The shop was larger than any I had seen in Yange. What it lacked in décor compared to the Council Office and The Competitors’ Inn, it made up for with the quantity and quality of merchandise on display. There were clothes and clothes, on mannequins, racks and hangers. There was little space in between the display for customers to walk through, and there were plenty of people inside to make that even harder than it already was. At the far end of the room, I could see stairs for even more clothes in another floor.

I just wanted to turn around go try my luck in another shop, maybe there was one that Tes hadn’t visited, or she hadn’t checked out thoroughly enough, but an approaching attendant crushed that dream. Sometimes it paid to be easy meat, or new meat, whatever kind of meat that made people want to approach you first. I decided to take full advantage of it.

“Hello, my name is Xan. Welcome to Zollie’s Clothes and Tailoring. How may I help you?” he asked in an alto-pitched voice.

And I went direct to the point, that was the only way I was spending the least amount of time in that hell they called a clothes and tailoring shop.

“Do you have anything in turquoise?”

He smiled then, all teeth and crow-footed eyes. At least, his clothes weren’t flamboyant, that would have made him look like a clown. I put him in his twenties. He had light skin, brown shoulder length hair with golden highlights. His face was attractive, more beautiful than handsome, and I got the feeling he would appreciate that comment very much.

I wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but I was certain that I looked more beggar than farmer in my outfit. After the few months in the farm and the constant training I had put them through, my clothes were not the most decent looking ones. Clean, yes. But that was it.

“Yes. Turquoise and its close shades are in the first floor. What are you interested in?” he said as he began guiding, forcing, me through the narrow passageways towards one of the stairs.

The clothes I saw on the ground floor seemed to represent all the colors to me. Like all of them. I didn’t have the time to properly scrutinize the shades, but it had seemed pretty representative. Apparently it wasn’t, or he was leading me to an organ harvesting facility because he thought no one would really come looking. What am I thinking? There is magic capable of creating organs from scratch if I understood right. There is no need for organ harvesting. There shouldn’t be, right?

I assumed there would be plenty of witnesses and let him lead me up the stairs and into the first floor. And the difference was startling. The décor had changed dramatically, it was clearly visible that efforts had been made into making the floor more inviting and make the clientele feel like they were shopping in a high class establishment. The marble finished floor and walls, the white lights that fully illuminated the room, the spaciousness of the whole floor, and organization; all tailored to make the place feel high class. I imagined it was where the wealthy of the city came to spent their golds. Definitely golds, and not silvers.

I stopped at the end of the stairs and looked at the floor as a whole, and then at him. And back again, clearly asking, ‘are you serious?’ Which he clearly ignored as he began walking farther in to the floor.

“Come on, what you are looking for is here,” he said without even looking back.

I checked around the floor. There were several people present, all minding their own business, with an attendant close by. I swallowed my sense of not belonging, and followed him. He had been right. He led me to an aisle filled with everything turquoise, from the lights to the darks, so dark they appeared black from a far. And from headgear to footwear, everything was there. I noticed that none of the headgear had the design that I had had Detta make for me. Close enough, but not there.

Truth be told, the aisle was only around five meters long with the variety of clothing being only in sizes and shades. They were mainly shirts and trousers, with a few shoes thrown in. But my previous life had been spent in near poverty and when I came to Mesily, that hadn’t changed at all. In fact, I would say things got worse. Compared to that, the shop did look a pretty high class place to me.

“This shirt is a close shade to the one you had in your fight today,” he said as he presented to me a shirt that was as close to light turquoise as I had seen in the Realm of Mesily so far.

And of course, leave it to me to get the attention of the one attendant in the whole shop who had watched my fight. I decided to ignore that and focus on the shirt.

“How much?”

“A gold piece. It is made of softened wool, you won’t feel a scratch on you.”

Using the scale that Paul had taught me, that meant that the shirt was worth around eight silvers. I turned to him to begin haggling the price only to be met with a stare that said haggling was not condoned in the premises, under no uncertain terms. I quickly swallowed up the words I had been about to say and turned my attention to the rest of the clothes in the aisle.

