Chapter 117: Not Good at Flying

Note: I couldn't leave you on a cliffhanger. It wouldn't be nice. Here's the second chapter today.

--

A single glance was enough to know Karra wasn’t up to the fight. The collision had affected the monster, but not nearly as much as it had hurt the infernal. She staggered to her feet, clearly broken by the crash but putting on a brave face as much as she could.

“Run, Arthur,” she shouted out the words unsteadily, like a drunk person might. “Get Lily somewhere else.”

Arthur froze. His eyes were locked on the monster as it took one step and then another towards Karra. There was nothing he could do. He wanted there to be some way to help her more than anything. There just was no arrow in the entire quiver of his build that could help with that. Not a single that he could think of.

Just as suddenly as the monster had begun to move forward, it stopped, sniffed the air, and listened to something Arthur couldn’t hear. Near the trees, a much smaller roar rang out as the Daisy, the mother Prata broke through the brush, charged between the monster and Karra, and bared its fangs at the monster.

For a second, the Jeremy eyed Daisy. Lith might have been right about the monster being the type to go for weaker prey, but even it had to respect the fact that the Prata was an unignorable threat.

Before Arthur could even breathe, the Jeremy and Prata sprung towards each other. As much as perception should have helped with the task, Arthur had only the faintest clue on how to judge an animal fight to know how it was going. The whole thing resembled a chaotic ball of hide, fur, and teeth drifting across the landscape.

For about a minute, it was a stalemate. Occasionally, the two beasts would break apart, snarling and bloody, before crashing into each other again. And then the deadlock broke. A huge swipe from one of the Jeremy’s clawed forelegs caught the Prata square on its side, sending it flying a few yards away. It crashed into the grass, tried to get back on its feet, slipped and collapsed back down.

The Jeremy wasted no time on triumph before turning its eyes back to what it judged to be its new weakest-prey target. Karra gulped and palmed a brick as it advanced on her again.

And then the ground in front of the monster exploded.

A giant cloud of dirt erupted, replacing the Jeremy in a brown-red ball. A moment later, the dust moved away on the breeze. As it disappeared, the cloud revealed its hulking red source, out of breath for the first time Arthur had ever seen.

“Oh, hey,” Karbo addressed the monster, who was just now becoming visible again through the dust. “That’s actually my niece.”

The Jeremy did not seem to care about the familial relationship. This, Arthur felt, was a mistake. With a startled roar, it took a full force swing at Karbo, pivoting its whole body to load up as much force as it could. Karbo, shining with a rainbow of stacked auras, caught the foot in his hand and gave it a flat smile before lift-spinning in place and throwing the entire animal like a shot-put. It screamed through the air in two different ways as it flew out of sight.

Karbo didn’t seem interested in the aftermath of his actions, and instead cancelled all of his auras and blurred towards Karra in one smooth, unreasonably fast motion.

“You all right? You shouldn’t really be fighting those.” Karbo looked at the ground, took in the broken bricks, and laughed. “Unless you brought bricks, maybe. Which, of course you did. How did that go? Bringing bricks to a monster fight?”

Karra sighed and collapsed back on her butt.

“I got in one pretty good hit. Just ran into it.” She looked down at her own numerous injuries, then shook her head. “All this is from that.”

“Hardcore. I like that. Here, take this.” Karbo flipped a pill towards Karra. “That’s the best one I have. Itela makes me carry them even though I don’t need it. Says I don’t know how things are going to go in advance. I guess she’s right.”

“Thanks. But no,” Karra said. “My vitality is catching up pretty quick. Give me one of the weaker ones. There’s someone who deserves that more.”

Karbo raised his eyebrows as he tracked Karra’s gaze to the fallen Prata. “Oh, yeah, I forgot about her. Tough girl. What’s the story there?”

“Arthur stuff,” Lily said, still suspended in Arthur’s arms.

“That checks out. Well, sure. She’s earned it.”

Karbo walked over to the huge bear-beast, ignored an entirely ineffective swipe at his legs, pried its mouth open, and flicked in the pill. Daisy almost choked on the pill as it went down, then cancelled a growl and sat up in surprise as all the wounds on her body began to close at once.

She looked at Karbo, tilted her head, and appeared to have just enough brain power to realize that he was the source of healing. On now-steady legs, she stood up, walked over, and licked Karbo’s shin.

“Friendly. You tamed this?” Karbo asked.

“Some sort of mutual protection pact. We don’t know how far that goes,” Arthur said.

“Pretty damn far. As long as it knows someone is a friend, it’s gonna leave them alone. And the pact makes them err on the side of caution.”

“How do you know that?” Lith strode up, his bow now safely strapped to his back. “I always heard it was variable.”

“That’s because everyone who writes that sort of stuff down is scared of everything.” Karbo scoffed in a way that made Arthur keenly aware of just how little there was that the infernal felt was worth being afraid of. “I once pacified a whole mountain of beasts, Prata and all. Worked out just fine.”

“Why…” Lith’s mouth dropped as he realized Karbo wasn’t joking. “Why would you do that?”

Karbo shrugged. “They were having trouble getting cargo over that mountain, and it seemed nicer than killing all the beasts. They didn’t know any better before, and now they do. Easy.”

“Uncle Karbo.” Karra rolled her eyes. “You’re forgetting everyone else is normal again.”

“Oh, right. Huh.” Karbo shooed the Prata away, and it immediately took the hint, ambled over to Karra, and began to check her injuries out with its snuffling nose. “Then it was hard. Appropriately hard for what a normal person would find difficult.”

Karra rolled her eyes again as Karbo appeared to consider that as the end of that matter. Arthur finally shook off his shock of the situation, had a thought, and looked again in the direction the Jeremy had departed towards.

