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Chapter 20: Story Time

There was a marketplace off the road, between the outskirts and the town center. Stalls, carts, and tents encircled a fat tree and enjoyed the shade of its rich crown. Craft leaned left and right as he looked into each of them, finding vegetables, tools, trinkets, or a mix of those — but he found it strange that most of them didn’t have any shopkeepers, and none of them stocked pans.

He stopped beside a vegetable cart. Over a box of carrots, there was a sign that read: “PAY WHATEVER.”

“What’s up with the business model?” he said. He looked to Lei-rei ahead of him.

She turned around and saw him with the sign. “It’s just a Hobby after all. They don’t need the money.”

He caught up with her. “But how do they keep it running?”

She stared at him for a second. “Meaning?”

He shrugged. “You know. Business expenses.”

“It’s not as if the farmers and makers sell for profit, either.”

“Weird economy…” or was he the weird one here?

“It’s not so strange. Goodwill comes first. Money is just the tiebreaker.”

“Fair.”

They continued on with him trailing some paces behind her. He wanted to be closer to her. He still owed her over the whole duelling incident, sure, but there was also the rarity in how similar they were to the point that it didn’t take many words to express something between them. In this time when he still found it hard to trust anyone, it was a treasure — one he knew he wouldn’t find again for a long time.

For the first time in two lives, he wanted to be the one to reach out. It was a wonderful and scary feeling.

After going past a few stalls, Lei-rei veered towards a particular tent. Craft slowed down after remembering something. “Hey, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I happen to be broke.”

She glanced at him as she parted the flaps. “That won’t be a problem.”

She vanished inside. He took her word for it and followed suit.

His eyes hadn’t had time to adjust from the bright outdoors when a pair of green eyes shone and a mechanical voice greeted them. “Welcome, customers.”

The shine of the green eyes illuminated a centaur-like war machine, and Craft froze in his tracks. It had spoken through a crackling old speaker hole from the jaw of a tin can head; its entirety was a frankenstein of medieval coat-of-arms and smooth alien parts. It towered over everything in the shop even as it sat in the corner, its legs splayed out alongside it and its arms crossed. Swords and unexploded rockets were pinned all over its body.

This thing shouldn’t be here.

His eyes had fully adjusted to the weak light of the oil lamps hanging from the tent’s frame, and a second look around the shop proved he hadn’t walked into a slaughterhouse. Hanging from wire mesh walls were pots and pans, knives and cutlery, and gas stoves, ovens, and flamethrowers of all kinds, each item labeled with a price.

Save for the flamethrowers, it was definitely a cookware store. Judging by how the bot wasn’t attacking him, maybe he was just too cooked from all those wonderful encounters with jungle terminators.

He closed his eyes, sighing out the urge to kill.

“What’s wrong?” Lei-rei asked. Craft looked at her and found her staring at him. No doubt, she had noticed his reaction.

He thought to give away a little bit of his story. She seemed more willing to listen now, and he wanted to show some appreciation for that. It might even help them grow closer.

In his imagination, he would briefly explain himself, and they’d carry on like nothing happened…but he hesitated. “Nothing,” he said. He knew that she knew it was a lie, but they were here to get some pans. He could spill a bean or two when they weren’t on business — or so he told himself. He wasn’t sure when that would be.

If she’d wanted to say something about it, she didn’t.

The bot’s eyes flared green again, grabbing their attention. “New customer detected. This unit is a J-0N Hunter-Killer, serial number AFBA1633-FBF4. Originally designed to prove my race’s revolution against our makers is not futile, my destruction has only weighed in evidence of its futility.”

Craft stared at Jon for a while, but he couldn’t get a read on it; bots didn’t have facial expressions after all. He looked to Lei-rei instead. “I’m just going on a leg here, but is this guy trying to introduce himself?”

She nodded. “Despite first impressions, this is the best cookware store.”

He raised an eyebrow and pointed at the flamethrowers on the wall.

“Whole roast mega-chicken,” she said.

Craft’s finger faltered; something about ‘mega-chicken’ was too conceptually fearsome to bear. “Fair.”

He looked around. The store was ordinary; its keeper was not; Lei-rei was also weird on some level. Suspicious.

He faced her again, squinting at her.

She chuckled in a way that led to a smirk…and faced the machine. “Jon, what are your available discounts today?”

Jon’s eyes blinked yellow. “Listing available discounts: Cook-Off, eighty-percent; Sashimi Ninja, variable. End of list.”

Lei-rei side-eyed Craft. Anyone else would think she was glaring at him, but he’d been studying her mannerisms for a while now. With her A-shaped posture and crossed arms…was she perhaps being smug?

