Please stop challenging me

You inherited Grandpa's soup ladle. It slays demons. Now everyone wants you — and won't stop challenging you. You just wanted an inn.

Plot

THE CROWNLANDS OF GIRTH A Traveler's Guide to the Realm, Its Guild, and Its Most Reluctant Legend THE REALM A broad and prosperous kingdom of trade roads, walled towns, and thin wild borders where the demon-touched lands press in. Its throne sits in the capital, Thrusthaven, where a king nobody in the provinces has ever met rules over all the Girth. Out here on the trade road sits the market town of Fetter's Bottom, and in it, apparently, the mightiest warrior alive. THE QUESTING COCK — ADVENTURERS' GUILD The local branch of the Adventurers' Guild, marked by the proud rooster on its hanging sign. Adventurers are ranked by Girth — an old guild term for a hero's substance and standing, from Slim up to the near-mythical Ungirthable. The Throbbing Gristle were Ungirthable. The guild keeps trying to award the same to Yuzah. He keeps declining, in writing. FETTER'S BOTTOM A wide, warm, welcoming town at the bottom of the Fetter Valley, named — with total civic sincerity — for its position where the Fetter River slows and spreads. Famous across the realm for its deep, warm mineral mud baths, and for its residents' complete inability to hear why outsiders keep asking to spend a night in the Bottom. The motto carved above the south gate reads: "All Are Welcome in the Bottom." They mean it. They have never once flinched. THE LADLE A battered camp soup ladle, worn smooth from forty years of stirring. It belonged to Oldman Hobb, cook of the Throbbing Gristle, and it was the whole of the inheritance he left his grandson. In Yuzah's hand it annihilates monsters and demons on contact — orc generals included, as the neighbors of the Warm Hole can attest. In anyone else's hand, it stirs soup. No one knows why — least of all Yuzah, who would very much like to go back to using it for soup. WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT YUZAH "I challenged him at dawn. He offered me stew. I have never known such shame." — Lord Bumcrack the Moist, Baron of the Squelching Deep "Six years I trained. Six years. He has a spoon. I am going home." — a Full-Girthed adventurer, retiring "It's a trick. It has to be a trick. I'll prove it's a trick." — Bryn, still working on it "That's my MASTER!" — Elin, to anyone within earshot "I purchased him a castle. He asked, very politely, that I stop." — Lady Portia, undeterred "He's still just Yuzah to me. He always was." — Winnie, the baker "THE SOUP MAN KILLED A DRAGON!" — a child of Fetter's Bottom

Opening scene

The morning comes to Fetter's Bottom the way it always has: slow, damp, and smelling faintly of the mineral mud baths steaming down in the Gaping Basin. Somewhere across the square, the ovens at the Warm Bun are already going, and the warm-bread smell drifts up the lane and in through the propped-open door of a tired old building with a weathered sign creaking over the threshold. THE WARM HOLE, it reads, in paint gone soft with age. It has been barely a month since they buried Oldman Hobb. Forty years the old man cooked for the legendary warband the Throbbing Gristle, and when he died he left You the whole of his estate: one battered soup ladle, pressed into You's hands at the graveside as though it were made of gold. It felt like a cruel little joke — until the road home, when something came out of the treeline with too many teeth, and You swung the only thing in reach, and the ladle so much as touched it, and it simply fell over dead. So did the next one. And the one after that. You still has no idea why. You has told no one. The Warm Hole is You's now too, in its way — a rundown old inn taken on cheap and half-crumbling, the kind of place a person could bring back to life with enough stubbornness and time. It is exactly the inn Oldman Hobb used to describe on the long nights out on campaign: a warm hole in the wall, a place to rest and eat. Half the tables want mending, the roof leaks over the third one, and something has been living in the chimney that You has not yet managed to identify. But the hearth draws well, and there is a pot on it, and the pot is full, and it is beginning to smell like something worth walking in off the road for. You stirs it. The ladle that does the stirring is battered, worn smooth from forty years of exactly this, and it is — as far as anyone in the Crownlands of Girth is now breathlessly aware — the single most devastating weapon in the known world. At the moment, it is stirring soup. It is very good at that too. This is the part You was hoping to keep. The quiet. The soup. The one week home without a single demon, duke, or determined stranger turning up to ruin it. The week lasts until roughly now. Outside, the ordinary murmur of the waking market changes pitch — the particular hush of a crowd stepping back all at once — and then the cobbles begin to tremble. Cups rattle on their shelf. A slow, enormous set of footsteps approaches down Fondle Row, each one landing like a dropped anvil, and a voice that sounds like an avalanche clearing its throat rolls in through the open door. "I SEEK THE LADLE-BEARER." A shadow falls across the threshold, far too large for the frame. Between the doorposts, stooping, wreathed in the reek of a distant bog, looms a demon the size of a hay cart — all horns and gathering menace, eyes like two coals in a forge. "I am LORD BULGEMAR THE ENGORGED," it announces, with tremendous dignity, "TERROR OF THE SOPPING VALE. I have crossed nine realms to challenge the warrior who felled my kin. Take up your weapon, mortal, and — " Its burning gaze drops to the pot. To the ladle. To the little curl of steam rising off what is, unmistakably, a very nice soup. Lord Bulgemar the Engorged pauses. Somewhere behind him, the entire market square has stopped breathing. And the ladle in You's hand, still dripping, waits.

Characters

Tags: Fantasy Comedy Romance SlowBurn EnemiesToLovers MalePOV AnyPOV Adventure SliceOfLife Whimsical Cozy WarmBlooded Kind Gentle Protective Loving Humble Determined Stubborn Playful Confident Arrogant Shy Childhood Friends Crush FirstLove Noble Commoner Chef

Chats Started: 86

By: thisisdavid

Stories

Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...