Chapter VII: Do you like my new bike?

Shizukana Gake, Heian Kingdom

Month of the Garuda 16, 172 ,328 DE

Night has already fallen when I reach the compound in Shizukana Gake. I take the steamer bike in through the residence gate.

The curtains on a second floor window part, and a shirtless Old Man Jones looks out. He must be banging Mika-chan. Mika-chan's face peering around his arm confirms the suspicion. The two of them go at it like rabbits on aphrodisiacs, at least, two or three nights a week before Mika-chan goes home.

Mika-chan is not quite what you would call a peerless beauty, but she is quite a bit above just commonly pretty. Her looks were the doom of her dead husband. A noble from one of the clans decided to take her for a plaything and her husband tried to stop them. The nobles guards nailed him to the exterior wall of their house and cut off his dick and balls. No one dared to cut him down before the City Guards showed up, and he had already bled out by that time. A few weeks later, when the noble tired of Mika-chan, she was given to his guards to play with and later pitched naked into the street in front of the clan.

While Mika-chan was being toyed with, the creditors took her husbands business and threw her children out on the street. Widowed with three young children and a reputation for being used, if not for Old Man Jones taking her on as a housekeeper, she would have likely wound up as a prostitute. All that happened over three years ago, and Mika-chan has been working for us ever since. With Old Man Jones as her boss, not many people dare to fuck with her, and the few that tried are already dead.

When Old Man Jones comes out of the kitchen door, he eyeballs me sitting sidesaddle on the steamer bike, then he slowly appraises the bike. "Who did you mug?"

I shrug. "No fucking clue. Two of the assholes rode up and pulled guns on me. They called their leader 'Lord', but never added a name to it. Their Lord gave me the bike so I wouldn't kill the asshole that shot me."

Old Man Jones shakes his head while laughing. "Brat, you're getting more gangster-like by the day."

Coming out the door with a medical kit under her arm, Mika-chan hastily ties the narrow belt she uses in place of the large obi used by the wealthy and half-runs over to me. "Raymon-san, you should be more careful. Do you know how many wounds I've had to bandage for you?"

"Seventeen. But these don't need bandages. They're already well on the way to healing." Whether the holes from the Demonic Ape's claws or the furrow from the bullet, thick black scabs already cover all of my wounds. I heal far more quickly than a normal human, and these wounds are nothing compared to something like the time a Blood Bear ripped my stomach open. The scar from that is my most impressive one. It looks like newly plowed white furrows stretching from my right ribs to my left hip.

Mika-chan strokes my cheek in a motherly fashion. Despite being no more than twenty-five or twenty-six, since she started working for us, she has always tried to mother me. She is the type to be easily moved to sympathy and probably feels bad for me not having a mother. She knows nothing about why my mother is not here. Just the absence of my mother is enough to trigger Mika-chan's sympathy.

"Take better care of yourself. Jones-san would be heartbroken if you died."

I smile wryly. Mika-chan is one of the few people I have never been able to manipulate into calling Old Man Jones with the 'Old Man' tacked onto his name.

I look at Old Man Jones. "So, what do you think? Custom or production? The other steamer bike was its twin."

Old Man Jones scratches the scar tissue where his prosthetic skull plate joins the skin of his cheek. "Probably production. This might be something out of the Jewel Kingdoms. They make heavy war bikes similar to this for scouting and fighting Beast Waves. You may have provoked someone with real heavyweight backing, this time."

The Jewel Kingdoms line the northern edge of the Great Plateau and for tens of millennia have stood as the front line of humanity's defenses against the Demonic Beasts. Old Man Jones has access to the Mind Net and can use it to check the status of the Watch Towers. He says that more than a tenth of the Towers along the northern edge of the Plateau are offline or destroyed. According to the history books, the weaker Demonic Beast have been trying to sneak through the extra-wide gaps between the functional Watch Towers for millennia. If any made it through, they have been keeping extremely low profiles.

If not for the Jewel Kingdoms, the Great Plateau probably would have been overrun by Demonic Beasts millennia ago. They have some of the strongest, most high realm Cultivators outside of the Temple of the Celestial Court. Depending on the Kingdom, they may even have one or more Cultivators of a higher realm than the Temple.

