RCJoshua

Chapter 172: Tea of Sustained Defense

Arthur jetted around the wall, distributing tea. The town’s wall was much smaller than the city’s had been, which meant he had no need for helpers to get that part of the job done. He balanced a couple trays on his hands as he made his way to far right of the wall for the last group of un-boba-enhanced defenders.

“Oh, there you are. I was wondering if you forgot us.” Skal grinned and freed up his hands with a no-look rock-chuck at the monsters that had piled up against the gate....

Chapter 171: Battle for Coldbrook

Arthur woke up sore, not in his muscles, but in the non-physical parts of him that managed his majicka. Other people would also empty their majicka stores, but Arthur had noticed that they didn’t seem to take the same hit from it that he did. Lily had once said that Arthur’s majicka was delicate, which he figured was about as accurate as anything. Where other people encountered Coldbrook’s abundant majicka without so much as a sniffle, Arthur got seriously sick. Where they drooped a lit...

Chapter 170: Chaser and Generalist

After recharging a little while longer, Arthur made a third round of tea, ones that would help mental classes with their stats. This was the smallest batch he’d make, not because mental-stat focused classes were that rare, but because most of them wouldn’t have anything especially useful to do with their classes during the wave. They’d be chucking rocks with the rest of everyone else.

After that, they went down to the shop. Arthur had sacks and sacks of root flour there already, a...

Chapter 169: Take the Help

Arthur was up before dawn, eager to get to work but with a stop to make. Throwing on his clothes and old shoes, he made his way to the cobbler to take the new measurements. But once he got there, he found it wasn’t going to be quite what he expected.

Of course, they did this. Once Arthur cracked the door, he saw an enchanter and cobbler standing before him, looking enormously pleased with themselves and holding their arms outstretched over a table of completely finished ...

Chapter 168: Arthur’s Plans

“Should we be worried about them?” Arthur asked. “Maybe find them and put them somewhere safe?”

“No, no.” Lith shook his head and looked like he was trying to picture Arthur herding the Pratas. “Monster waves don’t move that fast. The quicker monsters are held back by the slower ones. Pratas are pretty quick for all their size. They’ll take care of themselves.”

“Okay then. Anything else, anybody?” Arthur looked at the rest of the council, then the crowd. As...

Chapter 167: Preparations

“That’s reassuring,” Arthur said. And it was, in a way. It wasn’t the everything-will-be-all-right-starting-exactly-now statement Arthur wanted, but it was also not the situation where they were constantly rebuilding everything, time after time. As much as Arthur loved this place, it was hard to imagine living in it if every few months a wave of terrors came along and ripped everything down. The impermanence might have been something he’d get used to eventually, but it wasn’t some...

Chapter 166: That’s a Promise

“That’s great, Lily,” Arthur finally said when Lily finished her big list of updates. “So what’s today?”

“Today is metal. Nothing else that’s big can move on without it. Milo’s making a bunch of molds that Hune says she can pour metal directly into. And she’s making all the iron she can besides that.”

“Already? How?”

“Rhodia made her a bunch of chimney oven things and Karra carried them out to the mine. We have plenty of charcoal that’s just goi...

Chapter 165: Hospitalitea

The sun was up, and so was Arthur, staring down at the girl asleep on his arm and wondering if it was appropriate to escape. Not that he was desperate to get away, but he had woken up about an hour ago and had spent the time since then appreciating just how lucky he was to have someone like this.

Now, he was worried it was starting to get creepy and his arm was getting very numb, but there was no good solution on how to extricate himself. He didn’t want to wake Mizu up, considering sh...

Chapter 164: Interview

It was hours on the road before Talca was able to talk normally. Until then, it was a combination of grunts, various hand gestures, and a patient, almost obsessive refusal to look directly at Hune. She humored it for a little while, mostly talking to Arthur over tea and dried fish until she gave up, rolled her eyes, and climbed from the back of the wagon to Talca on the driver’s bench.

He almost fell off of the wagon and the whole trip would have gone off-road if Littal hadn’t known...

Chapter 163: Hune

Arthur took a look around the town as he ate, and finally started to understand what Talca had been talking about when he said that the town was built to be torn down and rebuilt again and again. It was the most spartan looking town that he had ever seen, mostly half-built wood buildings that seemed slapped together.

There was nothing here that would stand up to a monster wave. But once the people evacuated and the wave passed, they could toss up another handful of buildings again in an...

