I walked past the dying man with cold disregard for his condition and picked up the bow from where Hawk had thrown it. I turned it over, examining it closely. It was well made and surprisingly sophisticated in its design. Horn and wood had been glued together to give the back and belly of the bow distinctly different colours. It had then been polished smooth and treated with wax or fat of some sort until it gleamed in the sun. The string was made from sinew? I couldn’t tell for sure but it looked a lot stronger than the cordage I’d acquired from the ever damned Shop.

I tossed it on the pile of furs I used for bedding and retrieved a pair of arrows that had escaped the archers quiver when he fell.

“Well fuck me. How were we to know?” Grunted my guest. I turned and fixed him with a glare.

“You’re a Shikrakyn,” said the last bar one of the raiding party. The word didn’t translate directly into English. I didn’t know why the system had given me access to the language but it made the alien words make sense and I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. The language sounded like a blend of Welsh and Turkish to me. I understood what the strange word meant, though. It meant harvester of souls.

“What makes you think that?” I asked pleasantly, going back to my work. I built a pile of leaf-wrapped dried meat by the bow. “Hold that thought. You don’t have anywhere to be, do you?” I asked.

“You used magic. Only the great Blue awaits me now, bastard. There’s no need to toy with me.”

“Jolly good.” I went back outside and hunted down my sheath and waterskins. A few minutes later I came back to find him slumped unconscious. He’d dragged himself a few feet out of the cave. I emptied my skins of river water over his upturned face, making him cough and splutter as he was dragged back to painful consciousness.

“What is a Shikrakyn?” I asked as I began to fill my skins with boiled water.

“A curse from the gods. You are all mad!” he spat.

“Where is your friend going to run to?” I questioned, pointing in the direction the man that I’d mentally tagged as Hawk had fled.

“My brother is running to our forward camp. He’ll return with a full warband,” groaned the man. I squatted down opposite him and took a drink from my waterskin. He eyed it greedily. The steady trickle of blood from his wound hadn’t slowed. In a movement so fast I surprised myself, my hand lashed out and slapped him across the face.

“Don’t lie to me again,” I growled. He spat and shuffled himself into a sitting position, his back propped against the cave wall.

“Too fast. Too strong. You’re not of this world, for sure. Stranger, I would ask a favour of you for killing me.” I looked at him blankly. Killing this man freed me of all obligation to him as far as I was concerned. I raised an eyebrow to invite him to continue.

“When you hunt down my people, tell my father I died well?” he grunted.

“I don’t give a shit about your people. I owe your cowardly brother for putting arrows into Wilson and planning to sell me as a slave. And possibly for being a rapist. After that I don’t give a shit about the rest.”

He took a wheezing breath and stared at me, seemingly trying to gauge if I was being sincere. I was. I had no intention of killing his tribe or clan or whatever it was. Ten souls per person was tempting but I wasn’t going to abandon my rules in a fit of pique.

“Dilth hasn’t had a woman,” he groaned out a laugh at the thought. “He isn’t a man yet.”

“He looked like a man to me. Boys don’t try to ambush and kill a stranger,” I replied.

“Sixteen winters. He’d seen sixteen.” I noted that the man was already using the past tense for his still living friend. “This was our first Koryolis. You aren’t a man until you return with booty. Then you can take a wife and become a man of the tribe. Aresk cursed me with you and has seen fit to deny me that honour,” he finished bitterly.

Some kind of rite of passage? Primitive. The sophistication of the bow and finely crafted flint tipped arrows suggested this was some kind of late stone age civilisation. I hadn’t seen any metal items on the men -boys I corrected myself. Technically children. I set that thought and the uncomfortable emotions it stirred up aside for now. I checked the bodies of Dog One and Two. Aside from the stone maces they each had flint daggers attached to their belts. I tossed the daggers down by the bow on my furs.

“What do you call yourselves?” I asked him as I contemplated my next actions.

“We are from the Areskyn Tribe. My father receives homage from four other tribes and is king of much of the northern plains,” the man bragged. “Aresk has always sent us hardships to make us strong.” He grunted and pressed both hands down on his stomach wound. “I thought we were blessed, but now…” He narrowed his eyes at me as I stood over him.

“If I’m not bothered by them I’ll pass them by.” I’d made up my mind. I would head south. Catch and kill the archer on the way then move out across the plains. I couldn’t stay here forever waiting for a competitor to wander by. I had five true Souls to harvest and this place no longer felt like a home. It had been violated.

I had some more Souls and the urge to spend them was strong. Each level would cost me twenty Souls now so I could go up a few and have enough left over that I could afford some things from the Shop as I travelled. I grimaced at the thought; I would only use the Shop if I absolutely had to.

I bought three more levels, reducing my Soul stat back down to F and leaving me with forty six in reserve.

Level 13

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Primary Stats: Body: E Mind: F+ Soul: F

Available Souls: 43

Secondary Stats

Physical strength: 16 Reflexes: 15 Health: 120

Magic strength: 8 Focus: 8 Mana: 100

I put four stat points into strength and two into reflexes. My limbs felt different again. Nothing changed visibly but when I poked my bicep experimentally it felt like bands of steel had replaced the muscle.

“What did you do?” he gasped at me.

“I spent some Souls. What do you know about Shikrakyn?” I noted it was apparently obvious enough when I spent Souls that a man whose vision must be hazed by pain could tell I had done something, even if he didn't understand what I’d done.

“They grow stronger. Some by fighting with honour, some by trading or leading warriors to war. The old tales even speak of Shikrakyn who could get stronger simply by speaking to other people! You're demi-gods. Too strong, too fast.” He repeated his complaint from when I’d slapped him.

