Chương 36: Manhunt

We get attacked as we're walking through the woods, looking for greater lynxith. I assume they're going to be more powerful than the regular kind, and I want more of their claws. So I'm paying attention to the tracks around us rather than looking above. That's my mistake. I need to learn to pay attention in all directions, including up. Most people forget to look up, and apparently, I'm one of them. The panther leaps down among us and claws me on its way down.

The claw strike does 26 damage to my Shell, and is more than a little bit of a surprise. I jump back away from it and draw the arrow I was keeping nocked on my bow, letting loose at the panther right away, not even thinking about it. Panther. Advanced rare beast level 11. HP: 978/1100. As we turn to fight the one panther, another leaps down from a tree, followed quickly by two more.

We're outnumbered, just barely, but I think the main attack they have is a sneak attack, because the next one that hits me only hits me for 12 damage. El roars and stands up taller than before, swinging her axe back and forth and cleaving into the panthers with each swing, catching one in the face and sending it sprawling with a bloody muzzle. Gigi pushes another one off her shield, and I draw another arrow and shoot point blank at the panther who initially clawed me.

The battle takes longer than it feels like it should. We need better weapons. I like my scimitar, but it barely does 75 damage with a hit, and it should not take that long to kill a creature like a panther. Even my bow, which does almost double that damage, takes too long. I can shoot these things nine or ten times before they finally die. The battles draws out and feels like a slog, like a real grind. We definitely need better weapons. Or, at least, I do.

The others seem to be doing pretty well, though it takes them a while to kill the extra panther, even if they kill the three before I'm done with the one. You have defeated Panther x4. You gain (4400/3) 1466 experience. It's a lot of effort for not all that much experience. At least these ones came to us.

"We need better weapons," I say while prying the claws out of the panthers' paws. That's another quest we've completed, but it doesn't feel like we've had a real challenge yet.

"That took way too long."

"The weapons at Glacrows did more damage than weapons from our old world," Gigi says.

"Even the ones that're the same level of quality did more. Maybe we should go back there and spend some gold."

"I only have four gold left," I say. I hold up my bracelet of willpower.

"This thing really cut into my funds. I wasn't thinking about needing to replace all my other equipment."

"Maybe we can sell the meat?" El says.

"Can you fit these panthers into your bag? The meat won't keep forever, but if we dress them right, it won't rot right away either. We could probably sell the meat for at least some coin." I can't imagine the meat would be worth all that much. Panthers are almost all muscle, which makes for gristly meat that isn't the highest quality. But it's better than nothing. I get another point of survival and another point of animal harvesting for dressing the panthers.

I cut out their guts and leave them behind for scavengers, letting as much blood drain from the carcasses as possible before putting them into my spatial bag. While I'm doing that, El seems happy to just lean against a tree and enjoy the sounds and smells of the forest, but Gigi seems to be pacing back and forth, as if she's uncomfortable with us treating these panthers like so many slabs of meat.

"I think we might have to fight our instincts a little bit," I say.

"You feel a kinship to these things?" I ask her. She shrugs.

"Maybe that's it," she says.

"I don't know. I just don't want to wait around. I want to keep going. I want to find more things to kill. I'm not satiated with our hunt just yet."

"Well, we don't have to turn back right away," I say, putting the last of the panthers into my spatial bag. It's still somehow not full, but I can tell that it's getting there. The bag feels a little bit heavier than it did, which makes sense. Each of the panthers weighs about a hundred and fifty pounds, even once I've cut out their organs. That reduces to fifteen pounds a piece, so my bag is now a good sixty pounds. Still not heavy enough to really slow me down, but I can definitely feel the weight of it now.

"Good," she says.

"I want to find something bigger. Something nastier. Something that can actually challenge us a little bit." We keep going into the forest, and over the next hour I start to realize that there are more than just animals in this forest. I start to see trail sign of bipedal creatures, and we come across a battle sight where more shadow wolves have already been skinned, smaller animals chewing on the corpses left behind. That makes me feel oddly better about leaving animals carcasses behind.

They aren't just going to rot away to nothing. Nature will take care of its own. One thing dies so that other things can live. It also makes a lot of sense that there are scavengers abounding in this area. If there are a lot of adventurers going through this area, that probably means a lot of dead monsters just left behind. So it makes sense that most animals here would be scavengers, eating the dead left behind by those grinding for levels. Not everyone is going to use even most of what they kill.

So it makes sense. And makes me feel a lot better about our own actions. The bipedal creatures are particularly interesting. Some of them seem to be elves. Some of them are boot prints that are bigger than I'd expect of the elves, but about the right size for humans. Or rather, for the bestial blooded like the three of us. It's something I noticed in our brief stay in the city: elves are smaller than humans. Not by a huge margin.

But where I'm about six feet tall, El about five ten and Gigi about five eight, most of the elves we saw in Elmspire topped out at five and a half feet tall on the upper end. The average was closer to five feet tall, men and women alike. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. I've never been tall in my life. I mean, I'm taller than average, but never enough for it to really be noticed.

I've never been chosen for a basketball team because of my height, and I've never had anyone really refer to me as tall before. I used to fluctuate around five eleven and six feet tall depending on the day, so I never considered myself all that tall. I know that only about one in six people top six foot, but still. I guess I was on the tall side, but never like super tall. Compared to the elves, I'm super tall. I'm nearly a giant compared to them. Head and shoulders above everyone else.

It's the way I always imagined I'd feel if I went to Japan. The tallest elves we saw were still shorter than Gigi, who is the shortest among us. My point is, we see a lot of smaller footprints that probably belong to elves, and a few larger ones that seem to belong to people like us. But there are also some bigger foot prints that I spot as we travel away from Elmspire. You can tell from the size of the print just how tall someone else.

