Chapter 73

Luke woke up a little bit stiff, sort of cold, and ravenously hungry. Zea was practically lying on top of him with both her own cloak and his pulled over top of her. Their legs were tangled up and she had one of his arms firmly anchored around her, his hand grasped with hers. Her hair tickled his nose with each breath she took.

It was a good way to wake up.

After a few minutes of just sort of existing and enjoying the moment, Luke disentangled himself and left Zea wrapped in both cloaks while he went to relieve himself and see about finding something to eat. Game was surprisingly scarce, considering how easy it normally was to find something meaty and aggressive to kill, but [Survivalist] was quick to point out various nuts, berries, and roots that were edible.

“I guess we’re going vegan today,” he said as he gathered them up in his pockets, then used the hem of his shirt as a basket when he ran out of space.

He didn’t have a clue how to prepare them, and they would probably taste like shit raw, but Luke was hungry enough that he didn’t care. His only regret was that he’d completely demolished all the food they had last night while they were walking. Zea hadn’t said anything about it, but he could feel her judging him.

He found her awake at their campsite and hard at work rebuilding the fire that had burned low throughout the night. Wordlessly, he deposited his haul into a pile nearby. She gave it a look, then arched an eyebrow at Luke.

“Sorry, it was all I could find. I don’t have anything to cook them with.”

“I’m not surprised.” Zea reached into her bag and pulled out a small, long-handled metal pan. She sorted through what he’d brought back and separated out the fruit, then tossed the roots into the pan and held it over the new fire.

“Here, take over for me while I finish this,” she said, gesturing for him to hold the pan. “Just keep it at that height and give it a shake a few times a minute.”

He watched, bemused, as she started cracking shells and peeling things and doing other stuff that he didn’t even have the words to describe. “How do you know how to do all of this?” he asked.

“This is basic [Cooking] stuff. Do you not have that skill?”

“I don’t, no.”

“That’s weirdly impressive that you managed to go this long… oh, right… I’m sorry. You probably don’t have a lot of the skills people normally pick up just from living life.”

“It can’t be that bad, can it?”

“I have twenty-seven skills,” Zea told him.

“Oh… wow.” Luke called up his own status and skimmed his list. “I have… 16.”

“And how many of those are combat skills?”

“Eight…”

Zea sighed and shook her head. “This is what I mean. Since you got here, you’ve done nothing but fight. And that sucks. There should be more to your life than just fighting to keep it.”

“I mean… it’s not all bad. And besides, it’s not like I didn’t have a life before I got here. My whole existence hasn’t been just running headlong into the next disaster.”

“Still- oh, hey, give that another shake and pull it off the heat. Still, it’s not fair to you, and it’s not fair that you got pulled into this whole shitshow. Thousands of people want you dead for something that’s not your fault.”

Luke did as instructed, though it was a mystery to him how she knew it was done. It all looked the same to him, which was probably why most of what he cooked for himself ended up burnt. If this ended up not tasting like crap, he would have to consider picking up [Cooking] for himself.

“Do you think we’ll run into more people looking for me?” Luke said. There were no cell phones, no internet, not even a postal service as far as he could tell. They didn’t have cameras, so he doubted anyone really knew what he looked like unless they’d personally interacted with him, though he did find the idea that someone had made some big oil painting of him from memory to use for a wanted poster sort of funny.

“If we’re quick enough, we might stay ahead of it,” Zea said. “But I’m not that quick. You might beat it, but I won’t.”

“So the next city we get to, we could expect trouble from the church?”

“It’s probably best to plan as if we should. We’ll be better off sticking to small villages and towns for resupplying and sleeping, maybe staying off the main road completely. You need a new set of clothes, too. You can’t just go walking into town wearing a shirt covered in bloodstains.”

“That’s true,” Luke said. “Uh… I don’t have anything else to wear though, and I don’t think we’re going to find a pants tree anywhere on the road.”

“Yeah. It’s going to be an issue. No matter what we do, people are going to remember it if anyone from the church comes around asking questions. A dwifkin buying human-sized clothing is weird. A human covered in dried blood is probably worse. Maybe we could steal something.”

“Um, not to change the subject, but, Zea, I’m sorry you got caught up in all of this. You don’t have to come with me. You can take the money and go somewhere else. I’m sure they won’t look for you all that hard if I’m still out there running around.”

Zea just rolled her eyes. “You’re an idiot. Of course I’m coming with you. But I have some stuff I need to tell you first. I don’t want you to be surprised later if shit goes wrong because of my past.”

Luke had figured she’d had something going on, but it hadn’t felt polite to bring it up. She’d been homeless and hanging onto life by her fingernails, no family, no real friends, no belongings. When they’d met, she’d been wearing literal rags. People didn’t fall that low for no reason.

“I’m an escaped slave,” she said. “So, you know… a fugitive, kind of like you. Fun, right?”