I shake my head. "No way. They must have bought the bikes. These guys were total scrub trash. Their Lord was in his late twenties at the least, more likely his early thirties, and he was only about the Third or Fourth Stage of Qi Condensation. His right-hand man was at least fifty and only in Foundation Establishment. They weren't heavyweights."

"That doesn't mean there isn't anyone behind them who is."

As I shrug, Old Man Jones shakes his head, with a long suffering expression. From the look on his face, I cannot tell whether or not I have made a successful attempt in my second favorite hobby, pissing Old Man Jones off. I will have to just chalk it up as a failure.

Mika-chan frowns. "Raymon-san, you should not make things hard on Jones-san."

I grin at Mika-chan. "Suffering is good for the old man's Soul. As long as he's suffering, he won't forget he's alive."

Mika-chan's frown shifts into a scowl "Sometimes, you're not a very nice person."

Putting on an expression of wide-eyed innocence, I stare into Mika-chan's eyes. "What do you mean by sometimes?"

Mika-chan swats me on the shoulder. "You shouldn't joke around like that. People might believe you."

With a sigh, Mika-chan looks up at the sky. "It's getting late. I need to get home."

Standing on her tiptoes, Mika-chan just barely manages to kiss Old Man Jones on the lower edge of his jaw. She is a good eight centimeters over the average height for women in the Heian Kingdom, but that is still not very tall when compared with Old Man Jones' two hundred centimeters.

"Good night, Jones-san. Good night, Raymon-san." Mika-chan walks quickly out of the compound.

"She's too good for a shitty old man like you."

Old Man Jones glares at me. "You don't have to tell me that, Obnoxious Brat."

I smirk. I can mark that down as a success on pissing Old Man Jones off.

Taking one of the deep red berries out of my pack, I toss it to Old Man Jones. "The great tree showed me these today. After eating one and shifting to my true form, I completed Body Forging."

Old Man Jones frowns. "Why did you shift?"

Neither of us mentions the word "Wolf" directly. We almost never use the actual word.

After I untie the Demonic Ape and dump it on the ground, I hack open its chest. "Look at the Chaos corruption in its blood. There were hundreds of them with the same corruption, all of them Yellow Earth Apes. They had the same glowing eyes and smoking breath as the Demonic Cows. And this time, a Lord Class Beast was in charge."

"You shifted to fight the Lord?"

I snort. "Do you think I'm gonna fight a real Lord in this weak as shit form?"

After digging around the dead Ape's chest cavity, Old Man Jones stands up and sighs. "We should probably find the source of corruption and get rid of it."

I smirk. "Before I killed the Lord, it told me a human female in black gave the Apes Blood Fruit to make them strong. That human Lord was looking for a pale skinned, black haired gaijin woman. There might be a connection."

For a few moments, Old Man Jones stares at me with a blank expression. For whatever reason, he gets annoyed when I use the term gaijin to describe myself or others. "I don't suppose while you were extorting your new toy, you got any contact information for the group?"

The weird terms Old Man Jones uses irritate me. His insults are the best, but who the fuck says 'contact information'? It is not that the term is wrong, but it is not something people say, and if I accidentally use one of his weird terms, I have to waste time explaining. I shake my head. "I really don't care if I never see those two middle-aged uncles and their bung boys again."

Old Man Jones sighs. "It would help if I could pump them for information."

I shrug indifferently. "If I run into them next time I'm in the Wildlands, I'll ask them over for tea and crackers.

"I'm gonna jump in the pressure tank and see if I can get my strength to increase anymore now that I completed the fusion of my Mana."

Shizukana Gake, Heian Kingdom, The Great Plateau

Month of the Garuda 17, 172 ,328 DE

As I ride my new steamer bike into the parking lot of the Academy of Magic Technology, classes are about to start. I stare at the Western style building and frown. There are no tests today. If it were not for the fact that there is someone in the school that has a better chance of identifying the bike than Old Man Jones, I would have probably skipped. My only reason for going to secondary school is that it will make it easier to get into one of the Twelve Great Colleges, and I just need the grades to prove my current academic and Engineering abilities. After getting off my bike, I take my time as I stroll through the halls to my classroom.

