Chapter Twenty-Five: The Fist Thief and the Fist Shepherd

Perhaps, in every person’s life, there will come such awkward stages. In these moments, you suddenly realize you’ve completed all the things within your grasp; yet the tasks you plan to undertake are daunting, far beyond your current ability to even attempt. Trapped in such circumstances, you feel weary, jaded, and at a loss. You lose sight of immediate goals, unsure of what you are capable of or what you ought to do, drifting through life in a lazy, aimless routine dictated by habit.

Level thirty is precisely such a stage.

In the Valen Fortress, I had already finished every task within my power: helping merchants reclaim stolen goods from a small group of kobolds scattered outside the city, slaying a bloodthirsty black bear with a long history of attacks, collecting rare irises from a boar camp for the dyer’s matron—and so on, and so forth.

I even helped a housewife drag her drunken husband home from the tavern. Naturally, you can’t expect a drunkard to understand the meaning of “politeness” or “obedience,” so I made sure he suffered a little for it—well, perhaps more than a little, but in the end, it was only a dislocated left shoulder and a fractured right leg, nothing life-threatening.

I swear I hadn’t meant to go that far, but when a drunken man charges at you swinging an iron rod, there isn’t much room for a second option. I believe anyone would have made the same choice in my place.

What irked me most was that after witnessing her husband’s “re-education,” the poor woman immediately switched sides, feeling sorry for her drunken spouse and completely forgetting her earlier, tearful pleas for my help to cure his addiction. This fickle woman, broom in hand, drove me out of her house—though thankfully, she didn’t forget to toss my reward, a silver ring that increased my health by twenty points, at my feet.

After all this, my quest log contained only a few entries:

“The Soldier’s Discovery”: One of Colonel Pekra’s personal guards went missing during a reconnaissance mission. His last message indicated he intended to sneak into an abandoned woodland mausoleum at the foot of Mount Uzig. The colonel suspects he may have uncovered some secret and hopes someone can find him.

“The Missing Only Son”: Little Philly, the only son of Mr. Faseli, the prosecutor of Valen Fortress, disappeared during an excursion to Mount Uzig. This is the ninth such disappearance in the region over the past several months. The grief-stricken father hopes I can help him find his son, who has been missing for two days.

“The Vampire’s Fangs”: Some vampires have established a secret outpost in the woodland mausoleum at the foot of Mount Uzig. These degenerate creatures should have vanished with the demise of the withered lands nearly two centuries ago, and no one knows how they reappeared. My task: find them and deliver twenty vampire fangs to Sir Montara, the city patrol officer.

“The Lost Chapters of the Holy Codex”: During the battle against the Apocalypse King two hundred years ago, the sacred codex recording divine oracles in the Valen Fortress temple was destroyed and lost on the battlefield of Mount Uzig. The monks have been searching ever since, believing they may find the missing chapters in the mausoleum’s crypts.

Moreover, in that fierce battle two centuries ago, countless brave warriors fell heroically on Mount Uzig. Though their bodies were buried in the woodland mausoleum, their souls were cursed by Darethiel the Soulflayer and his minions, denied the peace of death, left to wander as wraiths in the forests. I must defeat at least nine such “Cursed Battle Spirits” to prove my valor, or my warrior trainer will not teach me the deeper arts of combat.

Clearly, all these quests point to the same destination: the woodland mausoleum at the foot of Mount Uzig, and therein lay my problem.

I had once tried to sneak into the mausoleum alone, but this proved a fool’s bravado. The rumors of vampires establishing a base here were all too true. Even outside the mausoleum, there roamed many pale-skinned, gray-eyed “Vampire Descendants”—level thirty or so (Berserk-class) humanoid monsters, possessed of inhuman strength and speed. Though unarmed, their powerful bodies, sharp nails, and bloodthirsty fangs made them formidable foes. And like all shameless villains lacking a shred of chivalry, these utterly depraved creatures always attacked en masse, giving no chance to fight back.

