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 the commotion he caused doing it drew the attention of even more of them. They weren’t just holding their ground either. No, most of them were on the move, darting around wagons or running for the trees. Some were just trying to play tag with Luke, and he had to run them down or let them take free shots at him.

For the most part, the drivers ducked their heads and tried to stay out of the fight. Most of them realized immediately that Luke wasn’t coming after them and did their best to stay out of his way. Some of them cowered on their benches with the reins still in their fists. Others scrambled to put the wagon between themselves and Luke. He noted one who even crawled under the wagon, which seemed like a stupid idea to him because horses were still animals and those wagons were not remaining perfectly still, especially not if the fight got too close to them.

Things were proceeding more or less as expected until a stray bolt struck a horse in the flank. That set it off and caused its partner in the harness to panic with it. The two of them reared up and lunged forward, barely missing the wagon in front as they galloped off the road and away from the fighting. Unfortunately while the horses cleared the gap, the wagon didn’t. It crashed into the one in front of it and, perhaps aided by the horses still dragging it, bounced up onto two wheels and then tipped onto its side with a great crash.

Screams of pain and surprise came out of the slats on the sides of the wagon as the occupants were all thrown to one side and piled up on each other. If Luke hadn’t been busy crushing the clavicle of a particularly boisterous guard who’d abandoned his crossbow in favor of trying to duel Luke with a sword, he would have flinched just from the sound alone. As it was, all the crash really did was highlight a need to start freeing the slaves soon. Even if the attack failed, some of them might still escape.

It was callous to think it, but it would also give the guards more targets to aim at. Luke was pretty sure the chain wrapped around his waist was about to fail, and he wouldn’t be able to take every hit soon.

On the other hand, he was a little busy and it wasn’t like the wagons were designed to be opened. Each one was a fully sealed rectangular box made of thick wood and banded with steel. Luke was pretty sure the proper way to open them involved some sort of bolt cutter to snip the bands and a big fucking prybar to take the back wall off like it was a giant crate. It did not look very smashable, not without seriously injuring the people inside.

Besides, when the one wagon had tipped over, Luke was pretty sure he’d heard chains rattling. If everyone was shackled together and to the wagon itself inside, it was going to be even harder to break the slaves free. The only way the bandits were going to have enough time to start freeing people was if all the guards were dead or captured, and killing was a lot easier than arresting.

Light sparked across the chain as runes flashed in a wave before going dark again. Luke was no expert, but he was pretty sure that meant he’d exhausted all the magic the chain had stored. That was confirmed a moment later when a bolt slammed into his pauldron and stuck there, its head an inch deep past the metal and lodged into his shoulder.

“Shit,” Luke said. He’d lost count of how many guards he’d taken out, but the fight was about to get a lot more painful. He ripped the bolt out and cast it aside so that [Life Surge] could patch him up.

A quick glance around showed him twelve of the thirty-two guards still alive and willing to fight. Some might have fled, but he didn’t think so. He’d also ended up killing three of the drivers, with the remaining nine either hiding or knocked out. Luke was past the point of going easy on them now.

Of the five horsemen, Luke had killed one in the forest and it looked like two more had been killed fighting Ruca, Val, and Wilby. One of the remaining two was fighting with Val while the leader and Ruca crossed blades, and the final one was charging at Luke at full gallop, a heavy spear held in hand. There was still no sign of the caravan master, or whoever it was in the front carriage-wagon.

Luke used [Analyze]on the horseman charging at him, just to refresh his memory. Level 20s were one thing, but a mistake against someone over level 30 could be decidedly more fatal. The man, Acrom Wellind according to the system, was level 34 and had invested rather heavily in strength and stamina, almost completely ignored his other two stats, and had a variety of skills that focused on staying power and the use of a variety of heavy weapons. Luke suspected he might be going for some advanced merger of his weapon skills, but needed another ten levels of AP to get everything to come together.

There was also a throwing skill in Wellind’s build. Considering the double-bladed battle axe on the guard’s back, Luke didn’t really need [Tactical Foresight] to predict what was about to happen. Rather than running him down and skewering him with the spear, Wellind’s arm snapped out and the spear shot the twenty feet through the air towards Luke’s stomach.

