Sam went over to the monkey corpse, and examined its armaments. None of them were enchanted, and in fact none of them were even strong enough to register when he used his skill on them. The only thing that had made them dangerous was the strength of the monkey wielding them, and the creature’s ability to empower them. In any case, they were not worth taking with him.
Sam picked up one of the bone daggers, and when he clenched his fist, it shattered instantly. Shaking his head, Sam left the corpse where it was. This did have some troubling implications however. The fact that the monkey had possessed non System registered weaponry and armor meant that it had been intelligent enough to create them. Thus far, none of the monsters that Sam had fought had been intelligent, but now it seemed that he would be dealing with more and more. The presence of the monkey spoke to the existence of some sort of primitive civilization in the woods. He doubted that there would be a random creature with that level of intelligence otherwise. In any case, it was certainly matching the original story about Sun Wukong.
The only thing was, Sam did not see the point of this whole Seven Seals business. There was no reason why the System could not have just provided its own weaponry. Not unless it was lazy, that was. Could that be a possibility? After all, Sam had seen that it possessed individual components that were certainly capable of being lazy. The other option was that it was just some sort of energy saving thing. Using the mythologies of nascent System integrated planets as a means of catalyzing their potential sounded like something that an optimizer would do. After all, the System was basically just one gigantic computer program. Despite its scale, it still functioned along the same lines as any mundane desktop or PC. It was in its best interest to save energy while possible.
Sam had no idea why he found all of this conjecture interesting, but he certainly did. He had never been one for introspection before, but upgrading his intelligence had changed him. However, there was a place and a time for this, and it was not now. Sam started running through the trees, keeping an ear out for the sounds of any more monkeys. As he ran, Sam kept his mind purposefully blank, not wanting to be jumped by monkeys in a moment of distraction. Before he encountered any monkeys though, he received a message through his party link.
“Sam, where are you? We’re under attack!”
“Ava, what’s wrong? Who’s attacking you? The monkeys?”
‘No, these guys are in military uniforms. They're-” Ava’s voice cut off in the middle of the message, and Sam cursed. The Legion was here.
Sam looked towards the mountain, and then turned around. He could always make up for lost time later. He couldn't make up for lost lives however. He did not have the resurrection potion on him at the moment, and it would be useless if there was more than one casualty. In fact, it might be even worse than that. Sam could only imagine the guilt that one might feel at being the sole survivor, simply because they had been the one lucky enough to receive the potion. No, Sam was coming to their aid in full force. The Legion would rue the day that they had ever decided to crawl out of whatever dark pit they had come from.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
The main problem ahead of Sam was actually finding the Legion. The woods were vast, and he already covered quite some distance since he had last seen the other members of his party. They could be almost anywhere by now. Sam ran as fast as he could, projecting his aura out to scare off the weaker monsters. He had no time to stop and fight with them now.
Ten minutes later, he began to feel a faint sense of wrongness coming from the direction of a large tree, and Sam bolted over to it. On it was a scrap of cloth that had belonged to Ava’s shirt, and next to it was a severed hand. The hand was gray and looked utterly inhuman, save for its shape. The wrongness was coming from that. There had been a battle here, and the Legion had won. However, it seemed like his comrades were still alive. If they had died, then the Legion would have left their corpses here. Either they had been captured, or then had escaped.
Sam snarled as he thought about how it had been his idea to send them away. That had been an idiotic decision. Still, for the Legion to be here right as they had arrived... Was the ship betraying them once more? Sam doubted it. His high Wisdom allowed him to easily see the motivations of other beings, and the ship had not seemed to be duplicitous in any way. It was too scared of Sam to play any tricks on him.
Sam knelt down closer to the ground, spotting a few furrows there and a few footprints next to them. The footsteps grew fainter and fainter over time, and they eventually disappeared about twenty feet away. They were from the soles of military issue combat boots, so not from any of his companions. One of the Legion members had been here, and it must have been a strong one to defeat four high G Rankers by itself. Sam looked around for more tracks, but that was the only one there. It had just been the single monster that had been here. Sam got up and walked down the trail of footsteps, pausing when he reached the end. There was a strange scuff mark there, almost as if something had pushed off the ground. As Sam looked up, expecting to see nothing, he spotted a hole in the canopy. The monster had flown off through here, which was why the footsteps were gone.
“Damn it!” Sam exclaimed. “Bastard could be anywhere by now…”
Well, not anywhere. There was still the question of the dragons. The monster could not have flown that far, especially if it had been carrying four others. The dragons would have caught up with it before long. Sam climbed up the side of the tree, and stood near the top, poking his head out of the leafy covering. As he surveyed the surrounding land, he saw a disturbance among a group of dragons to the north. About ten miles away, ten or more dragons circled a single area of the forest floor, but refused to dive down to find whatever they were looking for. A thin line of smoke trailed off above the area too. Sam smiled grimly, and jumped down. He had a direction now.