Bloodstained Blade-Chapter 30 - An Interesting Offer

True to his word, they made plans to leave on the following day. However, on their last day in the city, it was not Ivarr’s friends that held him up, or even the woman that he spent his nights with. The blade had not bothered to learn her name because it didn’t think that the names of prostitutes mattered.

Instead, it was the army itself that stopped him as he was heading out. Both of them briefly worried that they’d discovered the young man’s secret. The Ebon Blade could feel that fear coursing through its wielder as the lieutenant invited him to sit down for a drink, but both of them were way off base. Instead, they just wanted information.

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“I hear you’re a young monster hunter in the making,” the serious man said.

He had a touch of gray in his mustache and was obviously a veteran. If he’d been a few years younger, then the blade would have considered him to be the ideal wielder. At least, that was the case until it noticed the double griffon in the man’s coat of arms. Something about that symbol soured its previous impression and left it hoping the man would choke to death on the half-finished meal in front of him.

“I’m getting there,” Ivarr admitted with more caginess than humility. “But I’ve got a long way to go yet.”

“Nonsense,” the lieutenant said. “The bounty office gave me your name personally. Old man Naves is rarely wrong about these things. Said he’s surprised someone as young as you could take down an owlbear without a scratch.”

“Well, without a scratch is a bit generous,” Ivarr answered, rubbing his head nervously. “I was just out in the field for weeks. I just healed a bit before I got back, that’s all.”

“Well, either way, I think you’d make a hell of a scout,” the officer said, taking a bite of sausage. “What do you think? We’ll be moving in force soon into the mountains to clear out any lingering beastmen with a punitive force so they can never threaten Kalraka again. I could use a man like you. Hell, I could use three, but we take what we can get.”

Ivarr hesitated, blindsided by the offer. So, the blade stepped up. Ask him what it pays.

“That sounds, uhm… interesting…” Ivarr said. The blade could sense that his first impulse had been to agree and try to get his friends on board as well, which would have been a terrible decision. He had no idea how poorly the militaries of most lands paid, and as a lightly armed scout, he’d be lucky to get a tenth of what he was making on his own. “What would a man like me be worth to you?”

“Well…” the officer hesitated, taking a drink from his frothy beer to buy a moment to think. “For someone of your obvious talent, I think that four silver marks a week should be sufficient.”

Both Ivarr and the blade quickly did the math and came to the same conclusion. Four silvers a week wasn’t quite a gold a month. It was a lot of money, but far less than what he’d made on his last trip. He’d come back with nearly two and a half gold in three weeks, which meant that this would be a two-thirds pay cut at least.

The surface thoughts on Ivarr’s mind flicked from how light his coin purse was now to the busty barmaid and back again as his choice solidified. Suddenly, the blade was happier than ever that he hadn’t killed that woman.

“I’m sorry,” Ivarr said finally. “I appreciate your generous offer, but I think I’ll keep doing what I’m doing for now. If that changes, I’ll ask for you at the bounty agent.”

“Just like that?” the lieutenant balked. “No haggling? Nothing?”

It only occurred to Ivarr that he could haggle in that moment. The blade had known that, but it knew he’d never get that number high enough to make it worthwhile. The only real advantage to such a switch would be the food, but since the blade couldn’t taste that, it didn’t really care.

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Perhaps finding a way to get its wielder killed so that it could find a way to trade up to someone with real power and authority would be. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t help it get the greater monster souls it craved. It only had four now, and it needed forty-six more before it considered any change in tactics. So, for better or worse, Ivarr was growing on it. He was a young, dumb kid, but he was earnest and talented.

The two talked a little while longer, and as a consolation prize, Ivarr offered to trade some current information on mountains for dinner and a few coppers. The lieutenant accepted that. There was no reason he shouldn’t; it was almost as good as getting the scout himself and at a much lower cost. Ivarr was too young and guileless to understand that, though, and the blade opted not to correct him. Instead, it listened to the conversation while the two of them ate and drank while poring over maps before its wielder was on its way.

“Do you think I should try to kill that ogre this time?” the young man asked when they were alone and well outside of the east gate.

I think that fighting an ogre is the very last thing you should do, the blade answered after a moment’s consideration. The thing lives to eat orcs and other similarly sized creatures. How do you think you would fare against it when you struggle to fight the things it eats regularly?

“Good point,” Ivarr admitted. “But how would you fight such a thing?”

With magic, from far away, the blade said, half as a joke, as it remembered the way that Baraga moved as he took down his first dragon. When fighting something similar to you or against multiple opponents, you must not over-commit for flexibility. When you are fighting something that is several times stronger than you will ever be, though, you must go for a single decisive strike that will end the fight before it can end you.

“Does an ogre even have such a weak spot?” its wielder asked skeptically.

All things have such a weak spot. Even dragons do, the blade explained. In the case of a dragon, the thin rear wall of the eye socket or the ear allows for a strike directly into the brain, but for ogres, there are more options. There’s the heart, the spine, and the tendons of the foot and leg. They have the same vulnerabilities as you do, they can just crush you into paste before you can exploit them.

The two of them spent the day talking about anatomy that day as they began to climb the foothills once more. It was only in this conversation that it realized it had dramatically overestimated what its wielder knew about anatomy.

Ivarr knew that things had some vital points, like hearts and eyes, and that if you struck at them, you might kill them, but that was about it. Organs, blood loss, and everything else was a complete mystery to the young man.

“You stab things enough times, and they die,” he said simply. “What else is there to know?”

There were many, many other things to know, so the blade started with the most vascular organs, like the liver, and then worked its way out from there. The two of them spent a great deal of time discussing the best ways to penetrate the rib cage, and then they went on to discuss the fragility of joints. The blade didn’t bother to try to explain the differences between what it felt like to slice through ligament or a tendon, and other things he could never hope to understand. Otherwise, though, he did his best to explain things to its wielder in the hope it would make his strikes that much more decisive.

When a trio of beast men attacked them near dusk, they even did a little dissection after Ivarr made quick work of them so that he could see what it was he was striking at. That’s when he finally understood what the blade was trying to teach it.

It was one thing to know what a main artery was, but it was another thing to see it cut with intention and watch the target collapse almost in an instant.

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” Ivarr asked, both grateful and annoyed by the revelations, as he sat by a small campfire and pulled his cloak around him tighter.

Honestly? The blade asked. I thought you knew. I thought this was common knowledge.

“Maybe if you’re a veteran or a butcher?” the young man guessed, “But the only anatomy I ever learned was how to make kegs and barrels.”

The blade didn’t comment on that. It didn’t need to. Instead, it wondered how it knew these things. Did I always know them, or did I learn them through combat, it wondered.

There was no doubt that it saw the world differently than the man that wielded it. It felt the impact of flesh and bone along its length. It knew the difference between a mortal blow and a flesh wound just by the feeling of the flesh it slid through. Still, the gap was clearly an oversight because of its assumptions, and it would have to correct it if the boy was ever to reach his full potential.