Upon leveling up a whole bunch over the past month there were a couple of major milestones I had reached.
The first was that all of my stats were now in the 2k range, including my strength. That felt pretty big to me, even if it wasn’t actually that big of a deal in all honesty.
The second major thing to happen was what I could detect with [OWN]. Whenever I was being led through the cave to the arena or wherever there were a couple of things I noticed. While there wasn’t a lot of it, there was nature I could see through down here in these caves.
In the darker and deeper parts of the caves, it was mainly algae that didn’t need a lot of sunlight. Closer to the entrance there was some moss and liverworts, but I could tell those needed more sunlight to survive than the algae did.
My range was also starting to get massive. I had originally noticed, back when I first got the skill that I was gaining roughly 50 feet of distance to observe every level. That held true up till now. With my new skills, it was mind-numbingly simple to do the basic math to figure out how far I could theoretically detect things.
2500 feet. Just under half a mile. This allowed me to start actually seeing things outside my cellblock. The few mosses and algae hide around in the less traveled parts of the cavern. I hadn’t tried to place any out there, it hadn’t felt worth it to try and see things out there and either fuck my chances of trying to escape or finding out there wasn’t a good opportunity and annoy Lurks in the process.
No, instead I just held on to the knowledge. I knew Lurks knew that I knew she knew. But that was irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, the important part was whether or not I could do it.
And the importance of that knowledge was coming up.
I stood up from the table and as I did I made a decision. If I saw a good opportunity while I was outside the cell block I would make a break for it. My lightning was fast. Like, really fast. And we usually passed close to the entrance of the cavern every time I was led out to go talk with the cooks, if this was another one of those moments I would hopefully have a good opportunity to try for a breakaway.
I made it to the front of the cell block through the long tunnel. David was there again, talking with Perri, baskets of the produce I made being shifted around by several laborers the soldiers brought on.
I had become… somewhat friends with Perri. He was a friendly guy and just tried to be on everyone’s good side. Although it was kind of difficult to fully foster a relationship with someone in this situation, so it ended up being a kind of shallow friendship. It felt like he was trying more for the sake of trying rather than because he actually wanted to be friends with me, but I wasn’t entirely sure on that front. I could just be reading too far into it.
Not like it really mattered.
As I got closer I saw them both glance at me but they didn’t stop talking as I came to a stop next to them.
“Yeah, the chefs have been pretty happy overall with the picked-up production. Hell, more often than not I get some of the better foods. Life still ain’t perfect working here. But if I’m gonna have to work in this shithole it’s nice to actually have some decent food,” Perri said.
“Hah, ain’t that right. Yeah as soon as I found out what elfie here could do the idea instantly popped into my head. My own genius is frightening sometimes.”
I rolled my eyes at that.
“What’s up? Why did you need me?” I asked during the break in the conversation.
“Chefs wanna meet with you again, they have a special thing they want you to look at.”
I frowned, “A special thing? Did they say?”
Perri shook his head, “Dunno. Bossman sounded excited though. Just told me to fetch you when we went to fetch the stuff today.”
Huh. I was kinda curious now as to what they had to show me, but not so interested that I wouldn’t try to make a break for it beforehand if I saw the opportunity.
“Alright then,” I said with a shrug, “Whenever you’re ready then.”
Perri looked at David who shrugged.
“I guess we’ll head out then, see ya, Dave.”
David just grunted in affirmation, turning around and heading back inside the cell block.
“Okay then, we’ll just let them handle this in the meantime. Let’s start making our way to the big man,” Perri said before turning around and marching off with a slight hop in his step as he did.
“You seem to be in a good mood today.”
“Oh yeah,” He replied, “Received a letter from my wife back home, it’s been a while since I’ve heard from them since my last letter. So yeah, I’m in a pretty good mood right now.”
A small smile crept its way onto my face, “That’s good,” I said simply.
We made it into the cavern proper and immediately I started splitting my mind focusing on everything at once that I could. How many guards were there? What spots could I see with [OWN]? How attentive were the people around me? Were any of the cell block leaders walking around right now?
That last one was unlikely, they tended to either be out with their blocks while they were working or in the arena watching the fights. They probably had a few other places they liked to hide, but I didn’t know where they were.
