HUFF HUFF HUFF
“Kai. How long. Are we going to walk.”
Sweat ran down Sun’s forehead as he tried to keep up with the pace.
“Tired already?” I looked back without stopping. “Rafael is carrying Lili on his back, and he’s not half as tired as you.”
“At your age, I ran ten kilometers before breakfast,” remarked the big man, who wasn’t even sweating.
After registering, we had left the city. Strangely, the border of what used to be Seoul was closer, as if the city had shrunk. It really had shrunk, but when Sun asked why, I couldn’t answer. The index was limited and didn’t waste a line on things that made no difference.
I had already noticed that a lot of detail was left out, and I had stopped letting it bother me. I treated the world like a map I knew by heart, just with a few trees moved around. Where we were going, though, I knew every stone.
“It’s easy. For you. To say!” Sun panted. “I never left my room. I just played Empires.”
“The game where you evolve a civilization from the Stone Age to the future? I thought your thing was painting.”
“Huh? You played too?”
“I did. I was decent. I got bored when it got too easy.”
“Too easy? The Empires AI was considered super advanced for its time!”
“You think so? Even the hardest level always seemed predictable to me. It opens the same way every match. Expands east if there’s a river, south if there isn’t, and attacks on turn one hundred twenty, rain or shine.”
Sun stopped walking.
“When you say the hardest level, you’re not talking about Alexander, are you?”
“Was that the name? That’s the one.”
“Impossible. I never beat Alexander. Nobody at my school beat Alexander. There was a whole forum just about how nobody beats Alexander.”
“Then there was a whole forum of people who never noticed turn one hundred twenty.”
He stared at me as if I had said I’d walked to the moon.
Since the sidewalk, that’s the first look of respect I’ve earned for something I actually know how to do. Because of a game from 2018. Great.
Beneath the joke, a comfort: someone who spoke my language.
“So your thing really is painting. We’re here, you can stop complaining.” I stopped at the top of a hill.
Below, in a clearing surrounded by hills, like the bottom of a pot, about two hundred skeletons were walking in circles. It was daytime, and even so the place was dark. The light seemed ashamed to go down there.
ICK
Sun, who had just reached the top, threw himself to the ground.
“G-get down, Sehun! What are you doing?! If those things see us, we’re dead!”
“Aren’t you a man? Even Lili is calm, and she’s, like, fourteen.”
Sun looked up and met Lili’s calm gaze from Rafael’s back.
“Easy for her! I’d be calm up there too!”
“So you want to ride on his back too?”
Rafael looked at Sun and raised a thick eyebrow.
“N-no. I’m great.”
“Then get up. You’re a key part of the plan.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Step by step. Here’s the plan.”
*
A few minutes later, everyone was in position. I was heading down toward the skeletons wearing the Hood of Specters, but without covering my head. With the hood up, the passive would make me invisible to monsters below Lord at more than five meters, and at that moment I wanted to be seen.
The nearest skeletons spotted me quickly and came. They were ordinary skeletons, level 2, with footnote-grade combat technique and no brute strength, nothing like the Guardian and its guards. I dodged them effortlessly and kept walking among them. With every step, I drew more attention.
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Luring skeletons is like herding sheep. Sheep that want to kill you, but sheep.
When about fifty were following me, I took off running away from the rest of the horde, holding my pace so they wouldn’t give up. If I’d wanted to, I could have left them behind in seconds. I ran a few dozen meters, pulled up the hood and used Shadow Emergence.
The skeletons lost their target and looked in every direction. Then the dark sky suddenly brightened. They turned their skulls toward the light in time to see a gigantic fireball falling.
[EXP +1 x32]
[EXP +32]
The notice appeared for everyone when the skeletons burned in Sun’s attack.
“Did it work?”
“AAH!” The painter jumped in fright when I came out of the shadow beside him. “You have to stop doing that! I’m young, but my heart is weak!”
“My bad. I forget.”
I didn’t forget. But the look on his face was worth the apology.
“Is this fair?” asked Rafael. “We level up without lifting a finger.”
“It’s not a crime. It only works because each of us does something the others can’t.”
Lili relaxed her shoulders on his back, and the faint glow covering Sun went out.
