Chapter 3: Shame

He only saw over the edge, but it held unknown depth.

3rd person perspective

As Zure and Zeph left the Career building, she got a better look at Zeph’s face. He seemed to be generally uninterested in what seemed to be happening, but his eyes fluttered back and forth, as if drinking in every surrounding.

Just by looking at his eyes, he looked dead. They held no emotion, but there also seemed to be something behind them, as though they held a secret, untold to all but Zeph.

And the color of his eyes didn’t match how he was at all. They were a deep sea blue, as though they would swallow you whole if you were to stare for too long.

“Why are you staring at me?” Zure didn’t know how to respond to Zeph’s inquisition, and quietly responded, “No reason.” “If you have no reason to look at me, then don’t look at me.”

To Zure, Zeph seemed to be cold and heartless, but he also didn’t seem to be a bad person. “Thanks for saving me back there. If you didn-” “I didn’t do it for you. They threatened me with force, and I responded accordingly. Don’t get the wrong idea.”

Zeph’s perspective

To my left, there were skyscrapers lined across the way; same on the right. Most of the buildings were big business’ and held no meaning, until they reached the shopping district, which was occupied by a large super-mall and a few fast food chains.

We entered a Sandwich Queen, and I decide on the special #2; a meat and cheese sandwich, soda, fries, and chicken nuggets. “I don’t care what you’re ordering. I pay for my food, and you pay for yours.” I don’t see why she should expect any special treatment from me.

She silently nods okay and continues on looking at the menu. I then notice the price, which is 3 yenoms. Seems accurate. We order the food, receive the food, eat the food, and exit.

“All right, now I’m going to need you to guide me around the mall. Also, why are you so quiet?” She waits a moment before answering, then says, “If I don’t have a reason to say anything, then I don’t have to say anything.”

She seems satisfied with her answer, acting contempt, like she understood me.

“Don’t assume you know what I’m thinking. I only want you to be my guide for a while.” Her look of contempt shifts to irritation as quickly as it had been contempt.

The first shop we see in the mall is a magic shop, aptly named Magyk. I gesture towards the shop, and we enter. The first thing she tells me is that I can check the stats of each item by swiping up on it’s tag, and that magic is entirely dependent on stamina usage.

I pick up a scroll, which reads, Scroll of Fire: 50 yenoms. “Are these single use? Do I absorb the scroll?” “Pretty much. Once you buy the scroll, you take out your Cred and press the scroll to it.” I pick through a few more scrolls, and settle on lightning magic, health recovery magic, and a speed up scroll.

“Are you sure you want ALL of those scrolls? If you learn multiple types of magic, the effectiveness of each spell decreases. If you were only to learn the health and speed spells, you would be fine, because they’re both support spells; but others, like the lightning scroll, are attack magic, so the different types of spells will interfere with each other.”

So I’m limited to one type of magic. Inconvenient, but I already have Freeze and Chill, so I’ll go with support type magic. I go ahead and purchase the speed up for 75 yenoms and the health recovery spells for 125 yenoms.

As we exit the shop, Zure explains to me that I just have say a keyword every time I want to use magic. “Is the word related to the spell?”

“No, you can choose any word you want, but it helps to have the word related to the spell you’re casting.” I decide on the words Heal, for the heal, and Swift, for the speed.

The strength of the spell is dependent on how much effort you put into the spell, but it’s proportional to stamina, like I said earlier. More effort = More stamina.

I pause time for a moment and try to use Swift. When I try to speak, no words come out; sound doesn’t travel when time is stopped.

I try speaking under Chill, and though I speak at a normal speed, the pitch and speed of the words are heavily reduced, and the spell doesn’t activate until the word ends.

No magic while time is frozen. Honestly, this is fine because if I used stamina killing spells while using stamina killing Freeze, I won’t be able to do much.

We walk forward throughout the mall and see a multitude of what appear to be weapon and armor shops until stopping at one, called The Smith. I walk inside and see countless weapons on the walls, including swords, guns, bows, hammers, maces, spears, glaives, and daggers.

