Chapter 2: First Steps, Wrong Feet
The beam swung wide and clipped the scaffold post with a sound like a baseball bat hitting a melon.
I caught myself on the upright, barely, while thirty pounds of unsecured timber pivoted around my grip and nearly took out the worker behind me.
"Watch it!"
"Sorry—sorry—"
Arms too long. Reach six inches past where my brain expected them to end. I'd been compensating all morning and still couldn't calibrate for something as basic as carrying a straight piece of wood without becoming a hazard.
"Still getting used to the name-growth, huh?"
The voice came from below. I looked down to find a green face grinning up at me—different from Garr, younger features with older eyes, a combination that didn't compute until I placed the style of his armor.
Gobta.
The comic relief. The accidental genius. The hobgoblin who would stumble his way through impossible situations and come out alive through pure dumb luck and hidden competence.
"Yeah." I lowered the beam carefully, watching my hands the whole way. "My arms don't go where I think they're going."
"Took me forever to stop punching doorframes." He scrambled up the scaffold with a monkey's ease, grabbed the beam I'd been struggling with, and balanced it on one shoulder like it weighed nothing. "Your grip's wrong, by the way. Choke up more. Hobgoblin leverage is different from goblin."
He demonstrated. I copied. The beam settled into something manageable.
"Thanks."
"No problem!" Gobta's grin widened. "We're all still figuring it out. Even the Kijin mess up sometimes, and they're practically perfect."
The Kijin. Benimaru, Shion, Shuna, Souei, Hakurou, Kurobe. The ogre survivors Rimuru had named and evolved into something closer to demons than monsters. I knew their names, their abilities, their character arcs across multiple seasons of anime and hours of wiki reading.
I knew nothing about the hobgoblin standing in front of me.
The ticker pulsed.
I caught it this time—a brief brightening as Gobta talked, a slight uptick in the scrolling speed, like whatever was monitoring my vision had registered something worth noting.
"You okay?" Gobta tilted his head. "You're staring at nothing."
"Just tired." True enough. Hobgoblin sleep apparently didn't translate to mental rest when the mind sleeping was a traumatized transmigrator. "What's the rotation today?"
"Eastern wall until noon, then we're on supply runs." Gobta's expression shifted to something approaching professional. "Foreman Dolk wants the perimeter secured before the trade delegation arrives next week."
Trade delegation. Timeline anchor. I filed it away—some part of my brain still working like a community manager, tracking deliverables and deadlines even when the community in question was a monster nation.
"Got it."
We worked.
The mess hall was a log building that had clearly been one of the first permanent structures in Tempest—rough-hewn but solid, built for function rather than appearance.
I carried my ration tray to a back corner where I could see the whole room.
Old habit. Community manager instinct. When you spend eight years watching Discord servers and game forums, you learn to position yourself where you can see who's talking to whom, who's sitting alone, where the clusters form.
The patterns here were familiar.
Goblins clustered east, near the serving station. Orcs held the south tables, their massive frames taking up twice the space per person. Dwarfs—a handful, probably craftsmen—ate standing at a counter along the far wall, not mingling with anyone. At an elevated platform near the back, figures in better clothes and better posture ate food that looked slightly different from what I'd been handed.
Self-segregation. Classic early-community behavior.
People gathered with their own kind because familiarity was comfortable and reaching out took effort. In Discord servers, it showed up as faction channels going silent, sub-communities forming cliques, new members feeling unwelcome in established spaces. Here it was just... physical.
The food was a grayish paste with chunks of something fibrous. It tasted like cardboard that had been boiled in dishwater and then apologized to.
I ate it anyway. The body needed fuel, and complaining about rations when you were a nobody construction worker was a good way to attract exactly the kind of attention I couldn't afford.
The ticker pulsed.
Brighter this time. I'd started tracking the patterns—it responded to social proximity, to conversations, to moments where multiple people interacted near me. This was the brightest pulse I'd seen since the barracks message last night.
I looked around carefully.
Near the dwarf counter, two goblin workers were trying to start a conversation. The dwarfs weren't having it—body language closed off, single-word responses, the polite rejection of people who considered themselves above whoever was approaching.
The ticker pulsed brighter.
At the orc tables, a younger orc had drifted to the edge of the seating area, close enough to the goblin section that he could hear their conversation. He wasn't joining them—too much social friction for that—but he was listening. Interested.
