Chapter 11

Luke woke up the next morning to find the hawk sitting in a branch overhead, staring down at him. Despite his new levels, it still had that dreadful aura about it, but given how often he’d ran into it now, he was pretty sure it wasn’t going to attack him.

“Well if we’re going to be hanging out, you need a name,” Luke told the bird from where he was lying on the ground. “How about… Red… bird. Red Feather. Red hawk… Maybe just Red? What do you think?”

The bird let out a screeching caw and shifted its weight on the branch overhead.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Luke said. “Where should we hunt today? You want another of those marmot matriarchs? Maybe an elk?”

Red just sat there, looking hawkish and majestic.

“Alright, let’s just play it by ear and see what we can find then, huh?”

Luke cleaned himself as best he could without actually climbing into the stream. He was considering stripping down and trying to scrub his clothes in the water though. Even without any sort of detergent, anything had to be better than what he had on. His pants and shirt were both stiff with dried blood and mud, and he’d been wearing the same socks and underwear for days now.

Things were… not great in the personal hygiene department. Not having a convenient roll of toilet paper was another unpleasant surprise when Nature made that call to him. It was probably the most nerve-wracking shit he’d ever taken in his life, just squatting there wondering if something was going to pop up out of nowhere and try to murder him while he frantically pinched it off and hiked up his pants.

According to [Survivalist], he could make soap by mixing animal fat and ash together. Luke supposed that keeping relatively clean was important for fending off diseases and bacteria, though he found it a bit weird to just know how to handcraft soap. Skills were like that, just dumping tons of seemingly useless info in his head, too much to sort out, but then he’d be thinking about something and a relevant thought or process would come out of nowhere.

He had at least a few days of letting the animal hides dry out so he could make some containers to hold weapons and supplies, and he was already feeling nasty as fuck, so Luke figured soap making was a worthwhile endeavor. That would be an end-of-the-day project though, because he was about to take his new mace out and ruin something’s day.

Red took to the sky and circled around, often disappearing behind the canopy, but always showing back up. Luke shot the bird an annoyed glance, but then shook his head and smirked. It wasn’t like he wasn’t going to be killing plenty of animals and leaving them behind anyway. It was honestly surprising that he didn’t have a whole flock of scavengers following him around by now.

Luke didn’t think of what he did as hunting. His whole strategy was just to walk in a more or less random direction and trust his perception to pick out any incoming animals or monsters. Or monstrous animals. There were a lot of those too, things that looked something like animals he knew from Earth, but shot fucking lightning bolts out of their Goddamn antlers, for example.

A lot of things were highly aggressive too, like those marmots he’d run into on the first day, though they knew better than to screw with him now that he was a higher level than their matriarchs. It made it real hard to feel bad for busting their skulls open when they attacked him first.

He needed roughly 600 XP to hit his next level, and he was determined to get it before noon. That was only ten or twelve kills if they were near his level. He only needed to find one every fifteen to twenty minutes. That shouldn’t be too hard.

Half an hour later, Luke was thoroughly annoyed. “Where the fuck are you?” he yelled. The valley was miles wide; he couldn’t have killed everything in just a few days.

Then something rumbled nearby and tremors shook the ground. Luke smiled grimly and gripped his mace in both hands. He’d fought one of these yesterday and they looked way worse than they were. A raccoon the size of a dog house waddled towards him, too wide to fit between the trees but more than willing to shove its way through.

Two-ton raccoons were deceptively heavy. They didn’t look that big, but he’d discovered that their skeletons were metallic when he’d killed the first one. That included their skulls, which made head-shots a non-starter. Whoever came up with that shit must have been a comic book nerd.

That didn’t make them invulnerable by any means, and all said and done, they were still just overstuffed raccoons. He advanced eagerly, more than happy to engage the animal inside the trees. The branches would limit its movement more than his anyway.

Luke was really starting to get a feel for the way his body moved with stats. As the two-ton raccoon trundled forward, Luke took two bounding steps and leaped into the air. He came down mace first and crushed the raccoon’s shoulder, his own feet touching down on the fur a split second later and pushing off to send him back into the air.

The raccoon let out a harsh, ragged cry of pain, something that sounded like it should come from a great cat. Luke landed on the ground and pivoted. He had to weave his mace through the branches to keep it from getting tangled up, but that’s what agility and perception were for. He had the weapon back up in front of him and ready to attack with again in an instant.

The raccoon was too big to turn easily, too used to its bulk and its metal frame keeping it safe. Luke probably could have done a cleaner job with an axe or sword, but the mace worked just fine. He rained blows down on the monstrous animal’s body, tearing skin and muscle with each one. Even if he couldn’t break bones, there were still plenty of vulnerabilities.

[You have slain Two-ton Raccoon (lvl 8). 65 XP awarded.]

