Reborn as an Adventurer: I Gain a Skill From Every Monster I Eat

Chapter 3: Chapter 3 — The Slums

By the time he was six, the boy had grown into the sort of child who noticed everything.

He noticed which market stalls put out their scraps at dusk, and which ones did it a little earlier if you smiled at the right vendor. He noticed that the baker on Cooper’s Row always burned the bottom of one loaf each morning and, rather than throw it out, left it by the back step for whoever happened to wander past first. He noticed the exact creak of the fourth floorboard by the door, and made sure never to step on it after dark.

His name was Arlen, and everyone in the cramped, sagging tenement on the edge of Greyhaven’s slum district called him "the quick one," on account of how fast he moved and how rarely he seemed to go hungry, even when hunger was the one thing the slums had in endless supply.

The woman who’d raised him through his infancy — the one with the tired eyes and the soft voice — had passed two winters ago, from a coughing sickness that took half the tenement with her. Arlen didn’t remember much of the day itself. Mostly he remembered the silence afterward, and the strange, hollow feeling of a room that had always been loud suddenly not being loud anymore.

After that, there’d been no one single person looking after him. There didn’t need to be, really. The slum raised its children the way a forest raises its weeds — collectively, haphazardly, and with a certain rough tenderness that outsiders never quite gave it credit for.

Old Maren three doors down would feed him if he swept her stoop. Tobbin the cart-puller would let him ride on the back of his wagon for two streets if Arlen kept an eye out for guards who didn’t like unpaid riders. The other children — there were always other children, a shifting, ever-changing tangle of them — took him in as one of their own, the way children do, without ceremony or complaint.

Arlen didn’t mind any of it. If anything, he rather liked it.

"You’re a strange one," Old Maren told him once, watching him scrub her doorstep with far more enthusiasm than the job strictly required. "Most boys your age complain about chores. You hum."

"It’s not so bad," Arlen said, grinning up at her. "Better than sitting around bored."

She’d laughed at that, the dry, creaking laugh of someone who didn’t have much reason to laugh these days, and given him an extra heel of bread for his trouble.

It wasn’t that life in the slums was easy. It wasn’t. Some nights there was no bread at all, burnt or otherwise, and Arlen went to sleep with his stomach growling and his ribs a little too visible beneath his thin shirt. Some winters were so cold that three or four of the smaller children didn’t wake up in the spring, and the whole tenement went quiet and grim for a few days before, slowly, the noise crept back in, because it always did.

But even on the hard days, Arlen found something to notice. A particular shade of orange the sky turned just before a storm. The way pigeons scattered off the rooftops all at once, like something had startled them from a single shared thought. The taste of wild onion grass that grew along the drainage ditch outside the slum wall — bitter, but better than nothing, and he was fairly proud of being the one who’d discovered it was edible in the first place.

"You’d eat a rock if you thought it might taste interesting," said Denna, a girl a year older than him who ran with the same loose pack of slum kids, watching him chew on a mouthful of the onion grass with far too much enthusiasm.

"Rocks probably don’t taste like much," Arlen said seriously, considering it. "But I’d try it once. Just to know."

Denna threw a pebble at him for that, and he laughed, and ducked, and threw one back, and for a little while the hard edges of the world softened into something like an ordinary, scrappy, perfectly happy childhood.

He liked the days best when errands took him near the city’s outer wall, where the buildings thinned out and he could see past the rooftops to the dark green smear of the Verdant Crown Forest in the distance, and sometimes — if he was lucky, if he’d finished his errands quickly enough — a glimpse of adventurers passing through the gate, dust on their boots and strange gear slung across their backs.

He didn’t know what most of it was for. He didn’t know what half the creatures were, whose hides and horns and strange curling claws sometimes poked out of merchants’ sacks on their way to the market district. But he watched anyway, every single time, standing on his toes at the edge of the crowd until someone shooed him along.

"Someday," he told Denna once, the two of them perched on a low wall overlooking the gate, watching a mud-splattered party of four haul in something enormous wrapped in canvas, "I’m going to go out there."

"Out where?" Denna asked, unimpressed. "The forest? You’ll get eaten."

"Not the forest," Arlen said, though he wasn’t entirely sure that was true. "Everywhere. All of it. Past the forest, past the mountains, wherever the roads go."

Denna gave him a long look, the kind older children give younger ones when they’ve said something a little too big for their age. "You’re a strange one," she said, echoing Old Maren without meaning to.

"That’s what everyone says." Arlen didn’t seem bothered by it. If anything, he grinned wider. "Maybe strange is just what you call someone before they go and do something interesting."

He didn’t know where the thought came from. It simply arrived, the way certain thoughts did sometimes — fully formed, oddly certain, like an old memory surfacing from somewhere he couldn’t quite name.

He didn’t dwell on it. He was six years old, and there was a beetle crawling along the top of the wall that looked like it might be worth investigating, and the bread from Old Maren’s stoop was still warm in his pocket, and the whole wide unexplored world was still, for now, safely far away.

There was time yet. He didn’t know why he was so certain of that. He simply was.

For now, there was the slum, and the wall, and the forest in the distance, green and waiting.