In the end, I lost three golds for dark turquoise trousers and two light turquoise shirts. I really needed to make it past the next round if I wanted to justify that spending to myself. I vowed to myself that I would put everything I had into winning. Of course, that included my brains, no going all out at the start just because I wanted to win.

“You lost me money in your fight,” Xan said as we exited the stairs and began our maneuvering of the densely forested ground floor.

Really? Was that why he had refused to haggle with me? Payback. I’m not the one that told him to bet in the first place.

“I bet on your opponent. It was the obvious thing to do. I don’t think anyone bet on you. But they are going to start to. So will I.”

What was that? I already had enough people putting pressure on me, I didn’t need more of them.

“Then you’re going to lose more money,” I told him.

“You plan on losing?” he asked, suddenly very interested. He had stopped me walking out with a hold of my hand. I should have carried my staff. Why did I leave it anyway?

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“No!” I exclaimed. I would never do that. “I’m here to win. But…”

“Well. Still betting on you then. Besides, even if I lose the bet, I still made a profit here.”

“Of course you did,” I said as I began to walk out of the shop.

“I wasn’t that bad,” he screamed after me, but I paid it no mind, walking briskly past the security guards and into the Inn.

“Hey, Hartie. Over here.”

That was definitely Paul, and I really hated being called like that. Like hated it to my core. Everyone I might have gotten past without them knowing, would know I was there. And with the way Dawkins had welcomed me to the competitors’ club, I wasn’t interested in earning the attention of everyone. I debated it for a few seconds before I detoured to what had somehow become our table. Maybe the reason they had talked to me was because they found me in their table. The corner table.

“See, I told you not to call him like that,” I heard Lina say as I took a seat at the table. Everyone was there.

“You saw how fast he was walking, what did you expect me to do? Run after him?”

“Yes! If you are that interested in talking to him.”

I schooled my expression farther, as it seemed some of the annoyance had been clear for all to see.

“What’s up?” I asked, to move the conversation away from that topic. “Anything new and interesting happen while I was busy shopping for clothes?”

“Apparently, I’m the only one who didn’t make it past Round One.”

“I already knew that,” I told him. He had already told me that before I left for my shopping trip.

“You already knew they had made it through?”

“No, I knew that you had not.”

“Well, I’m telling you that they made it to Round Two.”

“Oh… right. That.”

“What about you?” Lina asked as the conversation dulled. “Did you make it through?”

“Yeah.”

“Really? Who did you have?” Lina asked.

“Hmm… tall, dark gr—”

“Braden,” Oki answered for me. I tried remembering his name, all I knew was that it had a B somewhere.

“Really!? You don’t even remember his name,” Lina said. “That is poor fighting etiquette.”

“I was busy avoiding his arrows to remember what his name was,” I argued.

And it was true, I had spent more than half the fight trying my best to avoid his constant onslaught of arrows. Their ability to return to him made it all the more difficulty to take care of them. I don’t think I had managed to break all of them before the fight was over.

The conversation continued, with us talking about nothing in particular. We talked about things that had to do with the competition and others that didn’t. I learnt a little background about each of them then. Not much, but enough to form a basis of why they had chosen to participate in The Grand Competition.

For Paul, it was just for the fun of it. That and the fact that he missed his wife and wanted to engage in something, engaging. His wife, Deirdre, had died a couple years back from a Mana illness, or so the healers had claimed. Paul hadn’t ever heard of search a thing, and he spent a few years accusing the healers of negligence and extortion, they had asked for too much and delivered nothing but death. He had begun exercising and fighting in the pits as I way to get his mind away from those thoughts. That was before he made Level 30, where he decided why not and pushed himself further. When the year began and the registrars passed through their town, he had joined on a whim. And that had been it for him.

