Chapter 60

No, I hadn’t killed him. The healers weren’t in any rush to deal with him as they had been with Dawkins in the Baronies semifinals, so I assumed I hadn’t done that much damage. But I was certain that I had dislocated his neck, there was no way that head turn had being normal. Didn’t people die from dislocated necks?

I pushed that thought away as I slowly got up from my bed, well one of the arena’s recovery beds. As much as I wanted to win get gold, I wasn’t exactly interested in killing people willy-nilly.

My body felt a little sore in places, but otherwise I was fine. Compared to how I had felt after all my fights in the Baronies, it was a welcome improvement, I hadn’t liked the sore-near-pain that came after a hard fought, or ruthlessly fought, fight. It wasn’t that my opponent had been weak or inexperienced, but he somehow hadn’t made me put my all into the fight. I knew he could have fought better, after all he had made it to the Counties, but he had not been able to fully showcase his capabilities. Whatever the reason was, I was glad for it. Easy wins were always welcome. But it had me wondering, had I gone through the same thing for the Baronies finals? Had the other finalist noticed? I wished they hadn’t.

Looking at the other beds, I realized that I was the first to wake up. I was more than sure that my opponent wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon, but the competitors that had gone before my fight was another matter. My fight had been the second for the arena, after a very protracted first fight that nearly carried over the approximated time for a single fight. It wasn’t that the fights had a set time to be completed, but after years of The Grand Competition, some analysts had come up with an approximate time of how long a fight would last. Of course, there were the occasional outliers that lasted longer normal, but those where few and far in between, sometimes not even happening throughout The Grand Competition.

I slowly got up and excused myself to the attendee healers as I picked up the pieces of my staff and made my way out of the healing room. The sooner I was out of there, the sooner I could begin working on getting better for the next fight. It was a long way to the top of the ladder, and I was determined to make it there.

“Hey, wait up.”

I couldn’t believe it. Xan found me just a few steps after I got out of the arena, again.

“I’m starting to think that you actually waited for me to get out,” I told him when he caught up and we began heading up to the Competitors’ Inn. At least that was where I was headed, I wasn’t so sure about Xan’s destination though. I had suspected that Xan might come to watch my fight but I had thought it a long stretch though.

“Not really. In the morning, I just got lucky, here I waited,” he said. “I came here after the second fight in Jibane Arena ended.”

So he hadn’t watched after all. I asked, “You waited all that time here?”

“No, I don’t have that kind of patience. It’s being more than two hours since your fight ended. I watched two fights before one of the healers alerted me to your return to consciousness,” he said.

“I didn’t think they allowed to do that,” I pointed out. I wasn’t sure if that was the case, but there had been something about patient-doctor confidentiality back on old earth. It seemed like something the two earths would have in common.

“I asked nicely.”

“You bribed them, you mean.”

“I like to think of it as encouraging them to do what I wanted,” he tried finagling his way out of the bribery charge. “I heard you were good, an easy win for you, I was told.”

“I just got lucky, my opponent was a little out of it and I took full advantage of that,” I said, I assumed that if I hadn’t gotten over my new-species stupefaction syndrome for the elves, it might have been me who wasn’t fully present for the fight. I still had to get over the other species, but I thought I was on the safe side where the anima where concerned.

We walked for a few minutes in silence, the passage a little easier than I was used to. There were far fewer people in the streets, either because of the hour of the day, or because the competition had begun and people were all crammed up in the arenas.

“Where are we headed to?” Xan asked as we took another corner, coming to a somewhat unfamiliar street.

“The Competitors’ Inn for me,” I said, taking a look around. The buildings were clearly foreign to me, I couldn’t believe it.

“Well, we are far from that. I don’t even think we are heading in the right direction at all,” Xan said.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked in mild irritation.

“I thought you had a destination in mind,” he replied with a mock gesture of surrender.

“Where are we anyway?” I asked him, looking around as I tried to see if I could get a bearing. But I was coming up blank.

“Near the bazaar,” Xan said.

When I heard that, my gaze quickly shifted to the remnants of my staff I had in my hands. It wouldn’t hurt to check them, I told myself.

“Maybe we should pay it a visit,” I said as I began trying to recall where exactly it had been. I had spent the whole two weeks actively avoiding it too, a little bit more than I avoided Artina and the others.

“You want to willingly go to the bazaar?”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Let’s just go before I change my mind,” I said as I took one of three routes visible to me, thinking that I had a one-in-three chance of taking the correct route.

“You are going the wrong way.”

Of course, I was.

“What are you interested in?” Xan asked as we took a turn I was sure looked familiar.

I answered him by shoving the pieces of my staff into his field of view.

“I see. Wait… I thought your fight was easy,” Xan couldn’t hold back the surprise as he nearly shouted the last part.

“It wasn’t. Plus, I was using a stick to fight off a heavily armored, well-armed opponent,” I said as I stared at the pieces, “This is the expected outcome.”

“And your loss,” Xan added.

“What?” his comment had me confused. But then it registered, and I had to agree with him, if my opponent had been a little there, I might not have won. Especially not with how my staff broke up at the end, it was new too. What if I had decided to use one of the old ones?

We soon made it to the bazaar, and just like the streets, it was less populated than I remembered. Xan led me as we weaved through the pathways, it might have been less populated, but it was still too much for me, especially if I had to keep track of someone else.

