Jenna could not process what was happening.
Actually, that was a lie.
In truth, she technically could do it, but she just refused to. Doing so meant she would have to understand the full ramifications of this situation and how it would affect her life going forward. She did not want to do that. So she decided to keep staring blankly ahead.
Unfortunately, as she continued to sit in the mud, the initial shock of the situation began to fade, and she began to think about her situation regardless. To keep her mind from the horrid thing called reality, she looked at her dad and forced her thoughts in his direction.
Her dad was sitting next to her in the mud. Jenna noted that his pants were doing a much better job of hiding the mud stains considering that they were already brown to begin with. Her pants were also brown, but they were a much lighter shade. The mud would absolutely be noticeable. She wanted to change her pants, but this was her only pair now because-
NO! I’m not thinking about that! She halted her line of thinking and focused back on her dad.
She couldn’t really make out the condition of his coat, it was too dark. She could see his face though. She thought about how his jawline was a good bit less defined than it probably should be, considering that he was the strongest person she knew. After all, she was level 14 and he’d wipe the floor with her every time she asked to fight him. She wondered what level he was, but everytime she asked he’d say not to worry about it before laughing nervously.
While thinking about his level, her attention was caught by his hair. She wondered what caught her attention as she didn’t think his hair was anything fancy, but after looking at it for a second she realized it was because the light from the fire was reflecting off of his blond hair.
Fire? Right, the house is on fire… Wait THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE! THE HOUSE AND EVERYTHING IN IT ARE BURNING! MY BED IS ON FIRE, MY CLOTHES ARE ON FIRE, ALL OF MY STUFF IS ON FIRE! She screamed in her head as she accidentally acknowledged the problem.
“DAD THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE!!” She jolted up from her sitting position and yelled at her dad, hoping that he would do something.
“Yes… It is…” He responded in a low, aggravated tone.
“WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING! WE HAVE... to…” Her words trailed off as she stared at the house for a moment, then ran towards it.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Her dad asked as he grabbed her arm.
“I’M GOING IN THERE! WE HAVE TO BE ABLE TO SAVE SOMETHING BEFORE IT’S BURNED RIGHT?!” She struggled against her dad’s grip, but she couldn’t break free.
“Jenna, we’ve been staring at the house for a while. I’m pretty sure we missed our chance. Besides, the walls are burning to nothing, I don’t want the roof to collapse on you when you’re in there.”
Jenna felt his grip tighten.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN?! THE ROOF IS STILL STANDING, WE HAVE TO HURRY AND-” She was cut off by a loud crash as the roof collapsed.
Jenna stared at the house.
She understood that if there was anything left, it was probably just crushed.
“Bu…ba...haa...” She muttered as she sunk to the ground with tears in her eyes.
Her dad sat beside her and wrapped his arm around her shoulder. They sat like that for a while as she cried and the house burned. She just lost everything. Her bed, the clothes she forced her dad to buy, that really cool stick she didn’t want to get rid of, it was all gone.
“Hey Jenna.” Her dad interrupted the silence.
“...yeah?” She absentmindedly responded.
“What did you do today?”
“What?”
“I want you to tell me everything you did today, in as much detail as possible.” He said looking her in the eye.
“Why…? You already know what happened.”
“Doesn't matter. Just start talking and don’t stop.” He firmly told her.
“Well… When I woke up…”
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Jenna was woken up by a bright light. After gorgily forcing her eyes open, she realized that it was morning, and the sun was shining through her window. Jenna stared at the window for a moment before orienting herself so she wouldn’t be disturbed by the sun anymore and went back to sleep.
After several blissful minutes, she heard her door open and felt dread wash over her.
“Ok Jenna, time to get up.” She heard the voice of a demon invading her paradise.
Fortunately, Jenna understood that listening to demons was an action that would always blow up in the person’s face. Her dad's increasingly outlandish bedtime stories had told her so. Thus, she heeded her dad’s warnings and continued sleeping.
