Chương 125: Chapter 123: Following her footsteps

I don't know if the god slayer attacked them first or if they attacked her first. My guess is that they attacked her first. She's an elf, and they don't like elves. So they may have been reckless and thought that just having her outnumbered by thirty or even sixty to one meant that they could defeat her. I wonder how many of them she killed before they changed their minds and ran away from her. You have negotiated peace with centaur x32. You gain (32000/5) 6, 400 experience. Son of a bitch.

That puts me at 199, 574 experience points. I need 200, 000 to level up. If we'd fought them, I definitely would've leveled up. But it feels good to have talked them down. It also feels good to have gained two more levels of negotiation.

"Why didn't we fight them?" El asks once they're gone.

"We could've used the experience."

"It just felt wrong," I say.

"We're not murder hobos," Ash says.

"We don't just go around and kill everyone we come across. They were sentient beings. I'm glad we were able to talk them down."

"They were worth more experience in battle," El grumbles. She's right, of course. They would've been worth a lot more if we'd just killed them. But what would that have made us? Murder hobos, like Ash said. It goes back to role playing games, so it makes sense that Ash made that analogy. Didn't they all meet through larping? Murder hobos are what you call it when people go around and kill everyone they meet.

Adventurers who have no homes, no set locations where they have to be, who just go and kill everyone they meet for the experience.

"We're better than that," I say.

"Did you learn anything, at least?" Vincent asks me. It's strange. I would've guessed that Vincent would take polyglot as a talent. He seems like he would want to know what people were saying. But he clearly didn't understand the conversation.

"Yeah," I say.

"I learned a lot, actually. She's been this way. We're only about three days behind her at this point. She came through, and they attacked her. She apparently killed a whole lot of them."

"Why did she get to fight them?" El asks.

"They attacked her first," I say.

"She's an elf, and they apparently hate elves. So they thought she was one of their ancestral enemies or whatever, and they attacked her. It didn't go well for them."

"I still think we should've fought them," El says.

"We'll find you something to fight soon," Ash assures her.

"I know you're just itching after that last battle."

"It's all been so boring," El says.

"I just want a challenge."

"You might get one sooner than you think," I say.

"She's only three days ahead of us. We might be able to catch her. Then you can fight her, if you really want to." That shuts El up. I don't think she wants to fight the god slayer. She doesn't want to lose. She doesn't want to die again. She just wants a fight that feels like it might kill her. I understand. She wants the adrenaline rush. She wants the joy that she finds in battle. We're not all murder hobos, but El does toe the line a lot closer than the rest of us.

"So we're definitely going the right way," Vincent says.

"And yet we aren't leveling up like we intended to before we found her. She's potentially gained a level or two in the adventures that we're following her through, but we have barely gained anything."

"Do you want to stop following her?" I ask. We start moving again, now that we're sure the centaurs aren't going to wheel around and attack us from behind. They couldn't really pull off a sneak attack of any kind, but it was a concern.

"I'm not opposed to catching up with her," he says.

"I just don't know what we intend to do when we find her. Do we offer a threat to her? Are we going to present ourselves as if we do?"

"We don't really have much of a plan for when we catch her," Gigi says.

"It's like we were always just expecting that to work itself out. Or like we didn't know what we were going to do, and didn't really expect to find her at all. But now it looks like we might, so we need a plan."

"I want to talk to her," I say.

"That's all. I just want to know what her intentions are."

"And what if her intentions are bad?" Vincent asks.

"What if she wants something that we disagree with? Do we leave her to it? Do we try to dissuade her? Do we try to kill her?"

"I'm not sure killing her is even possible," I say.

"I mean, she could have more hit points than all of us combined. She could have more spells and abilities than any of us. She could quite possibly be able to take all five of us on at once."

"I can cancel out any spell she casts," Vincent says.

"If she casts something that lingers, like Mab's Rage. We can also both cast that spell now. Mine won't last as long as yours, but we can still do a lot of damage to her."

"The five of us should be a real threat to her," Ash says.

"Even if she has six figures of hit points. We've proven we can get through that. We've proven we can kill monsters that are much more powerful than we are." If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"That's because our stats are higher than the monsters," I say.

"Our stats won't be higher than hers." I've been working under the assumption that all her stats are at three hundred. But what if they're higher than that? What if they're four hundred? Or five hundred? She could easily be as far above us as we are above the average player.

"We'd still be a threat," Ash says.

"We might not win the fight, but there's a good chance we'd be able to, all five of us ganging up on her."

"We can deal a lot of damage," El agrees.

"We could probably kill a dragon if we wanted to." She must have been thinking about that for a while. But she's right. The five of us could kill Wrax, if we really wanted to. We've got enough healing, defensive spells, and offensive capability that we could kill him, so long as he wasn't able to run away. Could we kill the god slayer? I've been operating under the assumption that we can't. But what if we can?

"I don't want to kill her," I say.

"Aside from the fact that it won't really do anything other than piss her off."

"It'll take away her equipment," Gigi points out.

"And it will drop her level. She'll lose a lot of stat points. It'll take her some time to get back up to snuff."

"So we can delay her in her goals," I say.

"Shouldn't we at least find out what those goals are before we commit to doing that?"

"We just need to remember that we are a legitimate threat," Ash says.

