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Chapter 246: Figure Out the Happy Thing
🕑 Added 2024-11-02 08:13:00 +0000 UTCThis is the second chapter of the day
Chapter 2 / 2
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Read "Chapter 247: Sam" on Snowing Pine
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It turned out Euth could do quite a lot. This dungeon’s rat-tier enemies were scaly insect-like things that gave Arthur the creeps. They spawned inside a central pit in the ground that was supposed to act like a nest, then scurried out to attack. Arthur kept well back while Onna took the kid up the edge of the danger zone.
“So the big thing to keep in mind here is that you can probably handle the pace of these things so long as you let them come out naturally. But if you disturb the nest, or jump in, or do some other stupid thing, I’m going to yank you out. That’s my job. Don’t be dumb,” Onna commanded.
Euth nodded, then sent a questioning glance in the direction of the pit.
“Fine. Go ahead,” Onna said. “Do your best.”
As the first of the little scaled bugs came out of the pit, Euth sprung into action. It wasn’t like when Arthur had fought his first rat at all. Euth was, without a doubt, very thoroughly trained in combat. He was catching the monsters out of the air as they leapt at him, either stabbing them with pinpoint accuracy or batting them out of the way with his arms. Whatever else he might be, a novice to fighting wasn’t part of it.
Euth worked his way around the pit again and again, killing at a pace that pretty well exceeded the maximum the pit was willing to put out. As smooth and perfect as he at this, there was something horrifying about how he went about it.
“What is it, Onna?” Arthur felt about the same way watching Euth fight as he would have felt about watching someone crunch their teeth through a raw egg. “There’s something wrong about how he does it, but I can’t put my finger on it.”
“Oh. That’s obvious enough. He hates fighting. A lot.”
“But it’s all he wants to do.”
“Eh.” Onna flipped her dagger in her hand. “It’s what he thinks he wants to do. But someone trained this kid up before he even had any idea there was an alternative. No idea why, but he’s been doing it for so long I doubt he’s ever even thought about whether or not he likes it.”
“But on some level, he hates it,” Arthur said.
“Every level but the conscious, I’d guess.” Onna suddenly grabbed her own dagger out of the air. “And there’s the dumbass move. Took him longer than I thought.”
Smooth and quick enough that it could have almost been just a mistake, Euth kicked a big rock just hard enough to send it tumbling into the nest, eliciting a series of low-pitched hisses from the swarm of bugs and spurring them to issue forth from the pit like a carpet of little horrors. Without points in perception, it would have been hard to see the stone move, let alone know that it was moved on purpose.
Onna had plenty of points in perception, and wasn’t the kind of person to go back on a promise or a threat. Like a bullet, she sliced through the air, picked the kid up by the collar of his shirt, and flashed back to where Arthur was standing.
“Let me go!” the kid said. “I don’t have the stupid class yet.”
“And you won’t get it, that way,” Arthur said before Onna could admonish the kid. “The System isn’t going to give you a class if it thinks you’re going to hurt yourself with it. At least not without absolutely forcing it to. At the best, you are making this take longer by doing what you are doing.”
“Like you’d know. You're a crafting classer.” The words fell off of Euth’s lips like a curse. “Not even a smith. You make food.”
“You think that makes him wrong?” Onna lifted an eyebrow.
“Must. The System is for fighting. Always has been.”
“Not here.” Arthur shook his head. “Maybe not even where you are from.”
“Fine.” The kid kicked his feet in the air. “Sure. Whatever. Now set me down so I can go fight again.”
“Nope,” Onna said. “I warned you, you heard me, and now you get to wait. Bring him back tomorrow, Arthur. We can see if he listens better then.”
After they got out of the dungeon, the droning, angry whining began. Onna had left almost immediately to go about her business in town, which meant Arthur had to serve as the kid’s escort. And Euth, at this point, was pissed. He was pissed at the System, Onna, Arthur, Spiky for some reason, and even Talca. There were so many things he seemed angry at that Arthur was pretty confident it didn’t have much to do with those things at all.
He just carried around so much anger with him that it didn’t really seem to matter where emotions went. The world was a spillway of sorts to his rage.
Which was bothersome, and annoying, and had begun to grate on Arthur by the time they managed to get back to the town. But it was still manageable. Arthur was an adult. A mature adult of the calming-tea-brewing variety. It was okay, right up until Milo found him to tell him about Mizu.
“It’s happening. Mizu. The baby,” Milo said, glancing at the still ranting Euth behind Arthur. Right at that moment, Arthur became incapable of hearing Euth, which meant it didn’t register when Euth became mad at being ignored, or when Milo’s eyes got wider and more worried as the boy caught up with Arthur as he walked towards the agreed-upon birthing place and accompanying medical care.
Arthur was still processing Milo’s news when Euth managed to circle in front of him, waving his arms and screaming. And then, the world came back into focus. If there was one thing Arthur’s brain could always understand, it was someone standing between him and Mizu when she needed him.
