Chapter 2
As I turned to leave the room, my foot hit the sorcerer’s staff, and it rolled away from me. Every time I had tried using magic with it before, it had been nothing more than a useless piece of wood, so I didn’t even bother picking it up.
The sorcerer’s dagger, on the other hand, was quite awesome, and it had served me well every time I’d used it to murder these fools
“Where did I drop it?” I asked myself as I glanced down amongst the fifteen corpses. The curved blade laid just within the dead sorcerer’s grasp, and I chuckled as I picked the weapon up. “You’ve got a new master now, buddy.”
The steel was still covered in blood, and even a quick swipe on Douchebag Wizard’s robe didn’t really help clean it away. The grip was tough leather and there were grooves where my fingers fit perfectly, as if the weapon was meant for me. It wasn’t the most perfectly balanced dagger in the world, but it had served me well in the battle, and I felt a thousand times stronger just holding onto it.
“I wonder how sharp this thing actually is,” I asked as I drew my thumb along the sharp edge.
As if my words had been some kind of trigger, a floating text box appeared above the dagger, and I almost dropped the thing. I blinked at the words a few times until I convinced myself that I was actually seeing what I was seeing.
Durability - 84%
Weight - 0.9lbs
Quality - High
Magical Aspect - None
Magical Ability - None
“Uhhh… Am I in a video game?” I asked the cave.
Apparently, weapons had stats, and I was able to see them by touching them. That was a pretty neat trick, but I still didn’t really think I was in a video game because I could feel the pain of being stabbed, and I had died a few hundred times before being able to kill all these assholes.
But if I wasn’t in a video game, why could I see stats of weapons? Why did I keep “reloading” when I died?
Where was I?
The hovering blue text was still on the wall. The middle part struck a chord with me, and it gave me an idea.
What if my power actually had something to do with the whole coming back to life after I died?
I rifled through the sorcerer’s robes until I came across the dagger’s scabbard, and then I attached it to my belt and sheathed the weapon. It was a comforting weight pressed against my side, and I patted the concealed blade like it was an old friend. Then I climbed around the sorcerer’s body and sat down on the stone dais behind him.
But then I ran into the problem of still being alive. If my power was just some kind of immortality, then the only way to respawn was to die. Did that mean I would literally have to repeat the same day over and over again? How was that any kind of amazing power? The words on the wall hadn’t appeared until after I had defeated Raijin and his cronies and tried to leave the room.
There had to be more to it than that.
I looked over at the wall and reread the prophecy or legend or whatever it was a few more times. There wasn’t any hint to using my power, but it also didn’t specify that death was my only option. If I was brought back to the moment I was summoned every time I died, I would have to keep repeating the day over and over until I literally never died.
“I’ve never seen Groundhog Day,” I sighed. “But this is kind of a weird version of it. I don’t want to wake up under Raijin’s dagger every damn day. Maybe I can save my spot?”
Video games usually had a kind of menu or very specific locations where the player could save their progress. But how was I supposed to do something like that without a proper interface or tutorial to show me how?
“Fuuuuck,” I groaned and laid back against the stone.
The idiot sorcerer probably knew, but I really didn’t want to have to off myself just to fight him all over again.
I laid there and stared at the ceiling for a while before I just decided to wing it. If I focused on the stone dais hard enough, maybe something would happen? The worst was that I ended up looking like an idiot, but I was the only one here to see, so who cared?
I closed my eyes and concentrated on the stone beneath me. If I could, I wanted to come back to this place if something happened to me. To this exact moment, after I had already defeated Raijin and his lackeys. I probably could have killed them easily if I gave it another go, but I already had the sorcerer’s monologue memorized like a song stuck in my head. I was ready for something new.
A tingling sensation began in my fingers and toes, and it crawled rapidly up my body. Once the tingling hit my shoulders and hips, a burning heat started at my extremities. I feared the intense heat and pain from my numerous deaths, but this was more of a pleasant warmth that wrapped around me like a blanket. When the warmth hit my heart, a little chime rang through the room.
