Bonus Short Stories

One Day at the Riverbank

I sat holding a handmade fishing rod and listening to the refreshing sound of babbling water. The bobber floated on the surface of the river, which glittered in the afternoon sunlight seeping through the trees. I had been at this for some time now.

We were in Beast Woods. To give ourselves a break after all kinds of adventuring, today Menel and I had come to a small river to fish. With hastily made fishing rods in hand, we each took up separate positions on some rocks, dangled down our lines, and gazed at our bobs. The trees swayed in the blowing wind, rustling their fresh green leaves. It was a quiet and peaceful moment.

“Oh, here we go,” Menel said as his bob sunk. He gave his line a quick jerk. A trout about twenty centimeters long was caught on the hook. With practiced motion, he pulled the line in, removed the hook, and threw the trout into his basket, which already had several fish in it. I’d caught zero. I could practically hear him smirk and was surprised at how bitter I felt. I pulled up my own line, intending to start over, and realized that something had already eaten the bait and left the hook untouched.

“What am I doing wrong?” Was it the bait, the hook, the line? I fiddled with my equipment as I tried to figure it out.

Menel chuckled. “Fidgety, aren’t you?” he said with a definite taunt in his voice. “Even a fish could tell what you’re thinking, brother. They’re all gonna swim away. Just go for it. Like you’re picking up a girl in town.” He grinned, his jade eyes gleeful.

“Well, I can tell what you’re thinking, too!” I snapped back and continued fishing for a while longer without result. There was just one moment where I thought I’d caught something, but my excitement quickly turned to confusion.

“Ya, you’ve got it snagged,” Menel said. The hook was just caught in some weeds.

Fishing had kind of a lot of depth to it.

When Menel’s basket started to become reasonably full, I finally threw up my hands in defeat and said, “I give up. I guess you have to be used to this kind of thing.”

“Huh? You aren’t used to fishing?”

“If I’m honest, no.”

“That’s a surprise.” The silver-haired half-elf blinked, a little taken aback. “You have a pretty good handle on outdoorsy stuff.”

Blood had certainly made sure I knew how to swim, climb, cut through dense forest, camp, hunt—in short, everything I needed to survive. I could even row a boat if necessary. However...

“I only learned the basics of fishing. We never practiced it much. My dad didn’t like sitting around. He was more the kind to dive underwater with a harpoon in his hand.” I should add that coming face-to-face with Blood in the dark depths felt vaguely like a horror movie.

“Wow, no patience, huh?”

“So, from the perspective of someone raised as an elf, do I seem impatient to you?”

“Most of the people back where I come from would spend all month, never mind all day, just chatting with fairies with a line in the water,” Menel said, recalling the Great Forest that was his old home. “So...”

“That’s too patient,” I said, unsure whether I sounded more impressed or incredulous. Either way, I shouldn’t have expected anything less from elves. They were the go-to example of a people who lived long lives and were slow to age. Their sense of time was on another level. “Well, I think I’ll stick with this for just a little longer.”

“Sure. Good luck.”

Picking myself up, I attached fresh bait to the hook and cast it into the river. And I fished while enjoying idle talk with my friend.

Time flowed effortlessly. These moments were surely something I had longed for in my previous world and could never obtain, and it was surely the result of several fortunes that I was even here at all. Under the warm light of the sun, I basked in that everyday bliss. With my fishing rod in hand, I thought of Blood, Mary, Gus, and all the people I’d met up until now, and prayed quietly for each of their futures to be full of happiness.

Then, suddenly, my float moved. Not daring to speak, I hurriedly pulled back. It felt inordinately heavy, and the resistance seemed to grow stronger and weaker. It didn’t feel like I’d snagged the line.

“I... I caught something!” I said.

“Is it a big one?!”

I pulled as hard as I could. The rod bent. There was a loud splash and a spray of water. And it leapt out at me: a thick body plastered with mud and covered in weeds; spiky, protruding scales; and rows of long, thin, sharp teeth in a mouth that looked like it could swallow a person whole. It was, to put it bluntly, an enormous sea serpent. And moreover, it was obviously a beast.

The mud serpent and I stared at each other for a moment in shocked silence. Then, all at once, I yelled, the serpent lunged and snapped its fangs, and I leapt away from my rock in panic, tossing the fishing rod aside.

Its fangs grazed my back just now! They came this close!

“Spear! Spear!”

Beast Woods, seriously, give it a rest!

“Fig, you heroes! Why does danger love you so much?!”

“Don’t blame me!” I shouted and yelped in panic again as I dodged another vicious bite. Grabbing a short spear I’d propped up nearby, I faced the mud serpent. Apparently this area was still too dangerous to let me spend a day in peace.

“But a catch is a catch! I’ll have you for dinner!” I charged at the mud serpent with my spear in hand.

◆

Side note: Beasts are surprisingly tasty.

