CHAPTER 65 [TRAJECTORY]

“You all know the drill everyone get in line in order. New recruits you go to the back of the line. We’ll file out of here in a line with Lurks leading us, from there she’ll divide all of us into different teams to accomplish our work today. Alright, let’s go!” David yelled at all of us.

I waited until everyone was already in the line and sidled to the back to find my place. I ended up standing behind the girl that had been leading our line in. She turned back to glance at me. I gave her a curious smile. She didn’t say anything and then just turned back around.

Alright then, keep your secrets. I shrugged and ignored her for now. Shortly after we finished getting together, Lurks’ tall form stalked out of the tunnel and she inspected our line before flashing that uncanny smile she had and speaking softly yet somehow still making her voice carry across the cave.

“Good, you’re ready. Let’s not delay any longer.”

And with that she turned around and walked back through the tunnel, David led the line following behind her. Lurks led us out into the main cavern where the day crew was starting to filter through. As we came out into the cavern and I got a full view of the scope of the amount of slaves here I realized something.

I had vastly underestimated how many people were working here. The crew sizes were heavily skewed from what I was seeing, there were easily over 5000 people here. Probably closer to 10,000. Meanwhile the night crew that was coming out of their respective areas seemed to total somewhere in the 3000 range. There were roughly 500 people in our group, Larks had roughly the same amount from what I could see. If I had to guess the exact same amount. The other two night groups were significantly larger.

How the hell were they keeping the slaves contained? The slaves at this point outnumbered the guards about 2-1. And daytime had a significant advantage in numbers over them for that.They really stood a chance of staging a break. So why didn’t they? There was something they knew that I didn’t.

I’d have to ask David later if I got the chance.

Lurks continued leading us past the other lines heading the opposite way. I got a lot of weird looks as we passed the day crew, but no one said or did anything. Unsurprisingly, as I heard soldiers yelling various obscenities around me. Several of them shoving or beating some of the slaves.

Much to my shock I saw one of the slaves yank out a knife and rush one of the guards.

He made it exactly two steps before his head exploded.

I stumbled in my steps glancing around to try and see if I could figure out what happened. I had barely managed to see it, but a projectile had slammed into his head. The problem is that I couldn’t quite tell the direction it came from nor where it actually impacted on the ground so I could discern its trajectory.

One of the guards noticed my frantic searching and took several steps towards me yelling, “Hey, cocksucker! Pay attention and move along! I won’t tell you again!”

I held his gaze for a moment before nodding and continuing to walk while looking a bit more discreetly. Eventually I saw what I was looking for.

Currently we were on the bottom of the enormous cavern we were in, we needed to travel roughly 150 feet up to get back into the gorge. Up towards the top ridge but on the opposite side of the entrance to the cavern stood a man.

It was hard to gauge his height from this distance and I could somewhat make out his features. Shaggy brown hair rested on his head, he had sharp angular features giving him an imperious look. He didn’t wear any armor and instead just wore fine clothing that looked like it was made out of expensive materials. He was also juggling a few rocks in a single hand.

And then I saw his hand snap, I could literally see the fucking shockwaves come off his hand with how fast he moved and yet not a single sound burst over the cavern, instead on the other side of the cavern I heard several cries of dismay.

I tried to use [Identify] on him, but he didn’t turn anything up due to the distance. I think I understood why no one was trying to leave. It was safe to say he was a higher tier than five. The only people I had seen move at supersonic speeds were 6th tier and up. Not saying that a tier 5 couldn’t do it, I just hadn’t seen it happen yet. The chances of anyone being able to comfortably beat that man were about a million to zero if he was in the 6th tier.

I had hoped beyond a hope that potentially the person in charge would just be a tier four and this would be a low level facility. But apparently the people in charge knew better, or at the very least were exceedingly cautious.

I turned back around focusing on the back of the person in front of me, a simple idea slowly popping up in my head. There wasn’t much I could work with currently, but I had a niggling suspicion of something that had a chance of getting me out of here. I just needed someone to cooperate with me. Or several someones rather, I wasn’t going to be able to do this on my own, but I was pretty confident it could be done.

I needed to learn more about David, find out what kind of person he was. If he was going to narc on me I couldn’t let him in on the plan, but there was also a chance that he hadn’t resigned himself to live out the rest of his days as a slave, I was going to have to bank on that hope.

Because if I couldn’t get him in on it, this was going to get a lot harder. I let out a soft sigh. This was going to take an eternity to pull off. But it was better to take years to plan it out and execute it perfectly rather than have some half-baked idea that crumbled at the first sign of opposition and then get myself killed.

They say no plan survives first contact. I call that lack of foresight. You should always have a countermeasure for different failure contingencies. If you weren’t planning for that, what were you doing?

