Chương 23: Thieves? Orcs? Assassins? Well, Thieves Might be Assassins. No, Some Thieves Are Kind

Orcs? Assassins? Well, Thieves Might be Assassins. No, Some Thieves Are Kind The forest had gotten the memo. Ben was on second watch and the forest had gotten the memo that this was an ambush forest. The trees had thickened. The canopy had closed. The light through the leaves had gone the specific green-purple of a stock photo of a forest at night with the saturation cranked up. Every fucking thing had committed to the bit.

The bird sounds had stopped about forty minutes after they'd entered the woods, which was either a real forest behavior he vaguely remembered from a hiking trip with his friends or the system's idea of a real forest behavior, but either way it had happened, and he had clocked it, and his shoulders had been creeping up his neck for about an hour now. The wagon creaked. Lefant pulled.

Maddy was snoring next to him in the straw with one arm thrown over her face and Bolt clutched in her other hand even in sleep, and the talisman was pulsing slowly against her collarbone in a soft amber that he could see through the fabric of her crop top, don't look at her chest dude don't look at her chest dude, and he looked at the canvas ceiling of the wagon instead and tried to do something useful with his eyes and surprisingly the ceiling of the wagon went lower and became Maddy's tits.

The watch was bullshit, because if the system wanted to ambush them at night the watch wasn't going to stop the ambush, the watch was just going to mean one of them got a slightly earlier warning before getting jumped by whatever goblin or assassin shit the system had cooked up, and the early warning was worth, like, two seconds, three if the watcher was paying attention, and Ben's attention had been on Maddy's tits five seconds ago which suggested he was operating at about a one second early warning, which was basically negative early warning, which meant— He gripped the wax knife.

He gripped it tight. Focus dude. The wax knife was cold in his hand and warm at the same time, which was the wax knife's whole deal, the wax knife was its own little wax knife thing and he had stopped trying to understand the wax knife after the dungeon. The wax knife knew what it was. The wax knife was Ben's wax knife. They had a working arrangement. He looked out through the slit in the canvas. The road was a road. The trees were trees.

The other wagons were a line of dim shapes ahead of him in the dark, with two lanterns burning on the lead wagon and a third bobbing along somewhere in the middle of the caravan where one of the merchants was walking with his light. The lanterns made everything past them blacker. He could see the back of the wagon directly in front of theirs and he could see his own hands and that was about it. The talisman pulsed. Maddy made a small noise in her sleep. He thought about the amulet in his pocket.

The amulet in his pocket had been in his pocket since the dungeon. He had not put it on.

He had been told that if he put it on he might dream of Eldarion's final hours, which was a horrible value proposition, but the lit major in his brain, the part of his brain that had been studying narrative structures for three years and had written sixty pages on Wolfgang Iser's reader-response theory for his junior seminar, that part of him knew the amulet was Chekhov's amulet and would have to go on eventually because nobody designs a magic item with a passive lore-dream effect and then doesn't pay it off.

The amulet was going to dream at him at some point. The only question was timing. He had decided that the timing would be his decision. He had decided this approximately six times. He had not, yet, made the decision. The amulet was a piece of metal in his pocket. He thought he could feel it, slightly, against his thigh through the lining, but probably he was making that up, because his brain was in panic-loop mode and panic-loop mode had a tendency to invent random bullshit. A branch snapped somewhere.

He didn't move. Moving was how you got noticed, and the branch could have been an animal or a wagon wheel or a rock the system had loaded incorrectly. He listened. The forest stayed quiet. Lefant kept pulling. The lanterns kept bobbing. After about thirty seconds his shoulders dropped about half an inch and he allowed himself one full breath. Very normal branch behavior. Yes. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

The blue sun was starting to come up somewhere far away, which he could tell because the dark at the edge of the canvas was going from black to a deep navy that the system was probably very proud of, and the rim of leaves visible through the slit had started to take on shape against the sky. Maybe an hour to dawn. Maybe less. Day two. Halfway. Gerald had said the woods were past the…

Old Bridge or whatever garbage and they had crossed the Old Bridge yesterday afternoon, which meant they were inside Gerald's warning zone now, which meant— A second branch. This one closer. He didn't even decide to move. His hand moved. The wax knife came up across his chest the way it had at the goblin chamber, the way his hand seemed to know how to hold it now without consulting him, and he had a sudden very clear thought: this is going to happen, isn't it. This. Is going to happen. Right. Fucking. Now.

A scream from the front of the caravan.