A true warrior never loses heart because the enemy multiplies. However, if you knowingly rush to your doom, stubbornly seeking battle where only death awaits, you risk losing more than just courage.

Thus, a tense chase unfolded through the verdant, silent mountains: a disheveled level-thirty human warrior, fleeing in panic through the woods. The strap securing his scabbard had been torn, and the sheath dragged behind, bumping over roots and rocks with a clumsy “thud-thud.” Behind him, two or three dozen men in black gave relentless pursuit, their grim faces and tight formation raising clouds of dust in their wake—a rather impressive sight, if not for the circumstances.

In fact, such undignified flights had happened to me more than once. I had tried every approach, every direction, to infiltrate the mausoleum, but never succeeded. Those relentless undead were as sharp as bloodhounds; aside from a collection of scars and nearly shredded armor, I gained nothing from my attempts. Fortunately, these mutated humans enslaved by the vampires had a particular aversion to sunlight and could not leave the deep shadows of the forest, or else this deadly marathon might never have ended.

It goes without saying how frustrated and dejected I felt. I’d already spent nearly a gold coin just repairing my equipment in pursuit of these quests, yet had made no progress at all. I didn’t even know where to begin. It was the first time I’d encountered such setbacks in my adventuring, and the deep sense of defeat wrapped my heart tightly, leaving me stifled and irritable. I wanted nothing more than to cast these troublesome tasks aside, to forget them entirely. Yet to give up felt like letting myself be beaten by some underhanded trick, a humiliation I could not endure.

Besides, the rewards for these quests were quite generous, and a bit of greed gave me one more reason to persist.

Once more, I opened my quest journal, staring at the “rewards” column, hoping to summon the courage to face this bleak reality...

“You madman, when will you finally learn to think like a normal person? If you want to die, just go ahead and die, but don’t drag me down with you!” Just as I was mustering my spirits for yet another attempt at the mausoleum’s harsh lesson, a rough and familiar voice called out from behind me.

“All right, all right, don’t get so worked up. After all that killing, it’s not so bad to take a break and admire that pretty little Reaper-girl. Work and play, you know!” Another voice, equally familiar, drifted from the same direction.

“Work and play my foot! We’ve died five times now, spent more than two hours just running back to our corpses. We don’t need monsters to kill us, exhaustion will finish the job! You and your... damned Reaper-girl can go to hell—well, she’s already a ghost anyway. No matter how pretty her face is, it can’t be used as a credit card, and we’re dead broke! How are we supposed to repair our gear?”

“So now you’re blaming our predicament on me? Shall I remind you whose clumsy thieving lost us all our money? If it weren’t for you and your bungling, would we be so poor we can’t even afford repairs?”

I turned around and saw the two figures in the midst of a heated quarrel. One was a tusked, pot-bellied, green-skinned half-orc, bellowing at the small, red-bearded dwarf before him. He bent over with great effort, his belly round as a ball, like a giant, lopsided gourd.

“Yangtze Delta?” I instantly recognized the half-orc rogue who had once fought alongside me against the Sabretooth Mountain bandits—his prodigious girth made him unforgettable wherever he went. His quarrelsome companion was none other than Longbow Sunshot, the brave and valiant dwarf “Berserk Priest” who had also fought by my side.

“Jeffritz Kidd!” Hearing my call, he spotted me with delight, immediately halting the quarrel and greeting me warmly. “What luck, you’re here too! Feiyan was just talking about you yesterday.”

“Yes, we haven’t seen you in days. Just now I was saying, if only we could find a responsible warrior like you, I wouldn’t have to fight so hard.” Longbow Sunshot beamed at me as well.

“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean? ‘Responsible like him’? You’re the one who keeps charging in blindly, burning through your spells and then playing dead. What responsibility have you shown?”

“That’s still better than some melee ‘specialists’ who only know how to run away at the first sign of trouble, leaving a cloth-armored caster like me to tank the monsters. Shameful behavior!”

