Born a Monster

Chapter 72

Smaller

How did I not freeze to death? I awakened at dawn, not at all refreshed, and COLD. When had the last time been, when I had woken up this cold?

I tried to stretch, and nearly hurt myself. I guess my body was still adjusting.

My eyesight, hearing, smell... oh, right, I was underwater.

I crawled onto a stony beach and coughed up water.

.....

[Tapping ritual successful; you now have 1/4 River mana.]

If I’d been thinking, I’d have cast Soothing Water last night. Well, I was alive. My limbs may resemble sticks more than what they used to, but I had them, and with the exception of my broken left hand, they all worked just fine.

I foraged until noon; Philecto was still not available.

Well, dang. Okay, I needed to sit down and figure out what to do if Philecto had died.

I was having difficulty paying the Guild back for twenty gold pieces; I didn’t think it likely that I could pay the Uruk back ten times that amount. I needed to have plans to hold this quest together.

So who else could I contact through dreams?

Wait.

Philecto hadn’t reached me directly; he’d talked to me through Achmed.

Lucid dreaming wasn’t able to reach Achmed. Okay, I’d try both of them tonight.

I was tired of grass, which it seemed I’d always been eating. Sadly, the way my evolutions were built, it was the easiest way to fill my stomach slots and get that biomass I needed to stay alive.

That said, I had to move cautiously, carefully. I was nearly dead, and wasn’t quite so tough as I’d gotten used to. I felt weak, and slow, and clumsy. Heck, compared to what I had been, I was.

So it was that I heard the sounds of combat while I was still well away. I crept toward it, then waited. And crept, then waited. And crept...

Jackpot!

One entire, recently dead, guaranteed to taste vile goblin. Stripped of possessions, clearly slain by arrow fire.

I salivated, making sure it wasn’t a trap.

It wasn’t. Oh my, meat! Ick, goblin.

I gorged my stomach. Heart, liver, lungs, muscles – all of it vile, all of it nutritious meat.

Three nutrition per serving, ten servings per stomach slot, four stomach slots. One hundred twenty nutrition after five hours. I made my way back to the lake, and settled in for a short nap.

I flagged all that juicy biomass to go toward repaying my loan.

If I weren’t trying to regain my recently sold back evolutions, a single goblin would last me five days. There were so very many goblins... and I might not even be able to fight one of them one on one.

Dang it!

No, no. Calm down. I was still smarter than I had been back then. And I had a plan to get back to what I had been.

If I played my cards just right, I might even manage to get back into the trenches.

I played my cards just right.

#

As long as I didn’t eat other’s food, or get underfoot, nobody in the Uruk trench-city seemed to care where I went or what I did.

Unlike the man-kin of Narrow Valley, the Uruk burned their dead. They also burned goblin corpses, when they found them.

In part, this was because goblin children would literally eat each other rather than starve.

Stupid goblins! If they were going to make it easy on me...

So long as I helped to chop wood, sharpened my axe at a grindstone before turning it in, and helped move bodies to the pyre, the corpse detail didn’t care.

So long as my sin armor protected me from the Aura Taint of handling corpses, neither did I. When my System warned me that I’d reached my limit, I stopped.

It inspired me to develop Purifying Water, just in case I ever did acquire Taint. In the basics, it was simple, but it would cause the water to become Tainted, the same way it became dirty when you bathed. It felt – wrong. Fortunately, I had no need of the spell just then.

When goblin corpses came in missing a few bites, we wrapped the bodies in burlap, and tried to burn them before too much leaked out between the threads. Goblin bodies burned with an oily black smoke.

That plan fell apart on the second day. I hadn’t even gotten to nibble on a single corpse yet.

My noontime attempt to contact Philecto failed, but I was able to reach Achmed.

“Achmed!”

“Not now, insipid fool. I am putting the finishes on this spell design. Sit and wait.”

I sat and watched. And figured out what his spell was supposed to do.

[You have unlocked Ice magic, attunement level 0. You have 1/1 Frost mana.]

[You have earned 5XP toward Mystic Research. After divisor, 1XP has been awarded.]

Ditto for Water Adept.

Someday, I needed to figure out why some branches of magic opened at one, and others at zero.

Hey, hadn’t my water branches opened at two?

Anyway, I waited for him to finish his spell, which he put a Kathani name to.

“Very well, NOW I have time for your innate prattling.”

“I am free of my cell, and wish to reform with the group.”

“That will be problematic.”

“How so?”

“We are to the west of the city; the prisoner cells are to the east.”

Were they? How did I pass them and not notice?

“I am currently to the southeast of the city. I’ll swing around to look for you tomorrow.”

“You really ought to eat something, first. You look ... thin.”

“Please let me worry about my nutrition.”

“Please do.”

“How do I find you, once I am west of the city?”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Beg pardon?”

“You have no weapons, no armor, no training, no magic worthy of the name, and no other abilities that can be of assistance to us. Stay away, ignorant whelp, and let those of us with competence resolve this matter.”