I split off a couple of minds to start adding to the nature that I could see slowly. And for once I was grateful for the fact that tons of people wanted to come up and talk to Perri. Normally I hated how long it took us to go through this process, but this time it was to my benefit. I was able to start spreading out moss in various places and get more awareness of what was happening around me.
Awareness blossomed in my mind slowly filling out a map that I was able to keep track of a bunch of moving pieces. The soldier counter in my mind in the cavern slowly went up.
343.
456.
622.
781.
1315.
1422.
2301.
The number climbed up and up and up before finally settling on a relatively large number., my apprehension rising with each number. I took a silent breath to steady myself.
Nearly half the soldier count by my estimation was up and around. Although a decent portion of that existed outside right now. Or rather roughly half of the number I could sense right now was outside. In reality, it was probably around a third of the total soldier count would be outside watching the slaves as they worked while the other two-thirds were either asleep or on break.
I’d managed to slowly figure out that the guards worked on a three-shift rotation. So naturally they had much less work to handle overall than we did.
On top of that, they had laborers and such that handled the menial tasks around so they didn’t have things they needed to do on their shifts not watching the slaves working. How that benefitted me however was that it slowly started to make the soldiers complacent.
This wasn’t a fun place to work, simply because there weren’t a lot of luxuries or amenities to offer the soldiers. However, the job was easy for them. Not a lot of effort needed to be expended to do anything.
One thing I had never been able to figure out was a way to get a stealth skill. I had tried, but I wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong. Maybe that kind of thing was tied more to the class identity rather than being a general skill I could acquire. Seemed a bit strange to me, but not like I could do anything about that in the end.
Instead, I just focused on just spreading my awareness around the massive room, trying to fill in as many blind spots as I could as we made our way across the room.
I spared one mind to focus on what Perri and the other soldiers were doing.
Over the past several weeks, ever since I had started producing for them and not just the block I was in, the soldiers had started becoming more friendly with me as well. Mainly because I was making their lives a little bit better while being here.
They would greet me and involve me in the conversations. I did my best to reciprocate their intentions, but my heart was never really into it. Regardless of how nice they were the reality of the situation was that they still fucking owned me like I was an animal.
I had also noticed over time that I was slowly getting more and more angry at things. I felt like I was on a hair trigger about everything. Like I was just one stubbed toe away from snapping.
I tried my best not to project onto the people around me, that seemed like a bad way to alienate friends or get myself in trouble with the soldiers. But I couldn’t help it either. The arena fights had helped in that regard, I had vented my anger in those fights, progressively getting more and more brutal in my fights.
Especially as I grew in strength. I was getting stronger, but my opponents tended to be around the same level. So the stat gap slowly started to close. By the time I hit the third tier, I’d be on the same level as them and it would hopefully be a cakewalk.
Although I still had to avoid taking attacks, while my damage was growing to be comparable to my opponents, what I noticed was that I was a little bit of a glass cannon myself. I could dish out attacks really well, but one well-placed attack from my opponents would still be enough to kill me.
I shook my head, I was distracting myself. I needed to focus. I quickly panned over my skills, [Conductor Points] wouldn’t be that great given how stationary they were. [Chain Lightning] would be great though. It basically went exactly where I wanted it to and it traveled fast. It seemed like it was going faster as I leveled up.
Well, that implies the speed was changing from a relative point of view. It looked, to me, like it was traveling at the same speed it always had been. Where that logic didn’t hold up was how quickly my mind processed the information it saw. As I leveled it should have looked like the lightning was moving more slowly. The fact that it was going, relatively, at the same speed, even after a bunch of levels, meant that it was moving faster. Or at least I hoped it was and it wasn’t just a placebo of my mind.
It was hard to measure these things sometimes.
Obviously, there were the ever-useful passives for both my mage and spell blade classes. Increased agility was definitely a boon here. I was glad at this point that agility was my highest stat. It rested at a respectable 5611. Assuming that I wasn’t activating [Dodge] or that [CQC] wasn’t active.
[Dodge] alone pumped it up to 8416, although only for a single second. But it was still a high number! And it allowed me to go fast. So fast I wouldn’t be able to fully keep up if I didn’t have [Accelerated Thoughts]. The more I used that skill the more of a blessing I realized it was.
