Chapter 127

The hardest part of the plan was finding a spot with no one else around. They didn’t want to kill some random person who just happened to be walking by. Thankfully, Zea had built in options in the enchantment that would let her trigger them remotely or with a timer, but the range on remote detonation was pretty awful.

They decided it was better to let the inquisitor catch up and make sure he got caught in the blasts than it was to keep their lead and hope they’d timed it right. As long as no random stranger walked into the middle of things, Luke wasn’t too concerned about the explosions causing collateral damage. A blown-out wall could be rebuilt. Bringing someone back from the dead was quite a bit harder, as he well knew.

As they went around the corner and broke line of sight on the inquisitor and the two mercs following them, Zea pulled both bombs out of her bags, took a second to prime the enchantments, and handed one to Luke. He studied the street for a second to find the best spot.

It was really more of a wide alleyway than a street. A trail of hard-packed bare earth ran down the middle, with strips of grass on either side next to the houses. There wasn’t much in the way of litter or garbage to hide the bombs behind, but the grass was tall enough that he thought it would go unnoticed to casual inspection.

More importantly, both houses were empty. The bombs might collapse them completely, but they wouldn’t kill anyone. Zea was sure she could trigger them both at the same time, so the plan was to place one on either side, then blow the inquisitor to smithereens as soon as he stepped between them. If they were lucky, the blast would take care of the two mercs as well.

He gently set one down in the grass to his left, acutely aware of every little rustle. That inquisitor’s perception was so high that he felt that the noise was a legitimate concern. He placed it as softly as he could, which in his opinion was pretty damn near completely silent. Zea did… well, other than stepping onto the grass, she did fine. Actually, that kind of covered up the noise of her dropping the bomb, as long as the inquisitor didn’t note a change in footfall patterns.

With the first part of their diabolical plan to murder a man of the cloth completed, they walked away at a somewhat slower pace. About thirty seconds later, the inquisitor appeared in the mouth of the alley, and their lead had shrunk from four blocks to two. Worse, Luke had already determined that the new alley they’d walked into was a dead end, and that if they jumped the wall that blocked it off, they’d be landing on somebody’s property.

Well, it probably wouldn’t matter much. They’d be there for all of four seconds before leaving out the other side, so no one was likely to even notice, much less complain. But It’d be just his luck to step into some sort of boobytrap the moment they went over the wall.

They were putting on the act, like they’d just gotten lost and taken a wrong turn. It wasn’t much of an act for Luke, who’d regularly gotten lost even when he’d had access to GPS. Still, he wrung out every bit of help he could get from [Deception], hoping to sell the ploy, hoping that the inquisitor would take another five steps forward without noticing the bombs.

For once, nothing went wrong with one of their plans, other than the fact that the mercs hadn’t showed up with him. Luke didn’t much care about getting those two though, not when the stronger one was only level 30. They would only be a threat in large numbers.

Both bombs went off at the same time, throwing a huge cloud of debris into the air. Chunks of wood, brick, and dirt arced into the sky and rained down on the city in every direction, reaching far enough that Luke had to bat a few chunks away to avoid being struck. He glanced down at Zea for confirmation, but she frowned and shook her head.

“Shit,” he muttered. The explosion hadn’t killed the inquisitor. He reached back behind him to grab the handle of his mace. If the damage was severe enough, maybe Luke could finish the job. He took a step forward to put himself between Zea and the rolling dirt cloud coming out of the alley, then peered into it.

He’d just bumped his perception up to 49. That should have been enough to see through the cloud, or at least to see a silhouette or something. Instead, the first warning he got was the sound of creaking wood on the roof of the building to his right. His head snapped up just in time to see the inquisitor, clothes ravaged by fire and skin bright red under the smeared black of soot. The man looked to be about fifty and made of wire and gristle. He had a thick mustache obscuring his upper lip and a head full of gray hair that currently looked like it had only a passing acquaintance with the concept of a comb.

He was also holding a short sword in one hand, its edge blackened and crisp, and a throwing knife in the other. In a flash, the knife spun through the air towards Zea, cutting across the distance too fast for normal eyes to follow. It might as well have been a bullet fired from a modern-day gun for all the reaction time Luke had while it traversed those twenty feet of open air.

Somehow, miraculously, he batted the knife off to the side. Considering that [Twitch Reflexes] didn’t do anything to help against attacks that weren’t aimed at him, he had to give all the credit to his own enhanced agility and perception, with a dash of assistance from [Tactical Foresight] recognizing the imminent throw and plotting its path.

