Chapter 44: Village of the Beastmen
Armored Dragon Calendar Year 417 – Rudeus, Age 10
[Claude POV]
"Embrace the heat, you cowards!"
My voice echoed through the makeshift smithy. The beast-tribe apprentices flinched but obeyed, stepping closer to the forge despite the sweat already dripping from their fur.
I had constructed this building myself. Hauled stone and metal up the massive trees where the village perched.
Created a workspace that would have seemed primitive by Earth standards, yet was more than sufficient for teaching basic techniques.
The apprentices were a mixed group. Rejects, mostly.
Warriors who had failed their combat trials. Young people who didn't fit the standard molds their culture expected.
They had potential—the kind that others had overlooked, that didn't manifest in obvious ways.
"Watch the temperature," I instructed, pulling a piece of iron from the coals. "Too hot and the metal becomes brittle."
"Too cold and it won't shape properly."
I demonstrated, hammer striking metal in precise patterns. Clang. Clang. Clang.
Showers of sparks filled the air with each blow.
"Your turn."
The nearest apprentice took the hammer with trembling hands. His first strike was clumsy. Off-center.
"Again."
His second was better. His third was almost acceptable.
"Stop." I took the hammer back and examined the work piece. Found the flaw I had expected.
"You're compensating for your weakness. Using force to make up for lack of precision."
"I'm trying—"
"Trying isn't enough." I met his eyes.
"In the real world, a flawed weapon gets people killed. Your weakness becomes someone else's death."
The harshness was deliberate.
These apprentices needed to understand that craftsmanship wasn't a hobby. It was a responsibility.
Other timelines, other apprentices, other weapons that had failed at critical moments because the smith had been careless.
I pushed the memory aside and focused on the present.
"Again. From the beginning."
The apprentice took a breath—controlling frustration rather than expressing it, which was itself an improvement—and started over.
His name was Tana. Younger than most of the others, still growing into his hands. He had the spatial instinct that came naturally to the tree-dwelling tribes, an understanding of angles that translated well to both bladework and, apparently, to smithing.
What he lacked was patience with himself.
The first strike landed clean. The second adjusted correctly.
The third revealed the problem again—pressure compensating for where precision should have been.
"Stop." I moved beside him, close enough to observe his grip. "Your right hand thinks it's doing this alone. Your left is along for the ride."
"I don't understand—"
"Your left hand guides. Your right executes. Both, or it doesn't work." I repositioned his hands without asking permission. "Try it."
The difference in the next strike was subtle. But it was there.
"Better," I said. Accurate, not generous. "Again."
By the time I called the session, Tana had stopped repeating the same mistake. Not a good smith—not yet. But someone learning how to learn, which was more immediately useful.
I dismissed them and began cleanup. Banked the forge, put away tools, examined the day's output with the specific attention that separated adequate from trustworthy work. Three pieces I would use. Four I would melt down. One that genuinely surprised me—a cutting edge made by a warrior woman no one had expected to adapt this quickly. Real instinct in the angle.
I set it aside. She would hear about it tomorrow.
[Rudeus POV]
Two weeks into the rainy season, I discovered the Dedoldia possessed unique sound-based magic.
The revelation came during a training session. A young warrior demonstrated a technique that created localized sonic waves.
The attack was invisible, unavoidable, and devastatingly effective.
"Teach me," I said immediately.
Gustav agreed. He spent three days demonstrating the fundamentals.
The breathing patterns, the vocalization techniques, the way mana needed to flow through specific pathways.
I practiced obsessively. Tried every approach I could imagine.
And failed. Completely.
"It requires the special vocal cords of the Dedoldia race," Gustav finally explained. "Humans simply can't produce the necessary frequencies."
The limitation stung. For someone who had spent a lifetime believing that magic was purely a matter of knowledge and practice, encountering an absolute biological limitation felt unfair.
But I was adaptable.
"What if I combine my voice with mana directly..." I asked.
"Not to produce the sonic effect, but to enhance the impact of my normal casting..."
Gustav considered this. "I have never heard of such a technique."
"Neither have I. Let me try."
It took another week. Dozens of failed attempts.
Plenty of embarrassing moments when my "enhanced" voice came out as nothing more than a strangled squeak.
The first approach: speaking and casting simultaneously, layering vocalization on top of normal incantation. The words interfered with each other. Mana distribution destabilized at the moment of casting. The spell fizzled. Gustav watched politely from across the clearing.
The second approach: whispering. As if reducing the volume might find a middle frequency. The reasoning was flawed from the start and the result confirmed it—nothing. Not even a fizzle.
The third approach: I spent half a day convinced I needed to find the pitch somewhere between human speech and the Dedoldia range. I experimented until my throat hurt and Gustav stopped politely watching and started politely looking elsewhere.
Still nothing.
I sat with the failure for two days.
Then I started thinking differently.
The Dedoldia sound magic worked because their vocal cords were built for it—biological channels that shaped mana along with sound. I couldn't replicate the channel. But what was the channel actually doing?
Guidance. The sound provided a physical path for the mana to follow, a structure to organize the casting.
What if the structure didn't have to be external?
What if I built the organization internally, before anything reached my voice? Used my own mana circulatory system the same way the Dedoldia used their vocal cords—as the shaping mechanism, not the delivery system?
I tried it on a water ball.
The spell formed in complete silence.
I stared at the floating water for a long moment, genuinely uncertain what had just happened.
Cast it again, deliberately. Same result. No words, no gesture—only mana organized along internal channels according to a pattern held in mind.
But eventually, I figured it out.
Voiceless incantation. A technique that used internal mana channeling to cast spells without spoken words.
Not the same as the Dedoldia's sound magic, but useful in its own way.
When I demonstrated it for Gustav, his eyes went wide.
