He leads John’s parents to their meeting area, making polite small talk, and when he gets back to the area he’s staying in, he sees exactly what he expects, John practically clinging to Jennifer while the rest of the group looks a bit annoyed at him.

Jennifer has a bit of a defeated look on her face, and Sen turns to Xue.

“So John hasn’t given up on Jennifer yet?”

Xue shakes her head. “He just gave up on hunting with us. You should see him at the Lotus school, Jennifer pretty much always rents a private room to train in these days.”

Sen winces. Apparently he’s gotten even worse than before. He joins in on the conversation about if there will even be any B ranked dungeons in the vicinity of Falan, as while there had been six D ranked, there were only three C ranked, and all of them are at least halfway to another city.

John tries to butt in at a few points, once even trying to be sneaky in mentioning that Fifth Dimension is going to be very important, something that probably everyone at the party knows at this point.

The group starts to talk tactics about the tournament at this point, but most of them come down to protect Julie as she uses her arrays. While she wouldn’t have time to set anything fancy up in a one versus one situation, with the team backing her up she’s able to do pretty much as she pleases.

It isn’t long until Julie herself arrives, and she gives everyone a hug as she does so. She’s looking even more done up than the other girls, a flashy red dress and gold jewelry flashing at her wrists, neck, and ears. Her parents refuse to talk to Sen as he leads them to the rest of the adults, probably still blaming him for having gotten her into immersion games.

The party continues through dinner, enough steak to make up an entire cow being fed to everyone. Eventually, it comes time for gifts, and Sen gets far more outfits that he’d never want to wear than he’s happy with, but he makes sure to keep a smile on his face. The girls are the only ones who seem to know his interests, getting him some actual physical books, pretty much his only hobby other than gaming.

The party has wound down, and everyone other than his friends has left by the time he gets his gift from his parents. It’s actually a sword, practically a perfect replica of his sword from in game, and Sen practically cradles it as he gets it. As much as he loves having a sword in game, he constantly feels something missing not having one in real life.

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He profusely thanks them, and then his friends start to leave. The last to leave is Xue, and just before she leaves, she turns to him. She takes a deep breath to steady herself before talking.

“Sen, please go out with me!”

Sen’s eyes widen as Lynna gets a big grin on her face. He’d expected she felt something for him considering how clear Lynna had been, but he hadn’t expected this. He sits there a while in confusion. While he’d decided to live as Sen in this world, Xue is currently seventeen, and while in Earth years she would be nineteen, that still seems a bit young for Sen.

Fortunately or unfortunately for Sen, he simply isn’t attracted to women that would be the same age if he added his two ages together. He’d been in his early twenties in his previous life, and his tastes hadn’t changed from back then, girls a bit over twenty, and he expects they won’t change until he gets past that age in this life.

He gets caught up in his worries until Xue slowly gets a defeated look on her face, but as she turns away, he grabs her hand.

“I’d be happy to try,” He says, a nervous smile on his face.

His nervous smile is completely overshadowed by the one Xue gets on her face. She nods, gives him a quick peck on his cheek, and practically runs away with her parents. Sen just stands there for a while, not sure if he’s done the right thing, or something completely immoral. While it wasn’t strange for people over the age of forty to marry girls even in their early teens in his past life, in his current one it’s seen as something abnormal.

He lets out the breath he’s been holding in. He’s decided to live as Sen, and he won’t let his past life have any input on this. After a bit, he’s straight headed enough to ask Lynna why on earth she’d fallen for him, as he is utterly clueless.

“You still can’t recognize her? She was Flowery in Last World Online.”

Sen stares. Flowery had been nothing like the cold Xue he knows in Fifth Dimension. She’d been terribly cheerful and outgoing, and had a big enough crush on him that even Sen with his rather low EQ had noticed. He’d ended up saving her quite a few times when she’d been put on the kill list of some minor guild for some reason Sen isn’t clear about, and then she’d started following him around, even ditching her Ares guild friends in some cases.

Sen wonders what exactly had prompted her to confess though. While it isn’t rare for females to confess, it’s something that is usually left to the male. He winces, she’d probably known that he would never do anything on his own, as conflicted as he feels about it.

“You know, if you hadn’t saved her that time in the tarantula dungeon, she probably would have just stuck to crushing on you,” Lynna informs Sen.

Sen thinks back. He had been pretty reckless in order to stop her from dying, and since she is playing at thirty percent pain level, she’d probably seen it as even bigger a favor. He shrugs, he’d do the same for anyone on the team. He would, right?

Before Sen goes to bed, he decides to play with his sword a bit. His parents have apparently even gotten him a gel target to play with, and so he goes to test it out. His first strike, he notices something wrong. While it’s a good sword, it should absolutely not be cutting through it this easily.

Curious if it’s just the gel, he goes to grab a kitchen knife to test it again, and frowns. The gel is even harder than he’d thought it would be, the kitchen knife only stabbing in maybe an inch before stopping, while his new sword cleaves through it as easily as if it is foam.

He puts it back in its sheath before going to bed, wondering who the hell had made such a ridiculous sword in this age of crappy replicas.