The first stall Xan brought us to only had staffs leaning more towards Mana focusing. As much as I was training myself for that, I wasn’t ready for such kind of staffs. Not that I would ever want one of them. Unlike other heavy Mana users, I was more of a staff fighter who happened to use Mana to supplement his other fighting skills.

We moved through more of such stalls, all having the same or similar kind of staffs. It was becoming increasingly clear what other people thought about my staff. When asked, the last vendor advised us to visits the armorers instead.

I was apprehensive of that, staffs weren’t something that armorers could make, not unless they made them out of metal, something my staffs clearly weren’t. If I could afford metal, I could have easily gone with swords instead.

My fears were proved to be true when the first armorer presented us with all metal staffs, he even looked dubious when I asked about wooden staffs. Their prices weren’t something to joke about either, cheaper than swords yes, but still way out of my price range. There were a few machete like weapons that were even cheaper than the staffs, but when I asked about them, the armorer laughed it off saying that if went with those in a fight, I would just be asking for a defeat.

The trend continued for a while before I finally gave up and asked Xan we return to The Competitors’ Inn. But Xan didn’t want to hear about it, saying that he had one last place we could check, if it was a miss still, then we would call it quits.

As it turned out, Xan’s last ditch place was a woodworker’s workshop.

“Why, pray tell, didn’t you bring us here sooner? This is clearly more likely to have what I’m looking for,” I said after reading the name of the workshop, and seeing some of the wares that were displayed on the outside.

“I thought that the armorers would be more inclined to actually having weapons, this here is a mere carpentry workshop, nothing more,” Xan defended himself, before adding, “Besides, it was your idea to go to the bazaar.”

“I didn’t know where to get them, and they did have staffs, just not the kind I was looking for,” I quickly tried to defend myself.

“Let’s just get this over with,” Xan said as he moved inside the shop.

“Are there any other carpentry workshops, or is this the only one in Choska City?” I asked as I followed him in, he had claimed it was a last ditch effort and that we would retire after trying the shop, I was right in assuming it was the only one in the city.

“There are other shops in the city, but you won’t find any with products that could compare to mine in quality,” a rough voice spoke to my left, so close that I nearly jumped back out of the shop. Why? Why did shop owners keep doing that to me?

Compared to the immediate pestering we received when we entered a stall in the bazaar, other than that comment about quality, the shop owner held back as we perused through the shop. I had thought that Xan would go directly to asking for the staffs, but he was doing a good job of pretending we were interested in a… was that a carriage seat? Was he actually shopping for a seat for his carriage? Where would he even put it? On top of the carriage?

I moved in close to him, making sure that the shop owner wasn’t within hearing distance before asking, lowly, “What are you doing?”

He looked at me, then back at the carriage seat he had been studying, “Checking out this seat.”

“I can see that! The question is why.”

“Because I’m interested?” he answered in a half-question tone, like he couldn’t fathom how that wasn’t obvious to me.

I ignored that as I asked, “What about my staff?”

“What about it?”

“Shouldn’t we be looking for it?”

“You are here, I think you can manage that at least,” he said as he turned back to his prior activity of checking out the array of carriage seats on display in the shop.

Now that I paid it enough attention, I could see that the main focus of the shop was carriages, with a few other furniture thrown in just to cover for when the shop was experiencing a low turnover.

There was no way I would be finding a staff in the shop.

I swallowed my nervousness as I slowly approached the shop owner. If I was going to get any help, it would be easier to just ask instead of spending countless minutes looking for something that might not even be in the shop.

“I…” I began, showing the broken pieces to him.

He immediately took them and began examining them. “What did you do with it? Go around hitting boulders? Hmm… I can sense the remnants of Mana channels in it… rudimentary at best…”

He then looked back at me, after having done whatever inspection he wanted, I assumed. “You’re looking for a staff, right?”

I nodded at that, throwing a glaze at Xan, but he was too engrossed in his seats, already testing out one of them. I guess I’m on my own on this one.

“Hmm… I don’t have the [Staff Making] Skill, so I can’t make a staff nearly as good as this one, but if you bring me one, I can make it more durable. As strong as tampered iron.”

I assumed tampered iron meant steel. If there was a way to make my wooden staffs as hard as steel, then there was no need to purchase a metallic one. But how long would it take me to learn the Skill to actually do that, and what about levelling it up?

“How much would that cost?”

“With a good quality staff, forty-gold,” he answered.

“Wow…” I really needed to learn to control myself, I couldn’t go on just letting my feelings and emotions leak out as they wanted, but in my defense, that was nearly as much as a metal staff.

He went to say something, but Xan interrupted him. “Hey do you work directly with the carriages themselves?”

The shop owner threw me a look, and proceeded to move towards Xan when I nodded at him. They spent the next half-hour talking about carriages while I reminisced at the situation I found myself in. If I didn’t learn the staff hardening Skill fast, I would run out of staffs long before the competition was over. And given how far off the forest was, making new ones wasn’t an option.

…

“Did you come here because you wanted to shop for a new seat for your carriage?” I asked as we made our way out of the shop.

“No! I mean a little bit yes,” he said. “When we began looking for your staff, I wasn’t, but then I got into the mood and I decided to come check out a few of them.”

“Do you always go shopping when you get into the mood for it?”

He didn’t answer that, but the laugh he gave was answer enough. What it was like to have such kind of gold, I could only imagine. Soon, I promised myself, soon I would have enough gold to do just that too. But first, I needed to find the most lucrative business ideas to undertake in the Realm of Mesily, right after I won a ton of gold in the competition.