Chapter 100: Calculated Risk

Sean was awake when the alarm went off, and hit the ground running. Today’s theme seemed to be a sort of unending desert and abrupt transitions. As soon as he stepped through the former barrier that held him to his forced rest, he found himself in a bright, sandy expanse, one without any clear indicators of where to go or what to do.

With a quick glance around to verify that all the directions truly did look just the same as every other, he took off running in the same direction he had exited the castle area from. There was no use waiting around. He’d either find some sign of what he was supposed to be doing pretty soon or he wouldn’t, and in either case, he wouldn’t benefit from just standing around.

He had only been running a few minutes when a trail of unsettled sand ahead of him alerted him to the first practically relevant fact about this trial. As the dust-cloud coming off the moving sand drew near, he saw that it was accompanied by a few-inches-high mound of sand. It came closer and closer, before finally seeming to get some sort of bad taste in its mouth before it veered off.

No you don’t, Sean thought, leaping through the air with his dagger drawn. Stabbing down through the sand was easier than he expected it to be, and he had only pierced slightly into the grains of silica that covered the desert before he hit something much softer and more fleshy. Cranking the knife to the side, he levered the animal out of the soil entirely and revealed a foot-long worm creature with leathery skin, a tapered sort of semi-tail and no other defining characteristics whatsoever.

Sand Worm Hunt! (1/100)

You’ve killed your first worm. Good job! Keep it up and eventually you will be able to move to the next section of the race.

Note that these little dry-ground burrowers are hunters, but not of anything quite so big and well-armed as you. Once they get close enough to realize you aren’t a defenseless rodent with their ground-sonar capabilities, they can and will run.

All in all, it’s going to be kind of a pain to track all of them down. It’s a shame you don’t have help with that.

As if on cue, Sean saw a head crest a nearby dune. It was a big enough guy that at first Sean thought it was Eike. Realizing it wasn’t actually his nemesis was a limited relief, since at this point he had to assume that almost everyone left in the competition was either brought in or somehow otherwise bought by Eike.

They all posed a threat, and that went double for anyone of Eike’s exact species, as far as Sean was concerned.

“Hello!” The man yelled, holding his arms from his body palm out at the sight of Sean’s defensive posture. “I’m not a threat to you!”

“I don’t believe you,” Sean said. “I flat-out don’t. Sorry. Get ready to fight.”

“No, don’t!” The man yelled. “That’s as good as admitting you have lost the competition. Look around you. Do you see any other worms?”

Sean glanced side to side, never letting the man out of his view.

“That’s right! In this kind of challenge you’d expect them to be scattered. I’m not saying you have to let me walk behind you or anything. Just let me go my own way. I’ll kill worms. You kill worms. I’m not going to pretend Eike doesn’t want you dead, but I don’t want to lose, either. As far as I’m concerned, what Eike doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

Sean considered this. He’d eventually be able to track down all the worms alone, but Eike would almost certainly have help. If it took Sean even an hour longer, than was an hour’s worth of edge for Eike to play around with. Even if he didn’t trust the guy, he didn’t have much of a choice to work with him. Or at least to let him work by himself.

“Get going.” Sean said, pointing his knife at a right angle to the direction the man had approached from. “That way. I don’t want to see you again before this is over. Understand?”

The man nodded. “I understand. And if I could just say…”

“You can’t.” Sean said. “I’m not interested.”

“Say no more.” The man nodded again, and to his credit did move off. Sean moved off in a different direction entirely, keeping the man in the corner of his eye until he disappeared over a dune, then turning at a right angle again to make himself harder to find if the man was playing dirty.

The worms themselves weren’t hard to hunt. Once he got within sufficient range of one, it would hear him and start moving towards him. It was mostly a matter of covering a lot of ground quickly, and then not letting them get away when they realized they were the hunted rather than the hunters. He learned that the hard way when he mistimed a jump, allowed one of the worms to slip by him, then spent the better part of a few minutes chasing it down as it took shortcuts through dunes he had to climb completely over.

Sand Worm Hunt! (89/100)

Luckily, the other man didn’t seem to be lying, at least about the part where he would hunt worms himself if left alone. He wasn’t moving quite as fast as Sean, but he was absolutely contributing. Sean occasionally glanced around and found no threats from the new man.

Maybe I really am misjudging these people. Sean thought. The only ones I know are moving under direct orders from Eike. Maybe when they get away from him, they aren’t homicidal maniacs. At least not all of them.

A sudden shifting of ground pulled Sean away from his thoughts as some sand came down from the top of a dune. Whether it was just stats or his general expectations, he didn’t even have to look to know what it was. Throwing himself to the side, he swept his knife up and out, feeling feedback from the blade as it connected and tore through fabric and skin.

“Nice move, there.” The man was suddenly visible. “What gave it away?”

