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Chapter 162: Life on the Road
🕑 Added 2024-07-19 16:45:43 +0000 UTCHours later, they were so far from home that it didn’t even seem like the same planet. The distance from the constant sounds and smell of the ocean were part of that, but far from the entirety of the alien impression. The trees were different. The rocks were different. The soil itself was a different color and produced a different feeling in the wagon as it careened over it.
“This feels even faster than before,” Arthur commented.
“That’s because it is. These are the newest-edition shocks, or at least were when I left to join Coldbrook permanently. Just before we got these fitted, Littal and I picked up achievements on some quickest-time runs between towns. Those are small percentage increases to what we can do, but that’s a big deal when we’re already fast,” Talca bragged.
“Littal can get achievements? I didn’t even think he had system access.”
“Not as such. I get achievements that I share with Littal. He’s had some increases too, but it’s hard to say what they are. Every time he tries to show me through our link, I just get confusing static. It’s like he’s working with the system in a different way only he understands.”
“Do you think all beasts are like that?” Arthur asked.
Talca shrugged. “No idea. I don’t know that much about beasts generally. It’s always been more about my friend here. But for him, he seems to understand that there’s something or someone helping him out. I’m not sure if he knows that because I’ve been around for him so long or if he’s always known.”
Regardless of the source of the new speed, they were absolutely ripping down the path towards the iron mining town. The roads were new, and were just about as flat as glass despite being unpaved. And with Littal being equal to even the steepest grades any road builder would dare attempt, there was very little in the way of slowing down.
“So what’s this going to look like?” Arthur was a bit worried about the actual process they were going to go through. “Lots of negotiation, I guess?”
“Maybe not. We’re a new settlement, and nearly everyone wants to help those out. If we can find someone who has the entire amount of iron we need just in a pile ready to go, who doesn’t mind selling it all to one party, we’ll be out of there in five minutes,” Talca said.
“But that’s not going to happen,” Arthur said, hearing the tone in Talca’s voice.
“Nope.”
“Care to share why?”
Talca took a gulp of the tea Arthur had made him, and made a satisfied ahh sound after the sip, just as he had for every sip from the glass so far.
“Sure. If for no other reason than to pay you back for this tea. The deal is that every settlement is in the same boat you are, at least the ones under Karbo’s protection, which is more of them than you think. And they’re all going to need iron. It’s not like you took a lot of time once you found out Milo needed iron, but everyone’s going to have been buying at an accelerated pace.” Talca paused as he put the tea down. “There might not be the iron you want, and there might not be what you want all in one spot.”
“What do we do then?”
“We improvise. Places like that are always making more. They even do it right up to monster waves when they expect to get wiped out. The monsters don’t have any interest in the iron, so it’s there when they come back.”
“Does this place do that all the time? Abandon the town, I mean?”
“Yup. Every time.”
“Seems rough. Having to rebuild like that.”
Talca reached down and scratched the small of Littal’s back. “Well, sure. But this town isn’t like Coldbrook. There’s hardly any reason to be there at all besides the mines. Almost everyone there is connected to the mine in some way or another, besides a few cooks. It takes them about a day to get the buildings back up, and that’s that.”
Arthur tried to imagine a life like that, and for some reason the part that stopped him was losing his lamps. He hadn’t been that excited when his house finally got magic lighting. It had just seemed like another day. But coming home to a crumbled house, putting it back up, and not getting the lamps back in the process was a step too far for him. There was just something barbaric about it.
“Why live there at all, then?” Arthur said. “It’s not even a home.”
“No, it’s really not. But it’s not supposed to be, either. It’s a mining town.” Talca’s voice became a bit nostalgic. “Most of these people are coming in, spending a year or so doing all the mining they can. They get their levels up, then move to some other place and hang up their own shingle as the official miner for a town somewhere. It’s a choice they make.”
“What about people who come into a town like ours and just mine there? They seem to be progressing fast enough.”
“That’s another choice. But that’s only because you’re a frontier town. And not every frontier town is like Coldbrook, Arthur. Having so many deposits of so many different things just outside of town is unusual. And there’s no telling when they will give out. Everyone matures their class in different ways. And it ends up being best that way.”
The rest of the day was relatively uneventful. Talca had a bunch of roasted and salted fish he picked up from Skal, who was unsurprisingly good at creating simple dishes from his catches. They ate through their stock of it while drinking tea, sometimes talking but also spending entire hours just watching the terrain melt by. Arthur didn’t complain about the boredom. Anything that made the trip go faster was fine with him, including a temporary all-fish diet and long periods of quiet. He wanted to get the iron and get back to his friends. Those were the only things on his list.
Dinner that day was a quiet thing.
“I was surprised you didn’t want to take the detour to that town. We could have slept in beds, and eaten at a table,” Talca commented.
“I didn’t want to burn the hours,” Arthur said. “Let’s just get this done.”
Arthur looked down at his dish of preserved fish and various re-constituted dried vegetables and considered the alternatives of warm bread, freshly roasted meats, or whatever else the anonymous-to-him town on the edge of nowhere might have provided. He shivered against the cold despite the fire while he did. He’d be sleeping in a pack on the ground that night, the furthest thing from his newly perfected bed he could imagine, and also next to Talca, who snored.
It was still worth it.
“Spoken like a transporter,” Talca said with a smile. “You would have been a good one, you know.”
“Me?” Arthur didn’t doubt that he could have built a relationship with an animal and figured out how to drive a wagon. But the social aspects of his life were so strong he couldn’t imagine where Talca had got this opinion from. “I haven’t spent a day in this world when I wasn’t surrounded by people.”
