Chương 146: Chapter 144: Waiting for Vincent

We spend most of the next day exploring the beach, just looking for what might be there and what we can get done. There weren't many creatures nearby, and we weren't attacked all day long. We did see an entire herd of the dire rhinos, but they never charged at us, so we just let them be, watching them from a distance as they moved past. But really, one day was about all any of us were going to be willing to wait. That is to say, one day was all I was willing to wait, and all El could really handle.

"It's boring," I say, sitting on one of the rocks that we brought to our camp site, poking at the fire.

"We need to do something. We can come back to the coast when he gets here."

"I agree," El says. She's on look out and has her back to us, but she still calls her opinion over her shoulder. Ash looks frustrated, but also like she understands.

"We haven't found anything just expanding our range from here," she admits.

"But we don't need to go charging off inland right away, do we?"

"There should be a compromise of some kind," Gigi says.

"Something that lets us have something fun to do while we wait, but doesn't take us too far out of the way?"

"Like what?" I ask. I'd tried training. It's boring to just do the same movements over and over again. We could spar a bit, but that will probably get old fast too. And I don't want to hurt any of them, or have them hurt me. Even with the magic to do the healing and all that, I still want to avoid it if possible. These three are my friends, and I don't want to hurt them.

"Maybe we could spar a bit?" Gigi asks.

"Or try to teach each other spells?" That just sounds frustrating.

"We can't teach spells," I say.

"We tried it a long time ago, and it doesn't work. Vincent has a special talent that lets him learn spells from other people."

"Let's find another dungeon," El says, then turns back to her watch. I hear her muttering under her breath after that. Something about the last dungeon being a let down.

"We could do that," I say.

"Or at least, we could try to do that. There's got to be something we can find."

"Maybe we should just start moving up and down the coast," Ash suggests.

"We can't be sure where Vincent is going to land when he gets here. He could be miles off, in either direction. Even if they go in a straight line, I'm pretty sure we didn't."

"What's the point in that?" I ask.

"If he's off, we'll find him when he lands. If we guess, we're just wasting time."

"You have somewhere you have to be?" Ash asks me. I shrug.

"I just feel like we should be working hard to catch up in this land."

"Catch up with who?" Gigi asks.

"With Amanda? Because I doubt we're going to do that in the time it takes them to cross."

"We might," I say.

"We've gotten a dozen levels a day before. We could do it here." Even I don't believe that. That would take getting millions of experience, each, in a single day. I'm not sure we could survive that many fights, or against the kind of monsters that would provide that.

"It is possible that the monsters in this land are that powerful," Ash points out.

"You guys said that the giant rhinos were level 45, right? Is that on the low end coming into the land, or on the high end going out of it?"

"That's the kind of thing we need to find out," I say.

"We need to get a better idea of what's going on in this part of the world, and the only way we're going to do that is to travel into it. We can't just wait by the beach for another week." El groans at the mere mention of waiting for another week. Ash sighs and puts her hands on her knees.

"Fine," she says, pushing herself to her feet.

"Let's start moving inland, then. We'll see what there is to fight, we'll see if we can find a dungeon, and we'll see if we can find signs of civilization. We'll come back towards the coast when Vincent lands. Agreed?" El has already turned around and is smiling.

"Agreed," she says. She starts moving to take down the tent. It's early evening. The sun hasn't set yet, but it's on its way down. Still to the west. Isn't there a point where you're circling the globe and it starts setting in the other direction? No, that doesn't make any sense. To do that, you'd have to pass where the sun sets, and suns don't literally set; the planet turns away from them. Stupid thought. Anyway, the sun is still in the sky. We've got probably an hour of light left, maybe two.

We can make good progress in that time. And we can travel into the night. I kind of like this idea. I like that we're going to be traveling at night, because I want to see if there are different creatures that only come out at night. That's how it was in the tutorial, but it didn't seem to hold all that true in the last continent. Over there, the monsters changed a little when the sun went down, but not as drastically as they did during the tutorial session. I lead the way once camp is broken down.

