Chapter 10 – Mistakes

“Ed, I need you to stay right here,” Luke whispered harshly.

“What, why?” Luke could practically hear the gears grinding, then meshing smoothly into place. “Oh. I get it. I’m bait, right?”

Luke didn’t have time to spell it out for Edgar, nor did he particularly want to. If the Archer wanted to learn, this was one way to do it.

Slipping away on the balls of his feet, Luke drifted between two tall stacks of crates and moldering linen coverings opposite the way the figure had gone.

Using his [Fleet of Foot] skill, Luke scouted as far as he dared. He didn’t want to leave Ed out there, exposed for too long, but he needed to be sure that there weren’t any more people.

Thankfully, he didn’t pick up on any other people, just the lone figure lurking around to get behind Ed, who was taking his role as bait seriously. He whistled tunelessly, obviously nervous, digging around in a nearby crate.

He had to admit, Ed had some stones if he was willing to sit around as bait in what must be utter darkness to the guy.

To anybody who could actually see what he was doing, it looked like a blind man rummaging around in a chest. Ed couldn’t see a damn thing, but Luke certainly could, and he saw the faint gleam of a knife removed from its sheath and raised toward Ed.

I guess that rules out any hope that this person just wants to talk, Luke thought. I had almost hoped it was another monster.

Despite everything, Luke wasn’t a killer. He couldn’t do it in cold blood. He raised a throwing dagger silently and let it fly just as the figure descended on Ed.

The dark blade streaked through the dusty air. It drew blood on the man’s hand as he cried out in pain and surprise. His dagger clattered to the ground.

Luke was there in a flash, his painfully overdressed shoe pinning the assassin’s blade to the floor.

“You want to die?” Luke asked, though the growl that emitted from his throat made it sound more like a promise than a question.

“N-no!” the man said, immediately throwing up his hands. “I didn’t mean anything, seriously! I can’t even see anything. I heard something hushed and slithering around, figured it was one of those creepy monsters, and that I’d score a quick kill. I don’t have any beef with you.”

Luke didn’t believe the man. He was clearly intending to attack Ed.

The way the man’s eyes roved across Luke to Ed, then back to Luke’s drawn scimitar, told him enough. He could see, at least as well as Luke, which was curious. Was it a stat threshold thing, or something else?

“What’s your name?”

“Benny, Benny, just Benny,” he laughed. “You know, like The Mummy? ‘Benny, looks like you’re on the wrong side of the riiiiiver!’?”

It was tempting to let his guard down, but Luke remained tense.

The man had reflexes to rival Luke’s. As soon as he said the iconic line, he dropped a hand to his hip and whipped out a dagger straight into Luke’s sword arm.

Predictably, Luke dropped the sword in a spasm of pain. The man called Benny rushed in with another throwing dagger gripped in his fist.

Unfortunately for him, Luke was ambidextrous. As the sword dropped from his nerveless fingers, he pivoted, shifted his footing, and lowered his left arm to scoop up the scimitar.

He didn’t even have to do any work. Benny ran headlong onto the scimitar’s blade that should have dropped to the ground. They stared, eye-to-eye for a long moment as the breath wheezed out of Benny’s lungs and around the steel impaling him.

The man’s dagger clattering to the ground sounded unnaturally loud.

Luke couldn’t stop himself from staring into the man’s dark eyes as the light vanished from them and he went limp.

You have defeated [Benjamin Riser - Human (G-Grade) Level 2, Rogue Level 5]. Extra experience gained for slaying an enemy above your level. 20 LP obtained. 5 Fate gained.

Level Up! Your [Rogue] Class has reached Level 5.

Stat points earned: +2 Strength, +3 Dexterity, +1 Perception, +1 Free Point.

You have Rogue skills to select.

Title earned: [Fate Stealer]

You have slain a known murderer, stealing their fate like they have stolen another’s. Your Marks have been updated. +2 Fate. Whenever you kill a fellow human, you gain half of their Fate. If they are a known murderer, you gain all of their Fate.

Luke jumped back and let go of the blade, as if his sword had suddenly grown red hot.

In the next moment, he shook himself out of it. He pulled the blade free of the corpse, realizing how stupid he had been to let the weapon go. If the murderer’s friends were around, Luke would need it.

One moment bled into the next as the body at his feet cooled. Every passing second, the chances of reinforcements dropped until Luke figured they were in the clear.

Shock at what he’d done made him numb as he cleaned the blood from the blade on the Rogue’s black cloak.

He felt sick, but that was no reason to let his guard down or neglect his gear. It had saved his life, after all.

While a part of himself shut down at the transgression, another part was exultant. He had just taken down another Rogue that was a higher level than he was. And all it had cost him was a cut along his right arm.

Luke cut off a strip of the Rogue’s cloak and used it to bandage up his arm. The cut was shallow. It had been a good throw, but one without much force behind it. The goal had clearly been to disarm, not to maim.

The second dagger was for that.

“Uh… Luke, Benny? What’s going on? Still can’t see.” He waved a hand in front of his face to illustrate the point.

“I’m here, Ed,” Luke said, kneeling down to the body. Better not leave any evidence.

