Free Web NovelChapter 314: The Misfit Andrew
"Alright, alright — that’s enough idle chatter for now. Time for this scholar to get back to her research."
Having finished recounting the illustrious deeds of her fellow scholars and answering the last of Andrew’s questions, Company Three’s Captain snapped her book shut and steered the conversation back on track:
"My brother’s side — once the messenger wyvern delivers the letter and clears the flight corridor, he should be able to get here by afternoon at the earliest, if we’re calculating generously."
"Before he arrives, I need to get some preliminary prep work done first."
No sooner said than done. She had already promised Andrew five days to complete this, and if she intended to keep that promise, then she needed to start laying the groundwork for the subsequent experiments right now.
She paused, her gaze settling back on Andrew’s face.
"Right then. Off with you."
Before Andrew could even open his mouth to ask if there was anything he could help with, she waved him off with the preemptive air of someone who had already read the room entirely — shooing him away like a hen chasing a stray chick:
"Someone like you, who has never gone through a single systematic course in scholarship, is nothing but a walking obstacle in my lab right now. Instead of standing around getting in the way, go find something else to do."
"Five days — not fifty years."
"For these five days, you and your companion are welcome to stay here at Astera. I’ve already had a word with the Commander, and your old quarters have been cleaned and prepared."
"You’re free to move around as you please during this time — just don’t stray too far from the base. If something unexpected comes up, we may need you on short notice."
Faced with the Captain’s arrangements, Andrew was silent for a moment, then gave his agreement.
He understood perfectly well that professional matters needed to be left in professional hands. He had zero background in this field — genuinely, there was nothing useful he could contribute here.
And so, in the end, all he offered was a sincere and measured bow of his head.
"Then I’m grateful. Truly." ƒreewebηoveℓ.com
"Don’t mention it."
In response to his thanks, the Captain simply continued sorting the samples on her desk, not even glancing up as she spoke:
"This is my duty as a scholar. If anything, it’s you who should—"
She looked up. Her eyes moved to Andrew, then to Miyabi, and there was something faintly meaningful in her tone when she continued:
"You’ve come back after a long time away. Rest properly. Stop looking for ways to help — we have more than enough hands here. There’s no gap for you to wedge yourself into."
The Captain, who understood Andrew’s personality down to the bone, had already seen straight through him.
Not that Andrew himself caught the deeper layer of what she was saying. He took it at face value — she was simply advising him to rest after the long, exhausting journey, out of consideration for how far he’d traveled.
And honestly? She wasn’t wrong.
Six consecutive days of high-intensity travel. Even with Andrew’s formidable stamina and mental endurance, fatigue had accumulated in layers he couldn’t simply shrug off.
And that was with Miyabi sharing the night watch duties. Without someone to split the vigil with him, those stretches of wilderness would have been considerably grimmer.
Now that a place where he could finally let his guard down completely had materialized, Andrew felt a bone-deep yearning to throw himself onto a bed and sleep until his body stopped complaining.
Miyabi, standing quietly at his side, felt much the same.
Six days of travel — for someone like Miyabi, who had never operated in the wilderness before, the journey had been an unprecedented ordeal. And on top of everything else, she had spent nearly every waking hour of the trip attempting to advance her auditory cultivation, leaving her mental reserves thoroughly depleted long before they’d arrived.
If Andrew hadn’t been there every step of the way, attending to her without pause, she would have collapsed from exhaustion well before they reached Astera.
But unlike Andrew’s barely-restrained eagerness to collapse into sleep, Miyabi simply stood in place, still and composed.
The candlelight reflected in her deep crimson pupils. Her expression was as calm as ever — but inside, her thoughts had already shifted to something else entirely.
Five days.
It sounded short. But it was more than enough time for many things.
— — —
The night passed without incident.
Outside the window, the light of early morning cut through the sea mist kicked up by waves crashing against the coastal rocks. The air carried that unmistakable bite of salt and damp — the smell of the ocean, one that Andrew hadn’t encountered in years, yet recognized the instant it reached him.
Beyond the walls of Astera, the Exchange Area was already alive with its usual clamor, bristling with the restless, vigorous energy that was uniquely human.
"Five days."
Andrew murmured to himself with quiet satisfaction, staring at the ceiling.
"...How am I supposed to fill the time?"
Waiting had always been the hardest part. He turned it over and over in his head and couldn’t land on a single useful answer.
He knew perfectly well that if the Captain had said five days, then five days was almost certainly an estimate already pushed close to its absolute limit. Virus cultivation, vaccine development — those processes ran on their own timetable. There were steps that simply could not be rushed, no matter what.
And yet, despite knowing all of that, the anxiety simmering beneath the surface — the urgency tied to the vaccine research — made it nearly impossible to sit still.
