It's the Murloc Life for Me [A Warcraft Isekai]

Chapter 7: Teach a Man to Fish, He Meets Some Fishmen

As morning came to the village, an unusual feature was present in the landscape. The waves gently lapped over the shell of a massive turtle, resting on the shore surrounded by bits of driftwood, the remains of a shipwreck the village had been using as timber.

I made my way from Mrgglr's hut over to the slumbering turtle. It seemed to sense my approach, or perhaps the piece of fish I was carrying and slowly awoke. It didn't lift itself off the ground but instead angled its head toward me.

I laid the breakfast in front of it and started patting its head. "Hey Cass, how's that leg doing? Are you resting as I told you?"

It had been a week since I had liberated Cass from Glrmgrlr, and he was still trying to master the sling. He was at the point where he could reliably hit a marked tree at 50 paces, but moving targets still eluded him.

Speaking of Cass, I had gotten tired of always calling it 'the turtle' or 'it,' so I gave it a name. Cass, after my first daughter Cassidy.

I wasn't sure of its sex, as I never had a turtle before, and I wasn't going to crawl under its shell to check. For now, I'll just keep calling it Cass, and cross any potential bridges when we come to them. Cass seemed to like its new name though, so it probably won't be a problem.

Since I managed to coax Cass over to this kind of secluded spot, spending the morning with my new turtle friend had become part of my routine. I would bring some food over, mainly whatever I could find leftover from yesterday, and have breakfast on the beach. It was picturesque, with the rising sun, chirping birds, and massive spiky turtle. Really made you grateful for the little things in life. Things like not getting killed and devoured by gnolls, a scenario that is all too real given how close I was to disaster during the last attack. If those hunters hadn't returned as fast as they did, I would have been bisected by a rusty hatchet.

Sitting down against Cass's shell, I sighed and started drawing in the sand, sketching ideas for a new stretcher. I might have bitten off more than I could chew with taking over the responsibilities of Mrgglr, even for this brief period. Just yesterday I had to set a broken leg, an accident from a murloc wandering into one of the impromptu training ranges set up by the hunters. It was hectic, with the hunters panicking and freaking out everyone in the village. We were all a little tense, and the appearance of 3 hunters running like hell didn't help with that fact. It was a bitch to get the stretcher through the forest, and when I got the patient to a bed, I found rope burns on their back. I needed to figure out how to build a better stretcher, but I was having trouble with available materials.

As I sat, I hummed a few of the other songs I remembered from Earth, mostly the calmer stuff. Cass seemed to like it, or at least they enjoyed sitting and listening to them more than trying to move on a half-healed leg.

After about half an hour, a tadpole came wandering over to where we were sitting. As they were getting close, about 15 meters away, Cass turned its head towards the tadpole and released a low rumbling sound, like a very slow thunderstorm. And like thunder, it promised a destructive response for anyone who heard it. The tadpole froze up, then fell to the ground and started crying. Rushing over to help it, I scooped the little guy up and power walked toward the village. Honestly, it was a little surprising to see a tadpole without any supervision, with the threat of a gnoll raid. It couldn't have been more than three years old and was dangerously isolated from its peers.

Once I got it back under elder supervision, I returned to Mrgglr's hut and looked over some of my notes. Murlocs, as it turns out, are not the most advanced people when it comes to writing. I don't think I have ever seen any writing at all, although that may be specific to this village. But I needed to write my thoughts down to keep them straight, and I didn't want to spend the time carving them into bark. I had managed to collect some clay from the walls of the spawning pits and formed them into tablets. They were still wet, so I couldn't move them around, but I had set up a space on the floor where they sat and acted as a whiteboard of sorts.