The two-ton raccoon was a pile of bloody fur and meat by the time he was done with it, but Luke was unharmed. He was covered in splatters, but he’d expected that. “One down,” he said. “Running behind schedule already though.”

Thanks in large part to Peripheral Awareness, Luke was much less gun-shy on fighting groups now. Something basically had to come up directly behind him in order to surprise him. That didn’t mean it was easy to defend himself from multiple angles of attack, but he’d found that repositioning himself was almost always an option. Animals were rarely smart enough to try to do more than flank him.

The few goblins he’d fought were possibly the smartest enemies so far, but even those hadn’t been very bright. They’d also strongly preferred the dark and he’d only seen one out in the woods when it was dark. The others had all stayed underground. That made the old flashlight trick an excellent opener. He had yet to see any that used any sort of advanced tactics, but then, he hadn’t seen very many. Luke knew better than to get careless around them just because he’d easily beaten the few he’d seen so far.

That was why, two hours later, when he’d made his way all the way down to the southwest corner of the valley, he found himself sitting in a tree near the edge of the forest trying to figure out what the hell he was looking at. It looked like some sort of armed encampment, complete with six-foot walls made out of stacked wooden logs.

There were look out towers on the north and south sides, each one manned by a pair of goblins. Eight huts huddled together within the walls, and some sort of long house sat in the back. Behind that was an extremely wide-mouthed cave. The empty space was split between what looked like small gardens and some sort of open space with a bunch of wood piled up.

There were probably twenty goblins visible from Luke’s vantage point. Some were holding spears or swords, some were working the gardens. One of them, a bit bigger than the rest and wearing some sort of fancy hat made out of sticks and feathers, was yelling and gesturing furiously at the gardener goblins.

Luke was too far away to tell if any of them were high level, but even if they were all under level 5, he wasn’t confident enough to fight that many at once. Just as he was about to start climbing back down, he noticed the goblins in the towers had actual crossbows. He shook his head; it was just one more reason to stay the hell away.

The look outs weren’t the only ones with crossbows. Luke discovered that fact approximately ten seconds after spotting them at the camp, when a bolt lodged itself in his leg. “Fuck!” he all-but-screamed. It wasn’t as bad as getting ran over by the van spider, but it still hurt plenty.

He started to fall out of the tree, but caught himself before he could slip too far. Below him, he saw two goblins with spears, both looking up and ready to skewer him when he dropped. Another goblin was about forty feet away on a low ridge that gave it a surprisingly good angle on him. That one was busy reloading its crossbow.

Luke didn’t have a lot of time to think things through. He started by pulling the bolt out of his leg, happy that it wasn’t barbed. It slid out easily, though a new jolt of pain went through him. Then he judged the distance to the ground, maybe twenty feet. On two good legs, he could make that no problem. With only one, it was a lot riskier.

What he couldn’t do was sit there and wait to get shot again. The tree itself was not thick enough to provide full cover, and he didn’t fancy pretending to be a target dummy. That left him only one direction: down. The trick was going to be getting there without getting skewered.

If there’d been just one, Luke would have tossed the mace straight at its face and been done with it. He might even still do that if he could figure out a solution for the second goblin. He didn’t have much on him besides his lighter, flashlight, folding knife, and multitool. The folding knife was probably the least useful now that he had a full-sized knife from his brother’s stash.

Luke was not an expert knife thrower. What he did have was 8 agility and gravity on his side. He opened that knife up and threw it as hard as he could at the goblin on his right. To his surprise, it sank directly into the goblin’s eyeball. The monster started screaming, dropped its spear, and clutched at the handle to pull the knife out.

That was all the distraction Luke needed to take out the second one. He dropped from the branch he’d been straddling, caught a new one lower down with one hand, and hurled his mace straight at the second goblin.

To its credit, it was aware enough of the situation to attempt to dodge. It even made it mostly out of the way, though the mace did clip its arm on the way down and send the goblin into a brief spin. That gave Luke enough time to fall the rest of the way to the ground. His legs flexed to absorb the impact and, hissing with pain, he reclaimed his mace.

The first thing he did was smack the screaming goblin in the face and shatter its skull. It dropped straight down in a heap, twitching but otherwise unmoving. Luke limped towards the remaining goblin, which looked like it was about to break and run. It made a half-hearted jab at him that he side-stepped, then leaped away.

Luke wasn’t about to let it flee. For one thing, he was pissed off about getting shot in the leg. For another, he wanted the XP from killing it. Finally, if it ran back to the camp, he might have another twenty goblins on his ass in the next few minutes. If he was really unlucky, they’d have heard the first one screaming and were already sending someone out to investigate.

He caught up to the goblin quickly and killed it with a single swing. Then he turned back to the ridge and scanned it once over. “Where’d you run off to, you little fucker,” he growled.

A twang caught his attention and his eyes snapped over to see the goblin perched at a different vantage point. The bolt was coming straight at him, but he moved behind a tree and let it go by.

“Got you now.”