Chapter 162: Life on the Road

Hours later, they were so far from home that it didn’t even seem like the same planet. The distance from the constant sounds and smell of the ocean were part of that, but far from the entirety of the alien impression. The trees were different. The rocks were different. The soil itself was a different color and produced a different feeling in the wagon as it careened over it.

“This feels even faster than before,” Arthur commented.

“That’s because it is. These are the newe...

Chapter 161: Getting Out of the Way

“You?” Mizu said. She wasn’t trying to be quiet. And Arthur supposed the question was relevant for the audience too, if not quite as much as for his girlfriend. “Why you?”

“Because each and every one of you are needed besides me,” Arthur explained. “The most I can do at this point is to supply some tea when the attack comes, and we haven’t heard a thing from the scouts indicating there’s anything that close.”

“Still. Someone else could go. Spiky could,” M...

Chapter 160: A Little Spin

Arthur managed to not knock anyone down for the rest of the day. And Lily recovered enough to start helping all the cooks in the plaza, which kept her from going stir-crazy about not being able to work as hard as she’d like.

Arthur slung tea until the morning rush broke, then sent the still-conflicted Karra back to her house to take a nap. Somehow he also managed to complete the much more difficult task of getting Lily to do the same thing, convincing her that the quickest way to the ...

Chapter 159: Knocking People Down

As Arthur knelt over Karra, her eyes suddenly fluttered.

“No, don’t call the medic,” Karra said, still laying on the ground. “It’s something system related.”

“Maybe, but that was a nasty hit. You are getting checked out.” Arthur waved off the worker, who sprinted back towards the town to find medical help. He looped his arm under one of Karra’s, helping her sit up as she wobbled dizzily back and forth.

“Whew. That was really something,” Karra said.

Chapter 158: The Wall

It was already late when Arthur slipped through the front door of his house and pressed the switch for the majicka lamp in his bedroom. He wasn’t going to get a full night’s sleep, but it was fine. He didn’t need quite as much sleep these days to begin with, likely a byproduct of vitality or majicka or a mix of both. Losing a few hours a single night wouldn’t hurt him much.

Before Arthur actually made it to his bed, he saw a small note pinned to one of the sheets. Nobody in town...

SnowingPine Website Update

Hello readers!

Tyr here, the developer of Snowing Pine.

TLDR: We’re pausing content on Snowing Pine until we can figure out what’s going on and pushing the extra chapter to Patreon.

Now for the longer explanation:

We recently chose to expand the site to include multiple writers, which is awesome, but that did mean I could no longer use the same authentication system we used back then, since that was patreon-creator specific.

So I took th...

Chapter 157: Free Time

Lily had stayed just long enough to help Arthur stay organized, which in turn let him clear out the lunch rush without too much trouble.

As always, the bigger majicka-draw orders for people who needed an especial push had taken it out of him. Before he got around to cleaning up, he ordered a big fried noodle thing with meat that he had recently learned could be made into as a sandwich. As the cook across the way worked it up for him, he returned to his own shop to make himself a tea for...

Chapter 156: Enchantments

Getting to the enchanter was almost a hike, which spoke to the growth of the town.

Before, Arthur would walk out of his house and be, well, everywhere. All the houses and shops with anyone in them were within a few steps. Now, he sometimes had to make a small walk, especially if the person he needed to see was a recent arrival or the place he needed to go was just built. The town stretched much farther towards both the beach and the canyon opening than it had before.

It was actual...

Chapter 155: Shoes

Shopping was perhaps one of Arthur’s favorite part of his new life.

At some point during his old life, he had been actively afraid of shopping, that he’d go into a store, find he wouldn’t really know what to get, and that he couldn’t get good help from the exhausted, underpaid retail worker manning the till. He didn’t blame them, since very few people’s life dream was to sell denim jeans. And then there was the fact that every time he brought something, it was saying no to a...

Chapter 154: Local Economy

Ghuda went to a table to enjoy his day off, immediately pulling out some sketch pads and working on ideas for improved poles. Not everyone liked to think about work during their off-time, but Arthur had learned that demons were generally the type to do so. Because their jobs weren’t stressful, people’s zones of what I have to do and what I want to do tended to have significant overlap.

Mizu, notably, never stopped thinking about wells unless she was embar...