The warmth faded quickly, and I opened my eyes once more. If my theory was correct, that was only half of my true ability. I scrambled from the dais and left the room. There was no gust of wind this time so it must have been some kind of activator for the text on the wall. I walked down the hall until I could no longer see the dais from where I stood. Then I concentrated hard on the moment I had just created, of me sitting on the stone slab just after I had defeated the sorcerer and his minions.
Chime.
Ice shot through me just as I heard the familiar bell, and I gasped. The feeling lasted the length of a heartbeat before it was replaced with a total numbness. One moment I was in the hallway, the next I was laying on the dais once more, and the sorcerer was still dead on the ground where he was supposed to be.
I was right. My power was the ability to create a savepoint and reload whenever I wanted to.
Holy shit.
This was fucking awesome.
No wonder the sorcerer was so interested in me. Being able to repeat a day when something went wrong was as good as immortality. I might fail a thousand times as I had with the sorcerer, but in the end, I would always come out on top. There was nothing that could defeat me if I could just go back in time and do it all over a different way.
The sorcerer also had no idea that I was just repeating the battle. He greeted me each time like it was the first time. All he knew was that my power would make him unstoppable, but he had no idea what I could truly do. Nobody would know that I was just repeating myself over and over until I got it perfect. They would all see me come in like a total badass.
And that was fine by me.
I decided to check the stats of the sorcerer’s staff. It hadn’t produced any epic magical feat when I tried to use it, but it was probably because I didn’t actually know any spells. Staves and wands could just be tools to concentrate magic in this world.
The moment I touched the staff, another floating text box appeared above it.
Durability - 95%
Weight - 1 lbs
Quality - High
Magical Aspect - None
Magical Ability - +10% magnification to spells cast.
The durability was greater than the dagger, but since I wasn’t about to go hitting people upside the head with it, the blade was still the superior weapon choice. Its magical ability was just a magnification to spells, which probably meant that I would have to learn some kind of magic from somewhere before the staff would be of any use to me.
“I never got my letter from Hogwarts, sooooo…” I dropped the thing and it hit the ground with a clatter.
I looted among the dead cronies and found a variety of weapons but nothing else. They didn’t have any supplies on them that would be useful to me. No matches, no money, no canteens or leather pouches for carrying water. They didn’t have any food or even a freaking pocket knife on them.
Wherever I was, there had to be some kind of settlement nearby. Either a town or a base of operations for the bad guys.
I was probably gonna have to kill some more Raijin cronies when I got outta here, wasn’t I?
I was able to summon the stats of each weapon when I touched the blades, and none of the daggers could even compare to the sorcerer’s. The swords came in a wide variety of durability, but their weight was always about three pounds, and none of them had any magic aspect to them. I grabbed the most durable sword of the bunch, even though it was barely above sixty-percent.
The sword wasn’t anything fancy, and I would have been surprised if a cheapskate like Raijin had splurged on arming his minions well. It was like a one-handed Knight’s sword. The blade of the sword was about the length of my arm and had several chips along both edges from use. The grip was made of rough leather, and the round thing at the end had no emblem or decoration whatsoever. The guard between the grip and the blade was just a simple strip of metal, and the left side of it was shorter than the right for some reason.
All that mattered for now was that it had a pointy end that could pierce anything I needed to kill, and it seemed like it could do at least that much.
I was just about to leave the room when I thought of another use for my powers.
What if I could spam my saves and get weapons with different stats?
It was a long shot, but what was the harm in trying it out? I had all the time in the world to mess around and test out my skills, and wasn’t it better to know the extent of my abilities as soon as possible?
Chime.
I shuddered as the icy feeling shot through me, and I scrambled over to the nearest dead body to pull out his sword. I couldn’t remember exactly which weapon had which stat, but as I retrieved each sword, I saw that their stats were exactly the same.
