Luos lay clutching his stomach as Chuff went through the bags of figs.

  “I guess fruit pays the toll this time,” Chuff muttered. “Nice stick, though.” He bounced it on its end and twisted the end in the dirt. “Thanks.”

  Why wasn’t Asmod doing anything? He glared at the hawgling, kicked aside by Chuff like a dog. What was the point of having a daemon if it didn’t even protect you from bullies? Clearly Asmod was going to stick to the rules that Samsian had laid out. No magic.

  He didn’t move to get up. Chuff had a whole posse with him, and Luos didn’t want to push his luck in a crowd. But his helplessness burned him up inside even as his eyes streamed with tears from the dirt that Chuff had thrown at him. He focused that anger into a glare at his useless daemon.

  It seemed to Luos that Asmod didn’t want to get up either, choosing to stay down, looking dazed as anything from Chuff batting him away. He wasn’t moving very much, and his eyes were unfocused. Luos wrote this off as the vessel he chose having been too runty. That’s just what he needed, a defective daemon.

  “Well, I hate to chat and run but I-…” Chuff starts. He is cut off by blood curdling screams.

  Luos forgets the pain in his belly for a moment as one of the thugs seems to have grown a huge deformed arm. It seems as though his radial and ulnar bones have extended twice the length of a man, forming a truss. The hand at the end, its fingers apparently fused, culminate in a deep curved shape.

  There was no intermittent period. One moment the kid was fine, and the next he was waving around this huge deformed-…

  But Luos recognizes the deformity. It’s not the kid’s hand, it’s the earth moving shovel tool he remembers using under Peezlebub’s guidance. He glances quickly at Asmod who is watching the arm wave over the group’s heads, the massive bucket yawing on the hinge. The hawgling looks alarmed but not fearful.

  “Calm- Calm down! Stop waving….I said stop it!”

  Another kid, one with a cool head in a panic, tries to calm his friend without getting swatted by the truss.

  The arm comes down, the bucket mouth down. It makes a smooth scoop in the earth several feet away from the edge of the crowd. The smallest kid screams and runs back towards town, away from the horrifying ordeal, away from the danger.

  “Get it off me! Get it off! I can’t feel- I can’t feel my hand, get it off!” the kid cries. He’s literally crying. Woah, kid, calm down, it’s just a little magic.

  For reasons unknown to Luos, the kid doesn’t try to bring his arm in. He’s not aware that the construct will vanish if he pulls his arm in close, or tries to flail it about. Asmod chose his victim well. If he’d chosen someone especially panicky, the group might have figured out the construct was ethereal, that it was completely under the control of the wielder, that being the kid whose arm the shovel was attached to.

  The remaining thugs were clustered around their leader. Chuff had not screamed. Luos had been preoccupied with the surprise, in determining what was going on, he hadn’t really seen Chuff’s reaction.

  He watched the arm with wide eyed fascination. Not good for Luos and Asmod. If the kids stopped panicking and instead considered this thing a gift, then Luos and Asmod would still be at their mercy. Best to get out while they were preoccupied.

  He grabbed both sacks of figs from the kids carrying them and ran towards the forest. Asmod jumped to his feet and ran after Luos like a terrier.

  “Hey,” one of the kids said lamely. It was enough to get Chuff’s attention.

  “He’s going into the forest!” he shouted. While this pulled the rest of the kids’ attention away from the shovel arm being waved around in the air, this also got the attention of the kid himself. While the arm was directly above the group, he unwittingly dropped the load of dirt right on top of them, burying them all in pounds of loose soil.

  All but Chuff, that is, who had ran after Luos the moment he had shouted, staff in hand. He didn’t stop to check on his squad, either ignoring their issues or choosing to leave them behind.

  This late in the evening, the trees did a decent job of blotting out the light of the setting sun. Luos and Asmod navigated the dense greenery as quickly as they could. Asmod, with his smaller body and four legs, was making simple work of the obstacles. Luos, with only two legs and encumbered by both sacks of figs, quickly fell behind.

  “Speed it up, slowpoke, or else Chuff is going to get you,” the hawgling hissed.

  Straddling a lichen and moss encrusted tree, felled during the wet season storm last year, Luos shot back, “I’m trying. Slow down.”

  They could both hear the older boy on their tail, using the staff to navigate the broken terrain. He was also saying something. Something he was close enough for Luos to determine was sing-song, but not close enough to hear the words.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Asmod spoke over the distant bully. “Will you put those figs down? We can skirt him and make it back to the road. That’ll take us to Uncle’s place where we can lie low until we’re ready to go to Samsian’s in the morning.”

  “I am not putting these down after coming so far with them,” Luos said resolutely. “We just need somewhere to hide until he goes away. Find something for us.”

  Asmod groaned as he squeezed through the branches of neighboring bushes, but not because of the effort.

  “Just give me a shovel like you did back there with that kid. I’ve got a plan,” Luos said.

  “I am not doing that,” Asmod scoffed.

  “You’re my daemon, you have to do what I tell you. If you don’t, I’ll-“

  “You’ll do something worse than Samsian when he finds out I helped you use magic? He expressly forbid it.”

  “You did it for that other kid back there.”

  “Yes, that was helping him do magic. I’m not allowed to help you do magic.”

  Typical daemon, following orders to a T. Luos thought harder as the two pushed their way through the dense growth. He thought so hard, he almost tripped over Asmod who had suddenly stopped moving.

  “Hey, he’s right behind us, we gotta move,” Luos ordered. But the hawgling wasn’t listening. His snout was in the air and his eyes were wide.

