It had been four days, I was tired, sore and hungry. I had a half full canteen, half a portion of jerky and about 7 points of stamina left. At least I was out of the ravine, I’d found a collapsed bit of cliff face which I'd been able to scramble up, at the cost of a large nick to the blade of my dagger (when I used it as a makeshift climbing axe). Anyway, I was back on the road now and making better progress for it. I had actually passed a waystone earlier in the day and then I was only 24 kilometres from the city - that was two more days if the road was flat, three if it was hilly. I could do this I reckoned, who knows what state I’d be in when I got there but it was possible.
I think if I hadn’t been trudging for my life or whatever I would have actually enjoyed this hike. The weather had held and I was for the first time in my life actually free, admittedly my agency was severely restricted by circumstance, but no one was telling me what to do and more importantly I wasn’t telling myself to do things I didn’t want to do either.
I was walking along the road when it suddenly stopped, or rather I reached the remains of a bridge that at one point must have spanned the twenty or so metres of the gorge I was now peering down into; all that was left of it were the abutments that had once supported the arched stonework. It must have collapsed recently as I could see the broken stone littering the valley floor below. I absentmindedly thought about whether the stream that flowed at the bottom of the gorge was on its way to join the river I had washed up in and whether in a few weeks time when the snow in the eastern mountains began to melt it would be a torrential river that filled the entire gorge.
Yep it was definitely better to think about that then how I was going to cross the gorge now. There was no obvious way of climbing down, let alone climbing back up, I was going to have to follow the gorge in the hope that there was some other way to cross it soon. With no other choice, I left the road and strode out into the forest.
The forest was, well, pretty much like every other forest I had spent any time in - probably magical in good weather but in the dull overcastness that was today’s, it was just gloomy and damp. I stumbled over roots, snagged my trousers in brambles and fell over more times than I care to admit. Eventually though I found I was starting to descend and after several hours the sides of the gorge were low enough for me to jump down and climb up the other side. I was tired, cold and hungry now and faced another four hours of walking uphill just to get back to where I had started this morning.
Thoroughly depressed I sat down and leant against a broad tree trunk for a few minutes to rest and get my breath back. I was sitting with my eyes closed when I heard the crack of a twig snapping somewhere close by. That startled my eyes open; was there an animal or worse a monster heading towards me? No it was worse, as still indistinctly but unmistkeably, I realised I could hear two voices coming towards me. If I was very lucky there were two hunters or woodsman going about their business, but this I knew was bandit country. Malin was a city state and its writ, such as it was, extended only a dozen kilometres from its walls, even if the official borders were further away they mainly represented a lawless buffer between the city and it’s feudal neighbours. Especially, as the city’s military might was restricted by treaty meaning its army was too small to maintain the rule of law over the whole area.
Why was I thinking about all this now though! I suddenly shook myself out of my reverie and into a panic. What was I going to do? I could run, but if I ran I’d definitely be spotted and assuming these were bandits they’d probably be full grown men who could easily run me down. So I would hide. Here behind my tree. At least I was on the right side of it, judging by the voices, so I wouldn’t be spotted immediately. Hopefully they would be too distracted to notice me and I’d have the advantage that they weren’t expecting to notice anything. I called the dagger out of my inventory. I had no skill to help me wield it but it gave me some illusion of being able to defend myself which was helping get my panic under control. That in itself was a good thing as I needed to have a clear head and to not give myself away by hyperventilating loudly.
As the voices got closer my heart sunk as I began to be able to pick out the conversation.
“I’m fed up,” said the first voice, “I told Holden that no one is crazy enough to travel this road in winter.”
“He probably just wanted to use that barrel of black powder we got from those miners,” said the second voice.
“Well it was a pretty good show watching that bridge go up,” the first voice said grudgingly, “still if I’d known it meant weeks of traipsing through the forest looking for marks I’d have told him to stuff it up his arse.”
“Now that would have been a show,” the second voice laughed.
Great, they were actually looking for me, well not me probably but some small time merchant with his whole inventory slung on his back, as that was the only kind that bothered to traipse between Alasce and Malin (my economics tutor would be proud), to rob and murder. I tried even harder not to panic, if they found me I’d definitely be murdered, it was just a matter if they did anything worse to me first. I tried to reassure myself, they weren’t actually interested in searching for anyone and they weren’t expecting anyone to be travelling the road in winter; in a few minutes they’d have gone and I would be moving as quickly as I could to the relative safety of the road; not that they couldn’t rob and murder people as easily on the road but it was more likely to be noticed eventually and draw out some sort of response from the authorities so they’d probably stick to luring people into the forest first? It was a logical argument and bandits were notoriously logical people right? Well I better hope they were as that was looking like my only chance of survival if there was an actual bandit mob in these woods.
