The conversation was hard work to navigate, and kindness wasn't achieving anything in Kubo's favor. Kindness was doing him a world of danger, it seemed. Guns had been explained to him, filling in the gaps in his knowledge of weaponry, and he recognized the message for the threat it was.

His blood chilled a little at how vulnerable he'd let himself become. He would be slower at drawing his shamisen from his back than Roland would be at drawing his guns, slower than his father would have been at drawing a bow. That was no good - his weapon ought to come to him fast since it was one, ought to have already been out. Something to work on if - after he survived.

He was not going to die here, not while his mother might be alive to find. But if she were becoming a monster too -

So he went casual. He shrugged. He scratched his neck, bringing his hand closer to where he could reach his shamisen, if his words continued not to work.

"I guess I don't know."

I'm here to find out what's happening to you, and try to draw you out of it. But he was not someone Roland would expect to achieve that. Maybe he wouldn't, but he'd try.

"I'm just a kid."

In the meantime, he'd play this story to Roland's perception.

"If I'm not here to hear a story, what am I here to do?"

The musing bought him time to consider what would work. And to wonder what Roland had glanced down into the darkness at.