Chapter 104: Hunter’s Refresher

The next person Arthur and Lily found was the hunter, who more or less found them himself. He wasn’t a stealth class like Corbin was, but out in the woods he might as well have been. Arthur heard a heavy thwump behind him as he passed a tree, then turned around to see a heavy-set bow-wielding rhino demon towering over him.

“I’ll never get used to that, Lith.” Arthur stood under the shadow of the much larger, much heavier demon, then turned to his cart. “You’re huge. That tree is small. I should have been able to see you. Wouldn’t you have been better as a tank?”

“Maybe, if I liked being a tank.” Lith leaned against the tree, which groaned under his weight. “Which I don’t. Think about it. Do you want to get hit in the face all day? As your job? Neither do I.”

“Still. The hiding doesn’t make sense,” Arthur said.

“It’s not really hiding. Not in the way you think.” Lith watched greedily as Arthur put together his drink. “When you walked by that tree earlier, you probably just thought it was just a big tree. My primary skill is called One with Nature, and it’s pretty literal like that.”

“Huh. And I guess the system does some weird stuff. Here, take this. Let it brew for a few seconds longer.”

“This is the tea I can eat?”

“The boba, yeah. And the leaves are, in fact, edible. You should try to leave nothing behind in the glass when you’re done.”

The tea Arthur made for Spiky and Leena was mostly just for endurance, with a slight buff to alertness. Milo got a tea that helped almost entirely with endurance and nothing else, while Kout got a drink that made him see slightly farther and boosted his balance. They were all helpful, but nothing special.

Lith’s drink was a different thing all together. Every ingredient had come together beautifully.

Hunter’s Refresher (Minor)

This all-edible tea is aimed at delivering as many calories and vitamins as it can while it re-hydrates, relaxes, and soothes. For a hunter, it’s the perfect thing, allowing for sustained effort, softer movement, more complete concealment, and a steadier hand on a bowstring.

Unlike most of your teas, this drink has no stimulant effect whatsoever, having purposefully avoided pep in favor of other considerations.

Effects: Slight stamina boost, slight improvement to stealth, and slight muscle-stabilizing effect

“It’s amazing, you know. I’ve trained for years to be steady. And this stuff actually makes it even steadier, somehow,” Lith said as he gulped down the tea, leaves and all. “There are alchemist drugs that do the same thing, but they cost a fortune.”

“Well, it was a great success, as far as successes with tea go,” Arthur said. “I’m glad, for what it’s worth. We need the food. Without you, there would be no meat at all.”

Lith had traveled as far as anyone to come to the frontier. His journey started near the capital, where he had been born and raised. According to him, a hunter class in the capital was about as useless as it could possibly be. As soon as the territory expansion was announced, he had packed his bags, kissed his mother goodbye, and high-tailed it towards the edges of civilization. It was only through sheer, dumb luck that he had ended up with Arthur and the rest of the gang, but they were thankful for it every day, especially around dinnertime.

“Well, I might not be as helpful today. Look at this.” Lith bent down and showed Arthur a set of footprints in the soil, put down by big, meaty paws that had sunk deeply into the soft dirt. “This is a Prata. They’re big furry things with plenty of meat. And they tend to circle through relatively small ranges of territory. I’ve been sitting in this tree all day waiting for it to come back through. No luck.”

“Could we tame some of them? the Prata?” Arthur asked.

“They’re technically tamable, but only just. Some people have them in harsher climates because they survive almost anything. But we’re not set up for that yet.”

“So no meat tonight?” Arthur said. “I can make do. Too bad, though.”

“Well, maybe. There’s still plenty of smaller game. I’ll check my traps later. We might get lucky.”

“I think it’s good,” Lily said. “Considering.”

“Considering what, you little ragamuffin?” Lith glanced down, smiling. He was a fairly business-minded person most of the time, but had taken a special liking to Lily. Apparently, he had a lot of little sisters back home and Lily seemed to be a sort of substitute for that element of his far-away family. “I’ve seen you at dinner. Don’t tell me you’ll be happy with just boiled grains.”

“No, I mean, because of the baby. It doesn’t seem fair,” Lily said as she pointed at the brush. “Look. She has such tiny feet.”

“Huh.” Lith bent down and parted the brush, revealing a set of smaller footprints. “That’s a sharp eye. So it’s not just a Prata, it’s a mother Prata. But if I had surprised a mother with her baby…” He shuddered. “Either I would have won and orphaned a beast, or I would have missed my shot and been in a lot of trouble. Thanks, Lily. I have no idea how I missed that.”

Lily beamed before moving on.

