Chapter 46

Day 4 since entering the gnomes’ warren…

Trouble…

That’s what this day was. It wasn’t as bad as the orc invasions but it had a lot of negative things happen.

First, I awoke up to Asakura waking me and shaking my arm with a very concerned look stating that Rina had a fever again. She’d noticed when checking on her early in the morning and discovering a lot of night sweat.

I knew the partition was a stupid idea. Being able to keep Rina out of the red zone meant spotting problems early on. I would’ve had a higher chance of noticing her in this state without it up. So I rip down the ragged cloth of unknown origin. I angrily throw it outside the tent into the darkness of a bunch of cave rocks. Asakura doesn’t mind, so I don’t think she put it up.

Not only that, but the partition is a tool of distrust. It was put up because of putting other people in the group below others. That was what made me mad about it.

I can also see the sleeping arrangements of the girl’s side of the tent. Parallel from left to right and closest to me going farther away from me the order was Asakura, Rina, and then Yumi.

I’m grateful that the tent is clean. Ironically being in a cavern there are less insects to bite us at night.

I found Rina dressed in the gnome overalls asleep. Mostly she used my old uniform jacket on the outside to cover things up when outside but while sleeping she only had the overalls weren’t very good at covering up completely all the chest areas. They did to a certain extent but it was scandalizingly close to not doing so. In the night seemed really daring because a lot of skin was showing.

But at least she didn’t complain. Wait is that bad that she’s not complaining?

Also remembering what had happened awhile back, was she wearing gnome overalls so she couldn’t be bare bottom spanked again if it were to come up? Did she realize how much skin she was showing? She also couldn’t sleep on her back well because she was still sore from the spanking she’d received a couple days ago.

This was a step brother’s nightmare. What do I do? I needed to protect her.

Near her Yumi was probably trying to get an eyeful and I wish I’d noticed this sooner. Yumi was now pretending to be asleep, but I couldn’t help but notice where her head and eyes were pointed.

Seriously that kid was like a dirty old man. Yumi’s breathing didn’t look right for someone who was really sleeping either. I took note of it; her chest rising and falling was too much and too excited for a sleeping person too. She had the makings for at least the spirit and psychology of some kind of wolf beastkin. She looked a bit too happy too. Yumi should have told us she was having breathing trouble and night sweat I realized…seriously what a pervert. And yes, girls can be perverts too I reminded myself. How long was she going to observe without telling us she was having trouble?

I have to keep her chastity intact…yep. It’s inevitable. Yumi needs to be defeated.

But how? If I did anything the whole camp would think it’s like a molester on a girl or she’d say it was like that. It does look bad with a guy punishing a girl, either they’d think it was assault or abuse.

Not to worry. I could keep my guard up while I found a solution. I couldn’t give up. Rina was dependent on me!

I should probably talk to Rina about this…wow am I a parent now? It wasn’t Rina’s fault but she should know about the wolves circling for honey. Oh crap. Now that I think about it. I have to step up since dad isn’t here. That means the classical shotgun carrying dad figure anytime a boy gets close to her.

My mind was racing, but I reverted to focusing on the situation.

We stopped to give her treatment and her breathing calmed down right away. I’m just grateful the heals work well with her condition. But that meant using more heals that I’d originally needed for other wounded people. I had to figure a way to overcome the negative balance of mana everyday from Rina. It wasn’t totally derailing me, but it was making it more challenging to get the gnomes and the wounded all taken care of.

After stabilizing Rina we went out to plan the day. It may sound boring but actually it turned out to have a lot of power and leadership subliminally suggested in doing type of administration duty sharing and planning for the group, particularly after inviting some of the others to join in. Naturally I couldn’t invite Akimoto or his aides yet. But sooner or later they’d find out and it would probably mean an argument.

I’d have to wait for the others to acknowledge me and my power structure first. In the mean time I’d let him think nothing special is going on while slowly bit by bit the others would become dependent on me for helping advise them of their problems. But I also had to do it in a way that promoted self sufficiency on their part, rather than dumping all the problems onto me.