“Listen Jenna, I know you don’t exactly enjoy sitting in a room full of children doing their best to beat you up, but this is your last week of school. You really should go.” The demon attempted to use logic, but Jenna saw the logic as flawed. Why would the amount of school remaining be a good reason to attend? You wouldn’t stand in the rain because it was going to stop in a few minutes, you would only go outside after it stopped.
“Jenna, I’m warning you that if you don’t get up we’re going to have problems.” The demon spoke in it’s infernal demon tongue.
Jenna became afraid of these “problems” that the demon was threatening her with. Her dad’s stories said these problems could range from having her soul stolen, to becoming horribly deformed, or worst of all, being grounded.
“Alright then, get up or you’re grounded.” The demon had cast his spell, there was no saving herself now.
Jenna slowly and unwillingly got up from her bed.
“Great, I’ll meet you at the table for breakfast.” The demon said with a smile as he closed the door so she could get dressed.
In a morning haze, Jenna stumbled to her closet and started to pick out today's outfit. After picking out a shirt that was colored a faded blue, she was unable to find a clean pair of pants. She had a couple skirts that were clean enough, but she had a rule not to wear skirts to school. The one time she did, she accidentally gave Ryan a show while she was slamming her foot onto his stupid bowl cut. Remembering the smug look on his face agitated her.
As Jenna resolved to punt Ryan’s head across the classroom today, she began digging through her closet to find a clean pair of pants. After looking for a good several minutes, she found a pair that was light brown, put them on, and went to eat breakfast.
She opened the door to the main room of the house and saw her dad sitting at the table. He looked about as anxious as he was yesterday. Probably for the same reason as yesterday too, something he called “adventuring season”. Where a bunch of money hungry adventurers would come into town to cause all sorts of problems and how she should absolutely stay away from them.
Jenna was pretty certain that the concept was something he made up as some story to warn her about talking to strangers. Especially considering he’s been going on about this for the last two months and the “season” never seemed to end. Deciding that it wasn’t worth thinking about anymore, she sat down and ate. Breakfast today was boar meat, her favorite.
As she was eating, she remembered a question that was nagging at her mind for a while.
“What will I do after school?” She asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, this is the last week of my last year of school. After this most kids would help their parents with the family business, but…” Jenna looked at her dad with disapproving eyes. “...nothing isn’t a business.”
“Excuse me?!” Her dad looked baffled at the accusation.
“I mean, all I’ve ever seen you do is sit in this house. You don’t have a job, I’ve asked around. You just sit in this house and do nothing. You’re a deadbeat.” Jenna pressed her dad.
“I-I’m no deadbeat! I’ll have you know that before you were born I was an adventurer! And a pretty respectable one too!” He stammered in an attempt to defend himself.
“I know that, but that’s before I was born right? We’re talking about now.”
“I-... uh- I…” He couldn’t think of anything he could say so he just stuttered for a few minutes.
Jenna found the numerous expressions her dad cycled through hilarious. Starting with shock, then moving to slight panic, then settling on defeated embarrassment. She stifled a laugh as best she could.
“Look, we’ll figure something out. In the meantime, go to school. You’ll be late.” Her dad ended the conversation and forced her out the door.
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As Jenna made her way through the swamp that was between the town and her house she kept an eye out for any local wildlife. Her routine only had her grinding after school but she didn’t see the problem in killing any animals she just so happened to see on her way.
Unfortunately the entire swamp seemed to have memorized the route she took because she could barely even hear any birds singing. There was no way she’d get any experience like that, but as a silver lining, Jenna found it funny that the ecosystem had changed to accommodate her being a force of terror.
In the end though, it didn’t really make much of a difference if she could kill one or two odd boars that stumbled onto her path anyway. The amount of experience that they gave was so miniscule that she understood how fractions and percentages worked by the time she was level 7 without any input from something like a teacher. Thinking about how many more boars she’d have to kill to make it to that ever so envied level up, the town came into view.
