Born a Monster

316 216 – Mason’s Nightmare

Plotline: Main

Type: Social

We put up tents, but the mosquitos still got to us in our sleep. Remember how I almost never bothered talking about them with my nice level two skin and scales?

Yeah, humans don’t have those.

We slept where we had to. It was something called a forced march, a mixture of jogging and marching. Then, at the end of the day, we put up floorless tents, threw our mats on the ground, and ourselves on the mats.

“You complain about very little, Ping.” one of the soldiers said.

“Would complaining remove whatever I would complain about?” I asked.

“Ah-ah. Very true.” Then, in a more conspiratorial tone, “It gets cold at night. Mang has the second guard shift tonight. You could come to my tent.”

“Why would I do that, rather than sleep?” I asked.

.....

“Fine.” he said. “I shall come to yours.”

“I don’t understand.” I said.

“It will all become clear tonight, Ping.” he promised.

And it was, when he entered my entered my tent with a knife at the ready.

Hint to would be assailants: don’t tell your prey when you are coming, especially if there is a posted duty roster they can check and verify.

“Slumber.” I cast at him.

“You little shit.” he whispered. “As if such a magic would stop ME?” He tried to leap on me, but left his belly exposed.

Might rating five means your unarmed blows do twelve damage. Base. My punch to his gut counted as a yellow critical, or double that. The air exploded out of him with a “hwuf”, and I got my hands around his neck before he could breathe in.

And then, I had a dilemma. Yes, what he had done was illegal. Yes, he was still alive. However, for me to even lay a hand on him was illegal, because black band.

For a time, I considered the logistics of just eating the evidence. The truth was, I just wouldn’t be able to digest him fast enough.

A quick look outside showed that our guards were awake by the fire, talking to each other to stay awake. Okay, so some stealthy options remained open to me.

Yeah, I didn’t want the sort of questions that would be asked if someone knew I could rapidly overpower a man roughly half and again my size.

Oh, hadn’t I mentioned that? My human form made me look in the ten to twelve range, and the top of my head was just about high enough off the ground to hit the top on someone’s rib cage.

My escorts had already taken note of the sheer amount of food I ate, even though I supplemented my income by hunting at night. So yes, it was possible to get past the guards, I just didn’t think I could do it while hauling an adult around.

In retrospect, I should have tried. Instead, I waited until the guards went on patrol, and under magical Shroud, dropped his unconscious and mostly naked body (complete with knife) by the back side of Xiu Ying’s tent. She was a female swordswoman, more than fit and hale enough to have beaten him unconscious. When he was discovered, it still created a stir, but none of that traced back to me.

I caught him looking at me after that, but we left him behind at the next village doctor.

Either he never said anything, or nobody believed him, or other circumstances that led to nobody in the company asking me about it.

I suppose some of you might not be up on your military terms. A squad or squadron is roughly ten soldiers and their leading sergeant, although the number can go down to five or up to fifteen, as replacement soldiers became available and depleted squadrons merged to make complete ones.

A company is made from between two and eight squadrons, nominally four or five. Being classified as light infantry, our company had five. The company also had an officer, who had their own command squadron of elite soldiers and promoted sergeants. Not champions, but also not your typical soldiers.

Three companies made up a platoon, and four platoons a regiment.

Mind you, I hadn’t seen anything to indicate organized units above the company scale at this time, and what I had indicated that they had trouble coordinating on the field.

In any case, with two soldiers per tent, with sergeants and officers each having their own, we had over forty sleeping tents. So it wasn’t a large camp, but it was large enough for such things to happen. And they may have, but none that I was aware of.

We made the main camp in three days of force marching, spent a day there getting various papers signed and having two of our squadrons abducted whole before being cleared to head to what had been Rice Bridge.

The new site looked like some idiot’s layout for a crafting district. Smiths, masons, carpenters, each just set up wherever there was room. To say it was noisy or smelly would be an understatement. Far to the south, southeast, and east, small camps of military stood watch. To the northwest...

If a giant had carved a section from the cliff face, diagonally with a large knife, he could not have made so smooth a cut. There were drag marks, where the missing rock and the earth above it had slid into the crevasse, but otherwise, the rock had been without blemish or scar.

Had been.

Over the intervening weeks, detritus had gathered around and below what looked like the base of a new bridge, half and again as wide as the original Rice Bridge. It looked horrible; the stones were not uniform, some not even level with their neighbors. The scaffolding around and beneath the stonework looked rough, sometimes splintered or with shattered planks.

“There it is, your home for the next six months. What do you think, Ping?”

“I think, honored elder, that this is going to take more than six months, if we can keep it from falling wholesale into the ocean below.”

The nearby soldiers laughed. I tried not to cry. Both the Carpenter and the Industrialist in me were just ... offended by how they were doing things. In the winding spaces between work camps, carts struggled to pass each other, workers hauled various resources toward the bridge (or sometimes to other camps), and a very few overworked soldiers tried to enforce rules of priority that nobody seemed to want to listen to.

“How do I know... honored elder, to which of these work camps am I being assigned?”

“Over here.” he said, leading me to a blue pavilion tent, with smaller blue tents attached at either side.

And there, my escorts abandoned me. I honestly believe that I could have just wandered away, if I’d thought of doing so. There just wasn’t time.

If I’d thought the work camp was disorganized, the matter of getting a sleeping tent and supplies was worse. At least it was easy enough to get food; I just made sure that each of the four nearby cooking tents issued me a wooden meal pass.

It wasn’t balanced nutrition, but I noticed that my System never warned me about the gingivitis or skin rashes that others seemed to suffer from. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The second tent I was assigned to actually had an available bunk, the top one. I was told where to be at tomorrow’s dawn to meet my team, and left to my own devices. Fool that I was, I learned where to go to sign for a backpack full of carpenter’s tools.

There was an hour on either side of dinner where the noises of hammering and sawing and such were replaced by the sounds of people making their way to and from the work camps. And then, the night shift kicked into gear, lit by oil lamps and lanterns.

It seemed a small miracle that people even got to their work stations, but night shift seemed as dedicated to the work as the day shift, and as much getting into each other’s way.

I had no clue where the water for the bathing tents came from, but everyone coming back had to pass through one to be admitted back into camp. The early people got clean water; the others... well, let’s just say that while everyone bathed, not everyone was clean.

And, with limited time to get their evening meals before the tents ran out of food, the incentive wasn’t exactly on taking long baths.

In the morning, I learned that I didn’t need my carpenter’s tools; I had been assigned to a laundry team. With great force of will, I reminded myself that this was, technically, the enemy camp. I wasn’t here to do a good job, and shouldn’t do any job.

It was simple enough work; we shredded a bar of soap, added scented oils, and poured in water of dubious cleanliness on top of that. We stirred and boiled the mix, upended a laundry bag into the cauldron, stirred and boiled that for an hour, dumped the clothes out into a wheelbarrow with holes in the tub, strung the clothes out to dry, and put them back into the bag for pickup. Sometimes, the right clothes ended up in the right bag, and our clients went away happy.

That lasted two days before soldiers came to arrest me for dereliction of duty.