Chương 37: Dead Bandits

The first guard I find isn't in a tree. He's standing against one, idly keeping watch but looking bored doing it. You strike <unknown> for (469-61) 408 damage Sneak attack! Damage doubled. The second guard I find is keeping a wary eye out, but it's clear by the torch in his hand that he can only see so far. You strike <unknown> for (469-68) 401 damage Sneak attack! Damage doubled. Guard number three doesn't have a torch, but also doesn't seem to be able to see all that well.

I get close enough to him that I can actually identify him. Human Bandit. Rare Advanced humanoid, level 8. HP: 800/800. The fourth guard I pin in place in the tree where he has already fallen asleep. I creep back around to where Gigi and El are waiting.

"That's five down," I whisper to them.

"They're all level eight, rare advanced. Figure the ones in camp will be right around there too. Maybe a few levels higher, but nothing to worry about."

"Let's get a surprise round of arrows and then attack," Gigi says.

"Caleb, you shoot first. When you take out another of their people, we'll all shoot at the group, then take them on in melee." Sounds like a good plan to me. I sneak close to the camp, until I can see the campfire area with a clean shot. There are three of them sitting around the fire talking. The rest may already be asleep. So there could be another dozen that will come join the fight. This is going to be dangerous, even with the level gap. I recast Shell, then pick out which of the three I want to hit.

One of them is telling a story to the other two. They seem pretty engrossed in it. That means they'll be used to being quiet, and it might take them an extra split second to shout for help. Maybe we'll get lucky somehow. I use Rapid Shot on one of the listeners. It does 670 damage to him, the bleed finishing him off a second later. The other one is hit twice by Gigi and El, but it doesn't look like they did enough damage to finish him.

I shoot him as I see him try to inhale to yell for help, hitting him in the chest hard enough that his scream comes out as desperate wheeze. We may have taken all three of them out without them having time to raise an alarm. We should have kept quiet, seen how many of them we could take out before they realized we were there. But Gigi and El don't seem to think the same way I do, and they are soon moving into the camp with weapons drawn.

El screams a battle cry, which I think rouses a few of the bandits out of their sleep. I stay back, only moving forward enough to stand near the fire. I'm much deadlier with a bow than I am with a sword. It occurs to me that if the bandits are the same way, I'm cutting a very clear figure and an easy target right now. But it feels cool, and it feels like it looks cool, so I'm sticking with it.

Seems to help with the idea that we invaded this camp while these guys were sleeping and are now more or less slaughtering them in their beds, too. Helps with me thinking that I just murdered seven people in the past twenty minutes, and that another eight or nine are now dying from either wounds that I inflicted or that my two friends dealt them, as these people are woken up without warning and thrust into a losing battle. We could've taken them in a straight on fight.

We probably could have sent in a note to warn them of our coming, and even let them set up a trap for us. We could definitely have won in an even battle, even with all of them prepared and awake and aware of what was going on. You defeat human bandit x18. You gain (14400/3) 4800 experience. On the other hand, I don't know how many suits of armor we would have wanted to pry off dead bodies.

As it stands, we got ten chain shirts, ten sets of leather pants, and fifteen bracers that we didn't have to strip off of dead people. We also got a hold of eighteen short swords, a dozen bows that all turned out to be better than what El has been using, and thirty five gold pieces between them.

"This is all stuff we can sell," I said, pointing to the suits of armor and the weapons.

"Maybe not for much, but probably better than the panther meat."

"This is a nice camp," Gigi says.

"Can we stay here?"

"What if there are more of them, still out there ranging around?" I ask, shaking my head.

"What if they come back and everyone's dead, but the three of us are sleeping in their tents?"

"Let's at least take one of the tents," El says.

"I'll even carry it." I have nothing against that. I mean, now that we've killed them, I have no problem robbing them. Of anything and everything. I don't much want to strip the clothes off their bodies, but I sure didn't mind rummaging through pouches to find that gold that I've piled together.

