Chapter 8

The sword stood next to the splintered pole which had once been the end of the wooden dummy, waiting.

Waiting for what?

The sword had had many wielders, and among those wielders, there had been those with more experience handling [Unique Swords] and those with less. Sometimes much less.

There had been the peasant boy, Arhad, who had found him in his father’s attic, battlefield spoils from some youthful war the father had held on to and never told anyone about, till the day their village was attacked by orcs.

Arhad had destroyed his village along with the orcs, and afterwards flung the sword into the bottom of a lake.

There had been Niesa, a princess who needed a weapon. She’d blown a hole in the side of her room the first time she’d used the sword, but she had gotten better, practicing again and again until the day she took the field against her sister the [Demon Lord], and fought her to a draw.

The overconfident hero Boril, the curious mage Lascau, the list went on and on. So many who had had absolutely no idea what they were doing the first time they used the sword.

The sword had always quietly found that amusing, and faintly ridiculous. They always looked at status before using him. His skills, what they were and what they would do were always there, plain to see. He’d chalked it up to a failing of wielders, that they were always unprepared by his power. A flaw. And one that the best of his wielders avoided, like the one who had retrieved him from his wife’s corpse and used him to decapitate the [Fallen God] who had murdered her.

The sword was shocked to discover he himself was like his most inexperienced wielders. Overwhelmed by his own power. The least of his power. After about his tenth wielder, none of them had even bothered using snuff, it was so underpowered compared to the other skills available to him.

Out of control.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Ms. Lopez asked, waiving her hand in front of his face, “I told you to go to the kitchens.”

The sword blinked, the field was empty, the sun was much lower in the sky. Ms. Lopez’ hair was once more arranged in her neat style, though her clothes were still spattered with dirt and little shards of wood.

The rest of the class was gone. He had no idea where they had went, or when that had happened.

“The kitchens?” He asked.

“Yes. Next to the dining hall. Go on. I’m off duty, I’m not baby sitting you any more.” Ms. Lopez made a shooing motion with her hands, and the sword found himself truding towards the dining hall.

He didn’t pass anyone from his class, but still the students he did pass whispered as he walked by. He found the sound annoying, it made the hairs on his arms stand up. Of course, there had been an audience for his mess.

If there were any potential wielders in the other classes, something he hadn’t even considered until now, they would not be impressed by what they had seen. No one needed a sword that was out of control.

Next to the dining hall was not a very clear instruction, but the sword, remembering how hot it had been the last time he was in the kitchens, simply went through whichever door seemed to have hotter air, until he ended up back in the long room with the ovens.

Cadmarius was at the large table in the center, Arthur at his side. They were bent over a pair of large stone bowls, pounding spices into powder with heavy stone pestles that thumped solidly every time they made contact with the stone bowl.

“Why, it’s Nick,” Cadmarius said in his slow voice. He was dressed in the same long coat as the last time the sword had seen him. “Hello Nick. Why haven’t you been coming in the evenings?”

The sword cleared his throat, unprepared for the question. “Oh, sorry. I…it didn’t occur to me.”

“You look like crap,” Arthur said, glancing up briefly from his to add add another handful of round seeds to his bowl. “What, did you end up actually killing one of the little bastards?”

“Arthur,” Cadmarius said disapprovingly, “We do not refer to our fellow students as ‘little bastards’.”

Arthur rolled his eyes, and did not correct himself.

“I was told…Ms. Lopez told me to come here,” the sword said.

Cadmarius nodded slowly. “Yeeeees.”

Pound pound pound.

The sword waited.

Cadmarius worked.

Arthur at last said, “Will someone please say something?”

Cadmarius paused, grinning a little. “You are very impatient Arthur.”

“And you’re both slow as molasses,” the boy retorted. “Not all of us had the leisure of watching glaciers melt or whiling a century away in some rock in the middle of nowhere, or whatever it is you two were doing.”

“Unfortunately not,” Cadmarius agreed. “But yes, Nick. You failed quite badly. In the past, Ms. Lopez has asked me to step in at such times, she asked me to do so again .”

“What does that mean?” The sword asked.

“It means that when you are done with your individualized classes, you will come to the kitchens,” Cadmarius said.

“What are we going to do in the kitchens?” The sword asked.

Cadmarius didn’t respond, instead producing a large funnel, which he put into the top of a narrow glass jar, and proceeded to pour the contents of his stone bowl into the funnel.

Little dusty brown bits fell slowly into the glass jar, forming a narrow mound.

The sword noticed that Cadmarius seemed to have no trouble at all lifting the heavy stone bowl. Arthur did, as he copied Cadmarius, and more than a little of his brown dust spilled onto the table top.

“What are we going to do in the kitchens?” The sword asked.

“What would you like to do?” Cadmarius asked.

The sword despised this question immediately, and didn’t respond.

Neither did Cadmarius.

“Pink haired goddesses help me,” Arthur swore. “You have to respond, or we’ll never be allowed to leave this furnace.”

The sword looked at Cadmarius for confirmation, and the man just smiled at him.

“I want a wielder,” the sword said at last. “That’s all that I want.” It was the only solution. If the sword couldn’t be trusted to use his skills on his own, he would just have to find a wielder who could be trusted. That was the only he was going to be useful. And he needed to be useful.

Otherwise, what was the point of being here?

“Not this again,” Arthur muttered under his breath. This time Cadmarius ignored him, nodding his head slowly as he pondered the sword’s words. “Well,” Cadmarius said, “there will be time for that. But, I think not yet. Instead, how about you chop some more onions for me?”

“What?” The sword asked.

“We use quite a lot of onions,” Cadmarius said apologetically.

“Why would that help?” The sword asked. “What do onions have to do with me losing control of myself?”

Cadmarius shrugged. “Maybe nothing,” he said. “But you won’t be allowed to use a skill for a good long time. You might as well do something useful.”

“He won’t say this because he’s too polite,” Arthur added, “But your knife skills are absolutely garbage. You need the practice. Shouldn’t swords be good at cutting things or whatever?”

Ah.

The sword understood.

This wasn’t some kind of lesson, it was just a punishment, a place to get him out of the way where he couldn’t harm the other students.

This was an eminently sensible plan, he wished Ms. Lopez had just told him that from the beginning, he would have understood at once. But everyone here talked to him like he was human, so it was always more complicated than it needed to be.

He opened the cabinet Cadmarius directed him to, pulled out a wooden cutting board and a bag of onions, and then waited as Cadmarius spent some time rummaging through the large knife block at one end of the table before presenting the sword with a large knife, black wooden handle, blade unpolished, but sharp.

Arthur joined him with his own knife and onions, and the sword tried to copy Arthur as the other boy neatly split the onion into two pieces, then made a series of quick cuts, and suddenly produced a pile of neat yellow squares.

The sword’s efforts were not so fruitful.

“Start by holding the knife from the blade,” Cadmarius said, coming up behind him to show the sword what he meant. “The handle is misleading. This way, you will have more control, and won’t cut yourself.”

The sword wanted the control more than he was worried about being cut, but he did as Cadmarius suggested, and bent to his task, though his still looked far worse than Arthur’s.

It was, at least, something to do.