Noel watched as Cain gently lectured the five other survivors who’d wished to fight and hunt monsters.
They had created a clearing to the side of the camp where they could ‘train’, but it was really just Cain teaching them some basic moves. Noel had learned everything she knew when she had first run out onto the streets two years ago. The streets of downtown had not been a nice place, and she’d learned the lessons she’d needed to quickly. She’d only had to pay with bruises instead of lives, unlike some of the other homeless kids.
The fledgling hunters who had never hunted anything in their lives were mostly young, high school or college students who looked to Cain like he was a holy man. Noel thought it made Cain a bit uncomfortable.
She wasn’t sure why Cain was even bothering with them. They weren’t Chosen, and all had straight F’s for their Body, Mind, and Soul. She didn’t need to finish high school to know what an F meant.
She watched with mild interest as they all took a strange stance that Cain was demonstrating, back straight, legs slightly bent, and moving their arms in circles slowly. Very pretty, but way too slow and soft to be used in a fight.
Cain’s speech had definitely roused the survivors, and though they weren’t happy about being told that goblins may have a bone to sharpen with Cain, they definitely were not looking to go outside and take their chances without him.
Besides, even the ones who didn’t worship the ground Cain walked on were extremely grateful to Cain for having rescued them.
...
It was hard to believe she had met Cain only a week ago. Cain had seemed like a fairly decent guy the first time she’d met him.
He’d surprised her over and over again with how extraordinary he was, and how much he obviously didn’t consider himself extraordinary at all. And maybe he wasn’t. But he was definitely one of the nicest guys Noel had met in her short eighteen years of life.
Cain was quiet most of the time, deep in thought, but he still knew how to take and make a joke. She liked that. People who couldn’t laugh at themselves or the world were fucking nightmares.
Noel looked beyond the clearing and into the distance, where grass was beginning to cover up the rubble like a layer of make-up hiding ugly pimples.
The city was beginning to burst with life, a stark contrast to the previous month. Mice and rats and cockroaches doubled, then tripled in size as they fed on each other. Vines were crawling up the ruins of buildings, covering them up.
If things kept growing at this rate, Noel figured the city would turn into a proper jungle in a year or two.
Most of the survivors had worked white collar jobs as accountants, social workers, and others, but there were a couple of people who knew at least some woodworking as a hobby.
Ralph was one of them.
Noel could hear the rumbling voice of the gentle giant directing the rest of the survivors as they went about fortifying the fence around the camp and the beginnings of wooden cabins.
Noel enjoyed Ralph’s company, but he was busy most of the time directing the construction efforts or playing with his daughter.
The tents left by the goblins were actually extremely well-kept, but there were very few things that they could use. And the former… ‘prisoners’ had wanted as few reminders about the goblins as possible.
They’d been beaten frequently, fed only enough to keep them barely alive, and had been forced to await an inevitable death to feed the dagger.
Noel looked at her ax which had not dulled nor lost its glistening edge despite all of the blood it had seen. She brought up her stats.
[Status: Noel Velaquez]
Class: None
Level: 5
Body: F (53%)
Mind: F (45%)
Soul: F (52%)
Active Skill: Berserker’s Trance
Passive Skill: None
[Berserker Trance]
Gain an extra body-grade by putting yourself in a trance-like state during battle.
RIght after she’d jumped into the crowd of goblins, halved in number by the trap that she and Cain had set up, she’d felt something bloom within her soul.
A joy. An unstoppable joy that burned through her stomach and her throat and came out of her mouth a full throated roar of laughter as she cut down the goblins one after another.
The goblins had fallen, faltered, and eventually turned tail and run.
She hadn’t noticed the wounds covering her body until she had lost sight of the last of them. And the exhaustion. She had been barely able to walk back to the camp, helped up by Wutang in Cain’s form. Wutang doing that still freaked her out. Cain with the mannerisms of a monkey seemed just so different from the calm demeanor he normally carried himself with.
The joy that she found in the viciousness of the battle should have made her a little bit afraid, perhaps. But all she could feel was a deep satisfaction that she was no longer the one on the receiving end of the violence that had colored her life for years.
Noel spit on the ground and snorted. Cain had taught her how to meditate, which seemed to help with absorbing the manna from the Soul Crystals. He had pointed out how she exposed herself when swinging the axe, and how to minimize her wide movements and be ready for counterattacks.
Let the goblins come. Let them all come. She would be ready for them. She would be stronger by then.
She walked over to Cain and the group, and was surprised to find that they weren’t talking about the basics of stabbing someone with the pointy end of their weapons.
One of the non-fighter survivors had joined them.
“So… You’re saying that you feel like you need to hear more goblins talking to really understand them?” Cain said, looking to a lanky man with dark circles under his eyes for confirmation.
Joe looked nervous.
