Bounty Hunter Chapter 7: Mountains

Chapter 7: Mountains

Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations

Editor: UA

Carringer only took a short time to go up the mountain because he didn’t meet any infected.. He arrived at the Moon Tower before midnight. There are no notes or boxes under the cliff today, so it seems that Rime no longer needs him.

Now the problem is no one’s there to open the door for him. Even if Rime knew he was standing here, Carringer was worried he wouldn’t open the door for him.

 Carringer makes a few symbolic taps on the stone walls, yells, and finally picks up a pile of small stones and throws them at the area where the gate once appeared.

It was all useless. The mage couldn’t hear him at all.

Carringer thought of the spherical quadruped, there is a mechanism on the statue that can transmit messages. According to previous experience, the mage must have left a lot of magic images in the mountains. If he looks carefully, he should be able to find one.

So Carringer changed his strategy. Instead of looking for demons today, the bounty hunter searched all over the mountain for the quadruped.

Demons are one of the enemies that bounty hunters may face. Carringer has fought demons several times before, and three of them were particularly impressive:

The first time was when he had to search for the lost spy insect construct, which was very annoying and laborious; the second time was when he needed to kill a necromancer together with two other hunters, and the necromancer died quickly. On the contrary, iron and flesh demons were very difficult to deal with; the third time was when he had to destroy an out of control stone shield golem entrusted by a certain mage. When receiving the task, Carringer thought it was only a little harder than an adult Orc, but it was a triploid. In the end, Carringer successfully destroyed its core. He didn’t get hurt by the shield guard, but almost fell to his death.

Carringer was very experienced in dealing with demons. He knew how the mages worked and was always ready for the things that would disturb them.

While paying attention to the marks on the ground, he pulled out the broad blade sword on his back and painted the body of the sword with shimmering powder. This is a type of magical preparation for disturbing the enemy; when spread on the surface of metal objects, the object will attract magic constructs with functions of detection and antagonization. If the construct has the ability to attack, the sword will automatically enter into the hostile state due to the influence of the preparation.

Whether it is a chimeric corpse with patrol ability, a magic eye that plays a monitoring role, or a magical image of any material, as long as it has the function of ‘detecting and antagonizing’, it will be attracted by the potion.

This medicine can only be applied to metal objects, not to living animals. Usually, hunters use it as a cover to deceive the patrolling demons or corpses, lead them away, or sneak into their locations

Now, Carringer has prepared his sword, but there is a risk in doing so, because he was afraid it won’t just be the ‘scouts’ that are attracted.Generally speaking, there won’t just be one kind of mirage in a mage’s territory, but various constructs of different patterns, which are used for surveillance, investigation, communication, chores, attack and defense, etc. In the case that there is something guarding the Falling Moon Tower, it will be awakened, go straight to Carringer, and automatically switch to a hostile state.

Carringer stretched his arms and neck to get ready for battle.

Looking at the cliff reflected by the faint blue light, he said to himself, “Why is it so difficult to see you? It’s harder than going to see the king and the princess.”

 

Rime is still reading, he’d already finished the section [How to avoid the impoliteness of leaving without saying goodbye.] At this time, the gears in the high place of the library creaks, and a metal ball connected by a chain slowly drops down, flashing an orange light. 

As soon as Rime stands up, he falls into the chair again because of the vertigo.

“Tower watchers activated an alert?” He looked up in surprise, two more balls began to glow and fall after the first orange ball.

“Why… All three are on?” Rime quickly pushed aside the book and pulled out a parchment scroll from the inside of his robe.

After the scroll was unfolded, Rime’s hands ran over the surface of the scroll, picking up lines from the text with his fingertips, and lifting them into the air like a silk thread. With a spell command, the line expands into a ‘paper’ map..

The ‘paper’ is a top-down layout of this mountain forest.

The void in the center of the map is the Moon Tower, surrounded by figures and lines representing trees and roads. There are some luminous spots on the map, representing four football-body demons, which are called ‘eye spiders’ in the legends.

