Chương 128: Chapter 126: The god slayer

We all whirl towards the sound of the voice, and we see her for the first time. She's definitely an elf, though her skin isn't the green of the forest elves or the grey of the mountain elves. Her skin is more tan, almost brown. She looks like she belongs in the tall grasses of the prairie. She has a sword in each hand, but the points are lowered towards the ground. There's a bow over her shoulder, and I see a mace hanging from her belt.

She's dressed in leathers, with a metal breastplate that covers one shoulder and then down over her chest. Her midriff would be exposed if not for the leather armor that rests beneath it. Amanda. Level 74 god slayer. HP:????? /????? I lift my hand in greeting.

"Hello," I say.

"It's nice to meet you." She smiles at me. She has green eyes, and there's a storm in them. She looks fiercely intelligent and more than a little bit suspicious.

"Yeah," she says.

"You too."

"Let's all sit down," Vincent says, his voice cutting into the rising tension.

"On the sand. Sitting down will make it harder for anyone to spring to an attack, and will allow us to converse without fear of attack." El clearly doesn't like this idea. Her legs are already spread in an attack position, her weight balanced between her feet, ready to spring into action. Gigi and Ash are also in attack positions, their weights distributed to allow the shield hand to have most of the weight, to be able to deflect most of the damage that comes against them.

"That's a good idea," I say. I take a few steps away from the water, not wanting to risk a stray wave wetting my legs while I'm sitting, and I sit down. I cross my legs and sit. Criss cross apple sauce, as they say. Or Indian style, if you want the one with the racist undertones.

"Let's all sit down and put our weapons aside. As a show of trust."

"Your mage can still cast spells," Amanda points out.

"So can you," I counter. Amanda doesn't sit until everyone else is already seated. Understandably paranoid, I suppose. She can see all our of hit point totals. She knows we're not your average adventurers. She probably knows that fighting us would be dangerous, even for her. But she does sit down eventually, setting her swords in the sand next to her hands. A lot of weapons laying in the sand, ready to be picked up at a moment's notice.

"I really didn't want there to be this much tension," I say. My sword is still in its sheath.

"I was serious when I said that we mean you no harm."

"I'm sure you were," she says. She has a dazzling smile. Her teeth are perfect and so white that they shine in the morning light. Her cheek bones are chiseled, her dark hair framing her face perfectly. Her eyes are two jade stones staring out of her perfect face. She truly is an inhuman beauty.

"How long have you been following us?" I ask.

"I assume you haven't just been waiting for us here."

"I watched you fight the land shark," she says.

"You five are pretty impressive." She's seen us fight. So she knows how much of a threat we may or may not be to her. I don't know if I'm glad of that or not.

"Thanks," I say.

"Why did you kill the god?" El asks.

"Was it just to get the class?"

"No," Amanda says.

"I didn't kill him to get the class. I had no idea I'd be getting a special class that way. I didn't even know if I could do it."

"Then why did you?" Ash asks.

"Because the world was ending," she says. She shrugs.

"The world had ended, and I didn't like the neat way everything was packaged for us. It didn't feel real, didn't feel right, so I wanted to find out what was really going on."

"And what was really going on?" These are the questions I really wanted to ask. This was what I really wanted to know. She sighs.

"I'm not sure," she says.

"I thought maybe it was some kind of government conspiracy for a while. Then I was working under the theory that it was aliens, that I was some kind of lab rat or something. For a while, I thought it was just purgatory, and that the dragon was the devil."

"It was a dragon?" Ash asks. She nods.

"He was calling himself Root," she says.

"I thought maybe that meant it was a computer simulation or something like that. I wasn't sure what was going on, I just knew that I wanted to get outside the borders of it. I'd cracked the system a little bit already, and I wanted to see how far I could get."

"That makes sense," I say.

"You had already figured out the death cycle by that point. Might as well see how far you could stretch that."

"I never felt like I was dying," she says.

"I would just wake up in the morning and find out that I had died, again. I'd be back to level one, I'd have lost a bunch of stats, and everything would start again. Hence the purgatory fear."

"You thought it was some kind of hell loop," I say. She nods.

"How did you even find Root?"

"He was underground," she says.

"He was always underground. Every time, in the same place. I would go and talk to him sometimes. He tried to convince me to finish the tutorial. But I never did."

