RCJoshua
patreon
Chapter 119: Human Complicated Things
🕑 Added 2023-10-27 17:28:38 +0000 UTCMatt wanted nothing more than to be hidden while he was deep in demon territory. He immediately claimed and donned the cloak. Willing it to turn on, he was pleased to see that although it dinged his max total stamina, it was neither a constant drain nor a huge ding. When he turned it off, it took several seconds for his stamina to refill. If he were ambushed, that meant he’d start the fight with slightly less stamina than he’d like. But the chance of avoiding any combat altogether, or to even get to drop on someone for once, was too good to pass up.
Sadly, he put it on just a bit late to be immediately helpful. Before the cloak had fully settled around his shoulders, he heard Lucy yell a short warning. When the cloth settled, he found himself looking at a serious-looking, bow-wielding woman.
“Don’t move. Don’t even breathe. I have an arrow nocked and my bowstring stretched. From here, I can’t miss. Drop your weapon.” The woman spoke from behind some kind of gaiter-like mouth covering, her hair and part of her forehead covered by a hood. All the information Matt could get from her was from her eyes, and they showed she wasn’t joking around.
“Fine, fine. No problem.” Matt held his shovel out in front of him, and then let it fall, hitting the ground and knocking up a small cloud of red dust. “What can I do for you?”
“Matt, she’s some kind of combat scout, judging by the class name. Probably not too tanky, if it comes to that. Also, she’s human.”
Human complicated things, some.
—
A few minutes prior, Brennan, Artemis, and Derek had been scouting the enemy village. Really, it had mostly been Artemis holding down the heavy lifting there. Brennan could see a town, and some blurry images of activity. Derek’s juiced PER stat meant he could see things moving around and know that they were demons, but not much more. Meanwhile, Artemis could pick out individual demons, get an idea of the general combat capabilities of the town, and feed Brennan the info his class needed to piece together a precise, efficient plan of attack.
Then, suddenly, Artemis tensed. The patterns of activity in the town had changed. She couldn’t quite put a finger on how, but near the city center, several people suddenly stopped. A second more, and they were gone. The whole town fell like dominoes, spreading from the center all the way out to the walls, driven by a mysterious pulse of energy.
And in front of that pulse, moving like a racecar, was what she could have sworn was not a demon, but an honest-to-god human being. The human stayed just ahead of the outer pulse until he vaulted the wall, hit the dirt hard, and kept running.
Then devastation came to the town, not just from the pulses but from an unholy fire that burned and consumed until nothing was left but a scorch mark in the wasteland.
“It’s like Epsilon.” Brennan couldn’t see the figure, but he could see the damage. And aside from being set in red demon dirt instead of a green field, it was a carbon copy of the devastation that had consumed Epsilon. Same shape, same size. Same mysterious, total destruction.
“I have to go.” Artemis was already moving. “There’s a human down there. I think he caused this. We need to catch him now. Stay here.”
Derek piped up. “No way, you’re not going alone. We’re coming.”
Artemis turned and pointed at Brennan, then at Derek. “One of you can’t use skills without calling the demon army down. The other, I’m sorry, is good but not great at sneaking. I’m the best option we have. Stay here. That’s an order.”
And then she was off, sprinting so seamlessly across the landscape that neither Brennan nor Derek would have known she was there if they hadn’t watched her leave. As it was, they could track her, but only just.
Derek watched her for a moment before speaking. “So, we aren’t going to actually let her go alone, right?”
Brennan grimaced. “No, I’m afraid not.”
—
“Good job dropping that… shovel? Interesting choice. Now get on your stomach, hands behind your back.” The archer woman was only a few feet away, but something told Matt that the short distance would help her hit him, rather than actually hamper her in any way.
“Don’t do it, Matt. Even you aren’t fast enough to dodge an arrow aimed at your belly. Think of something else.”
“I’d really rather not.” Matt put his hands in front of him, palms out in a peaceful gesture. And it was genuine, for what it was worth. He really didn’t want to get into a fight with the first human he saw on this world. “Can’t we talk about this… standing? Face to face?”
The string on the woman’s bow creaked as she put a bit more tension behind it. “You can lay down or take an arrow to the eye. Your choice.”
Matt kept his hands up for just a moment longer. “Fine, fine. Just don’t shoot me.” As his hands dropped towards the ground, they brushed by his pocket for just a moment, which was more than he needed to access a long-forgotten skill.
