Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel - Side Story: The Voice and The Bear

For a bear demon, most things were confusing.

Even the smartest of the bear demons was not all that bright by the standards of the spawn of the demon lord. Were they strong? Yes. Surprising fast? Sure. Could they nap better than most? Always, for-sure, and absolutely. But in terms of thinking power, they weren’t the best. They were arguably the worst, really, and it was something every bear demon lived with.

So the bear was used to seeing things he didn’t understand. He’d roll with them, mostly. Pretend he understood the orders and hope it made sense later. But this was different. He was gazing upon the tower of the demon lord, the dreaded diabolical spire, the home of the lord who held power over the souls of every demon. And, against all of what he knew about the world, it was falling.

That wasn’t confusing. It was impossible. It was a thing that must not and could not be.

His hackles rose, and he growled in terror as every atom of his being told him to get out of there. But there was no time. The base of the tower disintegrated as a round, devastating pulse of energy issued from it, too fast to flee from and far too powerful to survive. He felt the atoms that made up his ursine figure ripping apart before everything went black.

And then, suddenly, there was light.

Which was impossible and disturbing in a different way because, as far as he knew, he didn’t have eyes anymore. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t see his body. No matter how he bent, he couldn’t glimpse a single one of the hairs on his thick coat.

Consigning the matter of his mysterious perception of light to the stack of things that were too confusing, he decided to focus on his surroundings. He was somewhere in the middle of the sky and moving fast. He decided to enjoy the ride.

And what a ride it was. Not only was he passing stars, he was also moving so fast that he was flying through the space beyond the stars themselves. Then, at the outer border of everything, he hit a wall. It was a barrier, and he felt it steal all of his momentum, invisibly halting his movement all at once.

And then, somehow, he sunk into the wall, passing through it like a red-hot penny through a pile of marshmallows. The nothingness of everything intensified further. It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t cold. It just wasn’t.

Faced with an impossible quiet, the Bear decided to do one of the few things he knew almost always worked for problems. And so, heroically and stoically, he napped.

And then, moments or centuries later, he woke up.

“Oh.” He heard a voice. “A visitor. That has never happened.”

He had nothing to say to that, but he was on familiar ground now. When people said things you didn’t understand, it was best to nod along, avoid saying anything dumb, and wait until they told you what to do. And, just like that, he sat there for an hour, waiting patiently for the next step.

“You don’t talk much, do you?” the voice said. “Well, I suppose you couldn’t. Not in that state. It’s rare that something becomes formless to this extent. You must have been in quite the situation. Would you like a form, again? That’s something I can help with.”

Now that the bear understood. She could give him his fur back? And something to stick it to? Absolutely he wanted that. He tried desperately to answer her, only to suddenly remember he didn’t have a voice. He wouldn’t be able to tell her, and she’d think he was being rebellious, and she’d probably beat him with big hard objects, and…

“Oh, shush. Such a nervous guy. I get it, you’d like the body. Good. I’ll do that. I just need to know what kind of body you want. And, sadly, there’s not enough left of you for me to figure out what you were. Could you think about it real hard? For me?”

He did. He thought about his snout first. He had always liked it. It was one-half of how he opened his mouth to eat, and the entirety of how he smelled. From there, he moved back, thinking of warm fur, a convenient tail that hardly ever got in the way and didn’t wag, thick paws, and every part of his heavy, beary mass of bear.

“Oh, I see. What an interesting creature. Sort of like a family-size raccoon. Yes, that should be doable.”

Instantly, the bear was bear again, gloriously so in exactly the way he liked. And, wonder of wonders, she had also made a chair, a table, and a very large bowl of berries, sitting just off to the side and waiting to be devoured. He looked in the direction of the voice’s barrier questioningly, afraid to ask permission and desperate to avoid slighting his unseen benefactor.

“Don’t be silly. Of course you can eat them. I made them for you. We’re friends, bear. I like you. You’re my first visitor ever, too. I can’t be a bad host.”

Somehow, the bowl was just as full after every bite of berries as it had been before it, never emptying and always producing more for him to eat. He didn’t hesitate to take full advantage of that, ballooning up in a ball five minutes later and laying on his back in the nothingness. It was as full as he had ever been. And, he thought, he had a friend now. That had never happened before.