Another pulse.
"Social friction. Community formation. The system—if that's what this is—responds to social dynamics."
I tested it.
Stood up. Walked toward the serving station, close enough to pass by Gobta, who was somehow already on his second helping.
The ticker scrolled faster.
I walked away. Toward the quiet corner where the dwarfs ate alone.
The ticker dimmed.
I stopped in the middle of the hall, pretending to adjust my tray, and watched the patterns resolve.
"It's not just proximity. It's social proximity. Conversations. Interactions. Community moments."
The system—whatever it was—wanted me near people who were connecting with other people.
I filed that away and went back to my cold paste.
Afternoon meant supply runs, which meant hauling crates from a storage depot near the center of town to construction sites on the perimeter.
It was boring work. Mindless. Perfect for observation.
I watched everything.
The street layouts were efficient but not optimized—Rimuru's general design sense plus whoever was actually implementing the plans. Traffic flowed reasonably well for a city in its infancy, with clear main routes and smaller side paths that would become alleys eventually.
The species integration was worse than I'd expected.
Not hostile—nothing overt—but the soft segregation from the mess hall extended everywhere. Orcs walked with orcs. Goblins with goblins. Dwarfs kept to workshops and forges and didn't seem to interact with anyone they didn't have to.
The Kijin existed in their own layer entirely, moving through the city like visiting nobles, everyone making way without being asked.
"This is going to be a problem. Tempest survives in canon because everyone works together, but the social infrastructure isn't there yet. It's a collection of species sharing space, not a unified nation."
Community manager thoughts. Inappropriate. I was a construction worker who'd been conscious in this body for less than two days. Nobody wanted my opinions on nation-building.
But I noticed.
"Tarruk!" Foreman Dolk's voice cut through my observation. "Supply manifest. You can read, right?"
The question caught me off guard. Could Tarruk read? Could hobgoblins read at all?
The body's memories—what little I could access—offered nothing. I'd been acting on instinct and hoping the blanks would fill themselves in.
"Some," I hedged.
Dolk shoved a bark sheet at me. Charcoal marks covered it—symbols that looked like... actually, they looked like simplified kanji mixed with something else. Rimuru's influence, probably.
I could read it.
Not fluently—some of the symbols were guesswork—but the context filled in enough. Supply counts, destination markers, priority codes.
"Eastern cache needs three timber crates and two stone pallets by sundown," I said, hoping I was parsing correctly. "Priority yellow."
Dolk grunted approval. "You'll do. Run this to the site coordinator and confirm receipt."
I ran.
"Okay. I can read. Or Tarruk could read, and whatever process put me here preserved that. Either way, useful."
The ticker flickered as I passed a group of workers arguing about load distribution. I didn't stop—no time—but I caught the pulse anyway.
"Achievement nearby. Social proximity. The system rewards... what? Being near community moments? Participating in them?"
Questions without answers. I delivered the manifest, got a stamped confirmation, and spent the walk back trying to parse system logic from two days of scattered observations.
The assignment board was posted outside the foreman's station after sunset.
I found my name in the middle of the list.
TARRUK — KITCHEN SUPPORT. REPORT CENTRAL KITCHEN 06:00.
Kitchen duty. Away from the construction sites. Closer to... something.
The ticker pulsed.
Around me, other workers groaned or cheered depending on their assignments. Kitchen support was apparently considered easy work—no heavy lifting, no heights, no sunburn. Most of the names assigned were older goblins or workers recovering from minor injuries.
I wasn't injured.
I hadn't requested transfer.
"Random assignment, or did someone notice something? Does Tempest even have HR? Who decides where the construction workers go?"
Paranoia. Probably unjustified. But I'd learned early in community management that random-looking decisions were rarely random, and the people making them rarely explained their reasoning.
I walked back to the barracks with the ticker scrolling steadily in my peripheral vision.
Kitchen meant food preparation. Food preparation meant the mess hall. The mess hall meant maximum social density, maximum interaction, maximum... whatever the system was measuring.
"The system wants me in the kitchen. Or I'm reading patterns into randomness because I'm sleep-deprived and traumatized."
Either way, tomorrow I'd find out.
The progress bar I'd been ignoring for two days sat in my vision, unchanged, patient, waiting for something I hadn't figured out yet.
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