Fern and I ran towards the group of people attacking us making their eyes widen in surprise as they realised that we weren’t going to back down like their previous victims probably had. I was in the lead and had to duck under another arrow which missed my head by mere millimetres before engaging the first of the melee attackers who was armed with a short sword and shield that was practically identical to the ones that I had seen other players armed with including the players that I had fought at the inn and the kid that had joined us yesterday.

He wasn’t bad with them either but not good enough to stop me from slipping under his guard and drawing a line in the flesh of his shin causing a yelp of pain to escape his lips.

Meanwhile Fern dashed past us and dodged around the second player, who was armed with a shield like his friend was. Unlike his friend he was also armed with a spear like the one I had received from the tutorial.

Seeing that he was about to chase after Fern to prevent her from attacking the archer Evie quickly fired a bolt of energy that slammed into the back of his unprotected head as I stepped around his friend, slamming the man in the head with the butt of my naginata while his guard was still down from my previous attack as I passed.

The spearman cursed loudly as he spun towards the attack just in time to clumsily deflect the first swing of my naginata. Once his friend recovered he tried to attack me from behind only to discover that I had been waiting for such an obvious move, stepping to one side I deflected a spear thrust which shot past where I had just been standing forcing him to block it with his shield making him curse once more.

As I fought the two melee fighters Fern sprinted towards the archer who was taking increasingly rushed shot, only one of which even came close to hitting his target slamming into Fern’s left shoulder and making her stumble under a follow up shot much to the archer’s chagrin and Fern’s anger which he found himself on the wrong side of a few seconds later forcing him to draw a knife of his own from the sheath at his side.

The two men that I was fighting looked more and more panicked as time went on and they discovered that they might have been skilled enough to defeat some of the weaker players that they had been hunting down to steal their loot they weren’t good enough to fight me. Or at least not when I had a mage firing bolts of magical energy at them from a safe distance. It wasn’t that they were unskilled, but it was obvious that they were used to having the advantage of a ranged attacker supporting them and being on the wrong side of such a tactic was both disconcerting and unpleasant for them. This meant that I soon had the swordsman on the ropes with Evie pinning the spearman down with her ranged attacks as I slowly wore my opponent down using the advantage of my reach to slash at his shield time and time again as quickly as possible. Eventually the effectiveness of this became obvious as his shield started dipping lower and lower.

Seeing my opening I activated my Slash Skill which ripped through his neck. It wasn’t a mortal blow like it might’ve been in real life, but it was still this game’s version of a critical hit which showed when the player turned pale and started backpedalling as fast as he could. Unfortunately for him I wasn’t about to let him get away from me and stepped in, knocking his shield away with my weapon before running him through. The vicious attack causing him to collapse to the ground in a heap as his HP finally hit zero.

I could already feel Evie’s glare burning into the back of my head, but I knew that our attackers wouldn’t have hesitated to kill any or even all of us so I didn’t feel any guilt at all as I turned towards my remaining opponent who screamed at me in rage as he thrust forward with his spear. This attack was clumsier than any of his previous ones which was understandable, I had just killed his friend but it was still easy for me to put his spear into a bind with my naginata which I followed up with a punch that caused him to let go of the weapon.

I shook my head in disappointment as I picked the weapon off the ground, it wasn’t even like I had anything that increased my Strength but even a simple punch had been enough to make the surprised player drop his spear. I didn’t have much respect for player killers as it was, but this group was just pathetic. They hadn’t even managed to put us in a situation where Evie had to heal one of us even though I was fighting two of them at once after they had launched a surprise attack on us.

A masculine yelp from behind followed by the thump of someone falling to the ground let me know that Fern had also managed to defeat her target and I used the blade of my naginata to force my defeated opponent to look me in the eye.

“Well now this is a fine mess you’ve gotten yourselves into isn’t it?” I sighed as the player glared at me. “I guess we’d better hand you over to the guards.”

“Try it,” the player snarled angrily. “You killed one of our teammates and you’ll have to stop us from escaping somehow and when the guards see that do you really think that they’ll believe anything you say?”

“I do actually,” I replied with a smirk. That might have made anyone else hesitate to go through with what I had planned but unfortunately for them this group had chosen to attack my group. “At the very least they’ll keep an eye on you until the people that you have already attacked come forward.”

Reaching down I pulled the player to his feet, he tried to struggle but stopped when I placed the blade of my naginata against his throat. Nodding I turned around so that I could see Fern who was standing over the fallen archer with a length of rope in her hands. I blinked in surprise when I saw this, I had suggested that this would be a useful item to have but both Fern and Evie had reminded me that we only had limited funds right now and had been unsure that they would be able to afford something with such a limited amount of use in a game when they had more important things to obtain but apparently they had decided to buy some anyway.