The gnome training workshops actually helped with the idea of self sufficiency and getting people out of the emotional downer of what had happened to them by quite a bit. They needed to be actively doing and engaging things. It also helped them to see the gnome kids playing around and happy.

Last night they’d given us a workshop on how to identify and search for coal from other underground rocks and rock formations so we could be able to provide for our own campfire fuels and help with the colony’s own quotas. Of course it goes without saying that you have to have a special chimney setup to even use the coal because you don’t want the heavy vapor going all over the place where families are living. You only want to keep the heat, not the smoke after all.

Of course some were complaining they didn’t teach us how to find metals and ore.

Also even though it seemed kind of redundant to do workshops on something as basic as how to search for coal people were actually lifted up into more positive thinking this way. It helped them think they had a chance to survive. Especially people liked how the gnomes kept it hands on and applied, rather than useless theory.

So this was the advantage of their type of living. It was perfect for our situation where we didn’t know how to survive in this world yet. Even with all the training with Fox Girl I felt unready still. If scoring myself on my ability to hold my own and provide for myself in this world was based on a 1 to 10 scale, I felt like I was barely at a 3. Akira might be at a 4, and Yumi was probably closer to my 3. Yumi seemed like a 4 in many ways except for her low crippled offense and she didn’t know anything about this world yet. She could be a 4 really soon, I think. But I would probably say you needed at least a five to be able to make it. I needed to step it up.

For myself I wasn’t sure. I think perhaps I needed more training against orcs in the dream dungeons. I felt like it would never be enough.

Asakura listened intently as I coordinated with the gnome elders, continuing the planning meeting. She didn’t have a way to take notes since we didn’t have access to paper still, but she knew I’d ask her about some of the things that got unresolved. They’d been recognizing me as the human authority and letting me distribute the jobs to Akimoto and Akira together to give to others. Naturally neither of the other two liked this and didn’t understand why and how the gnomes were giving me the job of coordinating with them and I didn’t tell them why. But it was because I’d paid the gnomes after all so they couldn’t complain.

We gave them the answer the gnomes trusted me as their go between; which was true still.

We had a lot of complex issues to solve in the gnomes planning meeting. Things came up daily like farming labor chore distribution, garbage and recycling management, assisting with ore processing was something the gnomes wanted us to be involved with but they weren’t sure who would pocket and steal ore and who could be trusted with this yet. It would take some more time to work this one out. I kept telling Steve I thought it wouldn’t go well if undisciplined kids knew the rocks the gnomes were having them help carry were something valuable like gold ore or silver ore. We also had to talk about whom to have discipline people when they were bad. That was a hot issue because the gnomes were concerned if gnomes only were disciplining humans it might inflame the other humans into thinking they were trying to be taskmasters or treat them unfairly.

Of course they were right.

I hadn’t thought about that…dang. There were all kinds of weird little subliminal things that were acting out. The gnomes also while liking and respecting me seemed to also be afraid I’d exert control over them. Now it made sense why they were afraid to grow my skills.

I postponed finalizing what to do about that issue, even though Asakura was advising me on a lot of things.

Of course now none of the other survivors could think I still needed to share the school battle money since they didn’t know how much was there to begin with and it looked like the gnomes’ had taken all of it. I was keeping the rest for unknowns and emergencies rather than trying to keep it for myself. But it was also hard to tell how much of that was going to end up as being solely earned from my dungeon duties with Fox Girl if things kept going the way they were.

I confess I did feel that I had earned the rest of it, but that’s not to mean I wouldn’t use it wisely to try to promote mutual survival of the others too.

But that’s not to say Akimoto wouldn’t still challenge me in the future for leadership. In fact I expected it; especially since he was really into the whole tribal route. I think the idea of a king was mostly promoted by the thought of not having to work like everyone else.

And that’s not even including if we have any gnome versus humans problems, which could happen because of the selfish people.

But the misunderstandings caused by Rina had continued this whole time despite our efforts to correct them. Sometimes people would keep encouraging me and Asakura and cheer at us for being bold and creating a new society on this new other world.

