NOVEL NEXT 1.33 – Jumping to conclusions
“Fine.”
With that settled, they continued on as Sophie led them to her little nook, as she called it. In truth, it was a quaint little studio apartment at the heart of the city. Well, ‘quaint’ and ‘little’ were an understatement. It was cramped, and Emeri had to wait outside, but the others didn’t voice out their thoughts and patiently waited for her to finish brushing her teeth.
Thankfully, as she told them before, there was electricity. So, Mark expertly navigated apartment and took out a flash drive from a drawer near the TV and plugged it in. He then told Noah to move to the side of the sofa that they were sitting on and pulled out the remote.
Seeing all this made Noah confused. Mark and Sophie were only together through the latter half of high school and their early college years, at least, from what he knew. “Hey, have you been here before?” He asked.
Mark froze for a moment, but then continued to fiddle with the remote, pretending to not have heard him.
“You have, haven’t you?” Noah smiled, instantly connecting the dots. “You dog! You never told me you guys got back together!”
Mark glanced at Lily, then back at Noah. “We didn’t… technically…” He whispered softly.
Noah immediately understood. “No wonder he was showing off. He must have changed his mind and wanted to get some!” He knowingly pat his cousin’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. “I support you.”
“I heard you!” Sophie said as she got out of the bathroom. “Unfortunately, darling here only wanted a fling.” She said as she winked at Mark.
“What’s a fling?” Lily asked.
Everyone went silent…
While Owen was looking at this in amusement, everyone else looked at Mark, making him sigh. He struggled to think of something to say, but just ended up sighing again. “So, Lily… The thing is, when two adults… get together without actually getting together, if that makes sense, they call their relationship a fling.”
“But why would you want to do that?” She asked again, with eyes full of confusion.
Everyone went back to look at Mark. This time, he didn’t know what to say, so he settled on what every adult said in situations like this. “You’ll understand when you’re older.” He sternly said and didn’t dare look at the child’s dejected expression.
“But…”
“Okay! Since I’m done brushing my teeth, we can go meet the chief now!” Sophie interrupted her before she could say anything more. Mark gave Sophie a look of appreciation and quickly started walking toward the door. Noah just smiled at this and whispered something into Lily’s ear.
“I saw an ice cream shop on the way here.”
This made Lily’s eyes sparkle. “Let’s go!” She said as she hurriedly pulled Noah along and went outside.
A while later, they arrived at the police station, all holding their own ice cream cones. When they went in, they arrived to the sight of two middle-aged men surrounding and pestering a relatively older man who seemed to be in his sixties while he walked toward one of the offices.
“Chief, you know we can’t do that. We have enough mouths to feed as it is!” One man said.
“That’s right! We can’t just send our people outside the walls to find other
people. We’d be endangering the lives of our men along with theirs!” The other man with the handlebar mustache voiced his agreement.“But we need the additional people!” The chief finally couldn’t take it anymore and raised his voice in exasperation. “What would you have us do?! We have the orcs breathing down our necks in the south and a den of potentially dangerous spiders the size of dogs blocking any and all travel north of Jeffersonville! We need all the able-bodied people that we can get and right now, we don’t have enough!”
He inhaled deeply, trying to calm himself down. “Look, I understand all of what you said and even agree with most of them, but fact of the matter is, we can’t afford to worry about any of that right now. Every day the invasion gates those orcs and spiders are defending are up means more of them get through, meaning more danger for us. We need more people so we can organize an attack on them before the problem worsens!”
“…”
A tired look appeared on the chief’s face and, for a second, his wrinkles appeared to deepen. “The way we are now, we won’t be able to last.” He looked deep into their eyes and said. “Pray, gentlemen. Pray for a miracle.” With that, he left them to their thoughts and moved to enter his office.
“Wait, chief!” Noah called out.
The chief and the two men looked over at the person who had just rudely shouted. They saw two young men, a young woman who they recognized as one of their scouts, Owen the guard captain of their main gate in the south, a child riding a huge boar and seven piglets peeking behind it. If that wasn’t all, they were all holding ice cream cones, which made the scene weirder somehow.
The chief immediately felt a powerful reaction from one of his skills, [Threat Detection]. It was a skill that had served them well when it came to unknown beasts, telling them whether they were too strong to fight or if they were just not a threat in the way that it didn’t mean them any harm. That skill right now was telling him that the two young men in front of him were strong, incredibly strong, probably the strongest humans that he’d met.
“Ah Owen, who are these fine young men that you’ve brought us? More help I hope?” He asked, slightly hopeful.
Instead of Owen replying to him, Noah stepped forward, blocking his view of the captain. “Oh us? Just the miracle workers you were praying for.” He said with a toothy grin on his face.
“Those are some bold words, kid.” Handlebar said. “You sure you can back them up?”
“Shut up Otto.” The chief gave him a look.
