Chương 107: Chapter 105: Splitting ways again

Vincent comes over to see how we're doing. Just out of curiosity, I ask him "how much mana do you have left?"

"About a thousand," he says.

"But I'd stopped using spells that really drain that much mana when I stopped blinding them. You were incredible, by the way." I smile at him.

"Thanks," I say.

"I got really lucky." The truth is, I gained two levels each of dodge, bow, and sword, and five levels of shield during that battle. I also gained two levels of intimidation, though none of my intimidation attempts actually worked.

"That was more than luck," he says.

"At one point, you were fighting three of them at once. If they weren't getting in one another's way so much, you would've been in real trouble. But three on one against giants is pretty amazing." I shrug.

"I had to stop them from getting to you," I say.

"Gigi is dead," Ash says, finally having regained enough breath to be able to talk.

"She ran out of stamina a few minutes before you showed up. I told her about the bag trick, so I don't think she's losing all that much."

"Bag trick?" Vincent asks.

"It's something that Caleb did when we were fighting the orcs," she says.

"When he knew he was going to die, he took off as much of his equipment as he could and put it in his spatial bag. Even while they were pounding at him and knocking his health down to zero, he kept putting things in the bag. He basically stopped fighting back, but it meant that he kept more of his stuff when he died."

"Right, because you lose your equipment when you die," Vincent says.

"All but one piece," I say.

"I assume that will be her armor?"

"Hopefully," Ash says.

"Her armor or her shield. She couldn't get that into her bag in time." I nod, glad to hear that she'll at least respawn with most of her stuff. And she's got several quests to turn in, so she should be able to regain her level at least part way. Probably not all the way back to forty one, but a lot. And she'll have about a hundred extra stat points by the time she does regain her level. That should make her feel good. Around then, the notification for the end of the battle finally comes through.

You have defeated stone giant x7. You receive (1, 750, 000/5) 350, 000 experience. You have gained three levels. You have 33 stat points to spend. I put three each into strength, agility, and vigor, ten into willpower, six into awareness, and then four each into presence and charisma. That boots my stamina up to 5700, meaning it's going to be a lot longer before I run out of breath in a fight.

"So what do we do about Gigi?" I ask.

"Do we go back for her, wait for her here, or what?"

"I don't want to go back to Elmspire," El says, coming over to join the conversation, already looking more in control of her breathing than Ash.

"I want to keep going. She can catch up with us. Maybe level a few times on the way."

"I could go back for her," I say.

"I'm pretty fast when I put my mind to it. I could be back in Elmspire in a day and a half."

"I can get back around that same speed, if I really focus on it," Vincent says.

"Maybe I'll head back and swap out a few quests while I pick her up."

"Let's not decide just yet," Ash says.

"Give her some time to respawn, see what she wants to do. For now, I say we take a break, make camp, and get some sleep." Gigi doesn't contact any of us until well into the morning. She apparently took a while to respawn. But she's back now, and she's made it up to level twenty one already with the quests she had to turn in. She is willing to come meet us, but wants us to meet her halfway, so she doesn't go through the area with the most powerful monsters by herself when she's still such a low level.

That sounds an awful lot like going back to Elmspire for El's taste, and I'm forced to agree with her. I don't mind hanging out here for a few days, though I'd rather we just continue on to Marketplace. I really want to see this other city. I've only ever seen Elmspire, and I want to see what the other cities in this world look like. Vincent offers to go back and escort her part way, and to meet us in Marketplace. He knows how to get there; he's from there, same as Ash.

So it makes sense for him to be the one to go pick up Gigi. I can't help but feel like there's an ulterior motive to it, though. Maybe he has some business back in Elmspire that he isn't telling us. Maybe he just wants some alone time with Gigi. Whatever it is, I don't sense that it's nefarious, so I don't pry. Let him have his secrets if he wants to. I wonder if he just feels uncomfortable with El, Ash, and I now. Does knowing the difference in our capabilities bother him?

I mean, he seemed shocked that I was able to fight off the three giants yesterday. Honestly, so was I, but I think it was the first time he realized what a difference all those death cycles really did for us. We just killed six giants, badly wounding a seventh, and none of us are at all the worse for wear because of it. I even have all my MP back thanks to a meditation session this morning. I guess maybe he's feeling a bit out of the loop, or starting to see just how scary we all are.

Maybe it's made him change his mind about the god slayer. Maybe it's convinced him to go into the woods and let something kill him, so that he can respawn and do a level cycle with Gigi. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Whatever the reason, we part ways as friends, and he promises to meet us in Marketplace in a few days. We aren't going to rush, but we're going to keep moving in that direction. He and Gigi should be able to catch us up if they're diligent.