Most of the ranged things don’t interest me, but I check out the guns stats, which read: |M-4| |3 bullets per/sec| |Bullet Speed: 20 feet per/sec|. Only 20 feet per second? That’s really slow, but I guess it’s to compensate for the comparative strength of swords, bows, and everything else in the shop.

Immediately afterwards, I drift towards the glaive section. I notice one that looks like a katana hooked onto the end of a pole, which I realise is a naginata. I search for a naginata with a detachable handle until reaching one that has a pure black handle, and a blade that is almost darker than the handle.

I check my stats, which are |Strength: 22| |Defense: 15| |Speed: 24| |Stamina: 30| |Intelligence: 23|. I swipe up on the handle and check it’s stats. |Abyssal Naginata| |Strength boost: +28| |Sharpness: SS Ranked| |Handle: Detachable| |Cost: 1500 Yenoms|

Damn. If it costs 1500 yenoms, then it must be a top tier item. I bring it to the front counter and ask to buy it. “Are you sure you want to buy that?” I think I’m pretty sure. Wordlessly, I purchase the naginata and a waistband/sheath thing, detach the handle, and slide the blade into the sheath, and the handle into the belt.

I pause time for a moment while figuring out how to draw both pieces at once and use the spear. The sword draws exactly like a katana, but the spear handle takes a minute to figure out.

If I take the spear handle from my waist and attach it to the end of the katana while pulling it out, it seems to be a swift movement. By the end of the freeze, I’m sweating and breathing hard.

“Hey…. uh, why are you sweating?” “I’ll tell you later.” She looks unsatisfied and annoyed with my answer. “Hey Zure. What are your stats?” She pulls up her Cred behind her, then puts it away “Why do you want to know?” “Reference.” “Fine. Strength 18, Defense 20, Speed 15, Stamina 9, Intelligence 8.”

She seems embarrassed by the two especially. I’m not really sure how actual logic influences the Intelligence stat, but I’m not really sure how the Int stat even matters if Stamina influences magic. I ask Zure and she says that the Int stat influences what you can learn magic-wise, and also directly influences memorization skill. Good to know.

I take a look at the armor and see nothing, and I mean NOTHING, but normal clothes. “Are these supposed to be armor? These just look like normal clothes.” “And that’s where you’re wrong. They look normal, but just look at their stats.”

I swipe up on a white T-shirt to see that it gives a defense boost of 6. The shirt costs 200 yenoms. I can do better than this. I look at a black and white button up shirt, swipe up, and find that it has a defense of +20 and costs 450 yenoms. I walk up to the counter once more and buy it.

I don’t see much besides shirts, so I assume that that’s it. We leave the store, and after a quick trip through the mall, I notice a watch store. I quickly enter, buy a digital watch for 15 yenoms, slip it on my right wrist, and exit. We evacuate the mall eventually, and I see that it’s 5:24 PM. At least Aerth uses the same time system as Earth.

“I don’t need you anymore. You can go if you want.” I got everything I needed, so I’ll be heading to the Career Center to find a job for the next day. “But I don’t want to leave yet. So…. Tell me why you were sweating earlier!” Really now. I use Chill and walk behind her again. She tries to turn around, as I seem sped up to her perception.

“No.” “You liar!” Do I care if the daughter of some rich guy calls me a liar? “So? I had never any intention of telling you the truth. And why do you need to know?” “Because you seem really strong, and I… need money.” She turns away, shyly looking at the floor. “It’s hard to earn money hunting monsters by yourself! So I wanted to join your party!”

Really. Oh. It must be because of the 7 guys earlier. Taking them all down at once was probably a mistake, and I probably attracted a lot of attention as a result. I let out a sigh.

“If you can beat me in a fight, I’ll let you join my party or whatever. I won’t use that thing, if that’s what you’re thinking. You can use any weapons and magic or anything you have to fight.”

