The next several hours turned the village of Yoslan into something resembling a military campaign conducted entirely by children who had somehow been given sticks and the freedom to hate people twice their size.
Lennox had barely made it past the village square before Tovin appeared on top of a wooden fence, pointed his stick sword toward him, and shouted as though announcing the beginning of a historic battle.
“He is our mortal enemy! Seize him! Slaughter him! Rip his heart out! And we will feast on it!”
The children answered with a gleeful roar and charged:
“KILL!”
“KILL!”
“KILL!”
“KILL!”
“KILL!”
Lennox stared at the incoming horde, then immediately ran. “You crazy bastards!”
The children chased him through the village with sticks raised overhead, several of them taking shortcuts through gardens while others climbed fences and tried to intercept him from the sides.
Lennox leaned over a bench, ducked beneath a clothesline, scrambled across a stack of firewood, and nearly collided with a chicken before recovering his footing and sprinting toward the other end of the village, where Tovin was already waiting with several children positioned behind him like a tiny execution squad.
Lennox wheeled around so abruptly that dirt scattered up high beneath his feet, only to find another group coming from the opposite direction, and for the next few minutes he was reduced to running circles around houses while children laughed, shrieked orders, and smacked the ground behind him with their wooden weapons.
‘These damn demons…!’
One little girl even climbed onto a barrel and announced that Lennox had been cornered, which would have been more convincing if she had not immediately slipped off the barrel and landed in a pile of hay.
Lennox still took the opportunity to escape. “HAHA! DUMBASS!” He pointed and laughed at the kid.
‘These kids are insane! I know this isn’t how a future War Paladin should act, but they might stab me for real! And I don’t hurt children! No wonder their parents wanted a break! With the rumors of a coalition forming against the kingdom of Kalhalla and these demon children…. I can’t decide which is worse!’
That principle became increasingly difficult to maintain when Tovin began organizing ambushes. A group of boys distracted Lennox by challenging him to a duel while two girls crept behind him carrying ropes, and when Lennox finally realized what they were doing, he jumped over a fence with the rope snapping through empty air behind his legs.
Another child hid beneath a cart and grabbed at his ankle as he passed, earning a startled yelp before Lennox hopped away and pointed accusingly at the cart as though it had personally betrayed him.
The children thought this was hilarious, and Tovin eventually declared that Lennox was becoming too difficult to capture and assigned three younger children to follow him around shouting insults until he became irritated enough to make a mistake.
“Scatter! Venture out! Set up more traps! He must die! We will hang his corpse for the crows to eat!”
Esme’s side was hardly more peaceful. She had somehow become the village’s unofficial disciplinary officer after catching several children throwing stones at recruits, and her method of correcting them consisted largely of putting the butt of her scythe into the dirt while delivering increasingly ridiculous threats.
“Put that stick down.”
The boy holding it stared at her. “No.”
“Okay. Then I’m gonna tell your mother you tried to murder a Paladin.”
“Y-You can’t!”
“She left you here with us. Who do you think she’s gonna believe?”
The boy slowly lowered the stick, “Fine. Whatever.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Another child tried to sneak behind her, but Esme caught him by the back of his shirt without even turning around. “And where do you think you’re going?”
“To get my weapon.”
“You mean that twig?”
“It’s a sword!”
“Fine. Take your garbage sword and sit over there before I turn it into toothpicks.”
The children hated listening to her, which apparently meant they enjoyed gathering around her even more.
Esme spent much of the afternoon threatening them, chasing them away from dangerous areas, confiscating sticks, returning the sticks, confiscating them again when the children immediately started dueling with them, and loudly questioning why nobody had warned her that babysitting involved this much running.
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Archie, meanwhile, had somehow become the only person in the village whom the children approached voluntarily without trying to attack.
She sat among them beneath the shade of a house, listening to their stories, fixing a broken wooden toy, and occasionally helping one of the younger children tie their hair back.
Her calm nature made her an easy target for curiosity, particularly because her long green hair attracted constant attention.
Most of the children had never encountered a Parley before, since many came from kingdoms where Parley settlements were uncommon, and they had no reason to suspect that the quiet girl sitting among them belonged to a race that humans often feared and hated at the same time.
Archie kept her ears covered beneath her hair for exactly that reason.
Parley looked remarkably similar to humans, with the obvious differences being their pointed, somewhat jagged ears and unusual pupils, which could become extremely thin or appear completely white or black depending on the individual.
A wizard’s spell had altered Archie’s eye color enough to conceal the most obvious clue, yet Esme had noticed something unusual about her anyway, which had quietly impressed Archie.
The children, thankfully, were far more interested in touching Archie’s hair than examining her eyes. One boy tugged gently on a lock and asked whether it was naturally that green, while another asked why she always kept her ears covered.
Archie calmly smiled. “They become cold easily.”
The boy accepted this explanation immediately, saying “Oh.”
Another child said. “That makes sense.”
Hallwin had decided the best method of babysitting was apparently military training.
