Chapter 61

Luke had a goal, and he was going to keep moving towards it, but he knew himself well enough to know that if he didn’t take care of himself along the way, he’d crash and burn long before he hit the finish line. He’d rather it took an extra year because he wasn’t rushing forward at breakneck speed than never get there at all.

He wasn’t worried about the idea of the journey taking an extra few weeks if Zea went with him, not if it meant he got to spend more time with her. He’d been alone for a month already, not counting System. And Luke did not count System. That would have been like saying he was never lonely because his phone’s voice assistant counted as a friend.

He had some concerns about the amount of cold-weather clothes Zea said she needed, mostly in the ‘figuring out how to pay for it’ department. She had even less money than he did, so that would be on him to come up with the cash.

“What can I do that’s extremely lucrative, even if it’s only short-term?” he asked. “There’s got to be stuff that needs killing. The world is full of monsters.”

“You would draw all the wrong sorts of attention looking for work like that,” Zea told him. “The people who volunteer for those kinds of jobs are either desperate or insane, and they are screened heavily, then watched closely after to make sure they’re not building up too much XP. Honestly, how did you even get to the level you’re at now?”

“When I first got here, I was trapped in a valley in the mountains. There were a lot of goblins that tried to kill me, and some earth elementals that tried to kill everything that got close to them. And then one human made it in. The rest of his group died in the pass, but he got all the way to the end. I even saved his life by helping him fight off the giant elemental there. And then he tried to kill me too.”

“Oh. That sucks.”

“It does, yes.” Luke didn’t want to talk about the person he’d killed. “How much do you think you could get for a round against Zammin?”

“On short notice? Maybe seven or eight silver? If we had some time to properly hype it up and scheduled it for later in the week, a whole gold at least. I can float the idea by Sideon and see if he bites. You’re popular for a new fighter, but your matches against the big names have been really close. People don’t have a lot of confidence in you winning moving forward now that you’ve revealed some of your skills. I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d like to watch Zammin kick you in the balls, but I’m not sure Sideon would pay a premier fee for it.”

“What if I won?”

Zea snorted. “You’re not that good.”

“Ouch.”

Zea was probably right about that. He’d managed to take the dwifkin fighter in that sparring match, but Zammin was just so damn fast that it took everything Luke had just to stay on the defensive. And the little asshole wasn’t above fighting dirty either, which was a big problem considering his size. Luke would need a lot of practice to rank his skills up manually, or an infusion of XP to level up a few times.

“There’s got to be something we can do, even if it’s a one-time thing.”

“I can’t think of anything legal, and I don’t want you getting tangled up with anything illegal and drawing the wrong kind of attention to us.”

“Us?”

“Shut it,” Zea said.

Luke smiled. “I like us.”

Zea sighed and said, “For however long it lasts. Alright, let me go. I’ll go talk to Sideon about a Zammin fight and see if we can work out something.”

Luke watched her bend over to pick up her dress off the floor, smiled at the bit of extra wiggle in her ass. “You keep that up and you’re not going to make it out of the room.”

She tossed a smirk over her shoulder before standing back up right and putting the dress on. “Behave yourself. What are you going to do today?”

“I’m not sure yet. Want me to meet you at the Harbor around noon?”

“Yeah. I’ll have something figured out. You interested in a lunch fight if I can swing it?”

“Sure. More money never hurt anyone, right?”

“Exactly. Good to see I picked an industrious fighter to manage”

“It’s good to have such an excellent manager working hard to get me new fights.”

Zea crawled up onto the bed and tackled Luke, or at least she tried to. There was no way she was budging him if he didn’t play along, so he promptly fell backwards and landed with her on his chest. She kissed him, then said, “I mean it. Behave yourself. The church has got something going on. Rumor is a few inquisitors have been spotted in the rougher parts of town and extra templars are being put on rotation. Some people think they might be gearing up to do a purge.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“If we’re lucky, it has nothing to do with you, but it won’t matter if you get caught up in it anyway. If we’re not lucky… Well, either way, it’s probably a good idea not to stick around town too much longer. But since you’re still here, don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself.”

“Doesn’t fighting these fights do that?” Luke asked.

“Nah, there’s probably twenty or thirty fight clubs by the docks alone. As long as we stick to those and you don’t try to get into one of the fancy ones in the noble districts, it won’t draw too much attention. Zammin told me they’re a lot more thorough about vetting who they let into those clubs.”

“Bet the pay is better, too.”

“Probably,” Zea agreed. “But it’s not an option. So don’t get any stupid ideas.”

“Where would I be without you?” Luke said.

“Probably sitting in an inquisitor’s cell getting your fingers snipped off one at a time and your dick smashed with a hammer. Which would be a shameful waste.”

