Chapter 36: Barely a Shank

A long time ago, literally and figuratively, before his string of jobs, Sean had been a student studying to be a teacher, in Physics.

There were a lot of arguments about why it was necessary for teachers to pay some school a bunch of money, then intern at an entirely different school for free, and then eventually find a remarkably mediocre-paying job at yet another school. Some of the explanations almost made sense if you squinted enough.

The whole arrangement had always made Sean’s bullshit detector go absolutely crazy, but in the end, he did the student teaching. He didn’t love it, and was glad when the pay a bunch of money part turned into work at a school for free. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t getting paid, he had always wanted to be a teacher.

And then, in a meeting he shouldn’t have been allowed to run with a parent who he very honestly believed shouldn’t have been allowed to have children in the first place, he had lost his temper. It had been explained afterward that it didn’t matter what the parent had said about their kid, or that they had said it in front of the kid, or how patient Sean had been.

What mattered was that things had escalated to the point where Sean could no longer hold his temper in check.

You weren’t allowed to hit the parents, it turned out, especially not at the school. And no matter what the eventual investigation into the parent turned up and no matter how much everyone eventually agreed the parent had needed to be punched, the hit itself was still the kind of thing that went on one’s permanent record.

They couldn’t exactly tell him he wasn’t allowed to be a teacher anymore. But they made it obvious that he couldn’t find work after he graduated, and that he should probably look into some different line of work.

Afterward, Sean dropped out. He had intended to go back at some point and get some other degree. But for a variety of reasons that didn’t matter anymore, he just never actually got around to giving university education a second try.

The one big lesson he had learned from the whole thing was that, ultimately, he hadn’t wanted to be a teacher. He had wanted to help kids. And while the two had a fair amount of overlap, they weren’t 100% the same thing. Not recognizing the difference soon enough was, in the end, the barrier between him helping a lot of kids and him helping exactly one of them while hurting himself a whole lot in the process.

—

Back in the current-or-future-times, that memory of hitting the parent finally did something good for Sean. Because of it, he could see the trick. He didn’t actually want to be strong, he just wanted to be strong to keep a bunch of malicious offworlders from doing stuff like kidnapping and killing innocent dragon-guys for experience.

Killing Cedarhelm would give him the strength part, but not the all-important I’m-the-good-guy bit. And without that bit, there was no point to any of this. There couldn’t be. If he was going to start doing something as fucked up as stabbing friends in the heart for XP, he could just as easily commit to the whole being a jerk thing and destroy the world himself. He’d already be an asshole after the first domino, so might as well go for broke.

“Hey, Cedarhelm? I think I’m gonna be fine.”

“You are sure?”

“I’m sure. Now go back to being a hill, or whatever. You are a nice guy, and I mean this in the best way, but you also sort of scare the shit out of me.”

Out of pure reflex and despite his best laid plans, Sean ran away again as Cedarhelm let his scale drop back into place, righted himself, and settled back into his only-slightly-terrifying living hill form.

In safe range, Sean turned back and asked the question on his mind. “Could I have even done it? Kill you, I mean.”

“You might have. I’m over a hundred levels above you, but the heart is a very, very vulnerable spot on a dragon. I’m not sure anyone as weak as you has ever had an opportunity to experiment with this situation before.”

“Huh. Well, I guess we will have to leave it as a mystery. Shame about the XP, though.”

Cedarhelm hummed. “Well, little one, I have a bit of an admission. You wouldn’t have gained much from that, either way. Maybe some materials, at most. The system doesn’t allow for leveling via opponent suicide, luckily. Genuine resistance is part of the process.”

Sean leaned back and shot the dragon a long, angry look. “So what was that about then? Just fucking with me?”

Cedarhelm’s massive head-part of the hill moved back and forth slightly. “No, not that. It was just that you had done a lot of killing in the last couple of days. And I remember being young, and growing, and losing sight of what I was actually trying to do.” Sean considered that a moment. “If you had killed me, little one, and gotten a reward out of it, I have no doubt it would have hurt you at some point. But whether you decided to kill me and failed or killed me and got nothing, I had hoped to remind you what I eventually learned. That you don’t become a protector from being powerful. You become strong to better protect what’s important.”

—

Sean didn’t thank Cedarhelm for his questionable method of helping him, but he had got close. Cedarhelm was aware that Sean was almost-not pissed about the whole thing, which seemed to be an acceptable outcome for him.

And while Sean very much didn’t like being screwed with, Cedarhelm had, despite his tactics, reminded him of why he was in this game in the first place. If he were lucky, he was sure that he’d kill a lot of things in the future. But now, he was equally sure that it would never become about the killing for him. Cedarhelm had helped him skirt a trap he didn’t realize he was in.

