Interception

Colt sighed again. He had not foreseen a positive answer anyhow, but it did not hurt to ask. "Forget it, we should go back to Valheim for now. We have to turn in the Quest, then we can think about what we'll do from there."

As they started their descent, Colt pulled up his stat page and tried to decide where to put his new stat point. 'Hm, my Speed is falling behind. So maybe I should go with that?' Colt hesitated for a moment. If he were being honest with himself, he would prefer to stick it in Authority. But he knew too well how badly things would go if someone had a severe imbalance in their stats.

After deliberating on it for a good few minutes, he increased his Speed. His pace increased as he felt like his body had become lighter. The women noticed he was catching up to them, and Donna narrowed her eyes. 'I'm sure we lowered our pace enough to match his. Don't tell me he got another stat point!'

Donna groaned to herself when she realised Exile had widened the gap between them again. As far as they were aware, Exile was the highest level player in Valheim right now. She hoped to keep him around, to use his strength to allow her and Beans to advance faster. Then when they caught up, they could split from Exile and overtake him.

'He'd be worth ambushing if I could convince Beans to help. But she's too kind. I wonder how many points we could gain if we seized his Orb?' Donna thought, as she eyed Exile. 'Forget it. Who knows how many times he can heal before he runs dry. Then there's the question of if we can even harm him. His Endurance seems to be his strongest stat.'

When the trio were about halfway down the mountain, Colt stopped and stared at the forest. Beans glanced back with a look of confusion upon her face before tapping Donna's shoulder to get her attention. Beans pointed to Exile, who was standing still with a grave expression on his face.

"Exile? What's wrong?" Beans asked in a concerned tone.

"Kaleidoscope…" Colt replied in a grim tone as he continued trying to count the figures he would spot from time to time between the trees. "There's at least seven of them. Aeri is amongst them too."

The women froze when they heard that and scanned the forest for themselves. But Exile's warning was on point. There was indeed a group of players headed in their direction.

"Do we fight them?" Donna asked, even though she had her own misgivings. From what they had seen so far, this was not the type of game where a lead of a level or two would allow a player to suppress entire armies. Each increase in strength was only marginal.

"No." Colt shook his head as he began searching for other, safer routes. "There's too many of them. We don't know how they've distributed their stats or what spells they might have. And you two don't have any combat spells at all since you haven't upgraded your Authority."

'Hm, he's calm and collected. Most guys become all hot headed and brash when someone challenges them like this.' Exile's image had just went up a notch in Donna's mind as she waited for him to decide what they should do.

"We'll go this way." Colt pointed towards a rocky area in the forest. "The uneven ground will help to break their line of sight with us. However, we're exposed here right now so they'll notice that we've changed direction."

With that said, Colt started sprinting towards the area he had pointed at. The pair of women followed behind and all three of them noticed Kaleidoscope's team change direction shortly after. 'They're definitely trying to intercept us.' Colt frowned as he tried to plan out their next move.

'With my Speed level being what it is, I can't outrun them. My only choices for now is to hide and proceed cautiously or to fight. But fighting would be suicide unless we can ambush one or two of them at a time.' The more that Colt thought about it, the more convinced he became they would have to use guerrilla warfare to facilitate their escape.

He was not willing to sacrifice his hard-earned gains just to save some face! That was just the height of stupidity! It was far better to understand your limits and plan for them. That was how someone got stronger. That still held true in video games. Throwing away your hard work for pride would cost you days, or even weeks, to recover from.

You would never reach the higher levels as quickly as you could have by doing such a thing. That's why he hated Captains like Aeri. She did not hesitate to throw her team members' lives away just to gain more benefits for herself.

There was one incident in particular in the game Mayhem that had rubbed Colt the wrong way. His team had discovered a hidden boss in the game world but after testing it out, he concluded that at least 70% of his team would have wiped to kill it. It would have taken these players around two months to recover from a death, so he decided it was not worth it at all. They could always return once they got stronger.

However, Kaleidoscope had a spy on Colt's team. Aeri set out for the boss's location as soon as she received word about it with 100 members of her own team. This included the Pros, Ams and even those used as simple fodder. When Colt heard about it, he returned to the site in time to see the boss die.

However, despite what they had received for killing the boss, the losses were just too great in Colt's eyes. Only Aeri and three others survived the encounter. What made the whole thing worse was that every item they received only benefitted Aeri's class.

'And now it looks like she's willing to do the same right now.' Colt's eyes moved to the team that was tracking them. 'She doesn't care how many of her team die as long as she can claim our treasures.'