Chương 117: Chapter 115: Hunting down the god slayer

We spend another day in Marketplace waiting for Vincent and Gigi. We gather quests where we can, looking for things that will take us towards the ocean or that will help us get in touch with dragons, and we generally enjoy the comforts that a city has to offer. I take a bath for the first time in about a month, getting clean the old fashioned way instead of with Refresh, and I enjoy the soak in the hot water.

Magic is great for getting clean, but nothing compares to just sitting in hot water and letting it relax your muscles for a while. I also get a nice variety of meals. Ash takes us to several taverns that serve their meat just a little bit more rare than humans would want to eat it, which both El and I appreciate. There is some fish, but most of the meat comes from either livestock or from monsters. Apparently, selling monster meat is big business in Marketplace.

People pay extra for the hard to get ingredients, working to improve their cooking through the experimentation of strange ingredients. I learn that there are classes for things like cooking as well. It seems there are classes for all the secondary skills, and for several of the primary skills, that don't require combat of any kind. Though everyone had to fight at least a little during their tutorial level, most of the players here in Marketplace aren't the adventurer types.

They just want to keep chasing their passions. I've met several people who were over level thirty as just chefs, artisans, smiths, seamstresses, and even a jeweler. It's nice to see that the world is still livable for those who want to avoid violence. I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to want to live a violent life. I don't fear dying, and I don't mind doing it, but I don't want my life to be all about death.

I'd like to be able to create something, to make a difference in the world through something other than martial progress. Something about the work of increasing secondary skills seems noble to me, and the idea of being able to level up as a craftsman is really appealing. It makes me feel like those people are more part of the world than I am. I'm still fighting against the world we've moved to; they've adapted to it, become a part of it. They're part of the economy, part of the city.

They probably care about politics. I want that. Maybe not right away, and maybe not bad enough to stop exploring and adventuring, but it's definitely an itch there, deep down. I think if we had stayed in Marketplace for an extended period of time, I probably would have tried to join the crafting guild. I would've started making things with the recipes that I have, improving them and my secondary skills. And I probably would've enjoyed it.

But after about a day of exploring the city and enjoying its amenities, we get word that Gigi and Vincent have arrived in the city, and we go to meet them. Gigi has made it to level twenty seven, and has 8, 640 hit points. She's regained all the attribute points that she's lost, and gained several more on top of that, so she's starting to understand what the rest of us have gone through.

Vincent did not kill himself, and did not go through the releving process, so he's still rocking at level 46, with 2, 392 hit points. Which makes him the fragile one, by a pretty significant margin. Ash and I both have over ten thousand hit points – her at 18, 240 and me at 14, 430 – and El has 25, 620. It amazes me to think that El could survive a fifty thousand point hit. That's incredible. At my best, I couldn't handle that. None of us can. But El can.

"So how was leveling back up?" Ash asks as we greet our friends.

"It was okay," Gigi says.

"I'm nowhere near done, but the early levels came pretty quickly. Now it seems like every time I get in a fight, I gain a level."

"You'll probably gain more than one the next time the five of us get in a fight," I tell her.

"We tend to go after some pretty big monsters."

"I'm looking forward to it," Gigi says.

"I miss being able to tell how many hit points people have when I talk to them. It seems like everyone is a higher level than me now." We head out of Marketplace and start heading west, towards the ocean. It's the only piece of evidence we have for which way the god slayer went, so we have to go that way. I'm hoping we'll find something along the way that will give us a better chance of finding her. Vincent doesn't seem bothered when El very proudly tells him that the god slayer is a woman.

"So you have to refer to her as her, not him," she says. Vincent doesn't seem angry at all. He just shrugs and says "Okay." The road allows us to travel quickly. I notice that Vincent is still floating along, and I'm kind of envious of that. He isn't going to leave any kind of trail like that. I wonder if the god slayer is doing the same. I can't find any kind of trail that might be hers. I mean, I can; there are hundreds of sets of tracks on the road. It's a road; lots of people use it.

But I have no idea which set of tracks belongs to her. I can differentiate whether the track was made by a man or a woman, and I can kind of differentiate between the different types of demon blood. I can often tell based on the species. But we don't know anything about the god slayer. She might be an elf, she might be a human, she might be a dwarf. She could be anything. Whatever she has that makes people unable to describe her makes it impossible for me to know which tracks to follow.

Walking the road allows us to make really good time. We still walk for almost ten hours a day, which is probably more than we should. We're not in a rush, but ten hours seems like a pretty good pace. We've all got the vigor to keep going that long without waking up every day with sore muscles and without getting shin splints or blisters or anything like that. And on the road, ten hours of walking means we can make it about fifty miles a day. It's strange to me that we call that a good pace.

Not six months ago, I could make it that far in under and hour by car. Now I'm calling a five mile an hour pace really fast, impressively so. We're going so fast that we can't really pay that much attention to the tracks and trails, we can't really look out for traps, and we can't even be all that prepared for ambushes by bandits or what have you. Five miles an hour is fast. Really fast. It's more like a jogging pace than a marching pace, when you think about it. Sure, we could move faster if we wanted to.

We could probably all run at least ten miles an hour for a while. Probably for as much as six or seven hours without getting all that tired. But that would feel like a forced march. At this pace, we can still talk to one another. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Which by itself is amazing to me. I was never much of a runner. I didn't like running unless I was being chased. I don't care that it's good exercise; I always found it incredibly boring.

