Kenan couldn't sleep, so the first thing he did was move all the extra bodies to the pile he'd already made. Then he took inventory. The weapons the goblins had left behind were a welcome addition to his current arsenal, but apart from the shaman's staff, everything else looked low quality. Even the longsword the warrior hobgoblin had left behind was rusted at the hilt and chipped in other areas. It wouldn't last long, and compared to the weapons the system had given them, they really weren't up to par.
Which was why the longsword and staff were the only things Kenan took. The daggers the goblins had held were pretty much jagged pieces of metal sharpened with filthy rags wrapped around one end as handles. Those were more likely to kill him than help him kill anything. Beyond that, he'd made sure to get used to the new perimeter.
He had enough distance that from the porch of the cabin, he could fire a significant number of arrows before any monster got close. The garden wasn't large—about two meters wide and four meters long. Depending on how things grew here, it should be enough for them to survive, along with the Survival Bundle from the system. But he had no gardening tools and didn't feel particularly inclined to spend his precious exp on buying that bag of random seeds, even though it only cost 10 exp.
Once he was sure he understood their current environment better, Kenan decided to take the time to study the face-trees. At the moment, he didn't have a better name for them, but apparently these things used to be people—a result of the many heroes the system had brought here to fight against whatever evil existed on this planet... Horta.
Kenan spent the better part of an hour studying them, but try as he might, he couldn't glean anything useful from the trees outside of the fact that, even though they were uniform in size and length, the faces on the trunks were different. Some were animals, others were people, still others were monsters like the goblins they'd been facing. It was a rather chilling sight to see the outcome of failure. Usually you just knew something might or would happen if you failed a mission—it was something else entirely to be under the pressure of seeing the actual result of failure staring back at you.
"Well, nothing to be done about it but to get stronger," Kenan muttered to himself as he moved to the side. Already, the stench from the dead goblins was beginning to fill the clearing. He probably had to dig a pit and have Kate set them on fire to dispose of the corpses. But without any tools but a rusted longsword, it was going to take forever. And he was especially worried about setting a fire when they were surrounded by trees. A forest fire was a surefire way to put an end to this tragic story extremely quickly.
He shook his head. Next would be training. He'd paid attention to Kate's theories about skills and what the information packet had written. Kenan knew he had to find a way to incorporate this new spell of his into his repertoire of combat abilities. His training was the one thing helping him survive here, and he'd have to train Kate too if she wanted to survive. It wasn't possible to ignore the physical aspect of her abilities—min-maxing wouldn't work when reality was staring you right in the face. She at least needed to understand basic self-defense, and he also had to adapt everything he'd learned about fighting from human-based targets to animals and monsters.
Kenan moved to the side where his old quiver and the ruined arrows were. He wanted to ensure he was efficient at dealing with enemies at range. There were no guns here, so he had to go back to the weapon that had revolutionized human warfare—the bow. The increase in stats, even if he hadn't fully acknowledged them yet, was significant. He was already more than three times faster than he'd been before. His movements were more efficient, and his senses were a lot stronger to the point of being overwhelming.
Kenan took a blunted arrow and fired, his target being one of the face-trees with the body of a goblin propped up against it. The arrow bounced off the goblin's skull, leaving a small chip behind. Kenan frowned softly. The problem perhaps wasn't with his speed or his skill with the bow. The problem was with damage and penetration. He would very much like for a single shot to take out the monsters before they got any closer.
Neither the arrow nor the Basic Wind Bullet skill was doing enough damage for Kenan. It was the reason why he wanted to see if he could attach the skill to his arrows. He'd seen Kate use the spear to cast her Basic Fire Bullet skill. So in theory, it should be possible for him to do so, even without that Basic Magic Mastery passive skill she had. He suspected it was the presence of that skill that made it easy for her to use her skill like that. Kenan was hoping he could achieve the same thing with pigheaded stubbornness. He didn't need a skill to figure it out—he'd just keep at it until the skill and his weapons worked hand in hand.
Kenan kept at it for a whole five hours, during which point Kate had come out and taken a spot of her own in the clearing to do her own training. They weren't talking to each other, but they fell into a sort of easy and monotonous state. Whatever they were doing now, they were doing for their survival. And not just for their survival—they were doing this because there really wasn't anything else to do. They had to try their best to keep busy, or they would be driven insane by the sheer insanity of their current situation.
After the five hours were up, Kenan stumbled to the well. Luckily, it wasn't too deep, and he could get some water by using the plastic bottles the system had provided. Then he stripped, leaving his body bare and exposed.
Kate flung her head to the side, feeling suddenly prudish—which was crazy because she'd seen him naked far too many times to count. They hadn't spent all their time holding hands before they'd decided to get married.
She couldn't help it as her eyes traced the contours of his body. Kenan wasn't huge, but he was fit—a swimmer's or wrestler's body, with well-defined abs and musculature. She frowned. She'd barely seen him go to the gym during their time together, yet he was always so fit and sculpted. Her cheeks reddened. She remembered a time when those arms of his had held her pinned down while she'd screamed his name to the heavens—
"Kate?"
"NO!" she yelped, jumping back in shock after Kenan drew her out of her thoughts.
"You spaced out there for a second. Are you okay?" he asked with a concerned look on his face, with absolutely no care for the fact that he was stark naked.
She shook her head quickly as if to get rid of cobwebs. "I-I'm fine. Was just lost in thought for a second there. Do you need anything?"
He shook his head. "I'm just going to clean up and then go into the cabin to give you some privacy to get cleaned up too. I know you haven't slept yet, so we should probably get some rest. It's the middle of the night after all, and we need to be fully ready for the next day. Something tells me it'll be even more eventful than today."
He finished up and gave her a small smile before gathering his clothes in a bundle. They were wet, so he quickly spread them over the pylon like some act of defiance, letting them dry. Kate actually smiled at that, a sweet feeling bubbling in the pit of her stomach—even as her mind fed her images of her husband in bed with her half-sister.
Kate shook her head, but Kenan was already stepping into the cabin. Considering everything that had gone down, he was quite the gentleman for doing so.
But sooner rather than later, she was going to have to address the elephant in the room... or the clearing. He'd cheated on her with the person she hated most, the person who'd always hated her from such a young age. They'd had fights before, and they'd always found a way back to themselves. But she had no idea how they would start doing so now—not for this situation.
Kate knew without a doubt that if this were Earth, she would have already walked away without looking back. Her life before Kenan had been filled with one disappointment after another, betrayals from different sources, all because her sister had had it out for her. But there was nowhere to go now. Kenan had been her refuge and safe space, her sanctuary from all the pain. Yet even with everything that had happened, he still watched out for her. He'd still saved her life.
And while that hadn't washed away the sting of what he'd done, it was a step in the right direction toward soothing the wounds she now carried. He still loved her—it was hard to hide things like that from a woman, especially one who'd spent five years learning to read his every expression, every gesture. But she wasn't ready to fully forgive him. And to be honest... she wasn't sure if she'd ever be ready to fully trust him again.
The thought made her chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with her earlier injuries. Because as much as she wanted to hate him, as much as she wanted the anger to be enough, she knew the truth. She still loved him too. And that, more than anything else in this cursed world, terrified her.