She then lets out a smirk, and lets out a string of magic buffs upon herself, like strength, speed, and defense. I use Swift on myself in response.

She runs towards me, then vaults over me, and tries a feint from the side. But I also have cast Swift on myself, so her speed is nothing special.

I dodge, and she draws a dagger from a sheath under her skirt, saying, “You actually aren't half bad at fighting.” Of course I'm not bad. I'm not some fighting genius, but I've sparred with my brother enough to know what a feint looks like. “Just saying, I'm going to hit if you make a mistake. Monsters aren't going to hold back just because you're a girl.”

She lets loose a wild smile and moves in, and I draw the katana in response. Our blades clang resoundingly, and she pulls another dagger from her skirt. Shit. I should have known there was two daggers. I don't have time to draw my spear handle, and I’m not even sure that it would even defend against her dagger.

In cases like these, there are only two solutions: secret-tactics and psychological warfare. I seriously want to test her strength, not to mention my own, so I’ll refrain from the first for now, leaving me with psychological warfare.

I recall on the incredibly short time that we spent together, and think about any odd interactions where she became distracted or shy. I look upon the few times I told her I wasn’t interested in romance, and she got flustered; I’ll go with this tactic.

“Do you want to go out with me?” This is my last-ditch attempt, with her hand already drawing out her dagger. As if preemptively triggered, she says one word.

“Nope.”

With that, she swings the blade towards my neck and stops a hair's breadth from my jugular.

No way. No fricking way. I was so certain that would work…. didn’t she turn around when she was checking her stats? She doesn’t seem particularly tired at this moment, and she’s still grinning.

Could it be. Could. It. Be. Was she playing me from the beginning? I need to ask one question to confirm all of this.

“Are you claustrophobic?” Zure cocks her head, then replies, “Uh, yeah, unfortunately. Loser.” She sticks out her tongue at me.

“I’ve figured it out now. You’ve been playing me from the beginning. You probably could’ve effortlessly taken all seven of those guys from earlier, but you were boxed in and felt afraid, right? When you turned around and “checked” {air quotes included} your stats, you lied to me. You probably have all of your stats up to at least 30, if not higher.”

She turns and whistles, as if to say, What could you possibly mean? “I’ll take that as a yes. You faked being the police chief’s daughter and needing money, along with the blushing and joining my party act. You probably even anticipated us eventually fighting. You got me good with your acting, but now I want you to join my party, even though I can’t really trust anything you say.”

I don’t what it is with people giving me false bullshit, but I’ve been had twice now. Fucking twice. There’s a saying, Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. I don’t really believe in the saying, but it does apply, coincidentally.

“I didn’t lie to you about the info I gave to you earlier in the mall about the magic interference thing though.” Unreliable as she is, it does kind of make sense. Different magic types, interference, eh, I don’t know, seems legit.

“So will you join my party?” She’ll probably refuse and slink back to whatever evil recess she came from. “Sure.” Oh come on. “Do you really expect me to believe you? After everything that’s occurred here?” I’m still kind of in shock, to be fair, so everything is suspicious to me.

Hmm. Shock. Haven’t felt that in a while. “If I had to pick a reason for you to believe me, it’s that we had a fun day together, don’tcha think?”

She smiles brightly at me after saying this and she seems even more radiant than before. My heart begins to beat audibly and then…. No. I’m not falling for this crap.

“You mean you had fun.” Her smile widens. “Exactly! I want things to be fun all of the time!” For fucks sake. I know I said that nothing would surprise me anymore, but what I got here was a Just for Funsies!

“Never mind.” “Ppplllleeeaaaassseeeee? Please? Pretty please with a cherry on top of extra whipped cream and strawberry syrup?”

Did she really just guess my favorite ice cream combo? Well? What can I say to that? “Fine. But I’ll be seeing that ice cream soon, you hear?” “Yay!”

I swear, if I get fooled by the next person I meet, I will kill myself and try to reincarnate again.

End Of Chapter 3