“...Everything appears to be in order,” Patty says with the same gravity as someone reporting on the death of a beloved family pet. She only lacks the mournful shake of the head, the wiping at the eyes, or any other shows of humanity. “The floor eighteen all-skirmish will be at a quarter past thirteen. It is recommended to be in the preparation hall—right through that door—at least a quarter of an hour before the allotted time. Your party wins if any of you are the last standing, at which point you move on to the quarter-finals, then the semi-finals, and ultimately the spiralling finals.”

“So, if I understand this correctly,” I say measuredly, only half wanting to see her get her panties in a twist again, “as long as at least one member of the party is left standing in the all-skirmish, that’s the party that wins?”

The frustrated hesitation on her face is a wonderful sight to see. “...Yes. That would technically work. However, as this is a measure of your teamwork and ability to cooperate, it would paint your aptitude in a bad light and would therefore not be a recommended strategy.”

“Besides,” Moleman suddenly says, “isn’t it better to use it as a moment to make some friends?”

I make a face at him and turn back to Patty. “So, what’s the grand prize at the end?” I flash a toothy smile at her. “If it’s points, I’ll maul ‘ya.”

Ah, unfortunately, she shows no reaction. “I am certain that your companion will be more than willing to inform you.” I didn’t know you could say ‘companion’ like it’s a four-letter word, but by golly did she do it. “Now, if you’ll stop clogging up the line, I have other challengers to attend to.”

Before I have time to argue and ask for her manager, Moleman grabs me by the arm. “Bye, Patty! I’ll see you on floor seventy, yeah?”

She shoots him a cold glare but a warm smile. “If your companion lets you go that far, then sure. I’ll be happy to answer your questions again, SuperMoleman.”

And then we’re too far away for me to stick out my tongue at her, so what’s the point anymore? “Hey, Moleman, where are we—” Oh. We’re by the wall. Which is apparently covered in timetables, various lists of rules—official and non-official, graffiti left by anyone and everyone, posters for anything and everything, and the big centerpiece of it all: a huge poster showing a tournament outlay that really looks more like a death spiral. I’m not entirely surprised to find that the ‘all-skirmish’ is indeed just a battle royale, but the rest of the outlay unnerves me. It’s separated into floors, and the two first battles after the all-skirmish are totally normal, but then it literally becomes like a death spiral of some sort, with the winner of the first-vs-second against third-vs-fourth floor facing off against the winner of the fifth-vs-sixth and seventh-vs-eighth battles, and then either continuing up against higher and higher floors or being beaten and letting the new finalist move further. It looks absolutely insane.

“What the heck…” I mumble, which Moleman’s super-hearing apparently catches.

“It’s not as complicated as it looks,” he says, like a secret genius or something. “I asked the Goddess of Compassion about it, and it’s because of the simple fact that you can’t exactly do a normal semi-hemi-demi finals thing here. People get stronger pretty naturally as the floors go on, so if it had had a more standard tournament shape, the strongest player in the upper half of the floors would have had to spend the finals stomping the strongest player of the lower half of the floors. It wouldn’t have been fair, so now they’re doing this instead, where it’s more like moving through a gauntlet. It has the same structure for the solo matches in two days.”

I cross my arms. Yeah, no, I can’t really understand it. All I know is that I’ve gotta defeat them all, and then I’ll get to reap the sweet, sweet rewards of my bloodshed: more bloodshed.

Taking a step closer, pushing past one of the other dozens milling about in the room, Moleman points a finger at one of the timetables. “The time right now is… eleven-something, so we can already see who the winning groups are for floors one through thirteen. Once all the skirmishes have finished, the group-on-group battles will begin.”

“You still haven’t told me what the reward is for beating all of this,” I say, almost dismissively.

He jumps a little, almost as if he forgot he was talking with me at all. “Did I? Sorry, I wasn’t… Well, it’s not exactly complicated.” I perk an eyebrow at him. He simply shrugs. “It’s a wish.”