I let out a sigh as I kept following behind Perri, focusing. I was getting antsy and because of that, I couldn’t focus very well. After a few hundred feet of walking through the main cavern, I had as much situational awareness as I could get without giving away what I was doing.
A downside of being so famous is that people knew how my skills worked for the most part, which meant that if you randomly saw plants growing they would more than likely get suspicious.
So I had to do it all out of line of sight. Which drastically limited how much area I’d be able to see, but I was going to have to deal. Once I made a break for it I could ramp up my production of plants to see more.
Now. Where are the soldiers? Four sitting at the entrance to the cavern as per usual. Two facing out, two facing in. No gate to try and bust through there. Nearly one thousand soldiers milling around the slaves outside. Could I use that to my advantage? Convince them to try and make a break for it as well.
I wasn’t sure, even if I knew how they would feel about it I wasn’t sure how I’d go about convincing them to even try in a short amount of time. No. Better to just work on my own here.
We were getting closer to the door. Did I want to go now or try and do so on my way back through? Maybe a guard change would happen? Or maybe there’d be more coming through the entrance making it even harder to get through.
I grit my teeth in frustration. No, I’d just go. No sense in worrying about what-ifs right now. I just needed to do it.
I focused several of my minds upwards. The wall around the gorge was roughly 30 feet tall. A pretty big wall, but not insurmountable, especially since I could just use lightning to jump over the wall. No, that wasn’t the problem. The main problem was the giant spotlight pillars.
From what I’d heard, and I wasn’t sure if this was actually true or not, but the way they cracked down on people using combative skills where they didn’t want them to was with the runes carved into those pillars. They were carved into a lot of other places but the main ones outside were on those giant spotlight pillars.
The pillars were completely automated, they detected the skill, set off an alarm, and then panned over to the entity responsible and then would light up, the spotlight would then attack and sear straight through the body, killing the entity responsible.
Apparently, they were pretty quick about it. The problem was, how quick were they? Were they fast enough to catch me moving at full speed? Or was the problem that when you stood still it was easy for them to get you?
I just didn’t have enough information. Inside the cavern, it only set off the alarms that the soldiers would then respond to and either just kill the one responsible or punish them badly depending on the situation.
Hmmmm…
What if I just used attack skills inside to break free and then ran normally once outside? The alarms would still go off, but would the pillars still try and kill me if that was the case? I think that’s what I would try, if it didn’t work I would either be fast enough to dodge it anyway or I’d die regardless. The outcome would roughly be the same either way.
If push came to shove, I’d just full-burn my mana in an attempt to break free and we’d just have to see how the cookie crumbled.
I took another steadying deep breath, trying my best to keep it silent so as not to alarm Perri as to my mood state. We were roughly a quarter of a mile from the closest point in our walk to the cavern entrance. Even at our closest point, that still put me half a mile away. Not an insurmountable distance to try and run. I could probably pass it pretty quickly with [Chain Lightning] anyway, so it likely wouldn’t be a big issue.
I would still prefer to be closer if I could. Not much I could do about that though, I’d have to deal.
My heart was beating heavily in my chest and a sweat started to break out as we got closer. My minds started whirring pointlessly as there wasn’t anything to do but hurry up and wait.
And so I waited. The tension ratcheted up as we slowly approached the point I had designated in my mind. I ran over the course of actions in my head that I planned on taking.
[Chain Lightning] to the outside of the cavern, run from there to the top of the gorge, and use another skill to get over the wall. If the spotlights try to kill me, use more [Chain Lightnings] to avoid death.
That was it. Simple plan, made it harder to break it down though. Allowed for flexibility by nature of practically not existing in the first place.
100 feet till I executed my plan.
Fifty.
Thirty.
Twenty-five.
Ten.
Five.
I swallowed.
Perri started to turn around, “So, Alex-” He started.
I ignored him, my skills erupting. Armor sprouted to cover me instantly, a sword sprouting out of my wooden arm that I grasped immediately. Sparks viciously exploded off my entire body as I activated my passives.
I thrust a hand out, Perri’s eyes going wide as my perception sped up, my eyes snapping all over the place trying to keep track of every single soldier that had reacted.
I aimed towards the entrance and fired.
I moved like Lightning.
