Chương 69: Chapter 70: A slaughter

He growls at me, screaming with each blow as he swings wildly. I dodge to the side, and he sends dirt flying as he slams his blade in where I was just standing. I stomp down on the blade and slash out at his hands, cutting off a finger and making him lose the grip on his weapon. He steps back, holding his wounded hand close to his chest. Then he reaches behind himself and pulls out a wicked looking hatchet. He holds it in his good hand and swings it at me.

He can attack a lot faster with the shorter and lighter weapon, and I find myself being pushed back a step as we fight. He hits me, but it only does 55 damage this time. So it's not as powerful a weapon, explaining why he wasn't fighting with it from the beginning. I figure I can handle him with a little axe, but then he leaps back and pulls one of the shields from a dead orc, hefting it with his wounded hand. He grimaces a bit, but seems to find a comfortable place to hold it.

I'm still hitting just as often, but fully half the hits are being deflected by the shield. So in the time it takes for me to actually deal 240 damage to him, he manages to deal 110 to me. He's hitting me twice for every three times I hit him, but his shield is absorbing the damage most of the times I hit him. So we're closer to an even battle. I don't like even battles. But what can I do? I have no MP, so I can't cast any spells.

My abilities that work in combat are mostly bow related, and I definitely don't have time to back off and pull out my bow. I can't use Distraction once the battle has commenced. So what can I do? Well, I can dodge. I can dodge the swipes by the axe, not worrying about hitting him back just yet. I can maneuver us a little bit, until he's right between me and El. El is fighting the other captain, laughing madly as she does. But it still counts.

As soon as she's on the opposite side of the captain from me, I lunge forward, slipping my blade around his shield and under his chest plate, slicing deeply along his ribs. 468 damage. Flanking. Sneak attack. He grunts in pain, and I smile at him. Then I do a bleeding strike for 608. He seems to realize that he's flanked, because he steps to the side to break the line between us before trying to bash me with his shield.

I step back from the shield bash, putting him off balance for a split second, and I slash across his forehead. Now he's got blood in his eyes. He swings wildly, and I just stay back for a second, letting his panic grow as he doesn't hit anything. His health is dwindling down, he can't fight at his full potential, and I think he's starting to realize that the only corpses on the battle field are orcs. The five of us are still going strong.

He tries to tackle me, diving forward with the shield in the lead, like he's going to hit me in the stomach with the shield. I dart to the side and cut down heavily. His head comes away from his neck. And, thankfully, he dies. I'm not taking that for granted, but the way his body goes slack and his hit points drop to zero tell me that decapitation was successful in killing the orc captain. I look up, and there are no more captains to fight.

There are a few lieutenants, but mostly there are just badly burned orcs, fighting an increasingly desperate fight as we slowly move them back into their fortress, gaining ground one step at a time. I'm not one to kill with a single strike. Even when I'm flanking and doing the most damage I can do, it's barely over six hundred. That's ten percent of the orc lieutenant's health. But right now, it's doing a much larger percentage.

The orcs who make it past Gigi, El, and Ash are usually down to about a thousand health, so it doesn't take much for me to help clean up and prevent them from getting surrounded. The battle is turning. It's less of a fight now, more of a slaughter. We've defeated their leadership, and some of the orcs are even breaking ranks and running away. There's nothing we can do about the ones that flee. I suppose I could switch to my bow and try to kill them, but I'm not sure there's a point. I can't stop them all.

Fully twenty orcs break and run. No way I could stop that many. Some of them would get through, and would get away. With so many running away, the slaughter becomes a foregone conclusion. The remaining orcs fall quickly, so quickly that they don't even have time to surrender, if that were an option. I'd accept their surrenders. I'm not sure El would. I'm not sure El could. She's in a berserker haze, and I don't think she's paying attention to much other than the color of the form she's attacking.

The orcs are green. None of us are. I don't think she's differentiating more than that right now. The battle, or whatever it ended up as, comes to an end, and we all stand there, panting for breath. Even my stamina is a bit drained. We must've been fighting for a good half an hour. Maybe there would've been time for me to sneak in during the battle. Or maybe the battle wouldn't have gone well without me. I look at the others. Ash heals herself again, bringing herself up above two thousand hit points.

Gigi does the same, for the same result. El is rapidly healing on her own. I check the notifications. You have successfully infiltrated a fortress and escaped. Reward: 20, 000 experience. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. You have defeated orcs x70, orc lieutenant x8, orc captain x3, orc major. You gain (385, 000+48, 000+36, 000+26, 000= 495, 000/5) 99, 000 experience. Also, my bow, spellcraft, and sword all improve.

And I gain levels in Blur, Sniper Shot, and Bleeding Strike. Bleeding Strike goes up in damage, Sniper Shot reduces the cooldown to 40 seconds, and Blur allows me to move at 75% of my full speed. And, of course, I leveled up. Twice! I made it to level thirty! The first thing I do is select toughness as my talent. It's going to be good to break three thousand hit points. How many stat points do I have? Nineteen.