Others tried to keep their friends away from the ‘sex club’ people and were adding their resistance to having an immoral leader. Everyone had given us a bad rep for being the camp of the wicked now too thanks to the recent nude spanking sport that they said we’d created. Although we all denied it, even being ready to swear on a stack of bibles, it was to no avail.

Rina had clearly unquestionably damaged our credibility. But I felt like I can’t be angry with her. It’s too hard.

Akira showed up today and asked to join our night activities and let him and Yuriko sleep near us.

Long silence.

“Akira, there is no night activities. It was all rumor.”

“But...”

“NO!”

What he said sounds really weird. What is he thinking exactly? Or better yet, I don’t want to know. Is he thinking…

He had such a goofy look on his face that I was confused. But Asakura wasn’t; so she ended up slapping him boldly across the face so loud you could hear it across the cavern. Yuriko looked upset at him too. I wasn’t sure if he’d actually meant anything bad or had just looked like he meant something bad. After that he didn’t bring it up again; nor would anyone talk about it.

Wow.

That shocked me. It had to hurt. She was bold to against a scary guy like that too.

So even someone like Akira can have Yumi like delusions too huh?

Of course Akira couldn’t do anything back because Yuriko was also glaring at him. Unexpectedly he appeared to be in the doghouse with both of them. Why was that? Did something else to Yuriko to contribute to that? I suspected something like that.

Lately Yuriko seemed mad. Was it because he thought I’d paved the way for him to be producing skin ship with Yuriko before she was ready for it? They hadn’t been very happy around each other recently, when they’d been like perfect before.

But I couldn’t dwell on that. People needed us badly right now.

There were gnomes and people from our group this time wanting medical help. Apparently one of the gnome guards was hurt while slaying a cliff spider with his team at the boundary gate. Don’t ask me how but somehow the spiders can sometimes come up from deep underground through the tunnels that connect the entrance to the gnomes’ warren to the underground road that leaves towards the dwarven settlements.

The gnomes called it a boundary gate but maybe that was like their version of a border fence or border station? So this means their warren isn’t totally cut off like I thought it was? It was tied to some kind of underground tunneling system?

“That probably sounded about right. If the dwarves are trading with them they’d probably not enter from the surface since it’s swarming with orcs in these lands,” Asakura suggested when I asked her opinion about it.

“Sigh*, so much to learn. Every time we think we’re on top of things, there’s one more problem or something more to know. This world is pretty complex,” I replied.

“It is but we’ll get through it,” Asakura encouraged back at me.

Giant spider wounds are pretty serious it seems and have venom. I told the gnomes I wasn’t able to treat the venom directly for a poison antidote and that I hadn’t learned about that yet. Then they wanted to argue with me to try anyway.

We used their traditional antidote treatments for dealing with the toxicity and poison, but had me end up treating it for the portion of the bite, bleeding, tissue damage, and the rest. The gnomes were discouraged about being low on the supply of antidotes too. Steve had to interpret for me too and explain to them some of the things I’d said about them doing the antidote part. We had Steve stay to help get things worked out in case there was something unexpected that we needed.

Some of them were worried about if we’d have enough medicine in other ways too for other injuries later on in the month or year before the dwarves bring fresh supplies. Some of the gnomes are hoping the dwarven caravan might have someone with more skills to look at him, that may have training from the Dwarven Kingdom.

Is the Dwarven Kingdom that powerful that they might have surgical and medical training and teams?

I wasn’t an insect person and so I wasn’t able to tell right away what I was dealing with. But if the wound was as big as the guys wrist wouldn’t that be a really big spider? Sh--, I hate spiders! Why did it have to be an insect? Spiders have carapace too right? So if they are really big would that be like tougher than metal armor?

How often did spiders come around anyway?

And wait, that means the spiders can attack people underground in this place...

Damn!

The thing must be humongous because the bite on this guy’s abdomen was almost as big as his wrist for where the pincers had gone through I thought as we tried to treat him. Plus the venom had traveled through the skin leaving a terrible discoloration that was almost zombie like, even though we’d already applied the antidote.

