Chapter 36

Gruel

"Remmi, I was thinking about how you fought yesterday."

I've got a cup of hot tea to my mouth with one hand while my other stirs a pot of rice with wild berries and game meat that's to be our breakfast. Ayre's an alright cook, but she was just going to leave it at rice and call it good enough.

Dawn's just starting to flood the province, and though the sky's taking on colors, the biggest source of light in our glade campsite remains the fire. As such, when I lower my cup and look over at the elf, firelight reflects mostly off of her legs and glistens off of the bottom length of her bow as she oils it, but much of her upper body is cast in shadow by comparison.

She's back on the stone I first sat her down on while she was still recovering yesterday, but a good night's rest did her a world of good. She claims that the campsite I constructed with Auto-Mode is the most comfortable she's ever stayed in. Though I erected her tent, I did so over a bed of leaves and lack of rocks. Under my encouragement, she left the flaps open so she actually had airflow.

But the bugs, she'd predictably complained. She would have complained about the smoke from the fire, too, if I hadn't already made it smokeless with a second air feed, an innovation that absolutely blew her mind. As for the bitey little fiends, I'd already thrown a collection of wild mints onto the fire, including some I'm pretty sure are related to sage. They filled our campsite with a pleasing aroma that still lingers, but that I assured her the bugs would hate.

I even got a new spell out of it. Auto-Mode took note of everything I wanted to construct, and then whisked me along to do so, but it left the fire pit unlit. I had almost just gone and done it the old-fashioned way, striking flint to the back of my hatchet over tinder, but then I recalled Ayre mentioning adventurers often used magic to start campfires. A quick search and a hundred points got me Spark, a match at the end of my finger.

I was pleased to learn that we are both early risers, as well, despite an initial concern that she'd had trouble sleeping after all. It did mean that I got to light one more piece of envy in her when I came out of my lean-to (which I maintain was in no way an inferior experience to her tent) and immediately rendered myself and the clothes I slept in clean and pristine with my cleansing spell.

I swear I only teased her a little before I gave in and bought her the item version for her own use. With that, she had proclaimed her last complaint about camping defeated and insisted she'd never be able to tolerate the normal way again.

"You mean how I ran around in circles," I ask in response to her question with a crooked grin, "shooting into a mass of baddies that wanted a bite of Filet au Hero?"

Just because it's comparative shadow doesn't mean I can't see her brows furrow at my words. "... Yes. Exactly that."

I chew my cheek as I consider how to respond. "Well, the secret is high Agility and a lot of adrenaline."

I casually lean to the side to avoid the stone she hurls at me. Not that she was really trying to hit me with it. I think.

"I'm being serious, Remmi!"

"I'm not."

Okay, pretty sure that one was meant to hit. The second stone clatters behind me like the first, and I put on an apologetic grin.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" I insist. "Please, what did you want to know?"

Ayre takes a deep breath to settle and regather herself. Even then, she still picks her mug up from beside her to take a sip before speaking.

"Remmi, where did you learn how to fight?"

I give it a coin flip if that question is preceding mockery or praise, but either way, I'm not sure what kind of answer she's wanting. "Uh, how do you mean?"

"You don't handle yourself like you've never fought monsters before," she explains. "I've seen plenty of first times, and my own wasn't so long ago. I know how people behave when they're faced with monsters in a life or death situation for the first time."

I scratch at my ear as I cast my gaze upward. "Well, it wasn't my first time. I nearly got beaten to death by a wood golem the day after I got here."

"A month and a half ago," she recites, and I nod. "I somehow doubt you reacted vastly differently then. Besides, my point isn't about an exact number. By your own admission, you're green. If you weren't a Hero, that badge on your chest would still be made of wood. The whole reason Sacred Yorin made you wait for another Bronze adventurer is because you have the experience of a novice."

I can't argue against any of that, it's a fair critique, and probably true. If I had been dropped here without my gun or the abilities of a Hero, I'd still be struggling to learn the ropes, grinding my stats up like everyone else. If I'd survived this long at all.

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"Okay, sure," I concede. "I'm afraid I'm still missing what you're wanting, though. Are you asking if I had some sort of training back home?"

"That, or any other excuse for it." Ayre turns to face me directly, setting her bow to the side. "You say you have no monsters, but you know the nature of undead. You ask me for information, only to find it redundant, and you go rushing in. You proceed to literally run circles around them in a tactic that can only be called inspired by madness."

Then she narrows her eyes at me, in focus rather than frustration this time. "And even the abomination was not a revelation to you. You called it a boss. You knew where to shoot it. You never even stopped to think about it."

I mull all of that over. I hadn't really thought about any of it that deeply at the time, beyond how to do it. It was just what needed to be done.

I recall giving Yorin a similar explanation for my activities on the estate. I might have a problem with long-term planning.

