The God Machine 3: An Isekai LitRPG, page 4
“To interrogate me about my skill usage?” Luke asked. “We haven’t even been introduced and you think I’m going to share a piece of my build with you?”
“No, no, of course not,” Ruca said. “We came to make sure you aren’t demons.”
“Why would you think we’re demons?”
“Strange monsters have been appearing lately, far to the south. Rumors have just recently reached this province, rumors that say that the creatures look like monsters, but they are not. They are not part of the system, either. They have no XP, and you are rewarded with none when you kill them.”
Luke glanced over at Zea, who just shrugged back. There’d only been one enemy on the entire planet Luke had encountered that the system hadn’t given him XP for killing, and they were pretty sure that had been the direct result of divine intervention turning Adrevald Lath into a member of the walking dead. Undead and demons weren’t the same thing in Luke’s mind, but it was possible there was a translation problem.
“What do the demons look like?” Luke asked. He assumed they were shaped like people, since the two not bandits thought he and Zea could be a pair of them.
“All sorts of things, if the stories are to be believed. Some are small, barely the size of your head. Others are big as houses. They come in every shape and size imaginable and with a lot of strange abilities, things our own skills have no parallels for. The only thing that’s consistent about them is that the system doesn’t acknowledge when they die.”
“What even the fuck is going on over here?” Luke asked softly.
“Do you think …” Zea trailed off, but Luke didn’t need her to say it. It was entirely possible this was more bullshit from the Pantheon, but if so, it was really widespread. Their previous approaches had been far more targeted. Then again, all their attempts to kill Luke on the western continent had failed, so maybe they’d opted for a new strategy this time.
“Well, I hope you’re convinced we’re not demons,” Luke told the two not bandits. “Good luck with your liberating of the slaves. We’ve got places to be and people to see, so we’ll be going now.”
“Hmm. Yes, we’ve got our own work to see to as well. Someone has moved our tree out of place. If only that person would be so kind as to put things back the way he found them.”
Luke glanced back at the tree, already a mile behind him. He could go back and put it into position, but that would leave him open to an ambush. More importantly, it would leave Zea vulnerable to an attack, and she was not strong enough to fend off either of these two people. “I’m sure your group can handle it. You got it there once already.”
Val scowled at him, but Ruca nodded. “I understand. Smart of you not to trust strangers. We’ll leave you to your travels. Best of luck.”
“You as well. Thanks for the warning about demons.”
The two pair split there, with the not bandits going back toward their ambush site while Luke and Zea kept running south. After a few miles had gone by, Luke said, “System, tell me about these demons. Is this the Pantheon’s doing?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have any information on this subject,” System said, appearing out of nothing and floating through the air to keep pace when Luke. “If such creatures do exist, they are not part of the God Machine’s system, and thus, I have no authority over them. I can confirm that there have been a high number of deaths on this continent that led to full XP being returned to the God Machine without any going to another creature.”
“Does that happen often?” Zea asked.
“It is not infrequent. Usually it’s seen in accidental deaths, sickness, or old age. The number of creatures dying with no apparent cause has increased a thousandfold in the last two months.”
“Shit. So people are dying in droves, rumors are there’s demons roaming around, and they’ve got no system connection, just like Lath. Divine bullshit again.”
“I am not able to speculate on the actions or motivations of the Pantheon,” System said, for probably the hundredth time. Some things never changed.
“We should assume this demon outbreak is relevant to us,” Zea said. “They could be actively hunting us, either individually or cooperatively.”
“That would suck. How many do you think there are?”
“Hundreds? Thousands? Maybe more.” Zea frowned. “Numbers are less important than individual levels. Or not levels but whatever their equivalent is. You know what I mean.”
“Right, but we have no way to measure that. [Analyze] didn’t work on Lath after he got disconnected from the system or whatever it was.”
“Other bloodline abilities might not work either. Most of them revolve around controlling the target through its connection to the system,” Zea said.
Luke came to such an abrupt stop that he almost tripped. “Shit. I don’t even have the level-reset skill yet, and it’s already useless.”
“Not useless. It would work against everything that’s not one of these demon monsters. Who knows how many problems you can just blink away with that skill?”
“200 AP would go a long way toward increasing my stats, maybe putting some skills together into advanced versions, which would probably help a lot more against the demons. Whether they exist outside the system or not, I’m pretty sure if I beat one to a pulp, it’ll still die.”
“We’re getting a little ahead of the cart,” Zea said. “We don’t know how much of a threat these demons are. All we’ve got are some rumors from two people lying about not being bandits. These things might not even be real, and if they are, maybe they’re the equivalent of a level 20 monster.”
“Maybe,” Luke said. “But System did say there were a bunch of dead people, way more than usual. Even if those guys are wrong about the demons, there’s still something going on.”
The two started moving again. Their plan was to cover about a hundred miles on the road before the end of the day, but Luke was secretly hoping to get farther. Now that he knew there was a threat in their way, he was eager to cut their travel time as much as possible. He suspected he was going to need those extra days to hunt monsters.
