Chương 77: Chapter 78: Training and the prospect of death

Once they're gone, El turns to me.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" she asks.

"We'll keep an eye on each other," I say.

"If someone starts acting differently, we can put a stop to it."

"But how?" she asks.

"We respawn here now. The dragon can just keep killing us if we refuse to play along with his plan." That's a good point. Wrax could undo all the good that he's doing if he just keeps killing us over and over again. Losing five traits per category isn't much, but it'll add up if he keeps doing it.

"So if we decide we don't want to do it anymore, we escape and set our respawn somewhere else."

"I can't set it somewhere else for twenty four hours," she says.

"So we give it a day," I say.

"I doubt he's going to be able to do this more than once each per day. I'd be surprised if he can even do it that often."

"We should kill him," El says. She gestures around.

"Look at all the loot we'd get if we just killed him."

"You saw how many hit points he has," I say.

"Fighting him is just going to take forever, and it's pointless anyway."

"He must be weak to something."

"Maybe. But I know he has my same spell, the one that wrecks everyone in the area. And his version is stronger than mine."

"What does it take to level that spell up?" she asks.

"It doesn't much matter. That spell is great against things with fewer hit points, but it won't help with Wrax."

"I still don't like it."

"I know," I say.

"But you promised to try it, at least once."

"How far behind would I be falling otherwise?" she asks.

"Let's assume we lose fifteen in each stat when we die above level thirty," I say.

"There are eight stats. That's one hundred and twenty stat points lost. Getting back to level twenty nine gets us one hundred and thirty three. So it's like a thirteen point boost, just getting back to level twenty nine."

"And twenty nine you said is like the sweet spot?"

"That's what Wrax was saying last time around. At twenty nine, you only lose eighty stat points. That evens out by level twenty or so, leaving you with an extra eighty five points by the time you get back to twenty nine."

"So it's like getting an extra eighty five points every time we die?" she asks.

"That is tempting."

"Yeah, your health is going to get ridiculous," I say.

"So will everything else. Maybe after a few times, we'll be able to kill the dragon."

"Don't forget that we spend the days in between casting spells and training skills."

"That is a lot of extra power," she says.

"No wonder Ash wants it."

"What do you mean?"

"Haven't you noticed that she's a bit, um, power hungry? I don't think she used to be like this. She wasn't like that when we used to larp together. Like, she was down with power, and liked getting stronger and building her character and all that. But now she seems starved for the power, you know? She just wants it so bad."

"You think that's the demon blood?" El shrugs.

"Maybe. Maybe it's just a side of her I never saw before. But I know she's been pushing this whole dragon thing a lot harder than you have. And it's your idea." It was actually Wrax's idea. But that's not important right now.

"She is awfully keen," I say.

"And she wanted to level up a few times before he killed her. He could've just killed all three of us as soon as we set our respawn."

"She wants power," El says.

"And that means stats and skills. She's probably getting him to teach her to ride as we speak." That would make sense. I have three levels of ride, all from riding a dragon.

"Do you think we need to worry about her?" El shakes her head.

"No, but I think that if we want to stop, you and I have to be in agreement, and have to understand that she might not want to stop. She might want to keep going." That's a sobering thought. What if Ash wants to become a god slayer in her own right? What if she wants to go through the death and releveling cycle a hundred times? Will that change her personality? Then El lets out a sigh and shrugs again.

"Whatever," she says.

"Let's get to training, then. Cast your spells. At me."

"What? Why at you?"

"I want to toughen up," she says.

"And I want to get that last level of Shell. I need to take damage so that I can recast it." Even at 80%, her Shell is more powerful than mine. Mine provides an extra 4464 hit points; hers offers 5168.

"Are you sure?" I ask her.

"Just hit me," she says, groaning in exasperation. So I start casting Ice Spike at her every five seconds, and Magic Dart while it's in cooldown. By the time I get her Shell down, I'm out of mana and have to meditate for a good half hour to get my mana back. While I'm doing that, El starts exploring the cave, finding little rooms that we can use for our own. She even sets up a tent in one of them. Then we go back to me shooting her and her just standing there and taking it.