"Never?" I ask.

"Surely you did after you killed him." She shakes her head.

"Once I killed him, I woke up here, in this world. Level one again. But this time with a new class and without losing the stats from the death cycle."

"How did you kill him?" El asks.

"Was it a fair fight?"

"As fair as can be," she says.

"Given that I was human and he was a big fuck off dragon."

"I want to hear that story," El says.

"The story of the battle." I hold up a hand to stop her before she can get going. There are other things I want to ask first.

"Did you learn anything by killing the god? Did you find out anything about why all this is happening? Why we ended up in a fantasy world? Why the world ended? Anything?" Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Amanda shakes her head sadly.

"Sorry," she says.

"I don't have all the answers. I figured a few things out, and learned a few things from Root, but I don't have the answers you're looking for. The world just ended. That's something that worlds apparently do."

"But why us?" Ash asks.

"Why were we chosen to go through the tutorial and come to this new world?" Amanda shrugs.

"Your guess is as good as mine," she says.

"All Root ever told me was that we were special. We were chosen. Part of the great cycle or some shit like that." The great cycle. Maybe I was right about the whole thing where players can become the major gods. Maybe that is the point of bringing us to this world. Maybe the whole point of all of this is to get major gods. Either to create more of them, to replace the old ones, or maybe to get a new set of them for some other purpose.

"It's like the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing," Ash says, frowning.

"I hate that shit."

"I'm sorry I don't have better answers for you," Amanda says.

"I think you know more than you think you do," I say.

"Keep talking about what Root told you. Tell us why you decided to kill him."

"It was always an option," Amanda says.

"Every time I found him, he would give me the choice. Am I here to talk or to fight? Do I wish to do battle with him? If I said talk, we would talk. If I said fight, we would fight."

"How many times did you fight him?" El asks.

"Eleven," she says.

"The first ten times, he killed me first."

"So he was always giving you the option to kill him," I say.

"It sounds almost like he wanted you to do it."

"I think he did," she says.

"I remember as he was dying, he smiled. He seemed pleased with himself, and with me. Like he had reached some kind of achievement." I look around at the others. We didn't get sucked into the tutorial until after she had killed Root. We didn't get chosen to be in this world until after the tutorial god was slain.

"How many people were there in your original tutorial session?" I ask.

"A hundred, maybe two," she says.

"Why?" I look around again.

"There were just us five," I say.

"In our tutorial, there was just us. I never saw anyone else. Did you guys?" Everyone shakes their heads.

"All I saw was the signs that there had been other people. Blood and gore, but no bodies."

"I never saw any other bodies," Ash says.

"No sign of other people, just you two."

"There were five of you?" Amanda asks.

"Exactly five?" I nod. I think Amanda is going down the same rabbit hole I went down. I think she's following the same line of reasoning.

"The same as the number of major gods," I say.

"And you guys didn't even start your tutorial until after I killed Root?"

"We didn't have a tutorial god," Vincent tells her.

"Because you killed him." I hold up a hand. That sounded an awful lot like an accusation.

"I don't think we would've been chosen if she hadn't killed Root," I say. Amanda's eyes lock on to mine. They widen a little bit.

"You think—" she trails off. I nod.

"But then what does that mean for me?" she asks.

"Have I just served my purpose, and all is said and done? Do I just not count anymore?"

"I don't think that's what it means," I say.

"I think you're still incredibly important."

"What the hell are you two talking about?" El asks.

"They think that we were never supposed to be in the tutorial," Vincent says.

"We were supposed to die, with the rest of humanity, when the world ended."

"So what?" El asks.

"We didn't. We ended up in the tutorial. So what does that mean? Are we special somehow?"

"I think we're supposed to become gods," I say. That gets a gasp of surprise from El and from Gigi. Strange that Ash isn't shocked.

"The five of us."

"There are six of us," Vincent points out.

"If we include her."

"I don't like being part of a group," Amanda says.

"I'm really a lone wolf type."

"Me too," I say, chuckling at my own joke. Amanda looks at me and laughs. She must have just noticed that I have wolf blood.

"Even if we aren't a group, per se, we might still all six have that something in common," Vincent says.

"You forged the path that the five of us walk." Strange that he would say that, as he's never gone through the death cycle. Other than the one time inside the tutorial.

