Chapter 67

The mountains had been a fantastic source of monsters for Luke to hunt, just based on his brief time spent scouring them before he’d ventured into Valtira. Landston was in the opposite direction, though, so he reluctantly gave up the idea and started searching for game trails that would take him generally north.

Despite the difficulty of navigating the woods, he still made it the full forty miles in a single day. Being able to just force his way through thick underbrush or leap crevices and gullies that he stumbled across helped keep him going in the right direction, and he was sure that not getting lost from having to go around obstacles sped up the process.

Luke had no intention whatsoever of actually staying in Landston. It was too close to Valtira, and since Myla wasn’t an idiot, he was sure she’d made it back to the city alive and was sending messenger pigeons or whatever they used to spread around his description. His mace was distinctive enough that it would be a dead giveaway if anyone was on the lookout for it.

Instead, he circled the town twice. It wasn’t that big, maybe a hundred or so homes and some larger businesses near the south end. There was a manse on the north side, walled in and with a pair of security guards standing at the front gate. Luke immediately crossed that off his list of places Zea might potentially be and focused more on watching main street and keeping an eye on the people coming and going from what he thought was the inn.

He wasn’t expecting her to have beaten him there. It was technically possible, but she was smart, and she would be cautious. She didn’t have his stats, and she didn’t have the money to call a cab, or hire a carriage, whatever. It would probably be a few days before she showed up. Not for the first time, Luke wished he had his phone. It would have been really convenient if he could just text her and get an update.

Since that wasn’t an option, and he wasn’t going to be waiting in the town, or even setting foot in it if he could avoid it, Luke decided to explore the deep woods far away from civilization. With any luck, he’d find something lurking in there that was worth a nice chunk of XP without being overwhelmingly powerful.

What he found was a giant pig with way too many spurs growing out of its body and three sets of tusks hanging off its face. When Luke stumbled across it, it had its snout buried in the guts of something that might have once been some sort of large deer, or elk, or moose, maybe. It was mostly a slurry of bone, fur, meat, and blood at this point.

The pig spun in place, agile for something that was easily eight feet tall at the shoulder and as long as a truck. A pair of black eyes peered out from under a heavy brow lined with sharp little spikes, focused on Luke. It lowered its head, snorted, and rushed forward.

Pigsly was about level fifteen, if Luke had to guess. It wasn’t going to be worth a huge amount of experience, and it could definitely fuck up his day if he wasn’t careful, but this was exactly the kind of thing he was looking for. Luke jumped straight up, mace held tight in both hands, and came down with a [Power Strike] primed and ready to go.

He misjudged the timing slightly, mostly in an effort to correct for the tusks shaking wildly back and forth. His landing on the pig’s back wasn’t as smooth as he’d hoped for, but the mace slammed into its neck, just behind the base of its skull, and Pigsly hit the ground with so much force that it tore a furrow twenty feet long and a foot deep through the dirt.

And yet, somehow, not dead. It got a wobbly hoof under it and pushed up so hard that Luke was nearly thrown off its back. He went up in the air a few feet, then came back down, his legs flexing to absorb the impact and shift with Pigsly’s movement. Then he brought the mace around and up, triggered [Power Strike] again, and slammed it down a second time.

Pigsly’s skull definitely broke with that hit. Luke could hear the sound of bone cracking. The pig took two drunken steps, more sideways than forward, then tipped over and crashed onto its side. Its flanks heaved up and down as it struggled to keep going, but the fight was over now. All that was left was to give it a quick death, to end its misery, and collect his XP.

When he circled around to the front to finish it off, Luke found himself surprised to see that the pig’s beady black eyes were two blazing crimson pits now, and that it actually seemed to be growing stronger, not weaker. It struggled ferociously to pull itself back upright, and was hindered more by the many spikes it had driven into the ground with its fall than by the injuries Luke had laid on it.

“Oh shit,” Luke said. Pigsly had some sort of berserker skill probably similar to his own [Life Surge], and if he didn’t end the fight soon, it was liable to get a whole lot harder.

He didn’t really want to waste a third [Power Strike]on the same monster, but a quick fight followed by a break to catch his breath was way better than a long, drawn-out, knocked-down, busted-face fight. Luke activated the skill one final time and brought it down directly on Pigsly’s face.

Skin tore, bone chunks went flying, and brain matter splattered across the ground. A ding sounded in Luke’s head, and he let out a heavy sigh of relief. “Whew, thought shit was about to go sideways on me there.”

[You have slain Bonespike Boar (lvl 16). 263 XP awarded.]

“Not a bad start. Just need a minute here and we’ll see what else is out here.”

* * *

“Okay, you are really fucking creepy,” Luke said.

The snake, which was flying circles around him on bat wings, three pairs of them spaced evenly along its body, to be precise, hissed back. It was about eight or nine feet long and thick around as his thigh, black and green with frills around its head.

It was also, by his guess, level 20 or 21. Considering how fast the fucking thing was, he was willing to bet it specialized in agility. He’d missed every single swing he’d taken so far, and he wasn’t eager to trade another round. The thing had fangs in its mouth three inches long, and he’d just bet they were venomous.