Rime can locate any eye spider and retrieve its investigation records. He could see that the constructs inside the tower are not abnormal, but all the eye spiders outside the tower are moving. The three tower guards around the tower are activated, and all the constructs are converging towards some place on the mountain path.

Rime checked one eye spider after another, and finally saw real-time information about the encounter with hostile creatures on several of them.

Looking at the messages carefully, he immediately recognized who the other party was.

Rime locates an eye spider, picks up the spot of light with his fingertips, and unfolds a new phantom paper from it. He picked up the glass pen on the table and wrote on the paper without ink.

Meanwhile, Carringer is surrounded by four spiders.

The scouting goblins themselves have little combat power, but he has to deal with them carefully because they may release stored spells.

Carringer knew that there was a little red dot on the spheres, and he could communicate with the caster by pressing it. He thought about how to press the red dot safely. When he reached the red dot, the magic image made a sound and the red dot on the top started shining, “Please come closer, please press here, please press here, you can talk.”

Carringer pressed it skillfully, hearing the same tone as last time, “Please wait, don’t move your finger. Connected. You can move your finger.”

Before he could speak, the demon quickly uttered in a flat but angry voice, “How come it’s you again? What the hell did you do?”

Carringer chuckled. “As long as I don’t talk to your face, why are you so grumpy?”

“I’m also irritable in front of you! Now, what have you done?”

“I need to see you for something,” Carringer said. “Because I can’t knock on the door, I can only get your attention this way. Now that you’re in touch, open the door for me.”

“No! Go away!”

In the Falling Moon Tower, Rime quickly wrote [No I won’t open it! Go away!] This sentence almost made him throw away the pen in anger.

Fortunately, he quickly realized that it was a glass pen rather than a feather pen, and that it was left to him by his teacher Jingh.

Rime leaned back on the chair and rubbed his eyes. He had shown as much rejection and hostility as he could, and the bounty hunter still didn’t give up.

He could guess that the abnormality of the constructs must be due to the poison of disturbing the enemy. If he wanted to eliminate the influence of the potion, he’d have to use a potion with a counter effect, or cancel the acting ability of the affected constructs and then wake them up again. Either way, he had to open the tower door and go out. These things can’t be done remotely.

He didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to face Carringer, he didn’t want to face the people of Black Tree Village. He is very self-conscious and knows that he is not good at communicating with people in person.

So he cursed the villagers with letters and drove away the bounty hunter through the magicalimage – he wrote words, and the eye spider then read his words remotely.

In fact, the eye spider can transmit sound directly. Carringer’s voice is transmitted back and forth in this way, but Rime can’t do it. He can’t swear directly because he cannot speak that fastand his tone is not fierce enough, so he has no sense of authority.

Then Carringer’s voice came again, “I don’t understand why you won’t even talk about it? I’m a bounty hunter. Bounty hunters always work with mages. I’m not a temple knight who discriminates against castersGod, I can see your tower guard! It’s coming! It’s coming!”

Rime had a tangled complexion. These tower guards were developed by Teacher Jingh himself, and Rime knows how powerful they are.

Although Carringer asked for trouble, it would not if he was really killed by the guards…

“Why didn’t you run when you saw them? Their guard range is only halfway up the mountain. If you run fast down the mountain, you will be ok. Get out of here!”

Carringer immediately replied, “Are there only three guards in your tower? Is that too little?”

In fact, there used to be more than three guards. But over the years, there have been all kinds of incidents in Moon Tower. Now there are only three left. But Rime didn’t want to answer. He just wanted to get rid of the hunter.

So he wrote, “Too little? Then don’t run, stay and fight them. When you’re dead, I’ll tell your story to the poet at the foot of the mountain, and ask him to write a story about a mentally retarded hunter fighting a shield golem, and then being trampled into a blanket with his head smashed in. At least it’ll be a wake-up call. Goodbye. I’m going to turn off communications. I wish you a miserable death.”