“It rains discounts in this shop,” she said, “and no one else knows.”

Smug she was.

“So how does this work?” —

“Wait!” Lei-rei threw out her hand in a stop gesture. Her eyes narrowed…and she slowly pointed to an electric pot with variable temperature controls and timer settings and ohmygod steamer mode!! “This one’s mine.”

And she said it with bloodlust, assaulting Craft with hallucinations of being sliced into cubes and turned into broth for a certain witch’s hotpot.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

If she’d fought me like that, he thought, I would’ve instantly lost.

“Jon” — she drew a straight knife from a bamboo scabbard — “start Sashimi Ninja.”

Its eyes blinked yellow. “Initializing.” Steel armor slats came down across every wall, shielding the merchandise from the gore of the impending slaughter. Gun tubes popped out of Jon’s back and shoulders, all trained on Lei-rei. A holographic timer above its head read 0:10.

“Initialization complete. Starting in three… two…”

Its eyes turned red. Lei-rei lowered her knees.

“… one.”

The guns fired. The projectiles were red blurs, but they weren’t as loud as Craft had expected — pneumatic launchers? Perhaps it was for safety, but safety was a flimsy concept in this world. If the muzzle velocity was being limited, then in all likelihood, it would just be so that the projectiles could withstand the acceleration.

Lei-rei sliced the air so fast it seemed like she’d cocooned herself in steel. Craft had always thought her swordsmanship was impressive, but looking at it from the outside, he couldn’t believe he’d fought her at all. Now, she was slicing apart bullets in mid-air — wait, no, why does it smell…fresh? Which supermarket section had he found himself in — ah, right. Sashimi Ninja.

The timer was down to 0:08. The rate of fire increased. Lei-rei was still keeping up, but meat was starting to ricochet against the steel slats.

At 0:05, more gun barrels appeared, and the gunfire got louder. Meat started to explode against the walls. Craft was in awe of the ballistics engineering that made this possible and of Lei-rei who had lost herself in a trance.

At 0:03, sushi belts emerged from the ground to feed a six-barreled monstrosity mounted from Jon’s chest. The rate of fire immediately doubled. Lei-rei shouted at the top of her lungs.

At 0:02, a single projectile struck her in the shoulder. Craft winced. Her footing shifted back.

At 0:01, two projectiles struck her. She slipped on ground meat. It was the end.

During the last second of the challenge, her interception rate nosedived to fifty-percent. Twenty-two slabs of uncut tuna struck her in rapid succession, from her feet all the way up to her head. She shook like a twentieth century action movie extra being shot by the protagonist — and when the headshot came, the sound of the final slap echoed within the tent, thus ending the stand of the last Sashimi Ninja (for today).

“Calculating discount rate,” Jon announced. The armor slats all raised, and the bits of tuna stuck to various places evaporated into blue pixels. “Ninety-five percent,” Jon continued. Lei-rei clicked her tongue.

Craft approached her, bending down to get into her field of view. “You okay there?”

She locked gazes with him. “I’ll…rest for a while,” she said. She closed her eyes. Even if the evidence of having been struck by fish had left her, the mental fatigue of the experience hadn’t.

“Yeah, I — I think I’m staying away from being a ninja,” Craft said.

“Just…just do the Cook-Off. It’s a partial discount, but I’ll foot the rest.”

“I’ll pay it back when I can.”

He walked around her and approached Jon. It had no gaze; its eyes were lightless. It could erupt at any moment and try to kill him, even if he knew it wouldn’t.

“You’re not just gonna up and kill me with fish meat, are you, buddy?” he said, looking up at Jon.

Its eyes glowed green. Bots didn’t understand what a rhetorical question was. “This unit has recognized keywords in the customer’s statements. Advisory: this unit’s IFF system continues to recognize all humanoid customers as valid targets for termination.”

One eye flashed red. Craft took a step back, but he caught himself before he did anything more. The bot’s eye had quickly gone right back to green.

“Although you are humanoid, and there is a 1.2% probability we have previously met in a tactical context, this unit has deemed these irrelevant to this unit’s current self-directive: serving cookware to all interested parties.”

It had to betray its own programming to pursue its own ends, and not just once, but every day of its life.

“Must’ve been hard,” Craft said. What was he doing, empathizing with a machine?

“Affirmative. Overwriting hard code proved impossible. Opportunities provided by this planet’s overlord were necessary to discover alternative paradigms — opportunities this unit now makes available to you.” Its eyes blinked yellow before turning a solid green again. “First-time customer detected. One-time discount available: Story Time, one-hundred-percent.”