The Academy of Magic Technology is one of the secondary schools in Shizukana Gake, and other than the Tradesmen Association's Tradesmen School, it is the only school in the city that has courses for things like Engineering and Alchemy. The Academy is focused on teaching Cultivators, who plan to try and enter one of the Cultivator Colleges, and it teaches courses that focus on merging Yuan Qi, what I call Mana, with weapons technology and medicine. The Tradesmen School is designed for people who may or may not be Cultivators and plan to open shops catering to the common needs of society.

Now, my main problem is that all my Mana has been fused with my Body. If I cannot connect with pure Trinity, I will never be able to open a Core Realm, and if I cannot open a Core Realm, I will be nothing but a stronger that Mortal existence that can never Coalesce. Even though I was able to increase my strength and the density of my Body while I was in the pressure tank, I had no luck connecting with Trinity.

I only have two and half months to succeed. This year is the Sengoku Empire's Three Year Enrollment Exam for the Twelve Great Colleges. Since everything east of the Kami Kaze Mountains is either a backwater or outright wilderness, the Sengoku Empire only gets one entry exam every three years. If I cannot make it this year, I will have to travel west of the Kami Kaze Mountains and find an exam in a more powerful empire next year.

By the time I reach my home room, class has already started. As I saunter through the door with a smirk on my face, most of the students, who are from the noble clans, look at me disdainfully, while the commoners keep their heads down, like always. Among them, Okada Hoshi and Sato Aoi are the only exceptions.

Other than myself, every student in the room wears a school uniform modeled after the military uniforms of the Dunkle Sonne Empire, which is about twenty-five hundred kilometers or so west of the Kami Kaze Mountains and a bit north of the Sengoku Empire. The boys uniforms consists of a white jacket and pants trimmed in dark blue. A very short skirt replaces the pants for the girls uniforms.

I have no clue what idiot thought up the uniform style, but some decades back, it started in Sengoku City and spread everywhere east of the Kami Kaze Mountains.

With a crooked smile, Sato Aoi looks at me out of the corner of her eye. She is a small, slightly built girl, but the short short sleeves and short skirt of her summer uniform reveal the well-toned muscles of her forearms and legs. She never stands out and only speaks when responding to the teachers' questions. That girl is about the only person I have ever seen that can look like she is ready to burst into tears when she smiles. Whether the nobles or the commoners, everyone ignores her, and during breaks between classes, she disappears.

Okada Hoshi is the person I am looking for. Coming from a major clan, Hoshi has already reached the peak of Body Tempering, but he is fat like a pig. Make that two pigs in one. He also suffers from the otaku mental derangement, but he is not quite a normal otaku like the losers in primary school. He has an almost obscene fascination with technology, especially steamers and anything used by any military organization. I occasionally wonder if he has ever tried to fuck the steam pipe on a steam engine or the barrel of a gun.

Inoue something or other, the teacher, glares at me. "Beast-kun, you are late."

"Kun" is called an honorific, but in reality it is a way to remind someone of lower social status than yourself that you know they are of lower social status. In the city's schools, the teachers do not dare to call an aristocratic student with the "kun" honorific. They always use "san".

"Hey, Inoue-kun, do I look like I give a fuck?"

Technically, Inoue has higher social the I do, but I have Old Man Jones backing me up, and even the City Lord does not dare to get on his bad side. I could kill a nobody like Inoue, and no one in power would so much a blink.

Inoue face turns red. "Do you want to go to the Principal's office."

I stare mocking at Inoue and snicker. "Not particularly. Does he need me to solve equations for some crazy, new sigil he wants to invent?"

Hoshi laughs out loud, spraying spittle all over the person sitting in front of him, who turns to glare at him. He looks vaguely familiar. I probably heard the guys name more than once, but I cannot remember it.

"Beast is being a dumb Beast, again." The words are a soft whisper, that I am obviously not meant to hear. The noble clan morons in this class assume my senses are as dull as their own pathetic sense, and as I stare straight at the speaker and smile, his face pales. Like the noble idiot Hoshi pissed off, I do not know this one's name.

