Chapter 21: Aftermath

I looked at the captain, who stood at the dirt road, staring at the aftermath. There were only six other guards left in the town and they were all here, scrambling to pick up the pieces of their now dead friends. Many of them were in tears as they did so.

A few feet from him, Hazel and a medic guard knelt beside Finn, the two of them bandaging him the best they could. There was so much glass around them, all of it stained red. I went to them, Gronan following closely behind, and knelt beside Hazel and witnessed the state Finn was in.

He was asleep - either from passing out or a drug, I didn’t know - and took in shallow breaths. There were massive cuts all over him, most of them bandaged but the one that worried me the most was his hand where the acid had hit him. Luckily, I didn't have to see it as a crimson-stained bandage was wrapped around it.

“We picked out most of the glass,” Hazel said, her voice weak and her hands trembled as she applied pressure on Finn's arms. “I just hope Gronan can heal most of him.”

Gronan knelt on the other side of Hazel. “I’m not promising I can heal everything,” he put a light hand on her shoulder. “But I will keep him away from death.”

Hazel squeezed her eyes shut and I couldn’t do anything but watch as the sadness poured out of her. Tears streamed from her eyes down her cheeks then her chin where they dripped onto the ground. She tried to speak but didn’t find words to use, instead, she gave him a nod.

He took his hand away from her shoulder and put it onto Finn’s bleeding arm. “No one touch him,” He commanded as the medic began to pull out another bandage to lay on Finn.

He conceded and put the bandage away.

Gronan’s hand began to glow a familiar, warm yellow. The flow of blood began to reverse itself and the minor cuts that hadn't been bandaged healed right up and the blood-soaked bandages began to become tinted with spots of white.

Gronan let go and the glow disappeared. He was breathing heavily and seemed to hardly be able to catch it. The major wounds were still there and the bandage on Finn’s wounded hand hadn’t gotten any whiter, but even so, Finn’s breathing began to steady out. I felt more confident he wasn’t on death’s door. “That’s all I can do,” Gronan said and took in a large breath of air after like it had taken much effort, “I’m sorry.” He kept his head down toward Finn, not ready to eye any of us.

Hazel wiped her tears away and I could see a light smile touch her lips. She hooked a finger around Gronan’s chin and tilted it toward her, “It is fine, I am just glad to have him alive.”

Gronan nodded but still looked ashamed he couldn't do more.

“Half of our entire crew, wiped out just like that,” I heard the captain say behind us. I turned to see him still looking destitutely toward the battleground. “But this would’ve been a lot worse had you all not stepped in. Thank you, Adventurers.”

Would it have been? They would’ve never known about Fendrin’s necromancy, no one would’ve been harmed today.

But I didn’t say that. Instead, I told him, “It’s our job to help, I’m sorry for your losses.”

He nodded glumly. “We’ll recover.. These men today did a fine job of that and I will make sure to have a speech later today to commemorate the brothers we lost today.” He walked away without another word toward the rest of his men and began to help carry one of the dead guards away from the field. They were laying the bodies in a row along the street about fifty feet from us. I wondered what they were going to do with them but knew this was no time to ask.

“We need to get him to the doctor,” The medic said, “He’s not bleeding as much but it's the only way to keep away infection and let him heal.”

“I’ll go rest,” Gronan said. “Hazel, I’ll be back in the morning to heal him the rest of the way.”

She nodded but kept her eyes trained on Finn. “You will be okay brother,” She looked at Gronan, “Be back as soon as you can, please?”

He nodded and got up, “Let’s put your cloak up, we can rest in Hedge’s house.”

“Do you want to come?” I asked Hazel.

She shook her head, “I’ll stay with him.”

“Do you want me to put it up in the inn room?” I asked Gronan.

“That’ll do fine.”

We made our way there silently. I looked behind me to watch as Hazel and the medic picked Finn up, Hazel held him by the shoulders and the medic held him by the feet. Even with Gronan’s healing, blood was beginning to drip off his clothes onto the ground.

But at least he’s alive. Unlike the guards.

I shuddered and pushed the thought away. We made it back to the room at the inn and the robe tore itself off of me.

Time to go right back outside, I thought sarcastically.

The robe flew to the corner of the room and then revealed the portal within. Inside, I saw what looked to be a fireplace.

“Did it go to the right place?” Gronan asked.

I was about to ask the same thing. It came to me. “That’s the fireplace inside Hedge’s house! I guess the portal can move?”

“What if you're wrong?”

“Only one way to find out,” I walked into the portal. Immediately, I was greeted with the warmth of the fire and could hear the wood crackling.