“That’s called tactics, tactics! We’re civilized people, not some primitive barbarians eating raw meat!” I never had particularly strong racial feelings, but I had to admit, there was something odd about seeing a wild, burly half-orc grabbing a dwarf by the neck and loudly proclaiming himself “civilized.”

“Civilized, my ass! Even a level-one sewer rat has more courage than you.”

“Oh yeah? You psychotic killer!”

“Trembling coward!”

“Idiot with hair growing on your chin!”

“Lump with a bad case of shingles!”

“Gutless bandit!”

“Necrophiliac!”

“Brute!”

“Deserter!”

“Pipsqueak!”

“Fatty!”

...

The two grew more and more agitated, glaring at each other with clenched teeth. Suddenly, as if remembering my presence, Yangtze Delta turned to me:

“Hey, Jeff, we have a personal matter to settle. Just wait a moment while I bury this fool alive, then I’ll talk to you.”

“Yeah, it’s no big deal, just a few minutes. Before we chat, let me clear away this noisy little pest.” Longbow Sunshot smiled at me, friendly as ever. At that moment, both their faces were aglow with genial, heartfelt smiles.

The next instant, the two stubborn fellows rolled up their sleeves and launched into a furious brawl.

It was a crude, artless scuffle. The rotund half-orc yanked the dwarf’s beard with all his might, stretching Longbow Sunshot’s stern face into a long strip, then bunching it into a meaty ball. The dwarf priest, abandoning all sense of being a spellcaster, unleashed the full ferocity of his kind, aiming his punches and kicks at Yangtze Delta’s most vulnerable spots—details too sordid to recount.

So, barehanded combat can be this underhanded, I thought, watching Yangtze Delta hop around clutching his groin. I glanced nervously at my own trousers, feeling a chill between my legs—thank heavens I wasn’t the one fighting Longbow Sunshot.

Only now did I notice how disheveled they looked: Yangtze Delta’s hard leather armor hung in tatters, his belt broken and sagging uselessly on either side. Fortunately, his plump belly was round and taut enough to keep his pants from falling down. A broken-handled warhammer hung heavily at his side, next to a dagger that looked more like a scrap of iron—though I’d seen its deadly work before, it probably couldn’t even cut bread now.

Longbow Sunshot was in even worse shape. His left shoe was intact, but the right had a gaping hole at the toe, the sole flopping forlornly. His “Nunchaku” staff had snapped clean in two, each half clutched in a hand, making him look less like a priest of the supreme god Darimos than a wild drummer.

No wonder they resorted to such graceless means to settle their dispute. Deprived of proper weapons, there was no hope of besting one another with skillful technique. I watched helplessly as these two seasoned adventurers flailed away, each blow barely shaving off a point or two of health—so little, their wounds couldn’t outpace natural recovery.

If I let them continue this ugly brawl, I thought, they’d still be at it when the gods themselves descended. Around us, a few onlookers called out with glee:

“Whoa, Fist Rogue versus Fist Priest! Is this a new meta?”

“All right, enough!” Just as they lunged for each other again, I jumped in and separated them, one in each hand—my gear’s stat bonuses more than enough to restrain two nearly-naked brawlers.

“Will someone please explain what’s going on?” I shouted. “You two look like you just crawled out of a grave.”

“You’re not wrong...” Yangtze Delta said with a defeated wave, “...we were just resurrected...”

“And right before that...” added Longbow Sunshot, “...we were hanging around a graveyard...”

“...we made a trip to the woodland mausoleum...”

I understood.

(A bit of news: This weekend, a friend is getting married and I have to help, so updates may be delayed. Some good news: next Wednesday, we’re featured in Sanjiang’s recommendations. Barring any accidents, there’ll be two updates a day, time to be determined. A hope: Will my favorites finally break ten thousand after the recommendation? An ad: “Mighty Han”—it really is mighty! A link: http:///Book/188417.aspx A wish: May you all enjoy a pleasant weekend with your loved ones!)