Raiding A Wagon & Looking Through The Loot

After just a few moments of thought, Krvavy makes up her mind. She is going to raid that wagon. It’ll be fun, she’ll get some loot, and she’ll get experience. It’s a win win win for her.

And to be honest, this is a real no-brainer for Krvavy. She’s playing as a savage barbarian, and what are barbarians so often depicted doing? Raiding.

With her decision made Krvavy rises to her feet and immediately charges down the hill, holding her axe firmly in her hands.

The horses notice her before the travelling merchant does, braying out in fear and bolting away from her. That is probably the best thing that could happen, at least for Krvavy, as it causes the wagon to flip over onto its side, throwing the man onto the ground before he can even see her.

The reins loudly snap, one horse running off without any hesitation, leaving the other one to scramble back onto its hooves before following.

“What in–!?” Is all the travelling merchant can shout out before Krvavy is on him with her axe. He was lucky enough that his spear landed nearby and he has just enough time to bring it up to block her strike.

But that doesn’t help him in the slightest, as the old wooden haft of his spear just isn’t strong enough to keep Krvavy’s axe from his prone body.

Critical Hit! 583.47 Damage dealt to [Travelling Merchant]

[Travelling Merchant] has been slain!
+100 Experience

Level Up! You have reached Level 8. As a Drakling blessed by a divine power, you have 5 attribute points to allocate and have gained +2 to Might & Toughness. If not allocated by the time you fall asleep it will be done automatically.

It is over as soon as it began.

Krvavy frowns. That was honestly a bit disappointing. She kind of expected a bit more.

At least she got a level up out of it.

Shaking her head, Krvavy looks down at the dead merchant. During her little adventure she had been using Seismic Stomp to keep her mana at around half, so that she would still have some if she needed it while also grinding the skill up. And this is as good a chance as any to use Transmute Blood to top her mana up.

The merchants blood flows up her axe and fades away, slowly restoring her mana. But the corpse quickly dries up, leaving Krvavy a little bit disappointed. She recovered less than 30 points of mana.

That disappointment quickly fades away though, as a notification fills her vision.

Knit Flesh: Utilizing the sanguine arts you can weave living flesh together, shaping bodies and mending wounds. Costs 10 Mana per second of use. Associated attributes = Toughness & Insight.

That one new spell immediately makes raiding this wagon worth it, even if she doesn’t get any loot. Krvavy finally has a healing spell! Or at least a spell that can stop her from bleeding to ****, which is good enough.

And while she is looking at her new spell, Krvavy might as well quickly allocate those stat points. She has been neglecting her magic a bit, so how about focusing on the mental stats for a little while?

Putting all the points into rationality would probably be best if she wanted to get more Mana, but her Earth Magic uses willpower and she has already started bringing up her perception... Might as well continue that. At least until she gets the milestone traits. Three points into willpower and two into perception, then.

There. That looks alright. Now time to see what loot this wagon has for her.

Pulling her axe from the merchants chest, Krvavy eagerly takes a step towards the overturned wagon. Surprisingly, none of the goods have been tossed free, as they have all been securely tied down beneath a course fabric tarp.

Placing her axe aside, Krvavy carefully unties the ropes holding everything in the wagon. The ropes are tied so frustratingly tight that she almost wants to just cut them with her knife, but thick ropes like these feel useful enough for her to resist that urge.

As soon as the rope is untied, the tarp gets dragged down to the ground with a dull thud as all the goods fall free atop it.

Luckily it didn’t sound like anything broke. A quick glance across the fairly convenient display of loot shows that to simply be because there wasn’t anything to break. It is just a bunch of sacks and bags, with a single suspiciously rectangular thing wrapped in fabric partially burred beneath them.

That wrapped rectangle catches Krvavy’s attention, and she immediately goes for it. Dragging it out from beneath the sacks reveals that whatever this thing is, it is long. Maybe as tall as Krvavy is. Curious as to what this rectangular thing could be, Krvavy begins unwrapping it. She has a bit of difficulty in doing so at first, as the fabric has long and narrow wooden slats sewn into it. Guess that is what is giving it the rectangular shape.

Pulling aside the slatted fabric reveals what can only be a polearm, with a long polished dark wood shaft reinforced with some washed out bronze looking metal. The head is wrapped up in even more fabric, but Krvavy can still see the general shape of it, with an axe head on one side, something blunt looking on the other, and a spear point at the tip. Cool, she found some sort of halberd.

This last layer of fabric turns out to just be a bag over the head of this polearm, so Krvavy easily pulls it off. The whitish bronze reinforcement goes all the way up to the spearhead, but the blade, axe, and hammerhead are all a different dark silvery metal that looks a lot more like steel to her.

Alytu Poleaxe: This expertly crafted poleaxe is made in the Vantein design, with a symmetrical axehead, a tapered spearhead, and a ridged hammerhead. The haft is composed of treated Ironbark Hickory heartwood reinforced by Ukkin Bronze, while the heads are of polished cold-iron Tolldean Steel. Deals primarily Impact, Puncture, or Slash damage, depending on the head used.

Well, that seems rather fancy. Krvavy is really tempted to make this her main weapon, as it does seem a lot better than her axe, which is just a jagged head of iron jammed into a large femur. But this poleaxe is a lot more realistic...