I needed to find out how they would respond to a breakout, or attempted breakout anyways. I highly doubt I was going to be the first one to try this. So I had to find out what people had tried before, what had worked well and what hadn’t. Where had they gone wrong in their attempts, or had anyone actually succeeded and managed to escape? Things to find out when my position amongst the group was more established.

We exited the cavern into the gorge, the sun was hanging low in the sky casting an orange glow on the already orange ground making everything glow obnoxiously to my eyes. Eventually our line came to a stop down one of the many paths throughout the gorge, people slowly started breaking out of the line and started getting to different tasks. Some picked up picks and started swinging away at the wall, others picked up shovels and started scooping away at dirt and rock piles.

Each person walked over to a specific area and began working relentlessly at their tasks.

It took maybe fifteen minutes before I finally ended up near Lurk, finally able to hear what she could say, I listened in to get an idea of what to expect.

“You’ll handle the transport between the entrance of our area and the dump site.” The man she was talking to wandered off to handle his task.

“You’ll handle shoveling over there.” She said while pointing to the side.

“You’ll be cleaning the salt extracts.”

“You’ll work on widening the pathway at the entrance.”

On and on the job types went. It seemed very few people actually removed salt from the walls. Unless she had already designated all the people she wanted doing that. I glanced around at the rocks around us…

There wasn’t actually that much salt I could notice in the walls now that I was looking. From what I had heard this was supposed to be a lucrative export, but was that not the case? Karif had talked with me about all those weeks ago when I was initially learning about the surrounding areas. But it didn’t seem nearly as prosperous as he had been making it out.

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Without realizing it I was standing at the front of the line.

Lurks snapped right under my nose and made a little spark of mana that made me flinch as my vision snapped back to her.

“Pay attention or I’ll give you a reason to be scatterbrained. Good. You’re going to help work on widening the entrance.” She pointed back the way we had come in where a couple people were working already.

I nodded and started walking over there. On arriving I noticed a couple of picks on the ground, so I went over to grab one.

I bent over to grab the handle and then tried to straighten my back, only to nearly fall onto the ground. The pick was a lot heavier than I had been expecting. The thing easily weighed like 300 lbs. If not more.

“What the hell…?” I murmured to myself as I positioned myself to grab it with both hands and then heaved it up off the ground.

One of the guys turned around watching me and chuckled, “Yeah, they get everyone the first time. Some gravity enhancement on the picks. Super cheap and it sucks your mana to power it as well.”

My eyes widened as I looked at my mana as it was steadily ticking down. What? Why would they do this? Wouldn’t this be horribly inefficient?

My confusion must’ve been evident on my face as the man started explaining further, “It’s probably less an idea of making the picks more usable and probably more of a ploy to keep us in line. If you’re tired from lifting something heavy, have little stamina, and no mana, you’re less likely to try and escape since you know it won’t succeed.”

Huh. I guess this was the missing piece of the puzzle. Can’t stage an escape if you don’t have the resources, stamina and mana wise to do so. This just got a lot harder.

I stepped over next to the man that had been talking to me.

“So what am I supposed to do? Just smack away at the rock for the next 12 hours?”

He chuckled lightly, “Pretty much. Gotta be careful about how we do it though since we could potentially bring a huge portion of the wall down on top of us. Here I’ll show you.”

The man then spent the next thirty minutes just showing me the best way to swing and how to not have the rocks come collapsing down on top of me.

Surprisingly none of the soldiers actually stopped him from teaching me. I guess there was something to be said about getting a worker that could do work more efficiently. Not that they were being lenient or lazy necessarily. More along the lines of allowing your workers to gain proficiency so they were actually being productive. They still had a goal to accomplish after all.

Part way through smacking the rocks and being taught about how and where to strike I got a ping.

‘Ping’ General skill [Mining] has been acquired.

This would at least help make it better, and I already saw a noticeable improvement on a couple test swings. More rock broke away and a lot more cleanly as well.

“Oh, looks like you got the skill. Nice. It’ll make a huge difference as you start leveling it up. Once you hit tier one, you can start somewhat shaping the rock as it breaks apart from the wall, it makes it easier for the people shifting the shit around and will keep anyone from being annoyed with you while having to work with you. Seen a couple guys get killed over it just to prove a point.”

He shrugged at the end before turning back to his work without another.

“Huh, thanks for your help. What’s your name?” I asked him.

He turned to me while giving me a strange look, “Chamy, you should focus on working. They don’t mind us teaching. They catch us talking outside of that and they’ll beat you so bad you’ll wish they killed you.”

He turned away again without waiting for a response. Huh… Alright then.

I stepped up next to him and continued working myself, hitting the stones slowly and carefully. I was decently strong, my stats definitely boosting my upper arm strength. Especially considering I was lifting about 300 lbs of weight currently. How I knew that… I wasn’t entirely sure. Kind of like how I knew rough estimates of how fast I was running even if I couldn’t say the exact speed.

