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Jaune hissed quietly as May rubbed the healing herbs he'd picked up in his last month of low-level questing onto his bruised back.
Turns out that sparring with someone on your level was more painful than sparring with someone who was much better. Jain, after all, had never seen a reason to go all out, simply guiding the mage to a helpful conclusion of every spar.
Sun, on the other hand, probably had given his all to fight Jaune. Despite the monkey boy being more skilled, their physical stats still mostly seemed to be on the same level.
"Stop hissing already," May said into his ear. "You're the one who got into the fight. Willingly I might add, so deal with the consequences like a man."
Jaune grunted. He only wished he'd had the herbs in salve form. Rubbing dry plants onto wounds wasn't really the most delightful of experiences.
Jaune thanked May and pulled his shirt on again. Causing May to roll her eyes at him for some reason. "What." He glared at her, the archer pursing her lips.
"Nothing."
Girls.
She was still nicer than basically all his sisters though. Thinking of family reminded him of mum and his sisters, and how long he hadn't seen them.
Now he missed them. Great.
The good atmosphere that they'd shared for most of the day was now ruined. He decided to be the one to take the first step to once again having fun being in the same room as the other person.
"Your cooking is really good." The words caused May to look at him oddly.
"Thanks." She tilted her head slightly.
"Do you like swords?" he asked.
May stared at him. Jaune stared back, then sighed. "Sorry, as you've probably noticed I'm not really good at this..." He waved his hands in the air. "...people thing." May nodded slowly.
"Yes, just..." She shrugged, smiling awkwardly. "Keep practising?" The pitch of her voice changed as she spoke the last word, turning it more into a question than a statement.
"You know, I think I'm just going to go to sleep," Jaune said, once the silence stretched on for too long.
"Do that. We can do a few quests tomorrow, to familiarize yourself with the area." May looked at him expectantly.
Jaune was confused. Was there something else he was supposed to say?
Oh, right. He looked May in the eyes, eye, damn it. "Goodnight."
He could swear he heard the girl behind him mutter something about boys.
-/-
Jaune grunted as he ground another dried cauliflower into powder, adding the powder to a previously prepared mix of milk and alcohol. He put it above a burner to simmer and turned the engraved hourglass he had bought just for this occasion upside-down. The timer was twelve minutes long, so he would have to wait until the sand was half-fallen before removing the liquid from the fire.
Done with that particular salve, a medicine to help with bruises, he simply switched to another one of the improvised workstations in his room.
Using the utensils he'd bought himself, with the ingredients he'd harvested himself, he started to peel back the skin from one of the bright orange fruits found in the green spots around Brorusalem. Plucking out the white fibres on the inside of its skin, he put them aside and started to press out the skin above a glass vial to gather the oily, scented fluid that spurted out.
He took a bite of one of the slices of the fruit. One fruit only contained a minimal amount of the restorative liquid. Thankfully though, the rest of the... Jaune remembered it was called an orange, was extremely useful as well.
Not as medicine, but as food. Even if it tasted weird. Jaune sighed and wished he had an apple right now. Taking a glance at the hourglass, he removed the concoction he had created from the fire and held his hand above it.
Letting his magic flow to the appendage, he tried to make it mix with some of the aspects of the lavender coloured salve, namely the heat. After a minute or so Jaune succeeded. He repressed a whoop of joy (it would have ruined his concentration), and stretched out a finger, trying to compress the heat in as small a space as possible.
A small flicker of fire burst into existence, leaving just as quickly.
"I don't know why you feel the need to play with fire magic in my house," May muttered from where she was standing in the corner of the room.
Jaune raised an eyebrow at her. He knew it was slightly insensitive, but it was just a small flame, comparable to a candle. He took a pointed glance at the severed hand that lay on one of the other tables, crude stitches covering its surface.
"You know, I think it's incredibly cool how you're learning medicine!" May waved a hand about. "But, you make it look way too creepy." She looked him up and down. "Are you sure you're not an alchemist?" she asked, causing Jaune to shake his head.
"Pretty sure. I was, after all, gifted with the ability to read and have access to a mirror."
His words made May snort. "Some wouldn't think so, the way your hair looks sometimes."