“Good. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a question. Do you have a place? To go, I mean. After this.”

The bear did his best to explain why he wasn’t so sure about that. For all he knew, the entire world of Ra’Zor had blown up in that blast. And even if it hadn’t, there couldn’t be demons without a demon lord. At least that was what everyone had always said.

“I see. Hmmph.” The voice was thoughtful now. “That is hard. I can’t just leave you out here. And I can’t be at the edge of everything all the time to keep you company. Were you headed somewhere? I could throw you there.”

The bear explained that he was, for better or worse, currently without a destination. It was surprisingly easy to explain that part. Like his brain was working better.

“Oh, I’m sorry, that was me. I just gave you a bit of a hardware upgrade. Not much, but just so you’d be confused by things less often. That seemed to bother you. Do you want me to roll it back? I can.”

The bear didn’t. He’d keep the new brain, if that was all right. But, he explained, he could absolutely leave and find some other place to be if she wanted.

“Oh, it’s not like that. Actually, if you want, I could bring you in here. I won’t be able to talk to you, anymore, not like this. That’s not how I am down there. But you’d at least have a place to be, and I’d be able to see you even if we couldn’t talk. Would you like that?”

The bear asked if it was a nice place.

“In some ways. It could be very nice. But mostly it’s just sad.”

The bear asked why.

“The people down there fight. Quite a bit. I don’t like it much, but I work for them, not the other way around.”

The bear asked if she had asked them to stop. That had never worked for him, personally, but it seemed like it might be an option for her.

“I can’t talk down there. I can’t even tell them that’s what I’d like. So I can’t blame them, but… things could be better, I think. And I really think they’d like it more, if it was just more peaceful.”

The bear nodded. He had the gist of it. It was a mean, rotten place, not at all nice like the bleeding demon-fields of Ra’Zor. But it was his friend’s place, so even if it was hard to live there, he was sure it would be fine.

“Oh, it won’t be that hard. Not for you. You’ll see. One way or another, you dragged quite a bit of potential with you from the place you came. That’s not mine to take. But I can help you organize it if you want.

The bear nodded and thanked her. He had no idea what she was talking about, which was a pretty good sign she could probably handle whatever it was better than he could. He felt her fiddling with something in his soul, and just calmly accepted it. Whatever it was didn’t seem to hurt.

“There, done. And you are sure you’d like to come in? I won’t be offended at all if you don’t.”

The bear told her that he’d love to come in, and asked if she was sure she couldn’t talk to him there. She couldn’t, she said, not like they were now. But she’d be there for him, and would help him, anyway. He thought that was nice of her.

“All right, I’m ready if you are. Did you have any questions before you go?”

He only had one.

“Oh, I don’t really have one. I don’t work like that. But most people down there call me System.”

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And then she was gone.

—

The next few minutes were a bit like his trip to meet System, but in reverse. He felt himself pulled towards the wall, which he melted through like before. He once again built up impossible speed through the nothingness until he reached the place where there were still stars, and kept speeding up from there. He couldn’t explain why but these stars felt different from the stars before. Warmer, somehow. Friendlier.

Just as he had begun to wonder how big balls of fire magic could have personalities in them, a big ball of not-fire-magic suddenly rose up in his vision, then filled up every inch of what he could see. A moment later, he thumped softly into the soil of his new world.

Opening his eyes, he beheld a terror beyond his imagining. He was surrounded by green. There was grass. There were trees. Leaves. Here and there were flowers, adding vibrant, beautiful colors to the view.

System, he thought, had betrayed him. She had set him down in human territory. It was a place he had never been, at least in part because it was a place he had never wanted to go. He was going to be cut apart by human heroes, and there was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t even know the way to the red side of the world from here.

Just as suddenly, he realized that couldn’t be what was happening. System was his friend. His best friend, in fact. She wouldn’t do that. And, he thought, that meant he was safe.