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“Your cool down finished yet?” the first voice said, and my heart leapt into my throat. One of them had a skill they were using to search. Shit.
“Yeah pretty much, give me a second to sit down, always makes me fucking dizzy,” the second man said.
I didn’t wait for him to sit down, I had no skills for concealment or stealth, and despite the futility of it I ran. I didn’t think about where I was running to, I just sprinted as fast as my legs could take me away from them.
“Fuck, over there,” came a shout behind me and the chase was on. I barreled through the copse not caring about the tears to my clothes and skin I was rapidly accumulating, stumbling over roots it was only my momentum that kept me on my feet to the point what I was doing was less a sprint and more an extended fall that just happened to be going forward as much as it was down. And unfortunately the thing with falling is eventually you hit the ground, which is what I did, I don’t know what it was that eventually did it for me but I hit the ground face first. Great, I was going to die covered in mud.
I pushed myself to my feet just in time to see the two men also come to a halt just a few metres away clearly sizing me up before the inevitable murdering part began. They were everything my imagination had told me a bandit would be: dirty, dressed in ill fitting and cheap clothing, scarred and unshaven, and holding crudely made but wicked looking short swords.
“Make this easy on yourself lad, put the knife down, hand over your stuff and maybe, if it’s good stuff, you get to walk away home,” said one of the men. Fat chance of that I thought, but at least they thought I was a boy.
“How about,” I said, lowering my voice as much as I could, “I give you my bag and run off, let me keep the knife just in case I meet someone not as fair as you.”
Skill Check [Enchant]: Success Criteria [Random Number, Range 1-20]: 6
System Invention…Generating [Random Number]: 15
Skill Check [Enchant]: Failure
“Nice try lad, but I don’t want a knife in my back,” the second man said.
“Well I don’t want a sword in my stomach either,” I said, stalling desperately for time. Not that I was even trying to think of something, holding the knife in front of me.
“Then put down the knife,” said the man, “any fool could see you don’t know how to use it anyway.”
“And any fool could see you’re going to kill me the moment I put down the knife,” I said.
“He’s not wrong,” said the first man with a wicked grin on his face as the second man shrugged and charged towards me.
His sword was already swinging at me as he closed on me and I threw myself to one side, wincing as the tip of his sword grazed my shoulder. I turned just in time to somehow catch the next blow with my knife, the shock of it sending me staggering backwards, the two pieces of metal screeching as they dragged against each other, his blade just millimetres away from splitting my stomach open.
What happened next I only pieced together later, and even now I’m not sure what happened, this is just my best guess. He brought his sword up over his head, in what I’m sure was intended to be a blow that split my skull open, I ducked and shut my eyes and probably wet myself; I was about to die horribly bladder control was not my primary concern at the time. Except I didn’t die. The man hit me, knocking me over, and lay on top of me spluttering. I opened my eyes to the horrific sight, not to mention smell, of the bandit gasping on top of me, blood pouring out of his mouth. I looked down and saw my dagger embedded in his chest. The man must have tripped as he charged me and barrelled straight into my dagger, impaling himself right through the heart.
Disgusted, I used the strength I had to push the dying man off of me and stand back up. I was covered in his blood, panting and confused out of my mind. I was meant to be dead. He was dead. I was covered in blood but this time it wasn’t mine. He had tried to kill me. I had killed him. Someone was screaming something at me. Fuck I had no idea what was going on, I barely knew who I was at this point, in fact all I knew was I was alive and someone still wanted to kill me.
I screamed.
System Notification!
Special Conditions Met. You have entered Condition: [Primal Rage]
Strength: + 30
Stamina: - 3pts/sec
Intelligence and Wisdom: reduced to 2 whilst Condition: [Primal Rage] is active.
Condition: [Primal Rage] ends when Stamina = 0
Current Stamina: 15/30
Whatever that notification was I didn’t have the faculties to read it, I wasn’t thinking now, something had taken over my body and I leapt at the other man wrapping my legs around his torso as we fell and as he hit the ground I plunged my dagger into his eye ripped it out and stabbed his face again, the blade breaking as I hit bone, but by then the man was already dead. As the last of my stamina drained away, I indluged in my new favourite activity: I passed out.