“Sir Christopher,” Bruce acknowledged.

“Did y—”

“Yes, I did.”

“Why?” Chris’ brow furrowed. Why wasn’t he dead?

“You save my life,” Bruce said. “Twice.”

“Uh huh.” The knot in his forehead failed to unclench.

“And the quest to kill you?”

There it was. Chris took a deep breath and began to speak.

\\\

“And you’re sure you don’t know any monster girls?”

Chris had explained everything, down to clearing mana away from the meridians. Then things had taken a weird turn. “Yes, I’m positive.”

“Demon girls?”

Chris buried his face in his hands... hand. “For the last time. No.” He peeked out between his fingers as he remembered the bat-faces of the demons. “Why?” he said, a note of despair in his voice.

Bruce ignored the question. “And you’re certain about the quest to kill the guards?”

“Mostly.”

“Weird. Gregor didn’t say anything about that.”

Gregor turned out to be one of the unofficial leaders of Hartshire. He’d organized everyone into a group, and when the tutorial started had everyone search the houses for food—which they had found stocked with supplies—enough that they didn’t need to worry about hunting for at least a few weeks.

Chris shrugged. “Probably didn’t want the news getting out.” If people had known that killing the guards would make them the ruler of Hartshire, the guards would be dead by now. One of the five already was.

“Probably,” Bruce agreed.

Chris fell silent, there really wasn’t anything else to say.

“And what about Slime girls? Does your arm turn into a harem of Slime girls or something?”

Chris slumped back against the bed. How come he didn’t remember this? He was so caught up in the idea that humans would want to kill monsters that he forgot the only other thing humans would rather do.

That mention about his arm did remind him though. “Can you get me a Gnoll corpse? I need to get my arm back.”

Bruce gave him a thumbs up and sauntered outside, closing the door behind him.

Chris looked up at the wooden ceiling and let out a breath. That hadn’t gone as badly as he’d envisioned. He’d asked his own share of questions too. When he’d been running with Bruce outside the walls of Hartshire, the teenager’s questions had confused him. They shouldn’t have. But he’d expected the kid to never have returned to the troll glade. He had.

Bruce had set up spike traps and deadfalls, then lured the trolls into them by tossing rocks at the monsters, leading off one or two from the pack, isolating them in traps from which they could not escape, then finishing them off.

Bruce had gone back. Chris had been shocked. He didn’t know why. Maybe because he was overweight, or had a katana. Maybe just because he seemed innocent and gullible—and had been confused for unintelligent as a result, or maybe just dumb because he was fat.

Unlike him, Bruce had been looking through the trolls deliberately when he found his first Soul Gem. He hadn’t been looking for it specifically—more for useful materials—but he’d found it anyway. The second troll had by some fluke also possessed a Gem. The first Soul Gem had been something called a ‘Shell’ and was a defensive item that surrounded the user in a protective casing of rock at the cost of mobility, the second had been a Cultivation Technique. When combined with the Shell it thickened the defensive coating into something that closer resembled the trolls’ boulder forms and added strength. Either way, to use gravity to exploit the increased weight and turn the defensive Soul Gem into an offensive one had been a work of genius.

He’d been wrong, on several counts.

Hartshire hadn’t been defenseless either. The demons were too strong, but they couldn’t get past the Starter Protections barrier. All it took was baiting them toward the barrier and then killing them as they tried and failed to breach it.

He sat up as he heard heavily laden footsteps approach the outside of the door. He gave his Slime a slight prod, feeling it becoming somewhat more responsive, thin tendrils of green jettisoning the blockage of hardened slime from his veins.

Bruce pushed open the door and dumped the body of a Gnoll next to the bed. “You have no idea the looks I got carrying this here.”

“Thanks.” Chris moved over and pressed the stump of his arm to the monster’s corpse. He felt a thin covering of Slime cut through the matted fur and begin consuming the flesh beneath. The amount of Slime he could spare was sparse, though, so it would take a while. Bruce was also here, so he didn’t want to make everything too gruesome and gory by maximizing the surface area of his absorption.

Bruce looked down, hearing the sizzle of melting meat, but saw nothing.

Chris gazed at him. “So, since there aren’t people baying for my head, how did you stop everyone from finding out about… you know?”

“Everyone’s still busy fighting, and I saw your arm before anyone else. So I said I was your squire and that I could take care of you. No one saw anything.”

“How did you learn to bandage arms like that?”

“MMOs.”

It made sense, even if it was odd to imagine Bruce wrapping bandages around digital war wounds.

He frowned. How often had he thought about what life had been before? It had been three days—seven for everyone else—he’d barely even thought about his girlfriend since then. In fact, he’d barely thought about life before the tutorial and the System’s arrival at all. That was… strange.

Had the invasive singlemindedness from his overflowing mana also made things from before less important? He’d barely even considered what had been done to him. It had happened and he’d moved on. By all rights a person ought to be a quivering, nervous wreck by now. Surprisingly, he felt fine. The memories of experimentation, struggle, and near death were marked not by envisionings of pain and despair, but by that same singular desire to move forward.

The feeling felt foreign, alien—as if he was looking at someone else’s perspective. In a way, it was. In a way, he was grateful for it. He wasn’t certain he’d know how to cope if the mana hadn’t made the discomfort and distress of the experiences less. It truly was a desire to press forward, to overcome, and to leave all else trampled in its wake. But it wasn’t what was needed right now.

His thought processes were clearer without mana, less inclined to seek combat as the be all and end all. Feeling the Slime in his veins replenishing helped too.

He looked down at the Gnoll. It was a saggy sack of skin and hair, with almost nothing inside it—it looked as if the monster had been turned into a balloon. Not for the first time, Chris wondered where all the extra mass went.

“You might want to look away for this last bit.”

Bruce turned to face the door, as Chris’ newly restored right arm dissolved the remaining skin and fur. It reformed into its usual shape and he went to slip on his shirt.

“All good. How’s the battle out there?”

“Everyone’s out of arrows and projectiles. We’re down to melee and throwing rocks.”

Chris hummed in acknowledgement. A question came to him.

“What about the guards?”

“What about them?” Bruce’s mouth suddenly dropped open as he remembered the kill quest.

Chris shared a look with him, then began slipping on his plate mail. He regretted the loss of his gauntlet and weapons, but he could recover them later. He sank into his center and let a small amount of mana trickle freely into his meridians, enough to give him a little boost of confidence, not enough to compromise him.

He needed to stop the guards from being assassinated. What’s more, there was a battle to win.