“Aw, bummer,” I said. “So… by that logic, there is no random loot generation. I’m guessing that I’m not in a video game. I just have the ability to restart from a save point and look at the stats of weapons.”
I swung the sword a few times and frowned at the whopping sixty-two-percent durability stat. It was kind of pathetic when compared to the dagger, but a sword had a longer reach, and even a dull blade could knock heads around if I swung it hard enough. I had no idea if the sharpness of the blade was related to the durability state, but I remembered a YouTube video I watched where some survival guy had used a whetstone to sharpen a dull blade. I was pretty sure the spelling was different because I doubted any old wet stone would do the trick. If I couldn’t figure it out, maybe someone at the settlement nearby could teach me.
Assuming the settlement wasn’t full of bad guys trying to kill me.
“No more call center work for me!” I grinned as I finally left the dais room and walked down the long stone corridor. I had been transported to some fantasy land, and I was pretty much a god. Nobody could cut me down, and I could never make a wrong turn or say something stupid to someone and get punched in the face. If I did, I’d just chime back to the start and then do it over again until I got it right.
I was invincible.
The air in the tunnels was damp, cool, and filled with the scent of wet stone, moss, and earth. It was so much nicer to breathe than the choking blood and death of the dais room. The walls were made of the same dark gray rock as the room I had just left, and torches filled the tunnel with flickering light every few feet. The sound of water dripping echoed from somewhere deeper in the catacombs, and it made me think of how thirsty I was. There was no chance of me drinking from the walls, though, since I was kind of surrounded by dead people.
I came to the first intersection and glanced at both possible paths. The right was free of any obstacles and continued on for several yards before turning. The left path had a dead minion shish-kebabed on a set of giant spikes, and his blood was still dripping from the wounds.
“Well, that’s pretty fucking obvious,” I snickered.
I should have guessed that there would be traps in a place like this. If the Great Catacombs were the only place that the God of Time could be summoned, it wasn’t the kind of place any old wanderer should be able to navigate. The catacombs themselves had probably been long buried, and all of the maps leading to it had been burned long ago or something. That’s what I would have done if I wanted to keep an all-powerful being from getting summoned by a moronic sorcerer.
What it really meant was that Raijin and his cronies had probably left me a gruesome breadcrumb trail leading right to the entrance. All I had to do was follow the tunnels and follow the path that didn’t have a dead minion shish-kebabed on spikes.
I followed the breadcrumbs, and every few turns I came across a man crumpled on the floor or burnt to a crisp or at the bottom of a pit of spikes. I almost felt sorry for these guys, but if it meant that I had spent less time fighting in the dais room because of their loss, then I really couldn’t be too upset. Fourteen cronies had been bad enough, but it seemed that the sorcerer had brought a small horde with him, since I counted an additional eight dead cronies before I reached a long straight tunnel.
The tunnel was much of the same wet-gray rock covered in moss as the rest of the labyrinth, but there was a very faint breeze that brought the fresh scent of trees and growing things from somewhere. I picked up the pace until I was practically running around the remaining twists and turns of the labyrinth.
A few minutes later, I turned a corner to find sunlight spilling into the tunnel in front of me, and I had to slow my pace and bring an arm up to shield my eyes against the glare. The fresh scents intensified along with the calls of birds and the rustling of leaves in the trees, and I inhaled deeply as I guessed at what this world would look like.
I was just about to step across the threshold when a thought occurred to me. What if there were other rooms like mine within the catacombs? I doubted there were other all-powerful gods like myself waiting to be summoned, but there could always be some loot lying around. My respawning powers made it so I never had to actually worry about getting lost or dying forever. Was there really any harm in having a quick look-see?
Part of me knew that there wasn’t really going to be anything for me to take from the tomb. Why would anyone store items in a place like this? The dead couldn’t use money or weapons, and it wasn’t like this was an Egyptian pyramid where there were organs and stuff in jars. Not that there was anything wrong with preserving the guts of some dead guy for him in the next life. I just didn’t see the point, since he was already dead.
