by Matt Forbeck
It took Archie a moment to understand what they were upset about. In his mind, he’d just saved Yumi from being hurt by a cheap, underhanded attack by Salah. If anything, the people around them ought to hoist him up on their shoulders and parade him around the village as a hero.
Well, not a hero hero, but at least as someone who’d saved a friend. Someone who’d done a good thing. Even in the Illager mansion, he would have been cheered. More for taking someone out than for defending someone else, but still.
Archie soon realized, though, that no one had recognized that Salah had been about to attack Yumi. All they’d seen was him attacking the Villager—apparently without cause.
Archie stared up at them all for a moment before he figured it out. Then he gaped at his still-clenched fist.
The other heroes stared at Archie. Maybe they were just astonished to see how violent the conversation had turned. Maybe they wanted to see how the scene played out before they rendered a judgment as to who was in the right or wrong. Or maybe they were waiting for Smacker to take charge—because no matter the truth of the situation, that’s what happened.
Spurred into action, Smacker backhanded Archie across the cheek. The blow sent the little Illager sprawling onto the grass behind him.
Archie’s face felt so odd that for an instant he wondered if he’d been defeated. It seemed entirely numb at first, as if his face had been somehow removed by the attack and replaced with something rubbery and wet. Then the feeling started to return, and it stung like he’d stuck his face into a hive of angry bees.
Archie wanted to curl up into a ball and cry, even though he knew that this might be his final moment. It would have been a terrible way to spend it, but he didn’t feel like he had a choice in the matter.
Smacker loomed over him, blocking out the rays of the setting sun, which cast him in an evil, crimson light. Archie braced himself for another blow, which he felt sure would be the end of him.
He wished then that he were strong enough to stand up to Smacker and teach him a lesson. He wished that he was still back with his Illager tribe and that they’d never kicked him out. He wished for the power to not only defend himself—and Yumi—but also to have his revenge.
Smacker drew his sword and raised it over his head. Archie threw up an arm to shield himself, even though he knew it would do him no good.
“Please!” he shouted up at the hero, begging him for unexpected mercy. “No!”
As Smacker’s blade came down, Yumi charged out of nowhere and placed herself between Archie and that glittering sword. This so startled the hero that he fumbled his blade and fell into Yumi, knocking them both to the ground.
Normally, Archie suspected, Yumi wouldn’t have stood a chance of knocking over someone like Smacker, but she’d surprised the hero just as he was shifting his feet. They went down together in a ball, and rolled a short bit away before coming to a painful stop.
Smacker sprang to his feet, his sword still in his hand. He roared at Yumi in fury, spurred on by his embarrassment at a Villager having knocked him to the ground. The other heroes laughed about it, which only seemed to make it worse.
Yumi struggled to stand up to him, but Smacker kicked her feet out from under her. Terror grew on her face as she realized that Smacker might actually harm her and would make quick work of her. She didn’t stand a chance against him.
The other heroes stood gawking at Smacker, stunned into inaction by the ferocity of his reaction. They couldn’t seem to believe that one of them could suddenly turn so violent against such a minor threat. It wasn’t like a Villager could hurt one of them, right?
To his credit, Salah actually did step forward to defend Yumi. While they certainly had their differences—including, most important, how to treat Archie—he couldn’t just watch while Smacker hurt her.
“Hey!” he shouted at Smacker. “Leave her alone!”
Despite this last-second display of bravery and loyalty to one of his fellow Villagers, Salah had even less of a chance against Smacker than Yumi did. Smacker whipped back his sword and caught Salah on the chin with the flat of his blade.
The Villager tumbled back senseless. His legs gave out beneath him, and he crumpled into a pile next to Archie, unconscious but still breathing.
The heroes finally yelped in protest, no longer able to deny the fact that Smacker had lost his temper.
Fearful that the hero might attack Yumi next, Archie moved without thinking. If he’d given his action any consideration—if he’d actually formed a plan of any kind—he would have dithered about it until it was too late. And too late—in his mind, at least—meant that Yumi would meet her end.
Instead, Archie darted forward and punched the hero right in the stomach with everything he had.
It should have glanced off Smacker’s armor. Then it wouldn’t have hurt him any more than a hurled insult, and Archie would have bruised his knuckles.
But Smacker had raised his arms high to argue with the other heroes, which had raised the bottom of his armor shirt just enough to expose a thin strip of flesh, right at Archie’s level. Archie’s knuckles plowed straight into Smacker’s unprotected gut.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Smacker yelped and dropped his sword, less in pain than in shock. His blade clattered to the ground near his feet, and his hands darted to his stomach, right where he’d been struck.
Archie staggered backward, as surprised as anyone that his insane, doomed-to-fail attempt to save Yumi from Smacker’s rage had actually succeeded. He looked down at his fist as if it had suddenly appeared at the end of his arm by magic.
In all the times Archie had joined an Illager raiding party, he’d never once managed to defeat anything. A few times, he’d broken the bone of a skeleton or knocked an arm off a zombie, but despite his best attempts, he’d never harmed a living thing.
