Chapter 16

Afternoon to Evening of first day in the new world;

We’d worked hard all day trying to clear small shelters for people. The rangers led the way trying to prove their stuff and being excited by the fact that they now had a real RPG job. They began to take pride in scouting the area, making everyone stay hidden and even appointed people to watch as lookouts over the river and in key points over looking the plains that had led us here. In all cases however, they tried to encourage people to stay behind the trees so no one was in visible sight where they could be spotted.

With the memory of the orc battle being fresh still, people had no trouble with the idea of hiding and not being seen. Then there’s also caring for the wounded that need cover and shelter.

People...students mostly from our high school, had even gotten cleaned up after that too at the river, even with the threat of being discovered they didn’t want to live one more day with filthy blood and guts stains on their clothes. They did of course make sure those other two groups were nowhere nearby first. All of us had to hurry though, because we didn’t know when they would come back and we also didn’t want to leave signs of tons of people having been here.

And it was painful knowing the risk could expose us all.

People were still afraid of being made into sex slaves and being carried off so most people also washed their clothes and bodies with their clothes on, scrubbing at the fabric while wearing it is doable I found out. Although a lot of the girls didn’t realize their blouses being white, made their upper clothes partly see through if they didn’t have the uniform jackets on.

Unfortunately this made some of them violent when they caught guys looking at them, for any length of time.

I also learned I had to keep our new “herbalist” friend away from Rina, because he was trying to give her “medicine” which consisted of strange homemade “Joints” that he’d created, without actually knowing anything about what she felt like or what she needed. Obviously they didn’t look like medicine of any kind and Rina was afraid of him too.

It also made me wondered what he thought most medicine was, and what his version of healthcare was. But then I thought it would be safer not to know, and so I didn’t ask him that.

While trying not to be rude, we encouraged him to try to improve and learn his craft first. Within an hour another girl was also discovered to be a herbalist, but we turned her down as well for something that looked like the same thing.

We later discovered the homemade leaf and bark joints the herbalists made were good at acting like some kind of bug repellent. It was also a better bug repellent than the traditional stuff, with the only drawback being they smelled bad and you couldn’t stand the vapor and smell of the smoke, which the herbalist kept defensively calling “incense”, despite making everyone cough like crazy. He was also going off on joining his petition to fight for medical marijuana too, but we didn’t want to listen to that.

I wanted to see the ranger skills in action so then we went to see Akimoto and the new rangers.

“Huh? I failed?” one of them said while we observed him and Akimoto working on the first one, when he tried to make his first emergency grass and bush shelter. It had collapsed. He’d bent sticks for like a frame over and tried to get them together with grass tied over to hold them together but it’d just collapsed.

“Hmm, if we had some kind of hemp and rope of some kind, then it would have worked,” Akimoto realized. He was still trying to adjust the roof of the grass hut. Even if he did get it to work grass huts aren’t that strong.

“Eh? So that’s it. If we had some homemade hemp we could get the emergency shelter parts to be tied properly,” the ranger kid said. I later learned his nickname was Ziggy. People joked that he looked more Korean than Japanese and as a result I kept forgetting his real name and his nick name stuck. But I’m not really sure why that justified his nickname by the other students.

It was something that didn’t make sense.

Thus we confirmed that having skills didn’t guarantee success with the new skills, particularly if it was a skill that we’d never used before. With every skill, there’s failures and successes, since it’s reality based. But the idea had stuck and it did pioneer the way for success thereafter. It did help people get excited about building their skills too.

Ziggy then got to work trying to teach people how to make hemp tie downs and small short thin cords using various types of grasses and tree and leaf parts. I was actually wondering if there really was some kind of ranger magic after that. I didn’t know Ziggy before, but then suddenly everyone was building stuff out of things I’d never even imagined possible.

So now we knew how the small shelters were made.

Inwardly I’m worrying a lot. I need skills for me. And I’ve got to also make up the difference taking care of Rina! And possibly Asakura! These thoughts are sweating through me as I see them work at new skills and finding new skills to be identified in others.

The small shelters looked like something that Native Americans might have made on a hunting expedition. They were basically a few long branches taken from the ground or trees, then bent or positioned either next to another bush, or a big rock overhang and then with pine branches piled over the top. Then they would have other parts filled in with anything like plant matter, or whatever we could find. Other versions finally figured out you could use small green tree willows or the green tree branches that are still wet wood that bends and then bend several of them together into a conical shape and then tie them down using the homemade hemp pieces you’d just made.

