Chapter 96 - The Quiet Game

We trudge along on the fifth day of traveling, looking dejected.

Why, those of you out there who might be asking? Well, our food supplies were perfectly managed by Eniyala, so we weren't low nor hungry. We hadn't come across many enemies; only two groups, really. So our energy and Stamina levels were fine. The weather had even been extremely tolerable. The only issue is that we constantly were on the verge of our eardrums exploding.

Because Ro would not stop singing.

His voice was like nails on a chalkboard making love to metal scraping. It was so bad that even Panko and Lynsel, the two easiest to please, seemed distressed by the torture. Lynsel had even tried to teach Ro… but that only made it worse.

No one knew how, because Lynsel himself proved to actually be talented, providing us with much needed relief before Ro started again, ruining the experience of Lynsel's uplifting singing.

"Pretty soon, I'm going to smash him into the ground and leave him," Termi growls.

"Walking so faaaar~ From my sistarrrr! Who knows wheeere~ Leaving trails with my ha-irrrrr!!"

I sigh. "Yeah, we'd probably hear him even if we buried him alive."

Yorun nods in agreement, too antagonized to even cause me more strife.

"Yip…" Panko adds from my shoulder, burying his poor ears into my chest.

Seeing the morale of our group at an all-time low, Eniyala turns sharply to Ro with a deep breath. "Hey buddy! I have this game I loved to play with my brother. Wanna play?"

Like a child, Ro claps his hands together. "Game! I love games!"

The smirk in Eniyala's eyes glows true to me as she holds a finger to her lips. "It's the Quiet Game. Last person to make a vocal noise wins, and winner gets an extra serving at dinner tonight. Starting… Now!"

… Oh, blissful silence.

Everyone was playing along, giving our ears the break they had so longed for. I'm 90% sure that Ro has taken one deep breath and is simply holding it. Termi also looks oddly focused, as if she was taking the game seriously. The first to break the silence was none other than Yorun.

"You guys are so stupid. Are you children?"

The words barely escape his lips before two fingers are pointed in his face, one at a high angle, basically pointing up. Termi and Ro furiously point out Yorun, who grunts in his usual unappreciative manner and turns around without another word. Luckily, Ro's hand is fully human, or else his black extended nails would have pierced Yorun's skin through the mouth.

Followed only a few seconds later comes a yelp from Lynsel as a Rock-Armored Worm the length of him bursts from the ground by his feet. He gets two fingers to his bashful face as I take care of the Worm through a chink in its armor. I ignore the glares as I swipe away the message, fighting the urge to say, "how rude of me. I humbly apologize for my despicable act of protecting our party."

I think they got the message from my… finger gestures, though.

After a few more hours, Eniyala and I opted out to chat and occasionally bicker, leaving the two remaining the ones with the most serious expressions. We look behind us as several feet back, Ro and Termi glare at each other fiercely as they step slowly, refusing to make too much sound.

"I don't think he's taken a single breath since we started," I note in a low tone.

"Termi looks like if a MetalHorse was a human, the way she's moving," Eniyala replies with a giggle. "Whoever wins is going to be surprised."

I give her a look. "I knew there was going to be a twist. What are you plotting, you witch?"

She gives me innocent eyes. "Hm? I'm just going to do exactly what I said."

I roll my eyes. I didn't need to press further; not only did I not want to know, I'd find out soon anyway.

The change from Peino to Rockend was obvious. It was an immediate switch from grassy plains to rocky desert, which rose to put us halfway inside a short canyon before tall mountains began jutting out in front of us. Termi had told us that among those mountains, one of them was Mt. Turra — of course, this was days prior, as you couldn't even try to pry a word from her with tortue now.

But regardless, we reach the end of the canyon, which has steep inclines coming off the walls, and the winding canyon itself opens up like a delta. Termi points to an outcrop that will provide us all with ample shelter, right by the corner of the wall that turns into a hill. We set up our camp there, and Eniyala starts a fire to begin preparing food for the party. Termi takes the split second Ro looks to the rising smell of food to jump at the opportunity. She reaches behind her back, grabbing a small square, and taking it in both hands, she extends the square to be long and thin, swinging it violently into Ro's stomach.

WHACK!

"Agh… WAIT!"

Termi cackles, her victory certain as she stabs a finger into Ro's chest. "I win, I win!"

"No! You cheated!! That doesn't coun—"

"Cry about it, loser! I won, you made noise! I get that extra serving!"

Unable to cope, Ro falls to his knees, head tilted back to the sky. "Nooo—"

I smack him with a baseball bat on the top of the head. "Shut up, before you attract monsters. Termi won, you lost, try again tomorrow."

Ro grumbles, pouting in the deepest part of the overhang, as Termi holds out her wooden plate for her extra serving. "More steak, please!"

And Eniyala drops a mound of slop onto it.

