The road to Bizet took me through the edge of a forest where I was surrounded on both sides by sparse smatterings of leafless trees. It seemed to be autumn here, as it had been when I had been taken from Earth, but the chill didn’t bother me. I could still feel the cool air and occasional frigid gust of wind, but they had no effect on my undead body.
Even if I hadn’t been undead, though, I still probably wouldn’t have been bothered much. One of the articles of clothing that Jacques had purchased for me was a thick coat, which I was now wearing. I didn’t need it, but, as much as I hated to say anything positive about Jacques, he had an excellent sense of fashion, and the outfit he had gotten looked very good on me.
Though I hadn’t been able to look into a real mirror, I had gotten a decent picture of how I looked by looking at my reflection in the water of the river and on the blade of the dagger that I also had Jacques buy. The clothing was all different shades of black, that complemented my black hair and contrasted with my pale skin very nicely. I was wearing a black cloth mask over the lower part of my face to hide my fangs, but my eyes were still visible, and, strangely enough, purple. I wasn’t sure if that was this body’s natural eye color, or if that was a result of my race, but I thought it looked nice. My overall facial structure and body proportions were nearly identical to my own body’s, which, in my objective opinion, made me appear quite beautiful.
According to the map, Bizet was about a two day journey walking, but I had gotten a late start because I had to wait for Jacques and bathe, so it was noon when I left, and I decided to run to make up for lost time. Back on Earth, I had run regularly to keep myself in shape, but I could never go for more than a couple hours before my lungs and legs refused to carry me any further. With my undead body that needed no oxygen and felt no fatigue, by the time the sun set, I was feeling as fresh as I had when I started out.
I didn’t run into anyone else on the road, which was probably a good thing, because it allowed me to spend most of my journey reading through my stat sheet and learning all the details of my new abilities. Most were exactly what they seemed to be, but there were a few exceptions, and interesting rules and limitations. For example, my [Hemokinesis] skill could be used on any blood in or outside of my body, but would not affect blood inside other living creatures, meaning that I could not puppet them around, or siphon all their blood out.
Once they were dead though, I could freely manipulate all of their blood however I wished. That would definitely make feeding easier. I was not thrilled about putting the flesh of filthy animals in my mouth just to drain their blood. With [Hemokinesis] though, I could simply wave my hand and all the blood would fly into my mouth. Or so I thought. I hadn’t had an opportunity to test it yet. If I had known more about the ability before, I would have tested it on Jacques.
The second unexpected and annoying exception that I found in my [Status] was that [Appraise] could not be used the way it was often used in these types of settings. It was not a skill that I could use to determine the level and class of everyone and everything around me. It was a much more specialized skill that was more in line with the actual definition of the word ‘appraise.’ It was a skill used to estimate the value of objects. That type of skill may have been useful for a thief or a con-artist looking to steal valuables, or to a collector or a shop owner to determine how much to buy or sell items for, but to me, it was useless, as I did not plan on continuing my career as a criminal, nor did I have any interest in collectibles.
One detail that I had missed when I initially looked through my [Status] that I found useful was contained in the description of my [Vampire] race. I originally ignored this section because I had already read it when selecting my race, but I had nothing better to do while running, so I looked through it again, and was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.
Vampire
Vampires are one of very few naturally occurring [Undead] species, and the only naturally occurring [Undead] to possess both a body and a soul. Vampires creatures of the night created by an anonymous god near the beginning of civilization. They have great powers, and are superior to humans in almost every way, at the expense of having great weaknesses. Vampires can control blood, heal rapidly, and hypnotize their victims. Having no life force of their own, Vampires must take the life force of other living creatures by drinking their blood. If a Vampire goes too long without drinking blood, their stats will decrease, and they will die. If a Vampire is touched by direct sunlight, their stats will be drastically reduced.
Current energy: 88/100
The description for [Vampire] had been somewhat vague, and I was worried about how I would be able to tell whether I was running low on energy or not, but having a counter made things much easier. Even better, I had also discovered that I could create a custom version of my [Status] window that I decided to call my HUD. I spent a little while fidgeting with it before deciding on the final design and components.
[HP]:
460/460
[MP]:
1400/1400
[Life Energy]:
88/100
[Pawn of the Gods] enemies remaining
6/6
With this, I would be able to quickly check all my important numbers without the distractions of my [Status] window.