"We need to go into the conversation knowing that we have at least some leverage. I don't want you to start talking to her from a position where you've already deified her." That's a fair point. If I see her as unbeatable, then I've already beaten myself. We have to go into the fight thinking that we can win. But I don't want to fight her. I don't know why, but I don't think that's the right idea. And I don't think there's any way to convince me. I'm not willing to be convinced to attack her.

I'm not willing to be convinced that she's the enemy.

"We just need to talk to her," I say.

"She should have answers for us."

"What answers are we wanting from her?" Gigi asks.

"You keep saying that she has answers. What answers will she have?" I sigh.

"She might know why we were sent through the tutorial after she killed the god. I want to know why she killed the god in the first place. Why did she go through so many death cycles in the tutorials? Why did she kill the god? Is she glad she did it, or was it an accident? Is she trying to become a god? What does she want to do? Where is she going, what is she doing, and why is she doing it? I want to know all those things."

"So you want to know the why," Gigi says. She nods.

"I can get behind that."

"What do we do if we don't like the answers she has for us?" Vincent asks.

"I hate to keep bringing it back to this point, but what do we do if it comes down to having to fight her?"

"Then we do our best to kill her," El says, shrugging.

"We team up on her, overwhelm her, and do our best to kill her."

"But then what?" Vincent asks.

"She'll come back."

"She'll be weakened, at least," I say.

"She'll lose a whole lot of stat points, being above level seventy. What is that, like, forty points from each stat? She'll be careful as she levels up, trying to get through the deficit. But maybe we have to find her again. Maybe we have to find a way to stop her permanently."

"I don't know if that's possible," Ash says.

"But let's definitely plan on that being the backup goal. The plan B. Plan A is for us to just talk, right?" We all agree to that. I feel like there's more going on, but I can't put my finger on what. I don't know what will happen when we meet her. I don't think I can plan for all that. I need to see how she reacts, and I need to know how I react to her answers. I can't predict what's going to happen. I'm just glad our first plan isn't to kill her. We keep heading towards the coast.

It's easier to find now; I can just follow my nose. The salt smell is subtle, but it's there. But that brings up another problem. We're about three days behind the god slayer, but the ocean is only about a day ahead of us. When we get there, if she's not still there, we have to guess which way she went. I don't think it's that likely that she kept going west. Maybe she decided to swim across an ocean, but I think that would be kind of ridiculous. Kind of insane. I mean, who can swim that far?

But at the same time, I know that there are humans on Earth who would swim out into the ocean and make it pretty far. People used to swim the English Channel, after all. Not very often, and rarely successfully, but it is possible. And we're all so far beyond superhuman that she might actually try it. Should we consider trying that ourselves? I don't know how long I could swim, and I don't think it's reasonable to try to swim after her. No, that's insane. Which just leaves us two directions to choose from.

Two opposite directions. Whichever way she went, if we go the other way, we're just increasing the distance between us rather than decreasing it. We have to hope that we find another track, some kind of trail or marking to show which way she decided to go. First, though, we have to reach the ocean. The flat grassland continues on for a few dozen miles. I keep seeing more and more tracks of the centaurs, and eventually I find where they all fought.

There are still centaur corpses decaying on the field; apparently, they don't bury their dead. There are a lot of them. At least fifty of them. So she slaughtered more than half of their herd. No wonder they were so on edge. Fifty centaurs at twenty thousand experience each is a million experience points. That's probably enough for her to have leveled up again. So she's increasing the gap between us.

It's also clear from the spread of the bodies that she did the same thing I was going to do with the centaurs we ran into. Most of them were dead from her spell, not from her swords. Most of them fell to the chunks of ice that sliced them to pieces.

It's harder to tell exactly what killed which ones, as the bodies have been here for a few days and there are scavengers already going to town on them, but we can kind of see a very small group of them that probably fell to her sword, that were probably trying to surround her, and the others are scattered wide across the area. If she does have 300 in all of her stats, that means the range of the spell was like a football field in every direction. That kind of tracks with how far apart some of the bodies are.

We don't linger much on the site, getting the information we need pretty quickly. She made it pretty far across the plains before they attacked her. I don't know if that's coincidence or not, but it's barely five miles after the battle site that the ground starts to get sandy and the ocean comes into sight. It starts as just a line on the horizon, a deep blue so dark that it's almost black as we approach. I do find another set of her tracks, and I use Find Path to follow it.

It leads us towards the ocean, and soon the grass gives way to sand dunes. I've been to the beach a lot in my life. I used to live pretty close to a beach, before I moved to Minnesota. And there are beaches at a lot of the lakes in Minnesota. But the beaches are usually pretty small, maybe ten yards away from the shore. The sand doesn't really go much further than that. This sand starts at least a mile from shore. It's almost like a miniature desert that we have to walk through to get to the ocean.

We can hear the waves crashing gently against the shore as we go over little sand dunes. Her trail continues pretty much directly towards the water, and I start to worry that we're going to discover that she did, in fact, just start swimming. But before we get to the water itself, our walk is interrupted as a creature bursts out of the sand. It's a monster, all plates that look like metal and teeth and claws meant for burrowing. Land Shark. Very rare rare elite monster, level 45. HP: 45, 000/45, 000.

This one we're not going to be able talk our way out of.