LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 26 “The reunion with the two idiots. Part 3”
Chapter 26
“The reunion with the two idiots. Part 3”
“Edward, now!” Kalysto instructed. The young man obeyed, and this time he used his sword as if it were an axe and slashed right at the back of the orc’s knee, making him fall to his knees on the ground. And as the orc screamed, Kalysto took advantage and shot a couple of arrows into his open mouth and then positioned herself behind him. And while the orc was busy with one hand trying to hit Edward and with the other pulling out the arrows that had buried themselves inside his throat, Kalysto pulled out the knife that had twenty points of penetration and stabbed him in the neck and then in the shoulder as soon as he tried to get up to defend himself from her. But Kalysto had already moved away.
So the orc got up again and ran to his axe, lifting it with ease. With a swift movement, he lunged at Kalysto, trying to slash at her arm that still held the bow, but she evaded him by jumping to her right. Unfortunately, Edward was not as fast as she was, and instead of moving away, he had tried to follow the orc as it chased Kalysto, so when she increased the distance between them, the orc focused on the nearest target. And Edward, who barely knew how to hold a sword, and walked over every dry leaf on the ground, thus betraying his location, became the sole focus of that immense creature full of muscles, which surpassed him by more than a meter in height.
Kalysto put away the knife and immediately pulled out a goblin arrow with penetration stats, and launched it, along with three others, at the orc’s neck. The enemy’s body almost looked like a Christmas tree decorated with arrows, having at least ten half-buried in the neck or the back of the neck.
And yet he was still moving as if it was nothing.
“How the hell is that possible?” she complained aloud.
How high is this guy’s vitality? About a million? Worst of all, she had no way of knowing how many HP points each of her attacks took away. But it looked like it wasn’t many. Stupid arrows with no penetration stats! She complained, frowning at the collection of arrows she had stolen from the invading army.
The problem was that she had very few arrows with that stat and she didn’t want to waste them on something that wasn’t that important, only to find out later that she would need them even more in a life or death situation.
Then she stopped and surveyed the scene. The other two goblins were still hiding, waiting for the right moment to attack. But she didn’t worry about them, not when she could easily take care of them with three arrows to the neck.
The problem was the orcs.
Maybe it would be better to escape. She thought as she watched the clumsiness with which the orc trying to attack Edward moved. Who seemed to be guided by his sense of smell and his hearing.
“Edward, touch that tree, then run behind that one and hide behind this one!” She said to him, pointing to the trees she was talking about, and wanting to verify how accurate the orc was trying to find him without the help of his sight. Then she shot two arrows at him to distract him and give Edward some time to escape.
And she watched the situation carefully so she could devise a good escape plan.
“Hey, a little help here too, second place!” Koden shouted, annoyed to see that she was only helping Edward.
Kalysto however only arched an eyebrow and didn’t even deign to look at him.
“For someone who is always telling me that he’s going to knock me off my cloud and overtake me at any moment, don’t you think you’re complaining too much?” She replied as she watched the orc crash into the first tree Edward had approached, but failed to find the second one.
Good! That means his sense of direction isn’t so good. She was thrilled, and a thin smile broke out on her face.
“Are you making fun of me now? Really? I could die at any moment and that will forever remain on your conscience, second place!” Koden complained as he evaded another blow from the second orc. Not believing he could avoid it much longer as he tried to normalize his agitated breathing.
“And why should I, when you don’t even treat me with respect, even though I’m your captain?”
“We’re in another world, so technically, you’re not my captain anymore!” he pleaded.
“Then I have no other reason to help you. We’re not even friends or anything.”
“Are you serious?” Annoyed at being left out even in a situation like this, where neither of his two successful older sisters were there to overshadow him, as usual, Koden ran towards Kalysto with the second orc following him. “You gave Edward a weapon, and I know you’re not friends. You’re just his tutor!”
“But I am friends with his aunt, and I am indebted to her,” she replied with a shrug, playing it down. In fact, it had been that feeling that had kept her from walking away without looking for Edward first. Even now, just the thought of going away and leaving them there abandoned to their fate. A strange tightness settled in her chest, stealing her breath.
What the hell? Annoyed at the new discovery, she turned to Koden and evaded the orc’s blow a little before Koden himself did.
Edward’s shout interrupted their conversation
“Hey, I thought you and I were friends too!” The young man complained, inadvertently revealing his location to the orc who was trying to find him.
Kalysto wanted to smack her forehead with her hand at Edward’s stupidity.
“Edward, be quiet! You just gave away your position to the enemy! Change trees, now! And follow the same procedure as before!” She instructed, and the young engineering student did so.
But he was not finished with his argument.
“So for a year now you’ve only been helping me because you’re a friend of my aunt?” he reproached. And from the tone of his voice, Kalysto could tell he was hurt by the idea.
Yes, she thought, but didn’t tell him, instead after letting out a long sigh, she commented:
“Think of it this way,” she said, dodging the second orc again with ease and shooting two arrows in each eye, so that he would stop bothering her for a few minutes, “if your only nephew got lost in the same place as one of your best friends, and after a while you found out that that same friend, who owed you money, didn’t even help him and left him to die there, how would you feel?”
Edward frowned.
