Chapter 81

The guy in charge of the bandits wasn’t physically imposing. He was a few inches shorter than Luke with a slim build and a thin, dark mustache over his lip that matched equally thin, dark hair. If Luke had to describe the feeling of the XP coming off him, he would have said it reminded him of some of the children he’d seen in towns and villages on Aros. Sometimes it was so low that even looking for it, he couldn’t find anything. In this case though, Luke was betting the guy was a lot more like Myla, with multiple overlapping skills hiding it all.

“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt me too much to build up a little more XP,” the bandit leader said, drawing a slender sword from its sheath at his hip. “Or maybe I’ll keep you alive for now and sell you to some noble twat who wants to level his kid up quickly.”

“That’s a lot of shit talking coming from a guy who used to run a whole bandit camp until I killed them all.”

“That’s because the key to successful banditry is quantity over quality. Your minions have to know that even if they all jumped you at once, you’d kill them easily. Otherwise that’s exactly what they’ll do once they start getting stupid ideas.”

The bandit stepped into the prison area and closed the door behind him, cutting them both off from the light. Luke supposed both their perceptions were high enough to make out fine details even without light, but the bandit wouldn’t know that. He might get a surprise hit off if he acted like he couldn’t see very well. Luckily for Luke, he had just the right skill for that.

Pulling on [Deception] to fuel the idea that he was partially blinded, Luke shuffled backwards a step and turned his head a bit, his eyes squinted like he was searching for something he couldn’t quite see. The bandit was all arrogance, he’d see what he was expecting. If he was as good as he thought he was though, Luke would only get one surprise attack off. It would need to count.

“You should know something about me,” the bandit said, stepping to the left as he spoke. Luke’s head snapped around to face the noise and he shifted in place to square himself up with the bandit. “I spent a lot of years running a confessional for the Inquisitorial Department after I retired from field work. When I say that I might capture you and sell you off, I want you to know that I mean you’ll be kept weak through torture, but you won’t die. I am a professional, after all.”

He advanced while he taunted Luke, but then silently swept back to the right. Luke kept his eyes trained on where the bandit wanted to pretend he was and shuffled backwards another step. The bandit reached out with his sword when he was about eight feet away and tapped the metal bars on the opposite side of the hall, just to bait Luke in.

Luke took the bait and stepped forward with a wide swipe that looked like he was trying to clear as much of the hallway as possible. It would have been a fair play to make if he really couldn’t see anything, and the bandit bought the ruse. He slipped forward after Luke’s swing and drove his blade downwards in an attempt to stab Luke through the thigh, only to miss completely when Luke shifted his weight and pulled his leg out of the way.

The bandit was quick though, and he skittered backwards, perhaps already sensing he’d been tricked. It was too late by then, and Luke reversed the direction of his mace, charged it with a [Power Strike], and bounced the bandit off the bars of a cell. Against any of the other bandits, except maybe that cook, that would have meant a lot of broken ribs and a man who wasn’t getting back up off the ground again.

The bandit took the blow with a grunt, landed lightly on his feet, and dodged Luke’s follow up attack. He didn’t even have the decency to lose his weapon. “Well played,” he said with a smirk. “I underestimated you, and you took advantage of it.”

Then he came back in, this time with a blazing fast series of thrusts delivered from seemingly impossible angles. It had to be some sort of skill; the only other explanation was that his agility was just that high, and if that had been the case, Luke wouldn’t have tagged him with that first hit. The stabs came at him too fast for him to even attempt to parry, so he relied on [Twitch Reflexes] and [Unarmed Martialist] to keep him safe.

By the time the bandit slowed down from his flurry of attacks, Luke was bleeding in five different places and they were thirty feet deeper down the hall. Unsure of how often he’d have to face an attack like that and unwilling to let his enemy take the initiative to do it again, Luke surged forward. His mace swished through empty air as the bandit dodged backwards, under, and in one case that involved stepping off the wall and backflipping to land on his feet, over the attacks.

Luke’s agility was almost as high as his strength, and he couldn’t touch the bandit even after landing that solid first blow. Mixing in elbow strikes, kicks, and other attacks from [Unarmed Martialist]helped, but mostly in forcing the bandit back whenever he tried to exploit an opening in Luke’s slower attacks.

Neither of them were getting tired, despite their wounds. The bleeding had already stopped from the original stab wounds, and the longer he fought, the less they hurt. That wasn’t all adrenaline either; his stamina was helping to repair the injuries. The bandit had fully recovered from the one solid hit Luke had managed to land on him as well.

