To dig potholes, you first need a shovel. Next, you need someone to dig them for you.

“Hold this,” I told Claire. “Just for a second.”

She absentmindedly grabbed the shovel while I put away my unnecessary equipment and adjusted my newest clothing. Percival had insisted that I rummage through Master Conrad’s clothing — Piliton’s slightly taller son — as he was around about my size and stature. I’d ended up with a white silk shirt, a black overcoat, and a pair of blank pants.

If Asteroth had invented ties yet, I could’ve been a businessman.

When I was finished, Claire held out the shovel.

“Oops,” I said. “One more thing.”

[Dash]

I bolted off along the driveway, leaving her in the dust.

“Ollie! I swear I’ll—”

Her words cut off as I rounded a bend, peeling past the rows of tomatoes. The workmen were mulching the pumpkins up ahead, but I had no plans to stop by.

My Agility was sitting high and mighty, and the added Endurance buff from {The Full Percival Breakfast} had me feeling like I could keep this pace forever. I chanced a look behind me, expecting dust clouds.

“You can have this back.”

Thonk!

I fell down hard in the dirt as Claire swung the shovel into my thigh. My speed took me on a few more metres as I skittered in the dust.

When I came to a final stop, I was laughing so hard I was out of breath. I briefly wondered if maybe someone was smothering my real body.

Claire stood over me. “Thought you could outrun a [Huntress], huh? Not a chance. I’ve got like three abilities that are dedicated to making me speedy.”

She reached down and helped me up, planting the shovel onto my chest. “You’re gonna carry it in your inventory, and I’m gonna sit and watch while you dig holes at the other end. I’m going to love this. And you’re even kind of dressed like a servant!”

I brushed off the parts of the driveway that had stuck to me. My shirt came up looking fine, but there was a big mark on my left knee that wouldn’t come off. Considering the tumble I took, it wasn’t a bad war wound.

“So where to first?” Claire asked.

“Let’s do the Bill’s Yard side last. If I do it any sooner, I might feel like dropping back in to see Otto. It’s been a while.”

“How much friendship do you have with that guy? Sounds like it goes both ways.”

“Actually not as much as you might think. It’s (60) at the moment. Hear this, though. I reunited Marge — the lady who owns the bread stall — with her son during the Asterian Invasion. Our Friendship is sitting at (188). I think just seeing me now brightens her day immeasurably. Free bread, too.”

“Nice.”

Now that I was the designated hole-digger, we set off. Our first location was near the eastern border of Asteroth. The borderline was slightly ambiguous, and it created a no-mans-land between Asterian border patrol on the west side, and Tratine soldiers on the east.

We dug our holes further inland.

I dug our holes. Claire sat beneath a tree and whistled.

The shovel did an okay job, but the dirt was well packed. I would’ve preferred having another nuke potion to blow a hole in the countryside, or at least a destructive spell. It took an hour to pockmark holes all over a hundred-metre stretch of road.

“Okay, so one hour to travel here, and another to dig. The northern border is pretty far, maybe two hours, then assuming another hour to dig, that’s no good. I have to go soon.”

Claire stood up and stretched. She didn’t seem as concerned about timeframes as I was.

“Chill, dude. Watching you gave me a epiphany. This is like the most inefficient, unreliable way to topple a monarchy. Being realistic, how many people are going to make the jump from ‘Wow, this road sucks,’ to ‘Hmm. Let’s dethrone the fucking King!’ My guess is not many.”

“Could you have perhaps decided that before I did hard manual labour for the past hour?”

“Sorry, I was thinking. You and your shovel were the backup.”

I grumbled. My arms and back were sore. I felt like I could destroy the contents of a water cooler.

“So what’s the plan?”

Claire looked at me and pointed in a somewhat north-westerly direction.

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“The Hollow Forest. Let’s go talk to Marla.”

**************

I didn’t have enough time to travel all the way to the Hollow Forest, run away from wooden gnomes for a while, then confer with a treacherous, savage child, so we committed to just starting the journey and seeing how far we got. When the sun was directly above us, I would disconnect.

The main roads of Asteroth made a reasonably basic picture, kind of like a basic drawing of a barn. There was a criss-cross of two roads sitting inside a square, and then a triangle on the top that enveloped Bretonhal. The lines weren’t perfectly straight, but they did a reasonable job of staying on course.

Of course, there were hundreds of smaller roads that cut into the countryside, leading to villages, towns and other landmarks. These usually had crudely-drawn signs marking their existence, and the ‘roads’ were just trails where countless feet had walked over the last decades. The grass knew not to grow there.

We made good progress before I had to log off. There were the first signs of brambles and thorns growing along the road, which signified Marla’s domain. We were close.

“Really sorry about this,” I said.

Claire shrugged. “I can wait. I’d wait for days if it meant getting twenty thousand krad at the end. Oh, wait. Do you think if we get Marla to eat the King, that’ll count towards Piliton’s no-killing rule?”

“That’s your plan?!. I don’t think he hates the king enough to consider him sub-human, so yes.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Hmm. That puts a spanner in the works. I’m gonna disconnect and think it through. You’ll be back tonight?”