But a much larger part of me was playing the devil-on-my-shoulder bit. What if this world was like Zelda or Diablo, and there was all sorts of cool shit in the pots and jars? I had nothing to lose by spending my time exploring the labyrinth. If I didn’t find any loot, was I really going to be upset? I already had a pretty awesome dagger, and even if the sword left something to be desired, there was a good chance of a town being close by. I could always barter for a new one if I didn’t find any money lying around.
Plus, I wouldn’t know there was nothing for me to find if I didn’t actually go looking for it in the first place.
My gamer-brain refused to let me leave the catacombs without a thorough investigation. In every game with a dungeon like this, there was always some kind of treasure waiting to be found. In some ways, I kind of was the treasure, but there might be something else down the passages the sorcerer hadn’t searched. I highly doubted that I was going to find anything useful, but if I went in expecting nothing and actually found something, it would be like a little surprise for myself.
“We are going for a hundred-percent map completion.” I started to backtrack to the first shish-kebabed cronie just outside of the dais room. At first, I thought I was just going to get lost. The last trap before the entrance had been a pitfall trap, and every time I turned a corner and didn’t find it, I had to fight back the sense of alarm. It wasn’t like getting lost was a real possibility. I could just respawn to the dais room and follow the macabre trail again.
But even though I knew that I had this power, it was still so new and weird that my squishy normal self was trying to bring up fears that were irrational to the God of Time. After all, I could just do things over again if I didn’t like the way they turned out the first or ten-thousandth time.
I made the decision to respawn in the dais room when I rounded the next corner and found the pitfall trap. Retracing my steps from that point was easy, and I had to fight the smile that tugged at my lips every time I came across the next trap. It was how I knew I was getting to where I needed to be but it was so disrespectful of the dead to be happy to see the activated traps.
Knowing I had a get-out-of-jail-free card meant that the word caution left my vocabulary as I wandered through the catacombs. I didn’t bother looking around each corner for an ambush, because it didn’t matter. I would just respawn at the dais, find where the enemies were waiting, and kill them all.
However, the catacombs seemed to be completely empty. My footsteps echoed as I walked through the tunnels, and there was the occasional dripping of water somewhere, but there were no other sounds. At least the air was clean compared to the blood-drenched air of the room with the stone dais.
The first dead end I came to was just an abrupt wall in the tunnel, and there hadn’t been any kind of trap waiting to be activated. There was no room to loot, no treasure, no enemies, nothing. I backtracked and took a different branch of the tunnel, but this also led to another dead end with nothing waiting for me.
“Stupid map design,” I growled as I backtracked once more and turned down a different branch. There was a room at the very end of it, so I picked up the pace until I was jogging down the corridor.
And then I was squashed between the ceiling and a wall that popped out of the ground.
Chime.
I respawned on the dais with the kind of deep breath people take after being underwater for a long time. My heart started pounding erratically from the sudden death, and I had to place my hand over my chest to keep the damn muscle from bursting free and running out on me. There was no lingering pain from the crushing blow, aside from my wounded pride at having been taken out by one of the traps.
But now I was even more eager to check out that room. Traps weren’t laid out if there wasn’t something interesting that needed protection, so I scrambled from the dais and grabbed my pitiful sixty-two-percent sword. My eye caught the useless staff once more, and I decided to bring it along. The trap had been activated somehow, either from a tripwire or just passing over the underground wall. The staff was just the thing to use as a test. Better to break it than me.
I returned to the wall-trap hallway and walked a little more slowly this time. I held the staff out in front of me like a blind man’s walking stick, and let out a very unmanly shriek when the wall sprang up from the floor. The sound echoed all around me, and I really hoped there was nobody in the catacombs to hear it. The staff was snatched from my hands as it was broken like a twig, and the once-glowing rock at the tip of the staff clattered to the floor.