"Let's keep two as a party fund," Gigi says, looking at the gold.

"For lodging and stuff. That way, we each get eleven gold." That works for me, so I pick up eleven of the gold and add them to my pouch, bringing my total to fifteen. I then start pushing suits of armor into my bag. Another six pounds of effective weight here, eight pounds there. It's starting to get heavy. We head back to our own campsite, and El sets up the tent again.

"It sleeps two comfortably, three snugly," she announces when it's set up. Then she looks at the two of us.

"So how do we want to do this?"

"We should keep someone on watch," I say.

"I'll watch first. I'm not tired. You two get some sleep. I'll come wake someone up when I get tired."

"Don't be a hero," Gigi says.

"Don't try to stay up all night and make us wait for you to sleep the day way."

"Wake her up first," El says, patting me on the shoulder. That leaves me watching the area with a smile. I sit down with my sword and see if I can work on my sword with my smithing hammer. I try adding some bear claws around the crossbar of the sword. The claws disappear as I hammer them into place. I add in some of the panther claws that I gathered and hammer them into place too. As I do that, my scimitar goes from level 12 to level 14, the damage increasing to 43-53 damage.

At this rate, I'll be able to add another 12 total damage if I increase it all the way to level 20. I need something that does more damage if I'm going to be effective against the monsters of this world. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. But I do have to keep in mind that doing that is going to make combat more deadly. If I can deal six hundred damage at a time, I'm going to fight other creatures that can deal a similar amount of damage back.

The more deadly you are, the more you are willing to fight more dangerous enemies. So maybe it's not bad that my sword strikes are only doing 70 or 80 damage, because it means that my high defense is going to stop them from doing much damage to me. In the last battle where I actually fought up close, I was taking single digits of damage while dealing out high two digits of damage with each strike. Will that get boring, though? I mean, so far we're only fighting things that are less than half our level.

We're fighting things that are a third of our level. We need to find things that are bigger and tougher. And that means we need better weapons. I spend another hour improving my scimitar, eventually getting it to level sixteen before going and waking up Gigi. I'm still not overly tired, but she was right; if I stay up all night long just because I can, sooner or later I'm going to slow them down because I'm going to be exhausted. It's better to get some rest while I can, even if it's only a few hours.

I think that I let her sleep for two hours. She seems to be fine, getting up quickly and without complaint. That makes me laugh.

"What's so funny?" she asks.

"You're comfortable having a cat nap," I say. Just then, El lets out a deep snore.

"And she's sleeping like a bear. It's just funny." It also makes me wonder if El is going to start feeling weird about eating bear jerky. Would I feel odd about wolf jerky? Do I feel odd skinning wolves now? I feel distant enough from wolves that I feel no kinship for the shadow wolves. I had no problem killing them, and didn't think twice about stripping off their hides to turn into furs or eventually into leather. I don't care that I killed them; they were going to kill me.

Do I feel the same way about the human bandits? I'm not human anymore. But I was human, just a few days ago. I've always been human my entire life. Do I feel bad for killing them? I'm getting through this psychologically speaking by reminding myself that this is a game, or a gamified world at least. I'm telling myself that those bandits would've tried to kill us if we hadn't killed them. I'm telling myself that the way we fought them, the way we slaughtered them, wasn't the same as actually killing a real person.

Basically, I need to remind myself that they are NPCs. Not even named NPCs. They were literally identified as just being human bandits. No names, no histories. No conversation to have with any of them, no proof that they were real people. They weren't real people. They were just NPCs. Is this how people handle things when they go to war? Do they tell themselves that the enemy aren't real people? It sounds like a good way to try to avoid the PTSD that would go with combat. Our new world is custom built to give PTSD.

We're fighting and killing constantly. There are things that want to kill us, that are trying to kill us, that will kill us if we don't kill them first. I climb into the tent and into the warm bedroll that Gigi left behind. El doesn't stir, except to let out a bit of a snore when I climb over her. She's deep asleep, and I have to wonder if that's new from her bear blood or if she's always been a heavy sleeper. I lay awake for a little while, still thinking about the people I killed. Not people.