Once the sun had set, I stopped my running, and began searching for a tree to set up camp in. I didn’t need to sleep, but Jacques had told me that traveling at night was dangerous, even for large groups or experienced adventurers. With my stat boosts from being a Vampire, I thought that I should probably be able to handle myself anyways, but I wasn’t in enough of a rush to risk it, so I took his advice and set up camp for the night.
After an hour of sitting in the tree, fidgeting, I decided that not only was that plan boring, but it was a massive waste of time. I had 8 hours longer than anyone else to get things done and work on improving myself, and I was spending those hours twiddling my thumbs and hiding from monsters. I had no skills that I could be working on while sitting there except [Stealth], and that wasn’t any less boring than doing nothing. I wasn’t even sure that I was gaining any experience for it. I saw it slowly drain my mana as I kept it active, but I never got any leveling notifications. I knew that the skill was already level 15, so expecting something after just an hour of use, especially an hour of use without any targets to hide from, would not provide any meaningful levels, but the lack of any kind of feedback made it a very frustrating experience.
And so, I decided to abandon my perch leaving my bag behind and taking only my knives to go hunting. I reasoned that it was a good way to learn more about the terrain, and the wildlife in this new world, and if I managed to find something, I could both replenish my energy, and work on [Hemokinesis] which would be much more satisfying to level than [Stealth]. Besides, if I got into any danger, I had very high [Agility] in addition to [Stealth] so I should at least be able to run away or hide.
I searched the woods nearby for any signs of life, but for the first hour, I didn’t find anything. [Enhanced Senses] leveled twice though, which was nice. Since I couldn’t find anything near my camping spot, I figured that I was still too close to the road, and too far from the more densely wooded center of the forest, so I began to slowly make my way inwards, making sure to stay alert for any signs of movement.
This proved to be the right decision, as I began to hear the movement among the trees within minutes of entering the denser part of the woods. When I first heard it, I froze, and stopped moving, while listening carefully. It sounded like a group of… something, walking through the forest, disturbing the dead leaves and dry branches on the ground and occasionally grunting.
I double checked to make sure that [Stealth] was active and began to slowly approach until I could see what was making the noises. Excitement bubbled up inside me when I finally saw them. They were humanoids about the size of a child, but they had ugly, squashed-looking faces, enormous, pointed ears, and arms that were so long that with their hunched posture, their fingertips almost reached the ground. They were monsters that I had seen many times in various forms of media, and they were one of the kinds of monsters that Jacques had warned me about. Goblins.
There were seven of them in total, and all appeared to be male. They wore tattered rags as loincloths and nothing else. Four of them carried wooden sticks that they might have considered clubs, and the other three carried rocks. All in all, a group that I could easily take.
I followed them for a few minutes while I considered my course of action. There was a clear leader: the one in front who carried the biggest club. He seemed to be the most vigilant, and was always looking around, and occasionally calling orders to the other goblins. Though I couldn’t tell what he was saying, it was fairly easy to guess that he was calling out simple directional orders. The other goblins were much more laid-back. Well, maybe not laid-back, but they weren’t as focused as the leader. They were constantly jostling each other, grunting, pointing at random things, and occasionally angrily growling and hitting each other. Whenever they did this, the leader would shout at them, and they would temporarily settle down.
When I finally had a plan, I immediately put it into action. I moved as swiftly as I could will remaining silent and got ahead of them and waited. When they got close enough, I tossed a rock into a nearby bush in front of the group. The leader, being the one closest to the noise, and the only one who cared enough to notice it, immediately called out something to the others. They did not respond immediately, and the leader called out even louder, and the ones closest to him finally stopped.
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When they did, the ones behind were also forced to stop, but one stumbled, pushing the one in front, which made the front one push back, and a small brawl almost started before the leader shouted once again for them to settle down. Once they had all stopped shoving each other, they all readied their weapons, and fanned out around the leader, staring at the place where I had thrown the rock.
I did not know what they were doing. If they were trying to hunt, they were doing an abysmal job at it. Anything that was not scared away or into hiding by their recklessly disorganized marching would most definitely have left while they were fighting and arguing. But they still formed up anyways, preparing to fight what they must have thought was an animal of some kind.
