Chapter 69

“Nice,” Luke said as he looked at his handiwork.

[Survivalist] hadn’t seen much use lately, but it was a general-purpose skill that was extremely flexible. It gave him the knowledge he needed to make basic traps, and using some of the ones the goblins had tried against him as templates, Luke had gotten to work.

He’d started by making thin ropes out of wood fibers. It was three times thicker than twine should have been, but that was as tight as he could weave it together. Having a sharp knife that never dulled helped immensely, as did 40 agility. His hands flew, practically machine-like, weaving the fibers into something useful.

With hundreds of feet of homemade rope manufactured in a matter of hours, Luke had then started constructing his traps. He looped the ropes into snares, collected claws and teeth from a few of the predatory animals he’d run across, and sharpened those to deadly points to be thrown forward with triplines. He made small holes all over the ground, just big enough to catch a foot and roll an ankle, then covered them with screens of grass and leaves.

None of what he was capable of making was going to be lethal. Maybe if he’d had a bag full of poisons like Myla, he could have done some real damage, but lacking that, his only real goal was to trip his enemies up and slow them down. If he could draw them into traps that left them vulnerable and kept them from ganging up on him, he would consider his preparations to be time well spent.

There was only so much he could realistically accomplish with the tools and time he had, but Luke was satisfied with his efforts. He dug a small fire pit in the center of the clearing to help set the scene and dropped his backpack nearby. Then he went back and forth towards town a few times to help break a trail through the underbrush and settled down to wait.

Evening fell and Luke passed some time by carving a little palm-sized statue of Red out of a chunk of wood. He flicked the shavings into the center of the fire pit to be used as tinder once it got cold enough, but most of his focus was on the forest around him. He went over every trap he’d set again and again and tried to think up scenarios where he led enemies into them.

There were a lot of variables to consider, and he doubted the actual fight would play out anything like he was envisioning, but if he could steer it the way he wanted even for a few seconds here and there, he thought he had a decent chance. Then, once he’d taken care of the inquisitors, they’d simply disappear before anyone else could find them.

He hoped it would be that easy. There were definitely a lot of assumptions about how things would go in that plan, but his biggest concern was that since the inquisitors were following Zea, that she either wouldn’t show up to lead them into an ambush because they’d already snatched her up, or that she would show up, but would end up getting caught up in the fighting.

Luke’s hands paused for a second when he heard a soft rustle, then started moving again. He didn’t feel any XP nearby, but something was definitely in the trees above and behind him. Whatever it was, it had stealth skills and probably a high agility stat to back them up. That could be any number of monsters, but the fact that it was also hiding its XP aura from his senses as well narrowed it down considerably.

They had arrived. Luke closed his eyes and set all his senses to exploring the forest. There was a faint smell of metal and oil, not coming from him but somewhere in the brush to his right. Above him, he heard the creak of leather halfway up a tree. Straight down the trail, perhaps fifty feet away, a person was confidently walking forward. Their footsteps were soft, but they weren’t actively trying to hide themselves. Luke could hear the slight clank of metal armor with each step the person took and feel their XP total coming closer. It was a small relief to see that it was similar to his own.

One to confront him and keep him occupied, and two more to ambush him as soon as they had a chance. Luke’s opening move would depend on who attacked first. If the one above him tried to get the drop on him, he would put his mace into the assassin’s gut and throw them into the booby-trapped underbrush. If the one in armor charged first, he thought he’d lure them into his field of ankle-buster holes instead.

The upside was that Zea wasn’t anywhere nearby. Hopefully that didn’t mean something had gone wrong on her end, but if so, he’d worry about that later. Right now, he had three people approaching with what he was just going to assume was hostile intent.

Luke set down the little carving of Red, put his knife in its sheath on his belt, and stood up. His mace was in front of him, held across his body with both hands, and his feet were set wide apart. Then he waited to see what would happen first. His money was on the one approaching openly making first contact.

But then he thought about it, and couldn’t see any good reason to wait. That would just give them better odds when they ganged up on him. So he jumped straight up into the branches overhead and hauled himself up one-handed to land in front of the inquisitor who’d been crouched up there.

“Boo,” Luke said. The man’s eyes were wide, and he tried to throw himself backwards while simultaneously flinging a handful of sharp metal spiked balls into Luke’s face. They all bounced off Luke’s scalp when he ducked his head, drawing little pinpricks of blood and doing nothing at all to stop him from lunging forward to catch the man by the shirt.

Luke dragged the inquisitor forward and was pleased to find that he outmuscled his enemy by a considerable amount. If it weren’t for the fact that they were balanced on tree branches, and that there were at least two other church agents nearby, he would have happily closed the fight to a grapple to abuse his obvious advantage.

