Chapter 22

Luke was absolutely fucking exhausted. He was filthy with blood, of which about half was his own. It had taken about five hours before the goblins had given up, and in the meantime, he’d been forced into eight separate fights. Or rather, he’d let eight different hunting parties pursuing him with mastiffs find him, carefully working to make sure only one group at a time caught up to him.

That was not as easy as he’d have liked, since he was leaving a blood trail all over the damn forest. Most of his injuries had eventually slowed to a trickle, some of them bleeding no worse than a fresh nick from shaving. He idly scratched his face there, reminded of how itchy it was with the stubble he’d grown in over the last week.

Thanks to the miracle of stats, he was still alive to be exhausted. Otherwise he’d have died in the shattered remains of his campsite when the goblins first popped up. It was a thought he’d had often, and he was reconsidering his brother’s build strategy that advised a lower stamina.

Luke pulled his mind back to the present. That last group should have been enough to push him over. He checked his notifications to be sure, but he had a feeling. There had been extra ding in there.

[You have slain 5 creatures between levels 6-9. 266 XP awarded.]
[Congratulations! You have reached level 15. 15 AP awarded for use.]

“Perfect,” he said to himself. If he still wanted [Life Surge], and he did, that meant he needed to save 9 AP from this level and use the whole 16 AP from his next level up. That left 6 AP, which he decided to divide up. 1 AP went into a skill on his build recommendation list called [Unarmed Martialist] that he’d been putting off because he hadn’t seen a lot of use for it when he had his mace.

Supposedly it would also help him with footwork and dodging in addition to giving him the skills to fight bare-handed, but he hadn’t seen the use with [Twitch Reflexes] already handling a lot of his evasive needs. That skill had utterly failed him while he was fighting wounded, and [Unarmed Martialist] was going to fix some of the other skill’s blind spots, so he decided it was worth the price.

Hopefully Curt’s notes about it were accurate. It was becoming increasingly obvious that he was going to get hurt and that the skills weren’t infallible, especially against thinking and reasoning opponents. He didn’t have the experience needed to fight against his own skills and strong opponents at the same time, and while fixing that with yet more skills didn’t seem like a fantastic idea, he didn’t have a better one.

The other 5 AP were going into agility and stamina, 4 into agility and 1 into stamina to bring them both up to 21. If he was being completely honest with himself, part of his stat spread was visual appeal. He liked a lean, well-toned athletic look. If his strength got too far ahead, he started looking bulky. His clothes already didn’t fit him that well anymore around his shoulders and biceps.

His plans on making new ones out of soft, supple leather were shot to hell now. It was going to take a day to rebuild the new frames even if he recovered his tools, which was looking unlikely happen. Then it would be even more days waiting for everything to dry enough for him to work with it, then however many days it took him to cut and stitch it all together.

Luke would just have to take it one step at a time. His jeans were in relatively good condition, all things considered. One of his shoes was solid, but the other had a pair of matched holes in it. It was still better than being barefoot. His shirt was basically rags at this point, and his coat wasn’t much better. Somehow, miraculously, he still had his multitool, lighter, and flashlight.

Luke walked while he went over stuff in his head.[Unarmed Martialist] was already affecting him in a way that [Mace Mastery] hadn’t. It seemed to be entwining itself with his agility stat somehow, retraining how he walked and held himself. It was too soon to tell, but he imagined it would increase his coordination in a subconscious way that stats just didn’t. Agility helped him hold his balance, helped him make his body move exactly how his brain wanted it to, but [Unarmed Martialist]was showing him the best way to move his body.

He regretted not picking it up earlier now that he was experiencing it. “System,” he said softly, stopping in place.

“Yes, Luke?”

“Are there other skills like [Unarmed Martialist]that would affect how I move?”

“Of course. [Stealth] is probably the most commonly chosen skill that changes the user’s movements.”

“Ah, I see.” That wasn’t on Curt’s list. “Thank you.”

“You are most welcome.”

Luke killed another few hours doing laps around the forest, but it seemed like the goblins had given up. He wasn’t sure if he’d killed all of them or if they’d figured out he was targeting their hunting dogs and pulled them back, or maybe the sun had risen too high and they’d decided to withdraw until the light situation favored them.

He was ready to head back to Curt’s workshop and get some sleep, but he needed to do something about the occasional blood spots he was still leaving. That meant finding the stream that ran near his former camp and cleaning up. Between [Survivalist] and his own knowledge after spending over a week roaming the valley, Luke had a pretty good idea of where he was and where to go.

If ever there was a spot to be ambushed again, it was where they’d gotten him the first time. Luke obsessively checked his status for any signs of a new curse affliction and traveled both slowly and cautiously the whole way. Once he got there, he started stripping out of his clothes and scrubbing them clean as well as he could. That was mostly a lost cause, as the blood had been setting for hours.

