Chapter 9, Episode 29: Goodbye for Now, Korumi
I yelled out as the impact of—what should I call it?—the Glen-powered Pilebunker not only sent the metal slime nail into the rhino’s skull up to the head, but rattled the rhino’s entire body, tearing up the vines that restrained it. The rhino’s dying bleat was drowned out by the deafening sound of adamantite-meets-metal until it was hardly audible. With one last quiver, the leader rhino collapsed powerlessly, sinking halfway into the mud puddle.
I’d blinked to solid ground just before the collapse when I noticed pain shuddering through my arms. The hammer never hit my hands that held the nail. Still, even with the armor of physical energy coating them, Glen’s hammer-fall was so powerful that it fractured the bones in my arms.
“Did I break your arms?” Glen asked. “I thought you let go, last second.”
“I held it until the tip broke through the skull. Well, if it’s only this, I can heal it without much trouble. No harm done.”
“You can heal yourself too? After the hordes of Undead we’ve dealt with, you’re starting to look like a zombie yourself,” Glen said.
“I get what you’re trying to say.”
“It’s a compliment, dude.”
Despite being compared to a walking bag of rotting flesh, we’d pulled off the kill. The metal slimes had made it out too—thanks to the protection afforded to them by Hardening and using physical energy to boost their durability. There was no sign of other monsters either—mission completed.
Could I have dealt with the leader rhino alone? I wondered. Maybe if I’d stabbed its eyeball or the inside of its mouth with the bloody slime spear—anything else would have been useless. Glen also said that this rhino felt as tough as an S-rank monster, and I knew it was made more dangerous by the doping hornet sting. It might be prudent for me to work on improving my damage output in case I’d have to deal with a threat like this solo.
“Oh?”
“Hey, guys,” I greeted the mother rhino—completely regenerated now—as she approached us with her calf in tow. They didn’t make a move to attack us. Instead, the mother reared up on her now healed hind legs, raising her front legs into the air. The juvenile followed suit.
“What are they doing?” Glen asked.
“That’s their way of surrendering, I think.” It stuck out to me during my research because I wondered at first if they’d misinterpreted a gesture of making themselves look big and intimidating. This had to be the gesture a cannonball rhino made when it lost a duel against another. “Because we took out the big one?” I asked the mother and son. “Did Korumi tell you?”
Of course, they didn’t understand my questions—the juvenile’s legs started to tremble from the effort of holding up his considerable weight with his hind legs.
“Tame first, questions later,” Glen said.
“Right. There’s no communicating with them otherwise.” Considering the mother rhino was an Undead, I decided to tame the juvenile—and it went off without a hitch. “You’re okay being my familiar?” I asked. The rhino confirmed with a cute trumpet. “Then, I’d like to return to the manor. And we can let Korumi know what happened.” I steeled myself for the next question. “Will you come with me?” The calf acquiesced again, and the mother looked ready to follow me without a fuss. A stream of emotions too complex to describe came through our bond—maybe he knew what was about to happen.
“Hey, Ryoma. If we don’t pack the big one away now, it’s going to get eaten all up by monsters. How do we split it?” Glen asked.
“Well... The cannonball rhino is all yours. Just let me retrieve the metal slimes,” I said.
“I might have finished it off, but you’re the one who made an opening for it.”
“If I had to guess, there’s no way to split it up, anyway. A normal blade won’t pierce its hide,” I said.
“Oh, got it... Yeah, it’s not worth the hassle,” Glen agreed.
“It’s too tricky to cut, even if I use physical energy. The goblins could never sort it out. Like one of your buyers said, it’d be better to take it back uncut than shred it to nothing.”
The hunt wouldn’t have gone so easily if I’d been alone. Not only did I accomplish everything I set out to do, I gained a familiar out of it—that was pay enough for me.
“Then I’ll hold on to it. The vines are all loose. Can you take care of the mud?”
I siphoned the water out of the mud with magic. While I collected the big metal slimes, I dug out the leader rhino’s carcass. The calf watched quietly while Glen packed it away. There was no telling how he felt about the leader rhino, his former pack leader and the killer of his mother and packmates. At some instinctual level, the young rhino seemed to understand the law of the jungle—survival of the fittest.
“It’s all packed!” Glen called.
“Got it. Let’s head back to the manor,” I said.
With the mother and son rhino, we started back towards the manor where Korumi awaited. Well, Korumi was the manor, so...
I entertained myself with useless thoughts like that, until we reached Korumi waiting behind the gate of the manor. “Welcome back,” he greeted us.
“Hey, Korumi. We took down the leader rhino and brought the calf back,” I said.
“Yeah...” Even without a face, Korumi looked obviously sad.
“Korumi. This mother and son can’t stay together forever, but I think we can give them a little more time,” I said, not knowing if this really was the best thing for the rhinos or Korumi.
Picking up what I was putting down, Korumi’s face-shaped outline flicked up to me and bobbed up and down.
“Can you wait inside the manor?” I asked the two rhinos, and they went to stay with Korumi.
“Where are you going?” Glen asked.
“The doping hornet hive should be somewhere near the pond—I’m going to take care of that. It’ll be nothing but a liability if I leave it alone, especially since I will be using the village as a base of operations. Besides, I may get in the way of their goodbye.” I gestured to the rhinos.
“True... I’ll go hunt for something, then.” Glen ran off in the opposite direction of the pond.
An hour later, I found the hive. “That was pretty easy.” I’d expected the search for a tiny hive in the vast Sea of Trees to take much longer. All I did was follow the circular path of destruction that the leader rhino had carved through the woods. At the opposite end of the circle from the village, the oil-drum-sized hive hung from the branches of a particularly tall heatwood tree. Climbing that high would be an arduous task, and I couldn’t afford the risk of getting stung. A Lightning barrier could kill the bees the same way as the gluttonous flies...but it’d be better to let the slimes handle this one.