"Remarkable," he said. "You couldn't learn our technique, so you invented your own."
"Necessity breeds creativity."
"Indeed." He studied me for a long moment.
"You and Claude are alike in that way. Both of you encounter limits and find ways around them."
"Claude learned your sound magic..."
Gustav shrugged. "He picked it up in three days."
"Said it felt familiar, like something he had encountered before."
Three days. A technique that should have been impossible for humans.
And Claude had mastered it in three days.
I remembered the asphalt comment. The growing list of impossibilities that surrounded him.
"Gustav," I said carefully. "Claude's regeneration."
"I've heard it's... exceptional."
"Exceptional is an understatement." The elder's voice was thoughtful.
"The Demon Lords of the Demon Continent can regenerate half their bodies in an instant. Only they possess such capabilities."
"And Claude..."
"I've seen him recover from wounds that should have been fatal. Watched tissue knit back together in minutes."
Gustav shook his head slowly. "Whatever he is, he's not entirely human."
"Not in the ways that matter."
I thought about that long after the conversation ended.
[Claude POV]
The monsters came with the floods.
One month into the rainy season, the water levels rose enough to drive creatures from their usual territories.
Water spiders the size of dogs. Sea serpents that could swallow a child whole.
Things with too many legs and not enough mercy.
They attacked the village relentlessly.
The beast-tribe warriors fought back, but their usual advantages were negated. The constant rain dulled their senses. The flooding limited their mobility, forcing them to fight on unfamiliar ground.
I organized hunting parties. Coordinated defensive positions.
Used the training I had given them to transform chaos into controlled response.
But we were still losing people.
The breaking point came when a chameleon-like creature snatched a child in broad daylight.
Rudeus reacted first. An earth bullet slammed into the monster before it could flee, freeing its prey.
Eris followed up with a sword strike that separated head from body.
The child's parents wept with relief. The village watched, silent.
"We need to be more proactive," I told Gustav that evening. "Hunting the monsters in their territory instead of waiting for them to come to us."
"Our warriors—"
"Your warriors are learning. But this requires different skills."
I nodded toward Rudeus. "Magic for detection and elimination. Ruijerd for tracking. Your people for cleanup."
Gustav considered this. "A combined operation."
"Exactly. We hunt, your people recover the bodies for materials. Everyone benefits."
The compromise was accepted. Over the following weeks, we established a system.
The first major hunt became the template.
We tracked a nest of water spiders that had established themselves under a flooded bridge half a kilometer from the village. The bridge connected two sections of the living platforms—losing it meant losing access to the storage caches on the eastern side.
Ruijerd went first. He moved through knee-deep water with the silence of something that had hunted for centuries, marking positions with the hand signals I had taught the group the week before.
Four adults. One nest, probably eggs.
"Rudeus," I said quietly.
He nodded. Hands already moving.
The first earth bullet struck the lead spider before it registered our presence. Clean through the carapace. The creature curled and stilled.
The others reacted immediately. Spiders were not slow in flood water, even at this size. The largest launched itself toward Ruijerd, who sidestepped without urgency and drove his spear through it in the same motion.
The third came at Rudeus. He hit it with another earth bullet at close range and took a splash of hemolymph across his jacket for the trouble.
"The fourth is running," I said from my elevated position on a submerged platform. I had placed myself for sight lines, not combat—in a flooded environment, speed mattered, and mine wasn't reliable enough. What I had was a view of everything.
Rudeus redirected. The fourth spider covered six meters before a water bullet hit it from the side, sent it spinning. Ruijerd finished it.
The whole encounter: less than two minutes.
"The nest," I said.
We found it under the bridge supports. Two dozen eggs in a water-resistant membrane. We burned them.
"Efficient," Rudeus observed afterward, wringing hemolymph from his sleeve with an expression of moderate disgust.
"It will be more efficient the fourth time." I was already noting what had gone wrong—the gap when I called the fourth spider's position and Rudeus needed a half-second to locate it. Fixable. "We did too much reacting. Next time, cleaner positioning before we announce ourselves."
"You're treating this like a military exercise."
"I'm treating this like what it is."
The beast-tribe warriors who had observed from the platforms above moved down to collect the bodies. Good materials in a water spider—worth the hauling.
The arrangement was practical. Everyone benefited.
That was how the weeks proceeded.
Ruijerd tracked threats. Rudeus eliminated them with overwhelming magical force.
The beast-tribe recovered corpses and brought them to me.
I turned the corpses into weapons.
Monster hide for armor, bone for handles, sinew for binding. The materials were plentiful and free.
By the time the floods began to recede, every warrior in the village carried equipment I had crafted.
"You've armed an entire village," Rudeus observed one evening.
"Someone had to."
"It's impressive. Also a little terrifying."
"Why..."
"Because you think in terms of arming villages. Of preparing for disasters. Of turning every resource into a weapon or tool." He met my eyes.
"Most people don't think that way. Most people just... live."
I didn't have an answer for that.
Not immediately.
"I think," I said finally, "that the people who just... live, are usually the ones who get to keep living. There's something correct about that."
Rudeus looked at me with that expression—the one where he was deciding whether to push further.
He didn't.
From nearby, Ruijerd spoke without looking up from the blade he was sharpening.
"Children learn to walk by falling. Adults learn to survive by watching others fail." The stone moved steadily along the edge. "Those who carry more watching than most cannot afford to remain the kind of person who simply lives."
He said nothing else.
The fire crackled. Rain fell steady outside.
I went back to work.
Rudeus was right that I didn't think the way normal people thought. What I couldn't tell him was that I didn't always know, anymore, which parts of that were the memories I carried and which parts were simply who I had become.
Perhaps the distinction had stopped mattering.
The world was too dangerous for normal thinking.
That much hadn't changed.
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