And most of the reason it was boring was that I couldn't talk to people while I did it. I could listen to music or something like that, which would help, but I couldn't engage my brain in anything. I couldn't actually hold a conversation, because I'd be out of breath. But now, with a vigor of 185, I can jog all day long and not be the least bit short of breath. I can talk while I jog, and it's no different from talking while walking. I can have complete conversations without dropping the pace at all.

We tell Vincent and Gigi about our conversation with Balak, and about the fight with the cadre of bandits. We tell them about the god slayer, and what little we've learned, and we tell them that we're heading towards the ocean. We're about three weeks away, if we keep the same pace.

"My hope is that we'll get out of Balak's territory tomorrow or the next day, and we'll be able to attract another dragon," I say.

"Then we just need to be able to find one willing to talk to us, and we can probably track the god slayer that way."

"You really think she stops and talks to every dragon she comes across?" Vincent asks.

"Maybe," I say.

"Or maybe they're just aware of her because of who and what she is. Or maybe we won't get anywhere talking to the dragon. I don't know. But it's our only lead at this point."

"Why do we want to find the god slayer?" Gigi asks.

"I mean, if she isn't able, or isn't willing, to cause real harm to the world, then she isn't a villain, is she? We don't need to stop her, we don't need to hunt her down. We don't need to find her at all. So why are we so focused on that?"

"Maybe she has answers we don't," Ash says.

"I for one would like to know what inspired her to kill the god in the first place. Her actions affected the five of us more than anyone else in the world, and I want to know why she did it that way."

"Do you think that we would've been pulled into this world without her?" El asks.

"What do you mean?" I hadn't even considered that.

"Well, we got pulled into the tutorial world after the tutorial god had been slain," El says.

"And it was just the five of us. Everyone else we've talked to went through the tutorial with a huge group of people. Like, usually a couple of hundred of them. And they all had tutorial gods. But we didn't. We just had us five."

"And we had things available to us that weren't available to anyone else," I point out.

"Don't forget that Shell isn't a spell that just anyone else has."

"As far as I can tell, it's a spell that no one else has," Vincent says.

"I have been offered inordinate amounts of money to teach it to people."

"Wait," I say.

"You can teach spells?"

"I can," he says.

"It isn't easy, but it can be done. I can also learn spells by watching them be cast. But that's from a talent I have."

"So you could learn how to cast Mab's Rage?" He nods.

"If I see you cast it one or two more times, I intend to," he says.

"It seems like it would be beneficial if both of us had access to it."

"Oh, definitely," I say.

"I'd be happy to teach you, if you can tell me how to do that."

"I appreciate that." He smiles at me. He's turned fully around to face me, floating along in front of me at the same pace, essentially flying backwards.

"But it would at this point be easier for me to just see you cast it again a few times."

"Want me to cast it now?" I ask. He shakes his head.

"No need. Better to save it in case we need it. It has a rather long cool down, does it not?"

"Two hours." He nods.

"Yeah, save that. Just in case."

"So people have asked you to teach them Shell?" Ash asks.

"Have you done it?" He shakes his head.

"It seems like too valuable of a spell for me to allow it to propagate. The fewer people who have it, the more valuable it is."

"But it can help protect people," Ash says. Vincent nods.

"And not all people deserve that protection. There is a reason that the gods don't allow this spell to be learned, a reason it is broken up into so many different spells."

"And that brings us back to my point," I say.

"That's why we want to find the god slayer. We got that spell because of her actions. Because there wasn't a god there to prevent it from happening."

"And we might not have been pulled into this world at all," El says.

"Think about it. Why were there only five of us in the tutorial world? Why did our tutorial start after everyone else's ended? Everyone we've talked to, or everyone I've talked to, came to this world a week before we did. Why did we get included at all?"

"Seems to me like some kind of destiny," Gigi says.

"Exactly," El agrees.

"So are we, like, chosen ones? Is one of us the chosen one, and the rest of us just along for the ride? What were we chosen for? Maybe we're supposed to stop the god slayer. Maybe we're supposed to join her. Maybe," she gets really excited, waving her hand wildly, "maybe we're supposed to be gods."

"Like we're supposed to become the new major gods?" Gigi asks. El shrugs.

"Maybe," she says.

"I mean, there are five major gods, and there are five of us. Maybe we're supposed to replace them. Or maybe we are them, in human form, in a wibbly-wobbly time kind of way."

"I don't follow," Vincent says.

"Maybe the five of us ascend to godhood and travel back in time to create this world, and we become the five major gods," El says.

"Or maybe the five gods go through the cycle and become players, but they don't want to give up being gods, so they manage to do both at the same time."

"That doesn't make any sense," Ash says.

"And it doesn't sound possible."

"But doing impossible things is what being a god is all about," El says. I wonder about that. What if the five of us are going to be the gods, or used to be the gods, or something like that? It would kind of explain things, in a strange kind of way. I don't know how I'd feel about the world having at least two gods with ADHD, but maybe that's part of what makes the world special.

"So where does the god slayer come into this little theory?" Vincent asks. El shrugs again.

"I don't know," she says.

"Maybe she needs to kill us so that we can ascend to become the gods again. Or maybe we're just all on the same basic path, all headed towards the same place. Maybe we're all going to become gods."

"Or maybe it's just a coincidence that there are five of them and five of us," Vincent says.

"Yeah, I guess." El frowns.

"Spoilsport."

"Either way," I say, trying to mollify El, "it still makes sense that we find the god slayer. Whether it's something she knows or something she's supposed to do, we kind of need her."

"I'm not convinced," Vincent says.

"But I'm with you."