The broad semicircular path Arthur and Lily were on had brought them to the edges of the settlement, and now they had to head back. Mizu and Rhodia were working in the embryo of a town they had built, which meant there were just three more people to find if they wanted to catch everyone.

There had been other newcomers. One was the town’s unassuming armadillo with a class called Stamper, one that helped with both primitive road-building and in getting soil ready to serve as foundations for houses. And the second was a tree demon lumberjack who was out looking for particular kinds of wood to cut into shingles and roofbeams for their new houses.

“You know, that’s twice today,” Arthur said as they walked. “Where you told a person something that should have been their own business and ended up being right.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess,” Lily said. “Do you think I should cool it? I don’t want to be rude to them.”

“No, I think they appreciated it. It helped both times, remember?” Arthur scratched his chin. “It’s just a bit weird that you can do it. I would have missed all of that.”

“I don’t know,” Lily said. “It’s like my eyes get itchy when I look at what other people are doing. I can tell there’s something there to see, if I just look.”

“Well, keep it up. It’s helping, even if it’s not coming from a skill just yet.”

Lily puffed herself up an enormous amount in obvious pride, then skipped after Arthur as they moved through the trees. Soon enough, they found the Stamper and Lumberjack, gave them their drinks, and then beat it back towards town. They paused at the mouth of the valley to rest, looking up at the looming cliffs above them.

“How long do you think it will be before we seal this up?” Lily looked down the river at their still-undefended canyon. Some trick of erosion had kept the entrance to the valley much more narrow than the valley itself, but the entrance was still wide enough for twenty or thirty people to stand across, shoulder to shoulder.  “I know there’s not supposed to be any monster waves soon, but it’s a bit scary. Anything could come in.”

“I don’t know. We could haul in boulders, and the Stamper could pack them in soil. It wouldn’t be permanent, but it would be a lot better than what we have now. That’s why Milo wants to find metal so badly. He needs a bigger, tougher cart if we are going to haul that much stone.”

“What about the new Slapstone? The stuff Milo found?”

Arthur shrugged. “No idea. I guess it depends on how much there is. No use worrying about it right now, anyway. Everyone wants it done. We’ll do it as soon as we can, and even if we have to ask Rhodia to make nothing but bricks for a while.”

Back at the camp, the last few drinks were distributed, as well as news of Milo’s find. Rhodia looked relieved at the knowledge she wouldn’t have to focus on building materials, at least for now. Mizu, in contrast, was ecstatic. Apparently, Slapstone was a best-case scenario for well linings. She took her drink, forgot anyone else existed, and shuffled back towards her digging sites, mumbling maniacally about rocks and water flows.

“There goes your girlfriend,” Lily said, watching the blue weller disappear down into the ground again.

“There she goes. And she’s great.” Arthur sighed, clapped his hands together, and set his empty drink back up on the cart. “We can wash these up later. There’s still plenty of time in the day for our project. Are you ready?”

“Yes!” Lily bounced on her heels in excitement. “I’ll go get the shovels and things. I’ll meet you there!”

—

“There” was a beautiful grassy slope behind Arthur’s house, or at least the site of where Arthur’s house would eventually sit once it was built. He had chosen the site for the view, plus an assurance from Mizu that the property would also accommodate a wonderfully productive well once she had time to dig it.

Arthur sneezed as he looked up at the hill, which backed up against the sheer rock cliff that bordered the town in general. There were acres of grass, growing beautifully in soil so black it almost looked like coffee when turned over with a shovel. It would grow anything. Arthur didn’t have to be an agriculture class to know that. And it would need to.

Arthur had a lot of tea with him, and more tea was coming, but eventually, he’d run out. He could rely on outside shipments for that, but there was no telling when the caravans would get disrupted, and it would mean that he wouldn’t be able to inspect what he was buying before it came.

He couldn’t rely on others shipping tea in, and he had known that back in the city. That was why his packs were full of seeds, packed in carefully alongside the rest of his limited gear as an investment for the future.

Arthur sneezed again. His allergies were killing him. And if stirring up a bunch of soil was going to do what he expected it to, his sneezing was about to get a whole lot worse.

“I got the shovels!” Lily yelled, holding two tools up in the air like trophies of a grand triumph. “How much do you think we can do today?”

“Probably just one level. I want it from there,” Arthur pointed at a spot on one side of the hill. “To almost there. I’ll do the big stuff. If you could focus on the stairs up, I think that would be good. It seems like you’d do a better job with that than I would.”

It was true, too. Arthur had stats that Lily didn’t, so he’d be able to move a lot of dirt quickly by normal-human standards. But for detail work, she had him dead to rights. She saw things he didn’t see and was careful in ways he wasn’t. A staircase she built, even out of soil, would be much better than anything he’d do. There was no question about that.