Chapter 65

Before he’d gained skills that moved his body for him in battle, Luke might have been surprised at being attacked from behind. Well, probably not in this case, since obviously the church wasn’t just going to let him go. But despite only being on Aros for a few months, he’d spent a lot of his time fighting, and if his matches had been good for anything, it was teaching him the difference between an animal or monster and an intelligent, reasoning person.

So he didn’t need a skill to tell him that running in a straight line directly away from them was an excellent way to get shot in the back. Luke never would have considered the acrobatics he was about to perform back when he’d lived on Earth, especially not with a weapon held in one hand, but now he knew he could do it.

His sprint lasted all of five steps before he rolled forward into a one-handed handspring that converted his forward momentum into lateral movement. Myla’s throwing knife cracked against the roof tiles, splitting one into multiple pieces where it impacted, and clattered away to land in the street. Luke was only dimly aware of that, having spotted the damage when he turned his handspring into a cartwheel to get his feet back under him, and brought his mace up in an underhanded swing to catch the templar in front of him off-guard.

[Unarmed Martialist] didn’t like the maneuver, not at all. It was flashy, a little desperate, and riddled with holes. The only reason it worked was that no one was expecting him to shift from escape back to offense. His swing caught the surprised templar in the stomach so hard that the man let out an explosive grunt and was lifted clear off his feet. He suffered the same fate as Myla’s throwing knife had: he crashed into the tiles on his back, cracked a few of them, and then slid off the roof to land in the street below.

Luke followed right behind the man, except he’d planned to jump to the next roof. That was foiled by another knife, barely dodged when [Twitch Reflexes] shifted him out of the way. Suddenly off-balance, which was probably better than a poisoned knife stuck in his leg, Luke tumbled over the edge of the roof and landed right next to the templar.

He took the landing better, but the templar had armor to protect him from the mace strike and enough stamina to stand back up. He’d also kept hold of his sword, and Luke was forced into a desperate roll to dodge the descending blade. The templar kept the pressure up with a lightning-fast series of stabs and slashes all designed to lock Luke into his position on the ground. He blocked as best he could, grit his teeth when the templar slipped past his guard and left a bloody gash across his ribs, and kicked out at the man’s ankles to try to trip him up.

The templar was too good for that, and Luke didn’t have time for an opportunity to present itself. There were three more people less than twenty feet away, all of them looking to kill him or worse, and he doubted they’d be afraid to make the jump down to street level. So when the templar’s next overhead slash came down on Luke, he parried it with a [Power Strike]and threw the surprised man’s sword so far into the air that it cleared the eaves of the nearby house.

Luke scrambled to his feet and dashed away. [Mace Mastery]and [Unarmed Martialist] both protested at the wasted openings he let go by running instead of fighting, but Luke wasn’t interested in finishing the duel. Winning beat losing by a thin margin, but not getting caught blew both options out of the water. So he ran, turning [Unarmed Martialist]towards helping him keep his balance with top-notch footwork while he scrambled through the crowds.

It quickly became clear to the bystanders that some sort of bad shit was going down and the streets started to clear out. Luke briefly considered moving with the flow and trying to hide, but now he had at least four people in pursuit and Myla already cut him off once. Admittedly, he’d been going to a location she might be familiar with, but if she’d found him by making assumptions instead of chasing after him, that just meant she wasn’t stupid. In a way, that was kind of worse.

Luke was banking on superior stats to get him out of trouble. He was ridiculously outnumbered, and hiding didn’t seem like a good plan. It was time to find out just how fast he could go and how long he could keep it up. He’d experimented some on the roads out of town, and he knew he was fast, but not well how he stacked up to everyone else.

He ran for all he was worth, mace held up near the head and tucked close to his body to keep it from catching on things. He sprinted where he could, wove through the few people who hadn’t gotten the message to get the fuck off the streets, and took detours around knots of guards that appeared in front of him.

All the way, he kept catching flickers of movement with [Peripheral Awareness]. Whatever it was, it was keeping pace with him, and he had a sneaking suspicion it was someone with an agility-based build, someone who maybe worked as a church assassin and had spent a bit too much time studying him.

What he couldn’t figure out was why she wasn’t trying to stop him. His best guess was that she was keeping pace with him to keep tabs on his location as he fled. Maybe she had some sort of magical cell phone and was sending out group texts to coordinate with his other pursuers. If that was the case, the only thing he could do was stop running and attack, except he never actually saw anyone there.

Luke’s mad dash down various streets eventually brought him to the edge of the city. He hadn’t paid much attention to which way he was going other than generally north when possible, and was a bit surprised to see how far west the guards and templars had managed to push him. That wasn’t a big deal though; he could course correct by cutting through the woods and farmlands surrounding Valtira once he was safe.

