Chapter 46

Luke scrubbed at his beard with his hands and tried to hold onto his temper. Fucking System had to know this, but had never bothered to mention it to him. It wasn’t like Luke had been shy about his leveling plans, but not once had that rat bastard ever so much as hinted that too many levels could have negative consequences.

And it wasn’t just because Luke didn’t ask the right questions either. He knew that Curt had asked System a million questions when he was figuring out builds and taking down notes. He would have been smart enough to sniff out something like this, which meant System had actively concealed it. If Curt had known, it would have been all over that notebook in big bold letters, underlined, probably an entire page all on its own just with the warning.

“Okay, let’s say that I’m level 21, hypothetically speaking.”

“Hypothetically,” Zea said.

“How fucked am I?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know the numbers for humans. You’ll make it to middle aged if you never gain another level. Maybe you’ll get old enough to retire, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Shit. Shit. Fuck.”

He couldn’t do this as a level 21. Hell, even if he wanted to, there were going to be more monsters between him and the God Machine. He would level up involuntarily just from having to fight his way there. Unless there was a way to not get XP. “Can you kill monsters without getting XP? Is there a skill that stops that or something?”

“Not that I’m aware of. If there was anything, it would be a blessing from a god, but… uh… you know, what with the whole apostate thing, I kind of don’t think they’d give it to you, even if it does exist.”

“Okay, I’m completely screwed then. Let’s say I’ve got to get to level 40. What’s my life expectancy look like?”

“Fucking grim,” Zea said. “Middle age is probably a goal you shouldn’t expect to obtain. Even if you haven’t gone around the bend, people will feel that amount of XP on you and report it. You’ll have hunters on your ass immediately.”

All that really told him was that at some point in time, that XP masking skill would stop being optional. The percentage cuts from stuff like Disguise and Stealth weren’t going to cut it, not that they were doing much to help him already. Not going to the God Machine wasn’t an option, not if he wanted to get his family back. That meant more levels, which meant hiding those levels.

He wasn’t keen on the other half of that skill, the one that stopped him from feeling out anything else’s XP, but he supposed he’d eventually be a high enough level that it didn’t even matter. If he was level 50, what difference did it make if whatever he was fighting was 20 or 30? Still, he thought he’d hold off on that skill for as long as he could.

“Okay, this is a problem, but I can work around this. I just need to get to the God Machine and change how the system works before I lose my marbles.”

“You can’t change how the system works,” Zea objected.

“Sure I can,” Luke said. “That’s the whole point. I have a bloodline called SysAdmin that gives me greater system access.”

“That’s… blasphemy. Only the gods can alter the system.”

“Well now you know why they want to kill me,” Luke told her.

“Holy shit, this is… it’s insane. There’s no way you can really do this. And bringing someone back from the dead is functionally impossible anyway.”

“Why’s that?” Luke asked. If System had lied to him about this too, he was going to find a way to wring that insubstantial prick’s neck.

“I mean, the skill for it exists. It’s in the system, but it’s one of those things that are impossible to obtain. You’d never grind out enough AP to buy everything you needed for it without succumbing to XP madness first, and it would take centuries to learn all of the skills on your own.”

“If it’s in the system, I can get it,” Luke said firmly. “I just need to get to the command console and my bloodline will do the rest.”

Zea flopped backwards on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. “This is insane,” she said. “There’s no way. You can’t do this. It’s impossible. Fuck.” She sat back up and threw a glare at Luke. “I just wanted to make some easy cash managing a few fights off some human who had more levels than brains.”

Luke couldn’t help himself; he started laughing. “Sorry to disappoint. You can still do that though. I need the money too.”

Sometimes it was hard to take Zea seriously. She was barely four feet tall, maybe four-three or four-four at most and kind of adorable. Right now, she wasn’t adorable. She just stared at him, her face expressionless and her eyes cold, and judged him. He could see the gears turning, the thoughts running through her head while she weighed the risks.

He could feel himself tensing up. The way he saw this going, if she wasn’t in, then she was out and going to sell him to the church. If she decided she wanted nothing to do with his shit show of a life, she was smart enough that she wouldn’t announce her intentions, and he probably wouldn’t realize what she’d done until it was too late.

No matter what she chose to do, he was going to have to trust her. It was no wonder she was so nervous. She’d been ten steps ahead of him and realized where this conversation was going to end up before she’d even started it. If he tried to kill her, he gave himself good odds that he’d succeed. Just by being there and having the conversation, she’d placed a measure of trust in him.

“You don’t have to stick around if you don’t want to,” Luke said. “I appreciate the help you’ve given me already. If this is too hot to handle, I won’t blame you if you walk away. And I won’t try to go after you or anything. Just… keep your mouth shut about me, please? I promise I’m just trying to raise boat money and then I’ll be on the other side of the world. I won’t cause any problems for you.”

