Adam was having a revelation. For eight years he had thought he’d had the worst of lives. Murdered parents, indifferent teachers, dangerous orphanage staff, and living on the streets. Add in nearly being murdered, the possibility of his friend being destroyed as a person, killing for the first time, and his subsequent enslavement and he thought he deserved an award or a title for having the worst life ever.
It was a huge surprise to find out he wasn’t even in the running.
Caught up in his own brilliance, the duke had told them the story. Adam was horrified at the content, but glad that he wouldn’t have to ask the new kid to tell it.
The child’s name was Jay, and he wasn’t an orphan. Jay’s mother was a prostitute, but she hadn’t always been.
Jay’s family had happily lived near a church of the Sun King where his father had been a priest. Until he was disgraced, defrocked, and defenestrated. Between disgrace and defenestration he’d wasted all of their money, friendships, and favors. When he died they had nothing left. Jay was six.
The next six years saw his mother fall into despair, destitution, and drugs, helped along by alcohol. With no way to recover from the loss of everything and everyone they had ever known, she had turned first to the bottle, and then to the streets to support her son. Over time the drugs, alcohol, and self disgust turned her against the son she’d started streetwalking to support. Reason had fled long ago, and she berated and beat her son for little or no excuse. Jay took to the streets himself to escape his mother, and ran straight into the fists of older and larger street kids. Forced into fighting to survive, he’d become nearly feral. Each night he’d return to the shack his mother rented for them with time on her back, and hide in the corner trash pit while she serviced a seemingly endless river of faceless men. If he was found, he’d be beaten, mocked, or forcibly fed drugs or alcohol, but the streets weren’t safe at night for a sole beggar child like himself. He’d fought back against so many different assaults he was no longer certain how he’d survived, or if he had actually killed someone. There had certainly been close brushes with both.
A bout of sickness forced his mother out of work long enough for her to need to rack up debts with the wrong people just to eat. Jay had long since stopped looking to his mother for help, so he was only peripherally aware that she had done so. When she was knifed by a jilted john shortly after returning to work, she needed further loans to pay for healing, but those wrong people wanted collateral. They wanted her son as a slave, and she sold him without a second thought. The loan shark then sold the boy to the duke, who’s men were returning to the estate as Adam watched.
Adam had never known that it was possible for a parent to be so vile, nor for someone to wish they had been an orphan. Maybe if he had been, then Jay could have had some hope of a decent life. As it was, despite the horror of the situation, being bought by the duke to be monster bait for Adam’s power leveling was likely to be the better chance at life for Jay.
And if nothing else, Jay could certainly run.
Watching the guards try to corral the recently escaped slave boy was educational if nothing else. It was also entertaining, but both Adam and Martin were trying not to laugh.
Jay had slipped his shackles when the guards tossed the filthy guttersnipe into a tub in the courtyard. He’d waited until the water was a combination of both nasty and soapy, then splashed it into the faces of the nearest guards. While they were blinded he’d made a run for it.
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Watching a dozen grown men in heavy armor chasing a wet, naked boy around would have been more hysterical without the weight of the boy’s story hanging around them. As the chase stretched into its fifth minute they gave up fighting it, and just started laughing. Jay had managed to nearly blind the two guards at the tub, trip another on a clothesline from somewhere, and knock one off a roof. One had slipped on a bar of soap and was nursing a pulled groin, and two more had collapsed under the weight of exhaustion and armor. Seven guards down was a good run, but more had come to help and the boy was finally trapped. Adam suspected that he could have done better, but he had two years and a class on the boy.
Shaking their heads and chuckling, Adam and Martin headed down off the balcony to track down their errant new charge.
They found him in the care of Ruth in the back corner of the kitchen that Adam often worked in. Martin’s paramour had once again proven the wisdom of a woman and captured the boy through the simple expedient of feeding him. The two nearby guardsmen were both cautious and shocked. They hadn’t given up carefully watching the boy, but even after the riotous chase in the courtyard the guard captain had given strict instructions not to harm Jay.
Despite him wishing otherwise, Adam felt the System Assistance kick in once again. Due to having a better idea of how his class and skills seemed to work, he had taken to wearing an apron at all times. Pockets on both sides had been sewn to hold a multitude of kitchen knives, but the center pocket held another link to his skills. Rushing to the side of the near starving child, Adam heard himself say, “Oh you poor boy, did those nasty, old guardsmen give you a fright? Here, Have a Cookie!”
The words were bad enough, but he cringed at hearing the tone. If there was one thing he hated other than the loss of control that the system assistance brought about, it was sounding like an absolute idiot. A close second though, was having to watch him cuddle Jay’s head and stroke it like a puppy. The required cookie had already disappeared down the bottomless hole that was disguised as a boy’s mouth.
Like any normal boy, Jay tried fighting off the seemingly fourteen armed monstrosity assaulting his head. In addition to flailing arms, he also added the time tested method of screaming like a banshee.
Knowing what was coming, Martin tried to warn him. “Just give it up, kid. Fighting off that one is a fool’s errand, and trying will just make it worse.”
Jay completely ignored his advice, but he regretted it almost immediately.
After the duke had walked Adam and Martin through Jay’s life story, the two had had a bit of a brainstorming session disguised as training. Or Martin beating up a teenager in an attempt to teach him how to fight. They quietly went over Adam’s current skills, as well as those available. With the dual goals of successfully power leveling Adam to the duke’s satisfaction, and keeping Jay alive they at least had a basic framework to build from. Eventually, a plan came together. And Adam, under System Assistance, put the first part of that plan to the test, although neither of them had expected it.
“Shhhhhhhh, now.” A nearly invisible light seemed to flow from Adam’s mouth to Jay’s head. If he hadn’t been watching for it, Martin never would have seen it. The moment it made contact, the new kid’s cries were silenced. While Martin was smiling at the result, and proof of concept, Adam was obliviously patting the child’s head in a comforting fashion. His voice continued to croon out, “There, there. No one will hurt you now. You’re safe with me. Don’t you worry, I’ll protect you from the big, bad men.”
The two guards snorted and looked at each other in confusion. One child slave was going to protect the other from them? Right.
Seeing their disdain, Martin knew he had located Adam’s training buddies for the next year or so. Such proud men needed a little humbling if they had already forgotten the merry chase one child led them on.
Still laughing to himself at all the humorous things he found in the kitchen, Martin strolled over to Ruth. On the way, he lightly tapped a fist to Jay’s shoulder, saying, “I warned ya. That one’s even more trouble than you.”
~~~~~~~~~~~
Inside Adam’s head, Szellem was once more braying in laughter. Long periods of boredom and intense emotional unrest were worth it for front row seats to the train wreck he was employed to guide.