Talia shook her head. “Good for all of us. With so many high-level adventurers killing silkworm spiders, the wild dungeons are getting dangerous. Without Jeremby and the others, the northern road would have been just as dangerous in a month.”
Two men in plainclothes came through a side door carrying a large chest between them. One of them was also holding my new war pitchfork. They came to the table and opened the crate. One by one, items were placed in front of me.
Talia cast a simple spell and item descriptions appeared before me. Without the spell, the enchanted items’ information would have been inaccessible to me.
“Holy shit, those overalls and hat have an insane number of effects.”
“I did tell you that,” Talia said.
I didn’t reply. I was too busy looking at my new items. They were the first enchanted items I’d ever received other than the ring of communication. They weren’t as cool as a flaming sword, but the boosts were altogether out of the norm. It blew my mind that wearing these would cause such an effect. It would be like wearing an exoskeleton that looked like regular clothing.
The farmer items were all class locked, which was important because it made them twice as effective as they otherwise would have been. It had also tripled their cost, but I didn’t care about that. The cloak wasn’t class locked, but it was also the most expensive item—it cost the same as all the other items combined.
The only items that pained me to buy were the potions. At two crowns each, they each cost me nearly as much as my first six months living in Blackwood did and they were for a one-time use. I could accept handing over the exorbitant amounts for the other items since they would work day in and out for years, but the potions hurt.
Not as much as being eaten by a giant, though.
The rings and amulets went on and I kicked off my expensive boots to swap them for the pair on the table. I pulled the overalls on over my suit and threw on the hat and cloak for the hell of it.
Talia cleared her throat, holding out a pair of what looked like snowboarding goggles. “I know I explained this to you last time, but I can’t emphasise the danger enough. Falling over at a full sprint while using those items and abilities can kill you.”
I nodded as I finished pulling on the boots and took the goggles from her. I went for a run around the room at a normal natural pace to try everything out. I immediately felt the difference. Running felt as effortless as walking.
Talia smiled as I came back to my seat. “I can see our products please you?”
“Completely,” I said, grinning as I sat back down.
Her eyes went wide with shock, and it took me a second to realise she was looking over my shoulder. I turned to see who she was staring at and saw Fredrick, the chamberlain, walking towards me, his clothing announcing his station.
His eyes widened as he spotted me and he momentarily lost his professionalism. “What are you wearing?
“Don’t question my fashion sense and I won’t question yours.”
Fredrick gave himself a shake. “My apologies, sir, but the regent would like to have a word.”
Chapter Thirty-One
A PAINFUL MISTAKE
The carriage waiting outside took me to the arena where the gladiators had been fighting. We stopped around the back, and Fredrick led me down a set of stairs into an underbelly of twisting stone hallways and rooms lit with glowing crystal lamps before we arrived at a tunnel. We followed the tunnel to a dead end, where an archway covered in arcane runes and sigils was embedded in the wall.
The air was cold. There was no sound from the street above. This was the kind of place you took someone if you intended to kill or intimidate. Being whisked away to meet the regent during what was meant to be my free time had me in a foul mood. I wasn’t interested in playing games. And just because I didn’t stand a chance in a fight, that didn’t mean I was intimidated.
“I don’t see the regent, Fredrick,” I said tightening my grip on the war pitchfork.
The guards tensed.
The servant nodded, eyeing the weapon. “The regent is inside the arena. You must place your hand upon the archway to reach her.”
I shrugged and did as he said, placing my hand against smooth cold stone.
A prompt appeared.
Would you like to enter the arena?
Yes/No?
I cleared my throat, waiting for an explanation.
Fredrick immediately responded. “Accepting the prompt will allow the arena to create an avatar body for you so that you may enter. Your actual body will remain here under guard while you are inside. To leave, all you need to do is return to the tunnel you entered through and place your hand against the archway.”
I accepted the prompt.
The dead-end tunnel vanished as I was thrown forward. The sensation was so disorientating I staggered several steps before catching myself. I look around, still clutching my war pitchfork, and then walked back and pressed my hand against the archway behind me. I found myself back in the tunnel.
Fredrick frowned when I moved.
“Just checking you were honest,” I said, and then accepted the prompt a second time.
I appeared where I was a moment ago.
It was a short tunnel with an opening down the far end that had a set of stairs which clearly led to the arena. Weapon and armour racks lined the walls, displaying dozens of variations. I glanced down at myself, looking for abnormalities, checking myself over, but everything seemed the same.
I was even wearing the farmer overalls and hat.
An excited smile managed to chase away my foul mood.
I knew you couldn’t die in the arena, but I hadn’t known it was because the whole building was a virtual reality interactive system. It made sense, though. This world had some truly impressive components to it, but quick healing like the kind I had seen in the arena wasn’t one of them. Constitution increased your recovery rate, but it had to get past 100 before that kicked in.
The tunnel floor was littered with illusion sand. It was the same stuff used to create the model in Jeric’s vault. Up in the stands, I hadn’t been able to see the difference from regular sand, but down here, I could. It had the same too-fine nature.
