Chương 82: Who The Fu-

Nathan put one foot against the guy in front of him, pushing him away while pulling out his spear from the guy's body. At the same time, he used his free hand to take away the knife he was holding.

Without waiting, he threw the knife towards the runner.

This made one of the bandits shout.

"Duck!"

The runner did not even glance over before dipping his head down and covering it with both hands. With that, the knife ended up just barely passing by nicking the back of his hand as it went.

I wasn't just standing by either, but I honestly had no idea if this was going to work. My eyes widened all the way as an incredibly tiny fire spell formed on top of my finger. It was virtually harmless if it landed on someone's body or limbs, but that was not my target.

While the guy still had his head down, I let it loose, hoping that he wouldn't suddenly shift his direction. I was betting on the fact that it was awkward to do so while one's head was down.

As it traveled through the air, most of them ended up missing it entirely.

And when the runner lifted up his head, it struck the back of his head.

"Agh!"

A frown formed on my face immediately. A black spot had formed on the left side of the neck.

I missed.

My target was the nerves in the spine so that the brain would lose control of everything below the neck. While I would've liked to make another attempt, he had already turned the corner, making me curse under my breath.

Nathan clicked his tongue while backing off.

"Dumbass."

I got in front of him while smiling bitterly.

"Bullets travel instantly in an FPS, alright? How the hell are my AWP skills supposed to transfer?"

Three different bandits rushed towards me. While they were confused about what I was talking about, that didn't stop them. I could've done a horizontal slash if I was confident in my strength, but instead, I did an overhead one, bringing it down on the one in the middle.

He brought up his knife to block, while the other two thrust their knives toward me, aiming for my body. With my free hand, I directly grabbed the wrist of the one on the left and completely ignored the other.

Before my sword hit the man's knife, I clenched harder on the handle while tilting it to the side. Because of how small the knife was, it let me pass by it easily. Unfortunately, the angle was too awkward for me to go for the neck, so I simply went for the shoulder, and with a bit of resistance-

"AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!"

-cut through and sent his arm falling to the ground. As for the knife that was previously unhindered going to my stomach, it had suddenly stopped, freezing in the middle of the air. With a tremble, the knife fell down to the ground.

Because Nathan had stepped up and pierced through that bandit's chest, thrusting the spear from underneath my arm. Other than breathing heavily, he himself had no reaction. My strength was superior to the last bandit, allowing me to have control. However, it wasn't enough to completely outclass him, thus I wouldn't be able to do much with the knife itself.

As for the bandit, he didn't just sit still while watching me swing my sword. His free hand went for my throat, attempting to choke me out. I tensed the muscles in my neck, forcibly resisting the constriction.

I was still able to breathe, albeit just barely. But instead of trying to pry away his hold on my neck, I suddenly pulled with the hand holding onto his knife, catching him off guard and making him stumble forth.

At the same time, I pushed myself forth and raised my leg, slamming my knee against his liver. He was essentially disabled, letting go of both me and the knife, while crumpling down to the ground.

It made it more than easy enough to ram his knife into the side of his neck, while he was still holding onto it.

In a flash, two bandits were dead, while the third one was crumpled onto the ground, crying in pain because of his missing arm. The remaining bandits stared at us in shock. After a brief moment of hesitation, they all began running away, splitting off in different directions.

It wasn't that big of a deal I guess, since one had already escaped a while ago.

But I still fumbled with the dying guy's knife to get a hold of it before throwing it at one of them.

Unfortunately, it missed, and by a longshot too.

Trying to throw weapons with one hand accurately was frankly, insanely difficult. Though I had practiced before, I could only do it semi-accurately with two hands. Nathan made it look so easy though.

With a plop, one bandit had fallen onto the ground with a knife wedged into the back of his head.

Nathan sighed.

"This is what happens when you only use the AWP man."

I clicked my tongue.

"Better an expert than a jack of all trades."

Nathan shook his head.

"Anyway, we're going to have to go faster if we don't want to encounter more of these guys. They are clearly part of a bigger organization and will probably send people to search for us."

I gave a quick nod.

"Yeah."

With that, we began running. From what I remembered from our first gym session, our physiques were more or less tied. We ran for an hour or so, passing by people, and making them look at us with confusion.

Thankfully, we never ended up encountering those bandits from that point.