“Pocket sand!” Matt yelled, expelling a small cloud of red at the woman. Pocket Sand was not a daily-driver skill for Matt anymore. As his other skills leveled, so did Pocket Sand, but in most ways it stayed remarkably similar to its lower-level form. As a dedicated short-range ambush skill, it never gained much usefulness at ranges greater than a few feet. It didn’t do any damage, or at least any more damage than getting the dirt or whatever in your eyes would do. When it got bumped to LV 15, it didn’t develop any new facets or uses like other skills did. So Matt and Lucy had tried testing it on creatures in the dungeon to figure out where all that class XP had been spent.
It turned out that pain wasn’t directly correlated with damage. The first Clownrat he used the skill on had tried to claw its own eyes out before Matt had a rare moment of grudging sympathy for the thing and put it out of its misery. At short range, it would absolutely immobilize anything that didn’t have the good sense to get out of the way or the VIT to tank the pain. He was guessing this woman didn’t have much in the way of tanky qualities, and unless something really weird was going on, he was guessing eyesight was vital to how her class operated.
As the dust hit the woman’s face, she flinched just enough for Matt to get out of the way of her prepared shot, then desperately backed up as she vigorously rubbed her eyes with the wrist of her cloak.
Blinded did not mean completely without senses, and it meant that even less in the world of stats. As Matt scooped up his shovel and moved in on the archer, she abandoned her bow, pulled a hold-out dagger from her sleeve, and took a surprisingly accurate swipe at Matt’s neck-level. By the time the blade got to the area she was targeting, he was already behind her. Taking her legs out from under her with the flat of his shovel, he immediately moved to put his knee on her back, and pressed the shovel across her shoulder blades to pin her arms at least somewhat down.
“Now, listen to me. I’m trying to be nice, and you are coming on way too hot, and…” At that moment, two more people crested over the top of the hill behind Matt. Matt turned at Lucy’s shouted warning, then stopped dead, completely losing the thread of whatever he was going to say. The younger of the two people coming over the hill stopped as well, so suddenly and intently that the man with him also jerked back as if they were connected with a tether.
At once, both Matt and Derek opened their mouths, uttering the same word with vastly different intended meanings.
“You!” They said.
Artemis yelped in pain as Matt exploded off of her, digging in his knee and shovel as he did. He knew this guy. He knew how the young guy fought. As predictable as his new opponent was, those big, wide strikes would mean trouble for him if he had to dodge them mixed with arrows and whatever the third guy did. But one of the enemies was already disarmed and blinded, and another one was a mook he had beaten when he was much weaker. In a few seconds, he’d have one and only one opponent to focus on.
Anticipating a high strike, Matt ended his approach towards Derek by sliding in on his feet, but with his body lowered. He’d take out his legs, then knock him out with the shovel. Easy.
Derek defied his expectations. As Matt came in low, he shook off his surprise, kicked backwards, and parried the strike out of the way. Matt immediately kicked off to the left with Spring Fighter, then again to the right to get behind the kid. He didn’t hold back on his stamina expenditures, either. With full confidence that the kid wouldn’t be able to follow him, he stabbed his shovel towards the kid’s back, hard.
The kid somehow had tracked him. He caught the point of the Nullsteel shovel on the flat of his blade, absorbing enough force with his arms that it didn’t damage the sword at all, and jumping backwards to make distance.
“Wait!” he shouted.
Like hell I will, Matt thought. Then he noticed that Derek’s eyes weren’t on him at all, but instead off to the side. The other swordsman.
He turned just in time to pivot his head and avoid a direct strike to his eye, coming in like a spear strike at lightning-fast speed. It was aimed in the least convenient way, and for once, Matt had a hard time actually figuring out the best direction to dodge. That moment’s hesitation cost him in the form of a deep, bloody cut across his face. He hurriedly jumped back, covering his escape with another quick Pocket Sand.
That one strike sapped Matt’s confidence that he could take the third guy in an outright fight, especially with distractions on the field. He wasn’t just faster than Matt. He was, at least as near as Matt could tell, some kind of skill-heavy build, one that relied on finesse. Matt was much, much more used to dealing with big, strong enemies that attacked in animalistic ways. Seeing a precision strike shook him. But he had other stuff the guy didn’t know about, at least if he did it fast enough that the sword-kid couldn’t share intel.
Digging his shovel into the dirt, he used the few moments he had to charge up as much power as he possibly could, then heaved upwards, hoping that Lucy’s guess about charging his digging skill ended up being true.
It was. Suddenly, between him and the guy, a huge cloud of dust materialized, pelting his enemies with rocks and dirt. Matt leapt several feet away from his previous position to keep them guessing, then started charging up the biggest, strongest strike he could. He held his shovel low, so he could throw an uppercut-strike with it from a direction they might not expect.