It was only after he’d saved Zea from taking a knife in the throat that he realized the trap. He was off-balance now, vulnerable. That was exactly what the inquisitor had planned all along. Even if Luke had realized it, it wasn’t like he could have done anything differently, not in the microsecond he’d had to act.

The inquisitor came down from the roof, blade leading. That would have been an exceptionally stupid move normally, considering how hard it was to defend against an attack when mid-jump. In this case, it was less of a leap and more of a dive, and given the man’s extremely high stats, it was all Luke could do to throw himself backwards out of the way of that descending blade.

He saved his nose from being cut off, but only just barely. Even with three different skills pushing Luke out of the way and an agility score higher than anything else he’d ever seen, the inquisitor was so blindingly fast that it was all Luke could do to track the movements. There was no thought to the fight as he dealt with the follow up attacks, just pure reaction speed.

Luke dodge out of the way of a pair of strikes, slipped between the inquisitor and Zea, and deflected another blow on his left vambrace, only to have the sword sheer through the metal with a squeal and draw a line of blood across his forearm.

[You have been afflicted by the following condition: Poison- Cobalt Scorpion Venom (3M).]

Because of fucking course this inquisitor would be another poison user, just like the last one. The difference was that he was way stronger, although this particular poison didn’t seem to be doing much. If Luke had to guess, he’d say that the pair of bombs had cooked the poison coating the blade and rendered it more or less useless. The short duration and the fact that he didn’t feel much of a difference in his body seemed to support that assessment.

That was fantastic news, since the last thing he needed now was another handicap. The inquisitor seemed experienced enough not to expect anything either, or else he was just too good at schooling his facial expressions to show surprise when Luke failed to slow down.

They continued fighting, with the inquisitor forcing Luke’s positioning in order to keep Zea safe, a tactic he’d pounced on immediately and was using to great advantage against Luke. At the rate things were going, Luke was either going to end up overpowered against the inquisitor’s superior skills, or he was going to miss a block and let the inquisitor slip by to attack Zea. A single hit would probably be all it took to kill her.

Luke activated [Life Surge].

Instantly, he had the inquisitor on the defensive. The man obviously knew what kind of skill Luke was using, and that the best way to defeat it was to wait it out. Unfortunately for him, Luke could keep it running for a full two minutes now, which would be plenty of time to end the fight. He pressed his new advantage ruthlessly, even going so far as to channel a [Power Attack] or two into parries that came at a bad angle so that he could blow through them and smack his mace into the inquisitor.

The man took the strikes with nothing more than a grunt, having turned with the blow at precisely the right moment to nullify the lion’s share of the damage it would have done. Luke mentally cursed and tried to drive the inquisitor back into a corner where the man wouldn’t be able to dodge so easily.

That didn’t work, not just because the alley only really had a corner at the dead end, but because the Inquisitor had no qualms about jumping into the air. His agility was so high that the first time he flipped over Luke’s head, he still managed to dodge an attack by twisting his body around and drove his blade into Luke’s shoulder.

The wound healed immediately, but the fact that the inquisitor had scored it at all was terrifying. Luke should have had the clear advantage with both feet on the ground and the ability to move freely, but somehow he’d lost that confrontation. He couldn’t even imagine how bad he’d be doing if he hadn’t spent all that AP. Even at rank 4, [Mace Mastery] was not keeping up with the inquisitor’s bladework.

He was starting to get worried that even with [Life Surge] going and him using [Power Attack] every few swings, the inquisitor was going to outlast him. He needed some way to change the fight, to get it more on his terms. He had more strength, and a huge pool of AP he could spend if he had to. Maybe he needed to take it to the ground, get the man in a proper pin, and slit his throat.

There were probably even a few grappling skills he could buy on the fly. He’d done some wrestling in high school, but it wasn’t really his thing. Luke was pretty sure he could close in for a grapple if he accepted a stab or two as the price of doing business, but he was less sure he could keep hold of a man with over 60 agility, even if he did buy a skill to help.

He didn’t have a better idea though. He opened his skill store and split his concentration, desperately trying to stall for time while he skipped through the options. “Damn it, System, where’s grappling at?” he said under his breath, though he knew that System wouldn’t respond. The question wasn’t audible enough.

Then Zea finished whatever she’d been doing, and Luke was suddenly deafened by a rolling wave of sound so powerful it threatened to knock him off his feet.