The scream was a man yelling some bullshit swear words fantasy equivalent which was something like by the Pale Years in a voice he could not place at first because he had not heard that voice before, and then somebody yelled it back, and then there was a sound of metal on metal that he could only describe to himself, dumbly, as sword sound, the sound the system had assembled out of every sword fight in every movie, and then the lead lantern went out, and then everything went very fast.

"Maddy." He was already shaking her.

"Maddy. Maddy. Maddy get up." She came up like a person being kicked. Bolt was in her hand. Her eyes were full open in about a second. She didn't say anything. She looked at him, then at the canvas slit, then at the front of the wagon, and her face went through being asleep two seconds ago to full combat mode. The Monster Tube was already at her mouth. She drank. The chime went off softly, [Energized x1!], and she didn't even acknowledge it, she just put the tube down and uncorked Bolt from knife to spear in five clicks, the telescope sound coming out small and metallic in the wagon. The canvas tarp tore open. A face came through. A human face. A person. A person with a dirty beard and a dark cape, and the cape was the budget version of a dark cape, the cape was actually kind of brown more than black and it was patched in places with something that might have been…

something, he didn't know fabric that well, and the person had a knife in his hand and his other hand was reaching for the inside of the wagon and the person was saying something, was making a sound, was— Maddy was faster. There was a crack and the person's head was gone.

The Thunderbolt hit center mass on his face and the face just stopped being there, replaced with a small smoking black mark on the canvas behind where the face had been, and the body fell backward out of the wagon, and the canvas flap drooped, and Ben could hear the body hit the dirt outside.

"Out," Maddy said.

"What."

"OUT. We can't fight in here."

"Right." He went over the tailgate because that was the closest edge and his feet hit the dirt and the world outside the wagon was suddenly a real thing, was a road in a forest at dawn with shapes moving in the half-light and lanterns rolling on the ground and someone screaming somewhere up the line in a register he had not heard a human use in person before, a noise that his ear immediately catalogued as adult man screaming about something serious. The caravan was strung out along about fifty feet of road.

The thieves —they were thieves, they were budget thieves with bad capes, his brain was going to call them fucking thieves until told otherwise—were swarming in from the trees on both sides. He counted. He counted because his brain wanted to count, his brain had been trained on RPG party combat and the first thing the party did was count enemies, and his brain was running the script even though no part of him had given the script permission. Eight. Nine. Ten? The system pinged. [Hostile encounter detected!] [Bandit ambush!] [Recommended response: defend, flee, or negotiate.] [Ben! Your party is in danger!]"OH NOW YOU SAY SOMETHING," Maddy yelled. She was beside him. She had stepped down from the wagon and Bolt was in her hand at full extension and she was lit up in soft pink from her panel and the Energized buff was making her stance look weird, off, slightly too fast, like watching a clip at 1. 1x speed. He looked at his own panel. He reached for the mouthpiece on his hip. The wax pen's mouthpiece. The trance.

The thing that had let him stop the cutscene with the hobgoblin, slow the world down, get a clear look at the encounter and figure out what to do. Right. He had a tool. He had the tool he had used last time. He took the mouthpiece in his fingers and brought it toward his mouth and— [Ben!] [This is not a dungeon!] [The event is real!] [Please focus!] The panel was bright red. The panel had never been bright red before. Well, it had, just from a stupid blinker. This wasn't a stupid blinker.

Ben stood there with the mouthpiece an inch from his lip and the panel was strobing at him in a color it had never used and the words were in a register the system had never used, no sparkle, no of course Ben!, just three short lines in red, and there was a thief running at him from about ten feet away with a curved knife in his hand and Ben was supposed to be focusing and Ben was instead reading the panel. He brought the wax knife up. The event is real. The thief reached him.

The thief swung the curved knife in a downward arc that was the dumbest arc he had ever seen, an arc he could have read in a manga from the trajectory alone, and Ben moved his wax knife to meet it and the wax knife went through the thief's arm above the elbow without any of the resistance that an arm should have offered, the wax knife went through it and the arm came off in one piece and fell on the road and the thief stood there for a second looking at the place his arm had been.

The thief screamed in a way that Ben had also not heard a person scream before, in a register that his ear catalogued as getting the shit out of your arm cut, and the wax knife was still in his hand and there was a notification chiming on his panel saying [Critical hit! +XP!] [Level Up!] and Ben felt something in his chest he did not want to feel. Did I. Did I just. The thief was on his knees.