I stumbled through the underbrush as quickly as I could. It was difficult to pick my way through the dense plant life in the dark.
Martin didn’t seem to have the same difficulty as he tramped along ahead of me. He powered his way through the underbrush, easily parting brushes and vines. I found that those same plants wouldn’t yield for me without significant effort.
Another crash echoed through the night behind us, driving me to push through anyway. The sounds of battle were growing more distant, but we were far from safe.
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It was several marks later when the morning light finally started filtering through the canopy above. It was unknown to me how the monstrous battle ended, but the crashes had ended long ago.
I still couldn’t bring myself to relax. I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder repeatedly. Part of me was expecting to see the demon creeping through the shadows behind us despite how unlikely that would have been.
The others were each handling the rough start to the day in their own ways. Robert and Matthew were plodding through the undergrowth with the glazed expressions of the sleep deprived. Salvador, while still quite spry, was lacking some of his usual grace. Martin and Norbert were taking things with their usual stoicism and grumbling respectively.
Liam looked ready to collapse at any given moment. I couldn’t claim to be surprised after our frantic struggle to maintain the barrier. There would have been no way I could have held back the clashing monsters without his help.
I would have liked to help him out, but I was almost as exhausted as he was. I may have grown used to drawing mana from the pool the system gave me, but I hadn’t forgotten the strain of how I used to use magic. After having to once again use more mana than the system could provide me, I had a new appreciation for the convenience of my mana pool.
Both of us were very glad when Martin called for a rest by a stream. No one had any complaints as the two of us immediately sat down by the water.
After closing my eyes for what I thought was just a moment, I felt someone nudging me awake. Salvador stood over me with a piece of dried grune meat held towards me. “Lunch time, our brave little guardians.” He remarked cheerily.
Looking a little groggy, Liam sat up nearby. Judging by the change in lighting, I figured that the other let us nap until about noon. For some reason, the slender man’s face turned red as he came to his senses. That seemed to happen to him a lot.
As I took the offered meat from Salvador, I noticed that my next boon was already available. The note about my outlander class integrating quickly was proving accurate.
To my disappointment, only the update boon was available.
I wasn’t too discouraged. If there were any unpleasant surprises that I wouldn’t be willing to deal with, I could probably just change my class. I called up the subfeatures for the boon.
Codex: Critical System Updates
Expands system functionality to support operations considered critical by primary society.
Subfeatures
Citizenship Tier Restrictions: Enabled by default
Codex Connection Range Expansion: Enabled by default
Credit Record: Enabled by default
Legality Notifications: Enabled by default
Legal Surveillance: Enabled by Default
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Message Priority Granularity: Enabled by default
Personal Identification: Enabled by default
System Clock: Enabled by default
Some of the subfeatures looked fairly benign, but others looked rather suspicious. I looked through the details of each one to be safe.
The system clock promised a more reliable way of keeping time than watching the sun or burning marked candles and the range expansion was self explanatory. The message granularity basically just filtered messages by level of importance, from emergency notifications to general advertisements. The credit record kept track of someone’s number of credits, something which could somehow be traded with other people or directly used to accelerate boon integration.
The personal identification provided a set of details about me that other users could view. I didn’t consider any of the information it mentioned to be anything I would want to hide, so I was fine with that subfeature.
The legal subfeatures were a bit less palatable. I didn’t mind the one that would alert me if I was about to engage in an illegal action, but I didn’t like the sound of the other one. The surveillance subfeature would let anyone with an applicable class related to governance observe my actions at any time and would be notified if I broke the law. I really didn’t like the sound of that.
I shuddered at the thought of how much harder my life would have been if the village elders had always been alerted whenever I circumvented part of my penance.
The last subfeature was the worst by far.
Citizenship Tier Restrictions: Imposes a range of restrictions on users of lower citizenship tier. Restrictions include: Restricted access to system features, reduced boon integration speed, limited access to advanced classes, restri-
I didn’t bother reading the entire thing. I didn’t know what a citizenship tier was, but it sounded like it bore some unpleasant similarities to a pariah mark.
Repulsed by the awful subfeature, I tried to see if I could set it to be disabled without selecting the boon. There was no way I was going to take the boon if it forced this subfeature on me.
To my great relief, the system let me disable it.
After ensuring that both the restriction and surveillance subfeatures would be disabled, I selected the boon.
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INTERLUDE 8: A Concerned Father
As the group rested by the stream, Mathew sat and continued his carving. The picture of his battle with the wolf-bear things was coming along nicely. Once finished, it would make a lovely gift for his daughter.
Provided he lived to see her again.
In his rather eventful life, Mathew had encountered many ways of dealing with adversity. Some would respond with anger or sadness, while others would be filled with determination. Another way to handle unfortunate events would be to flee from them as far and as fast as your feet could take you.
Even then, fleeing all the way to an unexplored continent was probably a bit excessive.
Cutting a bit deeper than intended, Matt let out a sigh. Signing onto this crazy expedition was probably the dumbest thing he had ever done. Considering what he had gotten up to in his youth, that was saying something
At least the constant threat of some horrible monster jumping out of the bushes helped keep his mind off his wife and her… friend.
Mathew continued slowly whittling away at his piece of monstrous ivory as Salvador went to wake the two sleeping enchanters. He didn’t get the chance to see what was fighting the previous night, but he was quite glad that the two had kept whatever it was out of the camp as long as they had. It would have been a miserable few days back to the expedition camp if they had been forced to abandon their supplies.
It was kind of funny watching Liam flounder as he realized that he had fallen asleep next to the girl. It was obvious that the boy had a crush on her, even if she seemed oblivious to that fact.
Matt frowned as he considered that native girl, Kyo. It was good that she was finally starting to learn to speak Systemic, but he was a bit worried.
There was another way Matt had seen people react to terrible circumstances. Rather than rage against the world or cry over their fate, some people just seemed to stop feeling at all. Sure, they might occasionally crack a smile or mumble a curse, but it always seemed hollow.
The girl reminded him an awful lot of those people.
Even when talking about things that she was clearly interested in, like magic or those bitter little beans she was so proud of, she seemed oddly distant and muted. When asked about the ugly mark on her forehead, she pretty much shut down for a bit before seeming to forget the question entirely.
Mathew doubted that the destruction of the poor girl’s village had been the start of her troubles. Unless he was mistaken, her wounds ran much deeper than that.
Matt couldn’t help but imagine his daughter turned into such a hollowed out shell. It was a painful thought, especially considering that his grandchild would soon be on the way.
He wanted to help the poor girl but wasn’t sure how. Hopefully, meeting new people would do her some good.