I took the opportunity to slip behind them, unnoticed, and raised my dagger, aiming at the leader’s neck, and swung with all my strength. Though I had a little bit of an idea of my own strength from how easily I defeated Jacques, I knew Jacques wasn’t the strongest or most skilled, and made for an imperfect test subject. And I didn’t know how tough these goblins were either.
The result was that my strength was way overkill. My knife cleaved through the little monster’s neck like butter, sending his head flying with a spray of blood. It was so quick that he didn’t even have time to scream, and the others didn’t notice immediately either. I heard a ding, but fortunately the System was smart enough not to summon blue windows while I was in combat, so I could only assume that the message was the kill notification.
Not wasting any time, I took a step towards the next goblin on my left, who was carrying a stick, and dispatched him similarly. At this point, the others finally noticed me, but they could not react before the third one, a rock carrier, fell. Seeing three of their comrades dead before they could react. Two of the remaining four, the other two rock-carriers, immediately panicked and ran away, while the two stick-wielding ones attacked in a rage.
Originally, I had planned on killing the leader, and maybe one other to see how the others reacted, and retreating if they tried to retaliate, but I immediately threw out that plan and prepared to fight the two attacking goblins. I was nervous for about a second, before it vanished when I realized how incompetent the two attacking goblins were. I wasn’t sure if it was that they were simply that weak, or if my Agility and Perception were that high, but even with two attackers, I could easily predict their targets and trajectories and dodge.
I let them swing a couple times waiting for an opening, and when they foolishly both swung at me at once, and I took the opportunity to slice at the left one’s neck before either could recover their balance. The other swung at me in retaliation, but I easily dodged it, and then killed him as well.
I looked in the direction that the other two had run, and could no longer see them. I ran in the same direction, hoping to use my superior [Agility] to catch up to them before they got too far. Unfortunately, I only found one. After taking care of him, I searched for the other one, but couldn’t find him. He must have split off from the one I did find at some point. I didn’t have any tracking skills though, so I had no way to find him.
Once I had given up on finding the last one, I focused on my [Status window] so that i could see the notifications I missed.
You have slain [Goblin Scout] lvl 4
You have slain [Goblin Scout] lvl 3
You have slain [Goblin Scout] lvl 2
You have slain [Goblin Scout] lvl 3
You have slain [Goblin Scout] lvl 3
You have slain [Goblin Scout] lvl 2
So that’s why it was so easy, I thought. Even the leader had only been level 4. I wasn’t very high leveled, but my level still nearly quintupled his. I briefly wondered why I hadn’t leveled up from the fight, but given how low leveled my enemies were, they probably didn’t provide much exp.
The mystery of the surprisingly easy fight solved, I looked down at my clothes, and, to my dismay, found them to be splattered with blood. I had tried to be careful, and keep the fighting clean; it had only taken me one strike for each goblin, but apparently even then, it was too much to ask to come out of the battle clean. Then, inspiration struck.
I focused on the spots of blood that dotted my jacket and pants and imagined the blood floating out of it. As I watched, the blood in my clothes did exactly that. I heard another ding, and this time, the blue window appeared with it.
[Hemokinesis] lvl 1 -> lvl 2
Excellent, I thought, as I watched the extraction speed of the blood increase as I read the level-up notice. A few seconds later, my clothing was once again spotless, and all the blood floated in a single, rippling sphere the size of a marble in front of me. I experimented with [Hemokinesis] for a few minutes, making the blood ball move around, and change shape. When I had read the description of the [Intelligence] stat during my run, it had told me that [Intelligence] affected a person’s ability to control magic finely, and my high [Intelligence] was clearly shown in my little blood ball.
I could change the shape easily, and without much effort, and the shapes I could make were fairly intricate. At one point, I formed it into a miniature goblin holding a miniature club and made it swing wildly at the air a few times. There was something about making a goblin out of goblin’s blood that I found to be hilarious, and I laughed out loud for the first time since arriving in Astraeus.
I gained two more levels in [Hemokinesis] doing that, and when I felt that I had gotten all I could out of the little ball, I did one final test, forming the blood into a stream and directing it into my mouth. I hadn’t expected it to taste good, and I was half expecting it to taste bad, but what I didn’t expect was that Goblin’s blood would be bland. It tasted more or less like water, with a slight sour after-taste. It was like I was drinking water from a glass that had originally held lemonade.
I pulled up my HUD to see whether that small amount of blood had affected my [Life Energy] numbers at all, and also to check the mana depletion rate of [Hemokinesis].