“Achmed-”

“No. I follow Philecto, not you. Go away now.”

And he booted me out of his dream.

#

Well, was he right? I mean, I had only gotten captured because...

Because I was already wounded. And THAT was because of matters in Whitehill. Which were partially my fault, but not to the degree that they were Wren’s.

Someday, I would need to resolve matters between myself and Wren.

Right now, I had a band of heroes to go and watch.

Hey, why hadn’t they left? Oh, right. Greed. Their payment was waiting for them, inside Narrow Valley. Not defending the city, not serving me. They were protecting their gold coins.

And I knew my motivations. Due to a poorly worded oath, if they finished their quest and I wasn’t right there with them, then ... okay, it might or might not count as a failed quest. A failed quest might or might not force me to sell back Truthspeaker, which as my core class might or might not force me to sell back my others.

Sure, I could lose a few hundred biomass in evolutions. But losing near unto five hundred development points? Gods, that could cripple me for decades.

So, for none of the motives any bard worthy of their salt would put to song, I went out with hunting parties next dawn and got myself lost ranging far west of the others.

The river was faster and stronger than I had counted for; morning found me far downstream. I lacked stake and rope, and so didn’t dare sleep in the water.

I climbed a tree, and slept well above the ground paths, like some species of wood-cat will.

.....

Not my best sleep ever, but I didn’t roll off the branch and fall to my death.

The woods to the west, southwest, and south of Narrow Valley aren’t one big solid wood. It’s several smaller woods in a sea of rolling hills.

So I set about slowly making my circuit northwest, looking for campsites.

Over the two days THAT took, I ran across three other hunting parties, avoided a wood almost infested by spiders, got to run away from a bear [1], and had the wisdom not to approach a herd of wild horses.

The tent was down, but still staked. Raising a few poles was all it took to get it back up. The campfire was in a pit, presumably to limit visibility, and was properly banked. I took the wood axe and gathered some firewood.

The cookware was... disappointing. So I took the jugs down to the river and filled them, and gave the pots a proper scrubbing.

Let’s see. Forage. Vegetables, mushrooms. Were those edible? Tried one, no poison warnings. Edible. Berries, nuts, grains. A plethora of food, readily available. I took only what I needed for two pots of stew, and set about cooking the first one.

Sixteen points of nutrition per serving, ten servings per pot. I was in heaven.

#

Dina edged into camp, spear at the ready. She said something that sounded accusatory in Kathani.

“Yeah, I still don’t speak that language.” I ladled stew into what I had taken for her bowl and held it out to her.

She squinted, then blinked, and selected a different bowl. I filled that one.

Faraj and Awda were the next to arrive, and got the remainder of the first pot.

I put the second pot on. That was enough for Rina, Achmed, and Philecto.

No, there were requests for more. Well, there was time before dusk, so I gathered another round of stew. Clearly I’d need to range farther tomorrow, or the lack of forage would give away the position of our campsite.

“If I’m going to be cooking this much stew, I’ll need a larger pot to cook it in. A larger kettle for the tea would also help.”

“I just have to ask, is your – thing – in that pouch at your groin?” Philecto asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, it is.”

Again, all Kathani statements not attributed to Awda were translated through Awda.

Rina said, “We will also see what we can do about fabric.”

“If I’m expected to wear said fabric, please make sure it doesn’t have clothing stains.”

I didn’t even think about asking for a sewing kit.

“I must admit, I missed this stew.” Achmed added.

“We will need to move the camp in a day or two.” Philecto said. “What can you tell us about the trench?”

So I drew up what I could remember about the trench, where the pits for slaughtering animals were, the kennel, the aviary, and the necro-pit.

“We should stay away from that.” Achmed said.

“Obviously.” Rina agreed. “Why are we even discussing the trench? Aren’t there far too many goblinoids there for us to attack?”

“I’d actually like to bypass the trench, and get into Narrow Valley. I think with all the security they’re putting on the prisons to the east, that we may be able to punch over the line on this side, and make it to the western gate.”

“Actually, the prison concerns me. There are a good number of human prisoners in there. How did the Uruk capture that many?”

Philecto shrugged. “One presumes the outlying farms, although they may have brought them from that hidden town in the south.”

“If we’re freeing prisoners, we should start in the south.” Dina said. “There’s fewer guards there, and that’s where they keep the female prisoners.”

If you need to be told the things that soldiers do to female prisoners, then it is not my place to tell you these things.

“Is that something we can reasonably accomplish?” I asked.

“It is if we have the town military to assist us.”

Somehow, I had the idea that the town militia would be asked to do a bit more than it was capable of.

I nibbled on my index finger. “I know this is a trap, but let us consider how we go about this.”

#

[1] She just must not have been motivated. With my lower Might came lower movement speeds; even with Fleet of Foot, which YES I used, she could easily have caught and eaten me.