Chapter 69
I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to that. Me too? Come on, Hartie. Anything would fine, anything! I tried to encourage myself to act like a normal human being and respond cordially. I really did.
“Huh.” Was all I managed.
“Can I sit?” he asked, gesturing to the seat opposite mine.
It took me a few long seconds before I gathered up the wits to nod to him. He casually took the seat, looking like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. It prompted me to stare at him carefully, a little more closely now that he was sitting across from me. He wasn’t as imposing as I had thought him to be, but he was still bigger than me.
I hadn’t noticed it before, but as I observed him closely, I could see how he was all fidgety, barely maintaining eye contact with me, clear signs that he was a little nervous with the whole interaction. I guess after being interrupted from my meal I was more focused on what I had lost than the person in front of me.
“The potato-meat lanya, great choice for the night before a fight,” he said as he briefly glazed at my meal.
The comment brought me back to what I had been doing before I was rudely, or not, interrupted. A part of me just wanted him to get on with what had brought him to my table and be done with it. Delaying it wasn’t helping at all. Not for me at least.
“You are making this more awkward than it needs to be.”
It took me a few seconds to realize that I had actually spoken that out loud. I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me whole there and then. Maybe I could manage it with [Earth Grab], it had leveled up a bit since the last time I used it to its full potential. As I felt myself slowly descend into a pit of embarrassment, I decided to face the situation as I would any opponent in the arena. I composed myself as best as I could, and stared him down as if I was about to maul him to kingdom come.
“Right, right,” he said as he tried to maintain eye contact with me, his eyes dancing from side to side. I had always wondered how people managed that, what exactly were they doing as their eyes moved so?
“I was by that table with other guys when I saw you and decided to come and say hi,” he continued as he gestured behind him, quickly adding, “For us not to meet tomorrow as strangers.”
I let that linger between us before responding as he seemed ready to begin talking again, “Sometimes, that is much preferable.”
I couldn’t believe how cold that statement sounded, even to my ears. I was being cautious, not cold, but my body seemed to be responding to the state I had assumed a little too well. Even all the nervousness from before had slowly ebbed out. Looking at him, I could clearly see that that had made him a little bit off put. And that made me feel a little guilty. The littlest.
“This is the first time I’m talking to an opponent before a fight,” I told him in an effort to ease the mood. “At least, as much as I can remember.”
Potential future opponents didn’t really count as fights had to be won before they actually became opponents.
“Second for me,” he said as he seemed to settle down a little bit.
“You think that makes you lucky?”
“Mesily no!” he shook his head with a light laugh. “I nearly lost the last time.”
I looked down at my plate, running my spoon through the potato-meat mixture. What had he called it? Lanaya?
“Some would consider that luck,” I finally said, after not finding it in me the drive to eat.
“Yeah, some would,” he agreed.
A few seconds of silence stretched between us, and I felt the awkwardness begin to set in again. It always made me feel uncomfortable, and pressured, when people left it to me to drive the conversation. Especially if it looked like they should be the ones doing the driving.
“So, what did you want us to talk about? Where we are from, our likes and dislikes, like they do on dates,” I said in my poor attempt to string the conversation along.
“Dates!?” he said, his tone a little uneven.
“Yeah. You wanted us to get to know each other before the fight tomorrow. Do you know of any other way of getting to know each other?”
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“Right, right.”
That seemed to get him out of his, whatever it was he had fallen into. Under any other circumstance, I was sure that I would have been the one fumbling around on what to say. It had always happened in my life before, and I always hated it. But with something to talk about, the collected guy I had seen at first was soon back, and we spend a lot of time just talking. Just because I didn’t like talking to people didn’t mean that I didn’t know how to.
…
By the time we called it quits, I had somehow managed to eat the remaining part of my meal. But even after all that time, I had somehow managed not to get his name.
I made it to my room feeling tired in more ways than one, and a splitting headache to boot. All that talking had done a number on me, reminding me again why I found the whole constant talking not worthy it for me. I just couldn’t understand why other people would put themselves through it over and over again.
I went through my before bed routine but got stuck studying my new staffs. I was curious as to what made them better than my old ones, and how I could actually make new ones that were just as good. Or maybe even better, for I would need really good staffs if I made it past the Counties. Before long, the tiredness took over and I found myself dozing off. I postponed the studying for another day and retired to bed. I had an early match the following day, and I would need all the rest I could get if I hoped to win.