“Oh shut up,” Zea said, hopping off the bed. “You think I’m going to let a big payday like you get away after I’ve already put in the work? All I have to do now is make sure you show up for your fights and collect my money.”

Luke let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “Thanks,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you’re just so pathetic.”

“Me? Please, your shirt is more holes than shirt at this point.”

“Well you’d better not go down with the first punch tomorrow or I won’t be able to buy a new one!”

“Please. Zammin practically begged me to take it easy on the guy. No way I lose.”

“He did what?” Zea asked, any trace of playfulness gone from her voice.

“Er, that’s what we were talking about when we were drinking yesterday. He said the first guy I’ll fight against doesn’t have the stamina to take heavy hits and I should pull my punches so I don’t hurt him too bad.”

“Oh he did, did he?”

“Yes?”

“And who did he say you were fighting?”

“Uh… To… Tom.. Tomtaco? That’s not it. Hmm.”

“Tantoro,” Zea said flatly.

“Yeah, I think that was it,” Luke agreed.

“Tantoro is the second best fighter on their roster. You absolutely should not be holding back when you fight him. He’s not as fast as Zammin, but he’s considerably stronger and he’s been fighting for over a decade.”

“You’re a lot more serious about this than you were yesterday,” Luke said.

“Yesterday was tryouts. Now we’re in business and I make more money when you win.”

“Speaking of money, how much are we talking about here?”

“Not as much as you want, I’m sure. Five silver a fight, three to you and two to me.”

“Uh… that doesn’t seem like a lot. Pretend I don’t know anything and tell me how much gold that is.”

“Ten silver to a gold, assuming MSW is followed. Oh, sorry, Merchant Standard Weight. Obviously if a coin has more metal in it, it’s worth more.”

Luke did some quick math in his head. “So ten fights is three gold. And I’m going to need maybe a hundred. That’s over three hundred fights? How often do I fight?”

“Maybe twice in a night,” Zea said.

“Shit. That’s… what, a few months just to make that much money, not counting how much I’ll need to live off of. Zea, it’s probably not a good idea for me to be in Valtira that long. I was hoping to be here for a week at most.”

She barked out a laugh and shook her head. “That was pretty naïve of you. There is no way you’re making a year or two of common man’s wages in a week. Even if you wanted to start hunting monsters, you still wouldn’t make close to that, not even if you took every job there was.”

“There’s nothing I can do?” he said.

“Nothing I could help you with, at least. I can’t imagine anyone who’s not the heir to a large merchant family or a noble’s house having that kind of money.”

“Okay, well… what if I got hired onto a ship instead of paying for passage?”

Zea shrugged. “Maybe if you can convince someone to take a chance on you, but do you have any of the skills for it?”

“I don’t. No. But I could go gain a level or two and pick them up?”

Poor Curt’s build was getting farther and farther away from being a reality. At this point, Luke was using it more as a loose guideline than anything. He’d probably need an extra 100 AP to cover everything he was supposed to pick up, and he was nowhere near his goal. At the rate he was needing to pick up extra skills, he’d be lucky if it was only 100 AP.

“You have no idea how psychotic you sound when you say that. ‘Oh yeah, I’ll just go trade five or six years of my life to avoid having to actually learn anything on my own.’ Fucking crazy.”

“Hey, it’s a crazy situation,” Luke said defensively. “I don’t have years to spend on this.”

“Okay, yeah, that’s true, but just don’t talk like that out in public.”

“Right. Fuck. It’s so stressful not knowing what I can and can’t talk about.”

“Well let’s go over a few things,” Zea said. “Uh… man, explaining this all is weird. It’s like trying to teach a child, except if you screw up, nobody’s going to think you’re just a precocious little tyke.”

“Well let’s start with the basics,” Luke said. “What’s rude to do in public? What’s rude no matter where you’re at?”

“Okay, basics. Um, let’s start with system etiquette. It’s rude to talk about someone else’s level, stats, or skills. It’s intimate information.”

“I get the stats and skills, but the level? I mean, we can all sense it anyway.”

“No we can’t,” Zea said. “Your perception must be really high if you get more than a vague feeling of higher or lower level off an individual person.”

“Oh yeah, I did notice that. Okay, so don’t mention anything about system stuff. What else?”

“No, it’s not that you can’t… it’s just like… you wouldn’t talk about your neighbor’s sex life just because you can hear them fucking through the walls, would you? But in a more abstract sense, you might talk about the act of sex itself.”

“I’m not comfortable with this metaphor,” Luke said, acutely aware once again of exactly how young Zea looked.

She just smirked at him. Then she kept on talking about sex. Luke groaned and buried his face in his hands.