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Chapter 9: Llorts and Snilbogs
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The Suko Mountains, lying far to the south on the continent of Maasai, extend in a shallow horseshoe that separates the Southlands and the uninhabitable Irtum Crags from the rest of the world. Filled with danger and unknown mysteries, these mountains are rarely travelled and remain almost completely unexplored.
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The Rabid Rabbit flew through the air towards him, claws outstretched, pining for his throat. Spittle flew from its open mouth, long, sharpened buckteeth and pink gums glistening. Its beady red eyes, the hallmark feature of the rabbits, bore into him with crazed hunger.
Logan loaded his weight onto his right leg and lunged to the side, creating an opening in front of the rabbit, as was their well-practiced strategy. Sunlight glinted on the arrow’s razor tip as it flew by his head, speeding through the space he’d occupied just a moment before with an audible “whishh."
The black shaft of the arrow plunged into the rabbit’s gaping jaws and the animal collided into the ground with a crunch.
Logan turned, leapt at the rabbit, and stabbed his sword downwards with both hands, skewering its spine.
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Dexterity +1, Strength +1, Innovation +1
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Susie announced happily, it’d been a while since he’d gained any stat increases. This was the fastest they’d slain a Rabid Rabbit, and their constant practice and experience was really starting to show. Ryan jogged over, smiling at Logan.
The boy, only twelve or so, he still hadn’t asked, had proven his value in combat. He was a tremendous archer, and good with a knife too.
“That was awesome! Your timing on the dodge was perfect, and the way you did that kneeling sword slam thing, all ‘Huah!!’”
Ryan raised an imaginary sword over his head and rapidly lowered his arms, bellowing as he pretended to plunge it into the dirt.
“You were so cool!” he said.
“Haha, you weren’t too bad yourself, look at that shot.” Logan said, gesturing to the rabbit’s head with his sword, which he’d removed from its body.
“You’re starting to scare me with how accurate you can be,” he said, wiping the sword on the grass.
“You should see Pa, he’d have put three arrows in it before it hit the ground,” Ryan said reverently as he lifted the rabbit’s head and pulled his arrow from its maw.
It slid out surprisingly easily, the arrowhead stained red and dripping. If Huck was half as good as Ryan always claimed him to be, then he wished the man would join them on a hunt.
Huck had been talking to other villagers about crossing the mountains, but it was slow going. There were some that had mentioned going before, but now that they saw he was serious about the expedition, they were hesitant. He’d decided to keep working at the mines and try to win over some of the men there.
I have to find a way to convince Huck to join us at least once, he thought.
“That makes twenty-seven,” Logan said, making his way to a fallen tree and taking a seat, watching as Ryan began skinning and quartering the rabbit.
“We’re making good progress, what’s it been? Two, three weeks?”
Ryan had drawn his buck knife and began to butcher the rabbit.
“Two and a day, I think,” he responded, knife plunging into the rabbit’s sternum.
They’d discovered that by letting Ryan harvest their kills before Logan looted them, they could get more raw materials than his looting ability alone provided in addition to the coins and items it occasionally produced. Logan would then place the materials Ryan harvested into his inventory where they would remain preserved and stack with what they’d already acquired.
Their system was efficient and yielded far more than if Logan had looted the creature by himself. He’d have to get the boy to teach him how to butcher the animals himself, but for now Logan enjoyed the post-fight rest that had become his routine.
He opened his status menu, the once strange words now familiar. His swordsmanship skill had leveled up, and with it came a new description.
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Race: Untethered Soul | Age: ??? | Name: Logan Dileva | Titles: None | Affiliations: None
Beginner Swordsman
You suck just a tiny, little bit less. You know your way around most types of swords and can manage with a variety of bladed weapons.
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He felt pretty confident with his sword, definitely more confident than his swordsmanship skill made it sound like he should be.
“Susie, why are the descriptions so snarky? Are you doing this?” he asked in his mind.
“Why, my dearest Logan, I have no idea what you mean. Whatever are you talking about?” her mock confusion and the taken aback look projected onto his mind's eye were enough evidence for him and he let it go with a sigh.
