Chapter 103

Now that the fight was over and the adrenaline was wearing off, Luke started to feel all his injuries. He’d had a few dozen holes of various sizes poked, ripped, or torn in his body over the course of the fight, and what wasn’t actively dripping blood was swollen, inflamed, or bruised.

Probably the worst of it was the gut wound from a squirrel folk spear. It wasn’t immediately fatal or anything, but now that the fight was done, it hurt like hell. If he hadn’t had access to [Life Surge], he would have been extremely worried about it. His never-used [First Aid]skill told him it was the most life-threatening of all his injuries, practically guaranteed to kill him from infection if nothing else.

Unfortunately for [First Aid], Luke was fresh out of any sorts of medicinal plants or herbs, and he definitely didn’t have any bandages. The leather armor he’d taken from those bandits was nothing more than tattered scraps at this point, and his clothes weren’t much better. Worst of all, the harness he’d bought to hold his mace had not held up to the rigors of the fight. He kept it anyway, figuring he could repair it.

Luke skimmed through his notifications as he retrieved the bundle of firewood from where he’d stashed it. It was much harder to carry now that he had to add his mace to the pile, but somehow he managed. There were a lot of kill notifications, which he grouped together into one big lump.

[You have slain 262 creatures between levels 3-26. 22,905 XP awarded.]
[Congratulations! You have reached level 31. 31 AP awarded for use.]
[Congratulations! Twitch Reflexes has reached rank 3. 1000 XP awarded.]
[Congratulations! You have reached level 32. 32 AP awarded for use.]

“Damn,” he said with a whistle. That was nothing to scoff at, though he wasn’t about to volunteer to do it all over again. He’d expected the levels, and wasn’t even really surprised that he’d gotten two. If anything, the surprise was that he’d killed so few creatures. It had certainly felt like three times that many. Perhaps he hadn’t been as thorough about one-shotting a squirrel with each attack as he’d thought, or maybe the druids had been doing some sort of magic bullshit in the background early on.

Either way, he’d gotten a metric fuck ton of XP from the fight, and gotten a free rank up that saved him 25 AP in the process. He wasn’t going to complain about his gains, and was in fact feeling pretty damn smug about the whole thing. He had just enough AP to buy rank 2 of [Life Surge]now, and if he was being honest, he needed a stronger version of it. He was only waiting until he got back to Zea just in case the side effects were worse than rank 1.

When he got back to the cave they’d set up camp in and found the corpses of four squirrels in front of it, Luke threw the firewood down, grabbed his mace, and raced inside. Images of her being buried in a wave of roiling fur while they bit and scratched her to death danced in his head.

He could still feel her XP inside, so he knew that his worst fears weren’t true. But she could be injured, on the brink of death. The difference between her surviving and not might be measured in seconds. If that was the case, he needed to immediately buy the full suite of skills needed for magic and dump his AP into the most powerful healing spell he could aff-

Zea was sitting next to a backpack full of food, an annoyed expression on her face as she tried to clean herself up. Blood splatters covered one sleeve and were flecked across her chest and neck. Luke let out a relieved sigh and felt his stomach unclench. “You’re alright,” he said. “I saw the corpses and…”

“Yeah, I’m fine. No thanks to you,” she muttered, not looking up from her attempts to clean herself up. “And where the hell have you been for the last half an- holy shit!”

She finally glanced over and beheld Luke in all his ragged and bloody glory. He gave her a lopsided grin and said, “I had an adventure looking for firewood. If you could maybe do me a favor and pick up the firewood I dropped outside on my day in, I’m going to go ahead and buy the upgrade to [Life Surge] and use that. Guess we’ll see how bad it kicks.”

“Buy the upgrade? But you were two levels short half an hour ago…” Zea trailed off as she realized how much his XP had grown. “Gods save you, how many were there?”

“Two sixty-two,” he said. “I’m probably going to need another big meal here.”

“Are you sure you should use it again so close to last time?” she asked. Then she looked at him again and shook her head. “Better than what you’ve got going on now. Go ahead. I’ll start getting stuff ready.”

Luke took a deep breath and then dumped 100 AP into the rank up. It was by far the most he’d ever spent in a single go, and it had damn well better be worth it. He supposed he was about to find out. Glancing over at Zea, he said, “Going to use it now.”

[Life Surge], now rank 2, kicked on, and lightning surged through Luke. All traces of weariness disappeared from him as he jolted out of a slouch he hadn’t even realized he’d been in. He could physically see the bruises on his flesh fading over seconds and feel the holes made by spears and knives scabbing over. As they did, several small pieces of wood were pushed out of the wounds and fell to the cave floor. An intense wave of itchiness rolled through him, then the scabs peeled loose on their own and fell to join the wood splinters.

“Holy hell,” he whispered. Even the gut wound was closing up. It wouldn’t heal completely before the skill ended, but it was a puckered scar now instead of a gaping wound. Even as he thought that, the thirty or so seconds [Life Surge] lasted passed by. And still he didn’t come down from it. Zea was watching him like a hawk, waiting for him to drop from post-skill-use exhaustion, but he was still brimming with energy.

