Chapter 33

Luke sat on the ground next to the shallow grave he’d dug for his brother’s remains. “I think this might really be goodbye this time,” he said. “I guess we’ll see. I might get a mile up the pass and end up turning back when I run into another one of those goliath elementals. I got to say, I’m a bit nervous about making the attempt. Still got 20 AP, though. Maybe I should dump it into agility and stamina so I can run away better?”

If he followed Curt’s build notes, he really needed to pick up some utility skills and focus on upgrading his combat ones to rank 2 or 3. The build hadn’t included spending any AP on language skills though, which Luke was definitely going to do. Curt had thought much higher of Luke’s ability to pick up new skills from scratch than he should have.

[Cooking] was on his list to pick up as well. He was quite sick of charred monster meat and raw bitter berries. The only reason he hadn’t picked it up already was that, much like [Woodcarving], he doubted the skill would do him much good without tools. He was literally cooking off sticks he’d whittled to a point and skewered slabs of meat on to hang over an open fire.

At least the water was decent, but he really missed carbonation, vegetables, oils, and spices. Mostly, he missed eating things prepared by people who could actually cook. That was one of the things he was most looking forward to when he finally reached human civilization. That and safety, a warm bed, hot water to bathe in, new clothes… the list was actually kind of long, once he really thought about it.

“I want you to know that your advice saved my ass. Like a lot. I would never have taken [Power Strike] and [Life Surge], you know? I probably wouldn’t even have found them. I’m trying to follow this build as closely as possible, but stuff keeps getting in the way. Seems like every time I try to rebalance my stats, I end up having to splurge on stamina or agility because I need it right now. Plus I’m going over budget on skills you wanted me to pick up the hard way.”

Luke didn’t even need to look at the paper now. He’d read it so many times the information was permanently lodged in his brain. “Wish you were here with me. You’d know what to do. You always knew what to do. Probably why I have this guy.” Luke patted the mace next to him. “It’s been a lifesaver too.”

Curt had given him everything he’d needed to survive so far: the knowledge and tools that synergized and gave him a leg up on practically everything he’d fought. Now he was leaving the valley, leaving the area that Curt had prepared him for. As he understood it, his brother had never made it out, and his builds were made with a lot of ideas and assumptions but no firsthand experience in regards to the rest of the world.

In short, it was time to leave the tutorial. He couldn’t expect much in the way of handholding, and judging by the fact that the first human he’d ever met had done his level best to murder Luke, he probably needed to be discreet. He suspected he needed a new wardrobe, and definitely needed to pick up the local language.

One of those was easy enough, kind of. He went ahead and bought [Thalian] for 5 AP, but decided to sit on the other 15 AP until he scouted out the pass. If he could just walk through now, he’d dump the AP into a rank up. Otherwise it would go into agility and stamina if needed.

“I guess I’m just stalling now,” he said as he stood up. “See ya soon, Curt. You just relax until I get this figured out.”

* * *

The pile of dirt that was the goliath elemental was right where he remembered it. Luke had to bash his way through four elementals before he reached it, but they were all thankfully of the small variety. Luke jogged past the dirt heap with some amount of trepidation. He half-expected it to reform as he went by, but it remained a loose pile.

He went up another mile before the pass started to level out. It got steadily colder the higher up he went, cold enough that Luke wished his shirt and jacket were still in one piece. His shoe having a hole in it was also surprisingly uncomfortable. He’d mostly gotten used to walking on it, but having the cold hit his foot like that was a nasty surprise.

About four miles into his trek, he found another pile of loose dirt, this time with a corpse next to it. It was a young man, maybe a few years older than Luke. He was dressed in the same type of armor McDickbag had been wearing, the same type Luke was now wearing. Luke eyed the body thoughtfully, then stripped off the boots and compared them to his own shoes.

“Close enough,” he muttered, casting his work boots aside. They were a bit too wide for his feet, but the length was good. It was probably about as close as he could reasonably expect to get. The body had been crushed from the waist up though, the armor mangled, head exploded, and arms shattered. Luke emptied the money from the belt pouch into the one he already had and left the rest of the mess behind.

Two miles later, he found two more bodies and three huge dirt piles. “Jesus,” he said, looking at the carnage. The fight there had been earth shattering, literally. Huge fissures ran up the wall and across the pass. Luke had to make a running jump to leap a fifteen-foot wide crack that completely bisected the trail.

Both bodies were armored with identical equipment. One had a cloak that was still intact, though considerably more stained that he’d prefer. At least it looked like the discoloration was all mud, no blood. The temperature kept dropping as time went by, so Luke stole the cloak off that body. As usual, he looted the gold out of their pouches too.

