Chapter 37

After the training bouts with the others, I went to visit Xan at the clothes store. On a previous interaction, he had let me know that he could help me dye my hair, something I had been wanting to do for a while, to complete the whole turquoise look.

I was clothed in my last set of clean undamaged turquoise-themed clothes; the same ones I would be wearing for the finals. I wanted to have a clear comparison of how the dye actually fit with the whole image. Frankly speaking, it would be the first time I checked myself out in the mirror in the Realm of Mesily, I was rightly nervous. What if I didn’t really look like I did before? Maybe worse, or better? I didn’t even know which would hurt more.

“You kept your promise,” Xan said as we walked into the salon section of the shop, up on the upper floor.

“Just got lucky.” I found myself reverting to the short sentences out of habit, it was relaxing for me, taking away the stress of what the competition had turned out to be.

As much as Xan called it a promise, as far as I could remember, he was the one who talked about me winning the fight, I had had my doubts. Looking back, I still would have had those even knowing what the outcome was.

“There was no luck involved in that fight; you literally smashed the win out of her,” he laughed at his statement as he pointed to one of the vacant seats for me.

The salon had two more patrons, and their attendants. Each seat had partial walls dividing its space from the rest of the salon. There were a total of at least ten seats that I could see. In front of the two that had occupants was a mirror that seemed absent for the others. The whole place looked high-class, just like the rest of the upper floor did.

Oh Mesily, I had forgot to ask the most important question of all; how much he would be charging for the service, because there was no way he was doing it for free, not Xan. I didn’t have any gold on me, or anywhere else for that matter, and the few coins I had couldn’t make up a gold, not that I thought Xan would take anything that wasn’t gold.

Xan came back holding two large bowls with a set of vials inside, one of them had that turquoise color in it. I assumed it to be the dye, the others were anybody’s guess as to what they could be.

“Okay then, let’s get to it,” he said as he set them on the table in front of me.

“What are you charging?” I asked before he could start mixing up the vials, I didn’t want to incur costs that I couldn’t rightfully pay up.

“You are a competitor. You don’t need to worry about that,” he said as he began arraying his things on the table.

“You are doing this for free?” I asked him incredulously. I knew that couldn’t be the case, but I did hope.

He gave me a weird look before shaking his head saying, “No.”

“Of course not. Then state the number.”

“A gold.”

“I don’t have that much on me.”

He paused what he was doing to give me that weird look again. “What? But you are…”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m a competitor in the finals, but we haven’t been paid up yet. That comes after the competition ends, at the closing ceremony if I remember right.”

I couldn’t even recall who had told me that, not that it mattered.

“What about your personal savings?” he asked, already having completely abandoned what he had been doing to give me his full attention.

“Used it all up already.” I waved the statement away like it was no big deal.

“Doing what exactly?” he neatly raised one of his eyebrows as he asked. I really envied that, I couldn’t even count the number of times I had spent in front of a mirror trying to learn how to do that. I still couldn’t, both my eyebrows liked moving up together, but I did know how to quip the side of my mouth in annoyance.

“Hey, I have needs,” and the weird look was back, “other needs!”

He got all contemplative before saying, “I’ll do it for you for credit, and you can pay me back when you receive your prize. How does that sound?”

I perked up then, “Really? You would do that for me?”

“Yeah, like I have told you, you are a very interesting character.” He got back to his things as he added, “Besides, it will be two golds then.”

“Of course it would be.”

…

Half an hour later, and it was done. Xan removed a piece of cloth that had been hanging in front of me to reveal a mirror.

“Why had that been covered up?” I asked as he stepped to the side so that I could see myself.

“I forgot to remove the cover before we began, sorry.”

I ignored the apology as I stared at the mirror. It was tall, stretching from the floor to about two meters in height, and what I saw reflected in it rendered me speechless. It took me several long seconds before I could recover my ability to speak.

“I look awful!” I said as I peered closer at the image of me in the mirror.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“What? I thought it came out well, the colors actually pop out well.”

“Not that. My face, I lost my baby fat,” I said as I touched my popping cheekbones and sunken cheeks. Well, I was definitely pretty now, but I would need to regain that baby fat for it to pop out well. I still looked my age, barely past twenty, but I had gone through several adjustments to my facial features. Not enough for me to look different, but enough that I could comfortably call myself pretty. That was saying something coming from me.

Looking at Xan’s image, I noticed he had been rendered speechless too, though I couldn’t figure out why, so I decided to ask.

“What?”

He finally closed his mouth before mumbling something to himself. Then he said, “You are not a baby.”

“What?”

“You said—”

“I know what I said. Baby fat, not baby. But if you insist, then I have lost the generous amount of body fat that I had.” I wasn’t sure what I was comparing myself to, before I died or before The Grand Competition began. I couldn’t remember using a mirror before in the Realm of Mesily, so it had to be before I died.

After I got over my facial appearance, I paid attention to what had brought me to the salon. My short black afro hair had been turned light turquoise, the same shade as my shirt. Like Xan had said, the overall appearance was good, great even, it just… it didn’t feel like me.

In my previous life, I would have enjoyed the whole turquoise theme I had going on, but now that I was looking at it fully, it felt unsatisfactorily. Maybe somethings had not stayed the same when I crossed over, or was it got reincarnated? Had my preferences somehow changed? That was a scary thought to have, especially in a world filled with lots of other species. How many had Clare said there were? Ten? more?