“Well, yeah. I can understand their meaning if not their exact words.”
Joe had been a professor before he had been taken as a livestock by the Turuks, and had also survived the longest. He had paid very, very careful attention to which goblin seemed to be the angriest that day, or which one had been feeling slightly more generous with the dollop of stew.
Eventually, he’d actually gained a Mind skill called ‘Instinct for Language’. He had tried to explain it to her, but the professor might as well have been speaking in Turuk-tongue himself. Still, it was impressive. Joe was the only non Chosen she'd seen with a skill and a stat over F. His Mind stat was apparently a D+.
“It’s just…” Joe hesitated, but eventually got the words out. “It makes me really uneasy is all. I couldn’t understand everything they were saying, but they said one thing over and over again. High Mother of the First Tribe.”
The young ‘hunters’ shuffled their feet, looking unnerved. They respected Joe because, if Ralph had been the heart of the survivor group, Joe had been the brains. He’d taught them all the small things that had made their imprisonment a little bit easier, and maybe even saved their lives.
Cain ran his hand through his hair, now clean, free of blood, and jet-black.
“I guess we’ll have to have a little… outing.”
The ‘hunters’ looked even more nervous, but Cain and Noel shared a smile. Until Wutang screeched and hopped on Cain’s head.
Cain stretched his legs behind the gate. Behind him, people stood around nervously.
“Be careful, Cain,” Ralph said, giving voice to their thoughts.
Cain refrained from the desire to sigh. The camp had nearly had their first riot when Cain had proposed he go alone to scout around the camp.
It had made sense. Combined with [True Sight], Lightfeet would allow him to move about more safely in the quickly changing landscape of the city than anybody else.
“I will. I’ll be alright, guys. Just going to see if I can go and ‘catch’ any goblins. Noel missed quite a few, and there should still be some around here if they’ve survived. And we all know the goblins can be a bit hard to kill.”
Some of the survivors chuckled, but only a few of them. Noel, on the other hand, had been pouting the whole time.
“I still can’t believe you’re going alone,” she said.
“I won’t be. Wutang will be with me. And we both agreed that one of us should stay behind to protect the camp,” Cain replied, adjusting his backpack.
It held some water-bottles, candy-bars, and some smoked fish. A very balanced meal. He had noticed he could subsist off of less and less food as his Body became stronger, but he was a firm believer in feeding his body good and nutritious food. This was the best he would get. Oh, he felt like he would kill for a bowl of rice, some good bean-stew like his dad used to make, and kimchi.
Wutang chittered on Cain’s shoulder, gnawing on a nut he had found somewhere. No one was completely sure if he understood exactly what was being said, but Cain had assured them it was relatively safe to assume so. Safer than the alternative, anyway…the monkey was definitely both smarter and more mischievous than he looked.
“I shouldn’t be long. I might be back in a couple hours, or I might be back in a couple days. But I will be back. Good luck with the duties that we discussed.”
The last drew solemn nods from the builders and Ralph, as well as excited nods by the hunters. The builders, led by Ralph, had completed two large wooden cabins, one for men and one for women. They would be working on a special compound for the hunters, who’d be led by Noel, to store the game they hunted around the camp.
“And Ralph, I’ll try and find you some tools and ingredients if I can.”
Ralph nodded.
“I’ll do what I can in the meantime,” he rumbled out.
Ralph had confided in Cain, saying he’d need special materials, or at the very least, more sophisticated tools to actually make use of his Blessing.
[The Will of the Sea]
Infuses creations with ability to channel manna.
Power of creations depend on complexity, beauty, and connection with artist.
Scales with Soul.
Ralph had tinkered with the bones of some kind of canine beast that had been lying around in the camp, and it looked like a vicious tool. Ralph lovingly called it a bone-spur comb.
Despite his generally calm demeanor and trustworthiness, no one had wanted to be the first one Ralph practiced on. Besides, it had turned out that the ink had to be made out of something special, as Ralph had proclaimed regular soot as 'dead ink'.
As a result, Ralph had also been practicing carving pieces of wood in his free time instead of chasing down people to tattoo. But while Ralph was a sensitive man, he was not a very skilled artist. A rather clumsy one, actually. It was obvious that it would be a while before he was creating pieces that were 'complex', or 'beautiful'. His daughter thought they were pretty, at least, and could be found trying to convince Wutang to play tea with her.
Cain had promised to look for things like special trees and certain berries that he thought might help Ralph improve his craft. He would have looked for metal tools, but according to Wukong, the metals of Earth would absorb the ambient manna and regain their properties a lot slower than the animals or plants would.
It seemed they would be stuck with wooden or stone tools for now.
“Ok. Wish me luck.”
Cain set out before anyone else could stop him, Wutang chittering on his shoulder.
The camp all watched as he waved and disappeared from view.
Comments (0)
See all