Chương 169: Chapter 167: Preparing for the mountain

The first thing we need is climbing gear. We may be at a much higher level of attribute than most people, but we're not stupid. We know that we're going to be climbing a mountain, and that means we need the tools to do it. So we need pickaxes, we need a lot more rope, we need pitons, and we need cold weather gear. Mountains get cold as you climb up them. That's why they're covered in snow. Gigi pays for the equipment from the party fund, and we load up our spatial bags with everything we think we're going to need.

I'm pretty sure we're forgetting something. Ash and I keep trying to think of things that we might be missing. Better to get more than we need than to need more than we have.

"We should get a bunch of food," Ash says.

"No idea if there will be much hunting on the climb. And we might need another tent."

"With really long stakes," I say.

"So we can drive them deep into the rock. Probably need a hammer too." She nods. The shopkeeper, listening to us with coins dancing in his eyes, adds more to the pile.

"Is there a difference in the types of rope we can get?" I ask. I know that on Earth, there are a lot of different styles and types of rope. There's static rope that doesn't stretch and dynamic rope that does. Static rope is good for things like repelling, dynamic rope is better for climbing. It gives a little bit, stretching out when a lot of force is put upon it. Like when someone slips and falls. That bit of give prevents all the force from slamming into them at once, potentially breaking spines or other bones.

"Harnesses!" El shouts.

"We can make them if we have to, but harnesses are really important."

"I have harnesses," the merchant says, pointing his finger in the air and disappearing into the back before coming out with five harnesses that seem to be made of a toughened leather and a lot of rope that, if I had to guess, is made of silk. We get different types of rope, some pieces of metal that don't make much sense to me but that Ash insists will help us in climbing, and some twine so that we can attach the pick axes to the belts of our harnesses.

We end up spending a lot of money, which I'm sure makes the merchant very happy, but I think we managed to get everything we could need. Whatever we didn't get, we'll have to do without. It still takes us several days to actually make it to the base of the mountains. During that time, we pass through a bandit ambush that isn't sprung, either because they decided we were too well armed and prepared for it or because they weren't manning it that day.

But the tree across the path is pretty clearly cut down, not fallen, and there are a lot of places for people to hide in the little copse of trees that the path travels through. We do see some monsters, but like the bandits, they avoid us. Are we giving off some kind of aura that stops creatures from attacking us? We might be. It's possible that it's just the fact that there are five of us, one of us floating above ground and the other four clearly armed and armored. We might just not seem like easy pickings.

That's the thing a lot of people don't consider about animals. They're predators, and they aren't going to attack something that isn't easy prey. That's why animals move in herds. Too many animals together become hard to hunt, and not worth the energy it would take to separate them. Of course, if an animal falls away from the herd, they'll get cut down, but the herd itself will usually stay strong. Intelligent predators are no different.

When they see something that's easy pickings, like a merchant traveling alone with a huge wagon full of goods, they will attack that. It's not going to cost them much in the way of resources, and the possibility of gain is pretty high. But that same merchant traveling with a company of heavily armed mercenaries suddenly becomes more trouble than it's worth. I don't know if we're putting out an actual aura or if looking at us is enough to dissuade enemies.

Whatever the case, we have no more battles before we get to the mountain. I say mountain, but really it's a small range of mountains. It almost never happens that a single mountain raises on its own. I know that there was a Lonely Mountain in the Hobbit, but the fact that it was a single mountain was what made it special. Mountains come into being when tectonic plates shift against one another, pushing the ground until it become a mountain.

And that almost always creates several mountains, along with a bunch of hills that surround them. These mountains are no different. It's a range, maybe five of them all within close proximity to each other, with a bunch of foothills on the way. But there is one mountain that is pretty clearly the one we're looking for. It's much bigger than the others around it. It's the center most peak, and it towers over the others. If there is a mount Olympus here, this is clearly it.