[HP]:
460/460
[MP]:
1267/1400
[Life Energy]:
87/100
[Pawn of the Gods] enemies remaining
6/6
I probably should have checked my HUD before drinking the blood, as I didn’t know how much my battle, if it could really be called that, had depleted my reserves, and therefore didn’t know how much my goblin blood marble had restored. I would need to return the goblin’s corpses and use their blood to continue testing.
I didn’t know exactly where I had killed them, but I knew the general direction, and once I got close enough, my [Enhanced Senses] allowed me to smell the blood and follow it to the area where my attack on them had taken place. There were a few bugs crawling on the dead corpses already, but fortunately, the larger scavengers hadn’t yet arrived.
I focused [Hemokinesis] on the corpses, and tried to siphon out all the blood and form it into one giant sphere above them, but I was unable to do so. All I was able to do was create a few thin streams of blood from each corpse and a small ball a little larger than a baseball. I concentrated harder, and managed to get a few more drops, but couldn’t make the ball any larger than it was, until I heard a ding.
[Hemokinesis] lvl 4 -> lvl 5
As soon as this notification arrived, the amount of blood I was able to control increased, and my ball grew until it was closer to the size of a softball before stopping. It seemed that the amount of blood I could control was directly linked [Hemokinesis]’s level. I would need to raise that if I wanted to do anything more than gather blood for my meals.
But for that moment, that much blood was just fine. I streamed my bland ball of [Life Energy] into my mouth, keeping an eye on my HUD so I could track my energy levels. It took just under 3 softballs of goblin blood to fully fill me up, and when I had consumed that, it left me feeling as if I had just consumed a hearty meal, which I suppose I had, but it felt weird to call pure liquid a meal.
After that, I ran more tests with the remaining goblin’s blood, trying to use it to form weapons. I gained two more levels in [Hemokinesis] for my efforts, and the amount of blood I could control grew to the size of a soccer ball.
After an hour, I decided to stop to conserve my [MP]. I still had nearly half of it left, but I didn’t want to be depleted in case something truly dangerous happened. It was fortunate that I stopped when I did, because right around then, I began to feel a rumbling in the ground. I stood still, listening as it grew closer and closer, and soon, I could hear it and a little after that, I could see it too. Once I saw what it was, I recalled what the system had said when I slew the first goblins. It had called them [Goblin Scouts]. I, foolishly, had not considered that there might actually be a larger group that they were scouting for. I had just assumed that [Scout] was the title used for extremely low level monsters like those ones.
Instead, it meant that they had someone they answered to, and that someone was apparently a whole horde of goblins charging straight towards the spot where their comrades had died. There were dozens of them. Most were similar in appearance to the ones I had slain, but a few were slightly better equipped, and were holding rusty knives or old javelines that they held like spears, and there were a few larger specimen that I guessed were hobgoblins who had full-sized swords.
I promptly ran away, making sure to activate [Stealth] and utilize my higher [Agility] to its fullest. I left the main part of the forest and returned to the tree on the edge near the road where I had stashed my bag. I waited in my tree for a little while, hoping that the goblins would not come this far out, but a few minutes later, I saw their small, dark silhouettes making their way in my general direction.
They clearly didn’t know exactly where I was, and were fanning out to search for me, but I wouldn’t give them the chance to find me. It was possible that I could defeat them in a drawn out, guerilla battle, but it wasn’t worth it. I had already restocked on blood, and I didn’t know how strong the higher level goblins or the hobgoblins would be.
I strapped my bag to my back and returned to the road, leaving the goblins behind. It was still the middle of the night, so it wasn’t exactly safe to be traveling, but I didn’t really have much of a choice. I continued my run towards Bizet for about an hour before I caught a glimpse of the orange glow of a campfire ahead of me. Since it was on the side of the road, and looked controlled, I assumed that it was the fire of a fellow traveler, but I still slowed down and approached cautiously, just in case.
As I drew near, I was able to make out the details of the fire and its surroundings more clearly, and saw that the fire was in the center of a ring of covered wagons, and that there was a group of people sleeping in bags around the fire. There were four men awake and standing guard, one on each side of the road, one on the wagon ring, and the last tending to the fire. The one on my side of the road noticed me soon after I noticed him, and he waved. I waved back, and approached confidently, ready to meet other humans on equal terms for the first time in this body.