“Yep. Give it five or six hours. You should really just give me your phone number so I can text you when I’m ready.”

She shuffled, looking uncomfortable. “I don’t have one.”

“Oh. Well six hours then. Bye!”

--Disconnecting, please wait--

She doesn’t have a phone number? What teen doesn’t own a Yurt?

I figured she just wasn’t keen on giving her number to me. I knew I was technically a stranger, but I really wasn’t. And either way, it’s not like giving me her number would grant me some special access to her life.

Anyway. Esko’s.

I got dressed and met Dale in the loungeroom. Mom handed me a plastic box with cookies inside.

“For Esko. Not you two. If he refuses to take a cent for helping you train, then at least feed the guy some snacks.”

Dale looked at me. I looked at him. Not a chance, we both thought.

“I saw that! That look! There is a whole extra batch in a box on the bench. Don’t you dare.”

I went to the bench and opened said box. Inside were a few dozen more cookies.

“It’s all here,” I called to Dale. “Let the hostage go.”

He laughed. We pinky-promised Mom that all the cookies would arrive safely, then got on our way.

The forest was just as sticky as always, but the cooler weather made the humidity more bearable. I’d remembered at the last second to bring the practice spear that Esko carved for me, though I winced each time it bonked into a passing tree.

“How’re things going in B&B?” Dale asked.

“Decent,” I replied. “A lot has happened. I felt like I was finally going to be able to settle into a bit of a schedule, then I got this wild quest from an Asterian noble. There’s lots of thinking, and not much fighting.”

“I like those quests. Believe it or not, dark, mouldy dungeons start to get old after a while. Around the thousandth or so.”

“You’ve done a thousand dungeons?”

“I’ve done a lot of things.”

Once again, the veil of secrecy fell over his responses. I wanted to know what those things were because I wanted to learn from them. It was annoying.

“When are you actually going to answer my questions? It’s not like the world is going to explode if you do. I’m pretty sure I read crazier shit in the B&B News each day than whatever it is you’re hiding.”

He grinned and sidled past a low-hanging branch. “The B&B News is weak. There’s so much interesting stuff happening in the world every day, but they only have enough room to focus on the social stuff. Did you know that someone killed a [Dreadmaw] in Crastapol the other day? There’s never been one within a hundred miles of that place. That’s news. That’s what they should be reporting on. Not all that bullshit about who broke up with who.”

I balked. “I suppose. But no one’s going to freak out about seeing a dragon in a place it shouldn’t be, right? There’s no point being an ecologist when it’s just a game.”

We broke out into Esko’s clearing. Dale stopped and turned to me.

“It’s not just a game. It really, really isn’t.

**************

Training went fine. Esko beat me around for a while as I tried to improve with my shield. The blasted thing still wavered from my body whenever I went on the offensive, and Esko always took advantage of my mistakes.

I struggled to concentrate. For some reason, I was lingering on Dale’s words. And reading into them way too much.

Why the emphasis on the second ‘really’? Why the interest in the [Dreadmaw]? How does he even know about that? Did a friend at the Duels Final tell him?

My distraction earned me another hit from Esko’s spear.

“Dead,” he pronounced. “That’s three times now. You were better last week! That’s okay though, success isn’t a straight line.”

He was absolutely chipper once we put down the box of cookies and called it his. There was no oven in here — just a wood combustion stove — so he couldn’t have done any baking in a long time. In fact, unless he made regular trips to the supermarket and was just very good at hiding the evidence, I had no idea what he was cooking in that place.

There was a distinct lack of frog noises in this part of the forest compared to others. Perhaps they tickled his fancy.

“Hey Esko, Dale said that someone killed a [Dreadmaw] in Crastapol the other day. Does that sound right to you?”

He paused midfight. His I-got-cookies smile fell from his face, and a nervous line replaced it.

“That doesn’t sound right. No. [Dreadmaw] don’t fly that far south.”

“So what does it mean? Is there like, climate change in Blade & Battle? Should I be worried about the ice caps melting and all the best grinding sites getting flooded?”

He pulled himself back together and resumed slicing at me with a short-sword. We were focusing on my shield positioning and my ability to retaliate after taking a hit.

“In my opinion, you should always be worried about the ice caps melting. It happened before, and those blasted Pod-making factories don’t stop coming out with new models every ten seconds. The amount of waste…I’m sorry. That’s a favourite tangent of mine. And no, you don’t need to worry about flooding.”

I was glad. Lately I’d been dreaming up a certain style for my future [Hoplite], and gumboots weren’t included. Ancient Greek sandals were more what I was looking for.

“But why is Dale so interested in it? When he told me about it, he acted as though it was really serious. I feel like he’s keeping me in the dark.”

“I don’t think you need to worry. If Dale knew something that you needed to know, he would tell you. It’s just…an oddity. Dale likes oddities.”

He feinted to the right then whipped his sword in under my shield. It pressed into my stomach and I sat on the grass, spent.

An oddity, huh.