“You will listen to me and you had better damn well fix thi…”
Euth didn’t get any further. Arthur threw him. He doubted it was a very good throw, but he had to hope it wouldn’t hurt the kid much when he landed, since he was in no way prepared to waste another second on this out-of-town human.
The only advantage of the whole thing was the sudden realization that he had stats, and could get to the medical building much, much faster if he simply used them. Moments later, Arthur found himself at Mizu’s side, comforting her as best he could. Whether it was because Euth was busy getting medical care of his own or because other people were wise enough to keep him away from Arthur at that moment, they had a relatively peaceful room for at least a while.
Arthur held Mizu’s hand through the process, talked to her, fed her ice chips, and generally did everything he could to make it easy on her. Five hours later, they had pretty well determined that while the labor itself might end up being easy, it wasn’t going to be short. The time dragged on enough that in a particularly calm labor-moment, Mizu actually sent Arthur away to grab some food, rest up a bit, and come back fresh.
It was while he ate an enormous bowl of what was mostly like shepherd’s pie that Euth found him again. Arthur glanced up at the boy, grateful to see that he didn’t seem to be wearing any medical apparatus. Whatever damage he took had either been light enough to not need treatment or to respond to it pretty quickly. The boy didn’t look damaged at all.
Euth did look like he had something to say. It took ten seconds of silence and then a raised eyebrow from Arthur to get him to actually say it.
“I was wrong,” Euth said.
Arthur did not dare hope this was an apology. The kid didn’t seem the type. He wasn’t wrong.
“About?”
“About whether or not you could have been a warrior. You could have been.” The kid rubbed his own shoulder, as if remembering something happening to it. “When you shoved me. There wasn’t any hesitation. That’s the main thing, my dad said. You can’t hesitate. Or get scared.”
“I did try it once, you know. I wasn’t very good at it.”
“I didn’t say you’d be very good at fighting. I just said… you know. You could have done it.”
“Maybe,” Arthur said. “Why does it matter?”
“Because… You’re a human, right? Different world, but you must have had war.”
“Sure.”
“So why don’t you fight?” the kid asked. “You’re obviously strong.”
Arthur didn’t correct him on the whole strong thing. The misunderstanding seemed to be working out in his favor.
“Because… look. Your family obviously died. To demons. Or something worse. Let's get that out of the way,” Arthur said.
The kid looked shell shocked for a second, then normal shocked, then nodded, grimly.
“And that sucks. I didn’t have a perfect life on my original planet but it wasn’t that. But on your world, it sounds like you fought for reasons, right? It wasn’t just for fun?”
“It was never fun. I think.” Euth hadn’t been very old when he had come over here, or else wasn’t very experienced. “It was just to keep the demons out. You had to do it.”
“But here you don’t. You have to understand that.”
“There’s no war at all?”
“Not only that, but even the stuff that warriors do doesn’t trump everything else. I mean, they are useful, but a guy who swings a sword isn’t more than a guy who makes shirts. Maybe even less, sometimes.”
“I didn’t even fight.” The kid held his hands up. “All that training and I couldn’t protect anyone. And now I just want to put it to use, and… it’s useless. It doesn’t even mean anything here. I never did my part.”
“Can I be honest? Like in a bad way,” Arthur said. “I’ve finished my food and my wife is trying to have a baby. I’ve just stopped caring about you. At all.”
The kid nodded. He seemed to get at least that much.
“But I’ll tell you this much. I bet on your planet, when people you knew died, you wanted them to be happy. You weren’t mad at them because they were gone. You just hoped they had gone somewhere better. Probably. I don’t know how you people were.” Arthur put his hand on Euth’s shoulder and, much more gently than earlier, moved him out of the way. “But if I’m right, that’s what you owe them. Figuring out the happy thing. Not getting killed in a fight.”
The kid took in a deep breath. “That’s… harder.”
“Yeah. Sucks to be you.” Arthur hoped the kid caught the sympathy in his voice because he was fresh out of time otherwise. “I’ll be back at the house… at some point. If you need something, ask anyone and tell them to put it on my account. Anything you need.”
Arthur left the kid standing in the street. Euth would figure it out, hopefully. It didn’t matter if Arthur felt bad about it, even though he did. He simply had more important things to deal with right then.
“You look like you just talked to Euth.” Mizu grimaced in pain as the progress kept going. “It’s almost funny. It’s like an evil version of anyone else talking about Arthur Stuff.”
“I did talk to him. But I did get an idea after talking to him that it surprises me I didn’t think of before,” Arthur said. “It should help you.”
“And what’s that?”
“Tea. Am I right that this process is pretty stalled?”
“Seems to be.”
“Then give me a minute. Just a minute.”
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Read "Chapter 247: Sam" on Snowing Pine
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Comments
uavgas
Arthur's gonna be a dad!
Kevin McKinney
Good stuffs!
