Chapter 46

“I told you to throw away your old clothes, you don’t need them anymore,” Xan said as I laid my staffs by the desk.

The desk meant that we, the competitors, were expected to be reading things. I wasn’t sure what that was, but I had yet to come across a book that I actually needed to purchase. Wait… that wasn’t exactly true, I had books I wanted to buy, but the logistics of carrying them on me as I walked from town to town after every round was done baffled me. Besides, books were way too expensive, especially the ones that would actually help me.

In our time at the bazaar, the cheapest book I had seen about The Grand Competition had gone for one-fifty gold. And that was just basic knowledge, with a few in depth topics thrown in. Even Xan had considered it a waste of money for a competitor; for an enthusiast, it would be worth every gold. But Xan had meant that statement without knowing just how far in basic knowledge I lagged behind, maybe it would be worth it for me.

I waved the thoughts of books away as I began unpacking my old clothes, the ones I still very much needed.

“Easy for you to say. If I don’t make it further, I can easily sell the new clothes for a gold or two each. That should be enough to get me by until I find work,” I told him, moving to hung my farmhand clothes and old clothes to the hanger, next to the ones he had already hang there.

Looking at them, I could clearly see just how bad they were, especially when they were side by side with the new ones he had just hanged up. Maybe he was right, but until I had an assured source of more gold, especially more than the ones he already spent on me, then the old attires stayed.

“What are you talking about? Even if you don’t win the first fight, you will still get nearly as much money as you got in the Baronies. That should hold you up for a while, especially with the kind of frugal lifestyle you seem to prefer,” Xan said.

I was surprised by that, my hand stilling in place. I hadn’t put much thought in how the prizes would be different at the Counties. Boni had said something about the top finisher getting over a thousand gold during the previous iteration of the Counties. If they increased the prize like they did for the Baronies, then it could be something substantial.

But in the end, “It still wouldn’t matter. I won hundred gold in the Baronies, where is it now?”

I went back to unpacking my things, putting the boots I had picked besides the hanger. They were still clean and fresh, they didn’t pose the risk of diffusing their smell to the clothes. Not that that was ever a concern for me, I washed my clothes and boots on a daily basis, if anything, it was the washing that would do them in.

“I need a lot more gold than that, a whole lot more. With the debt—”

“Investment,” Xan corrected me.

“—you have on me; I can’t afford to settle for anything less than something equal to what it is.” 558 golds to be exact, and that was not counting the meals I had had on him.

After I was done with the clothes and boots, I went to inspect the staffs. I knew the old one was out of commission, acting like nothing more than a glorified stick. Two of the others had seen a fight each, but the one I had used in the finals had a lot of notches where I had failed to defend properly against the swords my opponent had wielded. The other one looked relatively fine to my eyes, and the last one was still a virgin.

I picked the old staff as I got up. “I want to know where all the arenas are.”

Xan didn’t even complain, following me out of the room, the Inn and into the streets. We maintained a pace that allowed me to at least get an idea of where things were in relation to each other. After the elf passerby and the animus receptionist, I had expected to meet a lot more of the other species, but that wasn’t the case. I caught glimpses of what might possibly be one of them every once in a while, but that was it.

“How many arenas are there?” I asked as we took the first branch off since we left the Inn.

“The receptionist said there are six arenas in total, but only four qualify to hold The Grand Competition fights. Of the other two, one is an old arena scheduled for renovation this year, and the other one isn’t done yet.”

I could already make out the signs of what could only be an arena at the edge of the buildings blocking the street we were on, two more turns and we would be there.

“Why wasn’t it done before The Grand Competition began?” I asked as we reached the end of the street and took our first turn.

“I don’t know everything, you know that, right?” Xan asked me, throwing me a sideways glance. “It feels like you know very little about everything, and you expect me to know everything you don’t know.”

“It’s not that…” I mumbled to myself, but Xan must have picked it up.

“What?” he asked.

“The only way for me to know what I don’t know is for me to seek answers to what I don’t know,” I told him instead. “Right now, you are the only one around to answer those questions for me.”

I picked up the pace then, there was no way I could get lost with the arena being merely two turns from The Competitors’ Inn.

“Besides, before I joined The Grand Competition, the only thing I did was farm all day, rest, and repeat.”

It took us two more turns to get to the arena, making a total of three turns. That was one arena down, three more to go. But if things went as they did during the Baronies, then I only needed to know the location of one other arena, assuming the one I was staring at was the main one. It looked like it could be.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Since we knew that Xan wouldn’t be let into the arena itself, we went to the terraces instead, but we still had to pay a silver-hour for the both us. I also noticed that Xan used something like a card to pay, I had seen it before and just assumed it was his Citizen Card. But after seeing it several more times, I was more than sure it wasn’t his Citizen Card. Maybe a bank card, there was a banking institution after all, it wasn’t a far stretch to think that debit and credit cards existed too.

“Wait… does that mean that time you came to talk to me while I was training you also had to pay?” I asked as we managed to make it to the terraces.

“Yes, how else did you think I got in?”

“I never thought about it,” I told him, finally getting a full view of the arena.

It wasn’t that big, about the same size as the Main Arena in Sjuma, but the terraces were a deal more numerous than those of the Main Arena. Maybe double more, which would mean that the arena could sit more than three times as many people.

“Have you ever been in one of those?” I asked him as I pointed to the special viewing area of the arena.

He shook his head, and asked, “You?”