That was another perk. We received training for free on how to apply antidotes and poultices from the gnomes. They went over tips of how to store it, the best way to use it, and which medicines it was compatible with and which weren’t compatible. Surprisingly there’s a lot of things to remember. The problem is that the gnome’s words for stuff might not be the same as other culture’s words for things, I’m thinking.

Normally someone would pay to be taught this as an adventurer, Steve said shrewdly.

I found out then that it’s very common for nests of these spiders to try to break into the gnomes’ warren. Also it’s their most common injury and they have to keep constant vigilance at their guard outposts. They tend to have at least one occurrence every week with some kind of spider skirmish although they usually stop them with traps before they can get close enough for a bite to occur.

And it seems if you calculate what the gnomes showed me about their calendar and injury reports the bites occurred at even intervals whenever the spiders would just get hungry enough to risk getting killed to get in.

So this place wasn’t as safe as we thought…

Should I tell the others? Part of me wants to have them be ready, but another part of me things they will just panic and then there will be more trouble.

Plus in addition to the gnome guard, the kid with the mangled arm had his fever up again, and a few others looked like they were getting infected. So I had a tough morning right from the get go.

It took literally most the day trying to spam and alternating long recovery naps and heal spam on both the two cases of the gnome guard and the amputee kid with the bad fever just to get them out of near death condition. I’d favored the gnome guard again this time for obvious reasons; his wound was worse. By the start of early evening I was finally satisfied they’d both live, but that their injuries were still grave and mostly unhealed. I’d barely made a dent in them it seems.

I would have to ask Fox Girl and Sunghee the possibility of if the long sleeping time both day and night would be bad on my health. But to be able to use this ability and really stop people from dying there was no other way.

If we could just get to a point where everyone was starting to feel solid…

As the day stretches on we keep working to try to improve our lives and try to fit into the gnome warren.

It was also hard to tell when to know which was worse. I couldn’t pinpoint it exactly but only was able to estimate. Sometimes I’d ask for second opinions with Asakura and the other gnomes who didn’t appear to be taking sides. This helped to build trust with them.

To do this I also had to put other people with less serious injuries further back to wait another day while the line was already growing. That made them all mad of course, but we’d already told them the most serious wounds go first and been telling them that for awhile. I had to use the other gnome guards to help keep me from being swarmed too.

I’m now worried about getting mobbed.

But the gnomes were still overjoyed. Even that much they were very excited about and pleaded for us to live there permanently with them, now that they knew we brought something really valuable to the table.

If only their cooking weren’t so bad…it was …too bad. I almost wanted to die when I ate their food.

I wasn’t thinking of a gnome warren as the most comfortable place to live either. You never knew when you’d turn around and see some of the gnome kids spying on myself with Asakura…or Rina too, in her own way of spying… there wasn’t much for privacy here.

But the most feared event happened that I had been worried about all along.

One of Akimoto’s got into a fistfight with one of the gnome men. They had a scuffle go on for some time, with the rangers wanting to go outside and explore. They thought they could bully the little gnome guards into letting them through.

I’d have to ask later. I wasn’t sure if he just didn’t know about the spiders and the gnome guard incident and wanted to go outside in ignorance of it or because of knowing about it.

But it appears the gnomes have rules about how to leave the settlement and when. They don’t want people to discover where they live of course. Stealth and keeping their settlement hidden has been the basis for how they survived and they can’t compete with other races ability to produce soldiers and troops, plus the gnomes are so small.

Why the hell would that idiot try to go out without permission and without anyone spotting the door he left from with it insecure?! That guy is a moron!

The spiders are huge! If even one got in here without guards knowing…

Wow.

Naturally Akimoto and his goons were extremely stubborn and didn’t understand how he and his party could possibly accidentally lead other underground monsters to this part of the cave system by accident through their wanting to go outside to explore.

The fight ensued, and Akimoto’s aide speared the gnome in the gut. But he said Akimoto told him to do it so maybe both of them will be hanged after a quick trial. The other gnomes thankfully didn’t kill us all and didn’t kill the rangers but are now thinking of throwing us out. They are walking around armed now and in full armor.