She said it so casually, like it was a joke, but Luke figured that was probably exactly what happened to people the church got ahold of and locked away. That was all sorts of fucked up in his mind, and he didn’t understand why society as a whole let them get away with that sort of behavior.

But really, when he thought about it, it was simple. If the gods could grant people immunity to XP madness, then the church would always have the highest level people. Might made right. Even if most of them weren’t immune, there was never a shortage of religious zealots willing to spend their lives on a holy crusade. Luke couldn’t even imagine how much more intense that would be in a world like Aros where God wasn’t an abstract concept that maybe or maybe not existed, but there was actual, tangible proof of the divine.

“I’ll try to keep everything intact down there until you’re done with it,” Luke said.

“See that you do,” Zea said primly. “Okay, I’m going now. I’ll see you around noon.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

* * *

Luke spent the rest of his time shopping. Now that his new mace was safely stowed away under the bed in their room, he received much less attention from just about everybody. Nobody tried to stop him in the streets anymore, though he did still get the occasional stare.

It took a bit of doing to find the stores that sold dwifkin-sized clothing, but Luke vaguely knew what area to start searching in. He found the shop Zea bought her dress at and worked his way around the area from there. Eventually he came up with warm pants and a shirt in her size, as well as a dwifkin-sized cloak with fur lining around the hood. Once he got a good look at it, he realized all of their clothing had lining in it, and it made him shudder to think of how much she’d suffered wearing literal rags.

Luke got a lot of funny looks shopping in dwifkin stores and actually got kicked out of one when he inquired about buying clothes for a dwifkin woman. There was no mystery there; the owner was a bigot who thought it was disgusting for a human and a dwifkin to have anything to do with each other. He knew because the jackass made a point of telling him, very loudly, with some amount of spittle. Luke didn’t even get the chance to lie about the relationship, not that he wanted to.

He’d long ago learned the lesson that some people were just assholes who weren’t worth the effort to even think about, let alone to try to get them to be better people. Luke just went somewhere else where the shopkeeper was either less bigoted or valued money enough to keep his mouth shut about it.

The only reasonably priced thing left on the list was boots, but he’d learned first-hand how uncomfortable shoes that didn’t fit could be, especially the ones made on Aros that had probably been hand-crafted to fit someone else’s feet. If Zea decided to come with him, she’d need to get that done herself. If not, he’d try to leave her enough money to do it anyway.

She was already going to bitch him out for spending money on her, but that was fine. It was a small price to pay to make sure that no matter what happened, she wouldn’t freeze when the weather turned cold. He definitely wasn’t going to tell her about it until he left though. In fact, maybe not even then. He might just leave it as a surprise for her to find if she stayed.

Luke didn’t want to get his hopes up, but she hadn’t immediately said no. He’d feel better about this whole church purge thing if they were long gone from the city when that swept through. There was no doubt in his mind that the poor districts would be hit hard by that, and they weren’t exactly living in an upper-class neighborhood right now.

With about an hour to spare, Luke stowed his surprise presents under the bed, safely tucked up and hidden behind his harness, where he could quite easily see them but hoped the shadows would keep them safe from her lower perception. If she did spot them, he’d hear about it.

As Luke was making his way to the Bloody Harbor, he caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye. It was a man turning a corner behind him, which wasn’t anything unusual by itself. What was strange was that Luke was pretty sure he’d seen the guy before when he’d been thrown out of that one dwifkin shop. He’d stood out because it was a dwifkin neighborhood and there were only a handful of humans in it.

When he turned to look closer, the man was gone. It could have just been a coincidence, or he could be mistaken. The city wasn’t really that big, not by the standards he was used to anyway. Even if it was the same guy, that didn’t mean he had anything to do with Luke. Still, it didn’t hurt to be extra vigilant and Luke resolved to keep an eye out for anything suspicious.

“Aldrick,” a woman called out.

Luke followed the sound and saw Myla walking straight towards him through the crowd. “Oh, hello,” he said. “What are you up to?”

“I have the day off, and I thought I’d see if you wanted to get lunch again,” she said as she came to a stop in front of him.

“Oh, uh… I’m kind of on my way in to work right now.”

“That’s fine. I don’t mind waiting an hour or so for you to be free. Why don’t I come with you?”

“Myla, look. Um. I kind of started seeing someone recently.”

She regarded him easily, with one eyebrow crooked. “And? Are you one of those guys who can’t have friends that are women just because you’re in a relationship?”

“No! I’m not. Just… uh, sure, I guess. If you don’t mind waiting.”

“Not at all,” Myla said, beaming at him. “Come on, let’s go.”

Luke allowed himself to be led towards the Harbor. Somehow, this was going to blow up in his face, he just knew it.