"That means that we are connected, somehow."

"I wish I had better answers for you," Amanda says.

"I truly do."

"What were you looking for, when you came here?" Ash asks.

"Why did you seek the setting sun?" Amanda looks a bit embarrassed. Strange, considering what we're talking about.

"I wanted to see the ends of the world," she says.

"I wanted to see how far everything went. So I picked a direction and I started walking. West seemed easiest. Put the sun at my back in the morning, walk into the sunset at night. Easy."

"But there was something you wanted to find," Ash says.

"Something you were trying to accomplish, surely?" Amanda shrugs again.

"I kind of, um. I guess I kind of wanted to see if I could become a god. I can't attack any dragons anymore, so I thought maybe that meant that--""Wait," El says.

"You really can't attack the dragons? Like, the system won't let you?"

"My soul won't let me," she says.

"I can't really explain it. I just don't want to hurt them, you know? I don't really want to hurt anyone. I only fight when someone attacks me." I don't know if I believe that last bit. But maybe. I mean, it makes sense as far as what we've seen of her actions. But the dungeon makes me think that she at least twists that, at least a little bit, when it suits her fancy. Which is okay; it just means she has free will.

"We try not to fight unless we have to, also," I say.

"Though the experience is better if you do," El adds.

"Let's get back to why you came here," Ash says.

"You want to become a god. And you can't attack dragons anymore. So then what was the plan? What was your goal once you hit the ocean?"

"I didn't know how far it would be to the ocean," Amanda says.

"I've now walked from one end of this continent to the other. I had no idea how big this world was. Root told me that it was the same size as Earth, but I guess I just didn't believe him? I don't know. Talking with Root was always a challenge."

"Why?" I ask.

"Because Root talks like a psychiatrist," Amanda says.

"Always turning the question around on you. And his answers always had multiple meanings, and all of them were right. You had to interpret what he said every time he spoke. It was – it was just frustrating. Exhausting, really."

"That explains why you wanted to kill him." El says, smirking.

"How many times did you talk to Root?" I ask. I'm trying to get an idea of how many times she went through the death cycle. We know that she attacked Root eleven times before actually killing him, but how many times did she find him and just talk?

"A dozen, maybe two dozen times," she says.

"Talking to him was always worth a lot of experience, so once I found him the first time, I went looking for him every time after that."

"How big was he?" Gigi asks.

"He was huge," Amanda says.

"Basically the size of a small house. I don't know if I could've beaten him if he hadn't been in a cave underground. If he'd been able to fly, things would've been very different."

"How do you think you can become a god?" I ask. Then I immediately hold up a hand.

"Not why. I know why, and it makes total sense. But how were you going to do it? What was the plan?"

"Well, part of the plan was to find the beach guardian and kill it," Amanda says. She seems a bit embarrassed by the answer. Probably because it contradicts her earlier statement about not wanting to kill anything and not attacking first.

"I figured if I could beat the beach guardian, I could probably get out to sea and try to get to Europe, or whatever is across this ocean."

"Were you intending to circumnavigate the globe on foot?" Vincent asks. When Amanda nods, he looks impressed.

"I don't think there's enough mana for that to be possible. When would you sleep?"

"I don't really sleep anymore," Amanda says.

"Not unless there's a reason to. But I don't get tired very often anymore. I can easily stay up for five or six days without needing a rest." Six days of flight across the ocean. If she can fly as fast as ten miles an hour, that's 1, 440 miles over six days. That might be far, but I don't think it's far enough. The Atlantic ocean is, at its shortest, about eighteen hundred miles across. Three thousand at the widest. And the Pacific is wider still.

"You'd have to move pretty fast to make it across, even if it's just as far as Europe," I say. She shrugs.

"I could pack a raft in my spatial bag and use that to rest if I need to." A fair point. All she has to do is find somewhere the ocean is relatively calm, and she'd be able to rest as long as she needed. She doesn't need to find a boat; she can just take one with her.

"I feel like we're skipping over something important here," Ash says.

"Oh, I don't think we'll be able to get everything from one conversation," I say. Ash shakes her head.

"No, there was something specific, something that we all are just glossing over."

"The beach guardian?" Amanda asks.

"That's the one," Ash says.