“...Another damn wish?”

“Well, yes, but…” His smile turns enigmatic. “It’s a wish from the master of the tutorial.”

I frown to myself. A wish again, huh…

Honestly, I’m not too interested. However, the concept of crushing those who dare oppose me en masse and in person is very attractive to me, far more than any monkey’s paw finger snap. Considering that my current level is probably barely half of whatever Moleman has, winning isn’t on my mind in the least. It feels like a lifetime ago, but back during my pro-gamer days, I mainly played for the PvP. Plot, actual gameplay, game design… All of that was secondary to being able to construct a powerful avatar to use as a battering ram against the collective player base. No boss, no matter how artificially buffed it is, can possibly compare to the sweet joy of beating someone with nothing but pure skills.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

As I watch Moleman checking through the list of winning teams, I feel a competitive grin materialize on my lips. I take a step towards him. “Hey, Moleman, how about when I beat you fair-and-square, you have to treat me to dinner?”

Not looking away from the timetables, Moleman gives a chuckle. “Don’t you think I’ll treat you anyways?”

“Well, yeah, but I mean, like, a big dinner, a real nice one.” I close my eyes for a second to imagine it properly. “Four courses, caviar, fantasy-world-lobster-equivalent… Non-French champagne, gold leaf asparagus, beef Wellington but with whole minced truffles instead of meat, enriched mineral water taken straight from Mars… You know. The whole nine yards, and then a few inches more, just because.”

He throws a sly, playful glance at me. “I think you might be overestimating the kind of points I rake in.”

I hum loudly to show my lack of interest in his obvious excuses. “How about we have it once we both beat the tutorial, then?”

“I’ll have to ask my parents, but I’m sure they won’t mind.”

I grin, for many reasons, not just because I conned myself into a six-star dinner. “Great! Glad we’ve agreed on tha—”

“John!” someone somewhere shouts and I’m tackled to the floor, a pair of slim arms clutched around my torso. I reflexively slice at their neck but my claws bounce off because of the pink chainmail beneath their shirt, a few sparks leaping into the air and dissipating, leaving me to stare at their face. Her face. She blinks back at me. “Aw, shucks. You’re not John, are you?”

Wild RED hair peeking out from beneath a flat-topped cowboy hat. Freckles. Smiling, even though I just tried to kill her because she literally tackled me to the floor. But between the thick, curling locks of ginger, a pair of crystal-clear blue eyes shine. Submerged diamonds. Playful. Dangerous.

Pushing her off me I leap back, reflexively snapping into a ball to gain distance and distraction before falling into a crouch, fingers flexed and ready. My eyes quickly start moving about her shape, looking for an opening, instead finding what can only be described as the epitome of cowboy gear. Cowgirl? Ignoring the hat I want to ridicule but can’t because it really does look kind of sick, she’s wearing a leather vest, leather riding trousers, leather boots… Good leather. It would take more than a few hits to get through that, not to mention that she’s apparently wearing a chainmail shirt beneath the white blouse I just ripped at the throat. To be honest, I don’t know if it’s a shirt or a blouse. Is it a blouse because it’s a woman wearing it, or is it a shirt because everything else is so typically masculine? I don’t know.

But the thing that grabs my attention the most isn’t any of that, but rather something I hadn’t even thought about before. I didn’t notice it at all, but unlike almost every other challenger in the room, she wears a lot of satchels and pouches and things. Everything she owns is on full display, close at hand. Is she showing off, or does she not trust the inventory?

Either way, thanks to this, I can tell what kind of fighter she is. Namely: an archer. She wears her bow right on her back, together with her quilt of arrows. Not to mention the dagger and shortsword hanging at her hip.

She looks fully decked out to go to war, but her face undermines that impression.