We ended up with some small dilapidated huts lining the edge of the towering tall trees of the woods, spaced wherever we could fit them. Many of them could barely fit in two people and would shake with any reasonable amount of wind. Some people ended up just giving up and deciding to sleep in swaths of tall grass that they’d trampled down and cleaned to make sure was free of bugs.

They were actually pretty terribly made grass huts at first and people had to share them when there wasn’t much room to begin with. Some priority was encouraged for wounded and vulnerable people but we couldn’t enforce it. But somehow they were comforted by the fact that others were next to them still alive in the shelters. They were getting a bit better over time though. Nobody builds a perfect grass hut either it seems. We managed to get people to each try to be willing to share their shelters and that more body warmth would make it better and ensure they stayed warm.

Rangers were really amazing after all. It’s a sort of fighter class with mysterious skill emphasis and low magic ability that really seems to shine in a lot of unexpected ways. It did also seem that they were even more productive and quicker at it than the other people who were copying it by watching them. So maybe there was some kind of learning bonus to the skill production speed in effect? Or maybe its a bonus XP skill?

Grass hut making huh...

This wasn’t easy to do. People were not used to living in a system of sacrifice and lack of luxuries they were used to. Still to, when they did agree it still took time to get them willing to permit it and the amount of time it took talking them into it.

“We’re wasting so much time on stubborn people!” I heard Yumi cry out more than once in frustration, after trying for about an hour to get people to cooperate. It wasn’t that easy even with the threat of orcs.

Then too, others wanted to share their shelters with girls. Those girls didn’t want to share their shelters with the boys either, and would rather be with other girls for fear of losing their chastity earlier than intended. Then after that we had to solve a dispute about which wood was for shelters or prioritized for making weapons or fires.

Then it happened.

Our first internal fight.

I heard a commotion and ran over to find two boys fighting. One of them was a ranger kid and the other was another kid I didn’t recognize very well but knew to be part of the group from our school.

They were next to what looked like a fire pit and a bunch of branches close together in a tipi shape. Then I could notice was supposed to be a fire pit that wasn’t working very well. They couldn’t seem to get it started and were knocking stones against each other to get a spark. I’d seen this trick before, and noticed they were using rocks of the wrong type.

“We can’t have fires right now. Our enemies are too close!” one of the ranger kids said.

“I want a fire dammit! Fire is comfort. If people can get warm around it they will feel better! They just saw all those people killed. They need something to make them keep their hope!” the kid argued back.

“Yeah but it’s not even cold out. Look around, there’s no snow either. It’s almost the end of Spring here. If you light a fire everyone within ten miles of here is going to spot the flames, particularly at night,” the ranger kid said.

Hmm, the ranger kid was right. But would the others see that too? People could be pretty blind when they put their desires in front of their needs.

We’re lucky he caught that guy as quick as he did.

Before I could intervene the non-ranger kid tried to stab at his opponent with a small pointy knife. The shiny little rabbit sticker was some kind of small paring knife. It wasn’t something that should be lethal to use, but if he hit a vital spot…but the shiny metal was the first that people had seen in quite awhile besides my axe.

!!!

Everyone stared in blatant shock.

“Eh?”

“So he had a hidden knife huh? Wow, so low.”

“How could he do that?” another replied.

“Is-is that what murder is like?”

Ranger kid number four kicked the kid in the balls so hard that the kid dropped the knife. Then another girl grabbed it and ran off. Still the ranger kid showed restraint and didn’t clobber the other one, but looked at him with pity.

“Looks like we just had our first attempted murder,” someone said.

“Eh? It was like that huh?” someone else reacted.

Everyone is looking at the ‘criminal’.

“So what are we supposed to do with him?” they asked.

“But was it just an assault or an outright murder attempt?” someone said confused.

“Hmm, that is a good question. If it’s on impulse does that cancel it for murder though?”

“Well if you try to stab someone, that’s not the same as a fistfight, but was it temporary insanity from the orcs?” his friend argued.

“That little paring knife couldn’t execute a scared rabbit, I think,” a girl stated flatly.

“But regardless, now we have to have public order and a system for preventing crime as well as defending ourselves, and watching for enemies approaching. And we still haven’t found food yet,” I sighed.