Jaune rolled his eyes, threw a weak arcane bolt filled with water her way, and started to clean up the room while hearing her sputter from suddenly having her mouth filled. Putting all the utensils he'd used for his 'alchemy' away, he spoke. "I'll need the bruise salve if I want to spar in the melee training ground, and I always wanted to learn at least a bit of medicine, so it's catching two stones with one bird."
May looked dubious. "Uhuh, and that's why you're learning how to suture wounds on severed limbs. Also, I don't think the proverb goes like that."
Jaune walked over to the severed arm covered in stitches and waved it in May's general direction, making her flinch back in disquiet and growl at him. "Keep that thing away from me or I swear to god I wil-" She flipped over his bed, landing in a crouch to dodge the arm. He made it disappear into his inventory before it actually hit her.
"You'll what, use me as target practice?" Jaune asked.
May's eyes took on a dangerous glint, and not five minutes later Jaune found himself in her spacious backyard with the archer pointing her bow at him. He noted some trees interspersed with sculptures and the like. Trees in a desert, a privilege if he'd ever seen one.
"Are you sure you want to do this? They're blunted, but it still hurts." She shot an arrow at a nearby tree. A visible dent appeared where the arrow had hit the wood.
"Stop hitting the trees, May! For fuck's sake girl, how many times have I told you not to do it?!" her grandfather, sitting on a bench overlooking his rather big training yard, exclaimed. "Also, we have training puppets. We made them together just for this occasion; no need to torture the boy." He sent a pitying look Jaune's way.
Jaune waved the older Zedong off. "Don't worry about it sir, I doubt May will be able to even hit me, and if I didn't want to serve as target practice I would simply refuse." Predictably, his insult to May's accuracy heralded the first arrow sent his way. It was a predictable one which he had no problem dodging.
It didn't really bother him, Jaune thought to himself, jumping over a projectile aimed at his legs and fooling May into shooting at his airborne position, probably thinking he couldn't dodge in midair. An arcane bolt sent out of his right hand provided the momentum he needed to get out of the way despite this.
If he actually dreaded having arrows shot at him, he would simply not do so. But since it was good training for his dodging ability, dexterity, and also offered May a chance to train her how the loss of her eye affected her archery, it was perfectly fine.
Hell, a month ago he'd fought a full-fledged archer who had only managed to hit him once. Even if he suspected the man was a parasitic lowlife without much skill, he had still been about twice as old as Jaune, and that had to count for something right?
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He winced as he barely swerved out of the way of an arrow that whistled closely past his face.
But he'd also been fully concentrated on the fight back then, now he was consciously taking steps to be as distracted as possible. After all, retaining the ability to think while in combat, letting your body handle everything else was a crucial thing for a hero. It brought up the possibility of making more complex strategies while fighting.
Intelligence was humanity's big advantage against the Grimm. And the fact that they could train their body, a fact that some people apparently didn't know of.
Which was made clear by the fact that it was May who tired first, wheezing and holding up her hands in surrender. Jaune grinned. Another day, another victory.
...But he hadn't won against Sun. And May was still not in top condition and was was missing an eye. Jaune sighed and his smile dampened. But he would help her regain her former form. She was a friend at this point.
That's when her grandpa stepped onto the field, a longbow in his hand, eyes twinkling mischievously. "Mind giving this old man a chance?"
Jaune had a certain amount of automatic respect for people older than him. Maybe that was a part of why he allowed the man to use him as target practice. Or the fact it would help him improve faster.
One thing was for sure when it was over. If it weren't for the point of dexterity he got from that, he'd never consider being target practice for the old man again.
-/-
The arena clerk looked at the adventurer card in his hands, then at Jaune. "Rank C at your age. Impressive," he admitted.
"Thanks?" Jaune replied.
The clerk tapped his finger on the wooden table he was sitting behind and sighed. "You know, this is quite annoying. The tournament staff make sure to sort people into brackets containing their own age group." He made a circle motion with his hands. "But, if you have the skills that the usual Rank C has, it won't be much of a competition."
The clerk looked at Jaune, almost pleadingly. "Do you see my conundrum?"
The mage scratched the back of his head sheepishly. "Why not just, uh, sort by rank?" he offered weakly.
