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Tutorial Rewrite 73
🕑 Added 2023-01-18 09:32:49 +0000 UTCIt’s a simple plan, but in this case, I have good reason to believe it will work.
I have three weeks to kill as many as I can. This shouldn’t be any issue. It’s just that I need to kill them in such a way where I can pick them off not necessarily one by one, but rather in small groups. If they all come at me at once, I’m a goner. But since they don’t know where I am, as long as that remains the case, they won’t be able to do anything to me. It’s just me, against them.
Simple, right?
Another positive is that I don’t physically need to eat or drink or sleep, and I don’t leave any, erm, smellable traces. I do leave marks on the trees I climb, but these would be hard to timestamp, so I don’t think there’ll be much trouble with that.
Hmm.
I lift my nose into the air. Sniffsniffsniffsniff. Yup, I can smell them. I can even smell Het, and the way his arm is bloodied. Perfect.
It may be just slightly cowardly, but it is time for me to introduce this place to some good ol’ guerilla warfare.
First up, I spend a few hours simply observing their camp. My stealth skill, now called hidden, should be good enough to keep me out of their sights, but just in case, I still engage FPB. This way, I carefully observe their goings and comings. Right now, their biggest weakness, and my greatest strength, is that they have human physiology. I can see them drinking, and eating, and doing all other business a human would normally do. At one point, a small group of them—most of them being students with a single adult coming along—went out into the forest. I followed them, without any intention of attacking, simply observing.
As I watch them from the treetops, I see them go through the forest, and after a while, they reach a flowing stream. They fill a few buckets they were carrying, and then they return to base camp. I follow them.
Back at the base camp, a lot of stuff is going on. But my interest lies on a certain group, all wearing blue—the same colour that Het wore—carrying large bags and heading out into the forest. I follow them, but since they’re wearing blue, I won’t attack.
After going a fair bit into the forest, they set up a small encampment. Right.
I go back to the base camp, just in time to watch as a group clad in red—the colour of Jirya—does the same thing. I follow them, and once they’re too far away to be seen or heard in time to be saved, I attack.
Most of them are just young teenagers, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, with only a single teacher following along with them. The maths teacher. He gave me a really bad grade once.
The teenagers only have levels of around 20, so even though they all have short swords and a few even have bows, I still kill them relatively easily. And that leaves me with only the maths teacher. His wide eyes dart shakingly from me to the bodies lying in the high grass. “H-, Ho-Jae… Why—”
Before he says anything else, I leap at him. He stabs his sword through my left lung but that’s fine. Once I’m close enough to him, I tear off his jaw and push his loosened tongue deep into his throat to both choke and silence him at once. Very effectively. And then, before he’s had time to die, I start disassembling him. By the end of it, I’ve got myself a perfectly usable huma-, uh, shade hide. It’s a bit bigger than me, but it should be enough to cause some funky trouble. I put it into my inventory, and then I do the same to the other bodies.
Normally, I want to take everything I can, but this is a different kind of situation. So, since I can’t do much with or really eat them, I leave the hands, feet and heads right where I killed them.
Before I leave, though, I check through the bags to see if there’s anything useful. From what I can see, they have enough things to set up a small base, but since having a base would be to my direct detriment, I just leave that stuff alone.
My very first goal in this situation is to freak them out. I need them all to be on their toes, constantly, always. That way, they’ll have trouble sleeping, and they’ll quarrel, and they’ll eat poorly, and all this will in the end cause them to make bad decisions. Bad decisions that I can then take excellent advantage of.
I go back to base camp, leaping through the trees like a monkey. Not much is happening, so now is just the right time to set up traps.
…That’s a classic part of guerilla warfare, right? Traps everywhere? Yeah. My only problem is that I don’t know all that many trap-setting techniques. It’s mostly just to make them more freaked out by the jungle, so killing isn’t entirely necessary.
Let’s see, what kind of traps would be best? Falling pit with sharp sticks at the bottom? Regular falling pit? Tripwire? All very tempting. I would love to do something cool with tripwires, but I actually have no idea how I would make that work. I don’t even have wire to make the tripping. Disguised pits full of sharp stuff it is!
In that case…
Slipping back to where I’d killed that red squad, I loot the swords and spears and arrows that I’d previously left behind because. Hm. I’d better take these sorts of things more often. It also doesn’t hurt to steal their stuff, so even if I won’t use it or anything, I grab the tent stuff, too.
And now, I just need to make a bunch of pits and put this stuff at the bottom. My hands should be enough to dig, right? Right.
I want to make my traps on the little paths that go from the small base they made earlier to the big base, or to make one on the path to the river, but there are people walking there, so… yeah. I could camp out the river path, but then they’d catch on to my location pretty quickly.
They’ve already started sending out random tiny squadrons to try to find me, and since killing a squadron would alert the rest, there isn’t much I can do. At least, for now.
When night falls is a completely different story.
Unlike the daytime, most people aren’t up and about. Sure, they have some guards, but they don’t mean anything. The really important thing is that the paths aren’t being used, which means that my time to shine is now.