We start off following the trail left by the dire rhinos we fought yesterday, simply because we don't have anything better to do. No better clue to follow, no real reason to be going one way over another. We move quickly into our light jogging pace, and the world starts to feel a bit settled down again. I don't think I realized how anxious I was getting just sitting around and waiting. It's been the last several days, I think. More than just since we've come to this continent.

When we were on the island, I didn't like the way we were moving. It felt too disconnected, too random. It didn't feel like we were making any actual progress. This feels like progress again. This feels like we're moving to the next step in our adventure. I barely notice when the sun does set. By that point, I'm reveling in the joy of new sets of tracks. Aside from the big padded feet of the dire rhinos, I see what look like claw marks from something with three toes in the front and one in the back.

Kind of like a chicken, I guess, but much, much bigger. And then there are marks that look like the goar tracks from the island. I wondered if we'd run into that sort of thing again. We might even find more of the lynxith varieties. There's no telling to the variety of what we might find. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. We don't find signs of civilization that first night, though.

We keep traveling until well after midnight before we stop to camp for the night, and during that time I don't see anything that makes me think that people might be living nearby. There's no signs of humanoid footprints, no trash, no roads, nothing. I half expected to find a paved road that would lead us to a giant city. Maybe even a modern city. How weird would that be? We're still fighting with swords and magic, and they have like flying cars or some shit. No, I don't think that's going to happen.

For one thing, I think that Amanda would've told us. That's not the kind of detail you forget to mention. This part of the world is probably the same quasi-medieval level of technology as the other parts of the world. There might be a few advances that we didn't have back at Elmspire, but I doubt there will be anything so drastic as combustion engines. That would just be ridiculous. Aside from the lack of word from Amanda, I don't think it would happen because it just doesn't make sense.

If magic prevents technology from advancing, because magic can do all the things that advanced technology affords us as far as luxuries, then there's no need for the technology to advance. So unless they don't have magic at all in this part of the world – highly unlikely – I don't see them replacing it with technology.

Also, if there was a way to go from our old world to a world with all the same modern conveniences, it would make far more sense to send us here directly, instead of sending us to the fantasy world that the other continent was. No, I don't think we're about to change genres here. And I'm glad. I like using my bow. It feels more honest than a gun would. I know there's a lot of skill involved in using a gun. I get that. You can be a good shot or even a great shot.

You can know all there is to know about guns, and get more proficient with them because of that. But it doesn't feel like pure combat when a gun is involved. Guns are the great equalizer. They take a lot of the skill out of fighting. Like I said, they are a skill all their own, but they changed warfare. You can't have one soldier that stands up against an entire army based purely on their skill anymore once guns are involved. If there were guns, we couldn't have held back the whole orcish army.

So I really hope there aren't any guns. And if there was that kind of technology, I think we'd see evidence of it here on the coast. The further we travel, the more certain I become that we're not about to be thrown into a world where we're the backwards savages. But there's still that lingering doubt. That brief wondering if I'm going to have to practice quick draw and get good as a gunslinger. I don't bring up my concern with the girls. For one thing, I don't want to give voice to it.

For another, I feel like El would start bragging about being good with a gun already. I don't know why, but I feel like she'd be the one to do it. I know Ash would be all about the guns; they're more power. She'll probably want one she can bring back to the old world. In a world of swords, she with the boom stick rules supreme. The next morning, we come across our first sign of civilization. It's a road. It isn't paved, which makes me feel more comfortable.

A paved road would suggest cars, and that would ruin everything. This road is a plain dirt road, but clearly a road and not an animal path. It's been leveled out, smoothed. Any big rocks have been taken out of the road and tossed along the side. This is a road that has been constructed.

"That settles it," Ash says as soon as we set foot on it.

"There are people here."