Fern noticed me looking that the rope and waved me over with a slight smile and I gave the player in front of me a push in her direction making him curse as he stumbled forwards.

“So, you decided to get the rope after all?” I asked as I approached Fern as she tied up the defeated archer who she had somehow managed to knock out.

“Yeah I brought it with my funds in the end,” Fern replied quietly. “I figured that rope was something that a rogue should have. Of course I was thinking that I’d be using it for climbing or something not this.”

“Yeah that’s what I thought to,” I sighed. “But I’m glad that you have it. It would be a pain to transport these two idiots if you didn’t.”

Once we had tied the two players up, I slapped the still unconscious archer across the face as hard as I could to wake him up making him squawk in pain before glaring at me as he realised what was going on.

“Don’t even bother,” I told him as he opened his mouth to complain. “You cause us any trouble I’ll just kill you and have the guards collect you when you respawn. The people that you stole from should be logging back in by then and I’m sure that they’ll be very happy to attest to your crimes.”

He closed his mouth slowly but kept glaring at me as I pulled him and his friend to their feet and started leading them towards Evie, who was also glaring at me.

“Did you have to kill the other one,” she asked me angrily as I approached making me sigh tiredly.

“And what else was I going to do Evie?” I asked her. “They wouldn’t have extended me the same courtesy if they defeated me and I wasn’t going to be able to hold them off forever, even with my higher Stats.”

“I suppose,” Evie sighed. “I just don’t like how easy it is for you to do things like that.”

“This is a game Evie,” I reminded her gently. “It’s not like I don’t get what you’re saying but if a player dies here then they just wake up in their Rig and they can log back the next day. Yes, it’s unpleasant. But I’d be willing to bet that this lot did the same to at least a few other players before they decided to attack us, so I’d say that they got off lightly with only one of them being killed.”

“Zeke’s right Evie,” Fern agreed. “I’ve been killed by people who thought it would be fun to keep me alive for as long as possible and if this lot aren’t there yet, they’ve certainly started along that road and have killed at least a few players already, if we were stronger we might have been able to defeat all three of them without killing any of them but this was the best that we could do right now.”

“Don’t listen to her girl!” The spearman interrupted hoping that he had found a weakness that he could take advantage of “They told me that they had enjoyed killing our friend and that they only hadn’t killed both of us as well because you were watching!”

However, to his surprise his words caused Evie turned her glare on him instead. For such a small girl she could be intimidating when she wanted to be.

“Why would I believe someone who attacked my party without warning over my party members?” Evie asked the young man coldly. “Just because I’m not happy with their methods doesn’t mean I’m defending your actions.”

Evie’s words thankfully shut the spearman up and soon we were walking in the direction of Ponson drawing curious looks from the other players that saw us.

“So, Evie did anything drop from the guy that I killed?” I asked once I was sure that Evie had cooled off a bit.

“Yeah, when his body faded it left a small bag of stuff behind,” Evie sighed. “It contained two rabbit skins and a pair of ratty old boots which I think he must’ve taken from another player.”

I nodded my agreement. When a player was killed they didn’t drop anything that they had equipped unless the item that they had equipped said that it could drop in its description and at this point even the badly damaged pair of boots that Evie took out from her Inventory to show me was a fairly valuable piece of equipment so the only reason that it would’ve dropped was if the player already had a better pair equipped.

“Yeah we should probably hand that into the guards,” I said quickly quashing any desire of mine to take the loot. In reality no one would judge us if we decided to keep the boots, we had defeated the player who carried them fair and square, but I knew that if I suggested something like that Evie would probably get angry at me. Normally it would be impossible to work out who the boots had originally belonged to but as I already knew all someone had to do was use the same Detect Truth Skill that I had to do so. Besides, I was already going to have issues with how other players viewed me after my actions over the past few days, especially if someone found out that I had been the one to advise the guards on how to handle criminal players so making sure that someone’s property was returned to them would help with that a bit.

As expected, Evie nodded her agreement and gave me a small but bright smile, however a glance Fern’s way told me that she wasn’t as impressed with my decision but when I caught her eye, she too nodded her agreement.

“Sorry Fern,” I chuckled. “Don’t worry though, I’d say there’s at least a slight chance that we’ll receive some sort of reward for catching these idiots, so you’ll be able to afford some nicer gear soon enough.”

“That’s what you think you little shit,” the spearman snarled angrily. “Just remember that you have to convince the guards that we’re the ones that are in the wrong here.”

Looking back over my shoulder I could see that while the talkative spearman was sneering at me his friend the archer looked a bit more nervous.

“Like I said before; we shall see,” I replied calmly. Looking around warily at the players who were paying a swiftly increasing amount of attention to us as we got closer. I was far more worried about what he was going to say when we got close enough that they could hear us clearly than I was about the guards deciding that we were breaking the law in some way. Thankfully with my new status as a Ranger there wasn’t even a way that I could be accused of vigilantism which would certainly be something that would happen back in the real world.

