"Boss. I'd like it if you'd snap out of it already," Uno told me as he dragged me along the paved road. He was holding me by my temple as my feet slid across the smooth stone.
"But what's the point of dwarves when they're not insulting you every 5 seconds?!" I cried and moaned mimicking a mother wolf losing all of her cubs. If I could shed tears, I would've drained all my fluids trying to pump out tears.
"I'm surprised you guys follow him around," Asha remarked. I had nearly forgotten about Asha's existence until she spoke. No, I had forgotten the meaning of life.
I stood up with great resolve and asked her, "Asha, are you sure the dwarves are all pompous and posh?" My hands latched onto her shoulders.
"Yes. I am sure! Every single dwarven city is recorded with great detail, every single nation and race knows they're all the epitome of chivalrous gentlemen!" Asha explained erratically as she struggled to talk because I was shaking her.
"Enough, Boss. You'll scramble her brains, then who will lead us around?" Uno took my hands off Asha.
I sighed. What does it mean that an entire race had suddenly gone through a cultural change in just a thousand years? Was it a civil war? Realizing that insulting the opposing party will not in fact improve a relationship, but worsen it? Or had they figured out that 80% of all dwarven deaths were directly or indirectly caused by extreme alcohol consumption? Which one is it?
"Besides, why does all of it matter? Aren't you pompous, as well?" Asha said.
"What? Why are we pompous?" I asked.
That's weird. I thought we were pretty humble. I looked at my robes and found that except for a pair of metal shoulder blades and an amulet, I appeared to be a simple man.
"Who wears extremely well-made clean pure white robes and expects them to be a bunch of barbaric serfs? Aren't you all nobility? In addition to those, the way you speak already throws you off!" Asha exclaimed.
"What's wrong with the way we speak?" Uno asked.
My companions and I also questioned ourselves in our minds. What's wrong with the way we spoke? I thought it was the people in the city who spoke weirdly!
"You all speak in a heavy accent. To make matters worse, you all keep using harder words!" Asha elaborated, "Haven't you listened to yourselves? For example, Uno's question just now. He just said to me, 'May I inquire as to what the problem is with the way we communicate?' If you all weren't so tall, I would've mistook you all for dwarves!"
Was that the reason the people we talked to looked like they were trying to suck on a sour lemon the entire time? During my talk with the Grand Cardinal, I found out that the Commons I knew was dead. Long gone.
"Asha, what do the people here speak in?" I inquired her.
"The same as everyone in the western part of the continent. Western Commons," Asha answered.
I took out some ink and parchment and gave it to Asha before asking her to write a character. Asha looked at me with doubt. Nevertheless, she wrote the first thing that came to mind. I took the parchment and studied the alphabet clearly.
"What...what does this say?" I asked her. She looked as confused as I did.
"You know how to speak like noblemen but not read basic words? Are you all actually idiots?
Anyway, this means 'forest'. Why? How do you write 'forest', then?" Asha asked back.
I wrote 'forest' onto the parchment and showed it to Asha. She strained her eyes trying to identify what the word meant.
"Is your handwriting that bad? I can't read this," Asha commented. I took the parchment off her hands and showed it to Uno.
"I don't know what's the problem here. In fact, I think Boss has the best handwriting out of the entire group except for that one delusional writer back in the stronghold," Uno said. He was staring at the parchment blankly before it clicked to him.
"Wait! I mean stronghold back in our country! Disregarding that, why is that we can't read these alphabets? These letters look so alien to us." Uno pointed at the differences between my 'forest' and her 'forest'. In fact, it was more like Uno was trying to point out any similarities. They both looked so different, they might as well be two different languages.
I had come to the conclusion that Western Commons only sounded similar, but the alphabets were entirely different. I asked Asha if she knew any other language but she only knew Western Commons. I sighed.
I had Asha teach us some Western Commons as we travelled down the road. Azkator was at least a week from Aon if we moved fast, so that should be enough time to at least learn the basics. I'm a 1000-year-old lich, learning the ABCs shouldn't be too hard for a genius like me.
'THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE.' I screamed inside my head.
It's been a day and Asha has been teaching my group the letters and some basic words. We camped near the road, just by a dirt patch inside the forest. From what I could tell, this place was sometimes used by travelers. The moon was up in the sky and the darkness encompassed the area, only to be stopped by the campfire we started.
I was blankly staring at the words that Asha had drawn onto the dirt with a stick. While Uno and the others managed to do fine learning the words, the words simply left my memories as soon as they entered.
How could I, an Archlich, not know the basics of a commonly used language? I was sitting down with my hands on my knees. I simply froze on the spot. Even Daggerless managed to remember more words than I did.
"Boss, could it be you're actually an idiot?" Uno asked me with a chuckle.
Asha commented on my sorry state, "Why is he even your leader?"
"Wait! No! These things tend to happen! I am extremely fluent in Commons, at least the Commons I knew! Not this bastardized nonsense!" I tried to defend myself.
"Like I said multiple times, what kind of Commons are we talking about? And bastardized? Aren't your alphabets so unnecessarily complex? Western Commons is so much simpler. I bet even learning Lycan is easier than your Commons. That's saying something because Lycan is just a bunch of scratches and piss marks," Asha asked.
How dare she insult my language by comparing it with piss! I wanted to get angry but I couldn't muster the energy. Recently, it's been nothing but depression. The dwarves I knew were gone, the language I knew was gone, the respect (if any) I had from my companions was also gone.
Here, I laid, crying my tears out. That was until I heard some rustling among the bushes. My cook, Maven, crouched in front of me and whispered, "Boss, there's some people coming towards us."
Maven was not only my cook, but was also the one with best sight and hearing. She developed them because she would be able to tell when her cooking had reached its peak. As such, she had become one of my best scouts in the stronghold. But because we're all terrible at the whole sight and hearing business, Maven was probably just a decent scout in the outside world.
"How close are they?" I asked Maven.
"They're already here. I think they're just discussing who to send out," Maven replied.
I stood up and fixed myself. My companions could feel no threat so they did not moved into formation yet. Maven pointed at a bunch of foliage to show me where some of the bandits were.
Asha was about to ask what we were discussing when a hooded man came out of the bush. He had a sword and a buckler ready, geared with leather armor that had seen many battles.
"Let's make this as simple as we can," The man threatened as he pointed his sword at me. I could sense that his allies were nearby, ready to strike at us. However, we simply went about our business, not minding them.
"Hello," I simply greeted. The man was perplexed by my greeting. He took a moment to think before answering back, "This is not a joke. Give us all your valuables or each of you will have an arrow through your skulls. We're the infamous Bloodied Rags, you wouldn't want to mess with us."
I turned to Asha and asked her, "Who are these dorks?"
"They're the Bloodied Rags, they're a well-known bandit group that travels in groups separately throughout the Western Continent. One of their groups must've stumbled upon us. This is bad. I heard they're very skilled. They even ambushed one of the western nation's kings for ransom," Asha explained as her legs could barely keep her up. She was obviously scared, but I didn't they were dangerous at all.