Chương 109: Chapter 107: Word on the God Slayer

We ask around, but no one has heard about any kind of god slayer. No one seems to even know that such a thing is possible. But when we start to ask about dragons, things start to change. Apparently, dragons are a normal expense here in Marketplace. Every so often, a merchant caravan will get attacked by a dragon. Usually, they let the dragon fly off with one of the wagons and everything that it contains, just writing off the loss as a cost of doing business. But, of course, they don't want to do that.

So they're offering rewards for anyone who can kill a dragon. And there was someone who took them up on the offer. A strange traveler who seemed to have no fear when it came to dragons. I figure that must be the god slayer, and start asking questions to see if we can finally get some details about them. Vincent is convinced that the god slayer is a man. Ash is equally convinced that they are a woman. I just want to know what people say. Unfortunately, the descriptions of this person vary pretty wildly.

Some describe them as tall, some describe them as short and stout. Some say that the person was leaning heavily on a staff, others claim that they were young and moving around without any difficulty. It seems like every time we ask someone what this alleged dragon slayer looked like, we get a different story. Even still, certain details start to come up over and over again, and I think we can take a few of those as truth.

Everyone seems to agree that the person wore a heavy cloak with a hood pulled up, obscuring most of their facial features. Everyone also seems to agree that the person had a casual attitude, as if they weren't afraid of or even concerned by anything. They didn't talk with bravado about being able to slay the dragon. They just said they could do it, and negotiated a price. And not even a price that was particularly high on the front end.

It wasn't a con artist just trying to get a big payment and then disappear with it. I'm convinced that the discrepancy in the descriptions is the result of something intentional. Maybe the cloak itself was disguising their appearance. Maybe they had a spell like Blur active that made it hard to tell what they looked like. But I don't think that was an accident. And I don't think that people are lying to us. I think that the visual descriptions vary so wildly because everyone actually saw the figure differently.

So some kind of stealthing cloak, something that made them hard to remember, or that makes people remember them differently. I can see wanting something like that if you were the god slayer. I wouldn't be opposed to something like that before I go back to Elmspire. I feel like I'm getting to know the god slayer, weirdly. It's a parasocial relationship, and I know that it's not real. They don't know me, and I don't actually know them.

I just feel like I know them, or that I understand them, as time goes by and I find out more about them. The only other thing that everyone agrees on about the person who claimed to be able to slay the dragon is that they did not succeed. The dragon is still around, and it's still attacking caravans somewhat on the regular. The general assumption is that the presumptive dragon slayer wasn't as tough as they seemed to think they are, and they fought the dragon but were killed by it.

Whatever the case, I still think we should go along these trade routes and try to find the dragon. Either they already met with the god slayer and can tell us something more definitive about them, or they can at the very least help us figure out if the god slayer is still out there and what they might want. Either way, we can go meet with this dragon and get more information.

"Do you think we'll have to fight the dragon?" Ash asks.

"Should we set our respawn location here in case we do?"

"I don't know," I say.

"We might have to if it won't listen to reason."

"We might kill it," El points out.

"We killed the giants, after all." The giants were tough, but they were more sacks of hit points than they were real threats as far as dealing damage was concerned. They may have dealt somewhere in the realm of fifteen hundred points of damage with their weapons, but that really wasn't all that dangerous. I never had to worry about Shell going down. I just had to worry about running out of stamina. So they weren't dealing all that much damage. A dragon, on the other hand, deals a lot of damage.

Wrax deals at least two or three thousand damage per strike, and he's also really fast. He attacks much more quickly than the giants do. If Wrax were fighting the giants, I'd put my money on Wrax, even outnumbered five to one. Being able to withstand a lot of damage is one thing, but the real mark of power is how much damage you're able to dish out. And dragons are usually very good at dishing out damage.

"Should we wait for Gigi at least?" I ask. Having her and Vincent back greatly increases the amount of damage we can do, which is also important if we have to fight the dragon. I don't want it to come to combat, but if it does, I'm kind of with El; I want to win. And we'll have a better chance at that if we have Gigi and Vincent with us. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"We definitely should," Ash says.

"I wonder what level she's made it to in their travels. They should be here in another three or four days." They've probably had to do a lot of fighting. When I'm leading the group, I can avoid a lot of the monsters in the wilderness, either consciously or unconsciously, just by keep track of all the trails that we go down and choosing the directions that seem safest and fastest for us to move through. Wtihout me, they're probably running in to a lot more monsters. Which means more experience for both of them.