A roar shook the tunnel, vibrating through me, quickening my pulse.
My gaze snapped forward. I grabbed my war pitchfork with both hands, raising it into a ready position. I cautiously made my way down the tunnel towards the source of the sound and threat. Logically, where I was should have been a safe zone, but I’d been caught out by assumptions too many times to treat it as such.
I turned the corner and blinked. There was no gate over the end of the tunnel at the top of the stairs. The absence didn’t mean whatever made the roar could enter, but it was unsettling.
I swallowed, nervous thoughts running through my head. People love to rubbish character decisions in horror movies. They always think they would know better, be smarter. The truth is, most of the time, the characters don’t know they are in a horror movie until it’s too late. The same applies to reality. There is almost never a big sign announcing you’re about to meet a monster. Except, in this instance there was. That roar was clearly from something dangerous. But even if it was, I was most likely safe while inside the tunnel. Most likely.
I edged forward and stopped at the top of the staircase. I had a clear view of the centre of the arena—and the monsters there. Half a dozen of them approached the regent, showing teeth. They looked like a cross between a lizard and a wolf, with the wolf's dimensions but the features of the lizard.
I tried to focus on one to analyse it, but nothing happened. I frowned. Maybe it wasn’t working because I wasn’t technically here? The body I was using wasn’t real. That made sense.
The beasts moved as a pack, surrounding the regent to harass her from multiple directions.
The regent let them.
She wore an elaborate set of silver plate armour with an open-face helmet. Her weapon was an oversized, tw
o-handed warhammer which she wielded with the speed of a katana, twirling it around her body like a baton. She downright ignored the monsters at her back as she went on the offensive, charging the nearest target, closing the distance in an instant to deal a killing blow to the creature’s neck, using the spiked end, before it could do anything to get away. Her weapons and armour were as beautiful as they were functional, moving with her body like silk, as she ended the creature’s life.
The gladiators I'd watched only a few hours earlier were fast. She was faster.
The other monsters used what they thought was an opening to leap at her, only for her to turn and bring her hammer around in an arch that took the head off one and knocked aside the next. The battle, if you could call it that, only lasted another three seconds before the last of the six lizard wolves was dead.
Watching her fight reminded me of those Chinese martial arts movies, the ones not made for western theatres, where the movements weren’t slowed down, and there could be as many as three or four strikes a second. Only she was swinging an oversized two-handed warhammer that quickly.
She turned to me, put her warhammer down, and removed her helmet, giving off an aura of extreme relaxation. Her beauty and physical strength made her seem like a warrior goddess, a female Ares.
She frowned, tucking her helmet under her arm. “You look ridiculous.” Her strong voice easily travelled across the distance.
“Blame Fredrick,” I shouted. “He didn’t give me time to change.”
“I suppose it doesn’t matter. You may approach, Landlord Arnold, but I suggest you bring a weapon, something better than that war pitchfork. The next round will arrive shortly.”
I stepped up to the edge of the tunnel and took in the carnage. Dozens of monster corpses littered the arena. She’d been at this a while, though she showed no sign of exhaustion or injury. Above the arena floor, the stands lay empty. There were no eyes to cast judgement.
I had few options to choose from other than walking away, and I didn’t want to do that just yet. I needed to get a feel for the regent. She wanted the experience she could tax from the method I created, and she wasn’t going to stop coming after Jeric and I until we gave it to her or we did something drastic. I needed to understand who I was dealing with if I was going to come up with a way out of this predicament in less than six months. Our previous meeting wasn’t enough.
“If it’s all the same to you, I would rather stay here out of your way.”
She smiled.
It was a cold expression.
“I would be more than happy for you to stay out of my way, Landlord Arnold, but you keep putting yourself in the way of my plans, so why would you stop now?”
When we had stopped in front of the arena, I’d suspected she would do something like this but had hoped she wouldn’t.
“I see no benefit for me joining you here,” I said, honestly. Though I was curious about trying out the arena, where I could fight monsters without dying.
She chuckled mirthlessly. “Are you saying that you only work out of self-interest?”
“Yes, and without any intent to harm though that may have happened.” It was the most diplomatic response I could give, even though it sounded awkward.
“Are you saying you would stand with me if it was in your own interest?”
That was a loaded question, the kind that had caught Jeric out. She had something planned and I wasn’t going to like it. I was pretty sure she had just backed me into a corner of her choosing with only four sentences. And I only had one answer. “Certainly.”
“With that sort of attitude, you could never be a good noble.”
That wasn’t the answer I expected which made me curious. “Why?”
“Nobles are required to put our people first, help them grow, and protect them from harm. We work not for ourselves but for the good of those under us. It is our purpose. And you made Nobleman Jeric lose sight of that.”
“How?”
“By helping him put his daughter’s happiness above the safety of those in his care. After learning about the giant, he manipulated Blackwood’s land price, knowingly putting the people he was supposed to protect in harm’s way. As his regent, the burden of punishing him falls upon me.”
