Chapter 15: Training Logs

Ultimately, Rhett opted not to follow the teens, as they ignored the wisdom of their elders and snuck out the Sunnymeat ruins in search of adventure in the early morning.

Instead, Rhett snuck out to the logging area.

Well, specifically, by ‘snuck’, he meant he just followed Frenzy, who was more than happy to guide him down the trail to the Wildwood Forest.

As he did, Rhett was baffled by something he started to notice. The trail, such that it was, was practically overgrown, neither dirt, nor stone, and not even the odd lumber paths that were popular here.

It was bad enough that he had to ride on the taller man’s shoulder, as he slowly made his way through the tamped down weeds and grasses, in a long, winding manner that made him wonder aloud why the loggers hadn’t cleared a way.

“They have. But it’s not the traveling path. That one is just for hauling logs back to town. The rest of us take this way,” Frenzy explained.

He continued through the oddly inefficient path, and chose to show, rather than tell, when it came to why.

At each corner in the trail, the elf knelt down, to where a berry bush, or an herb patch, or a fruit tree stood proudly among the rest of the vegetation, plucking a bit and putting it into his doctor’s bag, before kneading a black substance into the soil under the plant.

“In the fancier cities, people call trails like these ‘shopping lists’, because of how much we ‘shop around’ on them,” he offered, giving Rhett a berry shaped like a tiny dagger.

“Because monsters and animals, and even the plants are such a problem in the wilderness, we lack the manpower to permanently establish much outside Sunnymeat. The trees grow too quickly, and the beasts are too ferocious.”

He handed the Ratling another thing from the trail, a sprig of herbs, the leaves on them long and their centers swollen with something sweet.

“Try them both,” he requested, and Rhett shrugged, stuffing both of them in his mouth.

The explosion of flavor was welcome, the sharp tang of the berry and the sugar-sweetness of the herb mingling together with a grassy taste and something almost spicy, in the way it pricked pain in his nostrils as the juices spilled out.

“In truth, they’re more like armories, filled with weapons,” Frenzy answered a moment later, when the rat’s mouth was too full to doubletake properly.

“Corporeals harness the power of rich, fresh foods to enhance their Arts, but everyone benefits from a meal like that. By growing certain things along trails, we keep ourselves fed, hydrated, and protected, in case of attack. Those Blaberries sharpen the body, and the Plumb Herbs…”

Rhett’s eyes widened in anticipation.

“Are sweet and delicious.”

His shoulders dropped and his head flung to the side in annoyance as he swallowed.

As they continued, and Frenzy plucked more and stranger herbs for his bag, they eventually made it to the logging site.

Setting him down, Frenzy gave Rhett a smile and a nod. “Thank you for not running off with my son and his bad influences. I have to go and ground him now, unless he came back with some long-lost treasure or some nonsense.” The Elf’s smile widened.

Rhett gave an awkward grimace. Hopefully they didn’t think he had snitched, just because he opted not to go into the deathtrap that was the splintered ruins.

“When you’re ready to leave, ask for my brother, Death-Personified-Through-The-Cutting-Of-Sinew. He’ll walk you back through the trail, alright?”

Rhett nodded, and the Beach Elf disappeared into the brush, leaving him to examine the logging site.

It wasn’t quite what he would expect from a modern operation. It looked less like a field of stumps, and more like a warzone, shattered trees and improvised walkways of melted rawhide stretched between them formed an improvised camp that kept moving forwards, bit by bit.

The narrow strip of fallen trees was on an incline, leading up a tall slope, and the clearcut path back to the village let him see all the way to the edifice of wood.

He did his best to follow the signs put up, declaring various places as “Monster”, “Special”, “Normal” and so on, trying to avoid the skull-markings on several of them as the path branched and split, workers taking on a variety of roles.

The biggest job, it seemed, was in triggering a sort of avalanche. The most muscled Orcs worked alongside the most corded Elves, pushing and pulling fallen trees, stripping them with copper and stone knives, and trying their best to orient them all parallel to one another.

At the very back of the pack, a scrawny Orc in obscenely overcomplicated glasses used a variety of instruments, like rulers and protractors, to study the growing pile of logs.

“Okay! That should be enough!” he shouted through a little leather megaphone.

Workers scattered like ants, as the Orc did his best to push one tiny tree up against the precarious pile. Once it was there, he used a gauge to push it ever so slightly askew.

The pattern was Broken, and as he ran screaming, the pile began to shudder and shake, eventually falling apart in an absolute rockslide of trees and thrown up clouds of dirt.

He was fast, Rhett noted, fast enough to outrun the rolling logs, and then fast enough to leap on top of them, riding them backwards all the way to the village.