“Yeah, just the one time. During the first semifinals.”

We didn’t spend much time in the arena after that, quickly leaving for the other arenas. In less than an hour, we had visited all the four arenas that would be holding the Counties. Unlike in Sjuma, all the arenas were exactly the same size, about hundred meters in diameter, while the sitting area was roughly the same, though Jibane Arena, the main one and also the first one we visited, had a little bit more seating space.

We did find a few people training in one of the other arenas, Chulu if I remembered correctly. I assumed it was a group of some of the other competitors, and avoided them diligently. They were too far for my poor eyesight to pick up any details about them, I hoped the same was true for them too.

The other arenas were Alani and Ithima.

After the arenas, we set off to one of the training areas in Choska set aside for the competitors until the Counties were over.

“Why are they not located in the arenas? Wouldn’t that make things easier?” I asked as we rounded a familiar corner. I was sure we were one corner away from the Jibane Arena and two from The Competitors’ Inn.

“How would that even work?” Xan asked.

“They…” but I ran dry. Try as I might like, I couldn’t picture what a training area actually looked like. Then there was the matter of the number of people it would need to handle, yeah, I hadn’t thought it through before I asked that question.

Xan came to a stop right next to a pair of guards who were standing in front of a relatively unassuming building. Its outside didn’t standout that much from the surrounding buildings, but its sign read ‘Jibane Training Center’, with two figures on each side of the writing performing different activities. I was sure one of them was lifting weights, the others I could only guess. Pilates? Maybe yoga, and then there was running, or skipping, it was hard to tell with the figure slightly higher compared to the others. The last one, I had absolutely no idea what they were doing, nor that a human body could actually accomplish what the figure was doing, was that even a human figure? Maybe I was looking at it from the wrong perspective.

“Go on, I’ll wait for you here,” Xan said, as he gestured towards the entrance of the building.

“Alone?”

“This is one of the few places I can’t go in, no matter the amount of gold I throw at them,” he said, gazing at the guards.

“Do you have that much gold?” I asked, amazed, and envious.

“No! I was just trying to make it clear that I’m not allowed in.”

I stared at the guards, the door, and thought about what I would find when I actually went inside and finally came to a conclusion.

“Maybe another time,” I said as I made my way towards where I thought the library was. I had seen it two times while we were touring the arenas, I was sure I had a rough idea of where it was.

“You are not even going to take a peek inside? They don’t bite,” Xan argued as he caught up with me. “You don’t even know if anyone is inside. It could be empty.”

“Even you don’t believe that,” I said as I took my first turn, three to go.

“Where are we going then?”

“To the library,” I answered him, then realized that I actually no longer needed him for the day. “You can go do whatever you want.”

“I’ll see you to the library first. Make sure you don’t get lost.”

True enough, when we made it to the library, Xan bid me farewell and went on his merry way. I stared at him as he walked away for more than a minute. Unless he sought me out, that would be the last time we saw each other for the entirety of the Counties. I was about to begin grinding, I wouldn’t have time for leisuring.

I felt a little anxious going into the library, my hands were already moist with sweat, and as I talked with the receptionist, my voice came out a little squeaky. The last time I had been in the library, I had had Xan as an anchor, but all alone, it was overwhelming. And at the same time freeing.

The sheer amount of knowledge housed in that library alone, I could spend a whole lifetime in there and never grasp it all. I couldn’t wait for a time when my curiosity would be allowed to run free, but before that, shields.

Xan had shown me where I could find books related to shields the last time we had visited the library; on the second floor, the third to last aisle on the left of the staircase. I had crammed it like my life depended on it, it would. I was also determined not to be distracted by pretty pictures any more.

It took me a while to find the correct aisle, it had been to the right, not left, of the staircase. But I didn’t mind the delay, I had paid for five silver-hours which would end just after lunch hour, or 1400hrs.

…

I took my time browsing through the aisle, looking at the titles, trying to see which could actually help me get started in the shielding business. There were the most obvious titles, such as Basics in Shields, Introduction to Shielding, Shielding at a Glance and The A – Z of Shielding, and then the eye catching ones: Competition Oriented Shielding, The Amazing Field of Shielding, Current Shield Art and Techniques – 15721. The last piqued my interest a little, that number looked like it stated the year the book was compiled, which was huge, making me wonder when exactly the Realm of Mesily began counting years. Or it could be something else entirely, the number of arts and techniques covered in the book perhaps?

In the end, I picked three books that had hinted at actually having content that I could actually understand.

The first book, Fundamentals of Mana Shields, had basic information on creating shields, but it didn’t have as many details about the properties of the different shields that existed, adding to that, it had little to no illustrations for demonstration purposes, and the few present weren’t detailed enough for me. I had vowed off picture browsing, but I also happened to learn best by visual assimilation; monkey see, monkey do.

The second book, Gelmus and Nislin Shields in The Grand Competition, intrigued me the most, it had text alright, but almost every page had an illustration of a shield, essentially a picture book. A picture occupied nearly half of every page and then a full description of the shield filled the rest, talking about the base properties of the shield, what it best protected against and its weaknesses.

The third book, also Fundamentals of Mana Shields, was worse than the first book, all words and no pictures, all it did was give an in depth explanation of the basics of shields. Browsing through, it felt like it was meant as a companion book to the first one, they even had the same title. Looking closely at the book cover again, I finally saw a small italicized ‘Detailed’ just below the title.