretty sure all he needed to do was grind his heel down on the other hand to break a few more fingers there. The guy either had some sort of pain suppression skill or he was a complete masochist, because he just looked pissed.

“Alright, I get it. You don’t want to betray the other bandits. It’s kind of a surprising show of loyalty, but okay.” Luke brought his mace around and considered the angle of his next strike. The bandit had on some sort of leather armor, not really what Luke wanted, but the right size. It was a start, if he could avoid splattering it with brains, blood, and bone chunks.

[Twitch Reflexes] pinged on the palm-sized knife the bandit had somehow pulled and was holding in his broken hand. That must have hurt like a bitch, but the bandit was determined to stick Luke with it and was already driving it towards Luke’s calf when his skill pulled his leg out of the way. That of course freed up the bandit’s other hand, and he promptly rolled onto his back. The knife flashed in the rain as he threw it to his good hand and slashed at Luke again.

The mace came down and struck the bandit’s face, kind of like a golf club swung with one hand. It tore through skin and bone and left a stained smear across three feet of mud next to the corpse. A moment later, Luke got the kill notification ding.

[You have slain human bandit (lvl 15). 231 XP awarded.]

“So much for answers,” he muttered. Then he set about looting the bodies and piling anything useful up in the leader’s tent. There wasn’t a lot of use in the small camp, just a few coppers between them, a couple of blankets and bedrolls, most of which smelled awful, and the various weapons. The bows were a bit too big for Zea to use, he thought, but maybe she’d surprise him. The other weapons weren’t in the best of shape, but they might be worth something to sell.

While he was working, Luke asked, “System, who is Zixin again? I’ve heard that name before.”

“The Goddess of Death,” System replied. “She oversees the disposition of all souls when they depart from Aros and reach the afterlife. In human society, she is worshipped primarily as part of the Pantheon, but not usually in everyday life, other than to ask for blessings to ward off death.”

“Oh, sure. That makes sense. So basically that guy was wishing that I’d keel over dead of a heart attack or something. What a prick.”

They’d attacked him first, and then sent more bandits out to find him after he’d killed the first group. It was hardly his fault the rest hadn’t been prepared for him to strike back. It wasn’t like their camp was hard to find. If they were all too scared of getting wet to keep a proper watch, especially when they knew there was someone out there, that was on them.

Inside the tent itself was a crate that was partially covered under the collapsed canvas wall. Luke frowned at the sight, mostly because he’d kind of planned on stealing that tent since it was the biggest, but now it had a big hole ripped in the canvas from where he’d hit the bandit through it. The crate itself was stuffed full of clay jugs of what he quickly discovered was eye-wateringly powerful alcohol. Just the smell alone from uncorking the first one burned.

Whatever the hell that was, he was sure it was deadly to his liver. The hooch might be worth something, but the crate itself was so big that it was going to be awkward to carry. Luke was hoping to find something smaller and more valuable elsewhere. For now, the tent’s sole purpose would be to protect what little he’d been able to scrounge up from the weather until he got back.

The leader’s armor was the last piece of loot he was interested in. It was a bit uncomfortable, too wide around the chest and not as flexible as he’d like, but it didn’t cut his range of movements as much as the old metal armor he’d briefly worn before finding out exactly what the rainbow circle on it meant. He wasn’t sure how much it would help, but it didn’t seem like it would hurt, plus if he threw on someone’s cloak, it might help sell the disguise.

His preparations complete, Luke started up the trail.

* * *

He had to admit, he’d been expecting a larger version of the first camp, or maybe some crude log huts or something. Even some old stone houses that had been retaken by nature and were falling apart wouldn’t have surprised him. He was not expecting a Goddamn walled fort.

Admittedly, it wasn’t in good shape. The wall was mostly for appearances, since it had collapsed in eight different places. Chunks of the fort were missing too, and the whole back half had kind of fallen over, but it was still a bit of a shock to come across a four story building with a twenty-foot high wall circling it. There could be a hundred bandits living in there with room to spare.

Just because it could fit a hundred bandits didn’t mean there were that many. Luke was no expert on banditry, but it just seemed like way too many people for a few miles of road. If they had to divide the spoils of the work up that many ways, nobody would get anything. He didn’t know exactly how many bandits were there, but he was betting it wasn’t much more than the first group he’d dealt with.

That was no reason to get sloppy, since ten or twenty bandits were still more than enough to kill him. He proceeded slowly, relying strongly on the rain and [Stealth] to keep him safe. No one was on the walls, at least not that he could see, and he approached them without issue. Twenty feet wasn’t all that high to jump for him anymore, and he easily got his hands on the lip of the wall to pull himself up. As he’d expected, there was no one there.

Considering the weather and that he assumed bandits were lazy and undisciplined, he wasn’t that surprised. These ones were off-duty or whatever, so there was no reason to be sitting out in the rain getting sick. Luke spent a few minutes making sure he was right about that, even going so far as to drop back down off the wall and scour the grounds around the fort for any spotters or guards.

It was obvious at least what parts of the fort were in use. Most of the grass was overgrown, up past his knees in most places, but the bandits had stamped down a few clear paths from the front gate to the trail or a few of the outbuildings not connected to the main keep. Luke considered checking those buildings, but he had to figure that considering how much room the main building had, there wasn’t likely to be anything valuable kept in an outdoor area.

He decided to investigate those buildings later, if he didn’t find the loot in the big building first. Luke’s eye flicked from window to window, looking for motion or shadows that might indicate someone standing there. It would have been laughably impossible a month ago, but now that he was inside the ring of the stone wall and only a hundred feet away from the keep itself, it was easy to confirm no one was watching. [Stealth] only served to reinforce that when it let him sneak up to the side of the building without complaining.

A quick lap around the outside and some careful peeking inside confirmed Luke’s suspicions. Almost the entire fort was empty. Only at the main gate did he hear anybody at all, and even though he had to make sure to stand far enough back that his XP didn’t give him away, he was still able to count the voices. There were five people, three talking while they played some gambling game with dice, one huddled up near a fireplace and sniffling constantly, and one that had come to check on them and bring them some food, but who’d never left.

Much like the other bandits, they were all somewhere around level 10. Luke’s biggest hurdle would be the door itself, which he assumed was locked or barred in some way. The windows were too narrow for a person to go through, but if he wanted to break down the door, he probably could. It was only a question of whether he could do it fast enough.

Alternatively, there were plenty of ways in on the back side of the fort. He circled around and climbed up a pile of rubble, then hopped up to a second floor hallway, one that had a layer of moss growing on the stone and several creeping vines taking over the walls. The door leading deeper into the fort was closed and rusted shut, but it was easy enough to break the handle off and let it creak open under its own weight.

Luke prowled through the fort until he found a flight of stairs that would take him back to the ground level, then started working his way forward. Most of the space was empty and covered in grime, debris, or cobwebs. Sometimes, it was all three. That made it very easy for him to figure out when he’d reached the part the bandits were living in, as things got noticeably cleaner. Not clean by any measure, but the difference was night and day.

He didn’t find that group of five bandits first. Instead, Luke stumbled across the kitchen. A middle-aged man with arms as thick around as Luke’s thighs and a potbelly so huge Luke had to wonder how the man aimed when he took a piss stood at a table, ladling out something thick and gritty looking from a cauldron into individual bowls.

As soon as Luke passed by the door, the man’s head snapped up. With a smooth motion, he pulled a cleaver out of a wooden block and said, “Come on out. You’re not fooling anyone.”