Chapter 125: The Bear Watches the Students

Chapter 125:
The Bear Watches the Students

 

MARICKS’S GROUP didn’t exactly go in stealthily; the goblins noticed, and the students readied their weapons.

From what I’d heard, Maricks couldn’t use magic much, so he mained with a sword. Timol, on the other hand, preferred magic. Shia and Cattleya were pretty good at both. Plan was for Maricks, Shia, and Cattleya to take the lead, with Timol in the rear guard.

The goblins held thick tree branches—nothing too bad, if you could avoid getting hit. They broke into a snarling sorta laugh at the sight of the students, this awful “Ghee ghee ghee ghee.”

Praying that the horses wouldn’t get spooked, I watched the students engage.

 

Maricks, Shia, and Cattleya ran forward. Mid-dash, Shia and Cattleya fired off wind magic, throwing a cloud of dust at the goblins. The goblins growled (that nasty “ghee ghee ghee ghee”) and closed their eyes, swinging their sticks at random. Maricks closed in on the goblins and—slash—a goblin arm went flying. Shia and Cattleya followed his lead, and Timol kept blasting magic from the back for cover fire.

The fight was going smoothly. Maybe they’d been taught to blind monsters using wind at school? I mean, I’d have just gone full decapitation-a-thon from the start and been done with it, but maybe Shia and Cattleya couldn’t do that?

I hadn’t seen other people’s magic very often, so I didn’t know how strong they were on average. Even after coming to this world, I was still a loner. Which was fine, of course. I had bear equipment. I didn’t need anything else, or anyone.

 

The battle went on, and the students were doing great. I’d thought they might need my help, but they were really cleaning up. Sure, the goblins had numbers, but Shia’s group knew what they were doing. Maricks was getting in the fatal blows, and Timol kept on blasting to keep ’em occupied.

Ellelaura was right: They could handle a couple of goblins.

A goblin swung its dinky wooden stick at Maricks, but (clack!) Maricks caught it with his sword, setting up a perfect (and way brutal) backstab from Cattleya.

“Shia, there’s one more.”

“On it.”

Shia gathered mana in her hand and tossed a fireball at the goblin. The fireball hit the goblin with a vicious sizzle, the thing stopped moving, and Shia brought her sword down on it for good measure without a moment’s hesitation.

Whoa. And to think I’d worried.

Maricks smirked. “That was nothing.”

Okay, the kids hadn’t been in danger, but their magic still seemed weak when they attacked…right? Or was my magic that strong? Then again, normal E-Rank adventurers could slay goblins, so I supposed the students were powerful enough.

The real issue would be orcs. Half-baked abilities wouldn’t be enough for one of those pig-heads, so I’d probably have to carry the party in that case. And for all the students’ power, there was a lack of experience—not experience points, mind you. More like…I saw them hesitate about how to attack, like noobs in a game.

In the game world, I’d faced thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of monsters and people. I’d died a lot, lost plenty of times, and built up my experience. Dying and losing were experience, even if you couldn’t pin an XP value on ’em. Losing could be knowledge, could tell you what you were lacking and what you needed…but these kids couldn’t lose like that. Or, uh, they could lose exactly once before spending their “game over” in a casket. No way to carry that experience forward.

On the other hand, when it came to experience, I had no experience handling carriages. I couldn’t drive one. Just sitting in the driver’s seat made me nervous. Experience was power—physical or mental, experience was growth. If I hadn’t stockpiled experience from that game world back then, I think I’d have a hard time even with my bear gear.

Which was the point of the practical training, I supposed. Ellelaura and the king had both said something to that effect, right? Stuff like the hardships that came with travel, horse management, the difficulties of camping, the terror of a monster, the challenge of cooperating with others or establishing trust with a guard. All of that and more. Fighting monsters was just another part of the list.

The kids had to experience it, and I had to make sure they didn’t take those experiences to the grave. Yeah, this was gonna be more difficult than I’d thought—I’d have to give Ellelaura a piece of my mind when I got back.

Shia smiled sweetly. “You didn’t actually believe there were goblins, right?”

“Yeah,” Maricks admitted.

“That proves it then, hmm? Those bears really can detect monsters.”

Maricks sighed. “I really can’t believe it though.”

Everyone looked at Kumayuru and Kumakyu, sitting on either side of me. The bears tilted their heads at the group.

“You sure it wasn’t a coincidence?” Maricks continued in a strained voice.

I looked at my bears. I mean, it was a pretty wild thing to swallow. The little dudes looked like normal bear cubs. What if some rando back in my old world had told me that his feral squirrels could sense muggers? Would I believe it? Would you?

Luckily, I had a spokesperson on my side. “It’s not like the bears would lie to us,” said Shia.

Multiple spokespersons! (Spokes…people…s?) “Yes, that’s right.”

Shia and Cattleya scowled at Maricks. He took a step back, then another. Shia and Cattleya took a step forward, then another.

“The bears proved it, didn’t they?” said Shia.

“If they really detected the monsters by coincidence, Maricks, then why don’t you tell us where all the monsters are, hmm? Use your coincidence, why don’t you?” Okay, Cattleya was going just a bit overboard.

The two of them took another step toward him.

“Okay, I get it. I believe you. Jeez, fine, I believe everything, just…you don’t have to get that mad!”

“Marvelous, Maricks. You finally fit a new idea into that tiny, thick little head of yours,” said Cattleya.

Satisfied, the two of them left Maricks alone.

“Still, it’s amazing the bears can tell where there are monsters,” said Timol, looking over Kumayuru and Kumakyu. (If he had glasses, this would have been the perfect time for him to push them up by the bridge of his nose…but then, wearing glasses into battle would’ve been a bad idea to begin with.)

“Anyway,” Maricks admitted, “that was helpful.” From there, he started to give everyone instructions on how to clean up the goblins.

See, goblin corpses can attract monsters. You have to bury or incinerate them, or things’ll get hairy. It looked like they’d learned that in school, since they properly disposed of the bodies.

“I must admit,” said Cattleya after dealing with them, “having the bears here during our practical training is such a comfort.” She scooped up Kumakyu in her arms and sat down in the driver’s seat. I pretended to be reluctant when I handed the reins over to her. I don’t think she noticed.

Ugh, finally. Now I could relax even if the horses started losing it. The true battle…was finished.

“I’m not going to tell you about monsters on goblin-level next time, though, you hear me?” I said. “Next time it’s all you, and I’m not gonna step in unless you’re really in trouble. Consider this a freebie.”

“You make an excellent point,” said Timol. Maricks and him were climbing up into the carriage. “We must rely on our own strength.”

Maricks shrugged. “Bears or no bears, we can take care of some measly goblins. We could take on, like, twenty goblins, I bet.”

“Is there a hard limit? How many goblins is too many?”

“None! It doesn’t matter how many there are!” Maricks responded.

“Really?” Shia broke in. “Because I think we could fight them one-on-one, each of us, and be fine. I think if we were surrounded, we could each handle two or three if we worked really hard, but that would be our limit.”

In other words, they could handle double the number of goblins? We were looking at ten-ish then. More than ten, and the bear had to come out of her cave. Fair enough.

Once Maricks and Timol were aboard, we headed out again for the village. We encountered monsters only one more time before we got to our destination. Just four, so I left it to the students. Things went smoother than last time—looked like their experience had already paid off.

The carriage plowed forward until the village came into view up ahead.

With that, we were halfway done.