Chapter 32

The Saga of The Grass Knight Part 3

Floating above my seat inside the helm of my mecha, who happened to have lost the pull of gravity, I had pondered through existential theories of how excruciatingly incompetent my audacity in unfounded assurance when outlining my contraptions and machinations.

When I was about to complete the final summary of my thesis on how it all went into ablaze, I was jolted back by the mislaid physics of reality that had in its primary---slingshotted me out then back into my seat with a yelp and then a cursing groan. My hands throughout this whole endeavor had still gripped tightly onto the two analog twigs in front of my cockpit. Which was an instinctual habit of mine to clutch onto anything when everything went haywire.

The troll had trolled me. Iris cursed trolls. In my jarring befuddlement, my anger spiraled recalling the cause of my disarray. The ringing noise of the collision, fabricated a memorable melody, only heard by me in my delirium. It was the Trololo song.

“Lolololo lol, lololol, lololol. La la la la lah. Trololololol, lololol, lololol, Oh ha ha ha oh!”

Shaking my bruises and callus that had formed in my palms, I had analyzed the controller tables and diagnostics pebbles around my cockpit. There were a few pebbles missing, jostled out from their alignment. But, from what I can tell, the force and collision of the crash, did not regress back my mecha into lifelessness, but suboptimal at best.

Amelia had landed on her back, padded against flattened tall grass and disturbed soil.

“Argh...” Peb groaned in the lower compartments of the mecha.

“You okay Peb?”

“Yerr, my stones are good.”

I grunted from his reply, shaking the last echoes of the Trololo song that rang its end with my ears. ‘Oh, voracious Peb...’ Peb and his single priority will never quiver to the motion of physics. I glanced through the helm’s vision slits to analyze the situation beyond, but all I saw was the afternoon clouds. I tried to lift Amelia using both her gauntlets to sit her up, but she had tilted to the left from the motion.

“Oh right.” Remembering the cursed image of my mecha’s self-immolation, made me despair at the destruction of such beautiful metal. The dismemberment of Amelia had instinctively prompted me to shudder at the prospects of repair. In the end, though, I managed to balance Amelia by using her full weight to lean on the right gauntlet, leveraging her to sit up and scan the battlefield before me, albeit in a lower elevation.

Suddenly, I had halted, frozen still by the tension that I had surfaced in. I noticed the ripped and shredded remains of grass around me, clodded by green callus soles, but that wasn’t the reason that made me halt. It was the motley force of goblins that had surrounded me, eyeing me with such vindictive glee after being untethered from their grassy restraints.

“Parley?” I, high in pitch, suggested.

“Git him!” One of the more volatile goblins commanded.

They all sprang in with a jump, all hurdling like a deluge of green overshadowing metal. The utter force of bodies that had hustled and stacked themselves against Amelia, made her collapse back into the ground from and against the uncounted weight atop her.

I swiveled Amelia’s helm to both sides trying to avoid the rusted blades that were trying to pierce through vision slits of the mecha. It was a nerve-racking terror that had kept me on pivoting away from their tips. I tried to also configure a shake, to get the green mob off my mecha, but the numbers that were plastered atop her restrained her from much movement. Is this how am I going to die? Grappled and mobbed by a green swarm?

“Why did they have to be green!?”

Fixing my horrifying panic into gritted determination, I quickly analyzed the situation before me. I had to think of a way to get out of here, or Peb and I will wallow in a paradise built from soil and stone. It was inevitable to suggest that they won't give me mercy, from glimpsing the shimmering glee in their eyes.

This was it, the moment for a fair man to admit defeat or fight for every moment he was worth.

Looking for the specific button, from my haphazard jostle, I pressed it. The first layer of the mecha, began to detach. The grass wires that clutched the plate mail around Amelia began to loosen to the tears of the goblins clutching them. With that step done, I uttered an invective to my goddess, for the damage that will be done to the other layers of my mecha. I used my Active Skill, Invoke Song.

“Been there, done that, messed around

I'm having fun, don't put me down

I'll never let you sweep me off my feet”

The anger in my vocal tone had altered the music I sang into the gritted fury of an inventor damaging his toil. With my intentions conveyed through my lyrics and the Charisma to enforce it, the grass ecosystem within my mecha began to invert itself out of her frame.

“This time, baby, I'll be

Bulletproof

This time, baby, I'll be

Bulletproof”

Singing Bulletproof from La Roux, was either fitting or stupid, but made me determine, to live through this and curse again the whims of fate. Bloody fate. The grass that had protruded out with their paper-thin leaves, began to dive out and in, to the tempo of my lyrics. With their full height roughly around 5 inches, the leaves began to prick and pierce all the goblins above and around my mecha.

