Chapter 41: Danica

After wrenching her sword free from the giant’s bloody and bruised corpse, Lexi glanced over at her companions. Seeing that they were both quite worse for wear, but definitely alive, the paladin stuck the blade straight down into the ground so that it would stand up straight, and plopped right down there, leaning her back against the flat of the blade like a makeshift chair back. Breathing heavily, Lexi closed her eyes for a moment, silently basking in her party’s extremely hard won victory over the pair of would-be slavers.

These guys seemed way tougher than anything we’d faced before, which makes sense if the game’s central AI is arranging encounters based on our increases in skills and abilities. But still, this was pretty fucking brutal. Samantha and Gretel both look super rough too. I wonder if we’ll even have enough spell points between the three of us to get healed up? And, shit, if the encounters are already THIS hard two-days out from the quest’s destination, how fucking hard is it going to be once get there?

The internal monologue was only broken when Lexi realized that there was a popup message waiting her her, hanging politely in the periphery of her heads-up display.

No wonder that guy was so tough, level four! I didn’t even get bumped up that high with this new crop of XP, shit. Still, that puts me right on the cusp of the next level, so that’ll be happening pretty soon given the way things have been going for the last three days. This makes me wonder, though, can I see Gretel and Samantha’s XP and levels? I mean, they’re not just any NPCs after all, they’re my followers.

Lexi decided to test out the generic sublingual command structure that Felicity had instructed her in, and was happily surprised to see that it did in fact get her precisely the kind of data she was hoping to see.

Get Party!

While Lexi was more than happy to see that not only had both Gretel and Samantha gotten themselves up to level two, but they were both also steadily approaching the third level as well. However, she was still somewhat concerned by the relatively low power level of her party — as clearly evidenced by the sheer volume of damage both she and her two friends had incurred. If this had been a typical J-RPG, Lexi would have been extremely wary about such a low-level party, with no magical weapons, even considering attacking a potentially fortified goblin temple.

But, it’s not like I have any real choice in the matter. After all, if we don’t somehow manage to retrieve this Starseed, then it’s pretty much game over for me anyway.

An idea struck the paladin then. If Lexi had been a cartoon character, she imagined that a blinking light bulb would have suddenly appeared over her head. In her initial cursory sweep of the situation, she had noticed several arrows sticking up from the black robed mage’s back. Since none of her current party members were archers, she assumed that this had been the handiwork of the elf maid they had been attempting to rescue. If Lexi could convince this elf girl to join her party — which might just have been the reason the game’s AI constructed this scenario to begin with — then she could really be a force multiplier.

Struggling back up to her feet after the all too brief respite, Lexi pulled her enormous broadsword free from the ground, resheathing the blade on her back. She then limped over to where Samantha was, propped up on one knee, sweat dripping profusely from the monk’s shaggy white banks to run down her exposed bronzed musculature in glistening rivulets. The paladin extended an arm to the monk, who gripped it around the forearm. And, with a heave on both their parts, their collective powers — diminished as they might be — managed to get the injured Samantha back onto her feet.

“You look like shit,” Lexi said flashing a snarky grin.

“I have certainly felt better,” the monk replied, the hint of a smile pulling up at her lips. “Though, I certainly count the price well paid, for us to have defeated so mighty a foe.”

“Seriously!” the paladin said, wrapping her arm around Samantha’s waist to steady her as they walked. “What the everliving fuck was up with that guy?”

“I cannot say,” Samantha replied shaking her head. “Certainly such a spell is well beyond me, but my knowledge of such things is quite limited.”

“Yeah, same here. Still, those combos you came out with were really fucking killer!”

“Thank you,” the monk said blushing deeply, her eyes going wide as they stared rather intently at her feet. “They can be difficult to execute in the heat of battle, and if I happen to miss with the initial strike from the combination, I have no real way to adjust.”

“Ahhh, gotcha,” Lexi nodded. “No course correction, which leaves you open to a counterstrike from the other guy.”

“Just so,” Samantha agreed.

“Well still,” the paladin said, giving the monk’s amazingly striated abs a quick squeeze. “You were fucking amazing back there, and I’m glad we’ve got each other.”

Samantha made no reply to this, but from the deepening of her blush, Lexi knew that her words had struck home.

“Anyway,” Lexi continued. “Let’s check on Gretel and this oh-so-mysterious elf that we just risked our asses to save.”

The paladin and monk barely made it to the edge of the clearing where Gretel and the elf were huddled together before collapsing once again from the combined fatigue and sheer exhaustion of the battle the two had just waged. Samantha’s large muscled ass hit the ground, as her legs folded themselves into a cross-legged sitting position. Whereas Lexi less gracefully dropped to her knees, tossing her sword to the ground and rolling her head in clockwise circles to loosen up the knots that had formed in her neck from the repeated blows she had taken to the face.

The paladin took a breath, intending to ask Gretel and the elf how they were doing, but as soon as Lexi made eye contact with the elf girl, the latter’s mouth exploded into a torrent of rapid-fire speech that left Lexi — and the rest of the party — completely dumbstruck.

“You’re all super amazing! Are you all fighters and magic users? I don’t have any spells per se, but since I’m a ranger I can talk to flora and fauna, and sometime get them to help me, but that’s nothing compared to what you three did. I mean, wow! My name’s Danica, by the way, Danica Woodbine, and—”

Lexi realized with growing shock that if she did not cut the girl off, then who knew how long it would be before the paladin could get a word in edgewise.