Chapter 15

Curt’s build notes wanted Luke to invest in a suite of basic rank 1 combat skills, then pump stats for a few levels, and finally return to increasing skill ranks. It also called for learning a lot of rank 1 utility skills, as he dubbed them, and wanted Luke to do that the old-fashioned way. Luke didn’t really have the patience for that, so he was gimping his combat effectiveness slightly, but he didn’t figure wasting 5 or 6 AP was going to hurt him in the long run.

That having been said, Luke knew that his brother was both smarter and more practiced at this kind of stuff. Even if he didn’t necessarily see the logic behind it, he trusted Curt enough to follow the plan. His last deviation had mostly been the result of an emergency; he was wounded and needed the stamina to recover.

So he took his 11 AP and split it up between strength and perception to even them out and threw the single leftover point into agility. It might not have been necessary, but he found that agility helped the most to get him acclimated to moving properly again every time he increased his stats. It was only a matter of time until something else popped up to attack him, and he needed to be ready for that.

Luke did a couple practice hops and stretches, swung his mace a few times, and walked around in a circle. The changes weren’t as drastic now as they’d been in the early levels, but they were still there. His limbs thickened a bit with muscle, and his hearing got even sharper. Previously inaudible rumbling was easy to sense now, easy enough that he could almost pinpoint where it was coming from.

There were definitely more earth elementals around, and at least a few were heading in his direction. They just didn’t move very fast through the ground. He took a moment to study the landscape around him, figured out where the next one was likely to appear from, and approached it. Somehow, the elementals knew where he was, which he supposed made sense. They obviously weren’t using the same senses he was to keep track of things.

Overhead, Red circled the area once and screeched down at him. The bird seemed agitated, probably because it couldn’t eat any of Luke’s kills. “I will smash something fleshy for you later!” Luke called up to it. It screeched back at him again and flew off farther up the trail.

“So dramatic,” he said. “You’d think I never feed it. Him? How do you know if a bird is… how would two birds even… Like… missionary? Can they do that? Goddamn I miss the internet.”

The ability to just ask whatever random questions popped into his head and get an instant answer was one he vowed never again to take for granted, providing he ever got back home. His musings on that were cut short though, as his newly enhanced perception picked up on some minute cracks on the ground just starting to spread.

[Twitch Reflexes] was proving to be extremely handy for dealing with the elementals’ explosive entrances. Shards of dirt and rock went up into the air and Luke danced away from the explosion. He dodged the big chunks, took a shower of loose dirt to the face, and was otherwise unharmed. By the time the earth finished raining back down to the ground, he was already darting in to attack.

An extra 6 points in strength hadn’t seemed like too big a deal when he was trying to get used to it. Now that he was swinging for real though, it was easy to feel the difference. The mace was designed to be used two-handed, but Luke didn’t need to anymore. It whistled through the air like a willow switch, fast and deadly. He tore the elemental to pieces in a matter of seconds, and his biggest problem was overextending his swings.

He ignored the ding of a new notification in his mind and readied himself for the next elemental. Two of them were about to surface, and he knew there was a third one coming through the wall. It was faint, but he suspected a fourth would be coming at him from farther up the trail, probably showing up about fifteen or twenty seconds after the other three.

It all played out exactly how Luke expected it to. He was on one of the first pair as soon as they showed up, but he couldn’t quite break it down before its partner reached him. [Peripheral Awareness] helped him keep track of it, and when it lunged, [Counter] practically jerked him out of his own body as it forced him through a dodge and riposte that ended with his mace tearing an arm off at the shoulder.

Luke rolled with it. It was easier to move with the skills than to try and fight them, and they knew what to do better than he did anyway. He had no training whatsoever prior to getting pushed into Aros, no karate or other martial arts, no military, no boxing, nothing. The most he could say was he’d gotten into a couple of fist fights with kids his own age, which he’d won about half of.

So when a skill told him to move in a certain way, when it tried to force his body to react, he let it. It was just like that [Leatherworking]skill. If he zoned out and let it do its thing, the results were better than if he fought against it. Curt’s notes gave him a basic build for fighting: weapon skill, attacking skill, dodging skill, battlefield awareness skill. He could almost fight on auto-pilot.

That seemed like a terrible idea though, so while he did let the skills guide him, he also tried to learn from it. He wanted to know why the skill demanded that he move like they did if for no other reason than he figured at some point the skill would hit a ceiling and he would have to innovate on his own, which would be pretty damn difficult to do if he had no idea why he did the things he did.