It wasn’t that Archie hadn’t wanted to. In fact, he’d wanted more than anything to prove himself a strong Illager, of value to his tribe—someone the others wouldn’t constantly taunt. But the other Illagers were faster than he was and invariably got to anything that might have been his victim long before he could manage it himself.
So when he actually punched Smacker, a mixture of horror and pride flooded through him. It flowed up from his arms to his head, clogging his mouth as it went, so that he couldn’t muster up a word of either triumph or excuse. All he could do was goggle at his clenched fingers.
Then Smacker shouted something both offensive and dismissive at him, finally breaking the spell.
Archie gaped up at the much taller hero blotting out the sunset’s final red rays. Smacker gazed down at the little Illager with wide eyes. As he did, the surprise on his face transformed to righteous rage. He growled something, which Archie could only interpret as a declaration of a vendetta that would inevitably end in Archie’s spectacular doom.
Smacker took one step toward Archie before two of the other heroes stopped him, each with a hand on one of Smacker’s shoulders. They spoke to him in their odd tongue, but Smacker only tried to shrug them off. They refused to let him go, even when he bent over and reached for the sword he’d dropped.
Archie backed away slowly, unable to take his eyes off the shamefaced hero for even an instant. To his relief and disbelief, the heroes pulled Smacker away from his sword and set him back on his rump. Smacker grimaced in embarrassment as they laughed at him.
One of the heroes lifted the edge of Smacker’s armor shirt, confirming that there was no wound there of any kind—not even a mark left on Smacker’s skin. Another—the one who’d tried to help Archie earlier—produced a healing potion again and brought it toward Smacker’s lips as a joke. Smacker growled at the others, pushing them away while he scrabbled toward his sword. From the way Smacker glared at him, Archie knew he would be the hero’s next target.
A hand fell on Archie’s shoulder from
behind, and he spun about to find Yumi kneeling next to him. “We need to leave,” she said. “Now.”
He didn’t feel the need to argue with her. In fact, he didn’t feel much of anything at all. He’d gone numb from his toes straight up to his brain. He let her grab him by the hand and pull him away. His feet moved along as fast as she hauled him, if only to keep himself from being physically dragged on his knees.
“Where are we going?” Archie eventually managed to say. He’d thought that she might haul him right to the edge of the village and eject him into the wilderness, but he’d gotten turned around in the tumult and couldn’t tell which direction they were headed.
“Away from there,” she said, her voice full of determination, trying to quell a rising panic. They seemed to be heading toward the edge of the village. From there, the whole of the Squid Coast sprawled before them, edging toward the distant Creeper Woods. “Someplace safe.”
“There’s no place safe,” Archie told her. He’d meant those words as a complaint—a comment about the insecurity of the nature of the world around them—but they struck him as painfully true. He couldn’t go anywhere that Smacker wouldn’t follow. He could chase Archie down to the ends of the land itself.
Yumi hauled up short so fast that Archie bumped into her. For a moment, she stood with her back to him, her shoulders heaving. Then she whirled around to look at him.
Her face was filled with anger and frustration, but it melted away when she saw him. “You’re right,” she said. “You can’t run from them. But that doesn’t mean there’s no place safe.”
She grabbed him by the wrist again and marched back into the village. This time, Archie could tell exactly where they were going.
“No,” he said to Yumi. “Why would we go there? They’ll just tear it to the ground.”
“Do you have a better idea?” she asked.
He considered asking her to cut him loose. To let him run off on his own. He was small, almost unnoticeable. He might be able to hide for long enough, perhaps until Smacker and the other heroes lost interest in looking for him.
But he couldn’t muster the courage. When it came to trying to save Yumi in the heat of a fight, he apparently could find the means to do something lethally stupid, but when he had to make a cold decision about it, he couldn’t find a way.
Still, he had to try.
“Let me go,” he whispered, secretly hoping she wouldn’t hear him.
Her ears were sharper than he’d guessed. “Forget it,” she told him. “You didn’t abandon me, and I sure am not going to abandon you. You’re coming with me.”
As she spoke, they arrived at the front door of her home. Archie dug in his heels then, refusing to enter. “They’ll destroy the place and defeat you!” he told her. “I’ve seen it happen before.”
She stopped yanking on his arm, but she did not let him go. “This place has never been destroyed.”
“Heroes don’t understand anything but violence,” Archie said. “They swing around swords so much that everything looks to them like something to slash.”
“We don’t have time to argue this,” Yumi said with a scowl. “Just get inside!”
Archie was ready to make a stand against her and force her to hear his argument. She, at least, would listen to him. She was kind and reasonable, unlike Salah—and unlike Smacker.
Before he could open his mouth again, though, he heard Salah shouting, “There he is!”
Archie turned to see the Villager coming straight at him with the heroes in his wake. The idea that Archie should stop and argue with Yumi vanished from his head. Instead, he leaped toward the door to Yumi’s home, which she yanked open wide for him.
The moment Archie was inside the house, the door slammed behind him. He spun about to thank Yumi for the kindness of her foolish act, but he saw that she wasn’t there. She was standing outside the door instead.
