"My god...how could—but, of course...the other new student they'd been greasing up…obviously…if myself…then…"
Henry continued to stand transfixed by the beauty.
And how beautiful she was. Venus in the night sky would be dimmed against the brilliant glow of her skin. Her hair, a waterfall of auburn, cascaded down into the gentle valley between her collarbone and neck, and her face, brushed with a healthy sprinkling of freckles, possessed the austere but charming Celtic loveliness of Joyce's Ireland. Yet these surface landmarks were nothing compared to that beauty emanating from the much richer world within. Oh, the divinity of her bearing! With the unapproachable elegance of Proust's Oriane de Guermantes, her eyes, pale blue like The Trick—her elegant eyes seized each sentence of the girthy book in hand and appraised them for their exact worth. With the sensuous delicacy of Yuyuan's Rushi, her fingers, slim as orchid stems and moving lighter than an afternoon breeze, caressed the page to encourage it to flip, and, oh, how willingly the page obeyed.
"My god—damn it…" Henry swore, at once conscious of his miserly state, regretting his choice to discard his bourgeoise seduction attire.
But never mind, he thought. If this Aphrodite was of the class of human he suspected her of being, then his trifling outer layer would be inconsequential to her assessment.
Making a tactical retreat behind a corner, he placed Little Liu firmly on the ground. "Earth. Little Larry, cut the act. We're pausing the university sabotage plot; we're pausing the speed-dating. All resources are to be diverted to winning the decisive battle ahead. In this fatal hour, we either succeed in our campaign of love or we die alone!"
To meet this challenge posed by the universe, he would have to discard all subsidiary cares, refocus every fibre of his body and brain to waging the war of all wars, the war of love!
(Realistically, sabotaging his university entrance had had miserable odds anyway. Due to his freak information processing abilities and his crippling addiction to getting good at things, the resume his grandmother'd sent had been too impressive.)
'Henry J. Lee, I knew it.' A self-satisfied grunt of his grandmother came through the camera speaker. 'I knew you were up to—'
Henry shut the camera off, stowed it away in his toddler daycare bag, and muted his and Little Liu's e-assistants, before sending a quick message that he'd contact the geriatrics after the tour.
"And we're pausing that, too. Little Larry, part of every man's journey is climbing from the cradle of familial dependence and striving out into the world on your own two legs. Today, we begin our march towards adulthood. That lady," he gestured for the toddler to follow him in peeking around the corner, to sneak a glimpse of the beauty on the bench with the weighty volume - still very gorgeous, "with your assistance, she's going to become your new aunt. Can this uncle rely on you?"
The nephew nodded with the conviction of a low-IQ grunt who hadn't comprehended the danger of his military assignment.
"You won't regret your loyalty." Henry gifted the kid a seaweed-flavour Turkish delight he'd been waving as a bribe.
While the toddler munched on the snack, the uncle began his work.
Henry, drawing upon no less will and concentration than in the thousands of battles he'd fought over these years, summoning the full breadth of research into love that he'd accumulated in the last few hours, closed his eyes to begin mapping out his invasion plan of the beauty's heart.
Nothing happened.
"Right," he muttered, "no Mental Library…"
He made do with jotting down the basic skeleton of a plot on his e-assistant, which was being spammed with ignored, infuriated messages.
Kamikaze Toddler Opener. Cocky Icebreaker. Even Cockier Escalation. Exploratory Q&A. Deescalate For Tour Phases. Tour I - Andante. Tour II – Marcia Moderato. Tour III – Larghetto. Tour IV – Andante Moderato. Tour V – Moderato. Tour VI – Allegro. Tour VII – Larghissimo. Lunch – Rubato. Late Afternoon Itinerary - A piacere. Dinner serenade - Allargando. Etcetera. Marriage.
Kamikaze Toddler Opener
To begin, he turned Little Liu's shirt inside, hiding the 'Sickest son in the universe!' slogan. Then, whispering the child his orders, he sent him off alone.