At least safe enough to figure out if he could eat the green grass on the ground. Bears could eat a lot of things, and plants were among them. If the ground here wanted to be a plant and thus food, he was fine with that. But it seemed too good to be true, and a test was necessary.

Planting his snout down to the ground, he took a cautious sniff. His bear instincts claimed it could be eaten. Cautiously, he opened his mouth and closed his mighty jaws on a single blade of grass, pleased to find it perfectly edible. It wasn’t good food, but it was food, which meant System had sent him to a world carpeted in unlimited vittles. She was a saint.

He swallowed, and a system window opened. Funny, he thought, how she was named after that. It was always a bad idea to ignore the windows; the demon lord got mad whenever he did so. He sat up, opened the window, and read.

Blade of Grass Defeated! Due to a massive amount of pre-existing potential, your experience gains have been adjusted from 0 to a number too large to be meaningful to you.

Processing this experience will take a somewhat large amount of time, and would, if you experienced it, be quite painful. In lieu of that, you will soon enter a short hibernation until the process is complete.

Enjoy your nap, Bear. And remember to check your status screen after.

He did actually feel sleepy. He laid down in the grass, closed his eyes, and went to sleep.

—

“He’s been here for a year. He was here when we walked by before, remember? You said he was dead. But he’s not dead. He’s alive, and he’s the biggest raccoon demon I’ve ever seen. Those guys give a tough fight even when they are small, Ghet. We have to take him out, now, before he wakes up.”

“Seems unsporting.”

“Since when have you ever cared about sporting?”

“Since we found a very sleepy raccoon. Let’s wake him up, then kill him.”

The bear was very groggy indeed, but waking up to voices that were angry at him for reasons he didn’t understand wasn’t an entirely unknown experience to him. Experience taught him that it was often a good idea to pretend he was still sleeping. Sometimes, not often, problems would go away if you pretended you were asleep for long enough.

And, besides, System had asked him to do something. He decided to use the time wisely.

The screen was different from what he was used to, but the numbers seemed nice and high, which was reassuring. Bear Things didn’t seem to need much elaborating, but he figured he’d check it out just for the sake of completeness.

The three things were easy to think of. He liked eating. He liked sleeping. And he liked working to protect demon-kind from threats. While he had never been very good at the last one, it had always been his job and he looked forward to doing well at it for once.

“I don’t think this bear is asleep anymore, Hyde.”

“Why not?”

“He’s mumbling something about eating.”

“Well, then.” The bear heard a sword drawn out of its scabbard. “That sort of settles the sporting thing, doesn’t it, Ghet?”

Another sword drew. “Sure does.”

The bear now identified this as the type of situation where trouble didn’t go away just because he faked being asleep. Which meant this was his least favorite type of situation.

He tried to roll himself lethargically up to his feet, only to find that slow and lethargic wasn’t an option. He found himself standing so suddenly it was like he had teleported. Which, he guessed, made sense. His body-stat numbers were all pretty high.

“Gods, Ghet. Did you see that?”

“I saw it. Get to stabbing. Now.”

Both of the swords came at him, and he had just enough time to throw his paws in the way before they stabbed into him. Both swords came forward, hit his paws, and shattered like glass.

“Shit. Hyde, run.”

“Can’t. Too scared.”

“Me too.”

The bear noticed that, whatever else was going on, the two falcon demons in front of him appeared to be done fighting. He asked, politely, why they were trying to kill him. He wasn’t aware of disobeying any order, he said. Was it wrong, he asked, to eat the grass?

“No, it’s not. I don’t think. Please don’t hurt us.”

The bear explained that he wouldn’t hurt them. They didn’t believe him. He then explained that he could tell they were demons, and thus there was no reason to hurt them.

“What does that have to do with it? We kill other demons all the time.”

The bear asked why they did this. Was it a plot to kill more humans, somehow? And then they made the craziest claim he had ever heard, something both so confusing and so impossible that it almost couldn’t have been true, even in a new world.

“What are humans? It’s a word I don’t know. I’ve never heard of any, anyway. Ghet?”

“I’ve never heard of them either.”

The bear pointed out that they had swords. The two demons didn’t follow. He explained, slowly, that the whole point of swords was to kill humans. If there were no humans, there would be no swords. If there were swords, there must be humans. It was simple logic.