It's not an exact science, but the image I get when I look at the trail of these bigger footprints is closer to six and a half feet tall, and much broader than I am. I stop and compare those tracks to our own, and to our bodies as a result of the tracks, in order to get a better idea of what we're looking at. El is broader than she used to be, Gigi a bit more on the lithe side, and me more on the lean side than I was. I think that comes from the animals whose blood is running through our veins, so that makes sense.

But his one that I'm looking at right now, this thicker sole and deeper impression, tells me that someone taller and broader than any of us has been this way, and recently.

"Wasn't there a quest to find a bandit outpost?" I ask as I look at the foot print. If I had to guess, I'd say that the person who made this print weighs between two fifty and three hundred pounds. Six and a half feet tall. So built like a football player. I'm more lean than bulky; if I had to guess, I'd say I weigh around one seventy or so. I'm pretty sure that a week ago I was around two hundred pounds, but I've lost weight as I've gotten into better shape. One more perk of a gamified world, I suppose.

Though I think I lost most of that weight since coming to this new world. My body feels new, and apparently it looks new too.

"Yeah. Find and clear," El says.

"You think you have something?"

"I can't say for sure, but this is the first print I've seen that doesn't seem to be coming from Elmspire but is coming from a person."

"So let's follow the trail, see where it leads us," Gigi says. She grins a toothy grin, and I'm pretty sure her teeth are a bit sharper than they used to be. I feel around my mouth with my tongue. I'm pretty sure my teeth are sharper than they used to be too. Not sharp enough to be used as a weapon except in an extreme pinch, but sharper than they were. Better at eating meat. The pointy teeth are a little bit pointier, as are the flatter ones. I don't know teeth names. But I'm not surprised. Are we still changing?

I think I would've noticed if my teeth had suddenly gotten sharper, but maybe not. Maybe we're still changing, and I'm just noticing now because it just happened now. I can't be sure. I sniff at the ground, trying to differentiate this person's scent from the scents around it. While I'm doing that, I cast Find Path. With my new regeneration rate, I can use it forever without ever losing any stamina. Outside of combat, I'm regenerating stamina faster than I used to. Find Path uses two stamina per minute.

I don't even notice the loss. But in addition to the path lighting up for me to see, I do differentiate the smell. It smells like worked leather and oil, like steel and sweat. It's a very distinct smell, and while it's dissipating as I stand here, I can tell where it gets stronger and where it gets weaker. We follow the path, but I'm as much following my nose as anything else. My tracking goes up to fourteen, and I start to realize that I can track just about anyone if I can get their scent. I'm like a bloodhound.

My tracking skill is going to keep going up, I can feel it. Sure enough, after a few minutes of following the one set of tracks, we come across another set. This set leads back to the same place, but splits off into another direction. I follow where the two tracks merge, knowing that we're getting closer to wherever they are staying. An outpost, a campsite, something. I hope these are the bandits we were looking for.

But if not, there's also the scouting quest just to find three outposts, so maybe we'll get that done instead. The trail continues on, but I stop Gigi and El, waving them to silence as I crouch down and enter into a more stealthy pose. They move close to me so that I can whisper, questions written on their faces. I briefly wish we spoke sign language, or that they did at least. Then I could tell them what I spotted without risking being heard.

But that wasn't in the cards, even though polyglot would probably help me understand it. So I'm forced to whisper.

"I see a guard," I say.

"Up in the tree a little down the path." I want to say more, but every syllable increases the chance that we'll be heard, and hence spotted. I want to keep the element of surprise as best as possible. El points down the path, then up at a tree. I follow her pointing, but she isn't pointing at the right place. So I point more directly at the figure that I saw, and while I do so, I get a better look at him. He looks human, and while he is up in the tree and seems to be on guard, he isn't looking at us.

He looks bored, if I'm honest.

"Snipe," Gigi whispers, gesturing to me. I draw back my bow and take careful aim, breathing slowly. I've never killed a human being before. I consider that as I let the arrow fly, and wonder how I'm going to handle it when I kill this one. The arrow hits his throat. He clutches at his throat and falls out of the tree, but doesn't make much of a sound aside from the thud of his landing. I watch where he landed, and there's no movement. There's a log of my attack.

You strike <unknown> for (469-64) 405 damage Sneak attack! Damage doubled. The sixty four must've been his defense, maybe? Or his armor? Something like that. Still, good to know that whoever he was, he had fewer than 810 hit points. Wish I'd gotten a better look at him and found out how many hit points he has and what level he is. But I guess I didn't look closely enough. Or he was hiding it somehow.

If there's a way to hide what you are, that's the kind of thing people would use when they aren't proud of their class. If I had a class that identified me as a criminal, I'd want to hide that. Same if I chose one that would make me some kind of pariah in the community. I don't want to walk around with it being displayed that I'm an assassin. That would defeat the whole purpose and make sneaking in places impossible. And if it works with something like assassin, it probably works the same way for bandit.

It's a stretch, but it works on a certain level. It's certainly enough to make me wonder about the others further in towards the camp. It's a much more permanent campsite than what we made earlier. A more permanent site than I think I would ever make, unless I was intending to stay there for a long time. There's a lean to, several tents, and a large clearing. Surprisingly large, too. It seems out of place, and I wonder if they chopped down the trees to set it up.

But there are six sleeping tents arrayed around a central pagoda like tent, with a large fire pit and a large open area for practice or whatever. Seems like the tents each sleep two at a time. So that means at least a dozen, possibly as many as two dozen of them. We've taken one out and still have the element of surprise. There are probably other guards surrounding the camp, keeping watch at least as well as the one I already took out. Could I take them all out before we attack the main camp? I probably can.

I turn to the girls and gesture for them to stay put. Then I activate Camouflage and start stalking off in search of the other guards.