“You know Eike,” Sean said. “I didn’t think I’d see another assassin this soon, though.”

“Oh, I’m not an assassin,” the man said, pushing his rapier between them. “The first guy was. A friend of mine. Close.”

“Close enough that you picked up some skills from them?”

“Something like that. Are you ready to fight?”

“Just like that?”

The man smiled. “Just like that. I don’t think there’s much use in more conversation.”

Sean had a split second to wonder how he’d feel about someone who killed one of his friends in a botched assassination before the man was on him, keeping Sean out of stabbing range with a sequence of well-aimed blows that took full advantage of his reach advantage and generally higher skill. Sean got the feeling his own stats were higher than the man’s, for all the good that did him as he desperately tried to avoid getting skewered.

And then Sean spent two charges of Hard Time on his opponent’s sword, and it absolutely broke him. Sean figured that his enemy’s fighting style was built around precision and timing, and he knew that he hated when he was trying to do something precise and then got screwed up by some kind of interference. What he didn’t know was how bad that was if your entire build relied on it.

As the man came in with a stab to Sean’s chest, he slowed it enough and sped himself up enough to get past the tip of the blade. And while the fencer was still committed, Sean got a hand on the hilt of the sword and gripped down hard before yanking. He expected it to pull the guy off balance but instead pulled the sword completely free. Then, he managed to land two cuts with the Mystereamer, neither of which produced bonus damages, before the assassin recovered, sprang back, and pulled another replacement sword out of nowhere.

Sean found that whatever the new sword was, it wasn’t nearly as good as the weapon the man had been using before. He spent twenty or thirty seconds dodging blows that were a hair slower, and that tiny margin turned out to be just what he needed to be relatively safe long enough for the offworlder to forget about Hard Time again.

The next time Sean manipulated time, he grabbed the man’s hand, clamped down, and made sure his enemy didn’t abandon his pinned down weapon while Sean stabbed down. The enemy’s inability to retaliate made the difference in their stats much clearer. While Sean had been unable to do much to get around the guy’s strikes without cheating time, that seemed to be because of his advanced DEX and SAV scores. He seemed to have nearly nothing in STR and VIT, and it took much less time than Sean had imagined to disable him.

“What did you put into me?” the man asked. His veins were pulsing black with some kind of energy that had moved through him so fast, Sean had actually been able to track its progress through his vascular system.

“No idea. The dagger sort of does what it wants.”

“Ha. That’s a fun one,” the man said. “I knew a guy who had a hammer like that. It wasn’t reliable, but he always claimed over a full day it did more than a better defined effect would. Something about the system rewarding chaos.”

“Yeah.” Sean sat down a few feet from the man, who was fully disarmed, badly poisoned, and didn’t seem to pose much of a threat anymore. “Mind if I ask you something?”

“Go ahead. It doesn’t seem it will make much difference, now. Just don’t tell Eike. I do have a family of sorts he could retaliate against.”

Sean nodded in understanding. “What does he have on you? I can’t imagine it’s just a threat to your family.”

“It’s that, and pay, and benefits. You don’t know much about them, do you?”

“I don’t.”

“Eike’s family, as you put it, is an entire species. There’s tens of billions of us. He’s what you’d understand to be a prince, or something similar. It’s not so much that I work for Eike. There’s only a handful of people who don’t work for him.” The man took a short break to cough up some blackened blood. “Sorry about that. But, yes, it’s not just a threat to my family. It’s massive benefits weighed against overpowering retaliation. It isn’t a hard choice, for most of us.”

“So when I get out of here, I’m in trouble?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? If Eike is alive to tell the story, I’d say you are. He will drive an attempt to take you down. He’s always been… vengeful?”

“I’d call him a bully, but yes, I’ve seen that aspect of him.”

“In any case,” the man wheezed painfully. “I’d recommend killing him if you can. It won’t hurt me much, considering. And we have plenty of princes to go around.”

“Thanks. I’ll give it a shot.”

“Now if you will excuse me,” the man said, “I think I’d probably like some peace and quiet while I die.”

“Die?” Sean asked. “Why would you die?”

He grasped the man’s swords, then tossed them on his chest, where the man weakly gripped them as he eyed Sean suspiciously.

“Because I’m defenseless, and I can’t warp out of here while I’m actively threatened.”

“I think you’ll find that you haven’t been actively under any kind of threat for a minute or so now. Give it a shot, anyway.”

The man’s mouth dropped open in shock, before he nodded gratefully and disappeared. Sean rose to his feet, moving to find the last few of the worms. If what the man said was true and Eike’s army was really billions strong, one more potential enemy in the mix wasn’t going to make much of a difference.

But a potential ally could. It might be a long shot, but if he got out of here, he’d need all the help he could get.