“Ah, ye made it!” The voice came behind me but when I looked I just saw Gronan looking at me in the portal. I walked around it and saw Hedge in the kitchen with a leather apron on. He sat at the dinner table with a massive slab of bird-like meat on a plate. I felt my stomach drop.

Gronan followed me inside and then boomed, “Did you kill the bird?”

Hedge’s brow furrowed in confusion before he lightened up, “Ah, no, no. I’d never kill the lovely creature,” He hopped down from the chair that was nearly his height and made his way to us. “I got some lovely chickens in the back. Why do ye’ both look like shit?” He put a hand out and his finger grazed my hand. “Ah, I see, Finn’ll be okay lass, don’t worry,” He turned away and went behind the kitchen counter where his whole body disappeared.

“Your mind-reading power is weird,” I followed him into the kitchen.

Hedge pulled two more cooked chickens out of a brick oven with a metal peel. “Pull two plates out of that cabinet for me, will ye,” He said and pointed with a foot toward a cabinet next to him.

I opened it and pulled two plates out, putting them down on the kitchen counter that was as tall as Hedge. “You built this place, right?” I asked.

“O’ course, I already told ye that, lass,” He said as he placed one of the roasted chickens onto a plate. “Why?”

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“Why did you build it for someone of human height?”

“Ah,” he said and he pulled the other chicken out of the brick oven. “It was the old boss's orders is all,” he placed the other chicken onto the other plate and then put the peel onto a hanging rack.

“Well, if you want to, you can build it for someone your height now.”

“Thank ye, that’ll give me another project here! Now, come eat with me,” He took the plates of chicken to the table.

Gronan and I both grabbed a plate and went to the table.

I sliced the meat and stuck the bite into my mouth. To my surprise, it tasted exactly like chicken from Earth.

“So, how are you two taking the first time a party member gets hurt?” Hedge asked as he happily dug into his food.

I felt the bite I had just eaten begin to try to come back up. I saw Finn there, lying on the ground, bleeding profusely. Glass had been in his back, he had passed out. Hazel carrying him, blood dripping onto the ground. I shook my head, “I’d rather not talk about it,” I took another bite but didn’t really taste the flavor this time. All I could do was keep the fresh memory away.

“That may seem like a good idea at the time, lass, but if you keep everything bottled up, ye will explode one day.”

I kept quiet, swallowing my bite and going to take another.

“It’s not fun,” Gronan said. “But it happens. All part of the life of an Adventurer.”

All part of the life of an Adventurer.

I didn’t like that saying. I knew it was true but it didn’t mean I wanted to talk about it right now. Finn was suffering in a hospital bed and we were gorging ourselves on damn chickens. Everything felt wrong.

“Aye, s’pose ye’re right there, lass,” Hedge said before he stuffed another bite into his damn mouth. He spoke through the bite, “There will be more, for sure.”

I put the fork down, I couldn’t do this. This was not the topic I wanted to talk about. “I’m not hungry, is there a bath in here?”

“Aye, one upstairs over there,” He pointed to a set of stairs in the living room.

I got up and went upstairs. I was greeted with a wide hallway with two doors on each side and one at the end. I took a guess and went to the door at the end. I gasped at what I saw. My guess had been correct, I had made it to the bathroom, but it wasn’t just any ordinary bathroom.

The floor was made out of polished, stone tiles and the massive wall in front of me was made out of frosted glass with four glass doors equally spaced out from each other. Along with this, the room was aglow with orange from candles in the air that seemed to float on their own.

“Wow,” I uttered in complete awe. Even for a house from my world, this place would’ve been pretty damn big, and it was impossible for me to understand how it was all built from scratch with no assistance. This one room alone would’ve taken me years to make if I could’ve even made it at all. It was truly astonishing.

I opened one of the glass doors and found myself on a tiled dock that went into a man-made, miniature pond with steam slowly rising out of it just like in the inn. I stripped - besides my shoes, of course - and hung my clothes on a rack attached to the backside of the glass door.

Stepping into the water, I was greeted with enlightening warmth. I let it consume me, allowing myself to sink into the water until just my nose up was sticking out of the water. After a hard-fought battle, this bath was everything I could’ve hoped for.

Hazel and Finn don’t get to enjoy this.

He’ll be fine.

I closed my eyes and began to slow my heart rate. This world made no sense. Zombie ogres, if that was a thing in my world everyone would have lost their minds. How the hell did I even get to this world in the first place?

By Milanda?

It’d make sense, she was clearly not human or at least had magical powers and plus she was putting the descriptions of the contracts into my head. Or whatever these boxes were. This whole time I’d been assuming they were in my head, but what if they were something else? Would Milanda know? The question echoed in my mind. I wanted to just relax but I couldn’t help but want answers. How did I get here? What are these boxes? Who the hell is Milanda? Yet, as I sat here in this bath, I couldn’t get any of these answers. I closed my eyes and let the question continue to circle around and around in my head.