He darted past the last two houses at the edge of the city and felt his eyes widen as [Peripheral Awareness] screamed at him. There were at least thirty guards or templars armed with crossbows, all pointed in his direction. It was the goblin trap in the woods all over again.

But Luke wasn’t the same guy he’d been back then, and this trap wasn’t as well constructed. If they fired now, they’d be shooting at each other. They knew it too, so almost all of them hesitated to pull the trigger. The few that did were far too late to hit him, as he’d already skidded to a stop and darted back into the city. Shouts ran out behind him as he fled the foiled trap.

Luke jumped a roof rather than run all the way to the next side street. He landed on the peak for a moment, then threw himself forward. Below him, a startled woman working in her garden gawked as his shadow crossed over her. Luke spent just enough time looking down to confirm she wasn’t a secret church spy about to attack him, then returned his focus to sticking the landing onto the next roof.

He heard the guards scrambling after him and had a mental image of a dozen crossbow bolts sticking out of his back with the next jump. Even at this speed, he had no chance of outrunning a bolt. His only options were to put enough distance between him and the guards that even the luckiest shot would fall short, or to put enough buildings between them that they couldn’t shoot him. The problem with that second option was he was trying to get out of the city, not run deeper in.

So Luke jumped, then he jumped again, and again. By the fifth roof, he thought he’d gained enough distance to sneak a glance behind him. The templars had outrun the guards, but there were only five of them compared to the thirty or forty they’d numbered before. That was already a definite improvement, one that he liked even better when he realized that none of them held ranged weapons.

His last jump took him back to ground level. He rolled with the impact, sprang back to his feet and sprinted for the tree line a few thousand feet away. Unless someone uber-badass appeared to take a swing at him, Luke was in the clear now. All he needed to do was break line-of-sight on the remaining templars in the forest and circle around to start heading north.

It wasn’t an ideal scenario, not really. Way too many people knew what he looked like, and he was worried about the collateral damage the Bloody Harbor was going to suffer for associating with him, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about that. If there was any sort of instant communication between cities, there would be people watching out for him. Hopefully, that wasn’t the case and he could outrun news of him being an apostate.

Probably the gods would dick him over somehow. He didn’t believe a word of that hands-off Covenant crap anyway. Luke was going to have to be very careful about his future moves now, but he was sure Zea knew what to do. The church had been focused completely on him; there was no reason to think she hadn’t gotten away safe. Plus she had that magic feather thing.

If they’d hurt her, he’d tear their limbs off with his bare hands.

For now, he was going to continue with the plan. He’d meet her up the road in Landston. If she didn’t show up, he would slaughter a thousand monsters until he was the biggest monster of them all, then come back and rip apart the church until he found her. Nobody would be able to stop him. That was how power worked in this craptastic fucking world, right?

Luke ghosted through the tree line, easily slipping around the brush and ducking under tangled branches. Once he was hidden out of sight, he slowed down both because the terrain forced it and to catch his breath. He turned north and started looking for a game trail to follow, one that was widened from human hunter using it. As soon as he stumbled across one, he could put on the speed again.

He felt the an impact on his back, then two more so close behind that at first he thought it was a fist punching him. Only once he staggered forward and spun in place did he realize there was no one standing behind him. He didn’t need the system notification that pinged to tell him what happened, but he checked it anyway.

[You have been afflicted by the following condition: Poison- Night Stalker’s Venom (7M31S).]

“Why wait until I thought I was clear?” Luke asked. “Is it some kind of game?”

“No,” Myla said. She appeared from the trees, the blowgun in her hand. She was far more disheveled than he’d expected. “It’s probably better this way. Out here, your heresy can’t spread to infect anyone else.”

The poison was fast-acting, already spreading to his limbs. Everything felt heavy and numb. He tried to move his fingers, but they barely twitched. “Some kind of paralytic,” he said, his voice slurred. He wanted her to think it was working.

It was, but not so much that he couldn’t move. He could drop the mace to help sell the act, but then he’d be relying on his fists to fight her off. No, he just needed her to get closer so he could clobber her with a solid [Power Strike] infused hit. Once he put her down, he would be back on his way.

But Myla didn’t get any closer. She just pulled a new dart out of a hip pouch and fitted it into the blow gun. “It’s nothing personal,” she told him. “From my understanding, you off-worlders don’t come here voluntarily, but that doesn’t change anything. I can’t let you break the foundations of our world, accidental or otherwise.”

Then she brought the blow gun up to her lips and lined it up to fire.