On the other side, Carringer was standing on the mountain road in the early morning, carrying a broad blade sword, listening to the eye spider reciting the above words, and watching three shield guards, two times larger than a bear, approaching him from different directions. He was a little nervous, but not afraid, and even couldn’t help laughing.

Carringer exclaimed, “Wonderful, haha, wonderful! Torn into 300 pieces, let my mother and wife sew me for three days and three nights, duel with the shield guard, and be trampled into a blanket! Master Rime, where are you from? Elf, are all your family members in your hometown like this…”

Actually, Rime can still hear what’s going on here. He said he turned off the communication, but he didn’t. He just let the red dot on the spider appear to go out.

Rime’s face is a little hot. In fact, he could write more caustic sentences, but he didn’t want to go on.

Dialogue could distract Carringer, who is facing the tower guards right now.

Rime has made up his mind not to open the door or help Carringer. Carringer’s fighting ability is not weak, as long as he takes it seriously, escape should be no problem.

For Carringer, it’s not hard to run. His poison wason the sword, as long as he left the sword, the shield guard and the eye spider would not target him at all. But Carringer didn’t do that.

The nearest shield guard rushed to attack him with his arm. Carringer carried the broad blade sword and jumped and climbed. He caught a thick branch, looked at his position, jumped down and onto the shoulder of the shield guard. At the same time, he skillfully stuck the blade into the structural joint between its back shoulder blade and waist.

This position is the weakness, or design flaw, of most large shields. Their attack and defenses can’t reach this point. After the blade gets stuck, the shield guard could not pull it out by itself.

After his success, Carringer leaped off with agility. Another shield guard rushed up and charged.

Soon, the three shield guards were in a ball. They are equally strong, equally smart, equally stupid and indefatigable. Although they attacked each other fiercely, they couldn’t hurt anyone.

Carringer didn’t even want to fight. It is very difficult for human beings to hurt metal constructs unless they use some means to destroy their structures. However, he did not bring professional tools or a professional staff, so he had to come up with such a method.

He hid aside, mourning his broad blade sword, and deliberately making all kinds of painful sounds.

First of all, he hummed, and occasionally screamed, swore, panted violently, coughed, gnashed his teeth, and howled. He deliberately kicked the ground, ripped plants, and threw stones at other stones. He broke a handful of dead branches on the ground, coupled with suppressed pain.

He had already guessed that Rime would turn off the communication, but he must still be eavesdropping on the battle.

Although eye spiders can help the mage detect things and transmit sounds, it could not transmit images from the other end.If it could, then Rime would see the three guards attacking each other, and would have started swearing already.

Carringer was right.

The sounds, to Rime, were apparently of the bounty hunter being besieged by metal shields, being beaten to death, and having no time to regret running.

Rime grabs an old Scepter with a broken gem at his desk and rushes to the spiral staircase. He steps on the floating saucer, squats on his knees, and makes the floating dish rise as fast as possible.

Rime was swearing all the way. For him, just walking at such a fast pace is already a great burden, so his swears were incoherent and his voice intermittent. Although it was a little uncomfortable, he really did not want to shut up, scolding is his only way to vent.

He didn’t want the bounty hunter to die.

After leaving the moon tower, he recalled the engineering drawings from Teacher Jingh, recalled all the first aid knowledge he had learned, and turned the magic lighting in the tree crown higher by a few degrees.

When he arrived at the scene of the conflict, he was staring at the tragic scene: one shield guard was lying on the ground, and the other two were storming at it. A sword was stuck in the joint of its shoulder blades, it had been twisted and deformed, so it stuck more tightly. The shield guard itself was not damaged, but it was struggling to stand up again because it was being suppressed.

Rime’s line of sight crossed three behemoths and saw a familiar figure, leaning against the opposite tree.

Carringer, unharmed and smiling, bowed to him as if they were meeting for the first time.

