Chapter 45: Ambush Ethics

William Oh’s entire party caught their baptismal rotlung on the fourth floor and I swear to you, I saw him carrying all six of them on his back, plus their mounts and gear when he arrived at the Waystation. No joke, directly on his back.

Kid must have fifteen Strength growth or something.

• Level 18 hunter

 

After Will discovered ‘leeches’, he decided to learn how to walk on water, because that was the only way he was going to willingly step foot in the swamps ever again.

After a bit of planning, the team broke into two groups.

The trailblazers were Will and Loth, while Travis and Alicia followed as soon as they created a path that the two of them could follow without becoming waterlogged or being assaulted by bloodsucking insects…

Which were in the air, too, by the way.

Mostly their ‘trailblazing’ was testing half-sunken logs for sturdiness, tossing them onto the path they had taken and lashing them together with spidersilk to create tiny bridges between pockets of land where the brush grew up to a man’s eye-level, fighting for space so fiercely that Will got real good at cutting brush with his tomahawk and tossing it into the stagnant water in front of and behind him.

The first day was the worst, with the most bug-bites per person and general misery:

Their tent was enhanced by a dome consisting of a massive spiderweb manned by hundreds of spiders.

Half their food started growing mold because the damned vendor who promised it was 4^th Floor stable™ was lying his ass off, and a large portion of the people he scammed wouldn’t live to kick his teeth in.

Add it to the list of things to do.

Alicia didn’t get any bug bites at all, because any biting insect that got within twenty feet was annihilated, and while it was a superb blessing to simply stand next to their archer for extended periods of time and enjoy the lack of awfulness…life finds a way to make you leave your comfort zone.

The second day was better in some ways:

Loth tamed thousands of dragonflies overnight and deployed them to clear the path ahead of flying insects.

The leeches still lurked in the waters below, but their Party had gotten pretty good at avoiding stepping in the water.

Alicia was able to reliably shoot fish out of the water, which Loth’s dragonflies retrieved for lunch and dinner. The first couple attempts were amusing, when her damage boosting Relics caused the fish to explode, drenching her and Travis in leeches, fish guts and muck.

As a Party Leader, Will knew he probably shouldn’t laugh at the rich kid’s frozen bodies and dumbstruck faces…but he couldn’t help it.

Will learned his lesson, because it took many hours of cajoling by Loth to convince her to try again without the Gloves of Thunder Strike.

“Hunting food’s not my job,” Alicia muttered, staring at the water as if it might leap up and bite her.

“Alicia, look at me.” Loth said, drawing the archer’s attention to her.

“That stuff you were told about Jobs and Roles is bullshit. While some people might take on the brunt of a specific role, everyone should be able to do everything to a bare minimum level of competency, or your Party is incredibly brittle and likely to die when something unexpected happens…and if you can do something to help the Party, then you should. I can hunt, and Will can hunt, but we can’t hunt and clear a trail at the same time.”

They probably could, but Will wasn’t going to argue with Loth’s point.

“Now we know it was the gloves that caused ‘the incident’, so let’s try it one more time without, okay?”

Alicia glanced away from Loth, back at the water.

“…okay.”

Alicia nocked an arrow, pulled back and loosed, sending an arrow deep into the water, the feathers barely rising above the surface of the shallow water.

Half a dozen dragonflies converged on the fletching and grabbed the shaft, lifting the arrow out of the water.

On the end of the arrow was a fish, already dead and limp as the arrow had severed it’s spine.

Good shot, and a nice, big fish.

Alicia glanced at Will, who grinned back.

Then he realized there was no way she could actually see him smile, so he gave a thumbs-up.

Alicia’s shoulder’s relaxed.

“Excellent job, Miss Zodiac, that was the most fantastic shot I’ve ever seen!” Travis said, ruining everything with his brown-nosing. “Why I think Holdna herself couldn’t compare to-“

“Travis, get over here.” Will said, pointing to the tiny patch of roots and grass he was standing on.

“Umm…There’s no bridge yet.”

“Then jump. Or wade.” Will said.

Once Will had Travis away from the other two, he informed the Master Decoy that his constant praise for the easiest tasks was undermining their attempt to train Alicia to be a well-rounded Climber.

“She can tell that every word out of your mouth is total shit. I imagine she’s heard people like you say things like that her entire life. So all you’re doing is proving to her that she can’t trust you because you’re lying to her face constantly,” Will said.

Tavis paled, eyes swimming as his brain caught up with his behavior.