Then he wrung his shirt out and resigned it to its inevitable fate of becoming bandages. It was so ragged now that he didn’t get very many full strips of cloth out of it, but there was enough left to bandage his foot, which was honestly the worst of his wounds. The fact that he’d kept walking and fighting on it probably hadn’t helped, but he hadn’t had much choice.

Cleaned, bandaged as well as a ratty old shirt and rank 1 [First Aid] could manage, Luke limped his way back to the cave. He stopped and groaned when he got to the ravine. There was another group of those albino spider-like people, cave grippers according to his system notifications, coming down the ravine with their latest catch, a trio of shockrack elk. Normally, things that were much lower level than him avoided him, but these particular monsters never seemed to learn.

Luke pulled his mace free and trudged forward. They were all low level and he wasn’t afraid of them, but he’d just gotten clean and he was tired. The cave grippers stopped when they noticed him and exchanged glances. They lowered their meals to the ground and arrayed themselves in a defensive semi-circle around them.

“Look, guys, can we just not?” Luke asked tiredly. “I’m really not in the mood.”

He moved off to the side of the ravine and started walking past them. This was where they’d strike, as soon as he was past and showed them his back. Something in their psychology just wouldn’t let them not take a swipe at him, even though they knew he was a much higher level.

Sure enough, [Peripheral Awareness] clocked the aggressive first strike as soon as they thought they were behind him. Luke suppressed a sigh and spun on his good foot to lash out one-handed with the mace. Even though he wasn’t unarmed, his new skill adjusted the bend in his knee to keep his balance perfect as he extended his arm and threw his weight around behind the swing.

The mace struck the cave gripper’s shoulder, blowing it sideways and into a spin that only ended when it crashed into the stone wall ten feet away. A small part of Luke hoped that would be enough to convince the others to reconsider, but he didn’t expect it. Four times he’d been forced to fight them when going back and forth from the workshop, and every time, they fought to the death. The closest to retreat they ever got was that very first encounter when they’d brought back that tank of a spider.

He figured it was some kind of territory thing, and that since he kept killing the new groups that tried to take over the dried-out ravine, more of them were going to come up from whatever depths they lived at to try to fill the void. As tired of it as he was, he tried to think of it as a bit of free XP every other day.

The battle ended shortly after that, with no more than one or two strikes to kill each one. It was kind of interesting to see how [Unarmed Martialist] modified the way his body moved, often shifting his stance to allow for a greater variety of follow-up motions that let him react to attacks without having to predict them. With so many more options open to him, [Twitch Reflexes] got a lot more flexible and stopped trying to tear his wounds open again to make him dodge a certain way.

[You have slain 5 creatures between levels 5-6. 147 XP awarded.]

A part of him wanted to save the carcasses of the three elk, but since he no longer had his stretching racks, he was back to rigging up something using tree branches. It hadn’t worked very well the first time, but he’d been too inexperienced to realize it. He could use some of the meat too, but he didn’t feel like going back out into the forest to get firewood to cook it and it wasn’t like he could store it in the fridge.

In the end, he left it all behind. All he really wanted was sleep. Luke approached the crevice that led up to the workshop, climbed up to his place of relative safety, and passed out on the stone bench that served as his bed.

* * *

“You said it would be blind,” Gulgok snarled at the Blackfut.

Unimpressed, the shaman corrected him, “No, I said its perception would be reduced. Its level must have been high enough that the curse wasn’t enough to completely blind it.”

Gulgok hated his shaman, not just because the smaller and weaker goblin refused to cower and obey, but because of those strange powers he had. He’d put almost all his AP into esoteric skills that built up to something formidable, something that couldn’t be beaten with mere strength of arms.

Except the Day Hunter had overcome the curse, at least enough to keep some measure of awareness. If it could do it, then Gulgok could do it too. And if Gulgok could do it, then maybe it was time Blackfut learned to fear and respect him in the proper amounts.

But no, not yet, not while the Day Hunter was still breathing. If the damn pink-skinned monster had only shown up at its camp an hour or two earlier before the sun had come up, they’d have had it. They’d waited for hours throughout the night, Bluerock hunting parties scouring the forest, but in the end, the Day Hunter had walked right into the ambush they’d set up, only late enough that daylight had affected the Grimshard marksgoblins’ aim.

Or at least that’s what Margl claimed. More like his goblins couldn’t hit a two-ton so fat that it weighed three tons. Once they’d killed the Day Hunter, Gulgok was thinking it was time to reorganize the valley’s hierarchy. Bluerock had lost enough goblins already that their only choices were to be absorbed into Bloodbite or be exterminated.

And then, once he’d taken care of them, he’d finish off Grimshard and be the sole boss left. And then, when all the threats were wiped out and his power was consolidated, that shaman would get what was coming to him.

He just had to take care of the Day Hunter, and it would all be his.