I push my growing list of psychological shortcomings off to the side and use tasting the rice as a means to squeeze an extra moment or two to decide how best to answer her.

"There's honestly a lot of things that I could point to as contributors for that," I start after determining breakfast could definitely use more butter and sugar. Too bad we have neither. "It's true we don't have monsters, but we know about monsters. Mostly from mythology and fantastic tales."

I motion with the spoon. "And I told you our favorite thing to ask is how. Well, that goes beyond just how something might work. There's a lot of thought put into how we might behave, or how we should behave, in sudden dire situations, even if those situations are impossible."

She's giving me that stare again, the one where she's getting reminded I'm basically an alien. "Your people devote time to considering how best to fight monsters that don't exist?"

"For fun!" I emphasize with a grin. Though I look away thoughtfully and tap my cheek. "Probably says something about the danger we faced in earlier eras when overpowering monsters from the darkness are a major recurring theme in our modern entertainment."

Ayre scowls at me. "Would you stop that?!"

"Stop what?"

"Segueing into philosophy every time I try to get a straight answer out of you!"

"Hey," I counter, gesturing with the spoon, "How we came to be the way we are is a How question, too!"

"You and your Hows!" Another stone comes my way and joins the other two past me, but I'm certain that one, at the very least, definitely wasn't meant to hit. After all, I only had to move a little that time.

"Y'know, if you do hit me with one of those, it's going to bounce off my face and go right in breakfast."

"Do your people normally avoid them so easily?"

My grin returns in full force. "We have an entire game called Dodgeball!"

"... Of course you do."

She sighs again and brushes her hands off on her shorts. "So you've had some sort of conditioning for this sort of thing," she reasons. "In those dungeons your people make?"

I nod. "That's some of it. There's also literature and other media." And then I grin again. "We even have a whole bunch on suddenly showing up somewhere that has magic and stats!"

"All I'm hearing is that your people have overactive imaginations that they allow to run away with them," Ayre counters, "and are terribly prone to overthinking."

My grin doesn't waver. "Sure turned out useful for me!"

This time, her sigh is more like a groan, and her ears nearly point to her shoulders. "The worst part is that I can't even disagree there. You led those undead around like fish on a lure."

"It only works if you're faster than the enemy, and if they're dumb enough to fall for it," I explain readily, "but it's a common enough strategy that there's no single name for it. I've heard it called baiting or pulling train, but the idea is getting them to focus on you, usually with some light attacks, and then leading them to group up to maximize the effectiveness of area attacks. It's a favorite tactic for clearing out lots of weaker enemies at once instead of expending extra resources taking them out individually."

Ayre seems to be thinking the idea over. "I can see the benefits, but a tactic like that seems like it would require an unhealthy recklessness."

I pause in stirring to scratch at my cheek again. "Eh, well, our dungeons are recreational, remember. There's no threat of true death, so that let us experiment with a lot of different strategies that would have gotten people killed here."

She looks like she's about to scold me, but she stops just after inhaling and thinks it over again. "You know what? You should talk to the guild about building a training dungeon. I can actually see a lot of benefit to that, thinking that it's actually possible."

My look goes troubled. "I don't have the means to do it the same way here as we would back home, and their construction wasn't really my field of expertise, either. There'd be a lot of mechanics I'd have to figure out other ways to do."

This time, it's Ayre's turn to grin. "I thought you lived to ask How."

I'm pretty sure my face really is in a pout this time. "... I'll put some thought into it," I concede. "I'm just saying that it's not as easy as building a better crossbow. The technology we use for building dungeons is literally a thousand years more advanced than that. Toleste doesn't even have the means to build the means to build what I would need to do it the same way. I can't just roll up to Dina with a blueprint and say, Let's get started."

"You'll figure it out," she cheekily insists as I pass her a bowl of the gruel. "And the abomination, was its weakness taught to you in the same way?"

I nod, my grin back once more. "That's the first rule of boss battles, after all! Aim for the glowy bits!"

"And how does that make sense?"

I think about it for a moment. "Well, mechanically, it serves as a simple cue to the participants where the points of vulnerability are. In actual application, though, anything glowing is a place where energy is concentrating, meaning it's an excellent place to disrupt if you can do so. Or if you can see the glow from inside the boss, then it's a good sign that location isn't armored as heavily as others."

"So if you actually see it, you have a target, albeit a dangerous one," she concludes. "Yeah, that follows with the same recklessness as the baiting tactic. And I suppose even if there aren't any glowing points in real combat, it still teaches you places like joints are good places to strike, I suppose?"

"Exactly," I nod around a spoonful of rice before swallowing. "Now you're getting it."

"And all this for something you don't even believe exists."

Ayre's conclusion is delivered as flatly as her ears.

"Remmi, your people are terrifying."