“How are we not there yet?” Marco slashed vines and branches out of his way with his rapier. It wasn’t really built for the work, but the upgrades it had absorbed from dead pirates made that less of an issue than he would have thought. “We’ve been walking for days.”

“Hours,” Elisa said, double-checking her estimate with the position of the sun. “Not even that. Traveling through rough terrain takes time, Marco. It’s not like in the books.”

“And why the hell not? We’re high enough level. We should feel like this is a walk in a park.” Riv brought his club down on a palm sapling in his way, knocking it flat to the ground and ending its tree career for good. “Instead, I feel like a traveling landscaper.”

“This is not that hard.” Aethe continued on as she had most of the way, using her system skills to avoid most of the worst of the terrain as if she was water flowing through rather than a flesh-and-blood person trudging across. “I’ve been through much worse.”

“So have I,” Marco said, “but I think that you have a bit of an advantage over us. How high is whatever skill that lets you do that?”

“It’s level fifteen, I think?” Aethe responded as she showed her grace again and again. “I don’t get much opportunity to level it anymore. And a higher level wouldn’t even make a difference here, since the skill can handle this terrain already. It would just make the skill apply to worse and worse terrain.”

“Huh,” Marco said. “I wonder how much worse this would be without a bunch of points in dexterity.”

“It’s funny. Our levels have been going up, right? I remember at the beginning of this quest we used to stop and check them all the time. We still do to allot points, or at least I do. But we hardly talk about it these days,” Riv said as he made a mock swing with his club. Even to Marco’s untrained eye, Riv seemed to have much more force and precision behind those swings than before. “Here’s this worldchanging power, Riv, and it’s going to get boring soon. If anyone had told me that would be how it was going to be like this, I wouldn’t have believed them.”

“Oh, I think it’s still interesting enough. It’s just that we haven’t had to deal with many dungeons lately. We hardly get to pick our battles with the pirates, and I don’t think any of us has gotten any new skills in a while,” Marco said.

“My skills have changed a little over time. But yeah. It hasn’t seemed worth the effort to talk about them lately.”

Marco had a piece of paper in his pocket in which Elisa had put down what she considered to be his best stat distribution for the next fifty levels, unless something major changed. He had popped his points in there as she had told him to, and now couldn’t help taking a much longer look at the list than he had in a while

“These numbers almost don’t seem real sometimes,” Marco commented. He slashed his rapier forward and cleared a surprising amount of jungle in a single blow. “And then I do that and get reminded how much they are real.”

“Yeah, I just looked at my stats too,” Elisa said. “How many fights have we been in?”

“Well, it was first the Bladefish and then a bunch of horrible little goblins. That’s when we found Riv.” Marco looked over at their quartermaster, gladder than ever that they had chosen to accept the quest in the Palmer dungeon. “Then we successfully ran from a navy, which was good for me at least.”

“Then we killed that zombie captain,” Riv added. “And a whole lot of crabs. And then we’ve been killing pirates left and right since then.”

“It’s funny. You know I didn’t want to be a pirate captain, but the experience from it is so good that I’m surprised you don’t see more pirates everywhere,” Marco said. “Almost every fight we’ve been in has led to a new level up. They’d be the strongest guys in the area every time. Why not?”

Stolen story; please report.

“Only classes with a strong combat component get full experience from that kind of thing,” Elisa said. “Why do you think I’m always writing in my book? I don’t get nearly as much from fights as you two do, and I make up the rest of it by learning and documenting things.”

“I’m surprised you’ve even kept up in that case.”

“I wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for how bizarre the island and the temple are. I was falling behind before I got the bumps from those.”

The island they were on was bizarrely boring. They passed no dungeons, saw no beasts, and generally didn’t encounter anything more terrifying than their pants getting snagged on thorns or a bit more mud on their boots than they liked. Checking their screens had been fun and all, but it didn’t really help them for more than a few minutes before the loudest of them was back to whining about the walk.

“How can there be so little here?” Marco said. “Besides weeds and trees, I mean.”

“It’s a whole island of pirates,” Elisa said. “Most of them are going to be combat classes. They have to have had some free time since they showed up here, right? They’ve probably been hunting.”

“This much, though?”

“Sure. If a tenth of those pirates had been working this island, they would have crushed any animals that didn’t run from them. Overhunted the dungeons until they collapsed, maybe. Not all dungeons are multiple use anyway.”

“Really it’s shocking we haven’t seen something else though,” Aethe said. “I thought we would have seen it by now.”

