emergencycomplaints

Chapter 161

Luke was so exhausted that he didn’t think he could fight back even to save his own life. The necromancer might have been content to ignore him since he wasn’t a threat before the crossbow incident. Now the black-robed man was staring daggers at him, and Luke was wondering if there was anything he could buy with 22 AP that would save his ass in the next ten seconds.

Zea was dealing with a half dozen undead chasing after her after she’d been disarmed and basically lost a hand. Ruca...

Chapter 160

There was no time to think, not with the bolt all the way in the air. If she had, Zea never would have tried to stop it with her whip. The bolt was so small, and moving so fast. It would be impossible to hit it out of the air, even with her perception of 21 helping her follow its path.

She didn’t think; she just moved. The whip slashed up, impossibly thin but directed by her will to exactly the point where she needed it. The bolt came into the range of the razor prong aura and Zea kne...

Chapter 159

The man who stepped out of the wagon wore a midnight blue robe trimmed in silver. He had long, dark hair pulled back from his face and tied into a braid that was thrown over one shoulder, and pale, sallow skin. A sneer rode on his lips and he regarded the exhausted trio with anger in his eyes.

“Well,” he said, his accent somehow crisp and snooty at the same time as he dragged out the word. “This has been a disaster. On the bright side, I won’t have to pay all these guards now an...

Chapter 158

“Fuck that,” Zea said. “You’re going to get yourself killed if you don’t retreat.”

“I’ll be alright,” Luke said.

Zea glanced pointedly at his hip, where blood was staining his pants and the armor that Wellind’s spear had pierced. The armor was digging into his skin now, but that was still better than what would have happened otherwise. It felt like the spear had stopped at the bone instead of shattering it and passing through, a fact that Luke was fully willing...

Chapter 157

The chain’s magic held through the volley of bolts and Luke charged up the length of the caravan at top speed. Guards fell one after another, but they Luke paid for the momentum. He couldn’t dodge all the bolts, probably not even most of them, and he wasn’t trying to. What he was doing was relying on his armor and Zea’s skill at enchanting things to keep him safe, and he knew neither of those was foolproof.

He killed six guards in the few seconds he had to act with impunity, and...

Chapter 156

There were countless skills in the system, including those that helped with crossbow use. The one that concerned Luke was called [Rapid Reload], which helped the user pull new bolts, place them, and reset the crossbow far more quickly than they otherwise could. Between that and a decently high agility stat, it was easy to fire three or four bolts a second.

Roughly a third of the caravan guards had that skill, not that it would do them any good if they didn’t already h...

Chapter 155

Ruca watched, his hands clenched tightly around the hilts of his swords, as the slave caravan approached. The mounted guards at the front caught sight of the tree and called a halt well back from it. Ruca silently cursed as the front wagon came to a stop a few hundred feet away. The tree over the road trick always worked in the stories, but in this case, they’d have been better off with nothing. The timing might have been tighter, but they were few enough in number that they probably could ...

Chapter 154

The caravan consisted of twelve wagons. The one in the lead was completely enclosed, more like a huge, overgrown carriage than a wagon, with two men sitting on the bench on the front. The next two were the ones Luke pictured whenever anyone said words like ‘pioneer’ or ‘prairie,’ the ones with canvas stretched around ribs to make a kind of roof, with the oval-shaped opening on the back end. Supply wagons.

The remaining eight were something completely different. They were more li...

Bonus Chapter

From the author note on today's update:

Bonus Chapter!

Why a bonus chapter when I just reduced my posting schedule to catch up my backlog? Well, because I just hit my milestone goal for my first year as a writer. On September 1st, 2022, I lost my job. I had a nice long Labor day weekend, and then I started writing full time. As of a few minutes ago, I just wrote my millionth word (it was the word "three"). I even had a few weeks to spare. I made about $...

Chapter 153

Two people stepped out of the bushes. Both had the silver-white hair Luke was seeing everywhere now, and both were well-armed. Luke counted four swords between the two of them plus a pair of belt knives. One of them had a sheath strapped to his leg with another knife, and the other had her hair up with a pair of what looked like needle-sharp stilettos.

[Analyze] told him they were levels 37 and 35 with a bunch of combat, survival, and tracking skills, both strong enough...

Chapter 152

“First, I want to revisit my initial assumption. Can my family be brought back from the dead?” Luke asked.

“They can,” System confirmed.

“And I could do that right now, if I were at the command console of the God Machine?”

“That is correct.”

“I don’t need to upgrade my bloodline again?” Luke pressed.

“You do not. You will have full access to all bloodline skills at the command console.”

“And they’ll come back just like how they...

Chapter 151

“Ooooooh shit,” Luke said.

Nobody in the crowd was panicking or screaming, so obviously they’d been expecting something like this. Blood spurted into the air, and a chorus of voices rose up, all saying the same thing. Then the man on the stage died and his murderer’s lips moved in some silent prayer. Even with his perception at 55, Luke couldn’t make out what the man said.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Zea whispered harshly as she grabbed at Luke’s arm. “Mayb...

Chapter 150

The first thing they did upon disembarking the Silk Lady was to take a few minutes to just wander around and get a feel for the most prominent language. Neither of them had any first-hand knowledge of the eastern continent and only had System’s insistence than the locals spoke a language called Eledarn, and that Consortium Standard was the dominant trade language between the various clans that controlled the eastern continent.

