I Can See Evolution Paths

Chapter 33: Retreat!

Roland opened his notebook to the first page.

"Let’s start with the Taurus," he said.

Arthur nodded. "Okay."

"Why did your Goblin challenge Cassian’s beast?"

Arthur blinked. "It challenged us first."

Roland went still. "The Taurus did not challenge you."

"Of course it did, then my partner defeated it."

A silence followed in which Roland appeared to be locating the part of this exchange that was wrong and having difficulty finding it. He wrote something in the notebook. The force applied to the pen suggested significant inner feelings.

"Moving on," he said.

"Okay."

Roland turned to another page. "The Golden Dragon."

"Oh." The single word had a quality to it that made Roland’s pen stop mid-motion.

"Why did your Goblin attempt to strangle Mephistopheles?"

Arthur looked at him with genuine confusion. "Because it was winning."

"What?"

"The Dragon was winning the fight. So Vedas stopped it."

"By strangling it."

"That seemed like the most direct method."

Roland lowered his notebook. Then raised it. Then lowered it again and held it at a position somewhere between the two extremes that expressed his current relationship with the conversation.

"Arthur," he said.

"Yeah?"

"Do you understand how that sounds?"

Arthur considered this with the thoroughness he brought to questions he was actually uncertain about. "No," he said.

Roland absorbed this. "Why not?"

"Wouldn’t most people do the same thing?"

A brief pause while Roland’s professional composure and his honest response to that question negotiated with each other.

"No," Roland said. "Most people would not attempt to physically restrain a dragon with their arms."

Arthur suddenly brightened. "Oh. I get it."

Roland sighed. "...Do you?"

Arthur nodded. "You wanted to think of it first."

Roland froze. "...What?"

Arthur smiled. "It’s okay. You can use it next time. I believe in you."

Roland blankly stared at him.

"What’s wrong? It shouldn’t be hard for you. You’ll figure it out."

Roland froze. "...Thank you?"

Arthur nodded happily. "You’re welcome."

Roland trembled as his eyes dimmed a bit before he forcibly pushed through. "...why was Vedas punching the dragon in the face?"

Arthur’s brow came down slightly. "Where else would he punch?"

Silence.

Roland looked at him.

Arthur looked back.

"The tail?" Roland said, after a moment.

"That seems less efficient."

Roland closed his notebook. Then reopened it. He looked at the pages and then at Arthur and then at the pages again, in the manner of a man confirming that the notebook was real and the conversation was also real and that he was still in possession of both.

"Fine," he said. "How did Vedas learn to fight?"

"Watching people."

"Watching people."

"Yes."

"We’ve covered this."

"Yes."

"That is not typically how combat develops."

Arthur nodded agreeably. "It worked though."

"It shouldn’t."

"But it did."

Roland looked at the sky for a moment. The sky provided nothing. It had not provided anything the last time he had consulted it either. He was beginning to suspect it was not going to start.

"How did Vedas defeat the Taurus?" he asked.

"Teamwork," Arthur said.

Roland paused. "The fight was one-on-one."

"Yes."

"Then where was the teamwork?"

Arthur pointed at himself.

"I was helping," he said.

Roland looked around. "...You weren’t even on the battlefield."

Arthur nodded. "I know. That’s why I had to be loud."

"What advice were you giving?"

Arthur counted on his fingers.

"Hit him."

"Dodge."

"Don’t get hit."

"...Try harder." He thought for another second. "I think that’s everything."

Roland’s shoulders moved. He lowered his head, and the movement of his shoulders continued for several seconds, and Arthur looked at him with a concerned expression.

"Professor?"

Roland raised one finger. "Give me a moment."

"Oh."

Several seconds passed. Roland raised his head again, and his expression had returned to its professional configuration.

"How did Vedas evolve as quickly as he did?"

"We ran," Arthur said.

Roland waited.

"There was a huge boar chasing us." Roland nodded. "It really wanted us dead." Arthur smiled. "So it was great motivation."

Roland slowly lowered his pen and stared at him.

Arthur smiled.

"A boar—" Roland said.

"It was a very large one," Arthur confirmed. "We killed it and then Vedas evolved."

Roland wrote something in the notebook. He did not look at what he wrote. "How much of today do you consider to have been normal?" Roland asked.

Arthur thought about it. "Most of it."

The notebook nearly slipped. Roland caught it. "Most of it."

"Yes."

"The Dragon."

Arthur nodded.

"The Taurus."

Another nod.

"The evolution."

"I don’t really have a comparison point," Arthur said. "So it’s hard to say what’s unusual."

Roland stopped. "What do you mean?"

Arthur pointed at Vedas, who was currently crouched beside Melo. "He’s the only beast I’ve ever raised," Arthur said. "So I don’t know what the standard looks like."

The terrible silence arrived.

Roland’s mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again with the specific movement of someone who had prepared an argument and discovered that the person they were arguing with had accidentally removed its foundation.

Because Arthur was right.

A first-day Beast Tamer with a single beast and no prior experience had no reasonable way to know whether what had happened was unusual. He had nothing to compare it against. The statement "this is what I’ve experienced" could not be evaluated as strange by someone who had no other experiences available.

Roland hated logic.

"Last question," he said.

"Sure."

Roland pointed at Vedas, who had moved on from the sitting demonstration and appeared to now be having a philosophical disagreement with a rock. The rock continued refusing to cooperate. Vedas looked mildly disappointed.