“But don’t you see? As people get desperate for resources, particularly food, things like this are going to be happening every hour,” a girl said with a wild and scared look on her face.

“Ugh, you are right,” I admitted.

“What do we do with him?” the ranger kid looked at me, while the guilty kid was sprawled on the ground still afraid to get up. He was looking at us strangely. The guilty kid was really scared now and not sure what to do.

“Uh, crap. I wasn’t expecting something like this,” I said. “I don’t want to rush anything without thinking about it. We need to be careful how we decide something like this. It’s bad timing too.”

“For now we’ll have to have a vote and decide his fate, maybe? So are we going to hold a mock trial or what?” someone else suggested.

Did this mean I was going to discover the lawyer job? Somehow that made me feel kind of dirty inside…I didn’t like this idea.

And one worry is...what if someone shows too much leadership in the mock trial and wants to be a leader? Or heaven forbid they get a job like [Noble] or [Mayor]?

That hasn’t happened, but anything could happen now.

“Let’s think about it over dinner, and then decide in the morning. We could be rushing things,” someone suggested.

“Yeah, but what’s dinner?” another asked, which we were all highly interested in. Getting them thinking and talking about food turned out to be a bad idea, after all. Some of them became delusional wanting things we’d never see again, and the others were caught in despair and severe depression for the same reason.

“If you let him go is he going to do it again?” someone else wondered.

“It’s complicated with no real police around huh?” I scratched my head.

“We don’t get dinner till we can get a way to practice farming again. And farming takes months after you sow your seeds before a crop pops up,” someone said sadly.

“Well police aren’t infallible anyway. In the end don’t they do want they want anyway?” someone said.

“Is that true?”

“Well Yuta, and Akimoto, and a few others are fishing by the river,” the ranger kid said, shrugging. “I thought you all knew that already.”

“Eh?!”

“Fish!”

“Meat, meat, meat!” the food chant had already sprung to life among the survivors and was gaining volume.

Idiots...they are making too much noise, I thought.

It wasn’t until later when it was nearly night time and people were getting down to rest that I was able to find a place to go over what was in the item box. I didn’t want to do it in front of others, partly because of how people were already coveting my fire axe. I’d already almost lost it twice today from people sneaking up behind me when they thought I had laid it down to rest.

In short, if I created more jealousy then it’d be worse.

Carefully I opened it and looked down into the item box. It opened straight out like I had opened the lid upwards out of a deep plastic or wooden box with sections inside with rows and columns, some were empty and some were not. Strangely enough it was like I had taken the roof of a dollhouse in its way of the view, looking down into a tray of miniature items. It took getting used too, because if I stuck my hand in to reach down into the box, it was like a fluid space and wavy ripples were around my arm and hand as I was reaching down. Plus, in addition to the ripple wavy air my hand seemed to like stretch and distort as I felt downwards.

Magic was real in this world. This was proof.

In a way it was almost amusing and I couldn’t help but laugh and play with it for awhile. It was really bizarre and strange, and suddenly I was realizing how powerful magic really was in this world.

The inside of the item box; the color was entirely black almost like wood texture and framed wood with slots, and now I could see not only was the money, and orc food in there but other things too. There was a slot that had other weapons for the orc boss. Another spear, also very elaborate and well made which looked just like Akira’s and also some spare armor sets. There were arrows, and sling stones, plus other ammunition like javelins, and other loot like a sack of gems. Other than that it was pretty empty.

But wouldn’t a pig orc general have more items? He was obviously a boss and pretty strong for one. Why didn’t he have very much stuff?

Then I noticed it had switch on the belt, which when pressed made it so the item box was …intangible so that others couldn’t take it from me, but doing so also made it so I couldn’t use the item box temporarily, making the item box collapse back into being in closed mode. In fact I had to feel around to find the setting switch again, but finally my hand roved over it.

Oh wait. That’s funny…there was something else there…I felt again, and there was a second switch?!

I flicked it carefully and suddenly the item box changed on the outside wooden coating that opens up!

It was now not white anymore but a black lacquer color and it was like…a black inky fog started to drip from the box temporarily until the air cleared. I didn’t know much about this world, but common sense was telling me something wasn’t right. It shouldn’t be black, and it shouldn’t have the black vapor. I felt like there was energy of some kind there, and it was so powerful it was leaking out. In fact I could feel it; the vapor was the energy and it was real and dark. After playing with it a bit, I was sure of it. You could feel it when your fingers passed over the black inky energy.