He had no idea if he was rich now or not, but it certainly seemed like a lot of gold. Plus he’d gotten a pair of boots and a cloak out of it, which he greatly appreciated in light of the continuing temperature drop.

Still, that was five piles of goliath elemental remains he’d encountered now. It was a good thing he hadn’t tried that blind run. They would have killed him for sure. He had no idea how close he was to the far end of the pass. He’d probably killed twenty or more of the smaller elementals already, with no end in sight. He needed to make it out before he slept; there was no way he was going to be left in peace.

It was nice XP at least, and nothing had jumped out at him he couldn’t handle, so Luke kept running. The pass wound around, mostly easy to navigate with a few rough spots where the trail became narrow or had a drop off on one or both edges. Luke was more nervous than he felt he should be. Most of the time he’d adjusted to having stats, but sometimes something like this happened. He knew he wasn’t going to fall, that he could probably walk that trail during a thunderstorm without losing his footing from the wind and rain.

But part of his mind was still looking at the edge and telling him to develop a new fear of heights. He stubbornly ignored it and walked on, a bit slower than necessary and with a lot more worry, but ever forward. At some point in time, the trail started rising again and Luke held his new cloak tightly around him. Apparently a high stamina did not make him immune to freezing.

The bright side of things was that he’d killed twenty-six elementals so far, which was about half of a level. If he stopped to fight everything he saw, the number would probably be three times higher. It was tempting, at least in the parts of the pass that he didn’t have to worry about falling to his death, but Luke wanted to tempt fate as little as possible. There was no telling when another jumbo elemental might show up.

It was about four in the afternoon when he ran into a problem. The pass forked. Well, it was more of an intersection than a fork, but neither direction gave much hint as to which way to go. Any previous deviations in the trail had been easily identified and Luke had avoided them since he could clearly see them dead-ending within a thousand feet or so.

Both trails seemed to go miles and miles with no end in sight. One went up, the other down, but Luke had seen the trail rising and falling more than enough to know that just because he wanted to go down the mountain didn’t mean the section going down right now was correct. Maybe it was, but he couldn’t tell.

“System,” he said. “Can you point me in the right direction here?”

“I am only able to tell you that the human lands of Thalasa are northeast of your current location,” System replied.

“Neither of these trails goes in that direction,” Luke said.

“My apologies, Luke.”

He squinted at the blue apparition. “You’re not that helpful, you know that?”

“I will not be able to give you more in-depth geographical information at your current level of system access,” System said.

“Why do I even bother? Okay, fine. I’ll figure it out myself.”

“Very well.”

Sometimes he got the feeling System was lying to him, that it was making a deliberate choice not to be helpful. If so, there wasn’t much Luke could do about it. It was an intangible ghost, completely incapable of interacting with the physical world. Maybe if Luke learned some magic, he might affect it, but he doubted it.

A familiar screeching caw echoed down the left trail, breaking Luke out of his ruminations. He scanned the trail, looking for Red, or at least a darkened silhouette against the sky. There was nothing, but Luke had to pick a direction, and that seemed as good as any. He went left.

After a mile or so, the trail widened until he walked into a thickly forested slope. He kept one hand on his mace, just in case something jumped out at him, but trusted his perception to keep him safe. If nothing else, at least he figured there’d be no jumbo elementals with the trees packed so close together.

The smell of cooking caught his attention after a little while, and unlike his own feeble attempts, it actually smelled good. Luke followed his nose and quickly found a small fire pit with a metal grill mounted on some poles over it. Several chunks of sizzling meat sat on the metal, so delicious-looking that his mouth started watering.

“Uh, hello?” he called out. He didn’t want to just jack someone’s meal, but hopefully they’d be willing to trade some of the money he’d scavenged for a portion. That was if whoever was the owner of that campfire came back.

He caught a movement with [Peripheral Awareness] and looked up. There, perched on a branch overhead, was Red. Next to him, with one hand stroking the feathers on the crown of Red’s head, was something shaped like a person, but also clearly not. For one thing, it had feathers of its own, and a beak, and those same hawk’s eyes. It also had human-shaped arms and legs connected to a human-shaped trunk, though its feet ended in cruelly sharp talons. Wings sprouted from its back and were tightly pulled against its body.

“Oh, um. Hi,” Luke called up. “Nice to meet you. I’m Luke.”

‘Hello, Luke,’ the thing said, though he heard nothing out loud. Instead, the words appeared in his brain, fully formed and stilted with an unfamiliar accent. ‘My name is Kareem.’