Luke was already pivoting out of the way before the spear passed the front of the horse. It came at him faster than he’d expected and scraped across his armor, but left Luke unharmed. The horse followed in a split second later, and even though Luke hurled himself backward, he still got kicked as the beast passed by. The guard’s axe swiped at Luke’s neck, but Luke dodged it easily by moving with the momentum transferred to him by the horse’s kick.

The man bent forward and grasped the quivering haft of his spear as his horse ran by and pulled on the reins to bring it around to face Luke again. If the rider had been the only threat, Luke was confident in he could win. Wellind just didn’t have the raw power to take Luke down. But there were still seven guards paying attention to Luke and they’d only pulled their shots long enough to make sure Wellind didn’t get hit on accident. Now that the horseman had ridden past Luke, they started their barrage back up.

“How are you fucks not out of ammo by now?” Luke yelled at them, though not in a language any of them understand. The hostility in the tone came through clearly, though, and they responded by shooting at him again.

He let [Twitch Reflexes] guide him out of the way of as many as he could and spun to square off against Wellind again when he heard the horse start to run his way. Then, so abrupt he’d almost forgotten is was coming, [Life Surge] failed. Luke stumbled a step, just one, before he regained his balance.

In that single step, Wellind’s spear flashed forward and caught Luke’s hip. The armor probably helped, at least judging by the tortured screech the metal gave off when the spear dug through it, and then hot, wet agony radiated up into Luke’s stomach and down towards his knee. He was flung from his feet and rolled to a stop thirty feet away.

“Fuuuucck me,” Luke groaned. He needed to get back on his feet before something came along and finished him off, but for some reason, his leg didn’t want to respond to his brain’s commands. He had seconds at most before Wellind came around for another lap, and probably less than that before one of the guards put a bolt in him.

There was no time to wait for his natural regeneration to heal the hip wound, no time to bandage it up. If his leg wasn’t going to work, he’d just have to do a lot of hopping around. Maybe he could get behind one of the wagons, or better yet, back to the trees. That was going to put his back to the guards and all but guaranteed he’d take a few more hits, but it was better than dying on the ground here.

Ding.

Luke paused in the act of climbing up to one knee. There was no mistaking the ding of a kill notification in his head. It wasn’t even a real sound, just something he heard in his head, like the phantom buzz of his phone vibrating, only to find nothing when he checked it. Well, maybe that was a bad example, since he never mistook the system ding for anything else.

Luke craned his neck to look around and saw Wellind’s now-headless body sprawling across the ground as it fell off the horse he’d been riding.

“The fuck?”

* * *

Zea’s heart leapt into her throat when Luke took that spear to the hip. It wasn’t hard to guess what had caused him to stumble, and even if the guard hadn’t realized why it had happened, he’d recognized the opening immediately. Getting knocked down had actually saved Luke from a pair of crossbow bolts, and the guard had paused for a second to yell at the two idiots who’d almost shot him.

Before she’d realized what she was doing, Zea was charging out from behind cover, the handle of her razor prong whip grasped firmly in her hand. She needed no special skill to control it, just a simple investment of kinetic energy provided as she swung it forward and harnessed by the enchantments to activate the weapon’s devastating cutting properties.

Her path took her at an angle to cut the horseman off. If the horse had been a high level, she never would have made it in time, but the man had been using the beast’s momentum to put some weight behind his attacks, not for its foot speed. The average level 1 horse was much faster than a level 1 human, and especially a level 1 dwifkin, but it was difficult to level a horse up very high, and depending on the breed, much of its AP went towards stamina and strength, not agility.

Zea got in range with seconds to spare. The whip reached out in front of her, already primed and ready to strike. It stretched the entire length, a solid twenty-five feet now, and, driven by her will, coiled once around the horse rider’s neck. The coil of whip tightened, and the head was sliced clean off. The horse kept running, heedless of its rider’s death.

Luke was still trying to get off his back when the horse rider’s body hit the ground. He looked at the corpse, surprise evident on his face, muttered something she didn’t quite catch, and glanced over at her.

“Move!” she yelled at him as she rushed in his direction. She knew it wasn’t his fault, that he’d have a hard time even standing upright, but if he just sat there, the remaining guards were going to kill him. She reached his side and did her best to drag him back upright, at least as high as she could reach.

“Come on,” she said, tugging him toward the trees.

“We can’t,” Luke told her. “They’ll die.”