The man behind the desk shook his head, "Not everyone is an adventurer." Throwing his arms up the man exclaimed, "You know what, screw it, here's to your age bracket kid. Better you beating someone up slightly than some older guy overestimating you and turning you into a puddle." The man looked at Jaune expectantly.
"Uh okay, thanks?" the mage asked, feeling the glares of the people behind him, angry due to the fact he'd been holding up the line for more than just a few minutes now.
The clerk, apparently happy with Jaune's answer, nodded cheerfully, jotted down a name in one of his many ledgers and handed the mage a round piece of paper with the number '384' on it.
Jaune was then shooed away. He walked woodenly over to May and sat down next to her, taking a glance at her round piece of paper. 375.
Putting his hand to his chin, he mimicked a thinking position. Then when he noticed May was getting impatient waiting for whatever he was going to say, exclaimed, "I have no idea what these numbers mean!" Which earned him a slap on the arm and a roll of her eyes, eye...
The eye jumped into focus, looking at something behind Jaune, causing him to turn around and take a look himself. There he saw Sun, dressed in his usual brown shirt and pants lounging in line to the registry.
"Well, this makes the tournament a bit harder," May said. But Jaune only grinned. He liked Sun, really. He was nice in every area that didn't come in contact with the boy's apparent unwillingness to use magic. He wouldn't hesitate to use what he'd learned from their spars against him though.
"I don't think he will be half as hard an opponent as you probably think," Jaune said quietly and chuckled to himself, in what he imagined to be quite an evil laugh. Then he immediately sobered up. " I think it's about time we go towards our mission, isn't it."
May nodded somberly herself. "It is, isn't it."
-/-
Jaune leaned back on the rock outcropping they were sitting on, waiting for May to successfully herd the weird doggo monsters of the desert into a fairly packed space. Then he stood up and idly threw a few poison-filled arcane blasts in the direction above them.
The powder disperse slowly, but travelled quickly in the circulatory system of its victims due to their adrenaline-increased blood flow.
A few minutes of running around in circles and the doggos dropped to the ground twitching, the poison having interrupted their nerve endings for a time. Jaune walked over and hacked off the heads.
He lifted one of them up to May. "So you're telling me that something that gets knocked out by a weak poison in five minutes, when it usually takes twenty, is one of the biggest annoyances in Vacuo."
May shrugged in response. "They breed really fast, and nobody wants to root them out completely in case of a famine. They don't taste good, but food is food," she answered.
Jaune looked at the head in his hand oddly before throwing it away. "Weird doggo." He turned to May. "Famines happen often?"
"My grandfather lived through one when he was a boy. The royal magician has managed to consistently solve the food issue any times the warning signs of famine have showed."
Jaune was at a loss for words at that. "How?" How did you even solve food issues as a magic wielder? Sure, you could use magic to help farmers with their fields, but one man couldn't possibly do enough to save a big city like Brorusalem, let alone an empire. The man must have achieved it politically. Often times only one person in a high position needed to speak up to convince other politicians.
"I don't know, he used some spell, genini or something, and out of one pile of wheat came two," May answered.
Jaune halted.
So people like that existed. Able to spit in the face of reality and make it their bitch. It was somewhat inspiring, somewhat demoralizing. Odd that the man didn't seem that liked despite managing something as grand as procuring a basically infinite source of food. Was it even possible for him to ever reach such a level?
He clenched his fist to feel his strength pressing against him. The sensation changed slightly every time one of his physical stats changed. A sign of progress.
"Are you okay?" May asked, causing him to look to her, puzzled.
"Yeah, why?"
She shrugged. "You always clench your fist when worrying about something. You did the same thing when I proposed we go to the low-level dungeon in the city."
Was it such a bad habit to have, he thought to himself while May kept speaking.
"Why so determined not to go? We won't get nearly as much experience hunting these kangaroos."
"I don't like dungeons for the same reasons you probably don't like caravans now," he said, a bit more sharply than he intended.
May's head jerked back as if slapped, purple hair covering her eyes, eye, and she whispered a quiet apology.