Luke had the AP to buy both languages, but Zea co...

Chapter 149

The last two months of Luke’s life had been beyond boring. There was really only so much of staring at empty, open water he could take, and he’d hit that limit weeks ago. Other than a brief break from the monotony when the Silk Lady had docked at an island port to make repairs for a week, there’d been nothing to see and nothing to do.

Luke had used that opportunity to hunt down some local wildlife, both to butcher some meat and to finish grinding out the last bit of XP he...

Chapter 148

Author's Note: This is the final chapter in book 2.

- - - - -

Zixin appeared in the nothingness that surrounded her brother’s domain. She could have manifested herself right in front of him, of course, but that would be rude. There were niceties to abide by. Sometimes, observing those customs was the only thing that kept the Pantheon from fracturing.

For a minute, she thought that Hestoc would ignore her. He couldn’t pretend he hadn’t ...

Chapter 147

The chain was set to protect the ship as fully as possible rather than do the bare minimum, which meant it wasn’t going to last more than a few minutes at the rate Luke was hammering on it. Zea winced each time the echo of another impact reverberated through the wood and the mana in the chain dimmed just a little bit more.

They were going at it hard now. Luke had been holding back before; she just hadn’t realized it until she saw him cut loose. Both figures were blurs that ranged up...

Chapter 146

Zea wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on around her. The sailors were doing their jobs, Luke had fucked off to somewhere else and left her to her work, and she was entirely focused on compensating for the gentle rocking of the ship as she carved tiny runes into the steel. Unlike an enchantment forged with [Ghost Script], the real thing couldn’t be altered once she’d started. She had to do it all perfectly from front to finish, or she had to start over if sh...

Chapter 145

The simplest place to put AP was into stats. He had more than enough to drop 30 into every stat and just completely overpower Lath in terms of raw capabilities. Of course, that didn’t guarantee a victory. It had been a painful lesson that had been beaten into him repeatedly, but he was finally figuring out that just having a higher strength stat didn’t guarantee victory, especially when he was fighting against someone with skills that were way more advanced than Luke’s. Given the nature...

Chapter 144

Luke spent the next hour or so using [Analyze] on every sailor on the ship. None of them were over level 20, and in fact only one of them was a higher level than the Captain herself. Even then, it was only just barely, and that guy’s skill set was so obviously geared towards being a sailor and nothing else that Luke actually considered him one of the weakest people on the ship in terms of his odds of winning a fight.

He still wanted Zea to bump up her strength a littl...

Chapter 143

While the ship was much smaller than the Averast, once Luke was actually on it, it seemed plenty big. Still, to go out into open water, to cross the entire ocean in it… It felt like the entire cargo hold would have nothing but food and water in it. Maybe he was overestimating how long it would take to make the trip, or maybe there was a supply stop halfway.

They were met on deck by the captain, who was wearing much the same outfit as Luke remembered from the first time, compl...

Chapter 142

It was far too easy for the people of Aros to see in the dark, even on a moonless night, which this wasn’t. Thus, the goal wasn’t to avoid being seen by hiding in the darkness. It was merely that despite everyone having stats to see better in the dark and reduce their need for sleep, most people weren’t out and about at night. Fewer people on the streets meant fewer people seeing them.

Luke led them on a roundabout path through Sicanti, ducking through side streets and taking odd ...

August Schedule Update

Hello,

It's been a busy summer for me, and August is shaping up to be the most crowded month yet. As such, I will be changing to a M-W-F update schedule next month. I hope to resume my normal Monday to Friday schedule in September once things have calmed down.

As always, thank you for your patronage, and I hope to still see you all on the other side.

-E.C.

Chapter 141

“Everything alright there?” Zea asked as Luke barged back into their camp.

He looked a little wild in the eyes, but whatever he saw must have reassured him since he quickly calmed down. “Sorry, System pointed out to me a little bit ago that we had no evidence that Lath is still being controlled by zombie ants. He could have crawled away to recover under his own power and might have been tracking us.”

“Oh, I see. So you got a little spooked and came running back to me for...

Chapter 132

There was no way to keep Zea from gaining XP along with Luke, not as long as they were using [Ghost Script] to make the bombs. If she made them the old-fashioned way, there was enough separation between her as the enchanter and him as the wielder of the bomb to assign all of the XP to him, but those took hours and money to make. [Ghost Script] let her inscribe the runes on any old chunk of wood or a rock, as long as she didn’t need them to last for more tha...

Chapter 131

“125 AP,” Luke said. “Just slightly more than what I have available, because of course it is.”

Despite that, he wasn’t upset. Just knowing that there was an option for [XP Cycle] now was enough to take a lot of stress off him. Gaining a single level before he could put it into effect was no big deal, and he immediately started planning out how to abuse insect bombing to his advantage. They just needed to wipe out two or three hives to push up to a high enough ...

Chapter 130

Zea took the news that their plans on using a bloodline skill to strip the inquisitor of his stats wasn’t going to work about as well as Luke did, though with considerably more swearing. After giving her a few minutes to get it out of her system, Luke said, “There’s still the possibility of making something similar. We won’t know until we try. I figured you’d want to get a look at the interface with me.”

“Can I?” she asked.

“I don’t see why not. [Remote...