Oki could be called a veteran in The Grand Competition. He was on his third attempt at trying to make it past the Baronies. The first year, he had been a novice, barely past Level 30 and with no training other than the little he could manage in between the hours of working in his families. His town, Noova, were considered the prime producers of everything food related in the Barony. So much that, most of their produce was actually sold to other Baronies. And to produce that much, the hours were unforgiving but the Levels gained were much appreciated.

He joined the first time same as Paul, for the fun it. He had made it to Level 30, the highest Leveled member of his family, and he wanted to see where that could get him. Not far apparently, he never made it past the first fight. The second time he had come prepared, the previous year’s exposure had made him want for something more than the life he had back home. Sadly, he never made it to the finals, but he did earn more than his family made in a year that week. But the loss had still hurt.

It was from him that I learnt the Barony of Sjuma was considered a backwater Barony by all accounts. It was just emerging from the era of farming to join the rest of the Kingdom. People hadn’t paid too much attention to The Grand Competition when it was introduced to them, and when they finally started to, the Levels needed to win had become too high for most people.

Lina and Tes were childhood friends and natives of Sjuma. They had begun trying to participate over five years prior, but they were indecisive and lacked the commitment necessary to maintain high Levels. Getting to mid-twenties had being easy, getting past Level 30 and staying there was the hard part. They went through periods of intense training and no training at all, until they hired a trainer four months before the start of the competition. Their aim had been the competition after, but they decided to try their hand on the current one too.

I never really learnt why Paul had called me over. I doubted it was just to tell me that the others had also made it through the first round. Or just to talk. Was that what people did while they hanged out together? Talk about nonsensical things that actually didn’t contribute anything of value to their lives. I had a lot to learn in the ways of social interaction, but The Grand Competition still took priority where I was concerned. Once I managed to win a substantial amount of gold, then I could start to think about those other nonsensical things.

…

I studied the clothes as they lay on the bed, they were of a better quality than the ones I had, and they had cost me too much. I didn’t feel right wearing them in a fight that would most definitely end in their destruction. If I had a tailoring Skill, I might be able to repair my damaged clothes. It was more logical to fight with the farmhand clothes than the more pricey ones. On the other hand, I wanted to create and maintain that turquoise image as much as I could. If I made it past the quarterfinals, then I would be happy with myself. But could I make it past the quarterfinals? I didn’t even know who my next opponent was. I was doing a very poor job of studying the competition. All the others could afford to relax after a fight, I couldn’t. I needed to gather information that could help me in the fights to come, and for that, I needed to talk to someone who actually knew about my competitors, or watched their other fights. I had a group that could offer such information, I just needed to find a way of knowing where they were.

But before that, I needed to study what had changed about me. I knew I had gained a Level during the fight, I wanted to know how that had come to be.

[+][+][+]

‘[Identify]’

[Species: Human]

[Name: Hartie]

[Sex: Male]

[Level: 29]

Status:

[HP: 3042/3951]

[MP: 2580/4367]

[SP: 3829/6191]

Attributes:

[Agility: 36]

[Constitution: 29]

[Endurance: 36]

[Intelligence: 28]

[Strength: 20]

[Vitality: 26]

[Wisdom: 32]

General Skills [3/3]:

[Identify: 1]

[Language Proficiency: 3]

[Mana Manipulation: 7]

Skills:

[Acrobatics: 5]

[Archery: 3]

[Bludgeons: 3]

[Carpentry: 3]

[Daggers: 7]

[Enhance Plant Growth: 3]

[Earth Grab: 8]

[Fast Dash: 7]

[Fire Ball: 9]

[Fire Bolt: 8]

[Herbalism: 3]

[Hurtling Projectile: 11]

[Spears: 3]

[Stealth: 2]

[Staff Making: 5]

[Staff Shield: 7]

[Staffs: 13]

[Unarmed Combat: 7]

[Water Ball: 5]

[Water Punch: 8]

[Weeding: 8]

[Whirlpool: 4]

[Wind Gust: 9]