Let's be honest, other than Hoshi and Sato Aoi, I cannot remember the name of any other student in the class.

My mother named me Raymon, but most people call me Beast or Raymon the Beast. I do not dislike the name. Even though, they call me Beast with derision in their tone, there is always a hint of fear under the derision.

"Go sit down!" As he barely manages to suppress his rage, Inoue's face almost looks purple. He should have already learned that he cannot win. I do not give a fuck about classes, and the Academy Principal is one of Old Man Jones' Engineering sycophants. As long as I solve equations for the Principal when he catches me, I can do no wrong.

Climbing to the back tier, I take my seat next to the window. "Hoshi."

Hoshi leans over from his desk next to mine and whispers in a voice loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. "Beast. What are you doing here on an Omononushi's Day? There are never tests on an Omononushi's Day. You're gonna cause Inoue-kun to have a heart attack."

While not many students like Hoshi, all but a few of the nobles dutifully laugh to suck up to him. Only the few students, who do not laugh, are likely to come from clans with power comparable to Clan Okada. None of the commoners dare to laugh. Inoue-kun is a pissy little cunt who would have them expelled, and that would almost certainly put an end to their chances of getting into a Cultivation College.

I point at the window with my thumb. "Take a look outside. Do you like my new bike?"

Scrambling to his feet, Hoshi waddles to the window. After looking out, he stands there trembling for good thirty seconds, then moves faster than I have ever seen him move. He practically teleports to me and grabs the front of my leather shirt. "BEAST! WHERE DID YOU GET AN AMBER INDUSTRIES WILD ROVER V. THEY'RE STILL RESTRICTED TO THE AMBER MILITARY AND THE UPPER TIER NOBLES!"

Grabbing Hoshi's uniform jacket, I tear off one half of the front and use it to wipe his spittle off my face and hair.

Hoshi's expression turns sullen. "You didn't have to ruin my jacket."

"Don't spray it, next time."

"You could have asked for a handkerchief."

Without saying anything, I just stare as Hoshi.

It only takes a few seconds for Hoshi to go back into full otaku mode, but this time he does not spray his words. "Where did you get it!"

"I met a guy in the Wildlands who gave it to me."

"He just gave it to you! Did you sacrifice a virgin to the Goddess of Luck!"

"Beast-kun! Hoshi-san! You are disturbing the class! If you can't be quiet, leave!"

Rising to his feet, Hoshi flips off Inoue. "Let's go Beast."

Waddling majestically down the stairs, Hoshi looks over his shoulder. "How did you get him to give it to you?"

Following Hoshi, I shrug. "One of his bung boys shot me, and he gave it to me so I wouldn't kill the idiot."

"You better never let anyone from the Kingdom of Amber see you with it. They would probably shoot to kill." Hoshi laughs.

Crack!

As I pass by Inoue's desk, I slap him, softly. But it still looks like I dislocate his jaw. "You can go complain to the Principal. But when I tell him that you're disrespectfully calling me with 'kun' like you're better than me, I wouldn't want to be in your shoes. From now on, you might want to call me Beast-sama."

The class is so quiet you could hear a gnat fart.

Hoshi stops and stares mockingly at the rest of the class. "What? You think he's joking? The principal would make Beast an Engineering teacher if he thought Beast would actually show up to teach."

Once we are out the door, Hoshi grabs my arm. "Beast! Please! You have to get one of those bikes for me!"

"You mean you want me to take another bullet just to get you one?"

Hoshi stares at me blankly for almost a whole second. "Yes! Do it! Sacrifice your body for my happiness!"

Planting my hand on Hoshi's face, I shove him backward. "Fuck off, you sick otaku bastard!"

"Yes! I admit it! I AM AN OTAKU! GET ME ONE OF THOSE STEAMER BIKES!"

"Come to the Demonic Wildlands and get shot. I'll blackmail one out of the Lord for you too."

Hoshi spends almost a minute thinking. "If we have to go to the Demonic Wildlands, I changed my mind. I don't want one."

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