Chapter 153: Pointy Stick

The next day was deliciously normal. Arthur woke up in his real bed, complete with a real mattress provided by a specialty sewing class who made bed-things. It was in the demon style, which meant it was thin and firm instead of thick and fluffy. Arthur had hardly noticed the process of getting used to them. It happened when he was still getting used to his new world in general. He remembered thinking they were different on the first night, then got right back to freaking out about bigger cons...

Chapter 152: Tea Brewing

“You really don’t have to worry about your time.” Lily was trying to comfort Arthur, who felt pretty silly covered in mud that did next to do nothing to keep him from getting caught. “Milo got caught… I want to say ten seconds in. We heard the main group find them almost as soon as they started.”

“How? Rhodia was with him. She’s smart.”

“She’s smart unless Milo is bothering her. Which he probably was.” Mizu nodded to herself. “It was dark outside, and she...

Chapter 151: The Chase

Thick clothes could only protect Arthur so much. In the post-coldfall chill, they were hardly enough to keep him warm and forced him to draw on the adrenaline running through his veins for the last bit of heat. They also should have kept him safe from thorns and branches. But he had sought out the thickest, closest-growing patches of shrubbery and earned dozens of scrapes for his effort.

He could have worn extra-thick coldfall garb, the same ones that Ella had put Lily in. Remembering L...

Chapter 150.5: Author’s Note

Imagine you spent years and years doing the wrong things. You worked jobs that didn’t pay well. You did tasks that didn’t fulfill you, and often didn’t seem to matter to the people you were doing them for. All the while, you knew that it was all just a gigantic waste of time.

You did that while fighting off despair and sorrow just enough to keep trying new things, to keep pivoting around different talents and skill sets. You help hope of finding a worthwhile thing to do,&...

Chapter 150: Epilogue

If weddings were vastly different in the Demon World, wedding receptions were surprisingly the same. There was music, courtesy of multiple bands that rotated in and out. With that came dancing, ranging from the heavy-footed normal-capability dancing of non-dexterity classes to the airy, super-human movements of people like Corbin.

And some people, Arthur was glad to see, just couldn’t dance, no matter how high their stats were. Karbo was chief among these, clapping off-rhythm and movi...

Chapter 149: Joining Ceremony

As it turned out, there wasn’t much wedding work left for Arthur and Lily happily bounced away to join the bride’s group. Once he had unleashed the moms on the task, they went to work. And once they were done, they did it all again. By the time Arthur was back in Coldbrook, there was coat after coat of mom-work paint over the whole project. Every aspect of it was completed, re-completed, tied with a bow, and shipped out.

Just the flowers alone were a good example of what they had do...

Chapter 148: Friends, Allies

As Daisy looked on mildly, Arthur knelt down by Rumble, careful to avoid any of the scattered scales and fish guts on the ground. Reaching around Rumble’s thick, furry neck, he looped the twine under and over before knotting it in place. The Prata immediately noticed the difference in feel, shaking his head side to side slightly before sitting up and mewling.

“Uh-oh. Arthur, I don’t think he likes that,” Lily observed.

“Give it a second. Maybe he will get used to it,” ...

Chapter 147: Ring Bear

Now that Arthur had put out the mini-Milo fire, there was one more thing he needed to do. One last thing that would make everything perfect.

He just wasn’t sure if it was a good idea.

The area outside of the gates was fast becoming developed. Trees had always been sparse in the Coldbrook canyon, and after sustained logging to clear the area, they were even more thinned out. Spiky had told Arthur there were a lot of reasons this was a good idea, not least of which was having a cl...

Chapter 146: Hitched

Arthur realized that he had been living with a misconception. He had thought of the parents as Coldbrook as well meaning and bearing the heraldry of concerned motherhood. They had come for the express purpose of confirming that their sons and daughters were safe, happy, and healthy.

But they were also people who had lived their whole lives with the system. And that meant their levels were far higher than anything that Arthur and the rest of the town could match, as long as Talca and Ska...

Chapter 145: Army of Moms

An hour later, Karbo had the rough outline of a shelf done. It was a sort of rectangular section carved out of the top of the cliff and allowing for a view of the ocean on one side and the city on the other. Despite Karbo’s earlier protests that his work wouldn’t be clean, the previously irregular top was now completely level, at least as far as Arthur could see. He couldn’t see the outside edge, though Karbo had promised to do his best to leave a slightly higher stone shelf there for s...