Poetry is Forever

Whence hailed he? To what hath his eyes borne witness? His arms are forged like the toughest steel, his hand holds a glittering blade of ice. By the unseeable celerity of his draw, evil’s pawns are stricken through. Whirlwind, The First Move Killer, Strider... Reystov the Penetrator. No swords clash afore him; naught lies there but the corpses of fallen foes clutching the holes in their chests.

— The opening lines of a troubadour’s tale in a Whitesails tavern

◆

During a feast one day after we had resolved a host of problems, I suddenly got curious. “You have a lot of exploits under your belt, right, Reystov?”

“Mm.” Reystov, sitting in a corner of the venue and holding a drink, nodded with his lips tightly shut. Recognizable by his dirty cloak, his unshaven face which gave no clues to his age, and the well cared for sword he carried, the man known by the nickname of the Penetrator was a pretty reticent person.

“I’d like to hear the stories of your earlier adventures,” I said. Reystov didn’t normally talk much about his achievements, and I wondered what kind of adventures he’d had. “Do you think you—”

“No.” He quietly shook his head. “Blowing your own horn is a bad habit. It leads to arrogance.”

“And arrogance dulls your blade?”

“Right.” Reystov nodded, keeping his words to a minimum. He had an imperturbable, dignified presence, like a rock covered in moss. I didn’t get any sense that he was interested in gaining fame by talking up his achievements. These were the words of a person who was less concerned with his present self and more with adding another thin sheet to his pile of training to make his sword sharper for tomorrow. As a fellow warrior, I could admire that.

“That again?!” Bee broke into the conversation. “This is why you’re no good. You’re so hard to make material for!” Judging by the slight color in her cheeks, it looked like she had a little drink in her.

“Oh, the troubadour.”

“Robina! Would you please remember my name already?!”

“Right.”

“You two know each other?” They were certainly acting that way. I looked at them in surprise.

“She interviewed me a few times.”

“And every time he’s like this! You... gloomy bore!”

Reystov didn’t appear to take Bee’s unreserved comment badly. He just slowly shook his head. “I won’t be any different the next time, either.”

“You’ve got all kinds of nonsense spreading about you,” Bee said. “You have a poet as great as me here offering to produce something a little closer to the truth for you, and you give me the brush-off. Honestly.” Bee exaggeratedly shrugged her shoulders, looked up into the air, and heaved a sigh. “Reputation’s important for an adventurer, isn’t it? Whether you’re just surviving or trying to make it big!”

“If you have skills, it comes naturally.”

“You know there are loads of skilled people who painted themselves into a corner when they let their bad reputation precede them! Look, I know you could be the greatest swordsman in Southmark with one hand tied behind your back, and I’ll admit I’m not saying I want to make a story for you just out of charitable good will, but seriously, you’d better think about how other people look at you! You never know what’ll be your undoing if you’re a warrior, do you?!” After rushing all that out in a single breath, Bee whipped around to look at me instead. “Don’t you think so, Will?!”

“Umm...” What Bee was saying made an awful lot of sense considering she was drunk, but I could also understand that Reystov probably wanted to devote the resources he’d have to spend on dealing with Bee to his sword instead. Since I couldn’t fully side with either of them, I attempted to change the topic a little. “So there’s a lot of nonsense being spread about Reystov’s exploits?”

Bee nodded. “This guy, he takes on a hunting request for some big beast, wanders casually out, strikes through the weak spot first time, and comes back, right?”

Ah, I could picture the problem.

“Carrying back the corpse of the beast uses other people, but he doesn’t fight alongside others much, and even when he does, he works so fast that most people can’t even tell what’s going on. And he takes jobs all over, so...”

“It keeps getting embellished?”

“Yep. I try to find information, but there’s so many blanks. So in the end, everyone just has to fill in the gaps with their imagination about what kind of life he leads, who he is, where he’s from, what started him adventuring... all of that.” Bee sighed. “I might dramatize it a bit, but I wanted to go for something a li’l more grounded...”

“Not interested.”

“This is exactly what I’m talking about.”

This was going nowhere.

Bee groaned. “If I only had a little more material, darn it.”

As I looked at her, an idea occurred to me. “Well, okay then, what about this to liven up the party?”

“Huh?” Bee tilted her head, confused.

As Reystov regarded me with suspicion, I made the following proposal.

“The Penetrator versus the Paladin.”　

Bee’s eyes lit up.

“You’ll accept, I assume?” I asked him.

“You’re stronger than I am. How could I refuse?” Reystov gave a wry smile, reluctantly playing along.

We both took up suitable-looking tree branches and rose unsteadily to our feet.

“Oh, this is good! This is great! I’ll turn it into a story that’ll be told for centuries, millennia, no, until the end of time!”

Hearing Bee’s excited shouts, the other people at the feast gathered their gazes on us. We stepped closer. The mighty blade trained by Blood crossed paths with a thrust of brilliant purple lightning, and the air filled with excited cheers.