“Should we be worried about that monster?”

“That thing? No, not at all. I know about those. Pretty good at fighting. Not good at flying.”

—

With Karbo’s word and the heroic actions Daisy had just performed, it didn’t take long for the town to realize the mother Prata was, post-friendship-pact, a reasonably friendly animal. It didn’t want to go too close to the town and nobody felt like forcing it. Everything else, though, was completely green-lit. Within a half hour, Lily was alternating between riding Daisy and wrestling with Rumble, who wasn’t old enough to understand he should be aggressive in the first place.

“You want me to bring back some meat, if I can?” Karbo said. “There are always a few monsters left in the dungeon, after a break. And I’ve tried to eat almost all of them, at some time or another.”

“That would be great. Unless that gets in your way, Lith,” Arthur said, shuddering at the thought of Karbo trying to eat a monster.

“Oh, you’re the hunter? I guess I knew that, before. Well, come with me, then.” Karbo reached out, grabbed the bowstring of the hunter’s bow where it was looped around his chest, and lifted Lith into the air like a picnic basket. “I’ll help you out a bit. Can’t hurt to get some extra training in before we can get a warrior class stationed here.”

Lith looked both honored and terrified, then dropped the honored half of things as Karbo exploded across the now destroyed forest towards the once-trapped dungeon, bringing Lith with him at waist-level like a shoulder bag.

“He’ll bring back a hundred pounds of meat.” Karra shook her head. “He’s not admitting it, but he’s hungry. He didn’t hold back with those auras at all.”

“How does he have so many, anyway?” Arthur had seen a bit of that kind of power from Karbo before, but not to that level. “The system’s about balance, right? Nobody is less balanced than Karbo.”

“My mom talked about that once. Said she thought the system made a mistake. His whole class is sort of freehand. The system doesn’t help with much, but anything he can learn to do without a skill, the system lets him keep. And he’s a genius,” Karra said.

“I’ve seen him bite a faucet in half trying to get water out,” Arthur mentioned.

“Kind of a genius. There’s more than one kind of genius. Karbo is the kind that uses his body. In that way, there’s nobody smarter. But yeah, he does accidentally bite more things than you’d expect.”

A few hours later, Lith and Karbo were back, one carrying a huge field-stripped dungeon monster while the other hefted a big sack of something else over his shoulder.

“For you,” Karbo said, thrusting the bag at Milo. “Metallic scales. You can probably make armor out of them. Make some for Karra, okay? There will be plenty for a couple of sets, and once you have a warrior here, there won’t be any shortage of scales. Those monsters aren’t that hard to beat.”

“For you, or normal people?” Milo asked. “Seems relevant.”

“You know what? I have no idea. Too easy for me to gauge. Lith?”

“For normal people too. The Jeremy was the most dangerous monster in the dungeon. I almost could have hunted one of the other monsters, if I had backup.”

“Speaking of, where’s Corbin?”

“That little cat-demon? I don’t know. He told me about this problem, and I said I’d carry him in with me, then he disappeared.”

“He actually got away?” Lith looked legitimately surprised. “That can’t be easy.”

“Oh, that kid? He’s probably the best pure stealth class in his generation. Think about it. You’re all pretty good at what you do, but do you spend as much time practicing as he does? His own mother threw bags of flour around the house so she could make sure that he had really left.”

The rest of the night was, in a lot of ways, a spectacle. Karra dragged over a bunch of bricks to build a massive bonfire over, and the monster that Karbo and Lith had brought back was seasoned and roasted, along with several large fish from their local angler. They feasted, roasting vegetables on sticks, cooking grains, and ultimately gorging on the best they could cook up.

Karbo didn’t even pretend to hold back, eating pound after pound of meat as he recharged whatever internal stores allowed him to be Karbo in the first place. When he finally finished, Lily convinced him to take her on a ride around the forest at top speed, something only she was brave enough to ask for.

After things calmed down, Arthur broke into his limited supplies of baking things, made some cookies and tea, and then settled himself to enjoy the night. They gathered around the fire, telling stories new and old.

“And then, Lith said, ‘Run! It’s a Jeremy!’ and Arthur laughed. He started running, but I swear he laughed while this giant thing was chasing him,” Lith said, making the appropriate hand motions.

“I didn’t.”

“You did. I saw it.”

“It’s true. I saw it too,” Lily cut in. “I thought it was weird at the time, or would have if there was any time. What was it about, Arthur?”

“It’s just… Okay, this is an Earth thing, but Jeremy is a name there. A really, really normal name. Maybe the most normal name there is. So it surprised me.”

Everyone stopped at looked at him.

“That’s it?” Karbo said. “That was enough to make you laugh in the face of certain death?”

“I know, but if you understood how the name sounds to someone from Earth…”

“No, Arthur, you don’t get it.” Mizu patted his arm affectionately. “It’s the same here. Those monsters are named after the guy who discovered them. Jeremy.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true. It was our most common name, once,” Skal said, gazing wistfully off into the distance. “Of course, we overdid it. Nobody names their kids that anymore.”

As Arthur sat reeling from that particular revelation, the night went on around him. The combination of relief and celebration seeped into every moment, keeping even Skal up far past midnight. It was perfect, as far as Arthur was concerned. The only things that felt missing were Daisy and Rumble, but they were fairly clear that they preferred to do their own celebrating in the woods.

And just like that, in a way and to an extent Arthur had never felt before, he knew they were going to make it. They had been planting the seeds of a town, and now those seeds were sprouting all around them, taking on a life of their own.

It was time to sit around and watch them grow.