I think I was starting to get a rough idea of how the formula worked. I might be able to get a good idea going forward, especially if I keep tabs on the weights of things. Perhaps the formula is equally applied across stats as well. Something I might be able to find out going forward.

I knew how much I could roughly lift back before coming to this world. I wasn’t particularly strong, being relatively skinny. I think back in my peak I could maybe bench 200 lbs, but I had not kept up with that after graduating highschool and going to college, since I was no longer doing sports. So I’d be lucky if I could hit 150.

That’s pretty weak actually isn’t it? Although that was before becoming an Elf. So who knew what had changed too. Something I’d definitely have to work out going forward.

I was already several hours into the work day, supposedly they’d give us a thirty minute break to eat something. I was starting to feel kinda hungry, the food I had eaten earlier not particularly filling or nutritious. If I had to go 12 hours on just that, I’d probably pass out near the end. I was surprised they even cared about that though.

When I realized I was going to be a slave I expected more whips and irrational beatings, but so far we were given a lot of freedom and agency for being a slave. Honestly, I arguably got treated worse working for some corporations back on Earth.

It was a pretty surreal thought.

***

Five hours and forty-five minutes on the dot a call went out and we stopped working. The sun had set hours ago, so the sun was no longer casting a glow over the gorge. Soldiers now walked around with lamps inspecting the different areas. Giant pillars lit up and casted glows over the areas they were in and some even emulated spotlights able to be pointed in specific directions to look at stuff.

Quite a few groups, of I’m assuming other slaves, came through carrying the same sort of slop I had eaten in the cave earlier.

It was better than nothing I guess. I struggled once again to eat it, but managed to force it down my throat and keep it there. I just barely managed to finish before our thirty minute break was up. I stood up with a groan, my arms felt slightly sore already and my back was feeling the strain from swinging this 300 lbs pick all day. I was already halfway through the day though, so I didn’t have much more to deal with.

***

Alright, so that was a lie.

It was one hour before we were supposed to stop. Roughly. The sun was just starting to peek up over the horizon, I couldn’t see it from down here but I could see the light it was casting on the sky. The past hour had gone by so incredibly slowly though, it felt like the last hour was the same length as the last three. A feeling I was incredibly used to and we still had one more hour to go before we were done.

My arms felt weak, I struggled to lift the pick at this point. Sweat was pouring down my face and constantly getting into my eyes. Thankfully it was cool during the night so we weren’t overheating at the very least. But it was a small mercy on the top of the heaped indignities of the job.

We had managed to widen out the entrance of the side ravine we were in by another few feet on either side and had moved up through the entrance, slowly widening out the entire ravine so that more traffic could come through and we could actually fit multiple cart transports in here without issues.

Multiple groups of people were working further down the ravine towards the end carving paths into the rocks and others moving the large rocks they were knocking out towards where the carts could actually make it too and put them in there which were then taken to be dumped somewhere and someone did who-knows-what with it.

Not my business currently so I didn’t think too hard about it. I just focused on doing my job better and tried not to focus on how much time was left before they let us go back inside.

Something I had noticed was my classes were receiving a slight trickle of exp.

Whether that was because I was leveling a general skill, which had made it to level 3 so far by the way, or if it was because I was utilizing skills ever so slightly from the classes in the form of passives, I had no idea. But it was happening. It would still take like. Several months for any of them to see even a single level, but it was possible to level off of this. Not very cost effective, so I wasn’t likely to ascend to tier three before I possibly died from the heat death of the universe, but you know how it is. Silver linings and all that.

And just when I thought the call would never come, I heard Lurks yell out for us to stop working and to line up. The guy that had told me dumped his pick in the center with a few others, so I followed his example before following behind him back to the line.

I was breathing heavily while standing there waiting for everyone to get into the line. My arms felt like rubber, they burned with the telltale feeling of a hard workout, and I just knew they were going to be sore tomorrow. I would have to see if I could heal the pain with my skills tomorrow. It’d be an interesting thing to see.

Once everyone was back in the line, Lurks led us from the front, taking us back the way we came through the ravine, into the cavern, before leading us to the door and letting us in. She stood there with a slight smirk as we walked by her before she finally closed the door behind us and I heard a click as the door locked behind me, being the last person in the line. I immediately walked past everyone and started making my way to the room I had gotten by blood, before I made it to the hallway that led there I heard someone call out to me,

“Hey elf,” David yelled at me as I turned slowly to look at him, “I’m sure you’re about to take a nap, don’t sleep too long because we need to have a talk. So if you’re not up in about 6 hours I’m sending someone to fetch you, alright?”

I let out a subvocal groan of annoyance before giving him a curt nod and continuing on my way.

I was out as soon as my head hit the bed.