It snapped forward through the air, propelled in its weird up-and-down slither-and-flapping motion that was so hard to track. Luke let [Unarmed Martialist] pull him to the side as it flashed by, and instead of trying to smack it with his mace, he snatched its ass end, about a foot or so before its tail ended in a hooked barb.

Then he swung it, hard. The snake smacked into a tree and whipped around it twice before it ran out of body length. Before it could free itself, Luke clobbered it with his mace. The first swing only caught its body, but the second one got it right across the jaw. A broken fang flew through the air, and the snake went limp. Ding.

“Sorry, Snakesley, but in my defense, you tried to kill me first. Also you’re ugly A.F.”

[You have slain Chiroptic Viper (lvl 20). 415 XP awarded.]

* * *

“Nope! Nope! Nope, nope, nope, nope nope nope nopenope! Fuck this! Nope!”

Luke ran for his life while a swarm of mosquito monsters with needles longer than his forearm chased after him. There were at least a hundred of the fuckers and every last one of them was level 10 or 12. The only bright side to things was that they were big enough that it was really easy to hit them out of the air, kind of like swinging a baseball bat at a soccer ball that wanted to murder him.

If they’d line up and come at him one at a time, he’d take his chances, but he was a lot less confident about them all coming in at once from every angle. He was sure he’d take down a few, maybe even twenty or thirty, and that whichever one of them got the killing blow would get a nice chunk of XP from him.

Two of the mosquito monsters caught up with him while he was jumping clear of a tangle of fallen trees, but even in the air and with both of them behind him, he clocked their approach with [Peripheral Awareness]. He twisted around, dodging one, and smacking the other one away. Its body disintegrated on contact and what was probably two pounds of gore went splattering through the air to paint a nearby tree.

Ignoring the ding from a successful kill, Luke tumbled to the ground and whipped his legs around in a move that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a breakdancing competition to get back on his feet. The other mosquito monster was coming back at him from the front now, an easy shot, but before he could take it down, a dozen more caught up. Standing there and getting dive-bombed was a stupid decision, despite what [Unarmed Martialist]had to say about it.

He ran forward, killing the mosquito coming at him on the way, and threw himself into a forward roll when two of the other ones tried to stab him. He came out of it in a spin, his mace whipping out parallel to the ground and obliterating another one. That was three down, a hundred more to go.

They weren’t as fast as him, but it was easier to fly over obstacles than to run around them, and Luke’s escape attempt morphed into a running battle that saw him whittling them down one or two at a time while he desperately scrambled to not get caught by the main swarm. Eventually, he’d either killed enough or gotten far enough away from their territory that they left off attacking him.

While he was trying to catch his breath, Luke took a moment to check his messages. Despite the low level, he figured he’d killed enough that they were worth a good chunk of XP.

[You have slain 47 creatures between levels 9-14. 6016 XP awarded.]
[Congratulations! You have reached level 22. 22 AP awarded for use.]
[Congratulations! Peripheral Awareness has reached rank 2. 250 XP awarded.]

Luke took a second to consider the crazy amount of XP he’d just gained. It was easily more than he’d ever seen at one time, even more than the jumbo earth elemental had been worth by a wide margin. Bloodpike stirges, as the System called them, were very lucrative to hunt.

“Shit, I’ve been doing this all wrong. I should be looking for big groups of small creatures.”

Before that though, he had decisions to make. 22 AP was enough to upgrade just about any of his skills once, but he kind of wanted to see if he could keep getting new ranks just from using them. Maybe he could earn back some of the AP he’d spent on things that weren’t part of his build guide, plus it would be nice to get ahead on his stats.

They literally made him superhuman, able to jump fifteen feet straight up, break rocks with his bare hands, and run thirty or forty miles an hour for half the day. It was probably impossible to overestimate how important it was that he continue to grow in that way. The monsters certainly weren’t going to get any easier to kill, even if he had freakishly high numbers by human standards.

Pigsly had taken three hits infused with [Power Strike]to put down, and it had only been level 16. Luke couldn’t imagine a scenario where he ran into a level 50 monster and won if he didn’t keep buffing his stats. As much as skills were a more immediate power upgrade, he could increase them in other ways. He was well past the point where some power lifting or time on a treadmill was going to bump his stats up anymore.

Perception was what he needed most right now, both to help him find Zea, and to help keep him from being ambushed again. He took a deep breath, scrunched his eyes closed, covered his ears, and dumped 10 points into the stat. The enhanced senses still just about knocked him on his ass, and he knew he’d be spending the next hour or two adjusting to them.

The remaining 12 AP got split into 4 agility and 8 stamina, which was much easier to acclimate to. Luke decided to head back to town after that and do a few more laps. Zea probably wasn’t there yet, but it didn’t hurt to check. Tomorrow, he’d resume grinding out XP, but no more mosquitos, not until he found a way to handle huge packs of monsters all at once.