I have to believe that there's more at work here than just getting her to improve Shell. She must be doing something else. But I can't tell what it is. We continue in this cycle for the next several hours, barely speaking. She just grimaces as the spells hit her, and I just leave her to whatever is occupying her thoughts. Eventually, my spellcraft goes up to 35, and both Magical Dart and Ice Spike go up in level.

Magical Dart now does my spellcraft +8 damage, and Ice Spike now does 150% my presence in damage, which works out to 72 damage. That's not much. But it's going to go up as we level. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. After several hours of this training, El seems to get bored of it, and suggests that we switch to fighting one another.

"It'll help us train our weapon skills," she says.

"And our dodge. You like dodging, don't you?"

"Are you okay?" I ask. She clearly isn't, given the way she's wringing her hands on her axes and twirling them around nervously.

"I just don't like this," she says.

"I'll be fine."

"It's okay to talk about it," I say. I draw my sword and take up a fighting stance. She settles into her own fighting stance and glares at me.

"I don't want to." I start attacking her, and soon our conversation is punctuated by the clanging of metal."But maybe you should."

"How are you okay with dying?" she asks me. It sounds like it's coming out of nowhere, but I know she's been obsessing over the thought for hours now.

"How are you okay with a dragon just casually ending your life? I know we come back, but still. That shouldn't be something that you're just okay with." I was right about her speed. She's at least as fast as I am. Maybe faster. I think I have the edge with my higher agility, but it's a small edge, and doesn't make up for her having more hit points than I do.

"I'm not entirely okay with it," I say.

"I put sixty points into charisma to try to get Wrax to not kill me last time, remember?"

"But here you are, volunteering to let him kill you now, potentially dozens of times. How can you not care about your own life?"

"I do care," I say.

"I care very much. But I'm thinking about the way things will change when we're done doing this. I care about being more powerful than all the other players in all the guilds, and by such a margin that they won't be able to fuck with us. I care about being able to face something like Wrax and winning. But we can't do that as we are. We have to get stronger. And this is the best way to get stronger."

"We could just do the training," she says. She swipes her axe at my face, and I duck underneath it, trying to score a hit on her thigh just to have her move out of the way before I connect.

"You could cast your spells at me, I could increase my awareness, and we can just level up that way. We could go fight monsters and gain levels. If we make it to level fifty, no one will be able to fuck with us anyway."

"That's just a stop gap," I say.

"And it won't last forever. We're never going to be able to stop leveling if we go that route. Sooner or later, the general population will catch up with us, level wise. But if we can be hundreds of points of stats ahead of them, that's something they can't keep up with. We won't have to worry about being overpowered by anyone."

"But what about Gigi and Vincent?" she asks.

"They aren't going to be getting the benefit of this program. Are we going to want to hang out with them after we've died a hundred times? Will we even understand them? Won't they seem weak as hell to us?" She slashes at me five times in rapid succession, not giving me enough time to take advantage of the hole in her defenses, and just forcing me to dodge the attacks. I had considered that. I don't know why, but I assumed that they would eventually come here and do the same thing.

I thought we had found a glitch in the game, basically, and were were going to take advantage of it as a group. Maybe not all at the same time, but still all of us.

"They can come and do it too," I say.

"Once we know it works, once we've done it a few times, we'll contact them and get them to come out and join us."

"He can't level up five of us at a time," she says.

"He's going to get annoyed." I shake my head.

"I don't think so," I say. I stab at her, and she flows around it, knocking my blade off trajectory with one of her axes, the other one chopping down on my shoulder. It does 210 damage to my Shell. Considering that my defense took away from her starting damage, that's really impressive. She hits hard.

"Why not?" she asks, dancing back out of the way of my counter attack. I haven't landed a hit on her yet. It's hard because she has two weapons, and knows how to use them both at once. I have to wait for her to attack, then riposte with an attack of my own, when she's vulnerable. I have to dodge before I can strike.

"Because he gets half the experience," I say.

"And if he's just out killing things that give him a ton of experience, sooner or later he's going to level up. And then he'll be even stronger. And that's what he wants out of this."