"Can Vedas evolve again?"

"Probably."

The word "probably" landed with more weight than a longer sentence would have. "Into what?" Roland asked.

"I don’t know."

"You don’t know."

"No."

"Then why do you think he can?"

Arthur was quiet for a moment, watching Vedas and the rock, and then he said. "Because he hasn’t stopped."

Roland looked toward Vedas. For a moment he wasn’t looking at a Goblin. He was looking at a path that hadn’t ended yet. And then he waited for clarification.

None arrived.

"What does that mean?" he said.

"I’m not sure," Arthur said. "But that’s how it feels when I look at him."

Something in Roland’s chest did something he would not have described as cracking if anyone had asked him to describe it. He looked at his notebook and then at Arthur and then past Arthur toward Vedas and the rock, and he thought about twenty-three years of studying beasts and the frameworks he had built over that time and what was currently happening to those frameworks.

"Arthur," he said.

"Yeah?"

"I have studied Beast Tamers and their contracted beasts for twenty-three years. I have taught thousands of students. I have observed hundreds of beast partnerships across dozens of species." He paused. "I have never seen anything remotely similar to what occurred today."

Arthur thought about it. "...Really?"

Roland nodded.

"Huh. Good to know." He smiled. "Then Vedas is even more amazing than I thought."

Roland looked at him. "Huh?"

"Yeah."

"That’s your response."

Arthur blinked. "What else would I say?"

Roland’s eyes twitched. "Why are you acting like that is normal!?"

"How would I know what’s normal?" Arthur blinked. "He’s my first beast."

Roland’s composure departed without announcement.

It returned after a moment, which was the professional thing to do, but the return had slightly less structural integrity than the original.

He closed the notebook slowly, with the specific care applied to objects that were being handled at the limit of their tolerances.

"I need to speak with Principal Steven," he said.

"About Vedas?" Arthur asked.

"Yes."

"Oh."

Roland turned and walked away. The pace at which he walked accelerated in a direction that stopped being a dignified instructor’s stride before it had covered ten feet.

Several students who had been standing nearby without being obvious about it watched him go.

Arthur watched too.

"Did I say something wrong?" he asked.

A student beside him said, carefully: "You made Professor Hayes retreat."

Arthur looked at him. "What do you mean retreat?"

"He looked genuinely alarmed," another said.

"He was running," a third added.

Arthur turned toward the direction Roland had gone, which was now empty. "Was he?"

One student looked at another. "...See?"

"I told you."

"He really doesn’t know."

...

The story spread through the remaining crowd with the speed that interesting stories traveled at examination grounds when everyone present was already primed for interesting things.

One version said Arthur had shocked the Professor with information on where he traveled in the secret realm. Another said he had demonstrated that Goblins could evolve without any theoretical limit.

But even more stories expanded from it.

"Professor Hayes ran away," someone told a group of parents near the outer edge.

"Ran?" a parent said.

"Fast," the student confirmed.

"From who?"

The student pointed at Arthur.

The parent looked at Arthur, who was watching Vedas try to communicate something to Melo, and then back at the student.

"That boy?"

"That boy," the student said.

"I heard Arthur was teaching Professor Hayes."

"...What?"

"Apparently."

"...That sounds backwards."

"It does."

"But Hayes ran."

"...Fair point."

The story hit the second ring of the crowd two minutes later in a version that had been improved in transit.

"Arthur told Hayes the whole day was normal," someone reported to a wide-eyed cluster of students.

"Which part?"

"All of it."

"The Dragon fight?"

"Normal."

"Defeating Leon?"

"Normal."

"Evolving a Goblin twice in one day?"

"Very normal. His exact words apparently."

One of the students covered his mouth.

"And Hayes believed him?" another said.

"Hayes ran," the first said. "That’s the believing him part."

A girl in the cluster shook her head slowly. "Normal. He said it was normal."

"He meant it too," someone added from the side. "That’s what everyone keeps saying. He wasn’t being humble. He just genuinely doesn’t know it isn’t normal."

Silence.

"That’s terrifying," the girl said.

"Yes," several people agreed.

"Because if he considered that easy...," she continued. "Then what does he think is difficult?"

Nobody answered.

The final version of the story, traveling along the outer edge of the crowd toward the townspeople who had arrived after the exam ended and were relying entirely on others for information, was the following:

"He told the Professor that the battle with Leon was just practice," someone said.

"Did he?"

"For the GOBLIN."

"That’s what I heard."

"Was it true?"

"I have no idea," the first person said.

"But Hayes ran afterward."

"So it might be true."

"Or Hayes couldn’t argue with it."

"Which is worse."

"Much worse."

A father who had been listening to this exchange while waiting for his daughter turned to the man beside him. "What is the boy planning to do at the Academy?"

The man shrugged. "Normal first-year things, I assume."

"Normal," the father said.

"Yes."

"His version of normal." The man thought about this.

"Someone should warn the school," the father said.

"Someone is," the man said. "Hayes left to find the Principal."

"Oh." A pause. "Oh, that’s why he—"

"Yes."

"He went to warn them."

"That seems to be the conclusion."

"That boy." The father shook his head. "...is going to become Pathfinder Academy’s next Great Disaster."

His neighbor looked at him. "Is that good or bad?"

"For him?" the father said. "He’s going to have a fantastic time." He looked toward Pathfinder Instructors. "...I’m less certain about the Academy."