Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

“You really don’t have to worry about your time.” Lily was trying to comfort Arthur, who felt pretty silly covered in mud that did next to do nothing to keep him from getting caught. “Milo got caught… I want to say ten seconds in. We heard the main group find them almost as soon as they started.”

“How? Rhodia was with him. She’s smart.”

“She’s smart unless Milo is bothering her. Which he probably was.” Mizu nodded to herself. “It was dark outside, and she was in a coat. He thinks she’s pretty in coats.”

“I have heard him say that,” Arthur said. “That her head is like a painting in a hood. He’s not… he’s not very poetic.”

“Oh, leave him alone. He’s trying.” Mizu gave a punitive poke to Arthur’s ribs. “Not everyone can paint flowers.”

“Hey, I didn’t say Milo’s bad at all romance. He made their joining bracelets, remember? And almost all her tools. Even ones she didn’t ask for. He definitely tries. And succeeds, I think. Rhodia doesn’t seem to have any complaints.”

The town’s warriors, hunters, and scouts had dubbed the nightly chase of the crafters and artists The Hunt of The Normal and unsurprisingly loved it. Slightly more surprisingly, most of the normal classes loved it, too. The vast majority of them were caught quickly, unable to get much distance or good hiding spaces after the initial head start wore off. Only a small fraction of them took it very seriously. Chief among them, and for reasons he couldn’t adequately explain, was Arthur. On some deeply spiritual level, he had wanted to beat Leena at it. Unfortunately, she had proved uncatchable.

“Hey, tea man. Get to work. Everyone’s cold,” Milo said.

Milo had already collected a bowl of stew from the big communal post-hunt pot the cooks had been supplying for the town, the materials for which were paid for out of the town’s coffers. It had those now. Since trade had started up with the more established demon cities, money had been pouring into the town, filtering down through various workers who drew pay for their public works to cooks, crafters, and suppliers of equipment until every last demon in the entire town was making an income.

That didn’t come without a struggle, of course. Arthur had actually had to convince the council to vote on a moratorium on gift-giving, just long enough to let people get used to paying for things again. Nobody had liked it, including Arthur, but the results had spoken for themselves. Forced to make actual choices about what they wanted to buy with their limited funds, the townspeople had prioritized better. So had the government. Things were more efficient now, even if people had to start using coin pouches again.

All of which meant there was already a line of coins on the counter of Arthur’s shop when he got there, more than enough to cover everyone’s drinks for the night, courtesy of some combination of unnamed friends. It was a nice touch, and Arthur understood why they had done it. Now, he could make tea without having to deal with the intricacies of payments.

“Fine with me. Just give me a few minutes to rinse off.” Arthur lifted up his arms to give Milo a look at the mud coating his body. “I might have got a bit carried away.”

“I’ll say,” Milo said. “Did that work?”

“Better than not running very fast worked for you, at least. Rhodia, what went wrong there?”

“Milo wouldn’t go anywhere we couldn’t see the stars together.” The mouse-demon rolled her eyes affectionately at her husband. “Which meant we were entirely out in the open the entire time.”

“Well, that’s not all of it.” Milo patted his wife’s stomach with a significant air. “She’s running for two, these days.”

Everyone froze for a moment at the news before Rhodia pinched Milo’s arm. “You have to stop doing that to people. I’m not, everyone. Milo’s just joking. At least not unless my alchemist needs the world’s biggest talking-to.”

Arthur escaped before the banter could draw him back in, going to the room at the back of his shop. After enough cooking mishaps and spills to coat a small-sized house, Arthur had finally installed a rudimentary shower in his storage area. It was just large enough and warm enough so he didn’t have to work covered in syrup, dough, or whatever else he had exploded all over himself while not paying enough attention to his tasks.

The water wasn’t very warm, but to Arthur’s freezing cold body it felt like fire. He let it run, rubbing the bigger chunks of mud off his face and hands and rinsing until the water was running clear. It had been a long day. But if all the effort they were putting in had even a small effect, if it gave them even the slightest advantage in terms of what was coming, he knew it would be all worth it.

“We have a bet going, Arthur.” Onna nudged Mizu to indicate just who the bet was with. “Are you going to miss the chases when they’re done? You did the best out of everyone besides Leena, who I’m starting to get suspicious has been cheating somehow.”

“Miss it?” Arthur cocked his eyebrow. “No. Why would you think I did?”

“Because you covered yourself in mud and freezing water to do better, Arthur. And yesterday, you tried burying yourself,” Onna laughed.

“Or the day before when you tried to build a little hut out of sticks,” Lily said. “Or the day before that, when…”

“Okay, I get it.” Arthur laughed as he filled up his big kettle from the tap. These days, he didn’t even have to lift anything to do that. Milo and Mizu had built him a big, well-fed iron box that sat permanently on its own magical heating element and let out its contents through a fast-flowing valved spout. “No, I won’t miss it. I didn’t exactly like being cold and alone in the woods while I got bit up by little tiny flying beasts. I just wanted to do a good job.”

