Apocalypse: Fairy System by Macronomicon (fox in socks read aloud txt) 📕

long as he didn’t get lynched, he had food, water and wheels, so he didn’t exactly fear for his life.

He sure as hell wouldn’t want to be alone through another monster attack, though. If he’d been standing where Braz had been standing…

Jeb shook his head.

“I’ll see what I can do. Thanks.”

Jeb approached Brav’s pyre, where his family was sitting around the burning corpse, ignoring the desert heat. They almost seemed as if they were bathing in the thick smoke rising off the body.

“I’m sorry,” Jeb said without preamble.

“Sorry for what, human?” the nearest one asked, glancing over at him.

“Sorry I couldn’t have done more to help. I really would have liked to have saved Brav. He was easy to get along with.”

“I thought you had Myst. You said you had Myst. Myst users are supposed to be powerful!” a small melas protested.

“I do have Myst, but it’s not good at dealing with sudden ambushes,” Jeb said, lowering his head in the universal sign of contrition. “I’ll help, but I’m not omnipotent. Please don’t blame me for this.”

“You took us to the road!” one of the younger melas said, standing. He was maybe twenty, with good musculature and an angry look in his eyes, but his horns were underdeveloped, speaking to his youth.

The oldest melas present spoke. “Relax, Los, the road had nothing to do with it. The caravan has profited greatly from the human’s knowledge.”

He was near seven feet tall, not including the towering horns, with streaks of grey through his hair. He put his palm on the youth’s shoulder and pushed him back to a sitting position.

“It was not this human’s obligation to defend us. He is a paying passenger, not a hired guard, and yet he killed five sand fleas single-handedly, the first of which being the one attacking Brav. We cannot ask anything more from him. Come to terms with it and redirect your anger.”

An olive branch. Older minds saw the value in not lynching people.

“Thank you,” Jeb said, nodding.

“Thank you for trying to save my son.”

Ouch. The caravan master had some serious self-control.

“If you’ve nothing more to say, you should leave. The smoke is poisonous to those who aren’t related to Brav.”

Jeb blinked. “Of course.” He backed away and left them to their business.

“We’re born in fire, and we die in fire. It’s a fitting way to bring a life to an end, am I right?” A melas guard spoke, shoving a bottle of some murky substance into Jeb’s hand.

“Melas babies come out the pussy on fire?” Jeb asked.

“Of course, how else would we protect newborns and their mothers from Enoch’cheen? We saw how you took care of those sand fleas. Five is a bit of a low number, but it’s more than enough to earn you a drink.”

Jeb glanced down at the drink that looked something like an oil slick.

“Ah, what the hell.” He shrugged and took a swallow before his body immediately rejected it. It tasted like some kind of cross between motor oil and whisky, and it was not meant for human consumption, and Jeb fell to the ground, barely able to keep the bottle straight as he retched out the sip of nightmare fuel.

“Guess humans don’t like moros either.” Jeb felt the bottle lifted out of his hands, and he turned on his side, trying not to suffocate.

“I told you,” the keegan guard said.

“Shut up. One day a species will be Stitched on that properly appreciates fine drink.”

“My body is literally incapable of processing that,” Jeb said, groaning.

“See?”

“Bah.”

It took Jeb another half an hour or so to wash the taste out of his mouth, with a combination of bile and whisky.

During that time, he sat around and chatted with the guards. Most of them were as he expected, somewhere between level twelve and level twenty. Their leader was the only one with a Class, but he wasn’t wealthy enough to be a Citizen.

“I wanna be a baker,” one of them said proudly when Jeb asked him what Class he was planning on taking.

“What are you doing out here, then?” Jeb asked. “How does getting your ass killed by desert monsters translate to baking?”

“How else am I going to get to level twenty and get the Class? It’s not like you can gain levels by staying in town and baking all day. Gotta do your part in protecting the people from the monsters of Pharos.”

“That’s dumb,” Jeb muttered, before doing a double take at the people scowling at him. “Not protecting people from monsters. The fact that you can’t get levels for doing the thing you want to do. You’re making sure to bake a lot on the side, right?”

“Of course.”

Jeb tapped his fingers on the whisky bottle he’d scavenged out of the back of a dirty SUV. “So why baker?”

“You can be a baker without a Class in a small town, but I want to open a pastry shop in the city. A Class is just the kind of edge I would need to make it big.”

“Ah. So how many of the rest of you are here on your college thesis?”

More than half of the guards’ hands went up: the younger, more starry-eyed guards. Now that Jeb was alerted to it, he could easily tell the difference between the people who had chosen risking their lives as a career and the ones who were doing it to get their Class.

Going adventuring was almost exactly like going to college, with the exception of possible death. All Jeb had to do was look for the ones who seemed like they belonged in frat houses or sororities.

“What about you?” Jeb asked, glancing at the oldest guard, a wrinkled keegan.

“Caravan guard, level twenty-four. My Class, and I quote, ‘Has a passive