“You don’t like it,” Xan said with the finality of an expert at reading people.

“It looks great,” I quickly countered. “But… this is the first time I’m seeing myself in a mirror, and the image I’m seeing isn’t the one I had in my mind when I chose the color.”

“We could try a different color,” he said.

“What!? Noo!! I don’t want to owe you more than I already do,” I said as I stared at my image in the mirror. “Maybe after the finals.”

“A whole different color,” I said after giving myself a once over.

“What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know, maybe a little more blue, a dull blue. This one screams, ‘hey, look at me’, I want one that says, ‘cool’.”

I left the store soon after. By then, the sun was already beyond the city walls and it was time for me to head to bed. My fight would be after the third place fight between Artina and Dawkins, but I still needed to get there early, for my own peace of mind if nothing else. I could already feel the anxiousness creeping through me, I didn’t feel like partaking in supper at all, but I knew I must.

…

The third place fight didn’t really affect me at all, so I decided not to watch it. Paul had argued vehemently that it could help me learn something, a way to defeat a future opponent. Oki pointed out that Artina and I were both Mana and staff users, and that watching how she fought, win or lose, would help me get better.

Their arguments were sound, and I would have appreciated the information and experience I would gain from watching the fight, but I was just too nervous for me to be able to pick up anything from the fight. In the end, it wouldn’t help me at all.

That had been my reasoning for coming to spend the time during the fight in the waiting room. Of course I hadn’t told them that, I just grumbled to myself as I walked away from them with my head held low.

It didn’t matter how I looked at it, there was no way I was winning the finals. And the fun of participating in the competition went with my hopes of winning. The whole point of joining The Grand Competition was for the money I would earn when I rose high enough in the ladder. But as it was, the injuries and other expenses I had suffered would eat through all the money I was going to earn. If I took away what the healer would claim after the fight was over, what would I be left with? Twenty? Forty? I would be worse off than even the fourth place finisher.

I shuffled into the waiting room to find Artina and Dawkins already getting ready for their fight, with the healers swarming around them. I might have seen the one that I owed money to, but I couldn’t be sure.

Things had changed a lot for the last several days of the competition, Dawkins had been up in my business when I first arrived but he was completely subdued as he gave me barely a glaze before going back to whatever he had been doing. I thought he still looked down on me, but he must have realized that antagonizing me would get him nowhere.

Artina, on the other hand, actually waved at me, and as the idiot that I was, I first looked behind me to make sure she wasn’t greeting someone else before returning her wave with a half-assed attempt of mine. I collapsed on one of the benches at the side of the waiting room, away from the doors and the competitors and their healers.

After the healers left, Artina came to join me. I really hoped she just came to sit and nothing else, because I wasn’t in the mood for a conversation. Besides, we had never really interacted before, I couldn’t think of anything we could talk about. But I wasn’t that lucky as she began talking before she even sat down.

“You look like you have already lost,” she said as she sat down beside me. “You’re ruining the new look.”

That statement left me confused as I just stared at her dumbly. She gave a pointed look at my head, and that’s when I remembered the hair dye I had applied.

“Oh…” I said as I ran my left hand through my hair, blushing profusely. And I hated every second of it.

She already had her hair done the same as during our fight, all coiled up in itself. She looked free, unbothered and like she was having fun, completely different from what I felt.

“Where is the determined look you had before our fight?” she asked as she turned to stare at Dawkins who was busy working on his armor, with the cleaver right beside him. “It had me doubting whether I could win the fight before it even began. Rightly so, as it turned out.”

“This isn’t about the fight, not really,” I told her as I stretched out my legs and slumped down on the bench.

“Really? What is it about? Tell me,” she perked up, returning her full attention to me. I could see the gears turning behind her eyes and the glimmer in them that threatened to spill over and shine a light on me. She looked totally different from the person I fought in the semifinals, I should have just murmured an incoherent sentence.

“You are a gossip, aren’t you?”

“What!? Nooo!”

“That wasn’t even convincing, and you know it,” I said as I closed my eyes, trying my best to calm myself down. It was situations like this that led to me sharing things about myself with strangers, I needed to be careful.

She bumped me with her shoulder as she said, “Come on, I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”

I opened one of my eyes to find her blinking her eyes innocently at me. She was definitely going all in, but that couldn’t possibly work on me.

“Has that ever worked before?”

“Yes, all the time.”

“Do you think it’s working here?”

“You never know,” she said as she sat upright, staring ahead at Dawkins again. I could feel that she was closer to me than she had been when she initially sat down, and it bothered me somewhat.

“Are you nervous?” I asked her in attempt to change the topic from me.

“Yeah, very much so,” she said without ever looking away from Dawkins. Had she paid that much attention to me before our fight? I couldn’t remember.

“You don’t look it.”

And it was true. Apart from the constant staring, she looked relaxed and confident, something I wasn’t feeling at all. Maybe I should have let her qualify for the finals, then again I would be facing Dawkins instead. A slight throb through my right hand reminded me why winning was a must. The healer had said everything was back to normal, but I still felt like there were pieces that weren’t were they were supposed to be.

“I don’t let things like that control—”

She was interrupted by the announcer calling them to the arena for the fight.

“That’s me,” she said as she jumped up. “Wish me luck. I’ll see you later.”

And she was gone before I could even muster the energy to reply to her, saying my luck to an empty waiting room.