“Slave?” he echoed. “What the fuck. This world allows slavery? Why? That’s like the most evil shit.”

“Your world doesn’t?” she asked, surprised.

“Well… not most of it. Not where I lived, at least. So… yeah, that’s super fucked up.”

“I’m glad to hear you’re not on the slavers’ side, but technically speaking, I’m runaway property. There are people who make their living hunting for slaves, and we’re all marked magically to make it easier to recover us. That’s why I live so far north. You noticed there weren’t many dwifkin in Valtira, right?”

“That’s true. I guess, practically speaking, my only concerns are the chances that someone will recognize you and try to capture you, and where we can get warmer clothes in your size.”

“So that’s the other part. The reason I’m a slave. You know how most people don’t level up as high as you have, and AP is scarce for them? Well, one of the ways rich people get around that is by making slaves level up and get support skills for them. I’m an enchanter. I’ve got a whole bunch of skills related to it, but they’re mostly rank 1 since I wasn’t there long enough to start merging them. If I hadn’t run, they would have forced me to level up a bunch more, set me to work enchanting anything and everything they wanted, then killed me in a decade or two as soon as I started showing signs of XP madness.”

Luke just sat there, speechless. He’d never given much thought to how exactly a society that existed under the system functioned, or the ways in which the rich would abuse the poor, but it seemed there were shitty people everywhere. Exploiting others for profit was a tale as old as time, and the fact that people who leveled too high regularly went insane and had to be put down was no reason to slow down the collection of money.

He made a mental note to come back to the idea of merging skills. Curt’s build notes had given him the impression that the skills had to be at max rank to do that, which would require a ton of AP, so either he was misunderstanding something or slave owners regularly pushed their slaves up to level 35 or 40 to afford to do that. Neither would surprise him.

“Anyway, yeah… I escaped by suppressing the slave runes. That’s the danger of training an enchanter, we know exactly how we’re being controlled and how to fix it. It’s costly to get what I need to keep them from reactivating, and the only way to permanently drain them is to let them run for a few years, more than long enough for a slave hunter to follow the trail to me.”

“That’s why you’re so poor,” Luke realized. “I knew there had to be something. You’re too smart to not be successful.”

Zea rolled her eyes, but he caught a smile on her face. “So I’m going to be an ongoing financial drain to keep around, in addition to slowing you down. I was going to talk to you about all of this before but… well, it didn’t work out that way. You sure you still want me to come with you?”

“Yep. You’re the brains of this outfit. I couldn’t do it without you. Plus maybe I can help?”

“Maybe,” she said. “This thing you have… can you change anything? Could you take away all the skills they forced me to take, lower my level back down?”

“I don’t know,” Luke said. “Probably, if I can purify the bloodline more? Or when I get to the God Machine and do it manually? Uh, System, can I do that?”

“It is within the realm of possibilities, though you are not currently able to make these kinds of changes.”

“System?” Zea echoed. Her eyes widened as she caught on. “It’s… here? Right now?”

“Sure,” Luke said. “As much as it ever is, I guess. Thanks, System.”

“You are quite welcome. If you’d like your companion to be able to see and speak with me as well, you should be able to manage that if you are able to reach the next stage of purification.”

“That’s cool, I guess.” Luke turned to Zea and added, “System says if I can purify my bloodline, I can make it so you can see and talk to it too.”

“Good luck with that. A ritual master who specializes in bloodline purification is going to be attached to a noble house, and they do not freelance. You would need permission from the head of house to borrow their services, which even if they’re willing to give it, it’s going to cost you. I can’t really see us pulling that off.”

“Shit. I guess maybe I can do it myself? I’m not going to stop leveling, so I could spend the AP and buy it myself?”

“That’s a terrible idea,” Zea said bluntly. “You already stick out with all the XP you have, which, by the way, did you level up again?”

“I did,” Luke admitted. “I knew I needed some more stats to keep up with Myla. I was hoping to get a few more under my belt before she caught up with us, but that didn’t happen. Good thing you were here.”

“You’re lucky you threw away that monster core and I stumbled across it. That feather you gave me wouldn’t have lasted more than twenty seconds without the extra power I fed into it.”

“That reminds me, what did you do at the end? Something blew up.”

“Let’s just say that enchanting is a delicate art, and if the mana flows aren’t properly managed, you might find yourself with a bomb in your hands.” Zea gave an evil little laugh, but then she sobered up and added, “Aldrick, you need to reconsider this whole leveling thing. If this doesn’t work out like you think it will, you’ll be putting yourself into an early grave. Even if you can reverse it, people aren’t just going to ignore a level 50 walking around.”

“Oh, I’m going to take a skill for that. It’s called [XP Mask]. It makes it so that no one can sense my XP, but I can’t sense anything else’s, either. I’ve been holding off because I don’t want to attack something way above my level.”

“What the fuck? There’s no skill like that!”

“Uh… yes? There is? System? Is there something I should know about this skill?”