Okay, let's put five each into strength, agility, and vigor, then two each into manipulation and willpower. I'm still fourth when it comes to hit points, but not by nearly as far a margin. Ash has 4356 and I have 4200. I can hang with the big girls. El is close to 6500, outstripping us all, and Gigi has 5440, an impressive amount. We're basically monsters. And we now have a fort. What do we do with the fort?

"Do we burn it?" I ask.

"If we just leave it, the rest of the orc army is probably going to move in."

"That's assuming they're still coming," Ash says.

"They might not. They know that the location has been compromised, and they know that Elmspire has strong enough defenders to wipe out the battalion or whatever that they had stationed here. They may just abandon it."

"What would we do with it?" El asks.

"We could set our respawn location to this fortress," I say.

"And then we could have a place that belonged to us."

"But why?" El asks.

"We could keep things here," Vincent says.

"It would be nice to have a base of operations that doesn't depend on the city. One far away from prying eyes and from the guilds. We're going to have a problem with the player guilds now."

"Why?" Gigi asks, sheathing her sword and flexing her hand a bit.

"We're about to make a name for ourselves in Elmspire," Vincent says.

"With the intelligence that we can bring back now, our names are probably going to start carrying a little bit of weight, at least within the faction guilds. And if that's not enough, we're now all above level thirty. That makes us prime candidates for recruitment."

"It's not like thirty is the top level," El says. She's creeping up on level thirty five, so that much is obvious.

"You act like we're in endgame territory now."

"We very well may be," Vincent says.

"It's not easy to get levels the higher up you go. Sooner or later, the leveling has to become secondary. And thirty is a good place for that. You've been adventuring, you've done some important things. You've killed some serious monsters. It takes a lot to get to level thirty. Maybe it's time you settled down and joined a guild."

"What if we don't want to join a guild?" I ask.

"The requests start off pleasant," Vincent says.

"They always do. But eventually, they'll get pushy. They'll be insulted that we turn them down. And when they have the chance, they'll try to get us out of the way. Knock us back to level one, so we have time to think about how generous their offer was."

"Sounds like the mafia," Ash says.

"Kind of evil." I don't know why, but it's a bit funny coming from her. Maybe it's the charcoal skin or the shark teeth or the glowing eyes.

"We can just avoid them all," Gigi says.

"We go to the city to shop and resupply, to pick up and drop off quests, and then we get out of there. If we don't even spend the night, they won't be able to corner us."

"We can try that," Ash says.

"I don't know if I want to stay in Elmspire overnight anyway. The guards would probably be happier if I don't."

"So are we just forgetting about the fortress?" I ask. There are a bunch of orc corpses we need to loot and then move, but that's all that's standing in the way of this fortress being livable. We already know there's a barracks. There's probably a forge or something too. Maybe we could do some forging here.

"We can craft here in relative safety. And we can probably sleep with a much lighter guard, if we close the doors."

"I don't want to be tied down to a location," Ash says.

"I like the idea of constant travel. If we're going to wander the world killing monsters, we need to do with a purpose. Like seeing as much of this world as we possibly can." She gives me a look that I'm sure is full of meaning, but that meaning flies over my head.

"I agree," El says.

"Let's burn this sucker down."

"In the morning," Gigi says, holding up a hand.

"I want to use the protection of the fortress to sleep. And maybe the military cots that I'm sure are in the barracks are more comfortable than sleeping on the ground." We're all tired, but I insist on staying up to keep watch. A fortress is only good if no one can get in. And without someone watching, there's nothing to stop people from getting in. The last thing I want to do is wake up and find that the orcs who ran got reinforcements and came back, and are standing around our beds ready to slaughter us.

Looting the orcs didn't get us much. We do find enough gold for us to each get another seven, with four more added to the party fund, which Gigi is in fact still keeping track of. That's the fund for things like staying in inns or eating in the city, so we don't have to worry about paying for that. There are more swords, but I have them stacked up here with me in the tower while I'm keeping watch. I figure in two hours I can take apart a lot of swords.

It's just a matter of breaking the welded seal and then unscrewing the parts, pulling them apart and putting them into piles. I must've taken apart seventy five swords by the time my two hours is up and I climb down to wake up Gigi. In that time, my scrapping increases to 12, and I end up with a lot of materials for improving swords. Which I'm going to try to do in the morning, before we leave. I go to sleep in a cold bed, which is unusual for me.

Normally, someone else has been sleeping in that bed until just a few minutes ago. Usually Gigi. I take her bed roll and sleep there most nights, warmed by her body heat. It helps me fall asleep. The cold cot takes a while to get comfortable in, long enough that I decide that I, at least, prefer to sleep on the ground. You just have to make sure that the ground you're sleeping on is clear. And that someone else spent two hours sleeping there while you were on watch. When I do wake up, I see that El is still asleep.

So is Vincent. I decide to let them sleep and get up to see what Ash and Gigi are doing.