Instead, he let himself roll backwards off the branch and dragged the inquisitor with him. They twisted in the air, but Luke easily got the best of that and spun the man under him to slam into the ground first. Before the inquisitor could recover, Luke rolled to his feet and brought his mace down on the man’s chest.

Bones snapped and blood spurted into the air from torn skin and between the inquisitor’s lips. He was still alive, but Luke didn’t have the time to follow up and finish him. The inquisitor who’d been walking towards him entered the clearing and took the situation in at a glance. Roaring a challenge, he leaped forward fifteen feet. Luke ducked down to one knee, set his shoulder, and, as the inquisitor tried to land on him, heaved upwards.

Thanks to a twist in Luke’s abdomen, he threw the inquisitor into the brush, directly into one of the snare traps he’d prepared. The loop pinched around the inquisitor’s ankle and the hook trigger slipped loose, allowing the branch the snare was tied to overhead to snap back into position and take the inquisitor along for the ride.

Luke figured he’d bought himself at most a few seconds before the man freed himself, but that was the point after all. He kicked the man whose chest he’d caved in with his mace out of the way, eliciting a ragged cry of pain, and approached the brush he’d smelled the last of his three assailants hiding in. They were gone now, but even with whatever skills they were using to hide themselves, Luke wasn’t fooled.

He should have buffed perception earlier. It was amazing how much of a difference it made in finding people that he couldn’t see. The third inquisitor was completely silent, XP fully hidden from his senses, and on the move, but Luke could smell them. He could track where they’d gone, and where they were.

“That’s handy,” he muttered as he changed direction. Rather than move directly to them, he walked across the clearing and put another of his traps between himself and the last inquisitor. Conveniently, it also put his field of holes right in the way of the man who’d been caught in his ankle snare. That one had cut himself down with a hand axe and was now eyeing Luke warily from across the campsite.

“You got something to say, or should we just get back to it?” Luke called out to him.

“Die, you filthy fucking apostate,” the inquisitor said as he approached Luke.

The holes weren’t fooling the man. He slipped between them easily, his feet always finding solid ground. That was fine though. Keeping from turning an ankle in one once he was fighting for his life was going to be a lot harder, and Luke intended to abuse every single mistake.

The two clashed, the man with his axe and its twin that he pulled from his belt, and Luke with his mace. The man was taller, but Luke’s weapon was longer, and while they were close in strength, Luke had him beat in agility. His big disadvantage was his lack of armor, a fact the inquisitor took full advantage of. He was more than willing to take a hit if it meant he got to deliver one of his own.

But Luke kept him moving around, and twice the inquisitor stumbled, only to catch a [Power Strike] to his arm or hip. The first one robbed the inquisitor of one of his weapons when the armor crumpled and pinched his forearm. The second one stole much of his ability to keep his feet centered under him.

For his troubles, Luke took multiple gashes across his chest, one on his thigh that was worryingly close to his femoral artery, and a nick just above his eyebrow. Blood leaked down the side of his face, and he had to blink it out of his eye.

It looked like Luke was winning, but he’d learned his lesson about fighting multiple opponents: never forget how many there were. So he wasn’t surprised when the last of the inquisitors tried to ambush him with a dagger driven into his back. He’d been keeping track of their movements while he traded blows with the armored one, and the only really surprising part was how they managed to avoid being seen all the way up to the point of contact.

She seemed to appear out of thin air, but he’d tracked her progress by watching the grass flatten and listening to the sound of her heart beating as she drew closer. So when she was finally in position and ready to drive the blade home, Luke ruined her plans by bringing his mace around in a two-handed swing that arced a full three sixty around him.

The armored inquisitor jumped back, easily dodging the attack, but the assassin was caught so off-guard that the mace smashed into her side and sent her flying into a tree on the other side of the fire pit. She stumbled to the ground, kicked a tripline, and then got a face full of quills that Luke had harvested from a giant porcupine earlier in the day.

He paid for that move when the armored inquisitor got right up into melee range and got a hand around Luke’s throat. The man’s face contorted into a vicious snarl and he started squeezing, far harder than his strength stat should have allowed for. Everything started going black, and Luke dropped his mace to use both hands to pry at the fingers crushing his windpipe.

They were like steel wrapped around his neck, so tight that Luke thought the man might have had an easier time just ripping his head off his body. Desperate now, knowing he had at best seconds to think of a plan, Luke let his hand drop away from the inquisitor’s fingers.

And then his knife flashed up through the air, severing the hand at the wrist. The man fell back with a scream and clutched at his stump. Luke sucked in a lungful of oxygen, coughed against the pain even breathing presented him, and picked his mace back up.