Chapter 44

“What is it?” Xan asked, bringing me out of my stupor. “You look like a fish out of the water. And not the good kind.”

Looking around, I realized the old merchant had gone back to retrieving more clothes from the hangers. I leaned close to Xan and whispered, “I… I only have like 8… 7… 5 gold.”

“What!” Xan exclaimed loudly enough that I was sure the old merchant heard him. He looked around before bringing his voice down. “But you won hundred gold just yesterday.”

“Did I? I don’t remember,” I said as I went back to checking out the few pieces of clothes left before us.

“Wait…” Xan said after a few seconds, coming to join me in the clothes pile. “I think we have had this conversation before.”

“Now you remember…”

“Hey, in my defense you never told me what happened to the rest. What did happen?” he went ahead and asked, again.

“I have needs,” I said without even thinking, but the look he gave me forced me to immediately add, “Other needs!”

A sense of déjà vu washed over me then, and I realized we had just gone through the full conversation again. “Why did you force me to repeat that statement?”

“Don’t worry about it, I will take care of everything here,” he clapped my back lightly as he said that.

“No, I don’t want to be indebted to you again,” I quickly argued, remembering how the last debt had doubled over the span of two days.

“It’s not a debt, look at it as an investment,” he said, waving his hands at me as if to shoo away my complaints.

“But investments are no different from debts, they are expected to return the money with a profit,” I pointed out, using the little business, economics? knowledge I could remember from old earth.

“Yes. But unlike a debt that can be enforced when the debtor defaults, an investment can suffer a loss,” he counter argued.

I wasn’t sure if that was the case, or if he was just using more loan jargon to entangled me in a web of debts that would leave me infinitely indebted to him. I tried thinking of a counter argument but came up blank, then I tried thinking of how the investment would make him money, and still came up blank. What exactly was he investing in? Me? My clothes? I had failed miserably in the business course I had tried to take, and it was showing.

The only way I could see out of the predicament I found myself was to walk out of the stall right there and then, without purchasing anything. But we had already engaged the merchant, so much that he had already removed clothes from the hangers several times. There was no way I could bring myself to leave without purchasing at least something, and I didn’t think there was anything in his stall that I could afford.

I resigned myself to my fate, telling myself that I would refrain from putting myself in a situation where Xan had to step in and leave me indebted further still. It felt like I had had a similar proclamation before, but I couldn’t remember when that was.

Besides, how much could we really spent while buying a set clothes?

…

“I thought things were supposed to be cheaper in a bazaar,” I asked Xan as we left the bazaar, some odd hours later.

“Where did you hear that from?” Xan asked as he hefted the bag he was carrying over his shoulder. “Maybe for somethings, and not for others. It’s just like any marketplace, and each stall just like any other shop.”

“The shop you worked in in Sjuma wasn’t that expensive,” I told him as we began weaving through the throng of people in the streets.

It was already around noon time, the streets were busy again, the whole no houses outside towns and cities meant that the few towns and cities that existed ended up cramped with people, no matter how small they were. Just how populous were the major cities? The capitals for the kingdoms? Empires?

“No, it wasn’t. But you cannot compare the quality of clothes here with those found in that store.”

I actually couldn’t tell the difference, all that mattered to me was the amount of gold we had spent, a gobsmacking 498 golds for three sets of clothes and two sets of boots. Xan had wanted to purchase seven sets of clothes, SEVEN!!! I had had to threaten him with actual physical violence before he agreed to come down from such a high number.

We immediately headed directly for our room, and I tried vainly to keep track of what streets we took, but I lost track half way through. The good thing was that I recognized the street that I had met the elf. Xan had a lunch delivered to our room, after asking what I wanted, and I settled for my usual chapatti and meat stew. Xan decided to give it a try, but added a side dish of something that looked like a mash of fruits and vegetables. I salivated a little when I first saw it, momentarily forgetting the splitting headache I had gained while in the bazaar, but like I had said before, I had better control over my baser instincts.

…

After lunch, we went to the armory. Armories to be precise. After the first few stall we visited, it became increasingly clear that Xan was as much of an amateur as I was where armor was concerned.

“I cannot haggle for a price when I have no clue the worth of the item I’m to haggle,” he had said. Followed later by, “You will not use a ten-gold piece of armor to protect a twenty-gold piece of clothing.”

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I had had to remind him that the armor was to protect me and not the clothes, and then we nearly cut the whole armory visit short when he declared that what I was worth, there was no armor that could be worth protecting me in the whole of Choska.

It had been fun actually, a lot of fun. For once, I wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand the way of things. Xan had the gold to purchase just about any armor, or so he said, it was just that all the armor we came across always seemed to have a flaw. Most ranked in either the too bulky or too ugly categories, and the few that made it through were either worthless junk or ceremonial wear that shouldn’t be anywhere near a real fight.

The second time we nearly called the trip off was when Xan finally asked me why exactly I wanted armor in the first place, and because of the mood-high I was experiencing, I answered without thinking,

“Because other people have armor.”

