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Chapter 151: The Chase
🕑 Added 2024-07-11 15:57:56 +0000 UTCThick clothes could only protect Arthur so much. In the post-coldfall chill, they were hardly enough to keep him warm and forced him to draw on the adrenaline running through his veins for the last bit of heat. They also should have kept him safe from thorns and branches. But he had sought out the thickest, closest-growing patches of shrubbery and earned dozens of scrapes for his effort.
He could have worn extra-thick coldfall garb, the same ones that Ella had put Lily in. Remembering Lily as a puff of cloud brought a smile to Arthur’s lips. The memory was like a mint, sweet but also chilly. But Arthur had chosen his current clothes strategically. With every warrior, tracker, scout, and stalker out looking for him, he needed every advantage he could get.
No amount of majicka-laden tea could equality his lackluster stats with the combat-ready, survival optimized loadouts of the others. If he didn’t want to get caught, he had to be smart.
The clothes were just step one. They might not have kept out the cold but they were close-fitting things that wouldn’t snag easily and would resist tearing. Step two was smearing his body with mud scooped out of the river bank, even if it meant being cold and soggy and burning precious seconds of his lead. Step three was moving only after he heard pursuers pass into the distance, and only short distances over terrain that would conceal his tracks.
They’d find Arthur eventually. A piece of fabric from his clothes would be discovered on a bush, or a footprint he hadn’t fully covered would be found in the dirt. His current plan had worked well enough, but it was a stopgap at best. They moved faster. They looked further. And they were better in nearly every way. As things were going, he’d be captured, and he couldn’t let that happen.
I need to change the game.
After the next group of pursuers passed, Arthur sprang into action, carefully extracting himself from the briars and thorn bushes he had surrounded himself with before moving off at a fast trot in an entirely different direction. They wouldn’t expect that, unless they did. Normally, he would have put the chances of them guessing what he was going to do at an absolute minimum, but today was different. Today they knew more, understood more, and could predict what he would do better.
And they could do this because they had Lily and Mizu.
If his adoptive-daughter-and-sister-and-assistant owl-demon and his beautiful, perfect in every way he cared about, water demon girlfriend had just been captured, that would have been a different thing. Both of them were smart, and even if he had told them to give him up to keep themselves safe, they would have found ways to distract and misdirect the pursuers.
But both of them were fully compliant participants in his pursuit today, and that made things different.
With both Lily and Mizu assisting in Arthur’s capture of their own free will, he had a whole new element of pursuit to deal with. He had to think differently than he normally would. He had to zig where he’d usually zag. So while he normally didn’t dive head-first into a underground network of tunnels as fast as his feet could carry him, he found himself doing just that this time.
It was how the demon world was. Every day was a new adventure.
Arthur shivered as cold air drafted through some far-away tunnel entrance and out the exploratory tunnel he was now ducking into. He reached into his pocket and grabbed a lightstone, one of his first purchases since the town had shifted off barter economy to conventional currency.
The lightstone had taken a week-long journey from the capital to Coldbrook. And it was well worth the trip. If there was one thing Arthur had learned from living in a not-entirely-developed settlement on the outskirts of the world, it was the value of a reliable, portable light source against the dark of the wilderness.
Arthur held the stone out in front of him, letting its wide beam of illumination guide his steps as he took as many hopefully confusing turns as he could through the branches of the tunnel network. Those had been Milo’s idea. His bird-demon adoptive brother was of the opinion that if they were going to find trapped dungeons under the tons of rock they were mining, it was much better for the town if they found them while they were still in the mine. The town’s hunters and dungeon-diver warrior types were pretty good, and especially so when they could use the tunnels as tactical bottlenecks.
Or when chasing a poor human boy through the dark. This isn’t really hard for them. Arthur thought to himself. I can make it take longer. But how do I get away?
He couldn’t. He would hunker down in the dark, hope things would change, that some moment of tactical genius would come to him, or some unexpected ally would find him. It wasn’t a good plan but it was the plan he could put into action at the moment.
A good plan today is better than a great plan when I’m captured.
Arthur thought as he kept moving. He was close to the deepest parts of the mine now. He didn’t really need his light for this last bit and extinguished it as he rounded the last corner, hit the rock walls which marked the furthest that the miners had delved, and sat down on the cold hard rock to catch his breath.
“See, I told you he’d come here,” Lily said, her voice floated out of the dark. “It was all he could do, if you really thought about it.”
“I thought he’d be afraid to hide in the dark.” Mizu’s voice was amused as she lit up her own light source. She smiled as she took in Arthur’s mud-covered body as he sat miserably on the rock. If it was just her and Lily, Arthur might have still been able to get away, but they had a full half-dozen physical classes in tow, most of them warriors. Corbin alone was enough stealth and speed to pacify him, let alone the others. “Or just too cold. He doesn’t like the cold.”