Full forgiveness and thanks didn’t come until a bit later. After the conversation waned, Sean turned to the next item on his to-do list for the day, which was loot assessment. The bear pelts he had recovered were, for better or worse, not that useful to him for now. The ghost bear teeth, on the other hand, might be. Turning one over in his hand, he mulled over different ways he might be able to put them to use.

Unlike normal bear canines, these were straight, and came to a point that was not exactly sharp and not entirely dull. His best guess was that the ghost bears had enough force to just drive them through whatever defenses their target had. That theory was proven wrong when he pressed his gloved thumb on one of them and nicked his thumb.

Pulling off his glove, he saw the tooth hadn’t cut him very badly. It was barely enough to draw blood. What was more interesting was that it had done so through his glove, without actually damaging the leather in any way.

“Cedarhelm?”

“Yes, Sean Lawrence?”

“If you had to say, based on what you’ve seen, what’s the biggest weakness in my arsenal right now?”

“Hmm.” Cedarhelm paused, thinking. “It’s your story, Sean Lawrence. What would make it most interesting?”

Sean chewed on that for a little. If he was fully trying to min-max his levels, he’d see what the teeth were worth, and use it to buy some more scrap. From that scrap, he could make new weapons, like a spear, and maybe some other things. He needed a spear, actually, something to round out the ranges at which he could effectively fight.

Everything he knew about how the system worked, though, was pushing against that. The system was fun, or at least thought of itself that way. It had given him ghost teeth, something it probably guessed he would think of as cool. And he did think they were cool.

Only an asshole Sean would actually sell these.

“Hey, Cedarhelm? Do you happen to know where I could get some especially good sticks?”

—

Asking an earth dragon about his favorite kind of stick turned out to be a kind of mistake in and of itself. Sean let Cedarhelm talk for twenty or thirty minutes, listening about the various virtues of softwoods versus hardwoods and the beauty of open and closed grain woods. Finally, he worked up the rudeness to cut it off and get to the conclusion that it had some perfectly good trees that needed a bit of a trim right here in the grove.

Asking it about glue had been a lot simpler. There were some plants in the forest, it turned out, that even Cedarhelm didn’t love.

Toxic Clump (Level 14)

Some people dump rubbish in the woods. Sometimes that rubbish dumps back. Or something.

It’s a big dirty mutant plant, okay? Not every description has to be a winner. It’s all viney and bad, and if this were a video game, it would probably be weak to psychic damage. Don’t let it touch you a whole bunch, and you should probably be fine.

It made sense, really. Cedarhelm’s grove was filled entirely with native, non-system-fiddled plants. Those were the kind the dragon seemed to like. This plant was the opposite of that. It was a big, tendril-waving bush, and it was so soaked with sticky, gross sap that Sean had to cut himself free from the plant’s attacks several times. It was like the system had tried to make a heavy-handed commentary on pollution and got distracted by some game halfway through.

I hate this thing too. It’s the worst.

Luckily, it was more or less even with his level, and had a limited range. After some experimentation, Sean found the maximum range its tendrils could reach, ran around in circles to get them a little more twisted and awkward than the plant liked, then dove in and stabbed the hell out of it. A few lather-rinse-repeat cycles later, the thing gave up the ghost, dropping loot as it did.

Toxic Clump Sap

This small bottle contains the sap of the toxic clump, the same one that occurs in the plant itself. As an alchemical ingredient, it’s considered a bit hard to work with due to its inconvenient habit of solidifying after a shockingly short amount of time when exposed to air.

Be careful about gluing your fingers together. They don’t make a solvent for this stuff.

Given that the plant was right there and actively seeping the stuff, Sean didn’t waste the bottle of glue. Opening his pack, he drew out the sticks he had carved earlier. The ghost teeth had long roots, and it didn’t take much to hammer holes into the sticks to anchor each tooth. Now, he coated the holes with a slightly excessive amount of sap, stuck the teeth in, and then used a bit more glue to give the stick part of the weapon an appropriately sized grip made of trimmed tent canvas.

He really did almost glue his fingers together a couple of times before he managed to complete the set.

Spectral Sticker

The Spectral Sticker is composed of wood personally selected by an authentic dragon of the forest, a semi-spiritual tooth, and a glue that looks and smells like an abandoned effort at ecological commentary.

As a combination and celebration of nature and absurd construction techniques, the Spectral Sticker is, on the one hand, barely a shank at all, and on the other hand, as shanky as they come.

The wood quality here is about as good as it gets, and the glue is better than decent considering its natural source. But the tooth is the crown jewel. If these teeth are hard to process, you got around that handily by refusing to process them at all. As such, they have the same strengths they would have in the bear, namely a supernatural sharpness and a mild ability to project damage past many kinds of armor.

“Oh, yes.” Sean said. Even just the spear was great, and there was more to come.