“This time, baby, I'll be

Bulletproof

This time, baby, I'll be

Bulletproof”

Goblins atop me, began to scream and yelp, pierced by the poking pricks of my unarmoured grass mecha. They tried to get away from my porcupine strategy but were crammed in by the other goblins whose weight from behind jammed them from their escape of my grassy pricks. The System had told me the amount of damage I pierced into the first layer of goblins who had unanimously voted to be first on my onslaught.

Layers of cotton fabric and leather began to tear from the inverted grass that was piercing them through. The grass leaf inverted and inserted into the soil, through the cloth, piercing leather and chainmail, to prick a goblin, then recoiled back to do the whole process again.

The numbers of the green horde were too many, dead goblins were moved aside for other willing participants to conform against my defensive measures. Amelia’s back was still on the ground, still stacked against the plethora of mobs all hounding for me.‘Was this it for me?’

~ Teka the Grass Soldier ~

“Protect them,” I repeated the last words Sink had ordered me to do. Protect them. “Protect him,” Elandris said in her parting words to me. ‘Protect them. Protect him.’ All I do is protect, for I am a sentinel for the grass and grove. Protect and defend, all I do is protect and defend, for I am a Grass Soldier, and that is the role I had chosen.

‘Protect my friends, protect my charge, protect my heart.’

I turned to my beloved Sera, whose face had perspired as she sang a third time the song she had remembered from her past with Sink. Gripping tightly the large cylinder contraption Sink had invented for me, I looked on at her and the Fair folk who were singing, participating in this battle for life. I remembered the shy smile she had given me when I had confessed to her under the pink-blue blossoms of the willow tree. She was so beautiful, with her grassy scarf, wrapped around the hidden smile that she gives the world.

Turning to the opened covers of the wooden rampart, at Sink, the Tink, the Tinker of Tinks, the enigma of our grove. The Grassless small man who fights against giants. I shudder at the memory, witnessing his fierce intellect and his utter curiosity to resolve all issues that come by. He was fighting down there, alone in the grass field, against an army of monstrous giants. A fair man, hidden in his contraption, fighting a horde of giants, in a giant ruled world.

What makes a fair man like Sink? To go help and protect a helpless human baby, not of his own. To risk life and limb, for promise and oath. He was the instigator to my once hatred of him. I thought that Sera had the same feelings I had of her--for him. But it was something else, something alien yet familiar to my understanding. Siblings, sister. This was an entirely different way of looking at someone close. But my feelings for her were stronger, stronger than the bonds that Sink had described. And she had followed him into the world of giants.

Suddenly, I had stiffened at the changing course of the battle. Sink, in his colossal giant, fighting amongst monstrosities unheard of from my grove, had fallen. The huge swing of the large creature had battered Sink’s giant aways. The faces around me had paled, seeing this, but continued on their task nonetheless. Sink the grassless, my pod mate, my brother, what a strange conclusion to what I see him now.

“Protect them,” he said to me. “Protect him,” she said to me.

I turned to Sera who had paled witnessing Sink’s colossal downfall. “Sera…” I murmured.

She turned to me with her beautiful green emerald eyes, shining bright with caring warmth.

“I’m going.”

She had stopped singing then. “What...No?” Aghast at my decision.

“Here, I stand now, for the love and the sound. I am the only Grass Soldier. I have to.”

“No, don’t. Don’t do it! They are giants, please don’t!”

“Sink is there, fighting against those giants.”

“Please...No.”

I gave her a confident grin. A notion crossed my mind, and I acted on it. I pulled her in for an embrace and the deepest kiss that a fair man could give a fair maiden. When we had parted, I pulled off her grassy scarf, showing the world her naked smile.

I wrapped the grass woven scarf around my neck. “I’ll return it back to you when I save that stupid Tinkerer.”

Giving her no time to grasp me, I vaulted off the precipice of the wooden rampart, clutching the large cylinder with both my hands---whilst the grass scarf fluttered its end behind me. I pressed the pebble that would ring a sound to extrude and protrude the layered grass within, extending the cylinder into a 1-meter grass spear. Using the motion of the extending tip, I directed it into the soil, to then push me off again into the air. With the same procedures, I vaulted through the plains at a dazzling pace.

‘I’m coming, my pod brother... To fight and protect.’