“I would be very angry with him and I would never be his friend again,” he replied, as he continued running through the trees, trying to throw off the first orc who was now following the sound of his voice as the orc’s broad shoulders bumped against a tree trunk from time to time.
“That’s exactly my point,” Kalysto concluded. Hoping that with that he was no longer revealing his position, and she turned to Koden.
“Will you... stop... ignoring... me... pair of ingrates?” Koden growled at her, but he barely had breath to speak, so only Kalysto got to hear him.
“Oh, I see... So... how much money do you owe my aunt?” Edward continued, completely oblivious to his situation.
“Don’t go in that direction. There are two goblins hiding in the undergrowth!” Immediately Edward turned and ran the other way with the first orc several meters away. Seeing that he was still safe, Kalysto continued after evading a clumsy blow thrown by the now blind second orc. “Not that I owe her money as such, but Amanda has done me many favors, so it’s pretty much the same in my book. And stop giving away your position while you’re talking!” She scolded him. Then she faced Koden. “And as for you, if you swear to treat me with respect and obey my orders from now on, I’ll give you a sword so you can defend yourself and a potion so you’ll stop feeling so tired.”
Koden, with his hands on his knees, he looked as exhausted as if he had been running for his life for three hours straight, and he watched her with a frown.
“Why do you put so many conditions on me alone?” he complained.
It’s so strange to see a guy with muscles complain so much. Kalysto thought, and although Koden himself was not as muscular as Coach Brown, next to the flimsy Edward, Koden’s worked out figure stood out too easily.
“Do you see that I have a problem with making Edward follow my orders?” she asked in return. But they both knew that Edward had always been a good and obedient boy, as well as being spoiled by his parents, or at least he was until his mother died of cancer the year before. And their little family crumbled at the loss. Amanda had taken on the role of substitute mother and had helped her brother out of the deep depression he went into after the death of his much-loved wife. But while Amanda struggled to get her brother to stop hiding behind alcohol or neglecting his business, which went bankrupt a few months later, Edward had been neglected.
That’s when Kalysto met him, he was about to lose the semester while living locked in his room, playing video games.
Amanda had begged her to help him. And Kalysto did.
Taking advantage of finding him reading a manga, she told him about her plans to travel to Japan when she finished college, and told him about the Japanese classes she was taking. He seemed to be a little encouraged by that, so she invited him to her next class. It was enough to introduce him to Professor Sakura Lee for him to fall madly in love with the beautiful woman whose delicate and feminine figure looked like that of an angel, like the ones in those manga that he devoured with passion.
At first, Kalysto was worried about it.
But seeing that Edward gradually began to cheer up and at least made an effort to save his semester, she continued to help him study despite her busy schedule. By the next semester, he seemed much more cheerful, and his relationship with his father seemed to be on the mend. So she let the matter drop.
But sometimes, Kalysto wondered when would be the best time to tell him that the woman he had poured all his affection into and put on a pedestal was a consummate lesbian. And one who had the active role in her relationships.
Edward sometimes seemed so emotionally fragile, that Kalysto kept hesitating about what would be the best time to tell him, as it seemed he hadn’t realized it yet.
So Kalysto had washed her hands of the matter and told Amanda. But after the brutal murder of her youngest daughter after leaving a club one night a few months ago, the whole thing was forgotten.
But now, witnessing the ease with which Edward blindly followed her orders, she worried how easy it would be for others to take advantage of how young and naïve he was. And she looked at Koden, Edward’s best friend, with narrowed eyes, assessing him for a few seconds, almost as if he were a threat. As easily manipulated as Edward was, Koden was not an idiot. His only problem was the fixation he had with proving that he could be someone important too, so he could rub it in his older sisters’ faces that he wasn’t inferior to them. Unfortunately for him, upon arriving at university, where he seemed to have believed he would finally be free from being compared to them and open his horizons to a new world full of opportunities in which he could finally shine and stop being overshadowed by the overwhelming success of his older sisters, he ran into Kalysto. And while she was not only older than him by a year, inadvertently reminding him of his older sisters all over again, she was also shorter than him and constantly striving to maintain her good grades so as not to lose her athletic scholarship while working weekdays and weekends. In addition, she managed to be number one on the track team for the university.
A position that Koden, no matter how many hours he spent training or strengthening his muscles in the gym, had never been able to take away from her.
Despite having won a bronze medal at the last Olympics.
If you take away his need to surpass his sisters, Koden is a decent guy. It’s a shame about his attitude. But she could understand why he behaved that way with her, besides the fact that he was in love with Jessica, Kalysto’s Spanish teacher and drinking buddy. In his eyes, I’m the competition, in more ways than one. And although Kalysto wasn’t interested in Jessica in that way, she was the one to whom the young teacher told all her problems, especially all those related to her ex-husband. She then invited her to lunch in exchange for her help in grading the Spanish exams that were due the following afternoon and that she had not graded because she was hung over.
Kalysto watched Koden coolly as she again dodged the wooden club of the second orc, despite his blindness, he and the first one were guided by the sound and the heavy breaths of Koden, who was almost out of breath, gave away their location.
“Let’s make a deal,” she offered, “Say ‘status window.’ “