Workers shared shouts of success at this insanity, before making their way across the paths to the front of the logging operation, where others were mowing down trees with a variety of methods.

Rhett scampered after the workers, who greeted him with a decent level of politeness. He saw a small camp waving him over, hefting flagons of woodbeer, but he waved them off, gesturing at the loggers to express his desire to check it out.

This received a combination of jeers and easy grins returning the waves, so he continued on, examining the process for himself.

It was a blend of eccentric and traditional, in this case. Everyone indeed had axes, either stone or copper, or in one case, wood.

Beyond that, however, everyone had their own flourishes to add to the mix. It was enough that he struggled to pay attention to any one method, eventually finding something to tip the balance of his attention, when someone called out for an Elf.

“Hey, Sinew! Give me a top off won’t ya!?” an Orc pleaded, and Rhett scurried over as a dark-skinned figure strode over with an easy, boneless swagger.

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With several quick jabs to the Orc’s joints, pulses of red surged through him through the Elf’s knuckle. With now-cracking limbs, he seemed to hold his stone axe with revitalized hands, swinging it harder and faster than before.

The Elf himself was one of a few who didn’t have a physical axe. Instead, he seemed to use whip-like motions with his hands, cleaving arcs of energy erupting from his snake-like fists that hewed into the wood and severed fibers in them directly.

“Boy. Come here,” Sinew commanded, and Rhett jerked.

Quickly obeying the intimidating fellow, he approached, taking stock of the man’s appearance.

Tanned like the rest, the Beach Elf was a lithe figure, with muscles like braided wire and a flowing, poofy outfit made of horsehair silk and feathers.

On his feet, Snakeskin slippers covered them, and over his hands, a similar garment, like a glove, but with exposed skin along the top of his hand and fingers covered them.

“I call this the Idiotproof Snail’s Teeth. You will perform it,” he commanded.

Rhett was uncomfortably prepared for failure, he wasn’t even athletic in his past life! Despite this, when a tall scary monk commanded you to wax on, you did not wax off instead.

The elf looked bemused as rodent limbs crudely, slowly aped his flowing dance.

Windmilling arms, like a child’s idea of an attack. A leg raised up, echoing a familiar movie about a Kung-Fu Youngling, or something like that. A slow wave from one arm to the other. Fingers waggling.

Each motion was painfully slow and overly simple, none of them even overlapped, and even then, Rhett was absolutely not doing it right.

The most surprising thing was, that Sinew didn’t care, nor did he correct Rhett. The reason became apparent, as the simplistic sequence of motions continued for over a minute.

Something was moving under Rhett’s skin. Wriggling around inside of him. He felt his blood fluttering in his arms.

Each motion, no matter how crudely done, was enough to imbue a pattern into his mana, like Smacks had been talking about. Each pattern overlapped with the next, like a mathematical equation he couldn’t understand, on a deeper level than the fact that there was indeed some kind of pattern that resulted from the combinations.

Finally, Sinew threw a sloppy punch, and a gouge was cut into the tree. Rhett copied it, and another gouge was cut into the tree, his body suddenly feeling lightheaded.

His eyes widened. He had somehow actually done it?

“Don’t act so surprised. I called it Idiotproof. I would be more insulted if you somehow screwed up an Art that took over a minute to perform. It was explicitly designed to have the lowest tolerances I could possibly manage,” Sinew explained.

“Have you fallen in love with the Arts? It would be useful to me to take on a novel apprentice. Better for my experiments,” he answered, leaning against the tree.

Rhett noticed something. His own gouge was much, much smaller, but went much much deeper. Likewise, though this was probably because he was weak, he felt much more tired than the Elf looked.

“Your bodily mana is denser than most. Perhaps ten times as much. You have very little of it, but I believe that can be solved, by sharpening your will.”

He had a flashback to Cop, who explained exactly how she planned on ‘sharpening his will’. Cop was at least a pudgy Orc who cleaned for a living. This guy swinging him around to toughen him up would probably result in him no longer having a tail.

“N-no thank you, sens- uh, sir. Sensei. Whichever,” he babbled.

The Elf nodded brusquely. “Fine. Keep in mind, however, that Monks are… ‘cool’,” he said slowly, as if the word were a strange animal he was forced to babysit for a coworker on vacation.

“I was hoping to grab you before someone else did,” he admitted. “Before the newcomer popularity wore off,” he joked lightly.

Waving Rhett off, he returned to the tree in front of him, posing his hand into a strange hand-sign and using a glassy Ki-Blade to hack at the tree. “You did well enough. Begone, unless you want to learn ‘cool’ things,” he concluded the conversation.