If Jenna had to describe her opinion of the town in one word it would be “annoying”. The choice of words mainly came from the fact that everyone she’d ever talked to constantly said that they hated this place with a burning passion but no one ever seemed to leave. If they hated it so much why would they stay here? Was it because they had kids and were determined to make them live through the same torment they did? Was it because the area was relatively safe with the strongest monsters being level 3 boars? Maybe it was because the local lord, Baron Buttfuck as everyone called him, went insane 15 years ago and stopped making them pay taxes as well as let everyone get away with calling him that?
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
That ridiculous baron was another reason why she thought of the town as annoying. Everyone knows the man is crazy, why is he still in power? The man has perfectly good kids to do the job. One of them should have kicked him out years ago. When she asked her dad about it, he handwaved it saying: “Jenna, every politician you’ll ever meet is insane in one way or another. I think we’re pretty lucky to have someone who’s that bad at hiding it.” How was that supposed to explain it?
Speaking of her dad, his opinion on the town genuinely confused her. Everytime she asked he’d always go on a gigantic rant about how it’s by far the worst place he had ever had the misfortune of living in and then spend about 20 minutes listing off reasons why the place sucked. The strangest part was after listing everything off he’d go and call the place “perfect” with this strange look on his face. She had stopped trying to understand it.
Granted, she really had no right to complain, her daily underage grinding expeditions would have been stopped a long time ago if she lived anywhere else. She wasn’t underage anymore though, so she decided to remove that from the small list of pros the town had as she made her way to the school.
Jenna realized that something was wrong the moment she stepped near the school. She had expected today to be just like any other. One or two of her classmates would jump her as she came in, she’d beat them up, then drag them into the building where she’d use them as furniture in front of all the other kids who were still healing from when she beat them up the day before.
Today however, there was no one here, no one she could see at least. She scanned her surroundings but couldn’t find anything. Were they trying to ambush her? They’ve done it before, and the idea that no one wanted to fight her was an impossibility. The school was so openly hostile to her that she was pretty sure beating her up was considered extra credit.
Being as cautious as she could possibly be, which wasn’t very much according to her dad, Jenna moved toward the entrance. By the time she made it to the door, she noticed that she didn’t hear any noise coming from inside either.
At this point, Jenna was on a hair trigger. This was clearly an ambush that had the entire school involved and was well planned enough to remain completely unseen to her. There was no alternative that she could see. That meant everyone was probably inside, set up in positions that would allow them to pelt her with a barrage of [Ember] or other easy to learn skills until she couldn’t take anymore.
In anticipation of fighting every student and teacher at the school, Jenna reminded herself of everything her dad taught her about combat.
Go for the nuts. She repeated in her head.
With her wealth of knowledge at the ready, she decided to forgo simply opening the door to the single classroom and bashed it down with her shoulder. As the door flew off of it’s hinges, Jenna kept her momentum and launched herself though the air to dodge any rocks or projectile skills that could be thrown her way. When she landed, she kept her head down hoping that the confusion from the door being broken down would stop at least a couple of people from keeping track of her.
Getting up from her crouched position, she grabbed onto two legs of a desk and began flailing it around, knocking the other desks around her into the air. Once she could no longer reach anymore desks to bat away, she grabbed one leg of the desk she was holding with both hands and swung it as hard as she possibly could in the direction she heard the most noise. She kept her grip on the leg so as the desk cracked like a whip the leg was ripped from the rest of the body and she now had a stick to fight the hoard of students with. After taking a fighting stance, she looked at her surroundings.
To Jenna’s surprise, she was the only one in the room. All she saw was the only classroom in the school with the door busted off its hinges and split down the middle from the impact, almost every desk in the room upturned and most of those broken in some way, and the chalkboard now had a desk with a missing leg stuck in it.
Jenna lowered her stick and looked around again with a confused look on her face. The results of the investigation were the same as the last one: she was the only person in the room.