The toddler, like a pilot jumping in a fighter plane, jetted off, his stubby legs puttering him around the corner.
A stone-faced Henry lingered for a moment. He filled his lungs with a final preparatory breath. He exhaled to expel his many distractions.
Today, he was an ordinary teen, chasing an ordinary love.
"Little Larry!" He shouted half-heartedly, jogging after the kid. "Get back here!"
The uncle emerged in the open quickly on the nephew's heels, but the nephew, with his lighter build, was too nimble to apprehend. Dodging and twirling through grab attempts like through enemy anti-air fire, Little Liu zoomed ever onward to his target. Nearing it, he didn't slow down but, with the suicidal fanaticism of a kamikaze pilot, nose-dived at full throttle.
"Huh?"
The young woman, lost in this book's labyrinthine passages, lost in many thoughts, was abruptly freed from her reverie by a bump against her shin.
Hauling the doorstopper aside, she looked down at a toddler staring up in sunglasses and an inside-out shirt. For some reason, he was clinging to her leg.
Another figure in sunglasses appeared soon after. Reaching down for the toddler, he scratched his scalp in wonder as to what to do with the weird kid.
Cocky Icebreaker
"Sorry about that," Henry apologised. "My nephew's got a thing for incredibly beautiful women. You're the other student, right? Mind if I steal a seat?"
Peeling Little Liu off her with one arm, he sat down beside the beauty while restraining the toddler, who continued the charade by trying to break free and reach out for her. Playing it casual, Henry pretended to notice the item in her hand for the first time.
Although she was only on the 13th page, the leaves were worn from a previous perusal. A re-reading - VERY nice.
Even Cockier Escalation
"Oooh!" he remarked. "Is that Infinite Leaves? What a wonderful pick. A challenging but enlightening read, a trifecta feast for the soul, heart, and mind, an antidote to minimalism…in a word, a masterpiece. Of course, my judgement might be a tad biased. I did write the book." Flinging off his sunglasses in a suave motion, he revealed to the beauty two smugly-lifted eyebrows. "Hi, I'm 'HL', Henry Lee, the author of that tiny tome."
Yes, she'd been reading his failure of a novel.
Some people sought riches in a partner, some sought physical perfection, some a companion with whom to share the fun and sadness of life's adventures. Henry, though, had never demanded any of that. After the years of pain and struggle, all he truly wanted in love was someone who understood him and his monstrous literary talent.
A patrician girlfriend…was that so much to ask for?
The young woman was cast into silence by the revelation. Unable to regather her scrambled cognitive faculties, she blankly gawked at the squirming toddler being blocked from imitating the sunglass removal, the doorstopper in her grip, herself, and Henry grinning with lecherous intent.
Henry, employing his extraordinary powers of social deduction to infer the cause of her disbelief, laughed with humility. "Really, you can confirm with Ray - Professor Abrams, me and him go waaaaay back. I am, in fact, that HL, the bad-boy of Post-Maximalism."
Nobody had ever referred to him by this epithet.
The young woman's gaze flickered through his facial features, measuring his brow, his nose, his mouth, his general expression of pretentiousness.
Henry laughed again. "And I am this youthful. It may be shocking to have penned such a mature masterpiece at this tender age—actually two years ago, 15—but, well, I happen to have a lucky combination of mutations in neuronal glucose processing and dendritic spine formation that've made mine one of the fastest brains on the planet. They are hereditary."
The young woman blinked consciously, like someone clearing the sleep from their hazy vision.
Henry wasn't surprised that his boast would lack impact on a patrician. "No big deal. In my humble opinion, genius is an insignificant matter, an obsession of losers and pseudo-intellectuals. What's truly important in each of us are the marvels we create through our genius." He suggestively glanced at the massive novel. "What genres do you dabble in?"
Exploratory Q&A
The first salvo delivered, Henry, having been leaning uncomfortably close, retreated back 23 centimetres to allow the patrician beauty the personal space for breathing and formulating her response to his attack.
