As the five of them approached the guards turned them a curious gaze and one knelt down. The man looked the two over a little bit before speaking to them, not even noticing the three ant women.
“Whoa there. It’s ok no need to be afraid. I just need to talk to you for a moment. Where do you kids come from? Are you orphans and are you planning on staying here?”
The man looked between them for a couple more seconds before adding another comment. “ As a guard, I really have to know these things before I can let you in. It’s okay you’re not in trouble or anything.”
Aiko considered things for a moment Before she replied. She began slow but quickly built up steam and started telling him everything that had gone on from the time she woke up to this point.
The guard looked more and more bewildered as she went on and then took on a bit of a panicked look.
Aiko hadn’t realized that she was crying until she was done talking but one thing she hadn’t expected was for the guard to gently reach down and give her a hug. The man, because his deep resonant voice left no question about that, began comforting her and telling her that everything would be all right.
The guard then took her and Brass into the city. They quickly made their way between a number of different shops and the guard took them to a very large building and had a quiet chat with the owner of the building.
After a bit, the owner leaned down and asked her if she would be willing to work for him. He explained that they would need some place to live in the town but he couldn’t just give them a room for free.
He said that, if she worked for him, that he could see to her housing without any problems and that he would give her enough time off so that she could look for something else to do in order to make money to pay for the room if she didn’t like working for him.
Aiko quickly agreed and the five of them settled into a very small room according to the owner. Aiko Brass and the ant sisters all thought that it was immense. By comparison to the people that were normally living in these rooms, she could see that it would be small for them.
The next few weeks were spent doing all manner of small chores in what Aiko came to know was called an inn and was made specifically for travelers. At first, she had a hard time getting used to the implements needed to clean because most of them were so much bigger than her but she quickly realized that she could use her magic to do the chores so much quicker.
The innkeeper didn’t mind at all. The old man had come in on her using her magic to clean a room one time and after backing out of the room with wide eyes had simply stood there with a big grin watching for quite a while until a bell at the counter had drawn him away from the spectacle.
After that, the man never bothered her again over whether or not she would be able to accomplish any task that he set for her.
Brass, Zenya, and her two sisters went out every day looking for things that they could do to earn money. Aiko would join them after she managed to finish the chores that were set for her. She usually got done fairly quickly in the morning and then would spend the day talking to various people around town and looking for somewhere that she could be helpful and make money.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
The five of them managed to make a small amount of coin by doing various odd jobs but nothing steady came from it.
Just as Aiko was settling into the idea that she was going to be stuck doing chores the whole time they stayed in the town, Brass came hurrying into the bedroom and told her that he had found them all a job for a good while.
The next day the five of them went out to one of the fields outside of town. As it turned out one of the farmers had heard of them and was curious enough to search them out.
After talking with Brass for a while, he determined that they would be a good solution to his problems in his garden. The problem he was having was with pests eating his plants. Since all of them were so much smaller than the other races in town he hired them to go through his garden every day and kill bugs and other vermin.
It turned out that this was a very lucrative venture for everybody except Aiko. Everybody else was at such a low level that they were able to gain multiple levels very quickly just killing bugs and rodents that had wandered into the garden for a meal.
Soon enough, two of the sisters left stating that they had high enough levels that they felt they would be able to make a strong hive. The other three couldn’t and didn’t begrudge them the chance to fulfill their mission in life.
At one point Aiko had gotten bold enough to ask Zenya about the night before they left from the Nitze hive and had learned that all the possible future queens had been impregnated by multiple drones from other hives. They were then able to leave the hive and start a new mound by laying eggs. Aiko wondered aloud if she was meant to find someplace to lay eggs and Zenya explained to her that that’s not exactly how things worked for other species. The rest of the night was very enlightening and embarrassing for the girl.
The next day It was back into the fields. Aiko spent a bit of time every morning doing the chores around the inn anyway because the owner of the Inn had thrown in breakfast shortly after they started staying there. He claimed it was because he realized that none of the “children” were eating as well as they needed to be.
All of them got to experience a plethora of new tastes from all over the place. This town was fairly close to another and both of them were just on the edge of the territory of a large seaport city. Since the two towns grew an excess of vegetables, they traded these and other various goods to the seaport in exchange for various goods from up and down the coast.
The Workload in the garden intensified as the summer growing season progressed and the animals became more and more active after the winter months. At this point, some of the larger animals in the forest had begun to make their way into the garden in an attempt to eat some of the easier food available in plain sight. It didn’t go very well for them since Aiko could decapitate them with a single flick of her chaos blade.
When she started doing this to the first few the farmer didn’t notice. She would take them with chaos grasp out to the edge of the woods and drop the bodies off to rot.
One day the farmer came across her doing this and asked her what she was doing. When she told him he explained to her that she was losing money that she could have been making by selling the fur and meat from these animals. Aiko almost had a meltdown on the spot because she had wasted over a dozen animals that way.
The next couple weeks we’re very busy with her and her pals learning how to butcher and cure meat and cure pelts from the animals. It became apparent that they weren’t going to get very many levels with all three of them guarding the garden and all three of them wanted to garner a few more levels of experience.
They came up with a plan for each of them to take turns in the garden while the other two would make a pair and hunt in the edge of the woods during the day. After a few days of doing this, the farmer caught on and asked about it.
He was a little bit put out by the idea that they weren’t all guarding his garden like he had hired them to do but they explained that any one of them was capable of guarding his garden from all but the largest and meanest of forest animals that they had come across recently. Being skeptical the man asked to see and chose Zenya for the example. He already knew that Aiko was more than capable with her magic and so decided to make a point with the smallest of the group.