Archie tried to pull the door open so he could join her, but Yumi had a death-grip on the doorknob and held it shut. She gave him a stern look through the window and told him, “Stay there, and be quiet!” Then she turned to face the others.
“What is it you want?” Yumi said to Salah as he approached. She wasn’t about to wait for him to start shouting at her.
“You know what we want,” he said. “Who we want. Give him to us!”
She crossed her arms and set her jaw against him and the heroes who had massed behind him. “So you can defeat him? Forget it.”
Salah gave her a self-satisfied snort. “I won’t touch him. Villagers don’t hurt anyone. You know that.”
“But it’s okay to turn them over to hulking bullies who will do that for you?” She glared at Smacker. “That’s the same thing!”
Smacker shoved Salah aside, sending the Villager sprawling along the grass. He pointed at the door to Yumi’s home in a vicious way and then at his boot.
The meaning was clear. If Yumi didn’t let the hero into her home—or at least bring Archie out of it—Smacker would kick down the door and haul the little Illager out.
Yumi didn’t budge. “If you want him, you’ll have to go through me.”
Smacker drew his sword and raised it to cut Yumi down, but she refused to give him an inch. Before he could do anything to actually harm her, though, the other heroes grabbed Smacker and pulled him away.
Smacker yowled in protest at his assault being foiled, but the other heroes refused to release him. They spoke to him in calm but firm tones, evidently trying to talk some sort of reason into him. He answered them with frustration and anger—all while still flushed red with embarrassment—resolutely refusing to listen to them.
Eventually the four other heroes each grabbed Smacker by a limb and lifted him bodily off of the ground. With him hanging suspended helpless among them, they marched him out of town and into the surrounding darkness.
Archie couldn’t help but pump a fist in the air and cheer. He’d been sure that he and Yumi were doomed. The idea that the other heroes might step in to save them had never crossed his mind.
To him—as an Illager—all so-called heroes were actually villains: people who didn’t care about the lives of others, only their own interests. To see them corral one of their own and haul him away gave him hope he had never dreamed of. For a moment, he thought he might actually be able to carve out a home for himself in this village, among people who cared about him and his safety.
It was then that he saw the torches and pitchforks.
“No,” Yumi told the other Villagers. “Don’t do this. Go home.”
“We are home,” Salah said, with a mournful look on his face as he got up and dusted himself off. “So are you.” He pointed to Archie staring at them through the window in the door. “But he is not.”
Yumi wasn’t about to give in that easily. “We’ve been over this. You can’t just kick him out. He hasn’t done anything wrong!”
Salah frowned as if something awful had crawled into his mouth and was actively making him sick. “He punched one of the heroes. You know how we feel about violence.”
Yumi scoffed at that, but even Archie could tell the implications of that disturbed her. “Do you really think that little Archie could harm someone like that? The rest of them had a healing potion ready for him before he could even say ‘Ouch!’ As a joke!”
Salah put up his hands, palms out, in what he probably thought was a placating manner. “Look, Yumi, that’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point, Salah? Answer me that? If we can agree that Archie doesn’t have the ability to beat up a hero, then what else is there to discuss?”
Salah glanced out into the darkness. “Hard as it might be to believe, that attack really did disturb that hero. It hurt his pride, if nothing else. And if there’s one thing we know about heroes, it’s that they have long memories. That hero’s friends might have hauled
him away tonight, but there is no doubt that he will be back.”
Yumi’s shoulders sagged as both she and Archie realized that Salah was right. As long as Archie remained here, the village was in danger. Smacker might come back there at any point and raze the place to the ground out of sheer spite.
“So what?” Yumi said. “Heroes come through here all the time. They take our food, butcher our cattle, and even sleep in our beds. They don’t think of us as real people. They never have. How is what happened with Archie going to change that?”
Salah turned toward the other Villagers. They had all massed behind him, carrying their torches and pitchforks. Archie realized that these were all they really had to protect themselves. If the heroes came back—even if just Smacker came back—that wouldn’t be enough. They’d be helpless before such an onslaught.
They nodded at Salah in wordless agreement. Some of them wore pained looks on their faces. Others braced themselves with grim determination. But they had all agreed on one thing.
Salah was right. Archie had to go.
Salah gave Yumi a sad shrug. “Honestly, I wish it wasn’t so. Up until today, you were right about your little friend there. But now, when it matters most, he showed his true colors.”
“He stood up to defend me, just as I defended him.”
“That’s the problem,” Salah said. “Have you ever known a Villager to attempt violence against a hero before? It doesn’t happen, because we are a peaceful people, and we know better. Up until he arrived, you knew better too.”
Yumi glared at the man. “Are you telling me you’re kicking me out of here too?”
“None of us want that to happen,” Salah said, choosing his words with care. “That hero might be angry, but his anger seems focused on the Illager. Our hope is that once your friend is gone, he won’t care about the rest of the village.”
Yumi snorted at him in disgust. “And if that bully comes after me? What are you going to do then?”
Salah squirmed, uncomfortable with the implied accusation. Yumi turned to the rest of the crowd and spoke to them, her voice raw with emotion. “What about the rest of you? Where do you draw the line? If the bully comes for me, what would you do?”
