Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

t was already late when Arthur slipped through the front door of his house and pressed the switch for the majicka lamp in his bedroom. He wasn’t going to get a full night’s sleep, but it was fine. He didn’t need quite as much sleep these days to begin with, likely a byproduct of vitality or majicka or a mix of both. Losing a few hours a single night wouldn’t hurt him much.

Before Arthur actually made it to his bed, he saw a small note pinned to one of the sheets. Nobody in town really locked their doors, but there were only a few people who would have felt comfortable coming into his house and especially his bedroom without him there.

That shortlist established, he reached down, pulled the needle securing the note to his bed things, and read it.

Arthur,

When talking to Mizu about her shoes, I learned you were going to be out for most of the evening. Since you gave me free rein to do my work whenever, and since I wanted to get a head start on it as a form of a thank you, I took the liberty of letting myself in and putting some work in on your blankets and things.

I only did one set, but given how clean you keep them, that should hold you over until I have time to do the others. Enjoy. I also did your pajamas, but some of the clean ones. Look on your side table.

Lina

“Oh, hell yes.” Arthur shimmied out of his coldfall garb and into his sleeping things, and then more or less catapulted himself into bed. He was almost too excited to go to sleep, something he was able to worry about for almost two minutes before he was out like a light.

Walking up in the morning, he considered how subtle the effects of the enchantments were. It wasn’t anything he’d notice outright, which was probably a good thing given how light some people slept. Instead, everything was just a little bit softer, a little bit dryer, and a little bit warmer, like they had just come out of a drying machine and were in their ideal state.

The effects didn’t just end with comfort. Arthur woke up completely fresh, like he had achieved a state of nirvana just by sleeping like a sedated rock. He would have liked to have spent some more time in bed just soaking in the feeling, but he had places to be.

Being relatively small, the town was a relatively easy-to-get-around place. The furthest from Arthur’s house was the wall, which was getting much more built up these days. Where they had been maybe twice as tall as he was and narrow enough that he would have had to concentrate to balance on them, they were now broad enough for two people to walk past each other on top without brushing shoulders and roughly half the height of the cliff.

Rather than staircases, the wall had Slapstone ladders that, because of the material’s self-healing properties, melded into the other parts of the wall. It was a little harder to use but much quicker and much easier to chip out and replace in a different location as the ever-morphing design of the town’s protective barrier forced adjustments.

The crews were already hard at work as he walked up, some of them looking at him with hopeful faces before realizing he wasn’t carrying tea. But it didn’t take long to find the person Arthur was looking for. It was a bit hard to miss, especially since she was standing on top of the wall and barking orders.

“Karra!” Arthur yelled up. “Do you want me to come up there?”

Karra’s head swiveled around as she spotted Arthur, shook her head, and said a few more words to the other workers.

“Nope! I’ll come down. One second,” Karra yelled back.

Grabbing the sides of the ladder, she slid down to ground level like a red fireman, grasping just tight enough to get the friction she needed to slow her fall. She still hit hard, puffing up dust as her feet collided with the ground.

“You made it. Those guys up there didn’t think you would. They don’t understand you and Mizu like I do.” Karra gave Arthur a quick hug and pivoted towards the wall. “What do you think?”

“Did it get even taller?” Arthur asked. “I thought we decided against that. Something about it staying stable as it grew.”

“Yeah, it did. One of the workers figured out that if we pinned it to the cliff every so many feet, it wouldn’t fall. There’s no shortage of bricks and stone, these days, so we just went for it,” Karra said.

“That’s great,” Arthur said as he looked to the sides of the walls. Through a clever use of Slapstone and a bit of tunneling, the wall was now screwed into the cliffs. “It’s now a bigger problem for any monsters that want to try us.”

“Yup. And I’ve been meeting with your trapper about how to use the extra height best for some things he and Milo already have planned. Which is kind of why I wanted you out here.”

“I should have already given them clearance to do what they wanted. Did they just want confirmation?”

“Not them. Me,” Karra said. “This wall here is about the best we can do on a single wall. We could make it thicker, but that doesn’t help as much as you’d think it would. It’s already thick enough that anything the dungeons could throw at us would bash off it like a ball off a cobblestone street. And we’re limited by the confines of the cliff.”

“So you are done?” Arthur felt a little disappointment deep in his heart. If they were through with the productive work they could do on the wall, then their safety now rested in the hands of the defenders of the town and whatever tricks and weird stuff Milo and the other crafters could think up in time. “You don’t need the council’s permission to stop, if you are.”