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While he'd tried to be nonchalant with his starting question, under his held breath, he proceeded to invoke a medley of gods in case the one who'd engineered this impossible meeting was eavesdropping.
Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, please not minimalism…
Allfather, Slainfather, Warfather, please not minimalism…
Contextually, being in Australia, in this department, she was most likely a minimalist. But a man could hope.
Praise be to He who is saluted by Indra and kin, please not minimalism…
The young woman, after a few breathless seconds, registered that it was her turn to speak.
What genres?
Suddenly, like a murderer doing their grocery shopping when the bagging lady, an undercover detective, abruptly rips off their disguise and demands to know where the body's hidden, she completely froze up. Her features locked into one frame; her panicking mind rejected one guilty answer after another.
As the silence, itself a confession, dragged on, Henry stared back unfalteringly, refusing to gift her an easy out.
"Me?" She finally replied, and then, in a wave of embarrassment at the sound of herself, all the expressions she'd been hiding during that awkward pause played at once, her brow scrunching from concern to indignation, her teeth clenching from a cringe to an innocent grin.
"Yes, you." Henry smiled rapturously at both his presence stealing this beauty's tongue and the loveliness of that tongue upon its retrieval. Her voice was an unexpectedly deep contralto sprinkled with a sultry Tom-Waits-esque gravel – all beautiful souls should sing so uniquely! "What genres?" He prodded again. "Or genre. One is acceptable at our age."
They seemed to be the same age, two teenage patricians, a duo of young geniuses entering their primes, a perfect match.
"I…ooh…ah…my…ah…there…"
Beside them, the minimalist professor had been observing in disgust. "What an outrageous assumption. She's not one of your heretical creed, boy, nor has she any clue who you are. That's my copy. I lent it to her so she could prepare for your landfall."
"Oh?" Henry pulled back.
Deescalate For Tour Phase
He gave the beauty a light nudge. "Opinion so far?"
His Infinite Leaves being borrowed wouldn't deter him. The young woman making it to the 13th page without any preparations or supplementary material placed her in the 99.99th percentile of readers, lesser intellects getting pleb-filtered by the book's agonising 2048-word-long opening sentence. And, from her shock and shyness, she seemed to have already partially fallen for his complex charms. Lastly, although he'd been unable to pin-point it, there was some extra, undefinable quality about the beauty that was extremely alluring - his current guess: love at first sight.
She continued to be a patrician; his romantic pursuit of her marched on.
But, for now, he would ease back on the sleaziness. Having given his cocky introduction, wedging his presence through a combination of talent-exposure and obnoxiousness into the beauty's conscious, he would let her consider the first mixed—mostly bad—impression. Then, through him fleshing out the rest of himself over the course of this tour, his stature would be raised from the pit dug at the start and be made, by the contrast of its lowly beginnings, to seem to stand all the more taller.
This was the archetypal ill-mannered leading man redemption arc. When speed-running love, one must rely on such risky gambits. (Actually, he hadn't gathered enough data to determine if this assumption was accurate).
"It's…diffi…cult..." the young woman mumbled in reply.
Henry beamed at the compliment. "Thanks!"
The professor grimaced at the pretentious teen, before turning a much fonder gaze upon the young woman. "There you go, Candace. You've had the supreme displeasure of meeting 'HL', the maniac responsible for that abomination and no doubt many others to come. He'll be tagging along with us today at the behest of the higher-ups. Don't blame me."
The young woman, with the enthusiasm of someone dodging a chatty co-worker encountered on the way to the bathroom, offered Henry a polite but curt wave without eye contact. "Hi."
"And, Henry boy, this is Candace, she," the professor threw a wordless question to the young woman, who, panicking, shook her head in a vigorous refusal, "is a promising fledgeling. Full marks on her entrance essay. We're all antici—"
"Hey!" Henry interrupted indignantly. "You didn't offer me an option of anonymity. You gave her my baby without my permission."
The professor groaned. "Son, you have nothing to hide. What do you imagine happening? Are you afraid of being swarmed by paparazzi?"