Without knowing how strong he needed to be, the only solution was to put on as much XP as possible. Some of the AP would need to go to [XP Cycle], but after that, the more he spent on raw stats and skills, the better. For all he knew, the demons out there could kill level 100s.
Actually, now that he thought about it, that was a good question. “System, what’s the highest-level person who died without any of their XP going to anyone else?”
“Level 70,” System said immediately.
“Can you tell me how that person died?”
“Apologies, but I cannot.”
“Damn. Well, probably safe to assume it was either XP madness or a demon,” Luke said.
“How could someone even survive at level 70?” Zea asked.
“I mean, XP madness doesn’t kill a person,” Luke said. “It just makes them go crazy, and then someone else has to kill them. If you made it to level 70, especially if you were a combat specialist, it wouldn’t be easy for anyone to put you down.”
“There’s no use speculating,” Zea said. “We don’t know if their death was demon related. If it was, then no matter what we do, we’re fucked. Anything strong enough to kill a level 70 is going to be way beyond us. The only thing to do is stay away from it.”
“Not easy to do if we don’t know where—wait, there’s something on the road.”
They slowed to a stop, and Luke peered ahead. The road curved around a screen of trees a mile away, but something long and red moved there. The gaps between the branches were small, making it hard to get a good picture of what he was seeing. It had a bunch of segments, and it wasn’t until the wind blew the smell into his face that he understood what he was seeing.
“Horses. Wagons. People,” Luke said.
“Do you think it’s the caravan our new bandit friends are waiting for?” Zea asked. It wasn’t hard to read her expression and know that she didn’t care for the idea of a slaver wagon train.
“I don’t know. Better question is, if it is, should we do something about it?”
“Can we do anything about it? We’d be legally in the wrong, but let’s say we ignore that. How strong are the guards? Is it physically possible for us to take them out? If we can, do we have the ability to take care of the slaves?”
“Why would we need to take care of them?” Luke asked.
“Slaves are usually kept in bad shape when they’re being transported. Dehydrated. Starved. Sometimes deliberately made sick. It reduces the chances of having successful runaways.”
Luke gave her an incredulous look. “Your world is really fucked up, you know that?”
Zea shrugged. “As an escaped slave myself, I’m inclined to agree. But to get back to the question, if it is a slave caravan, what do we do about it?”
“I don’t know. I guess we should get more information first. Let’s go scout it out.”
CHAPTER 6
The caravan consisted of twelve wagons. The one in the lead was completely enclosed, more like a huge, overgrown carriage than a wagon, with two men sitting on the bench in the front. The next two were the ones Luke pictured whenever anyone said words like pioneer or prairie, the ones with canvas stretched around ribs to make a kind of roof, with the oval-shaped opening on the back end. Supply wagons.
The remaining eight were something completely different. They were more like giant wooden crates on wheels, sealed up except for six-inch-wide slats going across the sides near the bottoms. Luke could see feet and ankles, dirty and crusted with filth, through those slats. Stains running down the wood and across the wheels told him exactly how often the human cargo was let out. Considering there were no doors on any of sort on a single one of those wagons, it wasn’t hard to picture excrement being pushed out of those slats. Or food being passed in.
The slaves had been literally boxed up like freight, transported in conditions that would make anyone sick as a deliberate tactic to work against any stats they might have. Luke counted over a hundred feet in those eight prison wagons, and considering how wide each one was, he doubled his estimate. Even then, he wouldn’t be surprised if he was still too low. There wouldn’t be enough room for anyone to do more than sit down and huddle upright when they tried to sleep.
It was torture. Luke knew because his skill told him so. [Torturer] was listing out all the benefits to putting a bunch of people in a situation like that, everything from sleep deprivation to malnourishment to various foodborne illnesses that most likely resulted in dehydration and weakness. The fact that the skill thought of those as benefits left a bad taste in Luke’s mouth, but it did mean he knew exactly what kinds of problems he was looking at when he broke those wheeled crates open and let everyone out.
Getting to that point was a different issue. Each slave wagon had four guards perched on top, all armed with crossbows. Each wagon had a driver, and five more guards on horseback rode near the front wagon, the one that looked like an oversize carriage. Each of those guards had a bow on their back and a full quiver on their waist.
“Forty people,” Luke said. “Most of them are between levels 15 and 25, but those guys riding the horses are all over level 30. That one on the front wagon next to the driver is level 42.”
“I bet the caravan master is inside that front wagon. He could be high level too,” Zea added, pointing to the carriage-style wagon.
“I hate to say it, but we might be in over our heads with this one,” Luke said. The easiest thing for them to do would be to just get off the road and let the caravan pass them by. Legally speaking, they would be committing banditry if they attacked the slavers, and their appearances were so distinctive that unless they killed literally everyone who wasn’t a slave, it was practically guaranteed to cause problems.
Hell, even the slaves might talk about who rescued them and inadvertently give the authorities descriptions. Or they might get recaptured and the information forced out of them. Pulling the hood up on his cloak wasn’t going to make it less obvious that Luke was three to six inches taller than just about everyone he’d met since the ship had docked.
