Chapter 9

“Kale or spring mix?” The sword asked.

“Uh…” The boy on the other side of the bar scratched at his head, glancing between the two green mounds, and back to the sword.

It was dinner time, the sun had set and the great windows of the dining hall had gone dark, pools of night blue broken by the yellow lamps of the green. It was the middle of the dinner hour, the sounds of eating and talking made the sword speak louder than he normally did in order to be heard. Even so, he had already had to repeat himself several times when it was especially loud.

He thought about repeating himself again when the boy didn’t say anything, there were several more people behind him, but eventually the boy pointed at the kale.

The sword unclasped his tongs cautiously, grabbed a swatch of the dark green leaves, glistening with oil and vinegar and whatever else Cadmarius had added to it, and put it onto his plate.

“That was so great,” Arthur said, retying the red bandana covering his hair so that it didn’t fall over his eyes, “look at that, the human weapon used tongs. He’s one step closer to not blowing everyone’s brains out the next time he sneezes, what an incredible use of our evening.”

The sword grunted, his cheeks flushed, but he didn’t say anything.

He had learned in the past few days that responding to Arthur guarantueed the boy would say something in reply. Not that he couldn’t talk even if you didn’t say anything, he absolutely could, but the only hope for an end to the conversation was in letting him have the last word.

Since the incident with the wooden dummy the days had shifted into a new routine. The sword was still the first one to his classroom, and the mornings went largely as they had before. The only difference was that all the other early students completely gave up on talking to him.

His afternoons were now dominated by the kitchens. In practice, that just meant chopping onions. A task the sword now felt confident enough to say that he loathed. He loathed the way the onions made his eyes leak, he loathed the smell, and how hard it was to get it out of his skin when he was done, he had even come to loathe the knife, which never seemed to produce the cuts he wanted from it.

Arthur seemed upset at their new task, Cadmarius had informed them cheerfully of it only minutes before they were sent to the dining hall serving bar, but the sword was so relieved not to be chopping onions he didn’t even mind all the noise, which would, at any other time of day, have seemed unbearable.

“Gives a few of my staff a night off,” Cadmarius told them. “And it’ll be good for you to see the finished food. You can see what everything in the kitchen is for. And if you do a good job, the kitchen staff will like you more. Always nice to be liked by kitchen staff.”

So now they were at the serving bar, in identical aprons and bandanas, the sword scooping batches of salad, Arthur ladling soups into the small bowls in the students’ trays.

And yes, there had been some incidents early on in the evening when the sword had forgotten how the tongs worked, but he had done the last few batches with no problems.

“Kale or spring mix?”

“…”

The sword repeated himself, he must have said it too quietly again. It was getting noiser in the dining hall, many people arriving, not many people leaving. There weren’t many empty tables left.

“…”

He looked up to find it was his two classmates he saw in the mornings, the boys who always talked about death. They were staring at him wide eyed.

The sword tilted his head, then reached up with his free hand to adjust his bandana. The two boys both flinched.

For two people who, from what the sword understood, had faced death many many more times than a normal human ever did, they seemed remarkably scared of everything.

“Kale or spring mix?” He asked again.

Instead of answering, they just slid their trays past his station and mumbled requests for soup to Arthur. “Are you sure? It’s pretty hot stuff. Wouldn’t want your poor little mouths to get burned,” was Arthur’s snide question as he slopped soup into their bowls.

“Should’ve told them I put poison in the split-pea,” he muttered as the boys left, and more of the sword’s class moved through. He got many more similar stares, but people usually at least responded to his question.

The sword understood their wariness, after all, he was wary of himself now. An unstable weapon isn’t a weapon, it is just a hazard. All it can do is harm.

“POISON IN THE SPLIT PEA SOUP, JUST WHAT I WOULD EXPECT FROM THE DEMON LORD,” Haldar Brassbones boomed, pointing his spoon in Arthur’s direction.

Arthur rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak all-caps.”

“HMMMPH,” the Haldar said, turning his gaze onto the sword.

