Chapter One Hundred and Ninety-Five - Buddy System

Lunch was had!

It was really good too. I don’t know when Momma had time to make sandwiches, but they were excellent. The bread were big oval slices that still tasted fresh, and there was some sauce, lettuce, and carrots that had been shredded. There were even tiny tomato-like veggies cut up into little wafers inside.

All that served next to a big, heaping salad and some tea which I made on the spot. Momma had brought a little tin with some herbs in it for the tea, mostly dried berries and some wild-flowers that I didn’t immediately recognize. They were the sweet highlight of the meal.

Still, it was a little strange to be eating next to a forest where we knew enemies were lurking. I felt pretty safe, what with the buns and all, but I couldn’t help but glance over every so often, expecting a big ugly monster to leap out and try to have us for lunch.

Being eaten would have ruined the whole mood of a picnic.

“So,” Amaryllis asked as she poked at her salad. “There’s something that’s been bothering me.”

“Oh?” Momma asked.

“To open the gate to this floor, you need keys. Keys dropped by the zombies. Why did we try to sneak over if we would have had to kill them anyway?”

I continued munching as I looked over to the buns. It was Carrot that replied, while dipping her namesake in some sort of savoury sauce. “Oh, that’s an easy one. There are a couple of spots near the wall that you can bunker up in. Nice and safe. Well, safe-ish.”

“So you were trying to get us there?” I asked.

“Yup! When you only have a couple of buns, it’s easy to be sneaky.”

“You are very much the opposite of stealthy,” Peter said.

“Hey now!” Carrot protested.

I raised my hand up. I had a question too! “So, um, how do you fight a wight? Is there a trick to it? Oh! And what’s the puzzle on this floor?”

Peter nodded. “Wights are best fought with fire. They tend to only attack individually, so there’s little strategy involved. As for the floor’s puzzle; there are five braziers, you need to light them all, and then the fog lifts and the gate unlocks.”

“So we just run to each one?” I asked.

Carrot shook her head. “Nope. They change places all the time. You need to find them all over again.”

“I don’t suppose we’ll all stick together in one large group, as is sensible?” Amaryllis asked.

“There’s four of you, and four of us,” Momma said. “I think groups of two would make sense. We can regroup at the gate once the fog lifts.”

I sat up a little. “So who’s going to go with who?” I asked.

“Whom,” Amaryllis and Peter said at the same time.

Carrot raised her arms in victory. “That’s one pair!” she cheered. “I call dibs on the human!”

“Oh?” Momma asked. “Do you think you and the girl would make a good pair?”

“Nope! I just think she’s quiet enough that she won’t stop me from prattling on,” Carrot said.

I considered that for a moment while Awen wiggled her arms, all flustered and cute. “Awen is a pretty great listener,” I said. “Try to get her to talk a little too. She can be very interesting once you get past all the cute shyness.”

“That leaves myself and Broccoli, as well as Miss Momma and Buster,” Bastion said over the kettle-pitched squeaking that Awen was making. “Perhaps I should go with you, Buster. Leave the two team leaders to work together?”

Buster nodded, and Momma smiled faintly. “That seems perfectly fair. Now, if everyone is quite done, let’s pack things up and prepare to head out.”

“I can clean everything up,” I said.

“Thank you, but conserve your mana for now, little bun, we’ll be needing it,” Momma said.

That sounded quite reasonable, so I nodded and started to pack things away. There wasn’t much food left to store since the lot of us had eaten our fill. When everything was put away I took a moment to stretch--very important to do just before some physical activity--then took a glance at my stats.

Health: 135/135

Mana: 72/150

Stamina: 74/135

A bit more than half my mana and stamina were back. It had taken less time than I expected. At some point along the way the ‘one point a minute’ rule of thumb had fallen behind. Maybe as one levelled up things were restored faster? That sounded fair.

I held my warspade to my side, then adjusted my hat and made sure my pack was nice and snug. “This is going to be weird,” I said.

“Why’s that?” Amaryllis asked.

“I’ve been with you and Awen since... well, a while now. We’re not always together-together, but we’re rarely more than a few dozen meters apart,” I said. I ran my thumb along the haft of my spade. “Can I give you both goodbye hugs?”

Awen was quick to raise her arms in the optimal hugging position, so she got to be squeezed first. When I let go of her and turned to Amaryllis, it was to find her raising her wings with a roll of her eyes. “Fine, get it over with,” she said.

I squeezed her extra tight before letting go.

“Do you want a hug too, Bastion?” I asked.

The sylph smiled and shook his head. “I think I’ll be fine without. Though I appreciate the offer.”

“You can never have enough hugs,” I said.

He still didn’t seem that interested, and I didn’t want to push him.

“Okay then,” I said to Momma. “What should we talk about as we go find those braziers?”