"You couldn't have known; I've never talked about it. Just by interacting with you nobody would realize what you've been through either. Since you don't talk about it either"
"It's probably a mistake to not talk about it."
"It's not one I'm willing to rectify." Jaune nipped the conversation that was coming in the bud.
May seemed more relieved at that than anything else. She probably wasn't too eager to offer disclosure about the bandit raid either, Jaune thought to himself. Revealing the experience of almost dying. It was a baring of weakness, matched maybe only by the physical act of handing someone your weapons.
He absent-mindedly threw a bolt at an approaching... kangaroo, that's what they were called. Its head exploded. May meanwhile, looked into the distance while showing her own nervous tick.
Touching all fingers with her thumb twice, first with the left, then twice with the right, then with the left again. Then repeat one more time, starting with the right.
Eight repetitions of eight touches. The significance of the number was unknown to Jaune and he could only conclude that she picked it due to its attribute of being the only symmetrical number. The action repeated in such a way that it ended symmetrically as well.
Jaune clenched his fists.
-/-
They'd returned to Brorusalem after hunting a few more groups of doggos, only for the first thing they heard to be bad news.
"A party of seven adventurers killed while hunting down the bandits, another caravan lost. A bigger one this time," May's grandfather said as they sat down to eat dinner.
The man glanced at his granddaughter, noticed her apparent discomfort, and immediately derailed the topic. "But enough about that standard fare. There's a group of upstarts every decade. Tell me, how was hunting?" he asked, causing both of them to shrug simultaneously.
"I just drew them in for Jaune to paralyse with some powder and then kill them while incapacitated," May said hesitantly. "I won't say it was the least taxing hunt I've been on, but it was the most time-efficient."
"Time-efficient is good. You never really appreciate these things until you realize how little time in this world you really have." The old Zedong ate a few bites before continuing. "I have a quest lined up, pretty beginner stuff." He looked at the two of them. "Would you like to come?"
"Sure," May said quickly.
"Depends on the quest," Jaune said bluntly, earning himself a nudge in the ribs from his companion.
"Grimm extermination." Zedong leaned forward. "The bandit raids you've heard about are only a small part of what's actually been happening. Most of it is centred around the capital, but the waves are big enough to reach even here. I suspect politics."
He leaned back in his chair and sighed. "I'm too old for this, you two are too young. The events have increased the fear felt by the population by quite a lot. It wouldn't raise any eyebrows if we were to simply leave on a Grimm extermination mission for one or two months while it all blows over."
One or two months meant Jaune would miss the tournament and access to the library, which was a big part of why he was even here.
"If I may ask, what exactly is happening?" Jaune asked while wondering how he hadn't noticed anything. Maybe the issue wasn't that big?
"Succession wars. Not in the sense that the emperor has princes," the old man explained, "but in the sense that his officials are battling it out amongst them until he puts a stop to them. It happens every now and then, to weed out the most incompetent."
It was easy for incompetence to gather when there were times of peace. Jaune guessed it was an effective way to root it out. But still... "It's a dereliction of their duty."
Zedong nodded at Jaune's words. "It is, but are you talking about the duty of their morality as a part of our civilization or the duty that their class bestows upon them?"
"Both."
"Is anyone really forced to do what their class tells them to do though? If they break society's code too much, shouldn't the peasants and heroes also break theirs and slaughter the worst of the offenders to keep the others in their place?"
"Yes, but I assume it's not so simple," Jaune muttered, causing Zedong to shake his head.
"No, its very simple actually. After the first stone has been thrown, an avalanche will follow. But people have learned from the past. The group that started it is never the one to prevail until the end," the man explained.
"So what, we're perpetually playing a game of everyone loses, but the one who tries to stop the game loses the most? Meanwhile the atrocities pile up to even bigger heights due to the people's tolerance growing with every one committed?!" He was almost shouting at the end of it.
"Yes." The older Zedong had thought fairly long for such a short answer. Jaune looked at May, who was leaning away from him covering her ears, which eventually caused him to calm down.
"That kinda sucks." He sighed and propped his chin on his fist.
Jaune wondered if he'd really been to blind to miss the underlying tension and political machinations. He still didn't see it, even after that confirmation.
He would give up on the tournament this year and trust the older man though.