The smart thing to do was to walk away. As shitty as the situation was, it had nothing to do with them, and Luke wasn’t thrilled with the idea of close to forty people shooting at him all at once anyway. Most of the guards would do minimal damage at best, probably less than that if this enchanted chain worked as advertised. Between his very real armor and that magic barrier, he might just be able to rush through a cloud of crossbow bolts while they bounced off him.
Then again, he might not. It was just as easy to picture himself making it ten feet before he fell over, writhing in pain while he bled out from a few dozen holes as it was to picture himself leaping on top of the slave wagons and laying people out left and right.
There were also the ethical considerations. Slavery was legal. The guards were just doing their jobs. It didn’t even mean they supported slavery, though likely they hadn’t given it much thought. He was viewing that from his own position as a person raised in a society where slavery was very much considered a bad thing, and anyone who actively supported it was a bad person by association.
The whole thing made his head hurt. He’d liked it better when he didn’t think so much about stuff. Luke from six months ago would have spared a moment to consider his approach, then charged in. On the other hand, that Luke would have undoubtedly died if he’d tried it.
As much as Luke wanted to bust open those boxes full of suffering, he didn’t think it was possible, and certainly not without causing himself a lot of problems down the road even if they were successful. He was under no illusions that, assuming a successful assault, the guards would all stand around waiting for him to kill them instead of running for their lives.
There were good reasons to attack. There were good reasons to stay out of it. Luke wanted to help the slaves, but he didn’t think he could. He glanced over at Zea and opened his mouth to say that they should get away from the road until the caravan was past them, then he noticed her rubbing at the slave mark tattooed behind her ear. He wondered if she’d ever ridden in a prison wagon like that.
“Looks like the bandits were telling the truth,” he said instead.
“Looks like,” she agreed.
“You think they know what they’re getting into? Three’s not a lot to take on this many guards.”
“Probably more of them back in the trees.”
Luke nodded. “Possibly. I wonder if they know how big the caravan is. We could go back and tell them. Or … Go back and help.”
“How fast could you get back there if you went ahead?” Zea asked.
“Five miles or so, if I went as fast as I could? A few minutes. But where are you going to go?”
“I’ll follow behind, be maybe ten minutes later catching up. I’ll still beat that caravan, and those guys are probably going to need every advantage they can get to fight a caravan this big.”
Luke glanced back at the caravan, still a ways down the road and moving slowly. “Are you sure you want to get involved?” he asked.
“I know it’s going to make things harder for us,” she said. “And not just missing a few hours or a day. Even if things go well, this is probably going to come back around to bite us in the ass. But … Look at them. I can see those feet in there. I know you can too. Who has ever deserved something like that?”
“I agree with you,” Luke said. “It’s not right. I hope every one of those slaves is freed, but at the same time, that’s an awful tough nut to crack. Even if we manage it, do you think those guys have food and shelter for … What? A hundred people? Hundred fifty?”
“Better than the alternative,” Zea said.
Luke nodded. “Suppose so. Alright, follow as fast as you can.”
And he took off running back north.
The tree was more or less back in place, though it was half-diagonal across the road instead of across like it had been before Luke moved it. The guy watching the road was still there, and when he caught sight of Luke, he flinched so hard he almost fell out of the tree. Luke tossed a quick [Analyze] on him again, just because he couldn’t quite remember the guy’s name. The system was happy to tell him it was Wilby.
By the time Luke got over to him, Wilby had caught his balance and managed to climb down to the ground. “You okay there, man?”
“Yeah … Fine. Fuck, you’re fast.” Wilby shook his head. “Did you forget something?”
“No, just backtracked to tell you guys that your caravan is on its way in. It’s five miles or so south of here. So, like, you know, you guys should get all your bandits together and get ready to hit it. There are about forty guards that I counted, plus I wouldn’t put it past the wagon drivers to pull out a crossbow and take a shot at you.”
“Forty?” Wilby repeated, his face going pale. “Fuck me. Shit. That’s way too many.”
“Thought it might be. We’ve got an hour, maybe an hour and a half, before they’re here. You want to gather up your people and I’ll lay out what the caravan looks like for you?”
Wilby let out a shrill whistle, and a moment later, a second one answered it. About two minutes after that, the pair from earlier appeared. Ruca raised an eyebrow at Luke but didn’t say anything.
“This guy says he spotted the caravan. Forty guards,” Wilby said in Consortium Standard, probably for Luke’s sake.
Val let out a string of curses, shifting through at least three different languages and lasting long enough that Ruca pushed past her and asked, “Are you sure?”
“Counted them myself,” Luke said. “Hope you’ve got at least twenty guys over level 25 and ready to throw down with the regular guards because there were five guys riding horses all over level 30 and one guy at level 42.”
The volume of swearing coming from Val started rising. Ruca glanced at her and said one word in the language Luke didn’t know, and she cut off midtirade. He turned back to Luke and said, “It’s just us.”