Now how does that make sense? There has to be SOME kind of ambush right? I mean, we have school today. Where is everybody? She mentally asked herself.
Jenna assumed that the rabbit hole went deeper. There was no way any of her peers would let her come to school without trying to take her out. They certainly had the motive for it. With her around grievous bodily harm was nothing but a part of the school experience, they obviously wanted her to stop. There was some kind of scheme here she wasn’t seeing.
In reality, school had been cancelled today because during yesterday’s daily fight, Jenna had thrown her classmate, Ramiero, through the window of the school. While that normally would not cause school to be cancelled as it was a common occurrence, the teacher just so happened to be standing on the opposite side of the window. That night the teacher decided that their injuries were substantial enough to warrant a day off and spread the news throughout the town. Jenna, living outside of the town, was not privy to this information.
Her lack of understanding combined with her belief that the school was gunning for her at every opportunity led Jenna to believe that she had somehow played into their hands. That she was doing exactly what they wanted her to do and they were somehow closer beating her. Jenna began pacing around the classroom, trying to figure out the scheme and who was spearheading it.
Unfortunately for Jenna, she couldn’t think of any of her classmates that could organize something this big. So she just paced around the room for a few minutes becoming more and more frustrated.
After failing to not only pin the crime on anyone she knew but also figure out what the scheme was, Jenna decided to play it by ear. She confidently assumed the goal was to ambush her and that hadn’t happened in the classroom. Therefore, it had to happen sometime later today.
Deciding to take the challenge as it came, Jenna went crosseyed and looked at her stats to refresh her memory on all the tools at her disposal.
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Jenna Duke Thornwood
Level: 14
Health Points: 110/110
Magic Points: 46/46
Strength: 82
Dexterity: 47
Intelligence: 22
Vitality: 86
Constitution: 60
Wisdom: 11
Skills: [Sequel Secret] [Jab] [Punch] [Kick] [Axe Kick]
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Jenna decided that doing so was a bad idea. Reminding herself that she had less skills than her classmates who were drastically lower leveled than her just put a damper on her mood. She really didn’t understand it. The [Sequel Secret] skill was supposed to make her level up and get skills faster. While it certainly made her level up faster, it didn’t do its job in the skill department. In fact, Jenna seemed to have more trouble getting skills than she should. No matter how many times she did the requirements to obtain a skill it just wouldn’t work, but then she’d get a skill at random times way later than she should have. It frustrated her, especially since her dad admitted that other people who are level 14 normally have at least 30 or 40 skills, yet here she was with as many as someone who was level 4.
Jenna decided that she really shouldn’t think about that or she’d just put herself in a bad mood. She reaffirmed that she was really good at punching people for her age and moved on. With determination and the knowledge that an ambush could and would happen to her at some random time today, she left the classroom.
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When Jenna left the school, she was at a loss for what to do next. Normally, after school she would go grinding until it was time for dinner, but because she was expecting an ambush at any moment, she was hesitant. While she said she would play it by ear, she understood that she should prepare at least a little bit. The last time they ambushed her she ended up cutting it really close. Because Jenna can’t seem to learn any skills, she can really only punch and kick. While that means she’s an absolute nightmare to deal with at close ranges, it also means she’s a sitting duck otherwise. So her classmates all learned the [Ember] skill as a group and set up a firing line to take her out. Since [Ember] does 5 damage and there were six kids participating, it only took two volley’s for her to understand she was in deep shit. She was able to close the distance in time, but the point had been made.
With her previous near defeat and the knowledge that the entire school was in on it this time, she understood she needed information. How many people were participating? What skills did they have? Who was spearheading the plan? She decided that she should find the answer to at least one of these questions. Thus, she decided to loiter around town a bit.
As Jenna walked down the Main Street, she kept her ear open for any passing conversations that might be about her. Unfortunately, not many people were standing around outside. Even more unfortunately, even less people were standing around outside and spouting important information for her to hear.