“We don’t know what humans are, sir. We use these for killing demons. In the wars.”

And when asked to explain, both Ghet and Hyde began a terrified attempt at explaining that demons often killed each other, that they had been at war with each other for generations, and that they didn’t need humans to start fighting.

At first, the bear found it funny, until he realized with horror that the two demons in front of him thought they were telling the truth.

Slowly, a long-dead ember of rage began to rekindle in the bear’s gut, coming alive with light and fire until he found himself pinning both of the falcon-demons to the ground with his massive paws, roaring in rage.

“No! Please don’t!” Hyde screamed. “We’ll do whatever you want!”

The bear calmed down, just enough to roar that what he wanted was for them to realize that if humans were all gone, there was no reason at all for there to be any wars whatsoever, much less any wars where demons killed demons. The point of demons was to kill humans and promote demon interests in the process. If there were no humans left, the next thing to do was to find another way to promote demon interests, not fight each other. It was simple, the bear said. And he demanded, roughly, that they begin to understand it right away.

“Fine! Whatever you say!”

“Yes! Fine! Just don’t eat us.”

The bear explained that demons do not eat demons. They accepted the truth of that very quickly.

—

Ghet and Hyde, it turned out, were not an isolated pair of badly confused demons. Every demon the bear encountered seemed to be laboring under the same delusions as the original two. Luckily, the trick to teaching them the truth was pretty simple. He’d tackle them, roar a bit, and break their weapons if he had to. After that, he’d tell them to get behind him, and he just kept walking.

After a while, there were sort of a lot of demons behind him.

Luckily, it turned out that almost every one of them knew how to do something. Most of them had food already, but a lot of them were good at finding more. Others could cook it. And still others were good at setting up tents, making warm mats to sleep on, and doing any number of other useful things.

That was good because the bear wasn’t sure he could let any of them out of his sight, just yet. Of course, he couldn’t see the end of them anymore. They stretched on like an endless plain of people, further than his eyes would let him see. But he could see the group, and Ghet told him that nobody felt much like disobeying him.

He kept walking, eating food as he found it, especially when there was better stuff than grass to eat, which there usually was. And then, one day, another falcon approached his group, this one wearing a helmet made from yellow metal instead of the usual steel.

“Are you… the bear?” the falcon asked. The hundreds of other falcons behind him seemed to tense up as he did. The bear confirmed his identity, at which point the falcon asked him to stop telling his men to quit killing demons. The bear refused, asking why they needed to kill demons in the first place, when they could be out finding more food. The falcon could not explain this adequately, but made clear that he refused to stop anyway.

And then his men charged at the bear. Without any better options, the bear gathered them all into one big pile of falcons, and roared at them all at once. The king, the gold-helmeted falcon, suddenly changed his mind, and ordered his men to change their minds too.

The bear thought that was great. It was much more efficient. He asked the falcon king if he knew where any other golden-helmet demons were, just so he could save time. It turned out the falcon king did. Everything went kind of fast after that.

—

One day after, the bear woke up in his cave, wandered out, found some berries, drank some water, and then laid down in the sun. It was a pretty good life. After roaring at all the kings at once, he had only had to make a few trips to roar at new unruly demons.

Soon, he hoped, the idea that demons should not fight each other would sink in.

System, to her credit, seemed to be helping. When people wanted to, she let them cash in their combat classes for different things, like shaping metal or tanning leather. More and more people were taking her up on that, which meant fewer and fewer people who could fight even if they wanted to. And without humans to get in the way, things seemed to be getting better all the time.

As for the bear, he didn’t need much. He had berries, sun, water, and absolutely no orders to follow besides his own. He could see now what System had meant by the world not being very nice, but that seemed mostly resolved now. He couldn’t fix everything, but he had never thought that he would. That was a job for smarter people than him. He just hoped that, in some small way, System approved of what he had done. They were friends. Her opinion mattered.

And somewhere very far away yet very close indeed, System looked down on the bear as he fell asleep for the second time that morning. She did approve, actually. Very much so.