"Well, not yet, but very soon." Henry winked, half at the professor, half at his tragic destiny, and snapped to the patrician beauty with this baited information. "So, Candace, you're pretty famous?"
As if a gun had fired beside her eardrum, the young woman bolted in her seat, her hands flung up innocently to the sky.
Seconds later, there was a hefty thunk and crack as the doorstopper landed several metres away. Due to the tome's massiveness, the momentum gathered from its flight caused an edge of its hardcover casing to snap.
Busted!
Henry suppressed his revulsion at the desecration of his intellectual baby with the satisfaction of guessing correctly. Although he didn't recognise the patrician beauty, that could be explained by him being oblivious to almost everything in the world outside of his niche interests.
He noticed the beauty curling up in embarrassment - an unintended reaction. "Whoa, forget about it. That thing was wasting space on Ray's shelf. So what are your dominant fields? Television? Modelling? Acting? Music? Spor—"
"For god's sake, you hound!" yelled the professor. "She clearly doesn't want to tell you! Let her have her privacy! Candace, you don't have to answer him! In fact, pretend he's not here."
The young woman, struck by another bout of emotional pain at being called out so explicitly, curled deeper into her ball of mortification.
"Relax," Henry replied to them both, mildly offended by the insinuation. "I, more than anyone, respect the right to invisibility. I'm just inquiring whether we have any high-level pursuits in common over which we could form a platonic bond during this tour. It's Friendship 101, Ray. Standard manners."
The friendship part was false, but he genuinely didn't care about exposing the patrician beauty if she were famous – he was currently patting a 2-year-old international celebrity whose crap-filled diaper he'd changed minutes earlier. Instead, if this patrician beauty had achievements in other areas, her beauty would be elevated that much higher - more climbs, more patrician, more beauty. Additionally, he might be able to woo her by flaunting his other, non-literary achievements, his Infinite Leaves of avant-avant-garde music, his Infinite Leaves of video gam—no, no Saana.
Speaking of the toddler celebrity, Little Liu, having first resonated with the prospective auntie's speech difficulties and now been impressed by the display of physical strength in catapulting the book, tugged at his uncle's shirt for a formal introduction.
"What? Oh." Henry lifted the kid, presenting him like a fish posed by an angler. "This is my non-blood-related nephew, Little Larry. Why doesn't he talk? Still working on the climb of verbal communication. The sunglasses? Heliophobia."
Resorting to the tried-and-true in this uncertain battlefield of love, he disguised Little Liu's celebrity using the same excuse he'd concocted last night for his archnemesis Silver Wolf. He clarified the blood-non-relation so that this patrician beauty wouldn't later mistake him sharing in Alex's defective genes.
The young woman, making a face at the lousy heliophobia cover story, exchanged quiet nods with the toddler. Then, with a sigh, she gave the professor a look begging for release from her suffering. "Was there a tour?"
"Ah, the tour...I guess we shouldn't delay." The professor frowned in confusion at her deepened voice,
Surabaya, Indonesia, a street stall selling Indo-Chinese cuisine.
Before a batch of frying vegetable fritters, a young teen stood in a meditative pose.
Eyes shut, he'd been transported to a faraway land. Here, with the firm dignity of a knight, he was planted on a bridge, confronting the charge of the enemy troops wishing to pass him. His fingers clutched the hilt of his dual weapons - tongs in one hand, fly-swatter in the other. On the winds carrying over the crackling of batter in oil—the lava bubbling beneath the bridge whose protection had been assigned to him—and the stirrings of a music player—a distant battle—he listened to his enemies' movements, drawing dangerously near.
BzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZ.
His swatter flashed out at deadly speed.
Whi-chuh!
A bug, smited by the blow, fell from the air.
He opened his eyes and surveyed the corpses of his foes spread around him.
Hadi, aka Justinian The Great, taunted the dead with satisfaction. "So long as my lungs have air and my blood has warmth, thou will not taint the good folk's nourish—"
"Hey, Hadi! How's that console your auntie bought? You having fun with it? Making any friends?"
