The Insider System

Chapter 76: Forest Massacre Pt.3

Lake was about to kill this guy when he realized if he killed him it was possible the nullifier in the guy's hand might stop working, and he would be unable to see again. To test his theory Lake smacked it out of the guy's hand to see if it needed to stay in contact with him to keep working or if it could continue to work after he dropped it.

While it didn't turn off right away, Lake could tell it was slowly losing power, and the radius of whatever effect it gave off that allowed them to see was slowly shrinking. Lake saw the guy didn't try and pick it back up but instead just used the extra one Lake had handed him. "Orange Monkey."

The one in his hand came to life, and he started to run away from Lake. Lake didn't know what had given away the fact that this guy had no chance of winning if they fought but Lake found it annoying that he was going to have to chase this guy down if he wanted to keep the fact he was here a secret.

Right after he picked up the nullifier that he had knocked out of the other guy's hand, Lake was about to chase him when he realized now that he knew how to use the nullifier he really didn't need to chase that guy he could just use his to leave. He could also change his appearance again so if they did chase him down they would think he was the wrong person.

Starting to run towards where he was pretty sure the edge of the dark zone was closest, Lake realized his nullifier was still slowly running out of power. He wasn't surprised because he hadn't tried to activate it in any way, because he wasn't sure what would happen if he tried while it was already on, and he planned to reactivate it after it ran out of power.

Two minutes of running later the area he could see was too small for it to actually be useful, and a minute after that it finally turned off completely. "Orange Monkey." After he said the phrase he had heard the other person say to activate the nullifier he could feel it start to take his mana, and almost instantly it started to project the field around him again.

Now that he had some time to think about something other than the slowly encroaching darkness, Lake looked at the nullifier, and wondered if it worked in a similar way to the torches in the dungeon below the guild. They had been set up in every room Lake had been to, and they somehow kept the darkness from swallowing the rooms like it did the tunnels.

The only difference was this thing didn't give off any obvious light like the torches did. It was just a tiny piece of enchanted metal that somehow did something similar. Lake looked at the name nullifier than what he knew about magic and how every element had principles. His best guess was this thing was somehow canceling out one of the principles that made the Dark element.

He didn't know what the principle was called but he knew one of the principles in Light magic controlled how bright it was and the Dark Goddess had flipped that principle to do the opposite to make the Dark element so Lake guessed this thing was just nullifying the principle instead of trying to fight it back with light.

Lake patted himself on the back for figuring out how magic worked and kept running. In the end he didn't really need to know how this thing worked, and had just been keeping himself busy while he ran for his life. He needed something other than the fact that the forest was starting to get quiet and he still wasn't really that close to the edge of the darkness.

If he could go faster without just plowing into a tree he would but since he could only see a few feet ahead of himself and had to constantly dodge obstacles he probably wasn't even going a tenth as fast as he could. Lake just wished he had bothered to learn how to fly he had meant to but he just didn't get around to it.

Once he realized how fast he needed to be to outrun Lucas, Lake had spent most of his time on leveling jobs that gave Agility. Everything else had kind of been forgotten about. Thinking back to his behavior he was surprised Lucas hadn't brought up the fact that Lake hadn't been actually doing any alchemy.

Thinking about it some more, Lake realized Lucas didn't care. The day Lucas had paid for him the news about the God of Light coming back to fight the Demon Lord hadn't spread yet. Lake realized how lucky he had been to actually get out of the Light Temple because Lucas switched to war mode a few days after he arrived and started getting rid of people with allegiances to other groups.

There's no way Lucas would have paid for him if he had known the war was back on, and Lake was just going to leave a few days later. Lake wouldn't have stayed in the Temple for long, and would have tried to leave without the Assassins guild knowing, but Lucas paying his bounty had made walking around much safer for him.

...

Lake had just reached the edge of the forest and was expecting to exit the darkness at any second when he came to a stop. The bubble around him formed by the nullifier had just started pressing against something that it wasn't able to nullify and while Lake couldn't tell exactly what was wrong he knew it was a sign that whoever had done this hadn't just blinded everybody they had trapped them as well.

Whatever was blocking him looked like a wall and while he thought it was a bad idea to touch it he could tell he was stuck. Lake realized how naive he had been to assume he could just run from whatever scheme he had been caught in. It was so obvious that if your plan involved killing a massive amount of people you would keep them from running away.

Lake got as close to the barrier as he could without touching it to see if he could get any clues on what it was. Getting a feel for the element it was made from Lake could tell it wasn't Dark and since it was a similar color Lake could only assume it was Unholy.

This made sense to Lake for another reason as well, however they had called all this Dark mana here would also bring the same amount of Unholy mana, so Lake guessed they used the Dark mana to blind people and the Unholy to keep them here.

Efficiency was never something you wanted to see from the people planning to kill you but he hadn't been underestimating his opponent to begin with, so this wasn't really a wake up call just him realizing even if he knew it was stupid, running was still the best plan.

Lake took this opportunity to switch identities. He was now the other person he had killed, so when someone finally found him standing here they might give him enough time to lie once or twice before they tried to kill him.

Lake used this time to read his skills. He knew there was some plan that could probably get him out of here if he could just think of it and it didn't take long for him to reach the skill he had just received. If he activated Play The Part there was a chance it didn't just affect his personality, but his actions as well, and if that was true he could just do what they should have been until this was over.

It wasn't like Lake was against killing a bunch of people to save himself but by the amount of screams coming from the forest he would be late to the party anyway. They were clearly almost all dead already. Lake didn't do anymore thinking and just activated the skill and something really hard to explain happened to him.

It was like he had been shrunk and stuffed in the back of his own head. With his new small stature he could just barely see out of his own eyes, and he couldn't really stand on his tippy toes because he didn't have a body. Whatever Lake was right now it was pretty obvious he was just in for the ride.

Settling for what he could see Lake saw that his body had actually started to move towards the forest and a mark check later Lake could tell it was towards where he had left the body that he had stolen this identity from. Lake was happy to see that this guy was actually about to get to work because it meant he was going to be just fine.