After a moment’s thought, Andrew reached a conclusion: sitting here stewing in helpless worry was completely pointless. If he was going to be restless anyway, he might as well put that energy somewhere. Better to take a walk around the base and see if he could find something worth doing.
Because — come to think of it — the Captain’s brother, who served as the Logistics Division Captain and oversaw all of Astera’s supply management, had departed quite abruptly. That sudden absence was bound to have created a cascade of headaches in the base’s resource allocation.
If he couldn’t contribute to the vaccine side of things, he could at least contribute to logistics. That was still helping.
Decision made, Andrew threw off the covers, pulled on his armor, and headed out to tour the base.
What he hadn’t anticipated, however, was that no matter how solid a plan looks from the inside, reality has a stubborn habit of going sideways.
First, he went to the Exchange Area.
There, he spotted towering stacks of accumulated research reports — and thinking he could at least help the scholars organize the mountain of backlogged documentation, Andrew reached out to grab the first stack.
A young scholar immediately materialized in front of him, blocking his hands.
"Mr. Andrew! Please, don’t! We’ll handle all of this ourselves!"
His face was alight with unmistakable reverence and genuine, wholehearted joy — the expression of a fan who had just come face-to-face with his idol.
But his hands told a completely different story. They were planted firmly and without any hesitation in front of Andrew’s, blocking every subsequent move with absolute resolve.
He was entirely serious.
Andrew looked at the young scholar’s utterly determined face — a face that said allowing Andrew to lift a single page would be a crime against nature — and offered, a little feebly:
"I just... wanted to help..."
"I know you want to help, sir! But you’ve stopped disasters of unimaginable scale — more than once! You saved the world!"
The young scholar, clearly someone who hadn’t been in the New World very long, wore an expression of absolute earnestness as he continued:
"How could we possibly let a hero do manual labor like this?! Please — just rest! Resting is all you need to do!"
Andrew: "..."
He studied that young, slightly unweathered face — the conviction there, the almost fervent intensity behind it — and understood immediately.
Any hope of finding something useful to do here was essentially nonexistent.
Especially once Andrew noticed that the handful of other young scholars nearby — even the hunters who had come to assist — were all wearing the exact same expression, without a single exception.
For a moment, Andrew felt a peculiar helplessness.
But he didn’t give up. After retreating from that front, he quickly rallied and moved on to try his luck somewhere else.
In the supply storage area, Andrew spotted a group of Felynes struggling under the weight of crates of ore freshly excavated from the Dragonite Locale — each crate clearly too heavy for them, strain visible in every step.
He was just about to step in and help when a familiar hunter — one assigned to oversee material distribution — grabbed him by the arm.
At the same time, that same hunter’s other hand had already swooped in and scooped up the crate that had been giving the Felynes such grief, cradling it like he was afraid Andrew might snatch it away.
Only then did the hunter speak.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa — Andrew! Don’t you dare! We’ve got this covered!"
"I just want to help..."
"We know you want to help!"
The hunter had a crate in one hand and his other hand on Andrew’s shoulder, patting it warmly. He looked at Andrew — someone he hadn’t seen in years — and his face was full of the uncomplicated happiness of reunion.
Then he went on:
"But you’ve been away so long, and you’ve only got five days! Use that time to rest properly — don’t go competing with us for chores!"
Andrew: "..."
His second attempt had failed just as completely as the first.
In the end, he decided to try the kitchen.
The Meowscular Chef — that powerfully built Felyne with the scarred eye who wore his years of battle like a badge — was standing before an enormous roasting furnace, a massive Great Sword strapped to his back that stuck out a full head above his own height. He was tending to whatever was laid out across the vast, immaculately flat surface of the giant roasting pan in front of him when he caught sight of Andrew walking in, and his eye immediately brightened.
"Well, well?! Little Mo’s here? You blew in so fast yesterday I didn’t even get to say a proper hello — you looking to eat something?"
"No."
Andrew shook his head.
"Chef, I came to give you a hand."
"Give me a hand?"
The Meowscular Chef blinked, then broke into a booming laugh.
"You little rascal — you finally come back after all this time and you’re already looking for work? Get out, get out! You’re in the way in here!"
"But—"
"But nothing!"
The Chef waved a paw, making a sweeping gesture like he was literally shooing Andrew toward the door.
"When you were in the New World, you barely had a handful of rest days the entire year. Now you’ve finally made it back — so sit down and take it easy, understood?!"
Andrew was ejected from the kitchen.
He stood at the kitchen doorway, watching the crowd moving back and forth in their purposeful bustle, and felt something stirring in his chest that he couldn’t quite name.
Every refusal had come from a place of genuine warmth. And yet...
"Why do I feel like... I somehow don’t quite fit in anymore?"
The feeling was too subtle, too layered to pin down into words. He couldn’t have described it even if he’d tried.
In the end, having been turned away at every corner, Andrew finally let go of any illusions about finding a useful role for himself around the base.