I began to feel the world drift away from me. I had to get out of this bath before I drowned in it. But before I did so, I opened my mouth and sucked in a bit of the water before I spit it back out.

Never thought I’d wash my mouth out with bathwater but here I am.

Even with how wrong it felt, my mouth was now completely clean. I looked at my reflection in the water and smiled. I hadn’t ever seen my teeth so damn white. “Wow,” I whispered to myself.

I got out of the bath, dried off, and inspected my clothes. Just as in the inn, they were stitched up and good as new. I slipped them on and went outside where Gronan stood in the bathing room, staring around like I had. “Pretty neat, isn’t it?”

He snapped back to reality, “Oh yeah, it is,” He let out a long sigh and went to one of the glass doors.

“Gronan?”

He looked at me.

“You did good work, okay? Without your help, Finn might’ve died. Just because you didn’t fully heal him doesn’t make you a bad healer.”

He stood there silently for a moment as if he were chewing over my words. Then, he nodded and went inside the bath. I didn’t quite know if he believed in what I told him, but I felt good about telling him that.

I went out to the hallway and chose the first door on the right to be my room for the night. It opened easily and the hinges didn’t even creak as I opened it all the way. Inside was another masterfully done room. The walls were made out of wood paneling that was slanted at an angle and used two separate types of wood, a darker and lighter one that went across all of the walls. The bed was a king and had purple sheets that when I flopped onto, were just as soft as they looked. I felt myself sink into the bed as if I was being hugged by the bed itself. Before I fell asleep like that, I took my shirt off and wrapped myself in the blankets. It was then that I realized that the room was dark and I was sure it hadn’t been when I came in here.

Another strange quirk of this beautiful home I supposed. I let my breathing slow and let my mind drift off to sleep. But I didn’t drift off to sleep, my mind wandered back over to Milanda. Who was she? What was she? And how was Finn? What did it mean to be an Adventurer? What was the cost, the true cost?

No matter how tightly I squeezed my eyes shut, sleep never came. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes.

I’m not going to get any damn sleep, am I?

With a sigh, I pulled the covers off and put my shirt back on. I knew what I had to do.

#

“Who are you?” I asked.

Milanda just looked up at me, her face unreadable as always.

“You have been here the whole time, you haven’t even once left your post.”

“It’s my job to read these reports, and with the incident you caused, I have quite a lot of reports to read through.”

“Do you not sleep?”

“I do.”

“Where, here?” I gestured to the empty lobby. Nobody was here. It was early in the morning but I had seen a couple of people - most likely shopkeepers - yet, no guards were to be found. And why would there be? Half of them had been killed.

She shrugged, “Perhaps I do sleep here. Is it of any of your concern?”

I sighed.

Will she ever just come out and give me a straight answer?

“Maybe I will. I did not bring you here,” She said with a slight, inhuman smile on her lips.

“I didn’t-” I stopped myself. I already knew she could read my thoughts. “Then what did?”

She shrugged, “A calling.”

Another vague answer, great. “Did you give me the boxes in my head?”

She let out a very small, breathy chuckle, “No. And they are much more than ‘boxes’.” She lifted the paper on her desk up to cover her face, “Now, go.”

I knew there would be no more answers to squeeze out of her. I did as she asked.

More than boxes? What the hell does that mean? And what in the devil’s name called me here? Ugh!

I kicked the dirt road, causing rocks to fly out, bouncing off the dirt before landing. I had caused that small ripple, an effect in this world that would’ve never happened had I not been here. A calling, something had called me here. Without that calling, I wouldn’t be an Adventurer. I’d be home, on a farm, in peace.

But why call me here? I could only come up with one answer, to stop something. Something was coming, something big. Fendrin had said so in his notes.

And I had seen it, as much as I didn’t want to acknowledge it, I knew it was true. That ginormous leg in the ocean. That had to be a part of whatever was coming. I felt goosebumps break out on my flesh. Was I intended to take that on? How would I ever do anything of the sort?

By being an Adventurer, one that had to become the best of the best. Only then, would I be allowed to go back home. Back to Earth.

For once, I felt my mind relax just a fraction. I had come to an answer, one that would require much effort to overcome, but an answer nonetheless.

But what if that isn’t it? What if I need the wizard to perform that spell again? He’s dead, does that mean I can’t get home?

Yet one more damn question. I’d never run out of them, would I? But that was one I maybe didn’t want the answer for. The drive to get back home by becoming a great Adventurer was the only thing keeping me motivated. That, and the need to get back to my damn bed.