“What, Aethe?” Marco asked. “Giant mosquitos?”

“No. Resistance. If they hunted this island down this much, I’d think there would be patrols every now and again. We haven’t seen anything yet.”

Aethe jinxed it. They were only a few minutes further through the brush when Aethe jerked to a stop and motioned everyone to drop. They did, following her lead in staying completely quiet as whatever she had detected slowly became audible in the distance.

“They’re coming this way,” Aethe said, pulling her bow from her back. Her voice was barely audible, but everyone seemed to catch it. “Hit them very hard when they come through those trees.”

Marco had a few tense moments, wondering if he’d have the gumption and moral certainty to take down their enemies that way. So far, his fights had been with those who were undoubtedly evil or aggressive enough that he had to fight. He was sure that he and his crew would fight against these pirates. But even a moment’s hesitation at the idea of hitting someone first when the other side hadn’t attacked could be fatal here, especially since they had no idea how strong the enemy bursting through those bushes would be. And Marco was hesitating.

It was a false concern. The enemies numbered two exactly, and they came through the bush at so coordinated a time that it would have been almost impossible to see one without looking at the other in the same glance.

These, Marco realized, were the two pirates who had been let go from the bar after trying to cause trouble there. They were the two pirates who had been shown mercy and had returned that favor by bringing back a floating mass of cannon fire and boarding parties to slaughter anyone they could find.

There was no delay at all. Marco had his sword stabbing forward before the man could even register that he was being attacked. On the way in, Marco’s gun had fired once, and it fired again just as the pirate’s hand reached his sword, hitting his wrist and keeping his hand off his weapon for another split second.

Marco pulled his rapier out and cut at the pirate’s legs next, letting him get his hand to his saber and free it from the sheath. That was fine with Marco, considering that he knew that at least one of his friends was close behind him. His ducking motion continued past the leg slash and carried him behind the man as the lightning started hitting. Elisa tagged him easily, not hurting the pirate much but forcing him to jerk backwards into Marco’s waiting sword.

Off to the side, he could see Riv swinging a club at the other opponent again and again. It was surprising that it took more than one hit, but his assigned combatant wasn’t exactly hitting the dirt dead from every strike either, so he couldn’t judge. Marco continued by firing a gun into the back of the man’s head, crushing in his leather-esque helmet a bit and knocking him clean over. Elisa kept up the thunder as Marco stabbed him five or ten more times, finally taking him down.

“It feels nice,” Marco said, “to know that we helped Helde in some small way. Some payback for what they did to her bar.”

“Those guys were surprisingly tough,” Riv said. “He took three or four times the usual squishing.”

“I agree. My arrows were hardly penetrating.”

“I don’t think we have time to worry about that. Aethe, should we hide these bodies?” Marco asked.

“No use. They are about as close to hidden as they can be already. I don’t see anyone stumbling on them here that wouldn’t stumble on them no matter what. It would take very good luck or a skill.”

“Then let’s move.” Marco chopped down the next set of trees as Riv quickly emptied the pirate’s pockets of any useful-looking items or money. “Quickly.”

The town was closer than they thought, or at least what it felt like it should be after a fight. Another ten minutes gave them their first glimpses of sails in the distance, then another five minutes downhill towards the shore got them to the treeline of the pirate settlement.

It was dense. There were what looked like hundreds to thousands of pirates milling around, most having apparently come from small two-man assault ships meant for speed and soft targets. It also meant that there were a lot more people than what Marco had expected. They hadn’t seen the smaller from afar, and it had thrown their estimates of how much resistance they might face here off.

“Does it really change anything?” Riv mused. “It’s not like we could have taken them directly anyway.”

“It doesn’t,” Aethe said. “And we killed the only two pirates who know us by sight, I think. We are safer now, if anything. That many people, they definitely don’t know everyone.”

“Then what’s the plan?”

“We have two options,” Elisa said. “We can either go down there now and mingle, trying to learn things. Or we can hang back until night, sneak down to the docks, set it all on fire, and hope we don’t get caught at all.”

“The second sounds better. I’m not seeing why we’d ever want to do the first.”

“Well, think about it,” Riv said. “Nobody knows what we look like, but if they see us during the day not causing trouble, they might think we aren’t causing trouble when they find us poking around the boats at night.”

“But it’s a long shot,” Marco replied. “And we are going to be poking around a lot of boats.”

“Yeah.” Riv looked down at his hands sadly. “And I don’t see myself getting through that long without causing a problem.”

Elisa looked between Riv and Marco.

“Good thing I had a different plan in mind then.”