Chương 43: Out Adventuring again

We walk all the way around Elmspire before leaving. It takes us a good amount of time, more than long enough for me to report to the girls about my conversation with John and about how to communicate over the message system.

"It takes forever," Gigi complains as she plays with the interface.

"It's like texting on a phone from the 90s." I don't know if it's that bad, but I get what she means. It isn't fast. You have to spell out every word, and it doesn't come as fast as texting does. But maybe it will with practice. Maybe we just need time to get it up to a usable speed.

"It'll still help," El says.

"And I'm more worried about these guilds than anything else."

"Worried?" I ask.

"The guilds are going to get exclusive," she says.

"You watch. Soon enough, they'll start ostracizing people who don't join guilds. Until there's a guild made up entirely of people who don't want to be in a guild. Then that one will get attacked and subsumed into another guild. Eventually, there won't be any room for free agents."

"So you're saying we should join a guild?" I ask. She shakes her head.

"I'm saying we should get ready to make enemies of the guilds. You said this John guy was a lower level than us? He's probably towards the top of the level in his guild, or he wouldn't be recruiting. They'll want to show strength when they recruit people. Sooner or later, they'll stop with the soft sell and move on to the hard."

"That's where they threaten to kill you if you don't join," Gigi adds, helpfully.

"We need to level up, and fast," El says.

"I don't know if there is a level we can get to where they'll be afraid to cross us, but we need to try to get to it if there is."

"Maybe level fifty?" Gigi offers.

"If we make it there, then we can probably hold our own against anything the guilds send after us."

"Only if they're at least ten levels below us," El says.

"Hence the leveling up quickly," I say. I sigh.

"Okay. For what it's worth, I'm in. Something about the guilds just rubs me wrong anyway."

"Too much politics," Gigi says.

"Too much of the people on top pushing around the people at the bottom."

"Let's make for the edge of the forest, then," I say.

"That'll get us a scouting quest, and we might run into more bandits along the way."

"We'll head out for as long as we can manage," Gigi agrees.

"Get some better equipment or at least a lot to sell, then we can come back and see how things have changed. A week is a long time, especially at the beginning of all this. Maybe the guilds will be too busy fighting each other to worry about us." Sounds like a plan to me. I take point, and we start moving through the forest. I lead us around most of the animals we find, not wanting to disrupt the lower level creatures and waste our time fighting them.

I know every experience point counts, but splitting 70 points three ways feels like a waste. Unless we could find a group of like a hundred of them, I don't see any point in fighting most of the monsters whose trails we come across this close to Elmspire. I am surprised when I again find human sized prints in the ground, just about five hours away from Elmspire. We're traveling at a decent pace, I figure around three or four miles an hour.

Strange that there would be humans within even twenty miles of the giant tree. This feels like it's well within the territory of the elves. I certainly see their tracks all over the place. But these human tracks are different. Not only are they bigger, and less numerous, they seem like they're being careful not to be spotted. My tracking goes up to sixteen, which I don't think would happen if the tracks were super obvious.

These ones have been covered, at least a little bit, but they're still fresh, unlike most of the elven sign that I come across.

"It looks like they're trying to cover their tracks," I say, pointing to one footprint that looks like it had leaves brushed through it to disguise or erase it. It would've worked too, but it looks like the print was made early enough in the morning that the dew made the ground wet, and the print went a bit deeper than it normally would.

"Could be more bandits."

"Let's go check it out," Gigi says.

"Might be another easy run, and it'll finish off that one scout quest." Following the trail would probably be a lot more difficult if not for Find Path. But it highlights the path, so even when there isn't a print for a good twenty or thirty feet, I can still follow the trail clear as day back through the woods. Find Path also increases from 1 to 2, which reduces the casting time down to 50 seconds. I guess I'll eventually be able to use it on a path with a serious quickness.

It's not long before we find another bandit camp like the first one. Once again, there is a line of guards, but they are much more on task and vigilant than they were the last time around. That might be because it's early afternoon and not deep into the night, so they can see better and have a better chance of actually spotting a problem before it becomes a danger. Or it might be because they are higher level. Human Bandit. Rare advanced humanoid, level 10. HP: 1000/1000.

That's more hit points than I can do damage with a normal Sniper Shot, but less than I can do with a sneak attack. If I get the sneak attack, I can still take them out in a single hit. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. I tell the girls to stay where they are, and once again I make my way around the camp, spotting the guards and taking them out with a well placed Sniper Shot with sneak attack.

In doing so, my alertness and my bow skill both increase by one. My bow skill is closing in on thirty. I wonder if anything special happens at thirty. I don't see any reason why there would be, but I can hope. I take out six guards around the camp, and then we move closer to get a look at the camp as a whole. It's set up much like the other bandit camp was, except this time no one is sleeping. They're all milling around, talking, eating, or playing dice.

Six tents that sleep two people each, sleeping in shifts, means eighteen total bandits. Minus the six that I took out leaves us with twelve. That's four each. This is not going to be easy. I can take out one with Sniper Shot when we start the assault. Gigi and El might be able to take out another with their own arrows before we get started, or at least do some heavy damage to get that one lower in HP than the others. I can hit one with Rapid Shot; the bleed will kill him. So that leaves ten, nine if we're lucky.