Sitting in a chair beside him was a doughy middle-aged woman, her feet tapping along with a '20s mum-pop tune blasting from her music player.
BzzzZZ…BzzzZZ…
Whi-chuh! Whi-chuh!
Hadi smote two more bugs. "Fun? Friends? What mean these words? A knight knows only his honour and his duties to the good folk and God, and his sole enjoyment is in the toil of their fulfilment."
His mother, the chorus dropping heavy, flailed her limbs around in an embarrassing sequence of dance moves. "As long as you're having fun. Are you still stuck in that desert place…Su…Suzy?"
"Suchi, mum. It's not a desert; it's a savannah."
But, yes, he was still stuck, still trapped in a futile cycle of training for and failing to win The Company's 1v1 and 6v6 tournaments.
But there might be a way out now.
Since last evening, Hadi had been weighing the words of Cathy's friend, who'd astoundingly been revealed to be a member of Flaming Sun. His consideration wasn't for Henry's ardent defence of Him. To be honest, the systematic education medication whatever, Hadi had zero idea what any of that meant. He was only 15! Rather, Hadi had been mulling over Henry's earlier recommendations to abandon Justinian's, the persona's, doomed crusade in The Slums and use his physical skills to get recruited into Saana League. This offer had been given extra credence by Henry's guild membership. Since Flaming Sun managed the league, Henry might have the connections to sneak Hadi past his existing hurdles.
It was possible.
Alas, the more Hadi had pondered the matter, the tinier that possibility seemed. For whatever good intentions Cathy's friend might have, he could not understand the size of the barricade blocking Hadi's path, nor, if he were aware of it, could he ever possess the might to remove it.
Hadi played a moron, but he wasn't himself one. If his choice were simply between his love of roleplaying and a Saana League contract, he would pick the latter in half a heartbeat. Him, a pro-player, that'd be sick! The problem, however, was much larger than this, well beyond the scope of Cathy's friend's ability to imagine.
"What about that shadow man boss?" His mother asked. "Did you beat that level yet?"
Hadi shook his head gravely. "As at the close of each day, the light must always lose to the shadow, so eternally does my crusade against His dark influence persist."
"Hmm…he must be a tough boss."
"The toughest." Hadi fished out the frying dumplings to begin the next batch.
Indeed, he was contending with the toughest of them all.
'Are you asking me to rise?'
A third voice intruded into their conversation from his e-assistant. On the device had been playing a clip from a recent, sensational interview that Hadi'd watched many, many times.
When he glimpsed at his wrist, he locked stares directly with Him, lounging back on His unrighteous throne, His arrogant face smeared with the blood of the slain interviewer, His gauntleted hands imperiously wielding his golden zweihander, Worlddevourer.
Cathy's friend had promised Hadi a position in Saana League…but Henry couldn't possibly fathom that Hadi's path was obstructed by a figure far above Henry…the owner of Flaming Sun…the owner of Saana league…
Him!
Crusadingintheshadows!
The Tyrant of Saana!
Alex Wong.
Hadi tensed up at the mere mention of his archnemesis in his internal monologue.
See, the enmity between him and Him was nothing small. If it could be so easily resolved by someone at Cathy's friend's level, would Hadi have endured these six arduous months battling with Him, failing, again and again, to beat His 6v6 and 1v1 tournament?
BzzzZZZ…BzzzZZZ…BzzZZZ…bzzzzzZZ…bzzzzZZZ…
Whi-chuh! Whi-chuh-chuh! Whi-chuh! Whi-chuh!
His sword-arm lashed out in four lightning-fast strokes, reaping the lives of five foes. Their bug bodies clattered on the ground around him, dead. He, however, could derive no happiness from this minor victory, for in his palm was the memory of a much finer weapon than this fly-swatter, a weapon pried unjustly from his clasp.
Hadi glanced for a final time at his e-assistant, at the footage of Him paused on the last frame before the cameraman committed suicide, at His greedy, shadowy fingers, at his sword held hostage in between them.