Alpha Zero (Alpha LitRPG Book 1) Arthur Stone (hardest books to read .txt) 📖

rider. Clad in a full suit of armor of leather and metal, wielding a long pike with a proper spearhead, this one looked to be the only serious soldier of the bunch. A bow of wood and bone peeked out from a flat bag affixed to the left of the saddle, alongside an open quiver containing bundles of white-feathered arrows. I couldn’t see any other weapons from my vantage point, but I had no doubt that there would be more. An axe, a warhammer, a mace, maybe even a sword—something along those lines for close combat.

Bringing up the rear of the caravan were a bunch of people moving on foot. Women, old men, and children of all ages. Roughly thirty in all, among which I only saw a couple of relatively young men. They appeared to be common peasants. The wagons had no room for them, having been loaded with crates, sacks and barrels. But the pace of the caravan was slow enough that the pedestrians didn’t seem to have trouble keeping up.

The road didn’t seem to be used all that often, with many of the deep ruts filled with rainwater covered with duckweed. Every so often, you could see tiny frogs leap out of the water as a wheel rolled through it. A strip of tall glass ran down the middle, too tall to have been regularly trampled by horse hooves. Almost as tall as the bushes encroaching on either side of the road, edging against the wagons’ sides.

Further ahead, past the thick brushwood, loomed lines of tall oak-like trees. Massive trunks with sprawling crowns and large, unfamiliar leafage that sort of resembled chestnut, but not quite.

So we were in a forest, and a thick one at that. That wasn’t good. There hadn’t been anything of the sort in the vicinity of our homestead. The farmers didn’t need any decrees from their feudal lords to keep vegetation at bay, preventing the appearance of thickets in which something foul may begin to germinate.

The northern lands weren’t like the south. Here, the forest meant only headache for those with the misfortune of dwelling near it.

And this clearly wasn’t a grove the likes of which shudras and free settlers might tend. No, it was precisely the kind of dense woods one ought to avoid.

Where was I, then? And who were all these people?

The coachman turned around and spat out a lump of tar he’d been using as gum, nearly hitting me square in the forehead. Then he grinned, displaying a mouth with more gaps than teeth, and spoke in a nasal voice.

“Took you long enough to wake up, beauty queen.”

“How long was I out?” I thought to clarify.

“You were picked up yesterday, near the side of the road. Closer to morning. So, just over a day, it looks like. You just kept lying there, drooling. What the heck happened to you, eh? Are you just sickly?”

“Oh, I just... hit my head, is all. Where are we?”

“In the devil’s asshole! Can’t you see?” the coachman declared a bit too enthusiastically. The soldier next to him chortled without turning around.

“Are we on the left bank of Redriver?” I asked, figuring that a proper forest such as this could only lie across the river if we’d made it here in the span of a day.

“Still the right bank, but if you want to be on the left one so badly, I can make it happen for you,” the soldier groused, joining the conversation.

My grasp of the local geography was worse than I had thought. If we were on the right bank, I could relax a bit. Though it still had a fair bit of wooded stretches, they weren’t anywhere near as troubled as those on the other shore.

After digesting the information, I dared to inquire about one important detail.

“I had a purse with some coins on me. Where is it?”

“And why would you want to know such a thing?” the coachman said with a chuckle. “Do you prefer walking on foot or riding in a wagon?”

“I’m in no condition to walk.”

“Keep quiet, then. Don’t worry about your coins—they’re being kept safe by good people.”

“And who might those good people be?” I wouldn’t relent.

“See me and Rycer here?” the coachman asked, elbowing the soldier.

“Sure do.”

“He and I are good people. But the more you talk, the more likely we’ll turn evil.”

With those words, the soldier let out a loud fart, causing both men to guffaw with laughter as though they had never witnessed anything so funny.

And maybe they hadn’t, judging by their appearance and manner. I still didn’t know who they were or where they were headed, so the matter of the purse would likewise need to wait.

For someone in my situation, information was far more valuable than money.

Chapter 8 The Crossing

Degrees of Enlightenment: Unknown

Attributes: none

Skills: none

States: none

Despite regular threats of forcing me to walk or, worse yet, feeding me to goblins, neither Rycer nor the coachman—whose named turned out to be Krol—left my curiosity unquenched. The key was avoiding unpleasant questions or making them feel interrogated. Both men were clearly bored, the journey offering little in terms of entertainment. The horse barely needed driving while the wagons kept moving in a line, so why not indulge a feeble boy with a word or two?

Good people they were, indeed.

It took less than an hour to find out plenty more, though I didn’t understand much of what I’d learned. Both of my interlocutors were free people, meaning neither shudras nor vassals of any clan. They belonged to the so-called free folk of the north. No people were actually native to these lands, the locals comprising a mix of rebels that had fled from their feudal lords, servants that had lost their masters in the civil strife, fugitives and