Once the tunnel was clear again, I picked up the broken shard of staff and waved it over the trap. I kept my grip loose on the staff in case the wall jumped back up again, but it was a one-time-only kind of trap. I grinned at my genius and continued into the room ahead.
It was smaller than the dais room and aside from a bunch of coffins in the walls, there was nothing of interest. Every game I had ever played warned me against pushing back the lids of those coffins. With my luck, I would awaken a super powerful Lich Lord and get blown to smithereens in seconds. But what did that matter? Even if a Lich Lord appeared and killed me, I would just respawn in the dais room and do it over again.
No risk, no reward.
“It’s still fucking scary, though…” I ignored my pounding heart as I threw all of my weight against the nearest coffin lid. The stone growled as it ground together, and when there was enough of a gap for a Lich Lord to rise, I leaped back and drew my two weapons.
Nothing happened.
There was a skeleton in the coffin, but it was desiccated to the point that the skull turned to dust when I poked it with my dagger. I opened the other three coffins at ground level, but was met with the same nothingness. The placards beneath the coffins had various names on them, but none of them meant anything to me. I assumed that they had been really important people when they were alive, and that would warrant the trap to protect them in the afterlife.
Instead of wasting my time with backtracking, I just reloaded and spawned back in the dais room. I grabbed the sword and staff again to use as a trap detector and chose a different path to explore. I came across dead ends more than traps, but the staff served its purpose very well. Only once was I killed, and that was because the floor suddenly vanished beneath me and not even the staff could save me from fall damage.
In the end, there was no treasure of any kind hidden in the catacombs. I couldn’t even find any hidden rooms, although I must have touched every single freaking rock in the place. I returned to the dais room for the last time, grabbed my sword, and followed the dead minions’ bodies back to the entrance.
The suffocating echoes and closeness of the walls disappeared as I stepped across the threshold of the catacombs. The air was crisp and clear, and the birds singing around me was like music to my ears after only hearing my own breathing for the past few hours. There were evergreens all around me, but in a spot where they were sparse, I could see a plains far below where I stood stretching to the horizon.
I took a few steps away from the entrance to the catacombs and turned around. A sheer cliff towered over me, and just beyond its top edge, I could see rocky terrain and a few sparse patches of more fir trees.
The Great Catacombs rested within the side of a mountain. That made sense.
The sun was just about at its peak in the sky. There were trees and rocks everywhere, and the entrance to the catacombs was a gaping hole in the side of the cliff. The valley below had a faint line cutting through the grass, and I figured it was a dirt road that led to the settlement I was banking on. Since none of the minions had any supplies on them, it couldn’t be more than a day’s walk down the mountain.
Time to get moving.
A town was the answer to all of my current problems. I could get food, supplies, and a proper bed to sleep in, and I almost moaned at the idea. It felt like I had been awake for months and anything was better than waking up on that cold stone slab again. Someone in the town might even know of a way for me to get back home.
Back home to the call center.
Did I really want to go back? There, I was just some guy sitting behind a desk five days a week making someone else money while I tried to squeeze as much fun as I could out of my life on the weekends. Here, I was a god, the God of Time, or so said the wall. I had the ability to save my place and reload as many times as I wanted to, and I could relive all the best moments over and over again. I would be so much happier in this world than in my own.
But that wasn’t a decision I had to make at the moment since I didn’t know if I could even get back to my own world. There was no use worrying about something that wasn’t currently possible, and when I came across that bridge I would either cross it or burn it.
Simple as that.
The immediate terrain around the catacombs was relatively flat with only a few large rocks giving it some texture. There was a faint path in the grass leading to the entrance and, after following it for a few feet, I found that it ran right alongside the cliff away from the catacombs. It was only wide enough for one person to cross at a time, and the sheer drop made me keep a hand on the cliff as I walked. As much as I knew that dying wasn’t permanent for me, I really didn’t want to Wile E Coyote my way down the mountain and arrive at the town covered in bruises.