"Yeah," Gigi says, walking back and forth across the road.

"Do we follow the road, then? See where it leads?"

"I'm kind of surprised that it just stops," El says, standing at the very end of the road. It does just end. The road goes through the cracked plain and then just stops, the craggy ground picking right back up at the end of it.

"Maybe they just didn't finish building it yet?" I offer.

"Maybe they were wiped out before they could," El says, her eyes getting wide.

"Like, by monsters or something. A thousand years ago." Ash shakes her head.

"No, this road is new. The dirt is a different color. It hasn't even baked in the sun yet. This is a mid project kind of thing." El grumbles something about Ash taking away all her fun. We start walking down the road. Having a road to walk makes our progress much faster, as we can see any hazards from a long distance and don't have to worry about little dips in the ground or rocks to trip us up. I keep looking around, half expecting to be attacked at any second, but there aren't any monsters that charge at us.

The plains are barren, rocky, and pretty empty. We make it several miles down the road before we come across the construction equipment. I say construction equipment, but I don't mean like bulldozers or anything. There's a few wagons full of dirt, a giant round stone that is probably rolled down the road to flatten it, and a bunch of shovels and pickaxes. There aren't any people, but the equipment they used is there. Doesn't really feel abandoned so much as left for the day.

There's nothing I can tell by looking at the tools. They look like regular tools. No huge handholds, no weird angles that suggest more or fewer arms, nothing like that. The only strange thing is that there are several poles in the ground that tower over us like telephone poles. Same thickness and basic height. They couldn't have electricity, could they? There aren't any wires or anything, but it looks like they're setting up electrical lines or telephone lines.

"I don't like this at all," El says, looking up at the pole.

"What do you think it means?" I examine it more closely. It's just wood. It isn't treated wood, it isn't composite wood. It's just a tree that's been stripped of its limbs. It's barely even been sanded. It might regrow at some point, depending on the species of tree.

"I don't know," I say.

"I hope it's just a marker."

"If they've got the internet, I'm gonna be pissed," El says.

"Why pissed?" Gigi asks.

"Because I didn't sign up for a world with internet!" El says.

"I signed up for dragons and demons and monsters. Mythical creatures, not reddit posts."

"Don't you miss the internet, though?" Gigi asks. El snorts.

"No," she says.

"I don't miss how addicted I was to it. I don't miss spending hours doom scrolling, hoping for that little bit of dopamine while the world was on fire all around us. I don't miss the way it would numb me to doing anything, because it offered those tiny glimpses of entertainment and escape from the world. I got away from all the bad shit. I don't need the internet anymore. And I don't want it."

"I really don't think they have internet," Ash says, looking at the pole.

"Not even dial up."

"They'd better not," El says.

"What do you make of this?" I ask, standing up from next to the pole. I'd found something. A feather. A big one. It's about a foot and a half long, and bright white.

"I don't know," El says.

"Giant dove?" I'm not sure I'd want to fight a giant dove. They're very pretty birds.

"I don't think it's from a dove," I say.

"Then what?" Ash asks. I look at the feather, really look at it, and I think about what the people in this land might be like. It's possible that they're the same as the people of the other continent. Elves, dwarves, demons, demon kin, animal kin, that kind of thing. There were other options too, weren't there? Goblinoids and dragonoids. This land could have those. Or it could have things that none of us were allowed to be. That seems to make more sense. That seems more likely.

That would explain why we weren't started on this continent, why most people from Earth will never even know that this continent exists. So what kinds of things might there be? Well, if there were demons in the old world, might there be angels in the new one? Could this be a feather from an angel's wing? It makes sense if none of us former humans could become angels. Flying brings a while other dimension to tactics and to fighting in general.

It's also a set of limbs we'd have to learn to use very quickly and with a severe handicap. None of us have ever been winged before; how could we hope to keep up with natives who were born with wings?

"What if it's an angel feather?" I ask.