Momma chuckled. “Oh, this and that.”

“Don’t get her started about her kids,” Carrot warned. “She’ll talk your entire ears off.”

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We set off into the forest. I could hear Carrot talking for a little bit, but her voice was soon muffled by the fog, and within a dozen meters it was gone entirely. Momma and I walked more or less side-by-side. The problem was, the forest was the old sort, with bushes everywhere and walls of fallen branches making areas entirely unpassable.

The fog didn’t help. It looked as if some parts of it were thicker than others, with tendrils that sat in the air and only moved with the gentle sway of bubbles in a lava lamp, only bigger, and not as colourful, and a lot creepier.

“How long have you been friends with Amaryllis and Awen?” Momma asked.

I grinned up at her. “A while! Well, actually it’s been about a month, I think.” Strange, it felt as if it had been a whole lot longer than that. Maybe it was because it had been busy, with kidnapping attempts, and... successful kidnappings—of Awen, at least—then long adventures and dungeon delves and a tournament arc. Then the dragons and a bit of time off with Amaryllis’ family. “It hasn’t been super long, but I think we’ve been through a lot.”

Momma smiled over at me. “You have been through a lot together,” she said as she pushed a branch up for me to pass.

I folded my ears back and squeezed under it. “Yeah,” I said. “They’ve both become... well, the kind of friends that I always dreamed of having, I guess. We’re not as close as we could be yet, but give us another couple of months, and we’ll be inseparable!”

“How cute!” Momma said. “I hope you cherish your friends while you can. Life will sometimes drag people away from you, kicking and screaming sometimes, but still.”

I didn’t want to agree, but I knew that she was right. “Yeah, I know,” I said. “But for this adventure, and the next, and the next, we’ll be together, and as long as I’m still able to, I’ll do everything I can to be the best friend they ever had.”

Momma chuckled and pat me atop my helmet, right between my ears.

I usually found it really annoying when people patted me, but Momma felt like... well, she felt like a mom, and that made it okay.

“Careful,” Momma said.

My ears perked and I looked around us. We had entered a little clearing. Nothing too big, just a circle some dozen meters wide at the centre, and surrounded by trees.

“I think you should take this one,” Momma said. “It’ll be a good experience, and I can hop in if you need the help.”

“Take on which one?” I asked as I looked around.

A cackle from above had me looking up in time to see a blur leaping down at me.

I squeaked and rolled to the side. It wasn’t the nicest roll, what with my pack dragging behind me, but I managed to find my feet and hop back a little.

The thing was attacking Momma, arms swinging wildly, and breath coming out in a hiss.

Momma was parrying every punch and swing with one arm, pushing the blows away here, and weaving out of the way there. She was dancing, almost, and all with the easy grace of someone running through some habitual motion. She could have been doing the dishes for all the effort she seemed to put into the fight.

The monster, the wight, I realized, seemed to notice, and it bounced back.

“Hey!” I called out at it as I launched a ball of Cleaning magic right towards the side of its head.

The wight ducked back and out of the spell’s path, then with its back curved all the way around, it planted its hands into the ground and cartwheeled back and out of the way of a second spell.

It pressed its feet into the dirt, bunched up its legs, and shot towards me.

For just a moment I was surprised, but if there was one thing I was getting decent at, it was fighting in the air, and I knew that once you took off, there wasn’t much you could do to change directions.

The wight’s eyes, two glowing blue orbs that didn’t have iris or pupil, widened a little as I spun around and brought my spade up like a baseball bat.

The thunk of the spade meeting the monster’s face rattled my arms, but it still felt pretty great.

The wight rolled on landing, then reached out an arm and raked at my side. My armour took the worst of it, but I still felt its long, claw-like fingers digging into my ribs through my gambeson. Instead of stepping back, I moved in and tried to knee the monster.

It stepped to the side and swung at me again.

I parried with the haft of my spade, but that left my other side open and the wight was quick to take advantage of that.

The shadows around us raced up, and like grasping tendrils from some sort of eldritch monster, they grabbed at my legs and pinned me in place as the wight punched me full-on in the chest.

If it wasn’t for my breastplate, that would have been awful. As it was, it still knocked some of the wind out of me.

I let loose a bust of Cleaning magic, then when the tendrils grasping me loosened a bit, I hopped up on the spot and rammed a knee into the wight’s face.

It reeled back, which let me land and spin around.

Magic rushed to my foot just before my roundhouse crashed into the monster’s chest, a good dose of stamina powering the blow.

The wight went flying back.

“You, are very rude,” I panted as I walked over to it with my spade.

I brought the tool up, then swung it down as hard as I could.

The wight turned to dust beneath me.

Momma clapped behind me, while a very welcome message dinged into being before me. “Well done, little bun,” Momma said. “I think with a few years practice you could become quite the warrior!”