Ermos
They sat around a campfire, burning the wood of rotten roots, enjoying the rich juices of the fruit that Pash had tucked away inside that rucksack of his.
"It would have been a shame to leave them all to rot," he had explained as he revealed his treasure, "so I packed away as much as I could fit, just in case we needed them in the future."
And Ermos was very glad he did. He wasn't much a fan of pears, but these were a different sort. They were like the very best version of what a pear could be. So sweet and juicy and soft yet not too soft. He could have eaten a thousand of them. The juices dribbled down his chin, and he didn't care to brush them away.
They shared their food with Mane, who had a rather voracious appetite, even though he had bread and supplies of his own. But more than Mane, it was those teenage swordsmen that ate the most. Ermos watched them in fascination as they devoured one fruit after the other.
Even the two girls ate more than he would have expected and the boys almost matched Ermos in appetite – a fact that he wasn't too fond of, for he was very proud of how much food he was able to put away.
For a time, they merely ate in silence, the only sound being the crackling of the fire and the crunching of fruit. Those starving students also took massive gulps of water, completely emptying the canteens that Pash had brought with him, but the young apprentice had merely smiled and gone to refill them by one of the clear nearby flowing streams. He was very resourceful like that.
It was Ermos that spoke up first, bored of the silence. "You guys really eat a lot. How long have you been down here?"
Everyone gave him a strange look, as though it was weird that he was asking, but it didn't bother Ermos too much. He was used to those kinds of glances.
"…Eight days," a gloomy-looking boy said. He had long dark hair, a handsome youth with an angular chin and a soft nose. If he wanted to, he could quite easily have pretended to be a girl, and he would definitely have been hailed as a beauty.
"You've done well to preserve yourselves for that long," Mane said stoically. "Your resolve is to be admired. How did you manage it?"
The other boy spoke up. He seemed more like the cheery type, though there was still a sadness written on his face. He had a dumb look to him, with big green eyes that stared out at the world as though everything surprised him and short cut blonde hair held back with an unfashionable headband. "We drank from the streams. I kept telling these guys that someone would sure to be looking for us, but I didn't think it would be you who came to our rescue, Sir Mane! It's an honour to meet you."
The other boy gave him a dark look, as though angered by his cheeriness, but he said nothing and merely kept to his aggressiveness in a silence.
"I am sorry that it took me so long," was all Mane said, his eyes flickering towards the corpse that hung nearby.
The moody boy was quick to pick up on that. "So are we. His name was Sunne. Her brother." He pointed to one of the quiet girls to illustrate his words. She timidly looked away, unhappy to have the attention. A pair of round glasses rested on the end of her nose, and long brown hair hung down from her head. It was so long, in fact, that it almost gave the Queen of Flowers a run for her money – it went all the way down to her knees, ending in a pair of bells tied on by blue ribbons.
"You can't blame them for that! Sunne died on the first day, and he died defending us. It was our fault. Don't you try to put it any other way, Lucifan," the last girl spoke up loudly. It was only then that Ermos noticed her impressive chest. She proudly showed it off, wearing a short cut red velvet waistcoat that stopped before it could cover her belly. Her short cut shoulder-length red hair gave her a boyish look, but that chest did much to offset it.
As they talked, Ermos marvelled at it in confusion. How on earth could they grow so big? He felt his own chest. It was nowhere near that size. Maybe if he trained a little more, then he could…
"Okay…" Lucifan shrugged with a smug self-satisfied grin on his face, as though he washed himself of all responsibility.
"Gr…" the girl twisted her lips in annoyance, before dipping her head to Mane. "Please forgive him, Sir Mane. The lack of food must have made him… irritable."
Mane held up his hand to stop her and he shook his head. "There is no explanation necessary. His criticism is right. A problem of this scale should have been dealt with long before any students had to come and solve it."
"But you were off fighting dragons, weren't you?" The blonde-haired boy piped up excitedly. "I'm Fer, by the way. Fer Gaster! You're the reason I started training with the sword in the first place. My aim is to be able to wield one just like yours – no, even bigger! Everyone called you stupid at the start, didn't they? That's the same thing they say to me. But you kept with it, and look at you now, you're the Slash's greatest hero!"
"Tsch," Lucifan made a noise of disgust as Fer heaped the praise onto Mane. Ermos wondered what his problem was. The boy seemed thoroughly miserable. Of course, they had spent some time underground, Ermos could understand that making someone grumpy, but he'd just eaten the most delicious pears in the world, surely that was enough to make him smile?
Mane seemed just as uncomfortable with the praise. Ermos found it funny the way he squirmed as he formulated his reply. "A dragon fledgeling, yes," Mane agreed. "But I could have still made further haste, or ensured that someone else was sent in my place."