“Do you know of any others like me?” I asked. I moved over and stripped Dog Two of his cloak and leather satchel. I checked his boots but his feet were too small for me. I eyed the dying man’s footwear speculatively.

“Not for many seasons. None for a generation or more but there are old stories we still tell around the fires,” he coughed.

“How many people are there in the tribes of the plains?”

“Last time the Tribes came together was for the Halleth Festival in spring. All my clan known since then is the plains, as it should be. Many hundreds.”

I began loading my dried meat into the satchel. I took the little package with bear's teeth in it as well. Aside from that I couldn’t see any reason to take the rest of my meagre possessions. I poured the salt from my urns back into the bag it had come in and attached it to the satchel with cordage. Salt was likely valuable in an economy as primitive as these plain dwellers seemed to have.

I retrieved my spear from Dog One’s guts and wiped it down on his wolf cloak. I pulled the wolf cloak from Dog Two over my shoulders and the head, with fangs fitted along the upper jaw, was pulled up as a hood. I imagined I looked particularly savage. So much for my super power of a naturally bland appearance.

“I have spoken a lot. I did not have to. I ask for another boon,” he rumbled. I looked over at him.

“What?”

“End me quickly. A warrior should die at the hands of a worthy enemy, it assures a better seat at the table after the Great Blue.” He met my eyes with a proud stare. I knelt down and put a hand on his shoulder. He was a strong man and I think under other circumstances I could have respected him. He had handled the pain of his wound with as much dignity as could be expected and he had provided me with a lot of useful information.

“What’s your fathers name?” I asked. He smiled faintly.

“Hakubin. You will know him when you see him. Tell him Graben died well.”

“If I see him I’ll tell him but I won’t go looking for him. Goodbye Graben.” The knife in my right hand lunged forward and sank through his eyeball, breached the delicate bone around the optic nerve and slipped into his brain. I let him fall backwards, lowering him gently with my left hand as the right retrieved my blade from his skull.

I donned the satchel and moved over to Wilson. I’d known the beast less than a day but I would miss him. I carefully extracted the arrows from his body, cleaned them and threw them onto my pile. I stopped and picked the wolf up. He weighed almost nothing to me now. I would need to be careful outside of combat. I was too strong, too fast, as Graben had said.

Carrying Wilson into the deep part of the cave I laid his body out gently. I stood for a minute and contemplated my fallen friend. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t know what words would be right. Leaving him behind in the darkness felt like cutting a cord holding me to this place. I took the time to move all the wood I’d gathered back into the cave and piled it around Wilson. With a flick of a finger the pile started to burn and I retreated back to the entrance.

I stole Graben’s moccasins, offering a silent word of thanks that the man had feet big enough the leather wraps weren’t too uncomfortable when I put them on. Taking the bow and arrows in my left hand and with the spear in my right, I set off after the archer. My waterskins sloshed as I jogged along in the direction he had run. Once I reached the treeline I slowed slightly so I could look for signs of his passage.

In his panic he hadn't taken any care to avoid brushing against the bushes and ferns and the trail was easy to see. Broken leaves, snapped branches, trampled stems and the still damp mud made following him a simple affair. If it had not been for the rain last night I’d have spent less time preparing myself to leave my first home in this world.

My thoughts were confused. The anger at the killing of Wilson bubbled in the background but Graben’s words troubled me more. The gods had used this world before for their fucking games? Was this a real world or just some fiction they cooked up for my game? Was Graben a boot in the coal seam, a hint that this place was a new creation with an elaborate, fictional backstory or was this a genuine world with real people living out their lives? At least I knew I wasn’t alone out here in the wilds anymore. The prospect of stone age savages being my nearest neighbours took any comfort I gained from that thought away.

As it was, I followed the archer for perhaps half an hour, masticating on my unpleasant thoughts as I ran, to where he’d gone to ground. I found him huddled with his back to a thick tree, flint dagger in his right hand and his left arm curled across his badly burned chest. I stepped out of the brush with the spear levelled in both hands, having left the bow and arrows carefully on a dry stone to wait for me. This wouldn’t take long.

“Demon! Go back to the hells you came from,” he barked. Perhaps I should have tagged him Dog Three instead of Hawk?

“Hello Dilith. I owe you for Wilson,” I said quietly, closing the distance carefully. He swiped his knife back and forth in my direction which made me smile.

“Fuck you whoreson! Our souls will haunt you forever!” Again the knife swished back and forth at me.

“I think I’ll probably just spend them.” He paled and turned to try and run but I crossed the distance in a blink of an eye and the spear slipped between his ribs to destroy his heart.

Normalis Humano slain.

Ten Souls gathered.

Now with four daggers on my belt, a man can never carry enough knives, I stepped out of the woodland at the base of what had been my hill but was now simply an unhappy memory. The river wove its way across the steppe to my right and I took the time to drink my fill, emptying one waterskin. Refilling at the river I surveyed the grasslands to the south.

The rain had swept through but the grass was still tinder dry having sloughed off the heavy droplets. A few casts of summon fire and I could probably set the whole area ablaze. The possibility of letting the plains burn before I stepped out to walk through the ashes towards whatever passed for civilization in this world was tempting. I could envision earning a lot of Souls by doing so.

Fighting down the urge wasn’t as difficult as it might have been. Despite my greed I was a creature of focused, channeled violence. Indiscriminate killing was for the artillery and the air force. My rules, my code, forbade me from acting so recklessly.

The plains rolled gently away from me and on most of the low hilltops small patches of forest had grown up. I settled my gaze on one I was fairly sure was due south and set off to see what the grasslands had to offer me.