  “I’m coming to get you,” came a sing-song voice behind them, “and when I do I’ll beat you black and blue.” Chuff sounded happy, his rhyming threat coming to the pair up-beat.

  “I can hear him now, Asmod, we need to find a place to hide or we’ll have to fight him again.”

  “There’s something out there,” the frozen hawgling said. “I smell blood.”

  Before Luos could reply, Chuff emerged from the greenery, grinning.

  “And I’ll beat your little hawg, too,” he sang. He held Luos’ staff diagonally, gripping it with both hands, ready to block, or to strike.

  Luos was encumbered by sacks of figs, which were growing softer with the rough handling across the forest. “Chuff! Just let us go. It’s just a bunch of fruit for some old men, we’re not causing you trouble.”

  Chuff advanced slowly as Luos retreated. “I don’t want your fruit,” the older boy said. While he said it calmly and sincerely, Luos felt no better off. The bully was still advancing, and Luos couldn’t look away from the smiling face. Every backwards step he took to keep what distance between him and the older boy was another risk he’d catch his foot on a creeper or a broken branch and fall.

  “Then what do you want?” Luos asked.

  Chuff stopped. He pressed his lips together, like he’d just sucked a citron, and looked thoughtful.

  “Did you know,” he asked levelly, “if you hit someone in the back of the head hard enough, their eyes pop out?”

  He took a single rapid step forward and Luos jumped. Chuff continued. “I thought that would be interesting to try. Mr. Barterbur – you know him, right new kid? The mortician in town? Well, he says that people have these… little strings attached to the back of people’s eyes. And I want to see if you have them.”

  “You don’t need to do that, Chuff,” Luos said in a frail voice. Was Chuff being serious? Was he really going to beat Luos until his eyes popped out? Where was Asmod?

  “Oh, no, new kid. It’s something I want to do. And I’m lucky enough to have you in the woods, the orphan boy no one will miss.”

  Luos saw Chuff’s eyes dart down a fraction of a second before the boy swiped at him with the staff, laughing as he did. By chance Luos danced out of reach of the piece of wood where it would have struck his hand. But his foot became entangled and he fell backward.

  “You can have the figs, I don’t care any more Chuff, take it!” He scooted back on his elbows and butt.

  The older boy moved slowly, trying to find a window to strike. And Luos, on his back, had his vitals exposed to the other boy’s staff.

  “I want to pop your eyes out, new kid. I want to cut them from their strings and put them in my pocket.”

  He brandished the staff like a long club as he carefully advanced on Luos, his gaze fixed.

  Then there was a rustling in the undergrowth, and a squealing. With his adrenaline pumping, Luos was startled from staring up at the older boy. He saw Asmod coming to his rescue, probably to headbutt Chuff in the leg again. But no, the hawgling ran squealing right past the two of them.

  Even as Luos looked away, Chuff took that moment to strike. Luos was too distracted by Asmod to react. He couldn’t back up any further, his head butting against a tree stump. He couldn’t roll out of the way.

  But the strike never came. There was a sound like a hammer driving a stake into the ground.

  In the dim light, Luos saw a shadow had stepped over him, facing his attacker. Around the arms and legs – wrapped in stiff and dented leather armor - he could see Chuff’s shocked face in the dim light. The tip of the staff had a deep notch in the side.

  “If you want to collect eyeballs, I recommend you take them only from armed opponents,” the figure told the bully. There was a sword in the figure’s left hand, the tip pointed to the ground.

  The figure moved, and there was the sound of a sword being pulled out of its scabbard from the man’s left hip. Then a thud as the man tossed the sword on the ground in front of Chuff.

  “You can start with me,” he told the stunned bully. “Throw away that hunk of wood and pick up a real sword.”

  By the light of the stars, Luos could barely make out Chuff’s expression. Was he crying?

  He threw down the staff but didn’t go for the sword. “I’m an unarmed kid, mister. You don’t have the right to fight me if I don’t want to fight.”

  “That didn’t stop you from picking on this boy here.”

  “We were just playing,” Chuff chuckled. “Or weren’t you a kid once?”

  There was a tense series of heartbeats as the two stared each other down. Luos could feel the prickle of dry leaves and what might be the legs of bugs on his skin as he lay in the loam of the forest. He noticed for the first time what had tripped him. There was a piece of cloth wrapped around his leg, and it was connected to something.

  Chuff jumped when the man moved, but he was just sheathing his sword. He turned and knelt to Luos, offering to pull him onto his feet. Luos recognized the man.

  “You’re the guy from the boor fight today,” he said as he took the man’s hand.

  Then Chuff moved. The man turned.

  There was a clank of metal. A whizzing sound. Another thud.

  When the man’s attention had been focused on Luos, Chuff had gone for the sword still on the ground, the issue of challenge he’d been given. But even as he did so, the man had drawn and deflected the lunge, going so far as to wrench the weapon from Chuff’s hand where it landed in the shadows several feet away.

  “Ow! Ow ow!” Chuff whined. “You injured my hand! I was unarmed!”

  Before anyone could reply, Chuff turned and ran, clutching his wrist.

  “Some friend of yours?” the man asked when Chuff was gone.

  “Hardly.” Luos began examining the ground. “You didn’t actually cut his hand off?”

  The man shook his head. He extended a hand of his own, which Luos shook. “I’m Dover. You seem to have destroyed my camp.”

  Looking down, Luos saw that the cloth wrapped around his leg was once part of a small temporary shelter.

  Luos grinned and shrugged. “Can I offer you a fig?”