“THAT WAS AN IMPRESSIVE DEMONSTRATION,” Haldar said to the sword. “DRUDGERY IS UNWORTHY OF A MAN WITH SUCH STRENGTH.”

The sword disagreed, but he did not want the line to get any slower than it already was. None of the stations after his and Arthur’s had anyone using them, they had become the bottleneck, and the line behind was growing longer.

He asked his traditional question.

“WARRIORS EAT MEAT, LEAVES ARE FOR PEONS,” Haldar Brassbones said, and picked up his tray, skipping Arthur’s station as well to reach the first of the entrees, large slabs of grilled chicken.

“Goddamn racist [Barbarians],” Arthur said. “You know I’m convinced he only talks like that because if he talked normally everyone would immediately realize how stupid he is.”

“Spring mix or Kale?” the sword asked to the next person in line. It wasn’t so bad having to speak regularly when he knew exactly what it was he was going to say.

“Can I have both?”

The sword paused. It was one of the wielder candidates asking, the laughing girl. Her jacket was slung over one shoulder, her hair tied in a pony tail at the back, and her smile played at the corners of her lips, as always.

The sword considered the question carefully. This had not been a situation Cadmarius had covered with him.

He turned to Arthur, “Can she have both?”

“No, if humans have both kale and spring mix salad at the same time, their stomachs explode,” Arthur said, reaching over to grab the extra pair of tongs and dumping globs of both salads onto the girls tray.

“Do you want both soups too?” He asked, pointing at her bowl.

The girl’s grin widened. “You’re funny,” she said to Arthur. “I wish all [Demon Lord’s] had your sense of humor.”

“That makes two of us,” Arthur snapped back, shooing her away.

“I do not enjoy servant work,” he told the sword, when the line was less busy.

“Do you like any kind of work?” The sword asked.

“Heh,” Arthur said. Which wasn’t an answer. But the sword didn’t really care. He was getting tired. This much interaction, even structured as it was, was growing wearisome. The space between his eyes was beginning to ache, what Cadmarius called a stress headache.

“I’m glad you’re noticing pain,” Cadmarius had said to him when the sword had first asked about it.

He had not said anything else.

The sword really wished he’d provided a suggestion on how to make it feel better.

When he’d asked Arthur the boy had shrugged and said, “I don’t know—a pain killer? Or maybe someone in the class is a healer. They can give you a compress of grass and dandelions that’ll work better than ibuprofen for some dumb reason.” But the sword didn’t know how to acquire a painkiller, so he just waited them out.

He rubbed at his forehead, the last of the students seemed to have sat down. Usually he didn’t notice time too much, but today he was very interested in when this activity would be over.

“At freaking last,” Arthur said, leaning against the bar. He’d acquired a whole plate of food. “You should eat. Or you’ll faint. And it’ll be embarrassing.”

This was true. The sword went to fetch his own plate, and went through the line pulling items at random.

He had just returned to Arthur, who was trying to tell him something about the nuances of stew, when there was a screech from outside.

Long.

Loud.

Definitely not human.

Quite close.

Everyone in the dining hall went quiet.

Then they all started yelling at once.

Cries of “Beast!”, “Demon!”, “Werewolf!”, intermixed with calls for calm and demands for order.

Arthur kept eating his food as if nothing had happened, so the sword did too, although he watched with some interest as some of the older students waded out of the dining hall to see what had happened.

“Think its a demon?” The sword asked.

“Nah,” Arthur said, “No chance. I’d be getting notifications like crazy otherwise. Your subject draws near, or, a potential rival to the throne approaches, crap like that. Probably just another straggler who wandered into Earth, like that [Scout] who beat you up.”

“He did not beat me up,” the sword felt he had to say. “I absolutely defeated him.”

Arthur had that look on his face that meant he had something particularly long-winded to say, but he never got a chance to say it.

Instead the group of students who had gone to look came running back, their leader, a tall girl with long blond hair, long as her waste, yelled, “We’re under attack! Run!”

At nearly the same time, one of the great dining hall windows exploded inward, sending shards of glass flying in all directions, and the dinosaur riders burst into the hall.