Upon leveling up a whole bunch over the past month there were a couple of major milestones I had reached.
The first was that all of my stats were now in the 2k range, including my strength. That felt pretty big to me, even if it wasn’t actually that big of a deal in all honesty.
The second major thing to happen was what I could detect with [OWN]. Whenever I was being led through the cave to the arena or wherever there were a couple of things I noticed. While there wasn’t a lot of it, there was nature I could see through down here in these caves.
In the darker and deeper parts of the caves, it was mainly algae that didn’t need a lot of sunlight. Closer to the entrance there was some moss and liverworts, but I could tell those needed more sunlight to survive than the algae did.
My range was also starting to get massive. I had originally noticed, back when I first got the skill that I was gaining roughly 50 feet of distance to observe every level. That held true up till now. With my new skills, it was mind-numbingly simple to do the basic math to figure out how far I could theoretically detect things.
2500 feet. Just under half a mile. This allowed me to start actually seeing things outside my cellblock. The few mosses and algae hide around in the less traveled parts of the cavern. I hadn’t tried to place any out there, it hadn’t felt worth it to try and see things out there and either fuck my chances of trying to escape or finding out there wasn’t a good opportunity and annoy Lurks in the process.
No, instead I just held on to the knowledge. I knew Lurks knew that I knew she knew. But that was irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, the important part was whether or not I could do it.
And the importance of that knowledge was coming up.
I stood up from the table and as I did I made a decision. If I saw a good opportunity while I was outside the cell block I would make a break for it. My lightning was fast. Like, really fast. And we usually passed close to the entrance of the cavern every time I was led out to go talk with the cooks, if this was another one of those moments I would hopefully have a good opportunity to try for a breakaway.
I made it to the front of the cell block through the long tunnel. David was there again, talking with Perri, baskets of the produce I made being shifted around by several laborers the soldiers brought on.
I had become… somewhat friends with Perri. He was a friendly guy and just tried to be on everyone’s good side. Although it was kind of difficult to fully foster a relationship with someone in this situation, so it ended up being a kind of shallow friendship. It felt like he was trying more for the sake of trying rather than because he actually wanted to be friends with me, but I wasn’t entirely sure on that front. I could just be reading too far into it.
Not like it really mattered.
As I got closer I saw them both glance at me but they didn’t stop talking as I came to a stop next to them.
“Yeah, the chefs have been pretty happy overall with the picked-up production. Hell, more often than not I get some of the better foods. Life still ain’t perfect working here. But if I’m gonna have to work in this shithole it’s nice to actually have some decent food,” Perri said.
“Hah, ain’t that right. Yeah as soon as I found out what elfie here could do the idea instantly popped into my head. My own genius is frightening sometimes.”
I rolled my eyes at that.
“What’s up? Why did you need me?” I asked during the break in the conversation.
“Chefs wanna meet with you again, they have a special thing they want you to look at.”
I frowned, “A special thing? Did they say?”
Perri shook his head, “Dunno. Bossman sounded excited though. Just told me to fetch you when we went to fetch the stuff today.”
Huh. I was kinda curious now as to what they had to show me, but not so interested that I wouldn’t try to make a break for it beforehand if I saw the opportunity.
“Alright then,” I said with a shrug, “Whenever you’re ready then.”
Perri looked at David who shrugged.
“I guess we’ll head out then, see ya, Dave.”
David just grunted in affirmation, turning around and heading back inside the cell block.
“Okay then, we’ll just let them handle this in the meantime. Let’s start making our way to the big man,” Perri said before turning around and marching off with a slight hop in his step as he did.
“You seem to be in a good mood today.”
“Oh yeah,” He replied, “Received a letter from my wife back home, it’s been a while since I’ve heard from them since my last letter. So yeah, I’m in a pretty good mood right now.”
A small smile crept its way onto my face, “That’s good,” I said simply.
We made it into the cavern proper and immediately I started splitting my mind focusing on everything at once that I could. How many guards were there? What spots could I see with [OWN]? How attentive were the people around me? Were any of the cell block leaders walking around right now?
That last one was unlikely, they tended to either be out with their blocks while they were working or in the arena watching the fights. They probably had a few other places they liked to hide, but I didn’t know where they were.