The skill’s function was interesting to him, it didn’t seem to determine his skill, inundating him with newfound power like he’d experienced in games, but rather his increased prowess with the sword through training and experience eventually led the skill to level up and evolve.
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When it did, he felt a surge of power and competence; new combinations, techniques, and tactics suddenly revealing themselves to him. He also felt more agile and lithe with the blade, though he wasn’t sure if this was an effect of the skill or just his dexterity stat increasing. Perhaps both.
"Maybe you’ll turn out to be a samurai, or a knight… or maybe a French duelist! You’d need a rapier for that though, not this long, hefty thing. Definitely giving me knight vibes with this sword. Now you just need some plate armor, a cape, and a horse. We’ll call you Ser Loganalot, the Sword of Two Worlds!" Mikey said.
“Nah, not a knight, maybe a samurai though, that’d be cool. I can get a katana and a short sword and dual wield like Musashi, that’d be sick,” Logan said.
Logan and Mikey bantered like this frequently, theorizing about how Logan should fight and stylize himself. He was a blank slate in his new world, and though he wasn’t concerned with appearances in front of Huck, Ryan, and the villagers, he wondered what society was like on the other side of the Suko’s.
It sounded like Yram had been some sort of adventurer before coming here; what had they dressed and acted like? He had no idea, his only experience having come from light novels, anime, and MMORPG’s.
His stats had increased significantly in the last few weeks, rising from ones and twos to the mid-single digits.
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Stats
Physical
???
Spirit
Speed: 4
Strength: 4
Stamina: 5
Resilience: 4
Dexterity: 4
?:___
?:___
Focus: 2
Innovation: 4
Control: 0
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He was worried about his "Focus" stat trailing behind, but a stamina of five and a speed of four meant that he could run for miles at a time at speeds he’d never reached even when he’d competed in the state championships in track and field in high school, all while hardly breaking a sweat and barely tiring himself.
He also found that he could move heavy objects with far more ease than he’d suspect. This he’d discovered when a Brightspine Boar had landed atop him after they’d slain it, and he’d had to heave it off of him to get out from under its body.
The thing had been at least seven feet long and thick as a barrel; it must’ve weighed nearly five hundred pounds and he’d been able to shift it off of him with a bench-pressing motion with relative ease. That monstrous creature had been their most difficult fight, it had been a level 3 monster like the steam fish, and although he had almost died, he’d seen the most improvement from it.
The level one and two rabbits that they’d been fighting no longer seemed sufficient to increase his skills, or at least at nowhere near the rate they once had. They’d encountered many rabbits, some Brightforest Bobcats, a number of jumping, two legged birds called “Sworps” that screeched and buffeted slicing wind at them with their large wings, in addition to the one Brightspine Boar that’d nearly killed Logan.
He’d broken several ribs and crushed his legs beyond function, then gone unconscious under the creature’s weight. Logan owed his survival to a “Potion of Moderate Instant Recovery” that he’d looted from a Sworp and given to Ryan, who'd poured it down Logan’s throat, returning him to consciousness and healing him completely.
Logan was able to get out from under the boar from there, only realizing after the fact that he could’ve just looted the boar and it would’ve disappeared from on top of him. The potion had imparted an effect on him that disallowed him from using further potions within a three-hour period unless he wanted to suffer “severe spirit damage.” He doubted if he’d ever have enough potions to have to worry about the effect.
Ryan had finished with the rabbit, and Logan placed the items in storage—another white pelt, it was only their third. He wondered at it; weren’t animals’ pelts supposed to camouflage them with their environment? The white stood out harshly against the forest’s green and brown backdrop.
Maybe a monster’s evolution didn’t follow the same path as regular animals did.
After storing the organically harvested meat, pelt, and organs, he looted the monster. Its remains, save for blood that dyed the grass and congealed in the dirt, disappeared with a brilliant flash. The rabbit, in addition to the expected token, only gave him forty bronze.
This was still a lot of coin, but the number had been steadily decreasing as they killed more and more of the rabbits; It was only forty percent of what he’d received from the first rabbits they’d slain; a pittance compared to the sworps who'd each dropped two silvers, and the Brightspine Boar who'd yielded 5.