Rhett gave a thumbs up, and wandered down the line, wanting to peek at all the cool powers on display, however mundanely they were being used.

The most interesting one he came across, that caught his eye first, was a short Elf carrying pouches and tools all over him, only one of which was actually in use, and incorrectly at that.

Rather than using the iron hatchet in his hand, the Elf was balancing it on the tip of his finger, standing in front of a thick, lustrous grey tree that had little dents in it, and shards of broken axes around it.

“Hey, check this out, little man,” he said, using his finger to flip the axe end over end in the air, before snatching it out of the air and twirling it through his fingers.

As he did, the tree let out a loud CLANG!, and like a moment of frozen time, it simply became cut, without effect or transition.

Slowly, the metal tree began to tip and fall, revealing rings of different metals in it.

“Welp, that’s the end of that one,” he announced, packing away the axe.

“What was that?” Rhett asked, concluding that whatever it was, it was different from the magic he had been seeing so far.

“Trick. Rogues use it. Wear stuff under your clothes or in a sheath and you’ll be able to do it too,” he said, gesturing to all of his sheathed knives and pocketed tools.

“Or just use one, and be a Magician. Outer clothes do Rangery things, inner pockets build up Roguey charges. Cantrips, Tricks, whatever you want to call them. ” he said quickly, rummaging around for a small whittling knife.

“Hide a tool, let it get buzzy, do a trick. Simple as that,” he said, waving his knife over the fallen tree too fast for him to have actually been cutting anything with it. The way he swung it though, made it LOOK like he was doing something.

Upon finishing, he flipped the knife between his fingers and sheathed it, causing the tree to pop like a cork, branches and bark falling off it without visible cause.

“Dunno how it works. Name’s Knife-Axe-Sword-Smokebomb-Caltrop-Shuriken. Have a goodun, I’m going to go get drunk,” he quickly ended the conversation, moseying on over to the logging camp while several Orcs plodded over to work over the stripped metal tree.

“Don’t mind him. He’s got too much quick in his brain. He keeps a bunch of one-off things for when we run into stuff like this,” one of the workers explained, thumping his fist into the tree for good measure.

“We can’t cut it with our axes, but his Tricks don’t care. They’re weird like that,” the Orc shrugged helplessly.

“My name’s Cry. You here to help out? Saw you slacking off with Sinew earlier,” he wondered sternly. Rhett gulped.

“I was just curious,” he said, holding up his paws.

“Yeah? Well go ‘curious’ that tree down, we need all hands on deck to reach the pigstep before sundown. We gotta harvest enough pork-corrupted junk from there to make up for the damage, before the monsters get to it first.”

To his credit, the Orc pointed at a tree that was really more of a sapling, and was decently far away from anyone else working. A clear nod to the ‘new kid who doesn’t know what he’s doing’.

Encouraged, and more than a little intimidated by the attention on him growing, he ran off to do that.

At the same time, he snatched a sufficiently large loaf of Sawbread, having an idea to speed this up.

“Okay, you’ve got this, you’ve already done this,” he hyped himself up. He had dug the mighty Fort Towelhole after all, and that was in a piece of wood too.

Quickly chewing his sawbread into a large, traffic-cone like shape, he shoved his head through it and donned his woodfood “robes”, and a hat to complete the look.

Biting down on the sapling, his eyes widened at how easily his fangs glided through the wood. It was even easier than before, when he had first tried using Sawbread’s ‘Set Bonus’.

Now, the taste of applewood smoked rye appeared almost immediately, his fangs trivially snapping through everything in their path that dared to be wooden.

He realized that Frenzy was a slyer doctor than he gave credit, feeling at his teeth and realizing the weird magic dagger berries must have still been helping him.

The combination of the Blaberries and the Sawbread Armor together had turned his mouth into a deforestation abomination…

Bolstered by his successful mouthful of wood, and a little disgusted by this tree’s weird flavors, Rhett went, in his own words, “Full end of the popsicle stick beaver mode!”

It was weird that everyone was trying to encourage him to do stuff, and teaching him so much, but he guessed that was what happened in a society where people couldn’t just hole up in a room with a glowing box and infinite food.

They had to entertain themselves by giving exposition and secret martial arts techniques to complete strangers.

Or it might have been because he was apparently an adorable naive uneducated orphan former slave rat child mascot in these people’s eyes.

He really hoped it was the former, and not the large, adjective-riddled latter that was being implied by everyone pointing and smiling and joking about his successful sapling felling.

He was only three, maybe four of the nine things they thought he was… At best!