Dressed to Kill Chapter 5 (Patreon)

“Don’t worry, my light. You’ll be gaining new skills and levels before the week is over. And as you learn the patterns, we can work faster. How did you feel about your first day?” She smiled.

“I liked it.” I said honestly, smiling back. It felt good to be creative, to make things with your hands. It also felt good to destroy things. I could help my mom in her shop and I could keep the town from collapsing.

There was a pounding on the workshop door, three harsh knocks. I wasn’t sure if they were knocking or trying to bust the door down. I looked back to my mom. She shrugged, bewildered.

The knocking came again.

I swung the door open. Sandy looked down at me. A stain covered leather apron clung to her still. Dried blood clung to her hands.

“Gwen, it’s done —“ she started, then stopped, looking up at mom and making an annoyed face. She schooled it. “Esmeralda.”

“Sands.”

“I’m taking your daughter.” Sandy said, locking a hand around my arm and practically yanking me off my feet and toward the door.

“Will you be back for dinner?”

“We have extra! I’ll feed her!” Sandy shouted, throwing the door shut behind her and dragging me out into the night. The sun had set above. Sandy let me in an unexpected direction, looping far around her workshop.

“Where are we going?” I asked, pushing Sandy off of me. She turned around with a scowl on her face.

“To the edge of the town. I have to show you.” She whipped back around, stomping through the night over the foliage that lined the space between houses.

I followed.

The town provided a curtain of safety. Ours was too small to provide much arable land, but the effects of the system kept out the world’s monsters. It kept the weather tenable, and the environment friendly, and every day, we lost a little bit of the town to the monster infested wilderness beyond it.

I had been to the town end before, I had seen its constant shrinking. It was a bright shimmer in midair, an incorporeal world boundary; you could walk through it, but there might be consequences on the other side. Sandy led me through copses of trees to the very edge of it. She fumbled around in the dark for a second before lighting an oil lantern with a spark.

The ground here was stomped flat, like she visited it every day, her own shrine to a personal apocalypse. A wooden plank was spread across the ground, stretching out beyond the boundary of the world. The slow and subtle decay of the town’s protection was visible on it; inch by inch, beyond the wall, the wooden plank decayed. Nothing human survived the Wild.

At the farthest edge of the wooden plank, the wood had rotted away into dust. Each day was clearly marked by sections of wood decaying at perfectly even lengths all the way until the most recent length of decay. Sandy pulled out a knife from inside of her apron and carved a gouge into the ground with a curse.

“It still rotted last night. Look. The towns decay was halved but not stopped. Isn’t the point to stop the decay?” Sandy asked.

I crouched down beside her, observing the gouges in the ground that stretched far, far outside the barrier to where the light fell away into opaque and sticky black. How long had Sandy been watching this? Counting away the days?

“Rome wasn’t built in a day.” I said.

“What?” Sandy asked, her head snapping to me. She looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was. I had lived here so long that sometimes I wondered if I had simply imagined my last life.

“Sorry. Dumb saying. You don’t build cities in a day, is the point. We need time.”

“We’re running out of time. We have to — before the dungeon collapses.” Sandy said. She cursed again. “We have to go faster. We don’t need to waste time sewing clothes.”

“We?” I asked.

Sandy huffed out a breath.

“Sorry. It’s just — my dad — do you want the wolf pelt now?” Sandy asked, veering away from the conversation. She stood abruptly. I studied her for a moment.

“Show it to me.” I replied.

Sandy calmed on the walk back to the workshop. She paused outside the door. A lamp burned inside. With a grunt, she swung the door open, stepping in quick, eyes darting around the room. Then she sighed in relief.

“Fighting again?” I asked, following behind her.

“Yeah.” She said, walking up to her workshop table.

I walked beside her to the racks hanging with already tanned leather before leaning down and running my hands through the wolf’s fur. I wondered if tanning was actually this fast and easy without magic before deciding it didn’t matter. I didn’t live on earth anymore. There was one large piece of hide and dozens of smaller strips.

“I’m going to go get dinner.” Sandy said. “Dad insisted in cooking the entire wolf.”

“You gave it to him?” I asked, my head whipping towards her.

“Don’t worry. He thinks I killed it.”

“What?” I asked.

“Yeah. I — I’ve done it before. So he just assumed that I did it again when he stumbled into my workshop.”

I was stunned for a moment. She had done it before? She was clearing at the dungeon at some point? And —

“That’s why you fought with your dad? He thought you were clearing the dungeon… again?”

Sandy nodded. I looked back down at the furs, trying to figure out a reply. I wanted to scold her for going and doing something so dangerous, but then again, I was the one killing monsters now.

“I’ll be right back.” She said, avoiding the conversation and walking through the door that led deeper into the house — after removing the furniture she had placed to barricade it.

I held a strip of wolf leather in my hands and grimaced. If I had my moms ability to easily sew pieces together, this would be more valuable. I would have to stitch all of these pieces together, bit by bit, before I could cut them and pattern them.