“Gods.” Arthur stood up and made a futile attempt at wiping some of the excess mud off his clothes. “You know it’s an insult-to-injury thing that you’re using that light right? I didn’t know you’d use my present to cut my throat.”
“What else would I use?” Mizu smiled warmly at her light. “I like this light. It’s an Arthur-gift.”
“Well, this is all well and good, but…” Corbin reached out and touched Arthur’s shoulder, then looked at his watch. “I’m calling time on this one. Good run, Arthur. You kept it up a lot longer than I thought you would.”
“How did the others do?”
“We have Milo and Rhodia, since they always travel together now. And Spiky. Leena is still out there, somewhere. I don’t know how she does it. She has barely any points in physical stats, but the girl is just a ghost once she gets into a forest.”
“That’s fast. You got almost everyone.” Arthur tilted his head to the side, dislodging fast-drying mud from his hair as he did and sending it skittering across the stone floor. “I know I should be glad, since that means the hunters are that much better prepared. But I thought we’d do better for sure.”
“Well, the fact that you can run at all is impressive.” Onna, Mizu’s terrifying lizard-demon best friend, patted Arthur condescendingly on the shoulder. He was, as always, aware she could pick him up and throw him without even breaking a sweat. “But no, you can’t evade us for long. We aren’t going to be getting much out of hunting you guys after this. It’s almost time for us to start hunting each other. And then, if we’re lucky, we will be on to everyone-looks-for-Corbin by the time the monster wave hits.”
“Good luck.” Corbin lifted an arm and flexed his almost non-existent feline bicep. “I’m pretty good at hiding, you know.”
It was an understatement. Corbin was, as far as Arthur had been told, unrealistically suited for his stealth class. He was a kind of high-danger scout, someone you could send almost directly through an enemy force without getting him caught.
His stealth was well beyond what it should have been at his age, the product of a maniacal training period after his class acquisition and the fact that he was stealthed for almost all the waking moments of his life. Rumor was that his girlfriend back in the city could still find him, but nobody else could.
“We know.” Lith, the massive rhinoceros guard that served as one of the town’s hunters, winced. “I’m pretty good at finding things and I still have a lot of trouble uncovering you, even when you’re close. It’s a stretch goal.”
“Arthur, here.” Lily handed Arthur a metal flask as Mizu went to work with a cloth and some water in an effort to clean up his face. “The tea you made.”
“Oh, thank the gods.” Arthur popped the top of the flask and took a big gulp of his own boba tea. It was still hot and he could feel the warmth spreading out from his stomach immediately, alleviating his cold shivers. Of course, the heat of the tea was only part of it. This place, like all demon world places, did not run on physics except as a baseline palette on which majicka and the system painted their portraits upon. This tea was an example of that, soothing and warming much better than any conventional beverage had a right to, no matter how well it was brewed. “I know I made this, but it’s really, really good.”
“Yeah.” Mizu took the flask from him and took a drink. “So stop hogging it. You’re not the only one out here.”
“I’m the only one who took a dunk in the river in the middle of the night after coldfall,” Arthur retorted.
“Well, that’s true. But that’s your fault.”
“I bet there’s a water elemental greeting that goes something like, we pushed you in the river after coldfall, leaving you without warmth or dry clothing,” Arthur teased.
“Maybe,” Mizu giggled.
“So are we going back?” Lily shivered in her gigantic, puffy coat. She was the warmest dressed of all of them and had the vitality stats to match most crafters, but she was still a little girl. The psychological feeling of cold was harder for her to endure than it was for an adult. “I figure they probably found Leena by now.”
“Probably. We have to check. But really, we only needed your help to neutralize Arthur.” Corbin nodded in respect towards his teamaster friend. “You’d be doing just as well as Leena if we weren’t cheating, I think.”
“It’s not really cheating,” Arthur said. “I’m okay with it.”
Despite the fact that Lily and Mizu were non-crafters, it made sense for them to be on the hunter side of things. Lily’s class made any group of people she was working with just a bit more effective, and had some majicka-buffing rescue skills that could get a person out of a tight spot. Mizu was more-or-less responsible for the entire town’s water supply, which meant she was too valuable to put anywhere but in the absolute thick of the town’s strongest fighters.
It didn’t take a lot of thinking to see why that mattered. Warfare in the demon world was never against other demons. They had resolved that ugly part of their nature a time long ago. Instead, it was against waves of vicious monsters who came over the hills after overflowing out of near-infinite dungeons out in the wild, ravenous for blood and willing to bash against even the strongest of walls.
Once a city’s defenses failed, they’d flow like water over everything the citizens had built, tearing down buildings and crushing cobblestones. Any unfortunate person who happened to be in their way was counted among that damage, lost to the fangs and claws of the real threat.
And the initial protection period for new settlements was expiring soon. Whether the citizens of Coldbrook liked it or not, monster waves were coming. And they needed to be ready.
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Read Chapter 152 Now at SnowingPine.com!
https://snowingpine.com/fictions/demon-world-boba-shop/chapter/152
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