Although, Jenna had to admit, if she were planning to ambush someone she wouldn’t talk about it in public. It made sense that her opponents could understand that too. However, the lack of information given was all Jenna needed to figure some things out.
If you were planning an ambush, you wouldn’t talk about it. On the other side of that coin, if you weren’t planning an ambush but people around you were, you’d notice their strange behavior. Thus, you would say something like: “Hey, what's going on?” or “Why are you so quiet?”
Using that logic, if someone was talking about the obviously strange things going on, then they weren’t in on the conspiracy. Therefore, anyone who was silent is guilty.
By the time Jenna put all this together, she had completed a full lap around the town and was standing at the town entrance. So she tried to remember all the people she heard talking on her way there.
Jenna thought for a moment.
Then another.
She reached a conclusion.
No one was talking at all.
EVERYONE IS IN ON IT!
Jenna had assumed that the entire student body was part of the plan, and that was fine. She could manage that. The entire town rushing her at once? She’d be dogpiled. There was no way. Most of the adults in the town were level 7 or 8, and the kids in her school were levels 3 to 6 thanks to her forcing them to defend themselves from her.
Jenna’s eyes darted over her shoulder. There was no one immediately behind her, but people were loitering outside of houses and shops on the side of the road. She knew they were watching her, waiting for the right moment. Jenna’s stats alone were not enough. She needed more resources.
She thought about going to her dad, but she doubted she could make it back to her house without being jumped on the way. She needed to find help now. At this very moment, before anyone could do anything else.
But that was impossible. If everyone in town was currently working against her, she couldn’t ask anyone for help. She doubted that anyone would help her even if they weren’t in on it.
Jenna could read the room. This was a hopeless situation. Her heart quickened and she felt the walls closing in.
There has to be something I can do, right? I can’t be totally hopeless… right? I don’t want to just sit here and wait to be ambushed. I have to think of something, I have-
“Excuse me little girl, is someth-” A voice came from behind her.
“SWEET MOTHER OF-” Startled, Jenna turned around and slammed her fist into the assailant, launching them back ten feet into a tree.
After a loud and solid impact into the tree, the stranger let out a small groan of pain and slumped over.
As the initial shock died down, Jenna took a look at her assailant. It was a very dirty looking man. He was covered head to toe in mud and he was wearing clothes that, while seemingly befitting of someone who did a lot traveling, were not well kept in the slightest. His shoes had holes in them, the arms on his coat were not the same length, and the knees on his pants were worn down. Looking at the man’s poor wardrobe, Jenna realized that she did not recognise this man. Not a single bit.
Jenna hadn’t exactly memorized the name and face of every person in her little town, but she was absolutely certain that she had never seen this man before. That means that this man was from outside of her town. Which by extension meant that there was no possible way that he was in on the plot to ambush her. Which by further extension meant that she could force him to help her fight off the horde of people that were inevitably, 100 percent coming.
Unfortunately, Jenna just launched the man into a tree. He might not be too keen on helping her. She had to do everything in her power to get him on her side.
Jenna walked over to the broken man, crouched beside him, and, in the most innocent voice she could manage, she asked: “Are you ok?”
The man forced his eyes open and looked at Jenna with eyes that seethed hatred, letting his gaze answer the question for him.
“If that’s a yes, then would you mind helping me out a bit? I’m in a pickle right now and need all the extra firepower I can get. I can give you something nice if you help me.” While Jenna had already decided to ask the man for help, she felt compelled to offer a reward. She had never paid anyone for help before, instead letting the reward be: “You get to keep your teeth today.” However today she offered something tangible, even though the reward had yet to be decided on. She justified it to herself as a way to make sure he would help her, but it still felt strange nonetheless.
The man stared blankly in her general direction for a few seconds, as if thinking about something, then put on a strained smile and asked: “Sure… what’s wrong?”