Or maybe they'll take their time and do some fighting along the way to get Gigi more levels. I don't know. We can stay in Marketplace for a few days. I didn't feel comfortable harvesting anything from the giants. Maybe it's because they look like people, maybe it's because I didn't want to think that I was basically just carving up a fifty foot tall human being. Maybe they don't have anything that is actually useful. I don't know. And it doesn't really matter all that much.

They didn't have any treasure on them, either. We could probably have taken the clubs and sold them as a novelty, but they are huge and unwieldy in our hands, so we didn't bother.

"Do you think we'll need a lot of money?" I ask as we're walking. Behind us, Vincent is disappearing in the distance, flying much faster than he was moving when he was just levitating.

"For marketplace, I mean."

"That all depends on whether or not you want to go shopping," Ash says.

"It's just a city. Like any other."

"Except that it cares about the marketplace so much that it named itself after it," El says.

"I'm imagining a city where you have to haggle for everything from entry to food. A capitalist paradise. Or hellscape, I suppose."

"It's just a city," Ash assures us.

"It started out as a marketplace, and the center of the city is still taken up by the grand bazaar, but other than that, it's just a city."

"A city full of demons," I point out.

"A city full of demon-blooded people," Ash corrects me.

"And also orcs, humans, and even elves. It's pretty diverse there. I was kind of surprised that you guys didn't spawn there too."

"Maybe where we spawned wasn't based on just what we decided to be," El says.

"Maybe it was based on numbers, too. Like, they had to make sure that so many players spawned in each of the locations, so that no one city got too much of a benefit."

"Are we a benefit?" I ask.

"I mean, we were clearly an asset in the war. But that was just the three of us. Were the other players an asset? Were the players in the mountain army an asset?"

"The mountain army did better than the orc army," Ash points out.

"And they didn't have any players in their ranks."

"That's a weird point on the face of it," I say.

"Why didn't the orcs have any players in their ranks? I mean, there are orc players, presumably. Right?"

"There are plenty of them in Marketplace," Ash assures me.

"I definitely think there was a difference made by players," El says.

"Not just us, either. Seems like we get more access to things that can really change the playing field, even if we don't have the hit points to keep up with most natives. Well, I mean, most of them don't. We do." El has twenty five thousand hit points. More than double what a native soldier had. Even I, at the lowest of the three of us, have more hit points than the level fifty soldiers had. But she still makes a good point, I suppose.

"Do you think we'll hear anything about the god slayer in Marketplace?" I ask.

"I doubt it," Ash says.

"We haven't heard anything about her in Elmspire. I don't see why Marketplace would be any different."

"Sooner or later, we'll find a city that has heard of her," El says.

"I mean, that just makes sense, right? If she's out there, she's making an impact on the world. Look at the impact we've made. People have heard of us." That brings up an interesting point. The god slayer has been inactive for the months that we've been in this world. They haven't killed any other gods, as far as any of us know, and they haven't been raising an army or anything like that. For all we know, they've been living a peaceful, private life.

They more or less found the secret to beating the game, and now they're doing anything they want to. Life works in their favor, and they can handle anything that this world throws at them. They don't seem to want for anything, and so they aren't doing anything. So we haven't heard anything about them. But what if they hear about us? What if the stories of what we did in defense of Elmspire start to spread around?

What if wherever the god slayer is, they hear about three people, three players, who are more powerful than it seems like should be possible, who are harder to kill than just about anything, and who are clearly in the same league as the god slayer themself? Would they come looking for us? Would they decide to hunt us down, as we were finally someone that could be a challenge? We're always making assumptions about the god slayer. I wish we had more information on them.

As of right now, we don't even for certain know that they still exist. We know that they killed the tutorial god, and we know basically when they did it. But we don't even know if they survived killing the god. What if they didn't? What if the god slayer isn't even out there for us to find? That would make sense for why we don't hear anything about them. What if we're the closest thing out there to a god slayer now, and we're the most powerful players in the world?

What if we're chasing phantoms, because there just isn't another person out there? The most frustrating thing about that possibility is that we'd have no way to confirm it. Wrax seemed convinced that there was still a god slayer out there, doing something and having their own agenda. But even he didn't have proof. Even he was working off assumption and deduction.

"I think we need to find more dragons," I say.

"They seem like the only ones who are likely to know anything about the god slayer, if they even exist."

"Why would you think she doesn't exist?" Ash asks me.

"We know that she killed a god. The god didn't kill themselves. She's out there, somewhere."

"Assuming she survived the encounter," I say.

"But what if they didn't? What if they killed the god, and that killed them too? What if something happens when you kill a god that destroys you?" El shakes her head.

"Then Wrax wouldn't have been worried about it," she points out.

"If there was something that killed you when you kill a god, then there would be no reason to worry about the god slayer killing anyone else." That's a good point. Okay, so the god slayer is still out there, somewhere. We just need to find out where.