It had taken him a whole minute before he could form a sentence to reply to that. When we finally actually stopped to think about the kind that would actually help me in a fight, we finally settled on a forty-gold reinforced leather torsoplate, covering both the front and back, and a twenty-gold reinforced leather vambrances, or forearm and hand guards. Neither of us really understood the difference between normal leather and the reinforced kind, but the stall owner had gone so far as to demonstrate to us the difference in protection capabilities between the two. Safe to say, there was a difference, I’m just not sure whether it was a positive or negative difference for the reinforced leather.

I tried turning my staff into a spear, or halberd, by adding the necessary attachment, but it became very weird to wield, and the things I had gotten used to doing with it before were no longer possible. With the amount of training time I had before the Counties began, there was nothing that I could learn in terms of spear or halberd wielding to help me in the fights. Swords were actually worse; I actually cut myself with one while I was trying it for a swing.

I swore off them until I had an actual real trainer who could direct me in the way of the sword. My own worry was that they might actually find me so awful not to be worth of their time. Or I might find myself a money swindler who would lie to teach me only to get to my hard earned gold. My future didn’t really look blight in the least. It was looking more and more certain like what I had feared when I began using the staff as my primary weapon would become a reality, I would be stuck with it for the rest of the competition.

After that, we went to visit the city’s two libraries. It was actually one, the other one was nothing more than a bookstore that had nothing that could actually help me in the fights to come. The actual library was as large as the concert hall we had gone to the day before, with five floors of books and an extra one for the restricted books. It was the biggest library I had ever been to in all my lives, but Xan called it small, which left we wondering about the sizes of the libraries in the larger cities.

But as small as Xan thought it was, the amount of books available was overwhelming to me. And just like the swords, spears and halberds, it might prove worthless if I weren’t careful about how I approached it. The first thing I needed was someone who knew the kind of books that would help me, after that it would be easy peasy for me, after all, the library used a classification system similar to the Dewey Decimal system, my one semester stint at library science was finally paying off. Though, that would have to wait until the Counties were over, I still needed to cram everything of how the classification system was actually grouped, or at least where exactly to find the kind of books I would need without help.

The fee, on the other hand, was something else altogether. I had gotten used to the silver for two hours, but in Choska, that had quickly become a silver-hour. Xan told me that as the library got bigger, it housed more books and required a great deal of personnel to maintain and run its day to day activities. All that meant that more money was needed to keep it going. But he kept my hopes up when he told me that the silver-hour was the normal fee in the large cities too, though there were some specialty libraries that charged in the range of five silver-hours. He claimed that I would never need to use those specialty libraries, but I had a feeling that I would actually need to use them, I just hoped I would be a wealthy person when that time came.

By the time we were done giving the library a silver-hour tour, the sun had already dipped below the city’s walls, signaling that night was fast approaching. I pushed Xan to hurry up on guiding me to the Council Office for me to register as a competitor for the Counties. He tried joking about how we could always go the following day, but I gave him my best death stare and it must have worked because he didn’t joke about it again, instead, swiftly escorting me to the Council Office.

It was like in every city or town I had been to; the Council Office was always located as close to the gate as they could get it. In Choska, that trend still held true, with the Council Office located on the main street from the gate, but unlike in Yange where it was located facing the gate directly, it was located to the right of the main street. I didn’t have a clear idea of how Choska was divided up between the different social classes, but it looked like the Council Office was sandwiched in between what I would call the Merchants and the Riches if I used Yange analogies.

The outside was still as majestic, trying its best to outshine everything else in the city. The inside maintained the same layout with a few more receptionists than in Sjuma. Was that two or three more? I had somehow forgotten how many receptionists I had seen in Sjuma. It couldn’t be helped though, I had only ever been in the Council Office the one time.

I was in and out in under five minutes. Whatever they did to register a competitor must be a quick thing, and thankfully, there hadn’t been anyone waiting, and there were several free receptionists to boot. One of the free receptionists might have been an elf but I avoided them like the plague, I wasn’t ready for a full on interaction with another species. At least not yet.

Sadly, The Competitors’ Inn was located near the center of the city and far away from the Council Office. Thankfully for me, I had Xan to help me find it. Apparently, all the inns where the competitors would stay all throughout the competition would have that same name, as far as Xan could remember.

It took us a while to get there, and I was rightfully disappointed. It looked the same as The Competitors’ Inn in Sjuma, from the two guards standing at the entrance, the halfway divided dining area, the wooden brown walkway, to the receptionist area and the two staircases to the side of it. I had expected something new to experience, but if everything stayed the same, then it might get boring fast. The fights, the cities might be different, but if we stayed at rooms that looked identical all throughout, the sense of being in a new place would be greatly reduced.

I cautiously approached the receptionist area with its two occupants, trying so much not to pay undue attention to the very clearly animus receptionist, but I still somehow ended up on their side, inwardly cursing myself. I placed my card on the counter upon arriving, and slid it over to the receptionist. “I’m a competitor, here for The Counties.”

I felt a sense of déjà vu rush through me then. I must have said something similar when I first entered The Competitors’ Inn in Sjuma. I congratulated myself immensely when I didn’t jump out of my skin when the animus’ nails, claws, lightly brushed my finger as they took the card from me. On the inside, it was a whole different matter. I turned to look for Xan just for a distraction to keep me from fidgeting.

I immediately jumped, swinging my staff so fast I barely saw it cross the distance. Thankfully, thankfully, I missed.