…
Just like the Baronies, the quarterfinals were the last matches to be held in all the arenas, while the semis and the finals would be held in the Jibane Arena.
I arrived for my fight as well rested as I could have managed, and after having taken a moderate breakfast. We stood opposite to each other, in our start positions, ready for the fight to begin. And I was finally able to learn the name of my opponent.
[Human : Coello][Level: 41]
Status:
[HP: 7619/7727]
[MP: 6811/6941]
[SP: 7411/7461]
I didn’t know how I felt about the fight in general. Previously, the one on the other side had always a complete stranger who I needed to take down so that I could earn more gold. It wasn’t the same for Coello. It wasn’t that I knew him that well, a few hours of talking weren’t enough for that, but it was that I knew some of the reasons as to why he was fighting. Maybe they weren’t great, neither were they so simplistic as mine either.
This getting to know your opponent before the fight wasn’t such a good idea. It was making me doubt my drive, my reasons for putting myself through all the hurdles I was going through in The Grand Competition.
But in the end, this was a competition, and every one of us had joined it to win. It didn’t matter what drove me to that goal, I was going to plough him to the arena ground if that was what it would take for me to be declared the victor. After all, to me, my money problems were the only thing that mattered. Nothing else.
With that mentality in mind, I primed myself as the start of the fight was called.
He was dressed in what I would call a minimalistic armor, a chest plate and maybe a back plate too, I wasn’t sure. The rest of his body was covered in thick clothing, with an axe for a weapon and a small circular shield painted black and yellow in concentric circles.
Now, if only he had added a horned-helmet, then he would have completed the whole Viking look.
…
The axe was roughly as long as his arm, maybe shorter, with the aft a waxy brown wood with a slight curve to it, the blade flared out to a near half-circle. I had no prior knowledge of axes other than the simple ones I occasionally, rarely even, used to fell down trees and chop them up into pieces. Worse still, I didn’t know how to fight against one. Maybe I should have asked him that during our get to know each yesterday.
I watched him closely for a while. I stepped closer, my eyes glued on him, and the rest of the world fell away. My palms began to sweat a little, and my vision narrowed, excluding my surroundings except for Coello. I am focusing too much, I told myself, I need to pull back and be aware of my surroundings. So I glanced around and used my peripheral vision to see if I could catch anything out of the ordinary. Nothing seemed amiss.
He slowly widened his stance and reared back to swing the axe like one would chop wood. At the halfway point of the downswing, I spooked, and he only scored a shallow hit on my right leg. I whipped around and snarled at him before lunging. Somehow, he managed to put the handle of the axe between himself and I, and I snapped at the wood for all my worth.
He pushed to the left a bit, then snatched the axe back to the right to dislodge it from its prison. He only had a split second before I was lunging on him again. This time he swung the axe like a golf club and just aimed for my head.
He sucked at it.
But he got a hit in though; bad news, or good, was that it wasn’t the cutting edge. The back portion of the axe clocked me in the head, and I went down in a heap. With me stunned and laying there helpless, he lined himself up and brought the axe down with all his might.
It took all the willpower I had left in me to summon the energy needed for me to roll away, with the axe striking a breath away from my neck. What is wrong with this guy? Does he want to off me that bad?
I quickly threw a [Fire Ball] at him, which he deflected with his shield, and I used that moment to get back to my feet, attacking him almost immediately. He reacted fast enough, parrying my attacks and issuing attacks of his own. He knocked off my staff with his shield, closing the distance between us as he sliced for my neck with his axe. I twisted as fast as I could out of its reach, but it still glazed my shoulder.
I felt a searing pain where the axe had scored, and I was horrified to see the area quickly becoming wetted. I was forced back into the fight as he kept his attacks coming, my heart hammering as red hot pain raced through me. I gritted my teeth as I returned attacks of my own; it was times like those that I wished I had a bladed weapon. But soon enough, the pain receded, replaced by a soothing warmth that was quickly over showed by the strain I could feel creeping into my muscles.
After our few engagements, I had taken the measure of him; he was fast and lithe, cool under pressure. In other words, he would be a tough opponent to crack. I wondered what kind of strategies his previous opponents had employed against him, how had they fared? Maybe I should have watched one of his fights before, then I would have something to use against him. Maybe a way to get past his defenses.