Gears turning in his mind, Otto realized something. “The skill?” He asked.
“Yes, now shut up and let me handle this.” He looked back at Noah and said. “As you may have overheard, we really are in need of some miracle workers. We can pay you with services and commodities, since money has lost its value.”
“That’s nice and all, but what skill was he talking about? Do you have an identification skill like captain Owen here?” Noah asked. “There are really a lot of people with skills like that, huh…”
“Ah, no. Nothing so specific. My skill is a bit more… abstract.”
“Interesting… hmmm… But anyway, my name is Noah, this is Mark and that’s Lily sitting on Emeri with the reinpiglets behind them.”
“… Reinpiglets?”
“Mark over here named them after Santa’s reindeer.” Mark waved at the chief and said hello.
“No Rudolph though.” Sophie chimed in.
“Right… Back to what you said earlier though, can you really solve our problems?”
“Oh, for sure! It won’t be our first time getting rid of orcs. It certainly will be interesting how an established base with their own invasion gate will compare to the one we took out.” He said while thinking. “And as for the spiders, I hate spiders. So also definitely no problem there.” He smiled confidently, with an evil glint in his eyes. “Fuck spiders, I say. FUCK EM.”
“They’re highly venomous though.” Otto said.
“No problem.”
“Equipped with different types of webbing.” The other man said.
“No problemo~”
“Some of them have very tough chitin and are basically eight-legged tanks the size of cows.” The chief chimed in.
“No probl… What did you say?”
“They have very tough chitin?”
“No, the latter part. For a second there, I thought you said they were cow-sized.”
“Oh, yeah, they are.”
“What?” Noah blanked for a moment. Then he imagined the scene of giant cow-sized spiders trying to eat him and smaller dog sized ones taking bits of his legs from him. He shuddered and his hair stood on end. “Well fucking fuck, spiders first then! Can’t let those creepy crawlies multiply any more than they already have.” He said with disgust.
The chief heaved a sigh of relief and felt a weight lift off his shoulders. “Things are finally starting to look up.” He thought. “Let’s go into my office and discuss the details. Otto, get our lead scouts and tell them I want a full rundown of the spider den for our friends here.” Then he remembered something. “Ah, how rude of me. I forgot to introduce myself. My name’s Alexander King, but you can just call me Alex or chief, that’s what everybody calls me.
And so, they went into his office and sat around with cups of coffee in their hands, slowly sipping the hot goodness of what was probably a drink that was now in limited supply while chief Alex told them all he knew about the den of spiders.
From what the scouts had observed, there were several kinds of spiders, ranging from the smaller dog-sized scouts and workers to the much bigger cow-sized tanks and warriors. There were even some assassin type spiders which had the most potent venom with pitch black chitin designed solely for hunting in the dark. Last but not least, though, was the queen, or the broodmother, as some of the gamers among the scouts decided to call her. Fully the size of a minivan, but despite its massive size, it was more of a breeder that churned out spiderlings on a daily basis. Of course, its sheer weight could probably smother anyone into submission.
Hearing about all the types of spiders gave Noah chills, not in fear though, but from excitement. “Guess my new spells are going to get some exercise.” He’d been wanting to try out some of his spells on actual enemies since after the big fight with that orc champion, they’d been taking it pretty easy and just focused on traveling. Besides, most of the new spells were AOEs, so the orcs weren’t really good practice for them. Now though, with thousands of spiderlings? “Fucking spiders. Just you wait!”
KNOCK KNOCK
They all turned toward the door, where a Latina woman in her mid-twenties entered, seemingly in a hurry.
“Chief! I came as soon as I heard! Owen said that there were rankers in town!” She said in quick succession. Her eyes curiously turned to look at the other people in the office and shined. “Are they, them?”
“Yes, Rosa. They’re the helpers that just got here.” Alex gestured to one of the empty chairs. “Now, if you’d be so kind as to fill us in on the latest news from the spider nest.”
“Spiders first then?” She asked as she then noticed the cute child surrounded by some doubly cute piglets. “Is she going to fight too? She’s just a child! Are you guys forcing her or something? You are, aren’t you? You fuckers!” She aggressively walked up to the closest guy to her and moved to punch Noah in the gut.
Noah, of course, with his ridiculously high intelligence stat saw the punch coming from a mile away and easily avoided it with a burst of air, the punch barely missing him.
“Stop! Rosa STOP!” The chief snapped at her and rushed to hold her down himself. “You haven’t even heard the whole story yet! Stop jumping to conclusions! I’m sure Lily here won’t be participating…” He looked at Noah. “Right?”
“Well…”
“See chief! They’re bad people! How can they let a child barely ten years old fight those monsters?!”
Chief Alex’s eyes grew cold. “I’m sure our friends can explain themselves.” He looked Noah in the eyes and asked. “Well?”
Noah laughed awkwardly. “You see…”