The path forked just beyond the cliff with the left heading further up the mountain. I followed the right path, and it quickly became narrow as the trees closed in around me. Ferns and overgrown plants laid across the path in many places, and some had even been cut or bent recently, so I guessed that the sorcerer and his lackeys were probably the first people to have walked this path in a long time. The cuts made my traveling a little bit easier, but I still had to watch my step.
When the path veered suddenly to the left, I was too busy looking down at the valley between the trees to notice. The ground slipped away beneath me, and I started sliding down a steep hill. There were no roots or trees to grab on to and stop my rapid descent. All I could do was shift my weight to try to steer myself out of the way of obstacles. I hit a rock that sent me spinning sideways, and my descent was stopped by a large boulder. I smashed into it face-first, and everything went dark.
Chime.
So much for being invincible.
My respawn had taken me all the way back to when I had forced the save on the dais. My ability didn’t have an automatic feature that would save my spot for me when I reached certain goals.
It was a good lesson to learn. I just paid too high a price for it.
My heart still pounded wildly in my chest even though I wasn’t in any sort of permanent danger. I was gonna have to get used to that. Several minutes passed before I had calmed enough to rise to my feet, and then I grabbed my sword and headed back through the tunnel toward the exit.
Between respawning after my deaths and from my exploration, I would be happy if I never saw that place again. I was really looking forward to a long sleep in a soft bed, and I still had to slog my way down the mountain. And that was assuming there was even a town waiting for me at the bottom.
A new sense of haste filled me at the thought. If there was no town, I would have to figure out a way to camp out for the night. All of my survival skills came from video games, and they wouldn’t translate very well in the real world. I couldn’t just touch a pile of sticks and light a fire, I would have to actually rub the sticks together for a while to get it going, if that was even possible. I had to find that sweet spot of getting as far down the mountain as quickly as possible without falling to my death and having to do it all over again.
How many reboots was it gonna take me?
This time, I created a new savepoint at the entrance to the catacombs as soon as I stepped out into the nice clear air. There wasn’t anything around me more intimidating than a big fat squirrel, so I didn’t feel any danger in using it as my fall-back point. I searched around the front of the catacombs for a different path than the one by the cliff, but there was only a sheer drop into the trees, so I went back to the original path I took and started to hike back down.
I was ready for the path to make its veering turn, but I couldn’t help looking over the edge where I had fallen to my earlier death. It really was a crazy descent, and I was lucky to have only smashed my head in the end. A quick death seemed better than being maimed or impaired to the point where I couldn’t focus on the respawn point.
After about five minutes of hiking from my previous death, I came across a little brook trickling out of the crack in the cliff, and I couldn’t help but lick my lips.
“There is nothing like the sound of running water to remind a guy of how thirsty he is,” I muttered as I looked at the stream.
The few survival games I had played always required me to collect rainwater to have enough to drink, but ARK: Survival Evolved didn’t have any parasites or bacteria in the water. Rocks acted like a kind of filter, if I remembered right, so it couldn’t be too dangerous to take a few sips, could it?
I scooped the cold liquid into my hands and had brought it up to my lips before I paused. Just because I couldn’t actually die didn’t mean I should sit around making really stupid mistakes. I let the water slip between my fingers with a sigh, and I focused on the little brook for a new savepoint. I really had nothing to lose by saving here. It wasn’t that far from the catacombs, and it would be a good spot to make a temporary camp if there wasn’t actually a town at the foot of the mountain. It wasn’t much past midday yet, but the more time I had to create a shelter or a fire, the more time I had to perfect the skill and do it faster the second time around.
After the savepoint was made, I drank until my stomach sloshed around when I moved. There was no way for me to carry any water with me, so I just splashed some of the water onto my face and down the back of my neck to cool off. The trees had kept me in the shade most of the time, but the weather was warmer than back home. It was probably early or late summer, and it was at the time of day when the heat was unbearable.