We start walking over the hills and through little valleys, and soon find ourselves walking through a crevice. I don't know if it actually goes down below the level of most of the ground we've covered, or if there are just high walls from the mountains we're skipping over, but it's like walking through a canyon. And I don't like it. The problem with canyons is that they are easy spots for an ambush. It won't take a huge monster to be a threat out here.

A bunch of smaller monsters who are at the top of the canyon and can throw rocks down at us would be a huge threat. The canyon isn't so deep that I can't Dash out of it, which does help mitigate some of the fear, but I won't be able to relax until we get out of here. There is also the fear of a stampede going through the canyon. If there are more of those dire rhinos that we fought when we first got to this continent, and they come charging down the canyon, there's really not much we'll be able to do.

We can't just stand up to a stampede. Three of us will be able to get out, but the other two might not have time to get to safety. I keep my ears strained, waiting to hear the thunder of approaching monsters. But the canyon actually remains eerily quiet. Every noise we make echoes off the walls, and so none of us even seem to want to talk. Who knows what we will alert, what we will trigger, if we make too much noise.

We walk through the canyon for several miles, sweaty palms gripping weapons, before the canyon finally comes to an end, not at the mountain we want to climb, but at a sheer wall. It looks like there used to be a waterfall here. Maybe the waterfall is what carved the canyon in the first place. We might have been walking through a dried out river bed. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. The wall is maybe two hundred feet tall.

That's higher than the one outside of Wrax's lair. The walls aren't smooth, except for a path directly up the center that probably marks where the waterfall actually fell. But we won't climb there, we'll climb alongside it.

"Do we have two hundred feet of rope?" Ash asks, her voice a whisper. We definitely do. Vincent takes one end of one of the ropes and ties a simple overhand knot around the end of another rope with it. Then he takes the end of the second rope and ties an overhand knot around the first rope. When he pulls the slack out between the knots, they slam into one another, pulling the ropes together.

"It's called a sailor's knot," he says.

"I learned it in boy scouts. It's a way to tie different lengths of rope together. The two knots pull at each other, making the connection point really strong. The harder you pull, the tighter the knot gets."

"Perfect," Ash says. The word reverberates through the canyon a bit, and she grimaces. Her next words are back at a whisper.

"Can you fly up to the top and find somewhere to fasten the rope? That way the rest of us can just climb up." It is too high for me to Dash. And too high for Ash to jump. But not too high for Vincent to fly. After combining enough ropes to make it all the way to the top, he takes one end of the rope that he has fashioned from our various lengths of rope and flies up and eventually out of sight. There must be a cave up there. He drops the rope down, and it manages to coil about a dozen feet on the ground.

We all have to jump back to avoid getting hit by the rope, which I suppose was kind of a dick move on his part. He might have yelled down that it was coming, but none of us heard him. Not a big deal, I suppose. Ash decides to test her weight on the rope first. Between her armor and equipment, she weighs the most of all of us, so that makes sense. The rope stretches a little bit, but doesn't come loose. She's about to start climbing when I stop her.

"Hang on," I say.

"Let's test it with all of our weights, first. That way, we'll know if we can all climb at once or if we have to wait and climb one at a time. If it rips free, Vincent can always fly back down and try again." So we all get on the rope and pull with all our might. The rope stretches, but doesn't break. And doesn't break free of whatever Vincent secured it to. Nothing comes dropping down on our heads. Before we start climbing, Ash shows us one of those pieces of metal that she bought. It looks like a big eight.

She runs the rope through it and around it, then connects the metal eight to her harness. She demonstrates how to pull the rope through it as we go, and how we can lean back and pull the rope to the side to rest without risk of falling.

"This just slows the rope down," she says.

"It makes it so we can stop our falls, or at least slow them down. It'll be a little awkward to climb while pulling the rope through it, but it's much, much safer." Two hundred feet is a long way to fall. It won't kill any of us, I don't think, but it would probably hurt. And it would take so much more time having to climb back up if we did fall part way. Better to be able to rest part way if our arms start to give out. I'm glad Ash has some experience with climbing.