Then I looked again in the box. It didn’t quite feel right. So then I noticed something else. There were other slots in addition to the regular item slots, down the bottom edge were some hidden slots that had opened up with glass.

There were two hidden rows now revealed at the bottom, with one row containing some kind of strange magic crystals. I wasn’t sure how they were used or what they were for. So for the moment I couldn’t do anything with them. So I’d have to ignore them for now. I could do a lot of harm to myself or others by experimenting with them without knowing how they worked.

But the second hidden row almost gave me a heart attack as I looked at it.

WHAT IS THAT?!

I blinked a few times.

There were people in the item box!

I couldn’t believe It!

The orc had been stacking some of the women he wanted into the box and captured. In fact, I was looking down at them frozen in the glass dark crystal like containers. There was also room for up to ten of the transparent but darkly tinted glass crystals that fit in the demon box perfectly. The people in the box were alive and inside the crystals! I was sure of it. I could feel small little lights of energy where their hearts were that glowed slightly with a sparkly feeling.

The only reassurance is that not all the crystals are filled.

This wasn’t just an item box…it was some kind of demonic magic prison box?!

And they were in some kind of frozen glass?! But wasn’t this a tool of dark magic too?

Was that?!….no…no way! Was that possible?! This was a staggering discovery. If this sort of thing could be found on the first day in this place, how much more stuff was out there? Were there other magic artifacts like this one?

Picking at the darkly tinted crystals I found that I could even pick them up and take them out. The crystals were designed to fit perfectly in the box in the slots that matched the shape of the large crystals, being about a foot tall and about two inches in diameter.

I took a look at each crystal carefully and was even more surprised once I noticed what was inside of them.

It was Ayumi Sensei in the first one!

I almost cried out in shock!

Then I see in the next one!

That’s Haruka from my school in the second, who I didn’t know very well.

Then there were two other girls I didn’t know in the third and fourth with the rest of them being empty.

All of them naked frozen in the glass crystal boxes, except for strange small shiny silver collars around their necks looking like miniature dolls because of being shrunk down to small size. It wasn’t hard to recognize the identities of the first two girls though. He’d picked the girls with the biggest boobs, that were still skinny, and with pretty faces. I’m sure he would have added some of the girls in our group to these too, if he’d had the option.

In fact it did make sense. The orc general would have kept the best looking women for himself for his own harem and not wanting to share them with his men. He’d probably quickly tucked them away here so that his lieutenants and the others wouldn’t know about it. And he would also imprison them without clothes too.

But then I realized that time was either very, very slow or frozen in the little frozen crystals. In short, they were in stasis of some kind! This was how he was storing them, so he wouldn’t have to worry about the other pig orcs stealing his women while he was one, or worry about the chance of them escaping and running away.

I’d recognized Ayumi Sensei right away. She wasn’t strictly a teacher yet, but had been a student teacher that had come to our school a few weeks ago, trying to get the school to give her a permanent teaching position while preparing for her licensing exam a few months away. Her figure had attracted a lot of attention…I’d almost forgot about her because most people weren’t aware of her, and still had Asakura Sensei on a pedestal.

And within the second crystal was Haruka, a senior that was going to graduate this year that had a really good grade point average and was well off, and quite intelligent, but liked sports too. She was also kind of tall and athletic looking.

The other two crystals I didn’t recognize…were they in the box before the pig orc general raided our school, I wondered? I couldn’t tell exactly but wasn’t sure. Also because they didn’t have clothes, it was hard to tell…but one of them didn’t quite look Japanese.

What was I going to do with them? It must be terrible for them to be stuck in there. But I wasn’t even sure how to get them out. Would the demon box even release them or would it feed of them somehow? If I did release them they would surely have some kind of trauma from being captured and put in the box too, even if they’d not had…problems yet with the pig orc general.

He’d likely traumatized the two that were already in here, but the two fresh ones probably hadn’t been attacked yet. I would be able to help them more, I think.

But before I could decide anything, my attention was ripped away.

Someone was coming!

I hurriedly closed the box shut.

“Shun! Come help! Your step sister collapsed!” Asakura Sensei gasped for breath, after she’d found me where I’d stopped cutting wood just long enough to inspect the item box.

“Come quickly! You’re the only one that knows what to do!” she said, obviously crying with tears running down her face.