And they look like they could easily decide to kill one of us.

What a mess.

Now the gnomes want to have a trial in a week and Akimoto and his goons are in their jail. I feel bad for them, but they did that to themselves.

That poor gnome too; he was only doing his job.

Come to think of it we still haven’t explored the whole warren system. There are off limits areas too that we aren’t supposed to go to. I think the jail area is in one of them.

Steve told me near the end of the day that it seems that my good will has paid off. The gnomes remembered the kindness we showed to them today in treating their wounded and because of it have decided not to massacre us all in our sleep. He also said that with a smile, which was kind of freaky.

It was actually very lucky that the gnome guard spider bite occurred before the gnome guard wounding by a human. It helped to diffuse the situation.

Of course other gnome elders are with Steve so we know this is a serious issue. The gnomes want my assurance that I’ll prioritize making sure the two gnomes of both incidents live. They assure me that this is a gesture of faith in showing the gnomes that humans can be trusted. Though they say they are humble about it, there is an intensity to their eyes as Steve translates this.

It makes me extremely worried. What if the spider bite gnome succumbs to his wounds? What if they don’t heal up as much as I want them too? I’m new enough at this that I’m not sure what kind of long term effects would be worked out or not worked out.

What a lot of pressure. It’s like my head is in a vice now.

Thanks Akimoto!

You just nearly wrecked the only safe place we had!

Of course Steve has warned us that things will be on pins and needles for awhile. He’s concerned that some of the younger gnomes may try to retaliate against Akimoto in order to prove themselves for potential females in the nest. It’s a basic gnome proving point to be able to fight off enemies and defend the colony, despite that they are peaceful. It’s also well known among demi-humans that humans are weaker than nearly all the demi-humans.

What? Is that true?

I was thinking it might be superstition. I asked him if we could somehow make it up to them and pleaded with him earnestly on my knees. After all the gnomes taking us in was a big, big favor. I didn’t want to lose that.

Now that you mention it, Akimoto was from the judo club right? Perhaps some of his goons were too? Wasn’t he in there to begin with to treat discipline and anger management problems? I didn’t understand why society did that. To treat anger, rebellion, psychotic behavior they put you in a martial arts school…that makes no sense...

Because of the demand during the day and other things going on I only had an afternoon break and a late night break to practice my cultivation techniques away from the others. This was mostly due to not wanting them to see me doing this since it meant they might figure out I’d found this out by buying information through a spy.

I had to do mana cultivation exercises in the tent when nobody was watching and have Asakura guard the entrance to warn me if anybody was coming near. I went through everything Fox Girl told me to do first, and then worked on the things given to me by the spy. It does seem that they complement each other and I ended up working up a little sweat at the same time.

Of course I kept Asakura thinking that she needed to do exercises too and combat training with me. So we even sparred for an hour of the day, with the understanding that we’d also spar in the future daily. Although it was only with spears and sticks in place of the sharp knives; so far that was still worth something. But sparring isn’t like in the movies.

You first have to spend a ton of time how to talk about how you’ll train so you don’t hurt each other on accident. You have to also go over movement sequences together and calling them out for blocking practice and then mix up random calls and not calling out of the sequences. One of the unanticipated problems was getting rid of Asakura’s thinking of fear of getting hit by the ball. I had to teach her I wouldn’t hurt her first, even though she’d had trust in me that trust needed to be higher than the glare of the weapon I was holding. She knew I’d have more force than she did and would flinch a lot thinking I’d hurt her.

I hoped it would pay off on later days to train like this.

That takes a ton of time and you can’t just throw out all your force in your swings either. We had to go slowly and build things up, just going through the simple blocking sequences. Then every time we changed weapons we had to do redo the same thing all over. Part of this training, we were trying to figure out what kinds of equipment and weapons would be best for Asakura so we we had to try different things and experiment with what we had.

Still it felt like it was good progress and I thought I’d look forward to sparring in the future.

It goes without saying that I hinted that combat training with me was better than with others thanks to Fox Girl. Although I couldn’t tell her that there was a very specific reason for this.