Don't think of them as people. Think of them as NPCs. As quest objectives. I finished one of my adventuring quests by killing those guards and helping to kill the people sleeping in camp. It was worth the experience that I'll get when I turn in the quest, and it was worth the experience I got for killing the bandits. The fact that they were human shouldn't matter. Doesn't matter. They aren't real people. It doesn't matter that I killed them. I don't sleep well.

I think I'm not quite convincing myself of the lack of personhood of those people. I think I'm not quite convincing myself that it's okay to just randomly kill people. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe I should sit with this for a while, really feel it out. Let myself grieve the old life that I had, the one that didn't involve a lot of kill or be killed situations. I could mourn the simple way that life used to work, and try to get used to the simple way that it works now.

It's just as simple, if you think about it, but it's fundamentally different. And I need to respect that. I need to understand that it's different, and I need to accept it. Eventually, I fall asleep. I know this because I wake up to the feel of El shaking me.

"Time to get up," she says.

"It's almost dawn." I only got about four hours of sleep, I think. Yet it seems to be enough. I don't want to keep sleeping. I want to get up and keep going. I want to hunt some more. I want to level up. I want the deaths of those people to be worth it, to mean something. I wonder if I'll have this kind of problem killing other outworlders. I don't think I will. I mean, the other people from Earth are going to come back from the dead. They'll come back lower level and a whole lot weaker, but they'll come back.

And the monsters that I kill, even if they don't come back, will at least be a part of the greater circle of life. Right? I strap on my armor and my weapons and step out of the tent. El breaks the tent down and shoves it into her spatial bag, and we disassemble the camp. We make sure the fire is out, bury our little latrine, and do our best to hide any evidence that we were there.

We could leave some wood and the fire ring for the next group of people to find this camping spot, but it seems more important to hide the evidence that we were here than to help random strangers who may or may not even be on our side in the grand scheme of things. I chew on some bear jerky, and see El doing the same.

"Does that bother you?" I ask her.

"Eating bear, now that you're bear blooded, I mean." She stops and thinks about it, then looks down at the meat in her hand. For a second I see a look of disgust cross her face, but then she shrugs and takes another bite.

"Apparently not," she says.

"Food is food. I guess I still think of myself as human. I wouldn't eat a person. But I don't mind eating bear. Do you have any trouble with the wolves?" I shake my head.

"I guess I still see myself as human too," I say.

"But it did make me stop and think, you know?" She nods. Then she yawns and lets out a big stretch that seems to encompass her whole body, the end of it leaving her shaking a little bit.

"So what's the plan for today? Another bandit outpost, or should we go looking for bigger game?"

"I was thinking about that," Gigi says, coming over as she straps her shield to her arm.

"We need better weapons."

"Yeah we do," I say.

"Otherwise, we're going to end up fighting something our own size and it's going to take us hours to whittle it down to the point where we can kill it." I know we can all take a fair amount of damage before there's any worry, and I know we all have pretty high defenses, but if we fight something that's level 25 or higher, those things aren't going to matter as much. What will matter is how much damage we can dish out. What if we come across something that has 25, 000 hit points? That would take us weeks to kill.

I might run out of arrows before we were able to take something like that down. Not really. I'm not going to run out of arrows any time soon. Aside from the sixty that I normally have with me, there were about another hundred we were able to liberate from the bandit camp. I took half of those and put them in my spatial bag, the girls splitting the other half. So I've got over a hundred. That's enough to do about 12, 000 damage. Which is only half what we'd need to kill something with twenty five thousand.

Yeah, we need better weapons.

"The problem with needing better weapons is that we need money," I say.

"I've only got fifteen gold, even after that bandit camp."

"The bandits have money, and we need it," Gigi says.

"So it seems like the answer is pretty obvious. Let's go looking for those other bandit camps, or for that actual outpost. Those might have money, or at least things we can sell for money."