From the Dimension Home, I brought out the spider slimes and a big sticky slime. I had the spider slimes weave webs all around the hive, layer after layer, so not even a single hornet could escape. Once the webs were fortified, it was time to go on the offensive. I asked the big sticky slime to slither up the tree and encase the entire hive. Naturally, the doping hornets moved to defend their hive, trying to sting venom into the attacker from the inside and out. As long as it didn’t absorb the hornets or let the stingers make contact with its core, though, it wouldn’t be harmed. In fact, every time a stinger met its body, it used its sticky solution to capture and encase the insect without absorbing it. The entrapped hornets suffocated in no time. Once the entire hive was enclosed by the sticky slime without leaving any air holes, the doping hornets within the hive also suffocated within thirty minutes. There were some hornets that tried to escape the encasement, but they found themselves tangled up in the spiderwebs. A few hornets might have escaped, but they were native to the forest, anyway. There’d be no way to exterminate them.
“Good enough for now,” I said. “At least I verified this works.”
I returned to the manor, having collected the dead doping hornets and their hive. This time, the two rhinos stood alongside Korumi to greet me at the gate. The mother rhino loafed on the ground, her legs folded, her calf rubbing up next to her. But both sets of rhino eyes were on me. Apparently, they were all waiting for me here.
“You’re ready?” I asked the rhinos, and they each answered with a trumpet.
“They are,” Korumi answered for them. “She says, ‘Thank you. Please look after him.’”
The mother and calf rubbed their necks together one last time, and the mother rhino quietly vanished—like she was never there at all.
“Did she move on?” I asked.
“Yes. She’s not here anymore. It’s different from humans,” Korumi said, sounding at peace with it.
The rhino calf stood and walked over to me—another trumpet.
“He’s glad he’s your familiar,” Korumi interpreted.
I crouched down to eye level. “Likewise.”
With another toot, the calf rubbed his neck against mine, just like he did to his mother. At his young age, the calf already accepted that his mother was gone, and decided to start walking on his own.
As his tamer, I’d be the one to watch over him—his new pack leader.
***
“You’re leaving already?” Korumi asked, the day after I tamed the rhino calf.
“Now that I’ve done everything... I’m not in a rush, but I can’t stay forever,” I said. Even though Glen and I had been living here pretty comfortably, we were still in a danger zone. If I delayed my return for too long, those who were waiting for me back home would think I’d died—that wouldn’t even be the worst of it. If they decided to send out a search party, that could lead to casualties all on its own. “Don’t give me that look—or vibe, or whatever. It’s okay, I’m coming back. I told you I can come back much faster with Space magic, didn’t I?”
“Yeah...”
On my trek through the forest, I’d left stone slimes at equal distances to act like guideposts for a return trip and emergency exit. I left each of them a jar I’d crafted with Earth magic stuffed with rocks—a food source that would last them for a long time. I couldn’t blink from outside of the forest directly to Korumi, but blinking from stone slime to stone slime should let me visit the village and exit the forest again in a single day. I’d explained all that to Korumi and I even let him read my memories to show I meant it—still, he must have felt lonely.
The goblins were still in the Dimension Home too. Korumi could provide ample shelter for them, but they’d soon run out of food and water, which wasn’t a concern for Korumi or the Undead. There was still a lot of work to do before the goblins could move in.
I’ll be back sooner than later... If only there’s something to keep him busy in the meantime, I thought. Then, I looked at Korumi again. When we first met, he’d looked like Tabuchi. He’d appeared to me as the former village elder after that, before settling on the faceless silhouette. “I know. What if you try shape-shifting?”
“Shape-shifting?”
“In my homeland, there’s something called an ‘avatar.’ You take a bunch of preset parts and combine them in different ways to create the perfect look that you want. In games, people often try to make a copy of themselves to heighten immersion... People really go hard with these customizations.” Plenty of players spent hours before the game even started. “Even if this is your default look, you don’t have to keep that form all the time, do you? It could kill some time until I come back, to try and make your own look instead of just borrowing them from memories.”
“I’ll try,” Korumi said. Reading details from my memory, he shifted from a silhouette to a toddler. Even though he understood the concept of customization, it’d take him some more practice to work in some originality. Surely based on what I looked like as a kid, he had black hair and black eyes, wearing a child-sized tracksuit. Looking at him, it was easy to imagine that might have been what I looked like, had I existed in this world at that age.
“It’s like you’re my little brother,” I said.
“Brother? Brother!” Korumi bounced all around, twisting this way and that to try and look at himself, while I moved out of the way. I wasn’t sure being my brother was such a joyous occasion, but I’m glad he was happy about it.
“I promise you, Korumi, I’ll come back here, as soon as I can. Will you hold down the fort for me until I do?” I asked.
“Okay...! When you come, I’ll show you my avatar!”
“That’s a promise.” I held out my right pinkie—he knew what it meant. I took his tiny pinkie in mine and pinkie-swore. Then, we smiled and said our goodbyes for now.
Then, I joined Glen, who’d waited for me a little ways outside the gate. “Ready?” he asked.
“Thanks for waiting. He let me go in the end.”
“Kids will be kids. He’s not too fussy,” Glen pointed out.
“I guess you’re right. I will be back, very soon.” I turned around to see Korumi watching me across the open gate. Waving at him, I called out, “See you soon!”
“He really looks like a normal kid now...” Glen called to Korumi too. “I’m coming back to hunt when I run out of money! Let me bunk in one of your rooms, will you?!”
Korumi kept waving as fast as he could wave his little hand, a reassuring smile on his face.
To keep my promises both to Korumi and those waiting for me beyond the forest, I hurried to make my journey out of the Sea of Trees.
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login