Chapter 9 – Mending Fences

Luke hurried down the steps as his shadow lengthened out ahead of him. The sun was already trending toward the horizon, and the darkness of the next floor was even more complete than he had remembered.

The shattered window, partially blocked by debris, let in a long fat line of golden light that everybody was keen to stay out of yet close to at the same time. Luke found it surprisingly easy to see with what little light they had and made it down the crumbling steps on John’s heels.

John gulped a few times, trying to work out what he was going to say when Luke pulled out a health potion from his own stock and held it out. “We got lucky,” he told them, much to John’s shock.

Luke had looked at the sorry state of them all. They had already been through enough.

The Archer recovered with alacrity, however, because he was all smiles an instant later. “Their sacrifice will be remembered,” he intoned. “Alice?”

The HR manager turned Healer got up, stepped tiredly toward Luke and took the potion in surprisingly steady hands. She wandered over to Tracy, who lay supine on a table. The only member of their group still out for the count.

As the others went to join them to watch if alchemy was indeed a miracle worker, John held Luke back. “Why?” He looked pained.

Luke gave him an incredulous look. “Isn’t it obvious? They need hope, John. Even you couldn’t have spun what happened. I’m not exactly mister popular, if you haven’t noticed. Having to give up their potential lifesaving potion for a coworker while hearing that I was right all along about looting the bodies? It’d be too much.”

John clearly didn’t like it, but he wasn’t stupid. He saw the angles and understood the optics of what Luke had just done. “Then I don’t see any reason why you should be made to suffer for it.” He held out his own health potion. “Take it. I was going to give mine up, anyway. This way, I get to pay you back for keeping morale up.”

Luke glanced at John’s face and then at the red potion. He wasn’t about to turn it down. He had gone over and over in his head about what he was going to do on the way down. He snatched the potion and put it into one of the pockets in his black cloak. “I appreciate it.”

“Nobody needs to hear what happened up there,” John whispered.

“We shouldn’t stay here long anyway,” Luke whispered, then couldn’t help but ask, “Did you get a level?”

“I did, though only after I attacked that one. Why? You can’t think–”

Luke shook his head. “No, I don’t think you’re trying to hide that you’re a higher level from them. I’m working on a theory, that’s all. Think of it as collecting data.”

“Fair enough.”

They walked over to the table where Alice was gently dribbling the red, slightly syrupy contents into Tracy’s mouth.

Much like Alice’s healing, the effects were immediate. The color came back to Tracy’s skin, going from corpse pale to rosy-cheeked in an eyeblink. The bloody stump just below her elbow shifted beneath the bandages.

For a second, Luke wondered if the limb would regrow, but no such luck. It only rounded out as if she had it professionally amputated years and years ago.

Everyone watching collectively breathed a sigh of relief. For as dark as things turned out to be, at least something worked out in their favor.

Too bad it had to be a onetime use health potion.

“I think she’ll be fine now,” Alice said. “At least until I can recover enough mana to heal her again.” She looked over at Luke with a mother’s knowing gaze. “Thank you.”

Luke hunched his shoulders defensively. “Just doing my part.”

Alice clearly saw more than he would have liked, but she kept her thoughts to herself as she eased down beside the table and leaned the back of her head against the tabletop.

“What’re we going to do now?” Alice asked the group.

Luke had to stop himself from immediately offering a plan of action. Truthfully, he wasn’t entirely sure he would make the right call.

Not that there were many options to choose from.

While he had a moment, Luke distributed his free points again. This time it was split between Perception and Dexterity, bringing both up to a total of 29 and 15, respectively.

Status

Name: Luke Solus

Race: Human (G-Grade - Level 2)

Class: Rogue (Level 4)

Profession: N/A

Vital Resources

Health Points (HP): 155/180

Mana Points (MP): 60/60

Stamina Points (SP): 52/80

Stats

Strength: 17

Dexterity: 29

Endurance: 8

Fortitude: 7

Vitality: 18

Perception: 15

Willpower: 12

Wisdom: 6

Arcane: 8

Fate: 4

Free Points: 0

“We rest for now,” John said to the group, forcing some positivity into his voice. “And then we get ourselves out of here. That means down and out, so we’ll need to be prepared. And we’ll need all of us to do it.”

“I can scout ahead with Luke,” Edgar offered. “That’s how it usually goes, right?” he asked the Rogue.

Luke nodded dumbly, surprised to be addressed directly. “Normally, whoever has the highest Perception is usually best to scout ahead. Mine is only 15.”

That earned him a lot of looks, most doubting and a few speculative. He supposed gaining that last race level pushed it a little higher than normal. Then again, every Rogue level was raising Perception too.

It hadn’t occurred to him how much higher his stats might be than everybody else’s. From what he could remember of the other classes, not many gained Perception except Rogue and Archer.

“Well, mine is only 10,” Edgar said grudgingly. “I’m afraid it wasn’t nearly as high as yours when we came here. I’ll catch up with a few levels, Rogues don’t get any Perception do they?”