“I might be done.” Karra was still looking at the wall. “Or I might not. Do you know what the problem with walls is? Any wall, I mean.”

“They fall down?”

“That’s it. Or part of it. They fall down, or they can be dug under. Or they can be bashed through. Or melted with acid, or a dozen other ways monsters can make stone fail. Repair crews can help with that, but eventually a wall fails. Otherwise, people wouldn’t have to deal with monster waves. They could just wait the monsters out behind walls until they starved or wandered off.”

“I’m missing the point, I think.”

“So was I. And I thought about it some more and I realized that’s because we’ve always lived in cities. Most towns have a turning point where they can finally build a wall around themselves that’s big enough to circle everything, then another point when they have enough people to actually defend it from a wave. That takes a lot of people because the waves are huge and they circle the entire town. They have to be strong enough to take down the wave before it takes down the wall,” Karra explained.

“And we don’t have that many people yet,” Arthur said.

“Probably not. But we have some advantages they don’t have.”

“The cliffs?”

“Yes. And not just the ones here.” Karra pointed to the big, looming cliffs that bordered the town, then looped her hand a bit to indicate slightly more distant objects. “Once you get past these big natural walls, you get to the cliffs that fall off towards the ocean. And nothing could survive that drop. So if the monsters want us, they have to come at us dead on. And that means we can buy time.”

Karra guided Arthur to a table where she had a rough drawing on a large sheet of paper weighted down by bricks. It wasn’t a pretty drawing, but it got the general impression of her plans across just fine.

“You want to build more walls, behind the main wall?” Arthur asked.

“As many as we can before the wave hits. They don’t have to be as tall as the main wall. But once that wall falls or is breached, it gives us a place to fall back to where we can fight again.”

“This is brilliant,” Arthur said. “But won’t the first wall take down the others while it falls?”

“Not if we build it right,” Karra said. “I used to help with demolitions. If we weight it right, we can control the direction it falls, mostly. The secondary walls won’t give us all the time the first one did. But they’ll give us some. And with enough time…”

“We can multiply our chances of beating the wave,” Arthur finished.

“Right. Actually, one second. This’ll be quick.”

Karra pulled away from the table and ran over to a couple of her work crews, delivering a couple of different sets of instructions on the fly. Arthur was impressed. When she first showed up at the town, she had done all her work to order, waiting to be told what to do or joining already-in-progress jobs and adding the muscle that made them go faster. Now, she was the defacto leader of the town’s entire laborer class. They looked to her for direction, and she served as a bridge between them and the town’s designers and leadership.

“Sorry, Arthur. They hadn’t heard the updates for some of today’s work yet,” Karra apologized when she came back.

“No problem. So, this all looks great. Why do you need me?” Arthur asked.

Karra looked at Arthur blankly. “To approve it? I’m not going to start an entire town work project without approval, Arthur.”

“Hmm.” Arthur looked up at what she had already done, a giant main wall that seemed solid and unmoving. It was safety in a physical form. “If you say we should do it, then it’s approved. I mean, you’ve built all this by yourself. And it’s as good as any wall I’ve ever seen.”

“Not by myself.”

“You know what I mean. We gave you approval to build a wall, and you built it. You led the whole thing. Is anyone in town more qualified to do that than you? Would anyone be right if they said you were wrong about some aspect of building a wall?”

“Well, no, but…”

“Then consider it done. All of it, however many layers, whatever you think is right. I mean, work with Milo and everyone else, but… Karra, you knew your idea was the right one. If it wasn’t, someone would have spoken up when you showed it to them before I got here.” Arthur paused. “How long did you delay waiting for me to get here?”

“A day at most.”

“That’s a day we don’t have. Everyone trusts you, Karra.” Arthur waved his hand majestically. “I hereby deem you the head of the entire wall-building effort, with approval to do anything that isn’t incredibly weird or dangerous. Congratulations.”

Karra was going to argue. He could see it in her face, right until her eyes went suddenly blank and she fell like a flat slab of stone. Arthur tried to catch her and missed, leaving her to fall straight down. She hit her head so hard on the table that she took off a piece of the wood on the edge. Arthur was worried, but he was pretty sure that it’d only be a bad bruise with Karra’s sky-high vitality score.

“Karra!” Arthur signaled over a few people who had heard the crack and gave them quick instructions to go find the town’s medic. “Get someone here now. Something’s wrong. Karra just fainted.”