“So did all of us.” Spiky walked into the shop himself, much less covered with mud but with his own scrapes and cuts that signified his own effort. “But nobody quite as much as you.”

“Leena.” Arthur objected, prepping boba pearls for each of his friend’s drinks. “She beat me every night.”

“She doesn’t even know how.” Spiky held up a hand to stop further argument from Arthur. “Really. She just leaves and starts walking, and then gets found last. She swears it’s a fluke, and she’s not lying. That means you’re trying harder than anyone else.”

“Well.” Arthur looked out of his shop at the plaza. Since just before coldfall, the plaza’s warm-weather open roof and wall had been closed up, the latter with a permanent glass-panel front Rhodia had spent weeks putting together. Through the giant window, he could see a good portion of what they had accomplished in the town. Not a lot, considering all he couldn’t see, but even that small bit would be a lot to give up to a monster wave. “When the news came in, it just… shook me, I guess. That all this might get torn down. It just feels wrong to me.”

“Lots of cities start from scratch, again,” Mizu said. “The monster waves never destroy everything. Most of my waterways should survive, even if the well doesn’t.”

“They’ll get the well?” Milo said. “I would have thought they’d leave it alone.”

“The runes draw them in,” Mizu said. “There’s a weller saying. Never get attached to your first well. It’s good advice in general, but they say it was written about monster waves.”

For the better part of a year, Arthur, his friends, and what was now close to three hundred demons of all shapes and sizes had been working on building up this place. During that time, they had been protected. Guided and reinforced by the force of nature that was Karbo, they had worked at thinning out naturally-occurring beasts, clearing dungeons, and even putting down monster waves in their early stages before they could get too strong.

Now, Karbo was getting called away. Some distant disaster needed more than just conventional force to push it back, which meant that their section of the frontier now had to deal with the same problems the rest of the world did.

The roving militia was still pretty strong, but without a Karbo-sized hurricane of violence at their beck and call, they weren’t enough to completely prevent the waves. And so, they were redistributed to various towns of their choosing, bolstering the forces already there to make them more capable for either fight or flight. It was getting the better of that choice, between running and making a stand, that Arthur was willing to work for.

“I get it, but there’s only so much you can do, Arthur,” Spiky said. “Really. A single person can only contribute so much to a cause, and you’re already doing two jobs at once with tea-making and mayor-powers. Giving yourself a third is a lot.”

“Everyone else is playing the games,” Arthur protested.

“Not like you are.” Lily kicked Arthur’s leg from her chair. “You’re doing it Arthur-style, and you know it. Listen to Spiky. He’s right, even if there isn’t math to say why.”

“There actually is, believe it or not,” Spiky said, and everyone believed it. “There’s a percentage above normal output that makes people tired, and a percent above that that causes mistakes even if you aren’t tired. Arthur, you’re above the first and below the second. It’s just a rule of thumb, but…”

“But the town council, most of which is here, already had a secret vote to keep an eye on you,” Milo said. “You can work, you can keep an eye on things, but we’ve put Lily in charge of making you quit working when she sees fit. And you have to do it, or Mizu penalizes you, as she sees fit.”

Arthur laughed and turned to Mizu, then stopped laughing as she gave him a cool, serious look. “They aren’t kidding,” Mizu said. “It’s not an official punishment, but we figured you probably wouldn’t stop any other way unless we actually tied you up and locked you in a building.”

“Wait.” Arthur had a feeling this was a bluff he could call. “How would you even punish me?”

Mizu didn’t back down. If anything, she upped the ante. “Do you really want to find out?”

“Yeah, do you?” Lily said, cracking her tiny knuckles. Arthur gulped. He didn’t know what it would be, but between them, they had more than enough brainpower to figure something out he wouldn’t like much. Lily reveled in her triumph. “Nope, you don’t. So just be happy we’re letting you do non-tea things at all.”

Arthur shook his head, then went back to his tea-making. If he was honest about it, it was kind of a relief to hear he was being limited. In all his time on the Demon World, the periods he had put his tea shop second to some other goal almost outnumbered the times he hadn’t. The town wasn’t a tiny, delicate thing anymore, despite the fact that a monster wave could still wipe it off the map. There were plenty of people with all sorts of classes to cover almost any job much better than Arthur could. He could support them with drinks that made them better, and by helping coordinate the leadership. But there was no reason for him to lay a single brick or pick up so much as a single dagger.

Because in the end, that was who he was. He was a brewer of tea, someone who made people’s lives better by giving them one of the many things that made life worth living in the first place. It was his job, and he was pleased to do it.