This served two purposes.

First, I was working up and doing magic strengthening exercises. And also on top of that I was making it so Asakura had pretty much all of her day as my appointed nurse assistant. Because of Rina’s rumors everyone pretty much expected that anyway and wouldn’t let her join them because they thought Sensei was now a bad influence. But even though I was spending almost the whole time with Asakura I regretfully almost never had any time alone with her since people always wanted healing or other problems for us to work out.

But this was for a reason besides my own selfishness and served a great purpose. That gave her a chance to study things with me too on what worked with combining the heal magic with the herb medicine the gnomes used.

To spot chances to build on and create new techniques I needed to be able to have someone really smart with me to bounce ideas off. I think Asakura could do that once I got her more up to speed on how this world worked. But that meant I had to get up to speed first, and I felt far away from it. Someone else that could use their brain here would be indispensable and severely affect being able to keep a similar standard of living to what we had in our own world.

I also needed to get opinions other than my own sometimes on different approaches to study new techniques and catch when I was being ineffective or wrong.

I had another big fear as well, which I was trying to help Asakura keep me grounded on and that only someone who was fairly smart could do. That was I was extremely worried the gnomes would come in with a broken bone injury at some point that would require setting the bone before doing a heal spell.

This was problematic for several reasons.

-I didn’t know enough about anatomy to set bones.

Even if I had the knowledge we didn’t have the proper tools like things to keep the bones from slipping apart when broken, and things like that. We also couldn’t dig down into the flesh to somehow do that manually without causing someone to bleed to death. Nor did we have surgery equipment and I didn’t feel ready to learn such knowledge yet. I could basically only handle flesh wounds as best as I could.

-I didn’t know if Gnome anatomy or other races had different bone structures than humans even though they looked for the most part very similar. Their hip bones I suspected were shaped a bit differently, on top of their arms being slightly longer than hours compared with their own bodies.

Asakura and I discussed this problem ahead of time. I was also surprised she thought it was good that I was thinking about problems before they happened and not just waiting for them to incur. She also was worried about it, but we’d just have to do our best.

We then had a meeting with the gnome elders to discuss sterilization techniques and keeping a request for a pot and fire going during various times in the day for boiling tools, and hot war to kill germs.

Steve was surprised that I knew about this and confirmed he’d seen dwarven medics use this same concept, sometimes in conjunction with alcohol. But he said also that because gnomes have a weakness for alcohol they didn’t keep much around, because it’d been fairly problematic in corrupting their society.

Turns out the gnomes know about sterilization already but just have been a bit lazy?

I also found out Akira had been practicing combat techniques with the others when they weren’t farming. This is good but I’m worried about being left behind.

Of course, someone had to make sure the humans were doing their fair share now since the gnomes started to complain that Akimoto and his goons weren’t doing their share of the farm work and were often out on their own playing around.

Seriously? When is that guy going to stop causing trouble?

But it makes sense. People that don’t know how to work and not live of others won’t want to change once they have a taste of parasitism.

This was confirmed by others too. Naturally people complain if they see someone else gets a free life and they don’t.

So was that part of why they’d upset the gnomes? Maybe they were trying to push a little so they could have to work less thinking it would work in getting more freedom?

The hourly expectations for working with the gnomes were fair and it turns out were exactly the same hours the gnomes were doing themselves. So I couldn’t suddenly say it was OK for them to just do whatever they want. The gnomes also wouldn’t want to support freeloader humans, the gnome elders warned.

I agreed.

This also stirred up a lot of jealousy too. Apparently I was being cited as an example for something along the lines of, “if Shun doesn’t have to work how come we do?”

That wasn’t going to be easy to contest since they didn’t understand how exhausting just one heal spell was costing me in terms of energy.

Oh great, another problem had just come up. Now everyone was giving me dirty looks too. They wanted to be the one that didn’t work.

Didn’t they realize this was hard?

These people don’t realize there’s a lot more gnomes than there is humans here. And they think that they can just troll over their rights and first precedence of owning this turf.