I choose the path to the river as my first choice. Once I pick out an appropriate location, I get digging. And digging. And digging. And digging. And digging…
<You have learned:
Dig Lv.1>
Right, yeah, very useful. Digging an appropriately deep pit was a bit more difficult than I had imagined. The whole thing took me well over two hours to do, not to mention fastening the arrows at the bottom. Just for the sake of it, I also slathered the arrows with my own blood. Just because, you know? But the real challenge was covering it up. In the cartoons, the booby traps are always covered just in a layer of leaves, but apparently, you can’t just put a bunch of leaves over it and be done with it.
Most of the trap-making process was actually just me trying to figure out how to make a convincing-looking cover for the trap. Once it was done, I was almost tempted to test it on myself just to make sure it worked, but I couldn’t bring myself to.
And then, I just had to repeat the whole process for the other path. Eugh.
<You have learned:
Dig Lv.6>
Phew, that was a lot of work. I still have a couple of hours until sunrise, so it would be a waste to just… not do anything.
I make my way back to the main camp.
They’ve got a couple of guards, but they can easily be bypassed with fetal position blowover. Deftly, I roll towards one of the red tents and sneak inside. Well there, I stand up, just to get a good look at what I’m dealing with. There are about two dozen sleeping teenagers, snoring softly under their covers. They look awfully comfortable, but soon they’ll be even more comfortable. Hehe.
I sneak up to the side of one bed. In a single movement, I press my left hand onto the lower half of his face, stifling his scream, and the very second his eyes flare open in terror and recognition, I press my fingers into his neck, my claws stabbing through the soft skin, through the soft muscles, until I can close them around his quivering throat, which I deftly pull out. He jerks once, twice, before twitching a little as he stops moving completely.
<Shade (Lv.21) Defeated>
One down, approximately twenty-three to go.
I move to the next bed, but instead of just slashing his throat or something like that, I try something else. Honestly, I’ve always wanted to do this.
I place my hands on either side of his head, and then I twist as hard as I can. Cr—ack! And then, nothing. He didn’t even have time to open his eyes.
<Shade (Lv.20) Defeated.>
Very effective! But I think I prefer getting my hands just a little dirtier.
Slowly, deliberately, I move through the room, one by one, like a spectre of death.
But at the very last bed, I pause. This guy… I recognise him. Kim… Kim… Something with Kim. Min-Hyuk? Was that it? I don’t know. He was a classmate of mine. He wasn’t too bad. He didn’t laugh at me, or pick on me too much. He was… nice. My trembling hands reach for his throat. I just need to kill him. That’s all. Then it’ll be over. That’s all. That’s the only thing I need to—
His eyes gently flutter open. They fall on me. I look back at him. My breathing is fast, shallow. He almost seems… calm.
His eyebrows knit together. “Ho-Jae?...”
I grasp both of my hands around his neck so tightly that he doesn’t even have time to choke before I can feel something crack and he’s just gone, but that look of pure, innocent recognition in his eyes doesn’t leave, it just doesn’t go away, even when the light fades from his eyes, that simple, quizzical look remains.
<You have learned:
Clutch Lv.7>
<Shade (Lv.20) Defeated.>
Haaah, haaah, haaah… S-, see? That wasn’t so hard. Not at all, in fact.
Sitting down, I carefully bundle myself into a little ball. After a second or two, I roll out of the tent. I had wanted to dissect them, to make them look horribly mutilated and horrific and bad, but I just… I didn’t feel like it, okay? Isn’t it frightening enough with them just being dead? Being dead is being dead. It doesn’t matter if your guts have gone flying everywhere or if your head’s busted open. Dead is dead. That’s all.
Since there are still a few more hours left of the evening, I spend the rest of the night digging a few more traps, and then just for the sake of it, I don the shade hide I took earlier, and while wearing it, I deliberately waltz into camp, on all fours, waiting until several different guards can see me before I bolt forward and grab one of them, dragging him off while the others can do nothing but watch as he struggles in my grip, screaming all the way into the forest. Once in the depths of the jungle, I tear him up, disassemble him, and put most of what I got in my inventory.
I almost want to wait a bit before doing this, but the sooner the better, right?
I head to the river. It’s relatively small, but anyways. Following upstream, I investigate the origins of the water, but after a while, I hit an invisible wall, so, yeah. By scouting out a bit more of the forest, I find a small pond, which is more useful for my schemes. Pulling the internal organs and a few of the limbs I collected from my inventory, I dump the lot of it into the pond. Aside from the river, this is the only source of water in the designated area. So, to make sure they have no choice but to use this soon-to-be poisoned pond, I’ll just need to make them completely unable to use the totally superior river.
This means doing a little camping.
But, before that, I might as well set up a few more traps along the river, just to make it even more unappetising.
<You have learned:
Dig Lv.7>
<You have learned:
Dig Lv.8>
You know, all things considered, I’d say that this whole floor is going pretty well. If anything, trying to side with one group would just have made it more difficult.
Probably.