The smell of the food Sandy carried preceding her, somehow filling the room through the crack of air below the door. She shoved the door open with a shoulder, stumbling into the room and setting the plates down on her workshop. She leaned over her table, grabbing a piece of sauce covered wolf meat with her bare hands and eating it.

“What’s wrong? Will it not work?” Sandy asked, worriedly looking down at me.

“It’ll work.” I finally stood. “Just… I need to kill more of these.”

My stomach rumbled. I flopped over into the chair at the desk. It creaked in protest, leaning slightly, and I grabbed at the table to stabilize myself. The food supply of the village was lean. I was familiar enough with wolf meat.

Sandy leaned over the table, watching me expectantly as I took a bite of the food. The meat nearly melted in my mouth, far more tender than a grown wolf should be, the flavors exploding in a range so complex I flinched. Sandy nodded.

“Dad’s cooking. Why he’s trying to move to a proper city. Nothing for him here.” She said.

“Why have I never had this before?” I asked.

“Doesn’t cook for free. Turns almost all our meat into preserves to store them long enough between shipments. Merchant shipments only come monthly. Not at all during winter. Barely make enough back to buy the meat for the next batch.” Sandy said.

“He’d probably get everything he needs around the village done and more if he traded his cooking for it.”

“Tell him that.” Sandy grabbed her plate and sat with her back to the wall, shoveling the food down.

I took my time, only to be caught off guard by the system alert when I finished.

[STR +2]

“What?” I asked mutely, staring at it.

“It’s monster meat.” Sandy said. “Means stats. That’s why the jerky sells.”

The possibilities of food based stat bonuses were endless. I wondered what the peak of the cooking class looked like — would it be enough to elevate someone to superhuman standards on food alone? Did chefs receive more points from their own cooking in the same way that I gained a bonus on stats from my own clothes? I side-eyed Sandy.

“I didn’t get his class. Plus, he has dozens of levels. My class gets cooking skills, but I’d need dozens of levels more to do anything like that.” Sandy said. She fiddled with her hands. “You’re clearing the dungeon tonight, right?”

“Yes.” I wiped the sauce off my fingers onto an already blood stained cloth.

Sandy pushed up off the floor, walking behind me to the table. She rested her hand on the knife stabbed in the table.

“Wasn’t an invite.” I said, frowning.

“If I’m going to get yelled at for clearing the dungeon, I might as well actually clear it. Besides, you didn’t make it to the end yesterday.” Sandy ripped the knife free with a popping noise. She sheathed it somewhere in the apron she was still wearing, then wiped her hands on the leather and stepped to her bed, lifting up the frame to reveal a hidden bag. She turned back to me. “You need to grab your things right? I’ll meet you outside the dungeon.”

I assessed her. She wasn’t taking no for an answer.

“Alright,” I said before sighing. I guess I was gaining a plus one.

Circling back to my house, I found the workshop empty. Mom must have turned in for the night already. The backpack was just where I left it, shoved into a dilapidated cabinet. I took a moment to throw a sewing kit in it.

Sandy was not outside the dungeon when I arrived. I only looked around for a moment before stepping in. The world lurched like the dungeon had sucked me up and spit me out on the other side, but the time had grown late enough that it was dark even here, none of the disorientation of switching from day to night. The moon hung huge in the sky, far larger than any moon could possibly be without ripping the planet apart.

It took up a third of the sky, a giant white eye staring down at me.

I wondered if the dungeon was a planet at all, if it was a real place or just a fictitious piece of flat land rendered in some simulated void.

“It’s not that impressive.” Sandy said from behind me. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“The moon shouldn’t be that big.” I said.

“Its not our moon. Not our world.”

I turned to regard her. Despite her insistence that it was ordinary, she was looking up too. She seemed to chew on her thoughts, moving slow and intentionally.

It took me a moment to notice what was different about her; she was wearing armor. It was old and battered, metal with spots where rust had been scraped away covering her shins, gauntlets with missing fingers on both of her hands. She still wore an apron over the rest of her.

“Increases my skills.” She said. “Your mom made it, actually.”

“Oh.” I said. “And that helps you…”

“Kill monsters. Yeah. My Butcher class lets me see the easiest way to cut them to pieces. My activated skills automate it.” She started walking towards the center of the dungeon. I trailed behind, holding one of my sewing needles.

If Sandy was going to start clearing the dungeon, she would need new armor too. We would have to kill double as many of the wolves. But we could also carry double as many out.

“What does it look like?” I asked, as we approached the entrance to the wolf den.

“I see red. Glowing lines to bisect things.”

“Like, all the time?”

“No.” Sandy said, eying me. “Only while holding a knife.”

“Oh.” I said. Sandy was currently holding a knife. I saw the way she looked while holding it. Cold and calculating. I wondered if her ability worked on humans too.