Boss had a babysitting operation he needed done. He called it a mission, though-- so that’s what it was.

Montgomery Jiang jumped at the chance before even hearing the details. Even if there was a chance he’d get his balls literally twisted into a knot, practically any mission was better than choosing to stay at Elysium.

As long as he was in the field, he wasn’t training.

Tyvan. Ivalice. Heidi. Jeigan.

Every day was hard. Some days were fucking brutal. And recently... the shit he had to do wasn’t designed to be done by humans.

He had to make it work. Sometimes, he made it by being smart while still coloring inside the lines. Other times, he just had to bite the bullet and do the fucking impossible.

Not even 12 hours ago, he had to spend a god-damned eternity meditating under a freezing waterfall. And Boss said it wasn’t even his idea! If he ever found out whose it was...

Damn it. Thinking about it pissed him off to no end.

All that training...

Vision going white. Shortness of breath. Heart beating like it was going to give out at any moment. Internal thoughts sCreaMing ‘WhY?’ ‘Fuck You!’; and ‘Fuck EveRyThinG!’

It was a fucking miracle he was still alive.

He survived every single challenge, each one somehow worse than the last.

Every time he thought he was done for... he found Tyvan god-damned Valorum standing over him, looking down at him like he was literal garbage.

More often than not... he’d say the line.

Words burnt on the inside of his fucking skull.

Words he heard in his nightmares, asleep or awake or clouded in a haze of physical pain and mental trauma.

“We have a proverb concerning pain.”

Fuck off...

Pain was supposed to be weakness leaving the body.

If that was true, the hole it left behind was instantly filled up hatred and burning, fucking fury.

Monty shoved past the greeters at the door, entering the bustling hallway, filled with plastic faces and faker laughs. He’d showed up fashionably late. Only plebs and staff showed up on time.

His stomach growled, partly because he fucking loathed being in the presence of so many people in one place-- partly because he could expect a gala thrown by Nuri Park to at least have rice and galbi.

He’d lost so much weight...

Hours and days and weeks of sore muscles and starvation. Running until his legs and arms and insides and face went numb. Climbing ropes and walls. Dodging ARROWS shot from a BOW. Demands to use his magic until he couldn’t see straight-- until there was nothing left in his guts to puke out.

But that was training.

Field work was fuck-off time.

The venue was bare fucking minimum. Held at a generic, no-name hotel. White marble tiles-- fake and plastered on. The square footage of the hall, itself, was barely bigger than his garage.

He should have known that was the best someone like Nuri Park could do.

He saw what she was trying to set up-- in the the politically correct way she probably intended people to see it. She had established a neutral meeting ground, gathering a mix of people who mattered and people who liked to pretend they did.

Going by the obvious, open partition in the middle of the hall, it was actually two banquet halls connected. The plebs naturally swarmed to the north hall and the city’s elites gathered in their echo chambers in the south.

So that’s where he found himself-- not that he was particularly interested in anything his peers had to say. But the food on that side was bound to be--

--”Monty? Montgomery Jiang! Th-that’s you, isn’t it?”

Monty spun around, hands out, ready to--

Fuck. He was still on edge. That wasn’t his fault, though. His gigantic asshole of a boss worked him like a dog about to be sent to a fighting ring.

The guy that called out to him was someone he knew... a second or third son of a middle-weight electronics company. He wasn’t important enough for his name to be memorable... but he wasn’t nameless enough to be blown off without a good reason.

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Monty covered his mouth to fix his frown. Next, the guy would throw some kind of nuanced insult, safe enough to not cross a line but fucked up enough to get a laugh. What would it be, this time? His waist size? How red his fucking hair was?

And what would be a good way to respond? There was a bandage on the guy’s forehead. Could be from hitting his head on the underside of a desk after choking down a fat dick.

Bandage-head gave him a greasy smile.

”You-- you look good, man. N-new diet? Or what?”

Huh?

Monty looked down at himself.