In a flash, Rime understood the truth. He really wanted to swear, but rushing over here has made his chest tight, which made him really powerless.

No matter what Carringer had done, he can’t leave the three shields alone. He calls in an eye spider and draws a spell character on its top. The eye spider pops a small box from the side of its body.

Rime recites a spell. With his gesture, pale-gold grains of sand floated out of the small box, and the sand flowed into the three shields and penetrated into the joints of their bodies.

After all the sand particles had gone into the body of the demons, a thin silk thread changed from virtual to solid in the air. On one end were the joints of the statue and the other was the fingertip of the mage.

Seeing this scene, Carringer was totally absorbed, and secretly marveled. This is the first time he has seen a mage repair a magic statue.

Rime dropped the wooden scepter, beckoned the enchanted statue with his left hand, and drew various spell runes in the air with his right hand. The three statues first stopped their movements, and then slowly resumed their standing posture. One of them pulls out the twisted and deformed sword. Then the three statues stood in a line and slowly walked towards the moon tower to return to their hiding place and standby.

After all this, the thread in the air disappeared. Rime lowers his hands, is silent for a moment, and turns to Carringer.

“You…” Rime found that his voice was a little weak and could not finish his speech for a moment.

Carringer immediately answered, “The sheriff’s dead.”

Rime was stunned.

Carringer said, “He hid, the food you gave didn’t arrive in time, he attacked his family. I killed him.”

“So it’s him,” he nodded gently.

Carringer asked, “You only knew that an infected body had left the forest, but you didn’t know who it was?”

“Mn. I only knew the approximate range… ” With that, he slowly opened his eyes, “Wait, just… what did you say?”

“I said the sheriff is dead. That’s Marlowe.”

Rime took two steps forward and looked into Carringer’s eyes, “No. Just now, you said food?”

Carringer laughed. “Food, of course. Yes, I can see that what you gave is not medicine, let alone anti-infection medicine. Humans can eat it without any effect, but an infection can be cured with it. When the infected body is satisfied and comfortable, their desire to attack is reduced,and they will be lazy or even sleepy. You did the same with other infectious organisms in the mountains.”

Rime seemed to be relieved. Carringer thought there was something special in his look.

Rime said, “You know a lot about it. Yes, that’s it. It’s a magic potion.”

“Just a magic potion?” Carringer approached the elf. “Why don’t you ask for help? Isn’t it good to make magic potions together? Besides, since there is an infectious body, there must be a source of infection. Let’s try to get rid of the source . Isn’t that a good idea?”

When Carringer stares at him, Rime looks away. Without explanation, he turns to the moon tower.

Carringer followed, “I’m not the only one to blame for the shield guard. I wanted to talk to you about serious business, but you always have this attitude of resisting people from thousands of miles away. I’m here to work, you’re also dealing with the infection, we have the same goal. Why can’t we cooperate?”

“Because I don’t need it at all! It’s almost over. Don’t worry about it!”

Just now, Rime lost his wooden scepter. At this moment, his feet feels a little weak, and his eyes are also dizzy. Maybe it is because he walked too hastily, plus the fatigue accumulated before.

Carringer noticed something was wrong with the elf. He asked, “What’s the matter with you?” 

The elf didn’t answer, as if he didn’t hear at all. Carringer reaches out and taps him on the shoulder. He did notice that Rime was walking in a hollow way, so he paid special attention to his strength.

When his finger touched the dark robe, the whole person suddenly fell. Carringer was quick to grab the elf’s waist and not let him hit the ground.

Rime didn’t trip. He’d fainted.

“So light.” Carringer holds the elf horizontally and walks towards the moon tower. After a few steps, he realised that since the elf had fainted, who would open the door for him?

With no other choice, Carringer had to go down the mountain.

With the magic lighting in the woods, Carringer looks at the elf in his arms. The elf’s skin was bloodless, and his head and limbs hung in a state completely devoid of strength, like a puppet with a broken string.