Sure, enough once we got closer to Ponson the spearman started complaining loudly and saying that we were trying to frame them, and we were confronted by an angry mob of players who blocked our way back to town.

Knowing that the ruckus would eventually be noticed by the guards I called for a stop and stood silently in front of the increasingly aggressive crowd of players. In the end it wasn’t the ruckus that brought the guards running but one of the players who had decided that the easiest way to get to the bottom of what was going on was to go and get the guards, the player in question was a young man with dark hair tied in a ponytail behind his head and was armed with a sword and a wand. I wasn’t sure whether or not he thought that we were the ones who were committing a crime or not, but I resolved to thank him when we had sorted this all out for speeding things along.

“Zeke, what’s going on?” Catherine asked me as she approached with several of her guards.

Immediately I came to attention and saluted which I was hoping would let her know that this was something that I considered to be official business and was gratified to see her return the gesture. Thank goodness that the NPC’s in this game were intelligent enough to read the situation because otherwise I would’ve been arrested by now.

“Sergeant Heller, these two individuals and one other attacked me and my party and I suspect have attacked others, possibly even killed them, thankfully I also believe that they were outsiders like myself and the other members of my party so they will hopefully return to back up my statement,” I reported as professionally and respectfully as I could. Catherine was obviously taken back at my words but to her credit she rallied quickly ordering two of her guards to come and take the two players from my custody, much to the crowd’s consternation.

Most of the players now had confused looks on their faces when the guards started pulling the struggling players away instead of arresting us.

“Thank you, Ranger Zeke, we will of course verify your claims but as you are in good standing with us, I see no reason to doubt you,” Catherine said over the confused muttering of the players. “However, if you will follow me, I will take your statement myself.”

“That would be acceptable,” I replied looking over my shoulder at my party members who were looking at me with mild surprise on their faces. “Would you two be alright with that?”

“Well we are witnesses so I suppose that we should,” Evie replied tiredly. I couldn’t blame her for being tired, not only had she been fighting all day but the fight with the player killers must have been stressful for her despite her not even being in any real danger.

Fern on the other hand looked fairly happy with how things were going and nodded her agreement silently.

Catherine led us back through the crowd towards her office. We were still getting a few glares from some of the players who weren’t sure what was going on but anyone who had played games for a long time had encountered players killers before and as one might expect they weren’t fans. I mean sure there were a few people that were still sceptical of what had just happened but most of them were now glaring after the idiots who had been dragged away kicking and screaming by the guards who didn’t look any more impressed than the players did.

“Well then,” Catherine said once we were all seated in the small office in the gatehouse. “You’ve found yourself in another mess haven’t you young Zeke and this time you’ve dragged your friends into it with you.”

Despite the way she said that it was obvious that she was actually amused by what was happening and I couldn’t blame her. I kept finding myself in weird situations when I was playing this game, I did feel guilty that Evie and Fern had gotten involved in this particular situation, however.

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that by the way you two,” I said to the girls.

“It’s not your fault those three attacked us boss,” Fern told me with an irritated shake of her head. “I do find it interesting that you seem to find yourself in these sorts of situations though, I wonder if there’s some sort of hidden luck Stat.”

“Good question,” I chuckled wryly. “But a better one would be; is my theoretical luck stat really high or somewhere in the negatives?”

That produced a series of snorts from the other occupants of the room which made me smile. There was no way that I would’ve been confident enough to make that joke in real life but then I doubt that I would’ve entered such a small room with three women anyway, so it was kind of a moot point. Hell, I wouldn’t have said that I would’ve done it in a game until a few minutes ago so I counted this as an absolute win.

“Your right, that is a good question,” Catherine said with a massive grin on her face. “Scholars have been arguing for years about the existence of such a stat or even how such an obscure stat would work. But as you seem to come out of the situations that you were in stronger than you were before them, I’d say yours would be high if a Luck Stat existed.”

“Yeah our people have had a similar problem across most of the worlds that we’ve visited,” I chuckled. It really was refreshing that the NPC’s in this game were able to talk about things like stats without getting weird or refusing to acknowledge the idea of any other things referred to by players as stats than those included in the system that they were a part of.

Fern in particular looked quite surprised by Catherine’s reaction, which didn’t surprise me too much. She wasn’t really a talkative sort of person, so she probably hadn’t had an actual conversation with an NPC before. Which was actually quite funny as it meant that Evie actually knew more about the NPC’s than she did despite her almost complete lack of experience in anything else to do with games compared to Fern.

“Well then, shall we get on with your statements then?” Catherine asked. “Just tell me what happened, without leaving anything out and then I’ll send you on your way.”

“Alright, I guess I’ll start,” I said. “This is what happened.”