Bonus Short Story
After the Grind
“Wait a minute! There’s no room in here!”
“What do you think we are, sardines?!”
“Shut up and get in there!”
In the jail attached to the constabulary in a particular town, the cells—which were ordinarily spacious due to the general lack of criminals—were packed full of men with their arms bound. Another man, visibly exhausted, was tossed into the cell before the constables slammed the door shut and strode off.
“I can barely take a step in here... Talk to me, newbie. Gotta pass the time somehow. You’re a bandit too, aren’t you? How’d you get pinched?”
“I don’t know...”
“They got you while you were sleeping?”
“No, I was just woken up by soldiers. The details are hazy... Our hideout got stormed by a horde of goblins. My friends and I barely made it out, and then...”
“You too, huh?”
“What do you know?”
“What do I know? Same thing happened to us. Weirdly jacked goblins with good-quality armor, right?”
“That’s right! They attacked us in the night, and our gang was separated before we even knew what happened.”
“No doubt about it. They gotta have a tamer. You see anyone like that?”
“Not at the attack, at least...”
“Same with us. Again. None of us have seen who turned us in. Goblin attack. Knocked out. Woke up in here.”
“Whoever the tamer is, he’s gotta be a massive chicken. Slimy bastard.”
“Sending his familiars to do the dirty work while he sits back to watch the show.”
“Whoever the bastard is...”
“He’s going to pay for it.”
Resentful murmurs rose within the jam-packed cell.
“Shut up! We’re talking!” shouted the man who had already been in the cell before the latest arrival. The rest of the men were silenced by this. “Sorry about that. These guys got nabbed before they knew what happened too. Frustrating, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, that really pissed me off... Wait. I get it? Or...I don’t get it? Why am I...? I’ve been caught. But I ran. I...” The newcomer’s speech rapidly deteriorated, drawing the attention of everyone in the cell. Beads of sweat trickled down his face.
“Hey, calm down!”
Without reacting to any voices, the newcomer spoke even more rapidly: “I hear it! The strange sound! The voice! I was running as fast as I can, but the view wasn’t changing! I realized I was running in circles, then in the end... There was a kid.”
“A kid?”
“That’s right. He stood alone in the dark forest and told me, ‘I’m impressed you made it out. But this is the end of the line.’ Then everything went dark. Dark!” the newcomer screamed.
“Hey, just... No way. He passed out.”
Other inmates joined in.
“What happened to him?”
“Something about a kid. Is the kid the tamer?”
“Even if he’d seen the tamer, it wasn’t some kid alone in the woods. It’s too dangerous to work alone.”
“So the kid had nothing to do with whoever got us?”
“The kid might not even be human.”
“What did this guy see...?”
“What caught us?”
Ponder as they did, the bandits would never get an answer...
After several bandit gangs made similar testimony, a rumor began to circulate in the area that an Undead child, killed by bandits when he was human, controlled monsters to drag bandits into the ground and kill them.
It would take some time before the rumor reached the child responsible for it.
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