I raised an eyebrow, already over her little game. “Speak plainly. I’m a little dense.”
She paused, assessing me for several seconds. “Fine. For his actions, Nobleman Jeric is going to lose his position as village mayor. That is not up for debate. However, it is within my power to hand that position over to his wife as easily as any other noble.”
I crossed my arms and sighed. “And for that to happen, all I have to do is stand with you while you fight monsters.”
“Well, yes…. but if keeping Jeric and his family in Blackwood is not within your interests, then you can simply refuse.” She began to smile. It was the smile a cat might make while playing with a mouse. “I’ll be honest with you. I’m not sure what you will do. And I’ve made extensive enquiries into you.”
That wasn’t good. I was meant to be keeping a low profile for Salem’s sake. “Find anything interesting?”
“Not as much as I would have liked to. You are mostly an enigma I am trying to understand. You are incarnate, but I don’t know which temple brought you here, or how long ago that was, or who you were before you arrived. From what I gather, you are a farmer without support. Yet somehow, you managed to reach your first threshold. That is almost unheard of, except a guard captain in Weldon seems to believe you are a skilled exploitationist. This is something I would usually reject, as they are rare, except you manipulated Blackwood with Nobleman Jeric to gain a truly amazing amount of noble experience. That by itself would almost be enough for me to believe it, but somehow you also gained a fortune in farmer experience, auctioning it off in Weldon, where you managed to assist a farming scholar in passing through his third threshold, which is no small feat.”
I listened, thinking the whole time. Nobles gained a point in every attribute when they leveled with four to use at their discretion. From what I was told, the regent was level 65, which put all her attributes at a minimum of 75 without blessings, titles, or marks. In almost all ways, she was stronger and smarter than me, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t beat her. It just meant I couldn’t beat her conventionally.
I sighed, letting her think she was getting to me. “Is Jeric’s removal truly not up for debate?”
“No,” she said, using a tone that left no room for misinterpretation. “Even if the giant doesn’t bring any harm to Blackwood, he still put his people in danger. A noble’s job is to protect them.”
“So it is okay to send warriors off to die for your experience, but Jeric endangering his people for his is punishment-worthy. You sound like a hypocrite.”
If the regent's gaze had been cold before, it was ice now. Her voice came clipped and fast, with barely controlled anger. “You believe you have the right to judge me? You…a man that has never stood on a battlefield before a horde of warrior orcs. A man who has never walked through a slaughtered village where pieces of dead children left over from orc meals are pecked at by crows. I have stood before destruction. I have fought it. I have bled from it. And yes, I have waged war on it because a life lost today will save three tomorrow. I do not deny that my warriors have paid the price for my people’s success. But not once have I ever spent life for personal gain. Their sacrifice has grown this city from the level five I inherited to the level nine it is now. We produce better weapons and armour than any other city in the kingdom and in larger quantity. Because of my level, this city prospers. And that has saved ten lives for each one that perished. So don’t you ever compare what that man did with my actions.”
If I had intended to test her anger, I would have succeeded, but I hadn’t. It didn’t stop me from pushing her further now that she was angry.
I chose my words carefully, hoping anger would cause her tongue to slip. “I didn’t compare you to Jeric and I woul
dn’t. Your actions led to certain death; ours only risks it.”
She didn’t explode like I expected. She remained silent, watching. Several seconds passed and nothing happened. She finally smiled.
You didn’t go from being that angry to this calm unless the anger had been an act.
Damn it.
She was playing with me like a damn mouse, letting me think I had the upper hand only to then show me I didn’t.
Her smile grew as I made the connection. “Are you joining me or not?”
I gripped my war pitchfork and stepped out of the tunnel, making my way to her. The regent put her helmet back on and picked up her warhammer.
She stood relaxed but at the ready as she looked me up and down. “You should select some armour.”
“I don’t know how to fight in armour.”
“So you think it wiser to come out defenceless?”
“I think it wiser to run faster.”
She shook her head. I wasn’t sure if it was in disgust, an act, or in complete disagreement with my reasoning. I wasn’t as ignorant as some men when it came to understanding woman. They're not some alien species that speaks an entirely foreign language, but still, the regent was just as much an enigma to me as I was to her.
She’d thrown a party for someone she was trying to steal from, sent a man and others on a suicide mission simply because his wife got in her way. She’d been perfectly willing to take advantage of me in my charmed state. I didn’t know what to make of her. I was a gamer. I didn’t associate with people like her.
She began twirling the warhammer around her hand, playing with it like a toy. “Do you know what happens the morning after a noble turns 18 years old and loses their class?”
I shook my head.
“They are taken from their home to undergo a test of their character. They are brought here to fight monsters under the gaze of their potential teachers. They fight until they are torn apart and bloody, until they experience unrivalled agony. Some fall against their first monster. Others make it through dozens before they are defeated. The pain they go through lasts only a few minutes but feels much longer. Once they’re back together and whole, they are given an option. Give up or fight again.”
Oh Great! I was Reincarnated as a Farmer Page 36
