Regret was a constant companion as the masked man in red and white walked through the newly restored town filled to the brim with monsters. As he had feared, he had been getting looks from every direction, with around half of them being filled with lust and the other part being filled with a mix of envy and pride.

He wasn’t sure whether to be thankful or angered by the fact that Monarkea had essentially rendered him ‘off limits’ when she had essentially declared her intent to make him belong to herself, as while he wasn’t swarmed by horny reptilian women he was still followed by a wide assortment of them. Likewise, the men among them viewed him with obvious pride in his relation to their masters and, by proxy, to themselves, but Vaile could feel the envy they had towards his status and connections.

Thankfully, though, nobody had made a move, instead the only real issue being an omnipresent crowd of people surrounding him at all times now that he was here. He was, of course, thankful that they didn’t get too close, and the fact that there was a roughly ten-meter wide bubble around him devoid of people made his movement much, much easier.

Still, there was one massive inconvenience that this all presented, and that was the fact that nobody would talk to him. Monarkea and the rest of the true dragons had apparently sent down a message that nobody aside from themselves could even so much as attempt to talk to him, so even when he asked for directions he was met with silence and a general lack of help.

“Possessive to the extreme…” Vaile grumbled under his breath as he wandered around the town, constantly checking his minimap for any sign of his target. “Classic draconic obsessiveness over personally-claimed possessions…”

Vaile stopped walking and sighed before looking around, his gaze meeting that of a near sea of kobolds, dragonborn, draconewts, lizardmen, and more. He had long since given up trying to get anything out of them, and now all this crowd was doing was preventing him from being able to see or find his target.

It was time for a little parkour.

Vaile tensed his legs and then leaped from his original position on the street over a line of buildings and into another street, bypassing the massive crowd entirely before leaping again to get even farther away. Another few bounding leaps got him a much better look at the layout of the town than he had gotten over the past hour and a half of walking with a crowd around him, and now he was busy plotting out places where he would need to look for that dense bastard in his head.

And, as luck would have it, he found the person he was looking for after only another three trips into the air. Landing in a much safer manner than how most fictional characters are want to, Vaile dropped down from the sky roughly thirty feet from that wannabe Hero and seemingly did it without the dumb fool even noticing that he had, indeed, done so.

Vaile walked up to the would-be ‘savior of everything good’ and watched him from up close, not that he actually wanted to, of course, it was just that the roughly 13-year-old moron was just so… strange.

Vaile had, in his time in the MMO, seen many a person roleplaying as any number of things, and likewise, he had seen armor sets that ran the gamut of being garishly hideous fashion disasters to majestic works fit more for an art museum than an actual battle. And yet, not once in his more than a decade of play had he borne witness to armor literally made of trash and refuse, along with random bits of discarded metal objects and rags.

And that odd and eclectic mess that this fool wore was curious enough for Vaile to brave the stench radiating off of the teenager and get in close, even if only to marvel a bit more closely at the utter insanity of what he was looking at.

“Are you…” Vaile almost asked before his mind stopped him. If he was indeed who Vaile almost sarcastically asked if he was, then this would all go down very, very poorly for him. However, his will to mock this dumb bastard got the better of him, and he asked anyway. “Are you the Dark Prince of Madness and Insanity, Sheogoratch?”

Truth be told, Vaile did not expect this to be the case, especially since that character did not exist in the MMO, but it was something worth asking simply due to how absurd the situation was. Despite the poor idiot almost certainly not knowing what he was talking about, Vaile just had to bring up how only a Dark Lord of Foolery and Idiocy would ever dare to wear something so utterly bizarre.

Or was he someone who found his way in from a certain manga artist’s dreams? The outfit was outlandish enough that a fashion designer with a bit of a cynical side could easily have made it, so maybe this would be the part where a ‘punch ghost’ popped out and smacked him in the face?

“I’m named Axis Wode, silly!” was the more than welcome reply as the dopey grin on the dumb teen’s face nearly put Vaile off right then and there. “I am the Hero!”

“And I’m the King of Kong, Earl of Grey, Duke of Nukem, Count of Von Count, Lord of Ultra, Knight of Day, and Sir Loin of Beef.” Vaile said both mockingly and dismissively.

At this, Axis seemed to have the gears in his head begin to churn, and it took him a whopping three and a half minutes to process what Vaile had said, although he did not perceive it correctly. Axis dropped to one knee, or at least attempted to do so, and instead ended up lying on his face as he had toppled over when he had tried to kneel.

“Good day, your Majesty!” Axis said as the dirt on the ground rubbed against his mouth, partially muffling his words. “I would tip my hat to you, but I lost it.”

Vaile looked down at the fool and saw that behind where Axis had been a few minutes ago there was a line of hats trailing off into the distance.

“You mean you lost your hats, right?”

Axis merely shook his head, which further rubbed dirt in his face.

“No, I have one hats. And I lost it.”

Vaile wanted to ask if Axis meant to add an ‘s’ at the end of that one word, but decided against it and said nothing at this, merely closing his eyes and exhaling deeply and slowly. This endeavor was going to kill him via second-hand embarrassment, wasn’t it?