“Just a point per level.”

“Ah, well, maybe several levels then,” Edgar said brightly. “You should stay here,” he said to John. “The more we have going out, the more danger we’ll all be in. Right?” He looked at Luke for confirmation.

“Yeah. Smaller is better.”

After a short and much needed rest, Luke and Edgar headed down into the stairs.

It seemed to Luke that he recovered faster if he was relaxing. Not doing anything strenuous or walking about, just sitting and effectively lounging appeared to boost his recovery by a decent margin.

“How can you see in this gloom?” Edgar whispered as they slowly took the stairs that wound along the inner wall of the curved tower.

Luke was about to ask what he meant, but stopped himself. “You can’t see anything?” He didn’t have too much trouble seeing.

“No, nothing. I’m blind as a… er… well, you know. Not gonna say it, bad taste and all that.”

“Must be a Rogue thing?” Luke guessed, though it didn’t have the ring of truth in it. He didn’t necessarily intend to lie, but neither did Luke understand why he could effectively see in the dark.

It wasn’t normal, not without some kind of skill or title to grant that power. Perhaps the 50% boost in Perception compared to Edgar explained it.

Luke could make out faint shapes and shadowy forms, nothing concrete, but it was at least visible. There were no windows on the next floor, but there appeared to be a whole lot of broken furniture and boxes littering the space.

Tensing, he immediately looked to the ceiling, but couldn’t find anything there. His vision wasn’t great, but it was at least good enough that if there were more bats roosting, he should have been able to pick them out among the exposed beams.

“You want to go back?” Luke asked, keeping his voice pitched low as they slowly descended to the floor. He resisted the urge to go lower. There didn’t seem to be anything here. If they were quiet, there was a very good chance they could make it to the ground floor, even if there were monsters lurking about.

“Nah man, I wanted to back you up.” At least Edgar understood how to keep his voice barely above a whisper.

“Uh-huh.”

“What? You don’t believe me?”

“You can’t see,” Luke pointed out. “How are you going to back me up if you can’t see anything? You’re just as likely to hit me as a beast.”

“Okay, you got me. Want the truth?”

“Always.”

“You’re a bona fide badass, bro.”

That certainly caught Luke off-guard. “Thanks?”

“Nah, seriously. Think about it. The others up there don’t want to fight. You can sense it in the air. They want to hole up somewhere roasting s’mores and singing songs until this whole thing blows over. You and I both know that’s not going to happen. What we do here is going to determine what we do for the rest of our new lives. You have any idea how many years I’ve played Ragnarok Online and every janky korean MMORPG on the market?”

Luke chuckled. Maybe for the first time since the Company scooped them all up. “So it’s like that?”

“Game recognizes game, my man.” With his hand on Luke’s shoulder so he didn’t wander off and break his neck, Edgar continued the stream of whispered confession while Luke searched for hidden treasure or monsters.

Preferably both.

“The point is, they don’t want to fight. Why make them? But you, you’re legit. You’ve got that game sense, you know? That instinct that tells you what to do before you know you’re doing it. I’m not saying I’m a pro gamer or anything, but I’m not nothing, and more importantly, I want to learn.”

“If they’re going to survive, they need to fight,” Luke whispered solemnly. “That’s what the Company is looking for. People strong enough to make it.”

Edgar looked at him oddly. He probably didn’t think Luke could see. “I didn’t take you for a Company Man.”

“I’m not,” Luke said a little too quickly, “but you’d have to be stupid to not see the writing on the wall. They’re the ones who hold all of us by the collar. Until we know more about them, there’s no reason to draw their ire. They seem to want strong people, and making yourself indispensable is one of the best ways to make sure you can screw around at any company with impunity.”

“They teach that at Harvard?”

“I didn’t go to–” Luke shook his head. He definitely wouldn’t have been working where he was if he had. “This is the way the world is now, Edgar.”

“Call me Ed.”

“If they don’t smarten up and start looking around at the reality staring them in the face, they’re not going to make it, Ed.”

“You think you’d be able to whip them into shape?” There was a leading edge to his voice that Luke didn’t like.

“No.” Best to shut down any suggestion of mutiny early on. Some small part of his brain wondered why not, but Luke shut it out.

He knew he could take John in a fight. It would be laughably easy. That wasn’t the point.

He was no leader, and he didn’t want to be. That wasn’t his goal.

What Luke wanted more than anything was to go out and hunt monsters. To dance on that razor’s edge once more and see if he had what it took to come out the other side stronger for it.

No settlement management, sect leadership or whatever form of leadership the multiverse had to offer could ever compare to the thrill of that.

At his core, Luke was an explorer. He wanted to see every inch of what this new universe had to offer.

He realized he was grinning at the thought of seeing things that, back home, would have been only possible in games and movies.

Just like the skulking, hunched figure that lurked between two piles of boxes, clearly trying to get around Luke and Ed for a rear ambush.