Then I can switch to my sword and see what Mab's Rage is really like. I take a deep breath before we get started. This is what we do, this is what we're good at. This is an ambush, and we have the upper hand. We're much higher level than they are, and we're going to do a good job. They can't kill us. They won't kill us. I let loose the one arrow for Sniper Shot, and almost immediately fire off five more for Rapid Shot, taking down two of the bandits before they realize they're under attack.

Unlike the last time, this group is much more prepared for an attack, though, and the surprise does not last long. I fire off one more arrow before drawing my new sword and charging forward, activating my new spell while I go. I can feel the mana drain from me as I cast it. Mab's Rage better be good, for how much MP it costs to cast. As soon as I cast it, a cold wind picks up and begins to swirl all around me, shards of ice flying through the air.

El and Gigi's hair doesn't even get picked up, as if the wind isn't blowing near them at all. Must be because they are part of my party. But as I get among the bandits, I can see them start to move slower, and see them wincing at the pain that the cold is causing them. It only deals 33 damage, but it's 33 damage every second for a full minute. That's enough to kill these guys almost twice over. All I really have to do is get near the largest group of them, and I'll be find.

I use Bleeding Strike on the first bandit that I come across, doing 169 damage to him while he hits me for 12, my Shell blocking all of it. We begin dueling, our blades clashing into one another, while the area around me starts to thin out. They're trying to get away from the cold wind that's cutting into them. Unfortunately for them, the clearing isn't all that big, and thirty feet in every direction is a pretty large area.

Some of them will get free, but those that do will be forced to fight in very tight quarters against El and Gigi, and I don't see that going very well for them. My opponent and I keep clashing swords, fighting through the clearing. He is trying to push me to one side of the clearing, trying to at least get me off to one side so that my spell doesn't kill too many of his companions. He's sacrificing himself to try to save his friends. It's really noble, when you think about it.

But as much as he's trying to force me back, he isn't really getting me to move much at all. I'm fighting much faster than he is – my weapon adds ten percent to my speed, and so does my fast reflexes talent. Being faster than he is, it's hard for him to maneuver me around. I just circle him, dealing damage to him at a much higher rate than he deals to me.

And after thirty seconds of us dueling, he dies from the Mab's Rage spell anyway, allowing me to get closer to those who were able to escape its clutches and deal a lot of damage very quickly. The entire battle is over within five minutes. Once Mab's Rage ends, the bandits do rally a little bit, but they've lost the real advantage of numbers already; fully half of them are dead before the end of the spell, taken out either by the spell itself or by El and Gigi's weapons, or by a combination of the two.

Having only six of them left, and those six already damaged, it doesn't take much for the three of us to take them out. You have defeated bandit x18. You gain (18, 000/3) 6, 000 experience. We search the bodies and the camp, getting another 45 gold and 60 silver from their pockets and from a small chest that they have in the central pagoda tent. We decide against taking all the armor this time; I don't think it's worth all that much and it takes up a lot of space in our bags.

But we do take their swords and daggers, tossing them into the spatial bags. As we continue traveling, I start to wonder about our other adventurer quests. One of them is to go to a temple and clear it of undead. I hate fighting undead, because they don't bleed. This makes my arrows much less effective. But it's worth a lot of experience, and it's not like it's nothing we've done before. It's basically the same thing we did at the St Mary basilica in Minneapolis.

We just have to fight our way through the skeletons and destroy the generator. The temple is marked on my map, and we are heading generally in that direction.

"Should we take out the undead temple while we're going?" I ask when we leave the bandit camp.

"Sounds like a good source of experience to me," Gigi says.

"We need to do everything we can to level up. It's important."

"More important that potentially contacting Ash or Vincent?" I ask.

"Because the only way we're going to be able to contact them is to get to the land where they spawned, which means getting out of the forest."

"How big is this forest?" El asks.

"We can make it about thirty miles a day. How long do you think it'll take us to get out?"

"I don't know. Could be two days, could be a week. Could be more. We really have no way of knowing."

"Then I think we're not losing anything if we delay and take out the temple," she says.

"Like, if we knew it took two days, then stopping off would be a waste of time, because we'd be delaying by almost a quarter of the time we're spending traveling. But if it's a week, we're not wasting that much time anymore. And if it's more than a week, then it's even less of a diversion." Can't really argue with that logic. I mean, I could, but it's still pretty convincing. It makes sense, at least. So we turn towards the temple of the undead. We should get there around dusk.

"You guys get any abilities that will help us kill undead?" I ask them as we start moving in that direction.

"I got something that increases my strength and something that lets me do more damage with a single hit," El says.

"So I should be good for bashing the shit out of skeletons."

"I got a spell that coats my sword in flames and adds fire damage to my attacks," Gigi says.

"I don't know how much good that will do against skeletons, but if there are other undead creatures there, I might be able to do more damage to them."

"My spell should work just fine on undead, but it only lasts a minute," I say. Still, that minute is a long time when it comes to the amount of damage that it deals. And who knows? Maybe the advancing of a spell has less to do with how many times its used and more to do with how much damage it deals. Maybe Mab's Rage is going to level up super quickly.