“Wish I had this an hour ago,” he told her. “That whole fight would have been a lot easier.”

“It’s still going?”

“Almost double the length of rank 1 now.”

The scar on his stomach smoothed over, leaving nothing but healthy pink skin and a small hole in his happy trail. By the time the skill kicked off, a full two minutes after he’d activated it and four times longer than he’d expected it to run, he was free of even the slightest injury.

The first hunger pang hit him, but it wasn’t any worse than usual. It actually might have been a little lighter, though he couldn’t say for sure. What he didn’t feel was the wave of exhaustion that normally accompanied the skill ending. If pressed, he thought he could continue fighting. That needed some experimentation to confirm, of course, but if he was right, [Life Surge] had just upgraded itself from trump card to opening play.

“Oh, I like this,” he told her, flexing his hands open and closed. “Totally worth 100 AP.”

“You need some food?” she asked.

Luke shrugged. “I could eat, I guess. Think I’d rather wait for dinner.”

“Huh. Well, okay. I guess I’ll get a fire going while you, uh… figure out a clothes situation.”

“There’s not much to figure out there,” he said. “This stuff is pretty much beyond saving.”

“What are you going to do, just walk around naked for the next month?”

“I thought I’d keep the shoes,” he told her seriously. They had some holes forming at the sole, but they were better than nothing. The rest of it wasn’t even in good enough shape to be called rags. “Maybe we can take a week or so to rest and I’ll make something out of animal hides. Not here though, too close to the squirrels and they could come back. As soon as we’re done eating, I want to get moving again.

“Yeah… maybe. I guess we’ll have to see what we wander into next.”

Luke shrugged. There was only so much they could do, and they needed to keep heading north. “System, I don’t suppose you could tell us what’s north of here and how far we need to go to reach civilization?”

“You are approximately two hundred fifty miles from the closest human settlement,” System said. “The territory between your current location and the human town is mostly contested by various individual predatory animals or monsters. None are above level 30.”

“What about non-human settlements?” Zea asked.

“Not counting the squirrel folk you just encountered, there is a tribe of otter-kin sixty miles northwest of your current location. You would need to deviate from your current route to find their village. The next closest settlement is a clan of goblins in the mountains ninety miles northeast of here.”

“Fuck goblins,” Luke said. “Not going near those guys again.”

“I don’t know anything about otter-kin either,” Zea said, frowning. “Are they friendly?”

“I am not able to speculate on their motives,” System told her.

“How strong are they?” Luke said.

“They fall between the range of level 1 for their pups to level 40 for their strongest champions.”

Luke let out a low whistle. “If they’re not happy to see us, that could ruin our day. Might be better to just skip it.”

“So our options are to take a few days off so you can make pants, or just push as hard as possible to find a place you can buy pants?”

“Depending on how thick the forest gets, it might actually be faster to just make the run,” Luke said. He was pretty sure he could do two hundred fifty miles in a single day even in the woods. For Zea, it might be closer to a week unless she let him help her.

Having no clothes wasn’t the end of the world, if he was being honest. He didn’t really get cold anymore, and while getting stabbed in the dick by a wayward branch would suck, he wasn’t really worried about it doing any damage. Thank God that insensitivity only applied to pain, though. Zea would not be happy with how high his stamina had jumped up otherwise.

“No matter how we look at it, we can’t stay here,” she said. “The squirrels know where we are, so getting out of here in the next hour is a priority to me.”

“Agreed. Although the XP was pretty nice and at this point, even the strong ones aren’t a threat to me.”

“Don’t be dumb. They’ve still got whole cities to throw at us if they want, and we have no idea how tough their upper echelons are.”

That was fair. Other than the few druids, he was under the impression that everything he’d been fighting were kind of common infantry units or weaker. Even the squirrel folk hit squad that had tried to ambush him when he was fighting the stick monster weren’t that strong, early 20s at the highest.

He had to laugh a bit though. He still remembered how much he’d struggled to survive against that goblin, his first above level 20 kill. He never had figured out quite what had happened with the notification giving him assist credit. It probably had something to do with that other goblin who’d betrayed them all.

Now he was fighting off dozens of monsters at once, all of them the same level as that goblin, without even worrying about it. His stats had jumped way up since then though, and more importantly, all of his combat skills were rank 2 or higher. That made a huge difference too. Once he picked up [XP Mask], he was thinking it was time to get [Mace Mastery]up to rank 4.

“Oh, by the way,” Zea said. “How much is rank 3 [Life Surge]?”

Luke checked, then winced. “250 AP.”

“Damn. Well, that’s not happening any time soon.”

“Nope,” he agreed. “But imagine what it could do. Maybe I could just keep it running all the time with no drawbacks. That might be worth it.”

Zea just rolled her eyes and snorted. Then she paused and got a sly grin on her face. “All the time?”