Chapter 73: The Anthus Conspiracy I
“You could have just come here with that fancy new Dimensional Step of yours.”
“And miss out on all the sights and joys of trekking through the wilds? I think not,” Orodan defended, and she hummed in agreement, having enjoyed it as well.
Yes, there were roads he could have taken to arrive the regular way. But those were the trappings of civilization, and sometimes a walk through nature served one better. He wouldn’t have gained the five levels in Pathfinding either.
Five entire levels gained in Pathfinding, in a singular journey. It was a ridiculous gain, all thanks to his Combat Mastery.
Combat Transcendence was a strange and powerful thing. Even now Orodan felt he had yet to fathom the true potential of what he’d stumbled upon. Each step in the wilds came with insights as his mind, which split into many and became his skills, went to war with itself to provide the greatest outcome possible.
He walked left, and Wood Communion battled to insist he go right where the worst of the underbrush was, and Pathfinding would gain the most. He thought of going straight, and then Physical Fitness waged war to demand he instead handstand and walk on a singular finger through an incredibly rocky stretch between two mountains. He then wanted to go right but Vision of Purity fought to ensure he swam through a filth-filled swamp and explored the completely mud-flooded caves for the real Pathfinding experience.
He’d ended up getting lost multiple times as he wandered in circles, seeking the most challenging things possible. Until at last Pathfinding itself had stepped in, seeing that no further gains were possible in these particular parts of the wild, and it had set him on the correct path to Anthus.
With the military and the militia for each county doing regular patrols and sweeps, the roads and the immediate area around them weren’t too bad. The wilds off of the beaten path were a different story though. Plenty of the deeper wilds had Master and Grandmaster-level monsters, and much of them were uncharted, with expansions by any towns or cities having to be carefully planned in advance, or backed by the assurance of Grandmasters. Anyone else trekking through the eastern wilds of the Republic of Aden would have been in for a bad time.
Orodan though, had an uneventful journey. For starters, creatures with magical senses or soul detection abilities just couldn’t find him. And those that did have the ability to sense him physically - easily done given how loudly he tromped about the underbrush - avoided Orodan anyhow. A natural reaction to them being unable to get any instinctual feel off of him. A wise and understandable move since the wilds were no fairy tale utopia of gentle nature, but a brutal ecosystem in which monsters were as vulnerable to one another as people were to them.