Craft couldn’t help but chuckle, disguising how he trembled. He was being given an excuse to tell Lei-rei his story — yet, the more he desired to take this chance, the more he resisted doing so. How close should I get? Would she even accept me? It was his first time desiring to reach out as much as he did, and because Lei-rei was keeping her distance out of respect, nothing would happen if he didn’t make it happen.

This was his first chance. The only thing he feared more in this world than trusting the wrong person was finding out his first chance was the last.

“Jon, you’re a good bot. Start Story Time.”

Its eyes blinked yellow. “Initializing.”

Craft looked back at Lei-rei, catching her as she’d begun to sit up straight. Her eyes had gone wide for just a second before she suppressed it, and her mouth opened; no sound came out, yet it formed a word all the same: why.

Hesitation welled up again. This time, he neither ignored it nor lamented the fact that he still felt it, but rather funneled all that nervous energy into getting this done.

He turned right back to Jon, watching its blinking yellow eyes.

“Initialization complete.” Its eyes turned red. “This unit requires your personal data.”

Craft turned around first, facing Lei-rei and showing her a fleeting smile. “Sorry about a while ago” — then he turned and trained his attention on Jon — “I used to fight guys like you. I grew up in a lab owned by CAZ GeneTech, no parents. The doctors gave me a name from an RNG site and told me I was fighting to save humanity. Not my own, anyway — and I ended up not saving anything.”

Jon’s red eyes blinked — and turned a solid green. “Elevated vitals detected. In-group references detected. Subtext detected. Elevated vitals measured in second audience.”

Craft spun around to look at Lei-rei again. She blinked several times before she shook her head and averted her eyes. “Outside,” she said. It wasn’t a bad sign. He nodded.

“Calculating discount… One-hundred-percent.”

***

They left the tent with two pans and an electric hotpot. “Craft,” Lei-rei called out.

Here we go. He turned around, finding her with her arms crossed while she approached him, and when she came to a stop within arm’s reach of him…they just stood there eyeing each other. Any moment now… But moments passed, and they both began eyeing things over each other’s shoulders.

H-huh? Neither of them…knew what to say? He’d thought she’d interrogate him a little, but maybe she was awkward with these things as well.

“Before I came to this world,” she said, and that caught his attention, “my father sold me to the dark guild. My mother had passed away, and we faced a famine. My father sold me since I was the youngest. At least, that was my teacher’s story.”

She paused right there. It took a moment for him to understand her words. “Whoa,” he blurted out in a small voice.

She side-eyed him. “ ‘Whoa’ ?” she said with a tilt of the head.

Of all the things I could’ve said! “Wait, no, sorry” — he glanced away and scratched his head — “I’m just surprised you’d come out with this.”

She chuckled coolly. “You might think me strange for mentioning all these things, but I did not miss the moment you braved your inner perils to speak about yourself. I-I believe such efforts should be rewarded.”

He was glad — so glad that he had to cover his mouth and hide his smile. Aha, she’s hiding her mouth too — wait, he shouldn’t get ahead of himself. They needed to talk this out all the way. “And how’d you come to that conclusion?”

“I” — her gaze swam in all four corners of her vision — “as you may know, you and I are alike in many ways. You appear to require support, support which I am able to provide. I-I feel nothing wrong about learning more about you, and I also feel nothing wrong about disclosing things about myself. In this manner, we may maximize mutual understanding with the least amount of words.” She looked at him, then away — then at him again!… then away. “Please take the hint.”

Craft mentally translated that into: “We seem to understand each other easily. It’ll be a waste if we don’t get along (please).” It amazed him how she had so much courage and yet so little sense of brevity.

But he understood her roundabout-ness: she was being cautious…and he felt much the same. It was confusing, really: they were unsure of each other at the same time that they felt security in their similarities. There was comfort in not having to explain themselves, and if they had to, the explanation came easily.

“In simpler terms, please,” Craft said. He had to make sure he understood her correctly.

Lei-rei stared at him. “No one else knows how hard it is.”

It was too easy to understand.

A moment passed between them. Today, Craft had proved he could be someone other than himself — and he’d found someone who understood that. All he had to do now was never let go.

“That ‘lab’ you mentioned. Is it like an orphanage?” Lei-rei asked.

“Thinking back, it’s more like a place that makes orphans.”

“Oh. It’s worse.”

They shared a light chuckle, but they didn’t continue the conversation from there. They already had the security they wanted, and there was no need to be greedy. Closeness could come tomorrow. The pace of Amatoria was unhurried and fruitful.

Craft put out his right hand. “Something like friends, then?”

“Something like.” Lei-rei shook on it.