Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu Read Free Book Online Page A

up the tension.
    “Check this out,” he says, holding up a vial of something yellow and bubbly.
    “Oil of Reciprocated Feelings,” the shopkeeper says.
    “We’ll take two,” Rostejn says, flinging the coins onto the counter. I shoot him a look.
    “What?” he says. “You never know when this might come in handy. You just never know.”

    It is a half moon later when Krugnor joins our group. We’d spent several days slashing through wave after wave of dumb meat, orcs and ogres. Toward the end, we were barely talking to one another, just carving up bodies, leaving them in piles. Green flesh hacked up everywhere.
    Krugnor isn’t any of the classic types. Krugnor is special, and everyone can see it right away.
    It used to be there were only four kinds of people: fighters, mages, clerics, and thieves. What someone did for a living said something about who they were, what they thought of themselves, how they approached the world: strength, intelligence, wisdom, or charisma.
    Krugnor, on the other hand, is part of the new generation.
    “I’m a warrior-mystic,” he says. That’s how he introduces himself, when we find him by a babbling brook, doing yoga. “But I’m really not into labels. We’re all just people, you know?”
    I try to roll my eyes at Trin, but she’s not looking at me. She likes him. I can tell right away. I look over at Byr, to see if she’s noticing this, but even she seems to be in some kind of trance.
    Even my own disciple is smitten. “We need that guy,” Fjoork says.
    So I put it to a vote.
    Trin votes yes, tries to not look excited.
    “He’ll help with hit points,” Byr says. “We could take on a thousand-ogre wave, if we had to. Brute-force our way through. Just plain outslug the monsters.”
    Rostejn votes yes, too, although I get the sense that he just wants to get at some of the hardware Krugnor is toting in his equipment sack.
    And Fjoork looks head over heels for the new guy already.
    No need for me to even weigh in.
    Krugnor joins the group.
    “Shall we make it official?” he asks.
    I say, uh, sure, what does he have in mind?
    “Stare into one another’s souls, of course,” he says. “Isn’t that how you guys do it?”
    I say, yeah, sure, okay.
    Krugnor starts with Trin, big surprise, takes her head in his large, callused hands. They lock eyes and she seems to melt.
    “So that’s what a hero looks like,” Byr says.
    I tell Byr to shut up.
    Each member of the group gets their own turn. When it comes to me, I take a pass, but Krugnor’s not having any of it.
    “If we are going to be brothers-in-arms,” he says, “we will need to touch souls.”
    I tell him I’m getting over a cold.
    “It was really a nasty bug. For your own good.”
    “Okay,” he says. “But don’t think you’re off the hook.”
    After he’s done with all the soul-staring, Krugnor asks me for a copy of the battle plan. I say, uh, yeah, I’ll get that right to you.

    It is foretold that there will be two hundred fifty-five battles in our path to destiny.
    In the Final Battle, Battle 256, we will face the final boss.
    Sounds pretty exciting.
    And it was, for a while.
    Today is Battle 253.
    I think.
    Hard to tell, though.
    To be honest, epic battles of good and evil, they’re pretty epic, but after about the first two hundred, they all start to kind of blur together.

    Before setting out to the battlefield, we pray to our god, Frëd. He’s a minor deity, but sort of an up-and-comer. At least that’s what he tells us.
    We get a lot of shit from other groups for worshipping him, but he’s really Byr’s deity. Now that I think about it, she’s partly responsible for this mess we’re in. Before we became acolytes of Frëd, we all kind of did our own thing. And we definitely never talked about it, it was just sort of no one else’s business who or what you worshipped or sacrificed poultry for, so long as you pulled your weight and your deity wasn’t some imp who was going to screw with