“Skeletons have two weaknesses: holy magic and fire. If you don’t have either, they’re a pain to kill. Cutting barely does anything to bone, and they can take a lot. That’s why almost nobody comes here.”
“That’s why there’s nobody alive around here,” Rafael remarked.
“We have both in our pocket.”
“Even so, shouldn’t leveling up be harder?”
“Think of it this way: further down the road, a difference in level weighs very little in real strength. Look at these skeletons. They’re level 2 and can’t even react to a well-thought-out attack.”
“True.”
“What makes someone strong is knowing how to fight. That’s why this way of gaining levels isn’t healthy. Further down the road, it doesn’t work. That said…”
I went over to where the skeletons had burned and started picking out pieces of bone a little darker than the others.
Those skeletons had been there for years, absorbing the dark energy of the place. The concentration was low, but a bone here and there had hardened beyond normal. They were tempered bones, one of the materials for the Ultralight Reinforced Bracer, the formula I had gotten from the Architect.
I came for the material. The EXP is a bonus.
Among the bones, a soul was floating.
[Level 2 Soul collected]
[No attribute gained]
Thirty-two skeletons, one soul, and empty. What a stingy skill.
“Let’s do it again. A few more times and we’ll level up.”
“My skill recharges in a few minutes,” said Sun.
“Lili’s already caught her breath,” Rafael added.
The blessing was still on Sun, but we had discovered a detail: when Lili focused on a single target, his attacks carried a spark of divine lume. Lume was what the people of Selvane called the energy that ran through everything, from the stones of the market to the spells of the Tower. Holy fire, practically. Against the undead, it was cheating.
We repeated the routine. For level 3, I needed more than double the experience of level 2. Out of almost a hundred bodies, only two souls came out. One gave an attribute.
[Level 2 Soul collected]
[Tenacity +1]
Finally. I was starting to think the rate dropped the more I collected.
On the third round, an item appeared among the bodies.
“Who would have thought this would show up here.”
“Find something good, leader?” asked Sun.
“Stop calling me leader.” I showed the item in my palm, without bothering to hide it.
“A rock?”
“A rock worth gold. Black magnetite.”
“Black magnetite?” He frowned. “What’s it for?”
“For an ordinary adventurer, it’s a rock. For a blacksmith, it’s a treasure.”
“So it’s worth a lot?”
“Remember those coins from earlier?”
“Eight,” Sun said, instantly.
He didn’t know how much the coins were worth. They were copper, and copper doesn’t usually say much.
“This stone is the raw material for black magnetite, and on its own it’s worth 1 firgio. That’s a hundred shillings, the coin you gave me.”
“Got it! So we sell it?”
“No way! Like I was saying, for a blacksmith it’s a treasure.”
“Why? I mean, we don’t even have a blacksmith.”
“Yes, we do. It strengthens the item being forged and increases its…”
I stopped mid-sentence.
On the hill on the other side of the pot, something had flashed. A quick glint of metal, the kind a blade makes when someone draws it from the sheath to check that it’s clean. Right behind it, three heads ducked down a second too late.
Well, well. We have an audience.
From the height and the way they hid, they were low-level professionals. They must have been watching us since the city, and I had a good guess about who had sent them.
“Durability. Anyway.” I kept my voice the same. “Rafael, could you take my place for a bit? I need to rest.”
I didn’t let anything show, but Rafael was an experienced fighter. He understood at once and didn’t ask. As we passed each other, I whispered:
“Protect those two. I’ll be right back.”
He just nodded and went to take my place on the slope.
*
Rafael watched the kid walk off to the other side of the hill, sit on a rock and lower his head between his knees, the picture of exhaustion.
It was a good act. Too good. Rafael had seen truly tired men in many locker rooms, and real exhaustion didn’t pick the rock with the best shade.
He blinked, and the rock was empty.
“Huh. Where’d he go?” asked Sun.
“He went to take care of something.”
“What something?”
Rafael adjusted the shield on his arm and placed himself between the two of them and the slope from which, he now realized, the wind carried a smell of sweat that wasn’t theirs.
“Grown-up stuff.”
Lili climbed down from his back on her own. Until then, she had always waited for someone to set her on the ground. She kept looking at the spot where Kai had been. Then she looked at Rafael, asking permission with her eyes.
“Stay close to me,” he said.
She did. But she didn’t take her eyes off that spot.