He gathered a group of boys in the village square and had them perform push-ups beside him while explaining proper breathing technique, then took them around the village for several laps until half of them collapsed into the grass complaining about their legs.
Hallwin kept running anyway, encouraging them with the seriousness of a veteran commander leading soldiers into battle, and eventually several children began chanting his name while he ran.
When one boy complained that his arms hurt, Hallwin crouched beside him and gave him a solemn speech about perseverance, honor, and building strength for the future.
“You can do it! If I can do it, you can do it!” Hallwin exclaimed. “Strength his all you need in life!”
The kid answered while panting, “Huh..?! What do you mean if you can do it I can do it? You’re a large blob of rocks! Of course you can do it! I’m like a feather!”
A recruit passing nearby stopped to watch. “Are you seriously making them train?”
Hallwin nodded. “It builds character. With the incoming war, they’ll need to be ready.”
The recruit looked at the exhausted children. “They’re eleven.”
“That is why we begin early. I killed a hundred men when I was eleven.”
“So how did you lose to that brat earlier? That Lennox guy.”
“He’s…an anamoly.”
“There’s no telling what he’s gone through.”
Elsewhere, another recruit had attempted to play a game with the children and somehow ended up trapped inside a wooden shed while twelve kids sat outside refusing to let him leave until he admitted defeat.
Another recruit had been convinced to participate in a pretend monster hunt and spent twenty minutes crawling through bushes while the children followed behind him, laughing because they had secretly moved the toy monster somewhere else.
A third recruit had agreed to teach swordsmanship and discovered that his students were far more interested in hitting him with padded sticks than learning anything; Every attempt at responsible childcare seemed to end with another adult being humiliated.
By the time several hours had passed, the afternoon sun had climbed high above Yoslan, and the entire group of recruits had been reduced to exhausted bodies scattered across the grass and packed earth around the village.
Lennox laid flat on his back with one arm over his forehead, chest rising and falling as he stared into the sky.
“Finally…”
Esme had collapsed nearby with her scythe beside her, while several recruits had sat up against walls, benches, fences, and whatever other surfaces were sturdy enough to support them.
Even Hallwin had finally dropped onto a wooden step, his chest rising and dropping after spending hours running around with children.
Archie remained seated nearby, somehow still looking as peaceful as she had when the day began.
Lennox groaned. “Screw this. I should’ve left when I had the chance.”
“So eager to leave, aren’t you? You looked like you were enjoying yourself.” Archie said to him.
“Definitely not. I was being chased, and I swear if they would’ve caught up to me they would’ve ripped me to shreds. You looked like you were having fun, they were all over you.”
“It was a valiant effort, nonetheless, but you are strong to prevail through it all. Good job.”
“Tch. Thanks I guess.”
‘I don’t NEED YOUR PRAISE, WOMAN! I NEED TO ESCAPE THIS HELL.’
Hallwin nodded, “Yes. It was a mighty effort to survive such a horde of small beasts.”
“Oh!” Esme said sitting up, like she completely forgot something. “Shit. They have to eat. We haven’t fed them all day.”
A recruit lying beside a fence raised one hand. “Let them eat the rocks and sticks they use as gambling money.”
Ever since the recruit said that, Hallwin immediately looked horrified. “That would surely hurt them, we cannot have that. We must pass this trial. For honor.”
“It was a joke, muscle man. Relax. Damn, such a tryhard.”
Esme rose and stretched her arms, clearly done with all of this and wanted to get this out of the way. “Let’s go get some food then. Come on, Lennox.”
Lennox barely managed to turn his head. “No….”
But Esme grabbed both of his legs. “I’ll just drag you. I’m not going with anyone else. Since we’re rivals, we need to do rival stuff.”
She started dragging him across the dirt, and Lennox moaned, “Nooo…stop…leave me be….Wait no, yeah, take me. Take me away from these beasts!”
Several recruits laughed as Lennox disappeared down the road behind Esme.
…
A few minutes later, the village was far behind them, and the two had entered the woods several miles from Yoslan.
Trees surrounded them in every direction, their branches blocking much of the afternoon sun while leaves covered the forest floor.
Lennox stood with his sword h in his hand, the seven white runes glowing along the blade, while Esme held her scythe across her shoulder and looked between the trees.
“We’re hunting then?” Lennox asked.
“Yep. Don’t tell me you’re scared. This is the perfect time to test out these temporary weapons Nepherel gave us.”
Lennox lowered his eyes toward the blade, and thought:
‘Nepherel said something about how these weapons were a symbol of our soul or something. I don’t know, he said a bunch of crazy shit about it and I almost fell asleep during his lore dump. These weapons won’t last forever, it’s up to us to keep them stable, and each rune on the blade is a different skill the blade has. Overuse will destroy it, but Nepherel said if it gets destroyed in our usage, then it’s our fault. Oh well, this is good then. Now I can really show what I’m made of. After all, all I know how to do is fight.’
“Let’s see what these things can do.”