The heads feels so small compared to what she is used to. That is not only disappointing, as she likes the bigger more fantasy look, but it’ll probably be less effective to use. She can already feel that it has less weight to it, but she is more concerned about the fact that the smaller head means that she’ll have to actually aim her strikes.

What a shame.

But she is still going to take this poleaxe. No doubt about that. It looks cool, so it’d make a good trophy. And she can still use it as a backup for her current axe. It is definitely better than the Orc hammer that she has.

Wrapping it back up, Krvavy then turns her attention to the rest of the loot. The sacks are all rather disappointing, to be honest. All they contain is a bunch of grains. She doesn’t need bags of grains. And she wouldn’t be able to carry them all home even if she wanted to.

Feeling a little underwhelmed, she moves onto the looser bags. There are only a few of them laying about, and hopefully they have something good in them. She isn’t unhappy with the poleaxe, but she’d still prefer actual loot. Though she has no idea what exactly actual loot would be.

Opening up the bag reveals a few rolls of a slightly shiny white fabric, six rolls to be exact. This certainly seems valuable, at least compared to grain. And she guesses that she could use some fabric for something?

Rolled Bolt of Jihani Silk: This luxuriously soft and smooth fabric shimmers in the light. It is remarkably durable and resilient, even for silk. This particular bolt has remained undyed and is rolled around an approximately 1.5m (5’) rod of Jihani Mulberry wood with decoratively carved caps.

Krvavy’s eyes go wide as she uses Inspect on the fabric. It is silk! She is definitely bringing this home with her. This stuff must be extremely valuable! Not only does Inspect make it seem better than normal silk, but since this is a rather realistic world she’d bet that silk is just as much of a luxury as it was in history. And on top of that, this is a lot of silk.

Quickly opening up the other two bags reveals that they too are filled with near-identical rolls of silk. The only difference is that some of them are dyed pink, red, coppery orange, golden yellow, dark and light green, blue, and a royal looking purple. Most of the rolls are still undyed white, but Krvavy doesn’t care as this is just a treasure trove of silk.

But how is she going to bring home eighteen rolls of silk? Without damaging them. Tying the bags closed again, Krvavy carefully lifts one up into the air. It isn’t particularly heavy. Krvavy figures that she could carry the weight of all three bags around with relative ease, but the size of them would be a bit of an issue...

As she thinks about a solution, her eyes slowly make their way down to the tarp and the ropes. She has an idea, though who know how well it’ll work. Krvavy can tie these three bags together into a very large bundle, and then wrap it all up in the tarp. That will safely hold all the silk together, and then she can carry the large bundle around like a backpack, or something.

Deciding to give her idea a try, Krvavy moves the wrapped up poleaxe aside before picking up all the sack of grain, tossing them off to the side one by one. Grabbing up the ropes, she then ties the three bags containing silk together. Her knots are pretty sloppy and honestly not the best, but they are holding and that is all that matters.

Glancing over at wrapped poleaxe, Krvavy decides to include it in all of this. That’ll give her one less thing to carry. And so, she carefully slides the thin rectangular form in between the upright standing three bound bags. It seems like she didn’t tie the ropes tight enough, as it is surprisingly easy to get the poleaxe in there, but luckily the extra width makes it a little more secure.

She did all of that near the middle of the tarp, so it is rather easy to lift the edges and wrap it all up. After just a few minutes of work, Krvavy is done. The tarp is a bit oversized, to put it lightly, so there was a lot of excess fabric that she had to deal with. That ended up being fairly helpful though, as she was able to fold it back down and tie it around the shaft of the poleaxe, just beneath the heads. Hopefully that’ll make the whole tarp contraption rather secure, and won’t make it to hard to untie.

Grabbing the tarp near the top, Krvavy hefts it up over her shoulder. This is rather awkward, but doable. She probably looks ridiculous with this giant bag. And it is going to be an absolute pain getting this thing through the woods, isn’t it?

Now, is she done here? Or should she do something about this wagon? Oh, and she should see if the travelling merchant had any money on him. She didn’t find any amongst this loot, so he probably did.

Carefully placing the unwieldy tarp bag onto the ground, Krvavy goes over to the merchant’s corpse and rummages through his pockets. Sure enough, she finds a few pouches stuffed with coins, mostly gold but there are a few silver ones too. Despite his appearance he seemed to have a fair bit of money. Guess he was hoping to fly under the radar with all this silk.

Krvavy probably should have done looted him earlier so that she could just toss these pouches into her large tarp bag, but it is too late now. She is not undoing that thing until she gets home. And so, tearing a few strips from the merchant’s clothing, as he doesn’t really need it anymore, Krvavy ties the pouches to her loincloth. The coins jingle a bit annoyingly when she moves, but at least she’ll know when she drops them.

As for the wagon, Krvavy decides to tip it back onto its wheels and push it into a nearby ditch. Anyone using this road will definitely see it, but at least it won’t be in their way.

Now that Krvavy is done here, she should really head on home. Krvavy can’t wait to see Thea’s reaction when she shows the spoiled brat of a noble all of this silk. There isn’t really anything they can use it for, probably, but Thea definitely seems like the kind of girl who likes superficial things like this.

Picking up the large tarp bag and her axe, Krvavy turns and heads back towards the woods.