Totem 21: My Mentor Is An Ass (Patreon)

MAOR TOTEM!!!!

(Give me about 20 minutes and all previous chapters of Totem should be in a collection, or you can click on the Totem tag for backreading.)

Ash stared at us, taking in the scene. He had taken his sweet time showing up — arriving just as we were about to get to harvesting the roadrunner.

I had to admit that we didn’t make all that impressive of a sight. Annika and I were both splattered from head to foot with mud and blood.

Russell, who still had a bunch of bird spit on him, was whimpering over his dislocated elbow.

The most impressive thing about us was the house-sized roadrunner which lay dead.

Ash snorted. "That took you longer than it should have."

Annika's head shot up sharply as if she had been slapped across the face. Then she looked down again, chastised.

That set me off. "Hey, we just took down a freaking bird big enough to swallow somebody." I gestured to Russell as exhibit A. "Why don't you cut us a little slack?"

"A little slack?" Ash echoed.

"Yeah. And, on top of that, Annika just connected with her totem. It's a big moment for her," I added, hoping that he would get the hint and not rain on her parade.

Ash was less than impressed. "This is merely the first step in a very, very long journey. You are babies playing with toys you don't understand."

"You call that a toy?" I looked back at the roadrunner, meaningfully.

Ash shook his head and then, to my continuing amazement, he strode past us through the mud, used his air-claw to harvest the roadrunner for cores right then and there, pocketing them.

He made a show of looking over the corpse with an air of disdain. "You think this is an accomplishment? You're just throwing the base elements at these creatures. I had hoped better from the two of you."

My fists clenched, and I felt on the verge of throwing some of those base elements his way. But then Annika interjected.

"Then, do you have any wisdom for us, sir?" she asked with her head bowed.

Ash's lip twitched upward. "Finally, a girl with some sense.”

He didn't want sense. He just wanted someone to grovel for a bit of whatever he would teach them. I had mixed feelings about Ash from the start, but with the attitude he was pulling right now, scale had been thoroughly tipped to dislike.

If I ever get students, I wouldn't treat them this way, I thought.

Then, I caught Ash staring at me. He wasn't going to say a damn thing until I, too, asked nicely.

If it weren't for Annika, I wouldn't. The words were like glass crawling up my throat. "What do you think we could have done better?"

There. That was as civil as I could possibly get.

"What you need is to create your own techniques," Ash said.

There was a pause.

He was waiting for more. Rat bastard.

"And how," I said through gritted teeth, "do I do that?"

Didn’t I already have techniques? I’d just shot fire from my freakin’ hand at the roadrunner. Did he want me to go super saiyan at the thing?

"What else?" Ash said, as if it were obvious, and when he explained… Yeah, it sort of was. "That will only happen when you have sympathy with your totem. It's how you grow together. What you are doing now is merely using your totems as sources of power." He shook his head in disgust. "You may as well skip the process and simply squeeze extra power from your totems, becoming like your parents. At least then, you won't be wasting anybody's time."

I was getting really fucking tired of guy, but his warning sent a shot of ice through me. Instantly, I checked on the gosling to find it curled up and sleeping as normal. Unharmed.

It even had some extra energy to feed off of, thanks to the power that surrounded the roadrunner. Even if that power was now dwindling, now that it was dead.

Annika, though, was looking at Ash as if there was real gold in them thar hills.

"I don't want to squeeze power from my totem, now that I've met her," she said, with fervor in her voice. "And I do want to commune with her… But she's so small. So young."

His stern gaze softened a touch. "They are, at first. And you're a coyote — a mammal, which means your totem has a little more time to grow up before it can fully communicate with you."

Then he turned his eyes to me, and I read the dissatisfaction in them. My totem was a gosling, and while it was young,  it wasn't as helpless as a mammal.

Russell whimpered again, breaking the stare-off between the two of us.

"Is there anything you can do for him?" I asked Ash, unsure if healing magic existed in this world.

I mean, before meeting Ash, I hadn't witnessed anybody turn fully into their totem, so who knew what was possible?

He glanced over Russell with a dispassionate eye. "No, the joint is in place, and he will heal, though he may lose some mobility in the arm. Connecting with his totem could perhaps help this in time."

Which was years away. For Russell, that was zero help.

Frustrated, I changed the subject.

"So, what happens next?"

"You face the last monster, of course. The most challenging of all. First, you should learn your own techniques."

"Yeah, but won't that take time? And meanwhile, the monster's out there just eating more towns?" I gestured towards the wildlands, annoyed. "You were just hiding, watching us fight, weren't you?"

"Of course I was," Ash said.

"That means you let Russell get hurt." Annika inhaled sharply. "You would have let my brother die?"

And just like that, her admiration for Ash visibly waned.

"Of course, girl. This world is not kind or pleasant," Ash said matter-of-factly.

"The world is what we make it," I snapped back. "Maybe it's unkind and unpleasant because people like you sit back and watch kids get hurt. I'm not saying that you had to kill the roadrunner for us, but we're your students. We're just figuring this out. And now you come at us with techniques — you could have at least told us what we needed to do, or been there as a safety net."

Annika looked at me strangely.

I guess some of that had been peppered with Earth's terms and sounded off. But I didn't care.

Ash shrugged. "You asked for my help, and I've given it."

"Yeah, and you reap the rewards," I said pointedly, glancing at his hand which held the monster core.

His eyes narrowed and he put the parts in his pocket. Slowly, deliberately, his gaze fixed on me, challenging. And suddenly, those didn't seem to be human eyes. They were the eyes of a predator. A cougar.

Inside, my inner goose woke up and took notice, but I wasn't an idiot. He was stronger than me in almost every way. I wasn’t going to challenge him.

Then Ash doubled down on the dickery.

"If you think you don't need my help any longer, then perhaps I should leave," Ash said.

Oh really? He was going to play this game?

"Maybe you should," I said, calling his bluff.

"No, don't go," Annika pleaded. “Seth, say you're sorry. We need Ash’s guidance."

But I thought his guidance was a crock of shit.

"And now you're abandoning us," I said. "How noble."

"Good luck. I'll meet you in the city, if you survive," Ash retorted.

Ash turned slowly, deliberately, as if he expected us to beg him to stay.

Annika did. I didn't.

I wasn't going to give him that satisfaction. Soon, he was lost to the trees. My guess was he would continue watching us.

"Seth, what have you done?" Annika asked, turning to me.

I shrugged. “He wants me to beg for his help, and I'm not giving him the pleasure."

It looked like she wanted to argue with me, but then she sighed crossed her arms around herself, as if giving herself a hug. "But we need his help. We have to get Russell to the city so he can find healing."

I shook my head. "No, we have one more monster to face."

"You guys are going to fight another one?" Russell's voice was weak, and he sounded younger than I had ever heard him before. He had been such a little twerp that it was easy to forget that he was just a preteen.

Despite myself, I felt a pang of sympathy. "Yes, we are. And I know your arm hurts, Russell, but we need you. You have to be strong and help us out if you can."

"Why?" Annika asked.

I turned to her. "Because Ash just got one hell of a haul of monster cores from this roadrunner, and we need the cores from the next one. Russell could use some to give him a head start, and we can use the rest to pay for whatever healing he needs."

I looked at Annika. "What do you say?"

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