I split off a couple of minds to start adding to the nature that I could see slowly. And for once I was grateful for the fact that tons of people wanted to come up and talk to Perri. Normally I hated how long it took us to go through this process, but this time it was to my benefit. I was able to start spreading out moss in various places and get more awareness of what was happening around me.
Awareness blossomed in my mind slowly filling out a map that I was able to keep track of a bunch of moving pieces. The soldier counter in my mind in the cavern slowly went up.
343.
456.
622.
781.
1315.
1422.
2301.
The number climbed up and up and up before finally settling on a relatively large number., my apprehension rising with each number. I took a silent breath to steady myself.
Nearly half the soldier count by my estimation was up and around. Although a decent portion of that existed outside right now. Or rather roughly half of the number I could sense right now was outside. In reality, it was probably around a third of the total soldier count would be outside watching the slaves as they worked while the other two-thirds were either asleep or on break.
I’d managed to slowly figure out that the guards worked on a three-shift rotation. So naturally they had much less work to handle overall than we did.
On top of that, they had laborers and such that handled the menial tasks around so they didn’t have things they needed to do on their shifts not watching the slaves working. How that benefitted me however was that it slowly started to make the soldiers complacent.
This wasn’t a fun place to work, simply because there weren’t a lot of luxuries or amenities to offer the soldiers. However, the job was easy for them. Not a lot of effort needed to be expended to do anything.
One thing I had never been able to figure out was a way to get a stealth skill. I had tried, but I wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong. Maybe that kind of thing was tied more to the class identity rather than being a general skill I could acquire. Seemed a bit strange to me, but not like I could do anything about that in the end.
Instead, I just focused on just spreading my awareness around the massive room, trying to fill in as many blind spots as I could as we made our way across the room.
I spared one mind to focus on what Perri and the other soldiers were doing.
Over the past several weeks, ever since I had started producing for them and not just the block I was in, the soldiers had started becoming more friendly with me as well. Mainly because I was making their lives a little bit better while being here.
They would greet me and involve me in the conversations. I did my best to reciprocate their intentions, but my heart was never really into it. Regardless of how nice they were the reality of the situation was that they still fucking owned me like I was an animal.
I had also noticed over time that I was slowly getting more and more angry at things. I felt like I was on a hair trigger about everything. Like I was just one stubbed toe away from snapping.
I tried my best not to project onto the people around me, that seemed like a bad way to alienate friends or get myself in trouble with the soldiers. But I couldn’t help it either. The arena fights had helped in that regard, I had vented my anger in those fights, progressively getting more and more brutal in my fights.
Especially as I grew in strength. I was getting stronger, but my opponents tended to be around the same level. So the stat gap slowly started to close. By the time I hit the third tier, I’d be on the same level as them and it would hopefully be a cakewalk.
Although I still had to avoid taking attacks, while my damage was growing to be comparable to my opponents, what I noticed was that I was a little bit of a glass cannon myself. I could dish out attacks really well, but one well-placed attack from my opponents would still be enough to kill me.
I shook my head, I was distracting myself. I needed to focus. I quickly panned over my skills, [Conductor Points] wouldn’t be that great given how stationary they were. [Chain Lightning] would be great though. It basically went exactly where I wanted it to and it traveled fast. It seemed like it was going faster as I leveled up.
Well, that implies the speed was changing from a relative point of view. It looked, to me, like it was traveling at the same speed it always had been. Where that logic didn’t hold up was how quickly my mind processed the information it saw. As I leveled it should have looked like the lightning was moving more slowly. The fact that it was going, relatively, at the same speed, even after a bunch of levels, meant that it was moving faster. Or at least I hoped it was and it wasn’t just a placebo of my mind.
It was hard to measure these things sometimes.
Obviously, there were the ever-useful passives for both my mage and spell blade classes. Increased agility was definitely a boon here. I was glad at this point that agility was my highest stat. It rested at a respectable 5611. Assuming that I wasn’t activating [Dodge] or that [CQC] wasn’t active.
[Dodge] alone pumped it up to 8416, although only for a single second. But it was still a high number! And it allowed me to go fast. So fast I wouldn’t be able to fully keep up if I didn’t have [Accelerated Thoughts]. The more I used that skill the more of a blessing I realized it was.