He let out a quiet sigh, and decided to go find Sapphire Star.
Whatever else was going on, Sapphire Star was his master — and Andrew’s instinct, when he needed someone to talk to, was to go find him.
He grabbed a passing rookie hunter by the arm, and in the midst of the rookie’s barely-suppressed delight at being spoken to, asked where Sapphire Star was at the moment.
"Lord Sapphire Star? He finished a commission just yesterday, so he’s definitely still holed up over in the meeting area right now — grinding away at the mission report the Commander asked for!"
The rookie thought for just a moment before answering with complete confidence.
Andrew thanked him and turned in the indicated direction.
And then immediately regretted it.
Because when he found Sapphire Star, what he saw was this:
The New World’s legendary hunter. The hero who had thrown himself into the battle against the Black Dragon and helped bring it down through his own power alone. The pinnacle that countless hunters looked up to with awe. Andrew’s own master — Sapphire Star — was slumped face-first on the desk, wearing a novelty electric eel head costume, emitting sounds of profound suffering at a blank stack of paper.
"Can’t write it... I can’t write it at all..."
Sapphire Star’s forehead was planted on the tabletop. The long neck of the eel costume drooped limply to one side, like a flower that had long since wilted.
"aibo! At the rate you’re going, the Commander’s going to come chasing after you!"
aibo sat beside him, holding a plate of roasted meat that she had clearly procured directly from the Meowscular Chef’s kitchen. She was eating with one hand and nudging Sapphire Star along with the other, her voice entirely devoid of any actual urgency.
"I know I need to write it! But I can’t get anything out!"
Sapphire Star shot upright, the electric eel costume swinging through the air in a dramatic arc:
"Five thousand characters! Five thousand! I haven’t even scraped together five hundred yet! Five thousand characters — how am I supposed to produce five thousand characters?!"
"Just write down what you did during the mentorship. Walk through it."
aibo swallowed a piece of meat and stated the obvious, completely matter-of-fact:
"What happened on the first day, what happened on the second day, how the new hunters performed, whether anyone got hurt, what you taught them — isn’t that all content right there?"
Sapphire Star was silent for three full seconds. Then he wailed with even greater anguish than before:
"The problem is I didn’t do anything! I just stood to the side and watched them fight! A Great Jagras — if I’d stepped in against something at that level, would it even still count as an evaluation?!"
"Then write that you didn’t do anything."
aibo said it with a straight face.
"Five thousand characters about doing nothing?! The Commander would have me executed on the spot!"
Sapphire Star’s voice cracked on the last word.
Andrew, standing in the doorway taking in this entire scene, reached a very clear conclusion: coming to find Sapphire Star had been a mistake from the very beginning. Whatever impulse had led him here, it must have been a temporary lapse in judgment.
Armed with that realization, he turned on his heel and moved to leave without a moment’s hesitation — only to be foiled by the fact that, at his level, even the faintest movement was detectable to a hunter of Sapphire Star’s caliber.
The instant Sapphire Star registered who was at the door, his expression transformed into one of uncontainable, desperate glee.
"Wait! Don’t you run from me!"
His master’s voice came at him from behind, and Andrew had barely managed a single step before he felt the back of his collar go taut — and the whole of him got yanked firmly back into the room.
"Let go, old man!"
Andrew struggled twice, quickly determined that Sapphire Star had absolutely no intention of releasing him under any circumstances, and just as quickly decided to stop fighting it.
He was his master, after all. Might as well see what he actually wanted.
"Perfect timing."
Sapphire Star pressed him down into the chair beside the desk, then flopped face-first back onto the table himself, peering up at Andrew through the mouth-hole of his electric eel costume with the most pitiable eyes imaginable:
"My beloved disciple — you wouldn’t abandon your master in his hour of genuine life-or-death peril, would you?" frёewebnoѵēl.com
The words had barely left his mouth before Sapphire Star dropped all pretense and got straight to the point:
"Write the report for me!"
"No."
Andrew’s answer was immediate and absolute.
"Why not?!"
Faced with Sapphire Star’s performance of exquisite, soul-rending betrayal, Andrew didn’t waver for even a fraction of a second:
"Because my writing style is way too distinctive. The Commander will see through it in about three seconds."
Andrew laid it out with complete composure.
"And when he does — do you think you’ll die badly now, or do you think you’ll die even worse after?"
Sapphire Star: "..."
He genuinely believed it.
"Fine, fine — what did you even come here for?"
Having abandoned any hope of weaseling his way out of the report, Sapphire Star waved a hand in resignation and shoved the paper — which now contained a grand total of two lines — off to one side. He fished an apple from somewhere on the desk and took a bite.
The report could wait a little longer.
That was what Sapphire Star told himself, in the private language of a man determined to avoid the unavoidable for as long as humanly possible.
____
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