It seemed that Boundless Potential wanted him to actually grow, and not keep fighting the same monsters over and over again. They needed to push deeper into the forest, but he wasn’t sure they were ready.
Yram had been the only member of the village that anyone could remember actually going more than a few miles in. The roads all ran close to the edge of the forest, and the few paths that did run directly into the forest were specifically located in the least dense portions of the wood.
They’d been pioneered long ago, multiple generations before the current inhabitants of Woolam were born. It was speculated that at that time there were fewer monsters roaming the forests, but nobody knew for certain who’d first trod the pathways. Logan and Ryan had tentatively decided to venture inwards after a month of training, but they were growing impatient.
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Inventory nearing maximum capacity.
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The notification was accompanied by a small flashing yellow triangle with the symbol of a man, hunched over, balancing a huge boulder on his back.
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You are at 95% inventory capacity.
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He opened his inventory: though the weapons, jewelry, and potions tabs were nearly empty, his food, pelts, and crafting tabs were filled to the brim.
“I have a weight limit? I haven’t even come close to using all the slots,” Logan thought to Susie.
“Yes, and you’ve nearly reached it. Loot anything else and you’ll be unable to move faster than a slow walk.” Susie responded, as if he should’ve known this all along.
“This is nowhere in the ability description, why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?” he asked, mildly annoyed.
They were a ways from the town, but they’d only just begun their hunt. There was plenty of light left, and he didn’t want to let any of it go to waste.
“The system operates on its own rules and informs me of only the most basic information. As I’ve told you several times, what you can read in the descriptions is all that I know; perhaps level up your abilities first before complaining to me about their inadequacies, Sir,” she said, adding the 'sir' scornfully.
It’s not like he’d asked her to call him that.
"Hear that, Logan? You’re becoming a hoarder! I watched a T.V. show about your kind on WebFlixs! It was very fascinating. You’re lucky that Huck cleans your room for you and doesn’t say anything about it, you trashed the place immediately in the first few days—I’d hate to see what your apartment back on Earth looks like!"
Logan flushed with embarrassment. Ryan, who’d been watching Logan stare into space as he operated his inventory and conversed with Mikey and Susie, saw his change in coloration.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“My inventory, it’s almost full. Looks like we won’t be able to fit much else…” Logan trailed off, thinking.
“Ryan,” he said a smile creeping onto his lips, “Want to explore a bit? We’ve only been out here for a few hours; it’d be a shame to go back to the village now.”
Ryan beamed up at him, light brown eyes brimming with excitement.
“Yes! None of the grownups have gone, nobody knows what’s in there, I want to see if the stories are really true,” Ryan said as he returned his knife to his boot and drew his bow, holding it casually in his left hand.
“Alright then, let’s be careful. If we smell trouble, we leave.”
He opened his map, a function of his menu that he hadn’t made much use of before.
They’d always entered the forest at the same point, patrolled a few miles west or east, then retraced their steps and gone home. This time however, they were entering uncharted territory.
The map was covered in a black fog where he hadn’t explored yet; only Woolam, the springs, and where he and Ryan had hunted were revealed.
The uncovered areas were labeled and replicated with intricate detail when he zoomed in and became general distinctions of color and lines when he zoomed out. There were no gridlines or scale references, but the compass icon in the bottom left corner of the screen was useful.
By concentrating on any particular spot on the map, even an unexplored area in the black fog, he could place a marker and choose from any of a long list of icons. He could name the marker, and it’d appear in his field of view when he exited the map screen, accompanied by a distance in meters.
Why meters? He was American; wasn’t this power specifically designed for him? He put it out of his mind.
“I’ll record our progress on my map, if we find anything noteworthy, I’ll mark it, and we can come back once we’ve found a way to clear my inventory,” Logan said, closing the screen and sheathing his sword in the scabbard on his back.
The sword that Huck had bought for him from Master Gjorn was a double-edged longsword of around three and a half feet, plainly ornamented but sturdy, sharp, and extremely well balanced.
It felt like it’d been made specifically for his hands. Getting it into the back mounted scabbard, however, was a skill he’d had to practice several dozen times before he worked out the trick of it.
Logan and Ryan turned Northward, venturing into the inner reaches of the forest for the first time.