“Now if she does something truly exceptional, feel free to gush, but I swear to Granesh, if you act like that after she shoots something ten feet away again, I will fong you, and these shoes are literally built for it.”

Will tilted his mask up so Travis could see his expression.

“Understood?”

“Yes?”

“What did I ask you to do?”

“Don’t lie to Ms Zodiac, and maintain a professional demeanor.”

“Close enough,” Will said, putting the mask back down.

The next few hours were much more subdued as Travis visibly restrained himself from speaking on multiple occasions while Alicia brought in another eight fish for lunch.

He obviously couldn’t find anything to say that wasn’t drivel, so he defaulted to silence, which persisted through the rest of the afternoon.

The second day ended with them camping on a relatively dry spot, watching the stars through the bug net Loth had made for them.

While they bedded down for the night and Loth trapped their camp, Will stared at the strange dots in the strange black sky, wondering what he contributed to their team.

I can’t kill things as good as Alicia, Can’t support us as good as Loth, can’t even Tank as good as Travis.

Travis wasn’t a good ‘tank’ per se, but he could attract the enemy’s attention at the snap of his fingers, which was half the job.

All Will could do was…go places other people had a hard time going, subsist on weeds and bark, and Will was confident he was consistently not a burden, but what did he offer?

Will turned on his side and spotted his Sourdough barrel.

He got up and pulled the lid off the barrel, studying the faintly glowing starters slowly absorbing the Relic dust around them as they fermented new consumables.

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This is something no one else can offer, but to really crank out the consumables, I’ll need a lot more of them, or a much faster turnaround.

Will pulled the clay Idol out of the pile of Relic dust it was submerged in, revealing that the bit of clay had grown nearly half of its original form back.

In a couple weeks, I’ll be able to use it again.

Will sat and thought.

The skill scales with Focus and seems to decrease the amount of consumable used by 1% for every 10 Focus. The worst scaling I’ve ever heard of, but it does make sense, given that it’s inherently exploitable.

Will could easily fill the barrel with 1000 gold worth of low-quality Relics from the Hunting Grounds and submerge dozens of used-up greater healing potions for an insane profit.

But money isn’t what I want. I want Power. How can I upgrade Sourdough to become indispensable as an asset and a leader?

Will’s head felt foggy and tired trying to pay attention to everything everyone said and did, everything he said and did, but he wanted to be a good leader.

What did ‘a good leader’ even look like?

Will put the half-restored clay Idol back and sat down on the barrel.

Maybe I can upgrade Sourdough to repair or reinforce non-consumeables. Or drastically improve the speed…or the efficiency.

Even though he tried to distract himself with Build-candy, his mind kept drifting back to Leadership, or his lack thereof.

Did I make Travis indignant? Is he gonna hold a grudge for me yelling at him? Is that going to cause a problem? Was it worth it?

Will finally decided that he could deal with occasionally being the bad guy if it allowed Alicia and Travis to work together better.

Because right now Travis wouldn’t disagree with Alicia to save his life, and Alicia didn’t trust a word that came out of Travis’s mouth, a combination which was less than ideal.

“What’cha thinking about?” Loth asked, appearing out of the darkness, spiders spinning a line of traps in her wake.

“What a good leader is.”

“…A good leader is someone who humbly works to line up every advantage for their team such that they appear to succeed with minimal effort.”

“Not a guy with shining armor defending a stronghold, bravely leading the charge against a horde of slavering monsters?”

“A good leader would’ve culled the monster population in the years leading up to the horde, preventing it entirely.”

“Well, that’s boring,” Will said.

“Yes. Yes it is.”

“So your advice is to be as boring as possible?” Will asked.

Loth pinched his side.

“ow.”

“Think about the future. The consequences of your actions. Think about how to line up every possible advantage for your team, such that they can accomplish the goals you set out for them with the absolute minimum amount of effort.”

“I have been.” Will said quietly. “I’m terrible at it, and it’s exhausting.”

“It’s exhausting because you’ve never thought in this way before. It’s difficult, and you’re learning…but you’ll get used to it.” Loth said. “By any measurement, you’ve been doing quite well for yourself, gaining the Oilton family’s support, and stealing Mason’s Tank out from under him with Alicia’s influence.”

“But they did that, not me.”

“You sold our potential to Roger Oilton, which convinced him to fund us, and you instructed Alicia to meet the Lanover family, fully aware that they would bend over backwards for her.”

“Yeah, but I couldn’t’ve done it without them.”

“…What do you think leadership is, exactly?” Loth asked, cocking her head. “It does not exist in a vacuum.”

“What do you mean?” Will asked.