Big, innocent smile; eyes you can see right through all the way into her blindingly honest soul. “Man, I messed up, huh?” I don’t answer that one, because I don’t think it was aimed at me. I’m still thinking, though. See, she smells weirdly. There’s all the leather, sure, but then there’s something else, below that. Like eggs and ash. I can’t really explain it, but it isn’t a wholly bad smell or anything. Just… weird. Out of place. “Are you okay? You didn’t get hurt, did you?”

I need to assess whether she’s an enemy or not. But the more I look at her, the less I think she is. With the dagger and shortsword and the bow, if she’d wanted to kill me, she would’ve stabbed me in the back earlier. She certainly could sneak up on me unseen, so slipping a knife between two of my ribs would’ve been easier than pushing me into a brawl.

For a few seconds more, I watch her where she stands, smiling sheepishly but widely. I can’t tell how or why, but she doesn’t smile like you do when you feign compassion, or when you pretend to be happy. Frankly, her smile is ugly. It’s lopsided and oddly crooked but she still smiles it, doing so for no one but herself.

Somehow, she feels measured. Whatever it is she’s doing, whatever it is she is, it isn’t random or thoughtless. Even as we face each other in a silent deadlock, I can tell that she’s ready. Her stance is relaxed, but my instincts tell me that if I attacked her, she’d have an arrow lodged in my chest before I so much as crossed half of the distance between us.

I don’t think of her as an enemy, but simply because of the way she holds herself, I cannot let my guard down.

…No, more than that, as strange as it feels to admit… I don’t want to let my guard down. She’s at ease now, but if I provoked her a little, I could get the match of my life. I don’t know her level. That means it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to know my chances. I just want to—

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Moleman says, quickly stepping between us, his back to me, facing the girl. “I’m sorry, but could you explain yourself? If you have nothing to say for yourself, I won’t hesitate to contact the Server Alliance.” Where I sit hunched on the ground, I can perfectly see the blank expression on her face. And not in a ‘who’s-this-mob-character’ kind of way, more so pure non-understanding. Like she’s watching a dog trying to explain itself through barks and growls alone. “Well?”

She shoots a glance at me. I can instantly tell exactly what she’s thinking, but I don’t care about that. Instead, sighing, I straighten out and tap Moleman on the shoulder. He’s hesitant to turn to me, but once I tap him a few more times, he finally relents, his quizzical eyes as perusable as hers. I simply ask him, “You can’t understand what she’s saying?”

His brows furl a crease along his forehead. “Well, I…” He turns around again to look at her. “To be honest, I have no idea. I think she’s speaking English, but the accent is so thick I can’t make out a single word…”

“Personally,” the girl says, butting in, somehow answering the both of us at once, “it’s more that everyone else talks very strangely. Except for you! You talk my own language, so to speak.” And then, as a cherry on top, she gives an innocent little smile. “But, in your case, I guess it’s more so that everyone understands you in their own language, right?” Her smile falls a little and all of a sudden, before I have time to digest what she’s actually saying, she gives a curt bow. “I’m sorry for tackling you, I overheard you talking and since I could actually understand you, I thought you were from my town. Will you explain to your friend that this was all just a misunderstanding?”

I cross my arms. “Can you not understand what anyone in here says?”

“None,” she admits.

“You never learned a second or third language in school?”

“I didn’t have time for school, I was too busy training my sharpshooting,” she says as if that’s actually a real excuse for anything. Still, an accent so thick it’s basically its own language… I’d be more skeptical if I wasn’t from Skåne. While I think the whole thing over, she takes a step forward, removing the hat from her head and placing it to her chest as she does. And although he can’t understand a word she says, her intention shines so clearly in her eyes that Moleman simply steps aside, letting her approach me.

She holds out a hand to me. “It’s a pleasure making your acquaintance, mister.”

I look down at the hand, up at her face, down at the hat in her other hand, and then finally at the hand itself. Despite the tremble in my hand, I grip hers. “...Likewise,” I mumble.

But all she does is smile.