After a few hours, I had woken up in the Heartstone Trollmarket under Prague. My chest hurt, and the last few hours felt like a fever dream.
My chest was bandaged and I saw the amulet next to the bed I was laying to.
"Are everyone okay?" I asked as I was waking up.
"Your friends are okay Master Jim, they're here with you." Blinky spoke to me again and I relieved.
"Jim, do you remember what happened?" Claire said as she sat next to me.
"It was fine at first, but what happened next.."
Before she could even ask me or I could even ask her if her family is fine, I heard Douxie.
"Did you manage to defeat the creation of the government Satanists?"
I immediately got out of bed angry and threw myself at him. I had a terrible urge to beat him up.
"Douxie, you son of a bitch! You knew about the thing, but you didn't tell me! All I expected were agents or assassins, not straight up freaking demons!"
I was waving my arms in anger and I wanted to have a real fight.
"I was thinking you will expect it yourself since their love for occult."
"I will kill you!"
I got into a fight with him, my friends had to watch it. Apparently the other trolls were confused about the fist fight between the Trollhunter and the sorcerer.
I tried to shove him into the wall, but instead he was punching me in the head. I roared, and while I was fighting him, me and him ran and crashed into a troll's wooden stall and destroyed a wooden cart with crockery for sale.
"That's today morals, is that how a Trollhunter behaves!?" I heard the shop assistant, an elderly troll lady, retort.
"A Trollhunter just can't think ahead! Don't worry about him!" Douxie added, and I again groaned angrily.
"Shut up, you rat!"
"And he also forgets to switch to normal speech!"
He still kept pissing me off.
"Shut up!"
I had such a tantrum that I stopped for a moment, shivering and breathing rapidly. Douxie kicked me into stomach as soon as he had chance. I was breathing deeply on the ground with a bandaged wound on my chest, and I coughed up some blood.
"I promised to help you train, but some things you have to figure out by yourself."
I wiped my bloodied mouth, and though running hurt, I jumped on him again. Douxie held my fists to stop me from punching him in the mouth, I felt he had more power than I did. He let go of my hands and stepped away from me.
"Jim, I challenge you to a duel." He said, and I saw local trolls curiously watching me and him. Aarrgghh was confused, Blinky didn't look happy and Claire gave me view that I owe her an explanation.
"You know you piss me off the same way you did when I first met you." I said, standing up, still wiping blood on my face.
"Do you have a wooden pole here? 2 will be enough."
When I caught a wooden pole thrown by a troll from the crowd, I heard fragments of what my girlfriend was talking to the others. Local trolls started to chant "Fight! Fight! Fight!"
"Blinky, are you sure they will not hurt each other?"
"Eh, considering Douxie is a sorcerer, he can survive a lot of stuff, but Jim... well is vulnerable."
This wasn't like fighting with a sword, fighting with poles was completely different and Douxie knew it. But I understood how poles are used in combat, I immediately used my pole to block the attack.
"Hell, you're a Trollhunter, you're supposed to be prepared for both what lurks in the darkness and what's sent on you from the governments!" He shouted in my face as his wooden pole slid down my pole.
"An omniscient wizard, huh? I didn't expect you to turn out to be such a scumbag..."
I wasn't paying attention for a while, he immediately hit me in the leg with a pole.
"If this is training, you're training me in a very different way than Draal and Strickler used to-"
"This is practice!" He retorted angrily, slamming the wooden rod into my hands with force "I've been on the Earth for 922 years, you're not even 20, I have a reason for training you so harshly!"
The wound was so strong that a piece of bandage with dried blood from my hands fell to the ground and I dropped my wooden rod. My hands hurt like crazy.
He turned around, threw down a wooden pole and now pretended I didn't exist.
"Ladies and gentlemen, break up, there's nothing to see here!" Blinky dispersed the curious crowd.
"Ouch.." I said to myself feeling the pain.
Claire immediately came to me, putting her hands on mine. She looked directly into my eyes.
"Jim, what happened between you and Douxie?"
"Ah, nothing, just guy stuff."
"Please answer me honestly."
"Okay, fine, fine, he started training me to be ready for the whole world to come after me, he just didn't point out that the supernatural was still here and I ended up getting hurt because of it. That's why I was so pissed."
She helped me up, and as I felt the pain, it dawned on me that my back was strained.
I had no idea how impressed I must have been with this scene for the locals, but I figured it would be better to be out of the public for a while.
"So it's like they tried to kill you and you made a pact with the mob?" Krel asked me after I had space to tell the whole team my today's story.
"I made a pact with them, I had no choice, at first they wanted to kill me." I answered and closed my eyes while taking a big gulp of hot cocoa.
The only person who kept digging through the local books was Blinky, and my witnessing of the demonic being obviously worried him.
"Aarrgghh, do you know what's with Blinky now?" I turned at Aarrgghh and he responded "He's worried."
"Please don't let it be what I think, please don't let it be what I think, please..." He kept repeating in a circle.
Douxie was probably sulking after a fight in public with me today, because from the room where he was staying I could hear extreme metal solos and vocals that were nothing but a roar. So it didn't sound like music to me because it was so loud that it hurt your ears.
After tonight, before I travel to London, I was looking forward to getting a good night's sleep, the only ones who weren't thrilled with life as an action movie were Claire's parents. Her dad looked at me like I was a murderer, and it looked like he was really, really mad at me.
"You said it would be safe there, you endangered my wife and my children.."
"I told you to stick with me if something happened."
Mr. Nuňez got up and pulled me to him.
"They could shoot up Enrique, they could shoot up Enrique! Would you like to be responsible for a death of a 3 year old!?"
I was silent, I knew I was in trouble.
"We should have stayed in Texas, maybe we'd have had a new house, we'd have been safe, but no, my into you crazy daughter made us leave safety!"
"Mr. Nuňez, you really don't know what they're capable of." I responded.
"I don't care, I'll take my wife and kids and try to get my plane ticket back to the USA! The fact that they shot at me in Europe was enough!"
I ended up in the middle of a family drama when Claire interrupted the argument.
"Dad?" Claire asked, switching her views at me, and her father.
"Claire, sweetheart, I've had enough, let's pack up and get out of here!"
"Dad-" She said, but was interrupted by her angry father
"I want you to stop associating with Jim—this guy isn't normal and he's absolutely ruined your chance to go to college!"
"Dad, I love him!"
"I don't care if you love him, he's only brought the whole family into trouble. You'll come with us and your little brother too!"
When he came across her maternal side, which was also related to the fact that she was taking care of her brother, she immediately got angry.
"Enrique stays here, he is safe with trolls!"
"Okay, you guys stay in this hole, I'm gone! Ophelia, time to leave!" He then yelled at his wife and took her outside, although she asked what would happen to the children. I saw in Claire's face the same emotions I had when my mom died.
Javier did not find it suspicious outside that there was a car parked with keys, forcing his wife to go with him when she was devastated that he had forced her to abandon her children.
I was with Claire outside watching the whole scene and she was sobbing. A single turn of the car keys followed, and the car-bomb exploded.