Yay, an early update! And as always, both hilarious and interesting.
Congrats
treave.
So, Methuss does really send
children rookie knights to
die fight against slimes as part of their standard training. Sending a bunch teenagers away to dangerous locations without food nor supervision doesn't sound like a smart idea, but then again if they were intelligent they wouldn't force kids to attack dangerous monsters. On the other hand, they seem to be aware of jrpg rules: they evend bothered to give these rookies actual armor and weaponry! So I guess it balances out.
Erd most likely agrees with the latter. He would go as far as to point out that he was forced to do the same when he was ten but only with a wooden stick. In fact, he seems to be taking advantage of the situation to inflict
needless mental and physical abuse plus humiliation with the excuse of "training", just like what he had to suffer when he was a kid give Aria the same kind of training he had endured during his early "heroic" days.
In any case, I vote for
A>C>B
Let the children play and have fun until the situation gets dangerous/one of the involved parties wins. Then Erdrick will step in to point out that the fish escaped/was dragged away by river long ago while everyone wasted their time being idiots, teaching them
to stop fighting and instead cooperate to catch more and bigger fish that hunger is a force that rarely listens to wisdom. To further add salt to the injury, he can do so while loudly munching a sandwitch he took from the goblin village after a brief teleport trip.
Either way, regardless of the result, I say we capture these knights after they bring us to the slimes' location (in one way or another), offering half of them to the slimes as proof to show our goodwill. The other half would be rescued and
kidnapped taken to the goblin village to give them the opportunity to have a better life. Needless to say, their gear would be looted and recycled/sold for spare money.
“Well, it is a good time to train on controlling your aura, I say. You have been neglecting the way of the fist for far too long, boy, and you have nothing better to do at the moment, do you?” nags the gauntlet.
Heh, I kinda wonder how that "ascetic trip" went for Barbatos.
By the way, Fortunio really has some good managerial skills to be able to keep 100 cutthroats under his control. Perhaps he'll be intelligent enough to teach Erdrick the forgotten art that is getting sleeping-bags for these long trips outside of civilized world.