Ash starts up first, with El just about ten feet behind her. I gesture for Gigi to go next, and then I bring up the rear. I contemplate looping the rope over my shoulder as I climb, so that we don't have to haul it up after us, but I decide against it. That would make my climb a lot more awkward and difficult, and might end up dislocating my shoulder if I fall. Or if someone else does. Doesn't seem worth it to avoid a few minutes of hauling up an empty rope.

And while it does mean that someone could conceivably follow us, there's no one else in sight, so I'm not really worried about that. Climbing using only a rope is hard work. I do brace my feet against the wall and use the little ridges and nooks and crannies to help me get traction, which helps a lot, but I'm not even a quarter of the way up the wall when I notice that my stamina is draining. My regeneration is covering the drain, but I know that not everyone has stamina regeneration.

Ash does stop about twenty feet for the top. She dangles from her harness, holding the rope to her side the way she showed us how. She doesn't stop for more than thirty seconds, and I wonder if she did it just to show us that it was okay to take a break if we needed one. Gigi also takes a break when Ash does, though she ends up waiting a little bit longer. Still only about a minute, but it's long enough that both El and I get a chance to practice the pose that stops the rope from sliding through the metal eight.

It's kind of fascinating, actually. The rope has a lot of contact with the metal, with the harness, and with me. It's a lot more more points of contact than I have with the rope while I'm climbing. Kind of makes sense that it arrests our movement. I never got a chance to climb before, and it's really interesting to learn how. We make it to the top, and I start pulling up the rope. As I do, I notice that my climbing skill has increased from five to eight.

My stamina had drained a bit faster than my regeneration by the time I made it to the top, but I'm back to my maximum of 15, 180 before I get the rope all the way up. I coil the rope and put it in my spatial bag, all two hundred and fifty feet of it. Vincent had wrapped the rope around a stalagmite and hammered in a piton on the other side of it to make sure that it was as firm as he could make it.

"Nice job on rigging the rope," I tell him. He smiles at me.

"While I was waiting for you guys, I explored this cave a little bit. It goes pretty deep into the mountain, and I think it slants upwards. There used to be a river going through it."

"What stopped the river?" El asks. Vincent just shrugs. We head down the tunnel, and it's pretty clear that this tunnel was cut by running water. There are a few little pools of stagnant water as we go. None of them are that deep, more like deep puddles than anything else. But it makes me think that maybe the water didn't dry up all that long ago. The puddles look like they used to be deeper, but not by much. I wonder if something stopped the river from flowing. Maybe something artificial, like a dam.

Maybe there was just an avalanche that altered the mountain enough to change where the water source drained to. I lead the way through the tunnel, looking for traps. I'm not really expecting to find any, but you never know. This is a mountain that supposedly many have tried to climb before, and none made it back alive. I refuse to believe that a simple two hundred foot climb defeated all of them. There must be something else that got in the way.

I don't find traps, even with the glow from Ash's mace, but I do find something that disturbs me a bit. It's a corpse, and it's relatively fresh. It looks like what I would imagine a cave troll would look like. If it stood up straight, it would probably be about eight feet tall, which means it would have to hunch over to get through this tunnel, which is barely seven feet high. It has really long arms, and is covered in thick fur, thicker skin, and even thicker still muscles.

There are slashes covering its body, and a lot of them look like they've been partially healed over. I examine the wounds as best I can, to see if they seem familiar. And they do. We've seen wounds like like this before. They're wounds from two different swords, both wielded by the same person.

"Seems like Amanda might have beaten us here," I say. Ash examines the cuts that I point out, and nods her agreement.

"Seems like it. I wonder if she cut her way through the whole mountain or if she left some surprises for us."

"She can turn invisible and she can fly," Vincent reminds us.

"This guy was probably blocking her path, but she's likely to just pass by other enemies." A good point. There are probably a lot of monsters between us and the top of the mountain.