I decided to stop and take a bit of a rest beside the brook. I was not an overly athletic guy, and hiking was not a hobby of mine, although I didn’t mind taking a walk around the neighborhood or through the park after dinner sometimes. And I had never held a sword in my hand until today. My arms were sore from swinging the daggers and blocking and parrying and body-checking all those guys. I would have curled up and taken a nap if I wasn’t worried about some wild creature sneaking up on me while I slept.
When my breathing had finally returned to normal after my trek, I continued down the path. Every now and again I caught glimpses of wildlife besides squirrels and birds. Rabbits munched on greens a stone’s throw away from the path, and they scampered off when I got too close. I could hear the snuffling of some kind of wild boar, but I never actually saw the animal. If it was a male with big tusks, it was no loss there, and even a female with piglets could be pretty aggressive. There was a constant battering of a woodpecker, and I finally spotted him about ten minutes past the brook. A pair of does were in a small clearing just off the path to my right. They stared at me as they chewed their grass and walked away as casual as could be. I must not have been very intimidating in my bloodstained white button-up shirt and business slacks.
The journey down the mountain had been full of sudden drops, the twisting path, and more annoying insects that I ever wanted to deal with. It wasn’t like I had a can of bug spray in my pocket. The path was wider here, and I could see much further ahead. It curved gently to the right, and from the intensity of sunlight there, I assumed it opened up into the valley. When the ground started to even out, I could have jumped with joy.
I was about to put on a burst of speed when movement in the trees caught my eye. I immediately stepped off the path and ducked behind a thick tree.
The birds had stopped singing to one another, and some kind of grouse came tearing ass up the path past me. Whatever was in the trees up ahead was not even trying to stay quiet. It crashed through the foliage and kept making a strange yipping sort of sound. I would have thought it was a small dog if it didn’t sound so massive.
I poked my head out from behind my tree and caught a glimpse of the new threat. I blinked a few times and even rubbed my eyes because there was no way what I was seeing was actually real. Sure, I was in a world with a guy who claimed to be a sorcerer, but so far everything had been very normal.
What was coming through the trees was a creature that looked like the cross between a dog and a lizard, and thanks to hours of my life spent playing fantasy games, I immediately recognized it as a creature called a kobold. It stood on two legs and was probably about six inches shorter than I was. More of them started stomping through the undergrowth until an entire horde was making its way through the forest. Their scales caught the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. Most of them were earthy colors like shades of brown, green, and gray. There were a few dark blue scales mixed in, and one of the larger kobolds was dull orange.
I guessed that the five-feet tall little lizard men had a better sense of smell than me, but they were focused on something down the slope of the mountain in the direction they were marching. I counted at least twenty as they crashed onto the path and continued out of the forest, but I may have counted a few more than once.
I waited until the horde had disappeared down the path before I followed them. I walked on the balls of my feet and avoided anything that might have made noise if I stepped on it. I had no idea what they might have been so interested in, but as long as I kept out of sight, I could probably follow them and find out.
Kobolds were one of the easiest creatures to defeat in video games, since they were usually the lowest tier monster. These dudes didn’t look too impressive, but they carried shortswords and daggers and crossbows that could have some nasty-looking bolts. If the group was just four or five, I wouldn’t have a problem taking them on here and now, but twenty kobolds was going to be a challenge, especially since I still hadn’t figured out how magic actually worked in this world. An area-of-effect spell would have made short work of any group of enemies.
The horde was far enough away that they wouldn’t have heard me unless I shouted, but I was close enough to still hear their yipping. The cries became louder, and I thought they might have turned around and spotted me. But when I finally stepped out into the open of the valley, I saw that they were getting further away and they were yipping with excitement.
The town I was hoping for was a little over a mile in the distance. And the kobolds were headed straight for it.