Chapter 196 (2/2)

‘But you know what’s really fucking pointless?’ Another part of her snapped. ‘That you are sitting here fucking watching basically nothing. You can’t even see him. Better to spend this time training. What if that Aether inside of you fades even further away?’

Helen tried to ignore that voice. Inner her snorted.

‘Fine, deny it all you want. I’m just saying that you know we have a fucking shit sized bundle of feelings to sift through in regards to him. What if it also turns out that taking that D is what gave us the Aether? Would we do it again? And if we do, is that wrong? That we are just using him for Aether?’

Helen frowned, annoyed at herself, even though she knew it was something she would need to address eventually. ‘People use villages all the time for Aether. That’s not a bad thing.’

‘In what ways are a person similar to a village?’

Luckily, her thoughts were put on hold by several poles having Tassles drop off like flies. The most notable was the fact that the pole numbered 19 had only a single Tassle remaining. A rather bland red, without any notable markings. The Reflecting Pool Style, it said.

Helen’s eyes went back to the Ghosthound’s pole, and grimaced. Not only was she annoyed by his flagrant disregard for his Style by refusing to put it, and instead putting his name in bold on the Tassle, but she also felt a thread of worry as two more Tassles fell to the ground. Only half of the Ghosthound’s group remained, and about the same overall. Of all of the participants, it seemed that only 3 had passed. This didn’t include the last remaining individual of the 19th pole, who seemed to be aiming for the overall length prize, rather than taking the passage for being the final individual in that group.

Around 30 minutes had passed, and as the crowd muttered, watching the poles, nothing happened for a while. Only when the time had reached closer to 50 minutes did a few Tassles begin to drop once more. Slowly but surely, like browning leaves from trees in fall, the Tassles drifted away.

The Challenge of Tarnak, the full experience, was a 24 hour experience. It could be seen from the fact that so many had failed before the 1 hour mark how difficult a bar that was. But to be fair, it also demonstrated something else about the challenge: if you could make it through the first parts, you can make it for a while more. It, ultimately, was not about Strength at all. But Willpower.

And in her heart of hearts, Helen could see the eyes of the Ghosthound, burning brightly like ignited salt. That was not a weak willed man.

There was some commotion away from the stage, and she was surprised to see that the source of the commotion was Claptrap, pushing a cart. On top of it were pastries and sandwiches, wrapped in wax paper, prepared in the manner demonstrated by the Ghosthound from his homeland. Although Claptrap was initially very skeptical about Cooking, and unwilling to dedicate one of his last 3 skill slots to it, he was brought around by the ridiculous amount of markup on the price that people seemed completely willing to bear for the convenience and taste of the Ghosthound’s food.

The prices that Claptrap was yelling were enough to purchase bottom tier armor, and would not have earned him a sale in Qtal. But this was Deardun, and there was a different clientele here. A lot of the disciples of the larger Styles, whose strength had been “vouched” for, and they didn’t need to participate in these preliminaries, were here to see their competitors, and had some amount of spending money.

In addition, wealthy armor sellers and merchants were here, pandering to the upper tier Styles, and also looking for a destitute challenger from the preliminaries who they could give their armor to, for free publicity. These facts, combined with absolutely mouth watering scents wafting from the food, made it so a few curious individuals wandered over.

More than that, all in all, this was exceedingly boring to watch. This extremely novel idea, (imagine, bringing food around on a cart?), attracted some attention of a very bored crowd.

And once they tasted it….

Very quickly Claptrap had sold out, and he began taking out the materials to set up a permanent stall, to make food during the attraction. People were milling around, pointing their greasy fingers excitedly, and the merchants had taken notice, and were sidling up to Claptrap, asking him some pointed questions. He just smiled and shook his head, and they left, disappointed.

But they were intelligent men and women, after all. They also tried his wares. Although they weren’t sure of the recipe, the seed of the idea had been planted in these very enterprising heads. Over the course of the next few months, no non-combat individual was more sought after in Deardun than the Cook.

But for now, Helen just smacked the male spear attendant. “What the fuck are you doing? Go help.”

“Why me?” The male spear attendant whined. But as Helen advanced towards him, a gleam in her eye, he scrambled to his feet and hurried down to help with the stand. Helen sat down with a pleased expression. Although the leather workers back home were wary of her, they didn’t have the same fear in their eyes that the male spear attendant did. It truly set her heart at ease to see him scurry to work like that.