“True.” Talca stirred the fire, letting the flames roar up around the pots hanging over it again. “But just because that’s what you’re used to doesn’t mean you couldn’t have gone another direction. I’ve seen how you handle quiet. Most people get antsy. You sink into it. That’s the sign of a transporter, I think.”
They sat around for another few minutes before Talca poured the uneaten portions of dinner into jars for a cold breakfast the next day and climbed into his tent.
“Get to sleep as soon as you can. We aren’t doing a full night’s rest tonight,” Talca said as his parting words.
Arthur only had trouble with the hard ground for a bit before the fatigue of travel took him into a deep slumber. He dreamed of monster attacks successfully repelled and of attacks that left his home in flames until Talca shook him awake before morning came.
The cold was horrific. Arthur’s clothes were pretty good, but with the fire dead and no way to get himself any warmer than his body could do on its own, it felt like the chill was going to sandpaper his skin raw.
“It won’t be any better when the wagon’s moving.” Talca noticed Arthur’s discomfort, and grimaced as he imagined what was coming. “Once we get over this next ridge, it should warm up. Before then, it’s going to be rough.”
The time before the ridge gave Arthur a new appreciation for what Talca did for a living. The rough, fast travel on previous trips with Talca were the easy-mode beginners stuff that the man did for passengers.
Normal Talca meant waking up before anything else and moving through the silence of the sunless hours of the early morning, all to hurry to a destination. Normal Talca meant spending hours in a high-speed climb against a frozen wind. Normal Talca meant a rough and comfortless ride, prioritizing speed and ignoring his own numb fingers as he pushed through bad conditions to get to better ones sooner.
Arthur thought of all the tales Talca had talked about delivering in emergencies, and how preciously he had to treat every minute. It wasn’t possible for Talca to treat his job as just another day at work most of the time. It just wasn’t in his character to take it easy when other people weren’t watching.
Not every day was cold like this and not every delivery called for cutting into his own sleep time in favor of speed, but there must have been enough of those sacrifices that Arthur suddenly downgraded his mental estimate of the likelihood that Talca was right about his suitability for transporting. It went from Oh, probably, but I’ll act humble and became I have very sincere doubts this could be true. There was nothing about the Talca’s lifestyle that crossed paths with his own.
Just as Arthur became lost in his thoughts, they cut through one last swath of trees, went over a short level area, then started descending the hill. Like magic, the temperature jumped from absolutely miserable to pretty tolerable, then kept getting warmer as the wagon shot down the mountain.
“Are we on another planet?” Arthur felt the feeling seep back into his fingers as he shivered away the worst of the cold. “It’s like it’s a different season.”
“It’s like that, sometimes,” Talca said. “The mountain holds back the warm wind from the other side. It’s still not really warm, by the way. It just feels that way after that horrible wind on the other side.”
Once Arthur had full use of his hands again, he made tea that sped the warming-up process even more, heating up the remnants of the last night’s dinner at the same time. They ate in silence, drawing in what sunlight they could from the beginning of the dawn as they whistled down the road.
Talca had estimated a day and a half to get to the iron, and that estimate was holding strong. Arthur rejection of creature comforts in favor of speed hadn’t sped the timeline up. By the time noon hit, Arthur felt like his seat was made of fire. He was antsy, something that didn’t go unnoticed by Talca.
“Calm down. See that hill ahead of us?” Talca pointed. “By the time we get over it, you should be able to see the town. We’ll get lunch and then go to work finding iron.”
“I’d rather just get the iron first, if we could.”
“Bad idea.” Talca shook his head. “You don’t negotiate on an empty stomach. It makes people impatient and upset. Just trust me on this one. We’re going to eat, and then we’ll find your iron. In that order.”
Arthur suppressed a huff and settled back into his chair, whining mentally about the delay as the town finally came into view. It was barely a town. A couple of concentric circles of near identical buildings made up the bulk of the structures, which were set just off to the side of a massive, demon-dug hole in the ground.
“Strip mining?” Arthur was surprised to see how thoroughly the terrain had been altered by the digging efforts. He had seen that before, with a quarry, but hadn’t imagined they did it for metals. “I didn’t expect to see that.”
“I’m surprised you even know the term. Remember what I was saying about people coming out here to level? Not every ore deposit is created equal. This is one of the big ones. It goes deep, and it stretches wide,” Talca said. Even while talking, his hands never left Littal. “In most places, it’s not worth it to strip mine. Here, almost every pick swing yields up some metal of some kind. Or so I’m told.”
The town was remarkably uninterested in their arrival, even considering how many people must have come in and out to buy and haul off iron. Not only did nobody come out to meet them, the few people Arthur saw on the street gave them little more than a glance before continuing on with their business.
“Not the friendliest place,” Arthur said.
“Don’t judge them based off this, Arthur. They’re trying to get what work in they can before the whole town gets demolished. Something that could happen as soon as the next couple days, as far as they are concerned. It’s not exactly the best conditions for hospitality.”
The town’s cook was a bit more friendly, at least.
“Oh, welcome.” The wolf demon looked up from a large pot of stew, waved, then went back to stirring and seasoning. “A coin will cover both of you. It comes with bread. I’m sorry I can’t do more, but most of my things are packed right now.”
“No problem.” Talca tossed him a coin and got two large bowls of stew with big hunks of bread in return. “Any word on the wave?”
“Not yet, but I’m expecting it any day now. It’s in the air. I’ll need all the time I can get to get around it. Non-physical class, you see.”
Talca and Arthur sat down on a nearby bench and started tearing into the stew. It was simple, but after a day of fish and dried vegetables, it might as well have been a four-course meal. It was the first true rest Arthur had since the trip began.
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Chapter 162 is also available on snowingpine.com for those able to log in. You can read it here.