I let out a sigh as I kept following behind Perri, focusing. I was getting antsy and because of that, I couldn’t focus very well. After a few hundred feet of walking through the main cavern, I had as much situational awareness as I could get without giving away what I was doing.
A downside of being so famous is that people knew how my skills worked for the most part, which meant that if you randomly saw plants growing they would more than likely get suspicious.
So I had to do it all out of line of sight. Which drastically limited how much area I’d be able to see, but I was going to have to deal. Once I made a break for it I could ramp up my production of plants to see more.
Now. Where are the soldiers? Four sitting at the entrance to the cavern as per usual. Two facing out, two facing in. No gate to try and bust through there. Nearly one thousand soldiers milling around the slaves outside. Could I use that to my advantage? Convince them to try and make a break for it as well.
I wasn’t sure, even if I knew how they would feel about it I wasn’t sure how I’d go about convincing them to even try in a short amount of time. No. Better to just work on my own here.
We were getting closer to the door. Did I want to go now or try and do so on my way back through? Maybe a guard change would happen? Or maybe there’d be more coming through the entrance making it even harder to get through.
I grit my teeth in frustration. No, I’d just go. No sense in worrying about what-ifs right now. I just needed to do it.
I focused several of my minds upwards. The wall around the gorge was roughly 30 feet tall. A pretty big wall, but not insurmountable, especially since I could just use lightning to jump over the wall. No, that wasn’t the problem. The main problem was the giant spotlight pillars.
From what I’d heard, and I wasn’t sure if this was actually true or not, but the way they cracked down on people using combative skills where they didn’t want them to was with the runes carved into those pillars. They were carved into a lot of other places but the main ones outside were on those giant spotlight pillars.
The pillars were completely automated, they detected the skill, set off an alarm, and then panned over to the entity responsible and then would light up, the spotlight would then attack and sear straight through the body, killing the entity responsible.
Apparently, they were pretty quick about it. The problem was, how quick were they? Were they fast enough to catch me moving at full speed? Or was the problem that when you stood still it was easy for them to get you?
I just didn’t have enough information. Inside the cavern, it only set off the alarms that the soldiers would then respond to and either just kill the one responsible or punish them badly depending on the situation.
Hmmmm…
What if I just used attack skills inside to break free and then ran normally once outside? The alarms would still go off, but would the pillars still try and kill me if that was the case? I think that’s what I would try, if it didn’t work I would either be fast enough to dodge it anyway or I’d die regardless. The outcome would roughly be the same either way.
If push came to shove, I’d just full-burn my mana in an attempt to break free and we’d just have to see how the cookie crumbled.
I took another steadying deep breath, trying my best to keep it silent so as not to alarm Perri as to my mood state. We were roughly a quarter of a mile from the closest point in our walk to the cavern entrance. Even at our closest point, that still put me half a mile away. Not an insurmountable distance to try and run. I could probably pass it pretty quickly with [Chain Lightning] anyway, so it likely wouldn’t be a big issue.
I would still prefer to be closer if I could. Not much I could do about that though, I’d have to deal.
My heart was beating heavily in my chest and a sweat started to break out as we got closer. My minds started whirring pointlessly as there wasn’t anything to do but hurry up and wait.
And so I waited. The tension ratcheted up as we slowly approached the point I had designated in my mind. I ran over the course of actions in my head that I planned on taking.
[Chain Lightning] to the outside of the cavern, run from there to the top of the gorge, and use another skill to get over the wall. If the spotlights try to kill me, use more [Chain Lightnings] to avoid death.
That was it. Simple plan, made it harder to break it down though. Allowed for flexibility by nature of practically not existing in the first place.
100 feet till I executed my plan.
Fifty.
Thirty.
Twenty-five.
Ten.
Five.
I swallowed.
Perri started to turn around, “So, Alex-” He started.
I ignored him, my skills erupting. Armor sprouted to cover me instantly, a sword sprouting out of my wooden arm that I grasped immediately. Sparks viciously exploded off my entire body as I activated my passives.
I thrust a hand out, Perri’s eyes going wide as my perception sped up, my eyes snapping all over the place trying to keep track of every single soldier that had reacted.
I aimed towards the entrance and fired.
I moved like Lightning.