For now though, against monsters like these that were slow, it was more than enough to win. He battered and broke them, sometimes got scratched by exploding chunks of rock peppering his exposed skin, and reaped XP by the hundreds.

Luke had been on the trail for a grand total of ten minutes and killed enough earth elementals to almost level twice when he felt something change. Where before the ground had been solid with small vibrations that got steadily stronger as new elementals emerged, now the whole thing shook. Even the elemental that was dragging its way out of the ground fell over, which was kind of funny to see since it slipped into the ground instead of landing on top of it.

Then the ground started heaving, as if there were something massive beneath it trying to force its way up. Luke stumbled backwards, his agility stat failing him as the ground bucked and rolled under his feet. He ended up flat on his ass and looking up just in time to see Red do another lap and screech at him again.

“Yeah, I get it this time!” he yelled back.

Whatever this was, he did not want to be at ground zero when it tore itself free. Luke scrambled to his feet and started running back down the trail into the valley. Behind him, the earth itself cracked open, drowning Luke in a thunderous avalanche of sound as hundreds of tons of stone were thrown up and crashed down. Twitch reflexes kicked in, forcing him to leap to the side as a boulder bigger than he was came down right next to him.

It slammed into the ground and skidded another twenty feet before coming to a stop. If he’d been an instant slower, he’d have been caught directly under it, and if he’d dodged forward instead of to the side, it would have smashed into him from behind. That probably would have been the end of his life right there. Even if the boulder itself didn’t kill him, he couldn’t see himself standing up and walking away.

That was when the first wave of pressure hit him. It wasn’t a physical thing, but something that battered his brain. He’d thought Red was the scariest mother fucker in the valley, but he’d been wrong. Whatever was crawling its way out of a damn mountain was much, much scarier. The pressure was almost paralyzing, and it was only Red’s insistent caws, now from significantly higher overhead, that got through to Luke and got him moving again.

He ran for all he was worth while the thing emerged from the ground, only once glancing back at it to see the primordial mother of all earth elementals tearing its way free. It didn’t look like the smaller ones Luke had been fighting at all. Instead, it was a miniature mountain with arms. It didn’t so much have legs to walk as it just surged forward, wave-like, absorbing all the ground in its path and ejecting it out the back end.

Where it passed was left smooth of the wreckage and debris the huge elemental had scattered across the pass with its entrance. Even the stuff it wasn’t directly touching started to melt back into the ground, no doubt being used to help build its strange body. Luke didn’t stand still to get the details though.

A hand the size of a car broke free of the ground in front of him, fingers each a foot wide and grasping for him. He smacked the closest one with his mace, shattering it into loose rubble, then ducked away and juked around it. The hand flowed back down into the earth and he felt it moving beneath him. [Twitch Reflexes] kicked in and he threw himself as high into the air as he could.

It was going to be a bad landing. He was at least nine feet off the ground now, unexpectedly high, uncoordinated from surprise, and jumping forward at a downward angle. He was going to fall probably another three or so feet beyond his initial jump before he landed, but it was better than the alternative.

Three massive fingers were pinched together below and behind him, right where he would have been if he hadn’t jumped. They ground against each other hard enough to rain dirt and stones down, hard enough that if they’d caught him they would have left him as nothing but a bloody smear.

His arms windmilled as he landed, and he threw himself forward into a roll. The motion was complicated by the fact that he’d kept hold of his mace and was still wearing the crude backpack he’d fashioned. No doubt the water bottles tucked away in there were squished, but hopefully not broken. If that was the worst of it, he’d count himself lucky.

He must have been far enough after that, because he felt nothing but tremors in the ground as he ran. Those faded away after a few seconds, and by the time he reached the giant boulder at the base of the trail, there was no sign that a monster of dirt and stone the size of a house had been after him.

“Fuck me sideways,” he swore, panting for breath. “How the hell am I supposed to get past something like that?”

He hadn’t even made it a tenth of the way to the center of the pass, let alone gone down the other side. He really didn’t see himself just running the entire pass before the jumbo elemental made its appearance and squashed him. At the same time, he knew he was nowhere close to a high enough level to fight it. It had to be level 30 at least. Maybe 40. He wasn’t sure exactly how to tell.

In short: he was trapped.