Chapter 150: Black Cave
After a while of following the map Lake found a landmark that was labeled head towards the forest and over the river on the map. It was bolder that was easily identifiable because it was split in two and Lake guessed it had been like this for a long time because it was called split rock.
Lake wondered if someone in the past had just been bored while they walked down the road and saw the rock and said to themselves. 'I wonder if I can cut that in half.' He guessed it could have happened because of a bet as well. If so he wondered how much money had been won.
Walking straight into the forest it wasn't Long before he found the river the map had told him to cross. Looking at how wide it was, Lake decided to just jump over, it wasn't moving very fast or very wide so on the off chance he failed he would just end up swimming. Like he expected he had no problem getting over so he looked at his map and read the next instruction.
All it said was to go the same direction as the river was flowing until he saw the cave then it had a picture of what the cave looked like from the river so there was no way he would miss it. Lake didn't just walk out in the open right next to the river and instead went up into the forest slightly so they wouldn't see him coming.
With there being 17 of them he was sure they would have at least one person outside guarding the entrance. Once he was in the trees he activated Mute and Mana Vision so no one would hear him coming before he saw them. After that he started walking.
The map didn't say how long it took to get places, probably because some people moved much faster than others so he didn't really know how far away it was.
...
It ended up being a bit of a hike but he could now see the cave's entrance. It looked a little different than how it was drawn on the map but only because it seemed the bandits had taken the time to build up some fortifications around the entrance. But like the woman at the counter had said, it didn't seem too much time had passed since the last time a scout had come here because the fortifications weren't done.
There were a few holes in the wall and what he guessed was going to be a watchtower didn't have a top on it yet. That being said the craftsmanship looked pretty good and all the logs were fit together nicely and were shaved down like you would expect to see in a town. He bet if he was to leave and come back in a few more days the cave front would look like a house than a hole in a rock a bunch of bandits were living in.
He bet they had stolen a bunch of lumber off of one of the carts they had raided and were trying to put it to good use; at least he thought that made more sense than one of them being some kind of builder that could make processed lumber out here in the middle of the woods but in this world you never really knew.
After watching the place for about ten minutes Lake finally saw someone come out of the wall that was blocking a good portion of the front of a cave and head out into the forest. This was what he had been waiting for because he thought it would be kind of silly to just walk right in when he could stay out here for a while and pick a few of them off.
It would make it much easier on him when he did finally decide to go inside if he had already killed a few of them. Plus this person was wearing a massive cloak so he would be able to impersonate them extremely easily once they were dead and he had their core. Making sure his job was on Ripper, Lake started to move behind the Bandit.
Mute was doing its job and Lake had no problem getting right behind them. There was a problem though he didn't want their cloak to get covered in blood so that just left him the option of breaking their neck but he had never done that before and he was afraid that if he did it wrong he would just end up pulling their head off or maybe even not being able to do it.
It was unlikely but there was a chance this person had really high Endurance and their neck would be stronger than his arms. He doubted it though so he activated Burst and wrapped his arms around their head and twisted like he had seen in movies. A really gross popping noise later Lake eased the body onto the ground while he savored the feeling of Exp after all this time Lake started to remove the cloak. [Level Up] [Level up] [Rank up]
Once he had it off he pulled it over his armor and pulled his helmet off and put it in his backpack. After seeing how bumpy it made him seem he took the helmet back out and decided he would just leave it out here and get it once he was done inside. Now all he needed to do was retrieve their core and he could head inside.
He wasn't going to do that here though, it was going to make a mess and he didn't want to have to worry about one of the other bandits coming out here to go to the bathroom and finding their dead friend who they had just spoken to inside the cave. It was really the only way he could get discovered so picking up the body Lake headed away from the cave until he found a good place to hide the body.
Pulling out his knife Lake used Mana Vision to core the person quickly and rolled their body into the small ditch he had found. He threw some leaves over them and then used the core to turn into them. After that he pulled up his stats to see his progress from leveling up and what his new name was.
Name: Millon Haldor
Race: Human Lv.10
Job: Ripper Lv.6 ( 123/320 )
Special: The Insider Lv.0 ( 4/5 )
Stats
Health 100
Stamina 100
Mana 530
Strength 53
Endurance 15
Agility 77
Dexterity 87
Perception 83
Intelligence 114
Charisma 23
Free stat points: 117
Lake was slightly confused when his eyes went over the mana part of his status but he quickly remembered the necklace Lucas had given him when he had helped him look for those stolen Elixir Lake had meant to return it but it seemed he was just too good of a thief and he had stolen it by accident.
The truth was Lucas probably just didn't care about it that much and just let Lake keep it on the off chance they would be doing something similar in the future. He didn't really have the time to keep thinking about this so Lake dropped his helmet after marking it and started to head back to the cave.
As he was walking towards the cave Lake could feel how excited the insider was about this and he had to agree. Other than when he had pretended to be a Demon Worshiper for like half an hour and pretended to be that Alchemist for 10 minutes he had never really done anything the Insider really liked.
It liked stealing as well but deception was really what it was all about, and him infiltrating this cave was the first time he was really doing anything super deceptive that had any stakes to it. Usually the only time he was deceptive was when he was talking to someone and he tried to say what he thought they wanted him to say so they would like him more.
The worst thing that could happen when he did that was they realized what he was doing and they stopped talking to him, if he got caught this time he might get surrounded by an unknown number of people and while the odds were he would be fine you never knew. He was new to fighting still and against that number of people he might lose or get severely injured enough that he wasn't able to make it back to the guild.
But like he said it was unlikely and he wasn't really that worried about it. Getting back to the cave, Lake started to walk at the speed the person he had just killed had been when he had first seen them. It was a small detail but why not be thorough in a situation like this. Who knew one day someone might notice something like that if he wasn't careful.
Passing the wall Lake saw there were actually two people standing guard behind it and was happy he hadn't just tried to rush in because fighting these two would have probably made enough noise to alert all of them. "Hey Millon what took you so long."
This was clearly a playful question and not the guard wasn't interrogating him so he said. "It was stuck." Getting a laugh from the guard Lake continued into the cave. After a few steps inside he could see why it was called Black Cave. He had originally thought it was going to be really dark inside and that was definitely true but he was pretty sure it was more from the fact that the stone on the inside was a dark black color.
It kind of reminded him of the dungeon and how the stone got darker and darker as you went further in but he could tell this stone was just black and it had nothing to do with magic. This wasn't something he needed to worry about either way because not only could he see in the dark but he could tell there was a torch burning up ahead.
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