The fight had lasted a solid two or three minutes already, a kind of zen experience that left him completely in the moment with no room for other thoughts. The hallway was covered in a screen of rubble from Luke’s attacks hitting stone walls, but neither of them were bothered by the hazard, not enough to let it slow them down, at least. Luke wasn’t going to win the way things were going, but he still had a trick up his sleeve, not to mention his trump card.

If possible, he wanted to avoid using [Life Surge]. The aftereffects sucked, and it put him on a strict clock to overwhelm his opponent before the skill ran out. Against someone with a high stamina like him, he didn’t think that was the best call. So instead, he let the bandit take the lead, get a feel for how Luke moved, how he thought. The fight was starting to go against him, the older man’s experience in combat helping him predict Luke’s every attack.

Then Luke spent 15 AP and bought rank 3 [Mace Mastery].

The fight looked completely different. Instead of blinding attacks that Luke was struggling to keep up, his mace moved without even needing to think about it. He intercepted a sharp thrust from the bandit’s sword, managed to catch it between two of the flanges on the mace, and twisted sharply to pull the weapon to the side.

That wasn’t enough to disarm the bandit, of course, but if there was any single area Luke had an advantage in, it was his strength. He slammed the blade down to the ground and lashed out with a front-facing kick that forced the bandit to either abandon his grip or have his knee caved in. As Luke quickly found out, there was a third option.

The bandit twisted in place and threw himself into the air, upside down, and did a sort of cartwheel move that kept his hand on the hilt of his sword. It looked fancy as hell, something some kind of gymnast at the Olympics would have done to show off. It also left him incredibly vulnerable since his entire body was off the ground and not forcing Luke to fend off an attack of some sort.

Luke heaved the mace back up, aiming for the bandit’s skull. He missed, but only by an inch or so, and the mace slammed into the bandit’s shoulder. He was blown sideways into the wall, and Luke was on him before he could recover. Luke slammed his weapon into the other man’s body twice more before the bandit scrambled away.

Those last few hits must have knocked the fight out of him, because the bandit fled back down the hall. He was still surprisingly nimble for a man who’d just gotten the shit beaten out of him, but not so quick that Luke couldn’t keep up with him. He got the door open and got three steps into the bedroom before Luke caught up.

After that, the fight quickly went Luke’s way. The bandit tried to pull out another skill that increased his speed, but he’d held onto it until too late in the fight, and with his injuries, it wasn’t enough to save him. Luke pulped the man’s hip, then crushed his chest, and was about to bring the mace down again when he heard the kill notification ding.

[You have slain human bandit (lvl 27). 769 XP awarded.]

“Holy shit, why was this guy so much stronger than the rest of them?” Luke asked. “I mean, I know why. But like, the fuck.”

Now that the fight was over, his hands shook and it was a struggle to keep his breathing steady. That had been by far the most stressful fight he’d been in to date, even including that duel with that goblin. Myla might have been worse, but considering how he’d been taken out by an ambush there, he didn’t really consider it much of a fight. Zea was the one who’d fought that one.

Speaking of which, she was going to be pissed. He would just have to hope that the loot he brought back mitigated that, because he was definitely going to get shit about running off to fight bandits for the next week. He resolved not to tell her that he’d almost died to some random no-name who’d been tougher than anyone else he’d ever met. That would have been the shittiest ending to his journey.

Luke took a few minutes to put himself back together, stole the dead man’s sword and his purse, then gathered up the jewelry case and the broken money box. There were definitely other valuables in the pile, but he didn’t see a good way to travel with them. If they’d had a cart or a wagon, that might have been a different story, but that also would have required them to stay on the road.

Maybe some day he’d come back to pick through the rest of it, when things weren’t so dire. Or maybe he’d just sell the location and a description of the loot to someone else. Either way, there wasn’t much more he could do at the moment. He made his way back through the keep, scooped up the crossbow and the quiver of bolts near the front door, and headed back out into the rain.

He kept his eyes and ears open, but he was pretty sure at this point that he’d either killed all the bandits or that the ones he’d missed had run for the hills. Either way, he didn’t see any between the keep and the campsite, where he paused once again to break down one of the tents and collect the loot he’d piled up there, what little of it was travel-sized.

There was only one last thing left to do: face the wrath of a pissed off short lady who very well might punch him in the balls as soon as she saw him.