Termi gives her a strange look. "I said steak, not trashy Nutrio."

Adventure's Nutrio was an almost yogurt-like gray-black substance made of several materials, meant to sustain travelers with a cheap and high-volume and highly nutritious (per the name) combination of ingredients. I didn't mind it, as it simply tasted like vanilla pudding with a hint of grass — and after the bugs, anything was better than Locust Leg — but the other party members seemed mortified by it.

Eniyala gives Termi a small, warm smile. "I never specified which serving I was offering."

Ro, who was pouting, turns on his tail to see Termi's sullen face, and bursts out laughing. "Bahaha! That's what cheaters get!"

"Y'know, that coulda been you," I mention, my face already in my palm due to Eniyala's fuckery. Ro thinks about it, and I can see the loading symbol in his head, before he cheerily grins at me. "But it's not!"

I sigh. "This party is helpless."

"You're just realizing?" Eniyala retorts, handing me a plate and a small bowl. I set the bowl down, and Panko hops off my shoulder before happily munching down on his own serving of Nutrio. I also dig into my food. "It was doomed the second you added me."

"That was how this party started, dipshit."

"Exactly."

She stares at me for a second before smacking me upside the head and bringing plates to Yorun, Lynsel, and finally Ro. She makes herself a plate and sits with Yorun, and they chat lightly as they eat. I pay them no mind as I eat, finishing first and cleaning up around the fire and plopping myself in a comfortable spot under the beautiful sky. I hear Lynsel and Termi engaging in small talk as well as they help clean up the rest of the dishes and store the food back in its cube. I glance over to see Eniyala resting her head on Yorun's shoulder with her eyes closed, while he taps away on his phone. Shaking my head, I return my attention to the moon.

"So, do you like the fire-smelling girl or the weirdo guy?" Ro asks as he drops down to sit next to me. I give him a sharp slap, which feels like slapping a bag of scaly rocks. "Dragons are fucking OP," I mutter before responding. "What? The hell are you talking about?"

He sticks his tongue out at me, the ends twisting in opposite directions. "You glanced over twice while you ate, and that was the second time since you came over here."

"Psh. Please, kid. I just don't trust him."

"I'm not a kid! I'm older than you!" He sticks his lower lip out and crosses his arms at me. I look him up and down before drawing the hood of the short-sleeve white shirt I'm wearing up over my eyes. Aside from him and Eniyala, everyone had changed out of their armor or into the clothes they slept in. "Maybe literally, yes. But man, in human years, you're like, 11."

"Am not!"

"Are too. You even remind me of this kid named Raek… You remind me of a child."

Perhaps sensing the immediate sour shift into my mood, Ro scoots away. "Um… yeah, he smells dark and angry or sad. Everytime I smell anything around him, he just makes me want to cry or punch something. I wouldn't trust a sad guy."

"I think… it depends on the person, but yeah."

Ro stares at the moon with me for several minutes, before looking at me once more. "Why are there six people but only two tents?"

I sigh. "One for the guys, one for the girls. Though, we have too many guys for the guy's tent now, I'd say."

Ro raises his hand. "I can volunteer to sleep in the girls tent! I sleep with my sister all the time!"

I see Termi's head pop up in my vision, then her body, in a simple brown nightgown, feet flying off the ground. A six-foot rectangular shield is gripped on either side by her small hands, and it crashes down heavily on his head.

Ro's head slams into the ground. Termi hops back, breathing heavily as she glares at the boy lifting his face out of the imprint in the ground, turning to look at her. "Oh, hi cheater! We were just talking about you!"

She huffs, banging on his head again to no avail. "I heard. You can sleep in the sand; no way in Yamistro's fury are you sleeping with us!"

She bangs on his head one more time before storming off to the tent, leaving poor Lynsel petrified off to the side. "Uh, I can sleep outsi—"

"No," I cut him off firmly. Lynsel may not fight, but he was a good person, and no way in hell was I making the overworked, buff man sleep in the cold. "We have shifts, after all. I'll take first, then you can take the next, Lynsel. You'll be with Termi. Yorun can… Y'know, he'll be fine alone, he can come wake us if something happens, so you'll be with Eni, Ro."

I face his way to make sure the childish Lizard Boy understands the simple instructions, and spot him staring after Termi. "She's not bad!" He says to me with a goofy grin, and I sigh. "Enough, enough," I groan, finally getting him to agree.

- - -

The moon stares back at me, filling the sky — and land below — with a much gentler light than the sun. "God, do I even know what I'm doing? Is any of this right? What if Alyphia's wrong?"

<Don't give up, user!>

I stare quietly at the tutorial's message before swiping it away and standing up. "Not like I have a choice, anyway," I mutter. "Time to switch out."

By tomorrow, we'd reach our destination, and our wild goose chase would truly begin.