“What uh… what happened with Benny?”

“He had some funny ideas about how to greet people,” Luke told him as he looted the body.

Ed eventually put two and two together. “Ah, he went full murderhobo, huh? Good thing you’re more badass than he was.”

The cloak, perhaps because of the damage he had done to it, didn’t get looted, but he did acquire a new belt of knives and a common-rarity dagger.

Aside from the weapons, Luke found some potions from the fallen Rogue. Likely taken from his kills.

In total, Luke picked up 4 health potions, 1 stamina potion, and a 1 mana potion. Their quality seemed to be identical to every other consumable he had found thus far: crude.

“Essentially,” Luke said. “Not that I’m surprised, but it seems like there’s nothing stopping full-blown PVP here.”

Not to mention large-scale genocide and warfare. The Company might own us, but it sure as hell doesn’t care what we do to each other. This is utter anarchy. Are we just some sort of game to these people?

Luke kept all of this to himself. He had his own suspicions.

He wasn’t about to let himself fall into whatever tropes they were trying to put before him if this was some sort of sick and twisted hunger games deal.

Survival first, revenge later, he told himself.

Ed rubbed his throat as if he could imagine a dagger sliding across it. “Some people just covet that red nameplate,” he said woodenly. “You’re not… I mean, you’re not feeling a little bit of the ol’ bloodlust, right?”

Luke took a dark sort of pleasure from seeing Ed jump as he patted him on the shoulder. “Wouldn’t dream of it, Ed. But, on the whole, I think it might be a good idea to keep this between us.”

“Yep. Consider my lips sealed,” Ed told him with a shaky laugh. “Thanks for saving me, then again I guess I was your sacrificial goat so… go team?”

He nodded, then remembered that Ed couldn’t see anything. He supposed he was more rattled than he thought about putting down a murderer. Some part of him had still hoped that all they had to truly worry about were monsters, which were bad enough on their own.

“We really need to get something for light, huh?” Luke took two health potions out and pressed them to Ed’s chest. “Here, take these.”

While the belt of throwing knives was just about the same thing as he already had, it was still useful to have another set. Gear seemed to be easily broken, and Luke had no way of repairing anything at the moment. He had some ideas for repurposing the additional throwing dagger belt as well.

Several throwing knives were missing from his own belt. He had yet to figure out how to instill mana into it to regenerate the lost weapons.

Now wasn’t really the time to try.

However, he did find that he could transfer knives from one belt to the other. It wasn’t much of a win, but he’d take whatever he could get at the moment.

Thoughts spinning with concern for what might lurk outside, Luke finished up checking the floor with Ed.

If one person had gone inside and went missing, how long would it take for his friends to come looking? And what did that mean for the other towers and ruins around here? There were so many, it would be impossible to search them all.

There were simply too many places to hide, but the towers were large, intact landmarks. People would naturally be drawn to them. They would need to leave as soon as possible.

In a way, it made a sick sort of sense to Luke. If you had a Rogue wait in ambush on a tower’s lower floor, you could get some quick kills in. Gaining both Experience and LP, not to mention the rare and valuable potions people started with.

It served a dual purpose of weeding out the competition while enriching the bloodthirsty group willing to get their hands dirty.

Luke and Ed were at least able to find some items stuffed away in one of the crates. A couple of metal framed lanterns. Luke was expecting something more medieval, rather than vaguely steampunk.

(2) Item: [Glowstone Lamp]

A brass frame encircling a spherical chunk of carved glowstone.

Enchantments: Instill with mana to provide illumination. Retract mana to quench illumination.

“Where are we going?” Ed asked as Luke led them down the stairs. “Shouldn’t we go up and check on the others?”

“I need to check on something,” Luke told him. “You can go up if you like. Whoever that guy came with… well, you saw the other towers, right? We’re not alone here. Somebody sent him in, or at the very least he got curious.”

“And murdery,” Ed put in.

Luke paused for a moment. You didn’t even see anything. I could have been lying to you about it all. Why do you believe me?

He wasn’t about to say those things aloud, but it did weigh on his mind.

The ground floor held several monster corpses. It looked like the Rogue didn’t know how to loot yet. Luke might be able to stomach defending himself, but he didn’t like thinking of the man he killed as having a name and a past or hopes and dreams.

It was odd that the Rogue hadn’t looted anything, since Luke had been given the prompt almost immediately and as far as he could tell, there was no skill to it.

“Do you know how to loot monsters?” Luke asked as they stepped onto the shadowy ground floor. From their high vantage point at the top of the steps, even Ed could have picked out the dark forms of strange, hunched bodies.

They weren’t dire bats, but something else. Slightly too small to be human, with limbs that were unnaturally long and heads put directly on their shoulders without bothering to include a neck.

“Do that thing everybody was on your case for?”

“Yeah.”

“Sign me up!” he said excitedly.

Luke grinned and hurried down the steps. There were four creatures here, and while they had lost out on any experience, at least there was some loot to be had.

More importantly, it meant that the way out was clear. And now, more than ever, Luke was determined that they get as far away from the tower as possible before night came.