To be honest, I found keeping this pace up for a whole hour was already very impressive from this body, but I was getting winded. I probably wouldn't last much longer. On the other hand, While Nathan was breathing heavily, it was still at a steady pace.

Was having this kind of stamina normal for people in this shitty game?

No, we outclassed the rest of our class in terms of physique, so it definitely wasn't normal. Even when running at half our current speed, there were some that couldn't go any further after a couple minutes.

I guess he really was given a body that monstrous. Well, mine was too, but still, comparisons easily make valuable things feel worthless.

It took us a little while, but we made it to the slums. There weren't exactly any defining walls or marks to indicate that it had become the slums, but there was a big enough difference to tell. The buildings themselves had become more dilapidated and had become more concentrated.

While most places in the kingdom had many large paths for carriages to go through and people to walk on, this was very different. Since we hadn't gone along the main path, up ahead was only a very high concentration of buildings, at most one meter apart.

It was simply alleyway after alleyway, twisting and winding around so much that it was probably easier to get lost here than in a forest.

Nonetheless, we went through, focusing mainly on just going forward as much as possible. There were a decent amount of people that we passed by, however, nobody dared to even get close to us, immediately ducking into another alleyway, or going back into their house after seeing us.

That much was pretty understandable considering that we were covered in still fairly fresh blood, and Nathan still had his spear messy from the earlier fight. Although it was technically a more dangerous area here, there was hardly any obstruction simply because most people here understood quite clearly that they should mind their own business.

Though, it was still a hassle to navigate our way through all of the alleyways. Eventually, we got through, and before us was a rather tall wall, made out of stone. It wasn't the special stone that reflected magic, although it would've been ideal if that was the case. However, it was unrealistic even by the rich kingdom's standard for something like that.

The walls themselves were about thirty or so meters high. It wasn't too exaggeratedly high, but also wasn't that low. However, it was still going to be very hard to climb up since the walls were smooth. However, Nathan had already planned for this.

We got out the grappling hooks that we had bought earlier at this point.

Nathan let out a small sigh of relief while spinning the head of the grappling hook.

"Thankfully it wasn't too high, else we would've had to resort to blowing up the wall."

I too followed his example and shortly after we threw our hooks on top of the wall. It would've been hard with our original bodies, but these ones were basically a cheat. After giving a short tug to make sure that it was correctly fastened, we scaled up the wall with the rope's support.

Of course, there was an official exit we could've taken which was fine to take. However, Nathan didn't want to leave a record of us personally leaving the city. But more importantly, the processes you had to go through were a huge pain in the ass.

Upon getting to the top, we scouted to see if there were any guards nearby, but there were either no guards at all, or they just weren't around at the top of the walls. Using the same grappling hook, we slowly scaled down the other side of the wall. The journey both ways were fairly treacherous, but so long as we were willing to get crippled, then falling wouldn't kill us.

After making it to the other side of the wall, a wide plain had spread out in front of us, with a very wide and long dirt path far off to our right. As for the forest itself, it was a rather far distance.

Still, we continued on regardless.

There wasn't all that much time to waste since we only had two days to spare before it would cut into our school time, which was pretty important for the magic lessons alone. At most, we should take half a day to reach the forests, leaving us a day to do our business there before coming back.

As such, we began running once more.

I told Nathan to slow it down a little bit since my stamina was lacking compared to his, so it took a decent amount of time. While crossing the plains, I spotted several carriages that looked like dots in the distance. It appeared that the kingdom had a decent amount of business from outside sources at the very least.

Once we had gotten fairly close to the forests, Nathan stopped.

"The forests are going to be different from before. Chances are, there will be a considerable amount of danger. We should take a short break here to recover our stamina and make our way through after. Also, don't forget to keep your eyes peeled."

I let out a laugh through winded breaths.

"Of course, you told me that before."

We sat down in the grass to catch our breath. We had brought along some food with us, but not a considerable amount, so we held off on eating for now. Our plan was to catch some game along the way, which was honestly a tad bit arrogant considering we had no idea how to hunt, but I'm sure we would figure something out along the way.

That, or we would have to starve for a few days.

The path that we were on was nowhere near the main path that carriages took, so we were pretty confident that we would be left alone.

But...

"Hello there, adventurers. May I know why you are here?"

Who the fu-