"You don't think he just wants to use us as pawns in some bigger game?" She chops at me, and I dart to the side. Then I use Chop on her. I hit for 163 damage. No doubt, then, who would win if we actually fought to the death. She hits at least as often as I do, she does significantly more damage, and she has significantly more hit points than I do.

"Oh, we're definitely pawns in a bigger game," I say.

"But I think that his secondary goal is to become one of the minor gods. And to do that, he has to get stronger. So I think he will be happy to get more levels out of this, same as us."

"How much experience does he need to gain a level?"

"I don't know," I say.

"He's been level thirty the whole time I've known him. So he needs a lot more than we do, I know that." She stabs at me with one axe, the other one sliding across where my neck should be if I step the wrong way to avoid the stabbing. I deflect the stabbing axe with my sword and lean backwards to avoid the slashing axe.

"And this gives him an excuse to fight for experience rather than for food?" she asks.

"Maybe I should've chosen dragon blooded."

"You don't like being a bear?" I ask, a bit thrown from the sudden shift in topic.

"I like being a bear," she says.

"I'm tougher and stronger than I would be otherwise. But dragons are dragons, you know?"

"Don't you want to kill him?" She leaps back to avoid another Chop.

"Yeah," she says.

"But I want to kill everything. Just to be able to say that I did. I want to be a dragon slayer. How could I not?" I wonder if she'll feel that way about slaying gods. Will she want to do that, just to prove she can? Will El become the same problem as the god slayer?

"If you could go back to the tutorial, would you?" I ask as she slams both axes down. I block her attacks with my sword, but the sheer force of the blow almost knocks me down to my knee. She pauses, considering. I get my feet under me and push her away. She doesn't seem to really notice.

"I don't think so," she says.

"I mean, as nice as it would've been to know what was going on, we did just fine in the tutorial. And I think I'd get bored with the same couple of enemies."

"Yeah. We need to be able to find bigger and badder game," I say.

"Damn right we do," she says with a smile, coming in swinging again.

"Maybe we can't kill a dragon yet, but we've killed a drake, right? That's something."

"We need to be able to do a lot more damage before we can take on anything with Wrax's level of hit points," I say.

"Even your couple hundred damage per hit isn't going to be enough. We need to find a way to do damage in the thousands, at least."

"Yeah. Enough that we can kill those stupid bargheasts in a single hit." They have six thousand hit points. Yeah, if we could do that might in a single hit, we might be able to take on something like Wrax.

"That would be good," I say.

"Of course, if we do that," she catches me in the side with an axe blade, and I slide the sharp edge of my sword across her chest.

"We won't be able to do this anymore."

"What do you mean?"

"You just did 160 damage to me," she says.

"Which is no big deal. I can take that. But if you were doing like five thousand damage a hit, that wouldn't be okay. We couldn't keep sparring at that rate."

"Oh," I say.

"Yeah."

"Wanna screw instead?" she asks.

"What?"

"Sex," she says.

"Want to have sex? With me?"

"What, now?" She lowers her arms and steps away.

"Why not?" she says.

"Sex complicates things," I say.

"It doesn't have to," she says.

"We can just be fuck buddies."

"Why do you want to sleep with me?"

"Because I'm straight, you're cute, and I'm horny." she says.

"Isn't that reason enough?" Is it? It shouldn't be. Should it? I can't really decide. I just know I'm not comfortable with the idea. I shake my head.

"I'm not ready," I say. She shrugs.

"Maybe when I get my charisma up higher," she says. Then she lunges at me, slashing with her axes just fast enough that I have to dodge or deflect, that I can't fight back. She tangles up her arm in mine and pulls me close. I watch the axe in her free hand, waiting for it to come slamming down on my chest a few dozen times. I'm about to surrender when she leans in and kisses me. Her lips are like soft pillows, and while I can feel her tongue, she doesn't shove it down my throat.

She slips it carefully into my mouth, as if she's unsure she wants to be there at all. The kiss sends chills down my spine, and I shiver a little bit, bend over backwards in her grip. She lets me go, and I almost fall to the floor. I forgot what my body was doing and what position I was in.

"There," she says.

"That's at least a taste." I don't know what to say. All I know is that my own resolve is weakening, and my decision making skills are being called into question by every hormone in my body.