So Gigi is probably getting some nice levels out of it. The question remains, though: what should we do for those three or four days? We can try to take the time to relax, or we could see if there's a quest that we can get completed in that time. Maybe another dungeon or something like that. Something that could net us actual treasure. There don't seem to be many options as far as that is concerned, but there is a bandit cadre that seems to be harassing people on the road.

Hopefully more powerful bandits than what we saw in the forest. Or if not more powerful, then hopefully about ten times as many. Something that would make the battle actually matter, that would make it an actual challenge for the three of us. I do notice the difference in language. It's not a bandit group or a bandit encampment. It's a bandit cadre. What does that mean, in this context? I suppose we're going to find out. I hope it means a large group of more powerful bandits who happen to have a lot of treasure.

We head out of Marketplace and start patrolling the roads. I keep an eye out not just for anywhere that bandits might be hiding, but also on the sky in case a dragon flies by. I'm not sure how I'd get the dragon's attention, but if I can at least spot it, then I'll know that there's still a dragon in the area, and that it's flying above the roads where we're walking. I walk with my bow in hand, an arrow casually nocked in place.

I'm looking for little copses of trees, or places where hills on the side of the road will give the bandits a place to hide in wait. I suppose they could be hiding in the grass alongside the road, maybe under tarps covered in grass to make themselves more or less invisible, but I don't see anyone like that. Or maybe we do pass an ambush site like that, and they decide to let us go after seeing what our levels are. I wish there was a way to hide our levels. Or our hit points.

So far as I know, you can only hide hit points from people who are lower level than you. Which is fair, I guess. Maybe they see the three of us and decide we are too dangerous to be worth their time. Ash is level thirty seven, I'm level thirty eight, and El is level forty two. Those are some pretty high levels for adventurers, and I would understand if the bandits decided to avoid us. But it does bring up a problem. We're going about this quest in as passive a way as possible.

We're just walking down the road, hoping to find an ambush site or to get ambushed along the way. That's not the same as actually seeking out the bandits. We should be looking far from the road, trying to find their camp, their fortress, whatever. We should be trying to hunt them down, not wait for them to come to us. Maybe tomorrow we'll switch up our tactics. For now, we're just walking along the road, hoping to get ambushed.

"Will they come out and try to talk to us first, do you think?" Ash asks as we're walking. She has her shield in hand, but her mace is still hanging from her belt. Won't take more than a second for her to draw it, but there's no reason to walk around with the flanged metal in her hand.

"The other bandits always tried to talk," El says.

"They wanted us to just surrender and give them our goods, and then they'd let us go. It makes sense to work that way; you get loot without having to actually risk getting killed. But you never get all the loot that way."

"So you think these ones will just try to kill us?" I ask.

"Wouldn't surprise me," she says with a shrug.

"I mean, if you kill us, you get more stuff, right?"

"Not if we're players," Ash says.

"If they kill players, our bodies disintegrate, taking all of our stuff with them. We don't really leave behind loot, except like a third of the time."

"So killing the three of us would all but guarantee them something," I say.

"Still seems like a weak choice. A bad choice. Still better to try to get us to actually pay them than to risk killing us."

"I suppose," El says.

"They probably just attack the natives, though. Any chance we can convince people that we're natives?" I shake my head. I recall when I infiltrated the mountain army and had a conversation with two of the players that were in that army. They immediately recognized me as a player. Which makes sense; the identification is different. When I look at Ash, it tells me her blood and her her class, then her level and hit points. It doesn't identify her as a rare elite or a legendary anything.

"The system identifies us differently," I say.

"So they'll know we're adventurers just by looking at us." Ash bites her lip a little, which seems like a delicate feat given how sharp her teeth are.

"We need something that will help us find them."

"I could cast Mab's Rage and sprint down the road, and we could see if I can catch any of them in the radius during the two and half minute duration," I suggest. Obviously, that won't work, but it's the only thing I can think of. We need something that will force them to come out of hiding. Or we need a better chance of detecting them when they're hidden.

"Don't we have really high awareness?" El asks.

"Why can't we just spot them when they're hiding?"

"We should be able to," Ash says.

"I guess it depends on their sneak abilities." El's got a good point. I have an awareness of 134. No one should be able to hide from me. Just like no one should be able to cast spells on me. But there's a lot of shoulds out there. Still.

"We just need to think like bandits," I say.

"What do you mean?"

"If you were going to attack a merchant caravan, where would you do it?" I ask.

"About halfway between stops," Ash says.

"So as far from help as possible, far enough that they're committed to moving forward and can't just retreat back to safety or try to run for it."

"So that's where we need to look," I say.

"And we need to look for their tracks out in the plains, not on the road."