Oh. Oh, yeah.

If the cocksuckers at the gala were going to mock him for anything, his weight was no longer an option.

“I’ve been doing martial arts training,” Monty said, keeping careful with his words. “My... personal trainer fuckin’ starves me half-to-death.”

One of the guy’s friends spun his head around and looked over.

--”Martial arts training, that’s cool as-- hO-LY shit!! Is that MON-ty??? WhaaaAT happened to yOU?”

Monty scoffed, “Yeah. I climbed half-a-mountain with my bare hands just yesterday. Turns out if you put some calluses on your fuckin’ hands, the pounds just fuck off.”

He shook his head, “But no one wants to hear about that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, the only reason I’m here is for the catering.”

They didn’t let him go.

They had questions. And the crowd grew, one by one. Monty was about to lose his shit-- but some girl he didn’t know called someone over to bring a plate of hors d’oeuvres.

...Fuck it. That worked out.

Monty was used to being the center of attention, but... huh.

What was going on was... fucking different.

And as he kept answering questions-- as he kept giving out training advice he... actually knew shit about, he suddenly remembered something that Tyvan told him.

‘If you want respect, you must first look respectable.’

Losing the weight. Actually wearing a fitted suit instead of triangle-shaped stretch pants and a jacket made wide but too damned tall. Learning to keep his mouth shut for a bit and actually listening before speaking. Everything together-- maybe it was all part of one grand design to be a better person.

That didn’t change the way he felt, though. Tyvan was still the biggest ass he ever had the displeasure of meeting.

“You guys wanna hear a story?” he grinned, “Let me tell you how I met my personal trainer-- and how I got my ass fuckin’ handed to me at the Royal Sun Palace.”

----------------------------------------

“And then I said: ‘Excuse me! What about MY opinion??’”

Joy and laughter and acceptance surrounded Mister Montgomery Jiang.

Shay watched it from afar, feeling... something.

Inadequate, maybe? Monty was in a group talking to a dozen people-- the center of attention... everyone smiling and laughing and having a grand ol’ time.

She really wished Tyvan was with her...

He’d probably attract a crowd too, but at least she’d be part of it.

Monty was Shay’s plus-one.

He wasn’t her date, of course.

To be more exact, Monty was her battle-buddy.

And to be eveN more exact, her battle-buddy was Rider.

(What the fuCk was that about, though? Why did Monty, of all people, get a cool name like Rider?? Just because he had a stupid fucking rice rocket??)

According to Tyvan, Rider would be more inconspicuous of a gala partner than he’d be. On paper, that made sense. Monty was the son of the CEO of Majestic Constructions-- a rich kid, just like Nuri. Also, Tyvan would have caught the attention of half the single women in and around the hotel (and probably some married ones, too.)

What Tyvan absolutely failed to account for was Monty’s ability to open his mouth and make a spectacle. He wasn’t the smartest guy in ❴The Kingdom❵. He was probably the dumbest guy in ❴The Kingdom❵.

Shay wouldn’t have been as miserable as she was if she had someone to talk to.

Raia was somewhere on the grounds. She came to the event wearing a slim pantsuit, looking like a tomboy mafia bodyguard or... a fantasy prince. She was definitely Bishop’s sister-- not that she’d take that as a compliment. But if she cut her hair a little shorter, she’d look like the main love interest in a yuri manga. (--not that Shay wanted that, but there was a demographic for that kind of content.)

But Raia, of course, took every single one of Tyvan’s orders with an ‘I would rather die than fail’ kind of intensity. So, she was waiting wherever she parked her SUV.

But besides Shay's feelings of inadequacy steadily rising to the point that it threatened to consume every ounce of her being, Everything. Was. Fine!

Her coming to Nuri’s gala was part of her actual mission. And, at least that, she hadn’t failed just yet!

But until she could actually find Nuri and talk to her, she had to... fit in... with rich people.

--which begged the question: What the hell was she doing? She didn’t even fit in with regular people!