The entire line fell silent. All eyes turned toward Rhys, with the exception of Ryota, who was still facepalming. The giantess sighed and reached over her shoulder for her sword, while the enormously fat man turned ever so slowly to face Rhys.
“What did you say?” he asked, in his almost comically high-pitched voice.
“Did those earrings clog your ears? Are your gems blinding you? Me and my friend and everyone else here behind us were already in line, and you’re cutting in front of us, sir. Is that how a proper mage behaves?” Rhys demanded, crossing his arms.
“Gods,” Ryota muttered, rubbing his temples.
“Did you just say that… to me?” the man squeaked.
“I sure did. And everyone else was thinking it, too. Did your mother never teach you how to behave?”
Ebi Sutaro narrowed his eyes. “I grew up an orphan. I had no mother.”
Rhys scoffed, unimpressed. “Yeah, me too, but look at me. I know how to wait in line, unlike some people. I learned respect.”
Ebi Sutaro minced over, his little steps floaty. He got right up in Rhys’s face, or tried to. To put it kindly, he wouldn’t have had to get on his knees. Nonetheless, he still exerted his thickness in Rhys’s general direction. “Respect,” the small, wide man hissed, “is something fools like you show me.”
“Fools do, I’m sure. Luckily, I’m no fool.”
Behind Rhys, Ryota breathed out another pained gods.
Ebi narrowed his eyes and exerted his aura on Rhys, clamping down on him and trying to force him to fall out of the sky. Rhys couldn’t beat his aura with strength alone. The man did out-tier him by a significant margin, after all. But what he could do was weaken the man’s aura enough that he could resist it. He pushed out an aura of his own, one made of pure impurities, and slammed it into the aura that was bearing down on him.
Impurities were naturally virulent, and the second his impure aura clashed with Ebi’s, it tried to climb into the other man’s aura and rush to him, but Rhys held it back. He wasn’t trying to kill Ebi, just intimidate him. He held the impurities in a bubble around him, keeping them close enough that Ebi wouldn’t be able to sense what he was doing, but far enough that Ebi’s aura failed to crush him. Ebi’s aura struck the impurities and crumbled, weakening just around Rhys. The aura that struck him wasn’t Ebi’s tier, which Rhys judged to be 6, maybe a very weak 7, but something much, much weaker, barely even Tier 5.
Even as he did it, Rhys recognized that he wouldn’t be able to do this to everyone. No… probably the only Tier 7, high 6 he could do this to was Ebi Sutaro. The man’s unsteady foundation was weak. He hadn’t trained for his strength, but merely bought it. As a result, he didn’t know how to use… well, anything. His mana. His aura. All of the foundations were shaky, and when Rhys exerted a little effort, it was enough to make them crumble. If he’d trained at all, if he knew what he was doing, he absolutely would’ve crushed Rhys easily even with Rhys’s bullshit tactics, but he didn’t.
Ebi was fundamentally, and in all ways, like that billionaire who’d streamed himself playing a game that he was “super good at” and “on the top of the leaderboard for,” and then spent the entire stream dropping the best items, picking up the worst, and struggling to kill basic enemies. Sure, if Ebi had known how to pilot his character—that was, use his magehood—he absolutely could’ve solo no-touch one-hit KO’d Rhys. But he didn’t, so Rhys could give him the middle finger, and there was nothing he could do about it.
And so, Ebi crashed down on Rhys, and Rhys stood there unmoving, totally nonchalant. He didn’t visibly strain at all. His arms remained crossed, and not a single vein stood out on his skin. It was because he wasn’t actually countering Ebi’s aura, and instead using a tricky workaround, but no one knew that. Critically, Ebi didn’t know that. Nor did Ebi have the practice to identify what Rhys was doing, or recognize that Rhys was bluffing. All he saw was that he’d tried to crush a tiny Tier 5 with his aura, and failed to so much as make him strain.
The man paled. He stepped back, shocked. His eyes darted to his giantess bodyguard, who looked at Rhys with much less shock on her face. Ebi was fearful, but the giantess’s eyes appraised Rhys, looking him up and down. She squinted a little.
Rhys’s stomach sucked in. Uh oh. She knows it’s a trick.
“I… didn’t realize, sir. I apologize.” Ebi bowed quickly to Rhys and retreated. “Leanne! The line.”
The giantess looked at Rhys for one more moment, and a smile crawled across her face. And then she turned to her boss, her expression flat once more. “Sir.”
The tiny man and his outsize bodyguard turned and went to the back of the line. Rhys retracted his impurities and dusted off his shoulder with a little harrumph.
Beside him, Ryota stared in shock. “What the… how’d you do that?”
Rhys grinned. “Don’t you know? I’m secretly a Tier 8 expert.”
“No you aren’t.”
“Yeah, but Ebi doesn’t know that.”
Ryota looked after Ebi, then turned back to Rhys. He shook his head. “The real deal is different.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Nothing.”
The guards, who’d remained silent through the whole confrontation, coughed loudly and gestured thee two of them forward. “Hey, you there. Step forward.”
“Yes, sirs,” Rhys replied. The two of them did as the guards said, and before long, they finally set foot into the capital.
It was grand. Far grander than where Rhys had come from. The streets were paved with glittering, multicolored stones, and the houses were all constructed from the finest of materials in all kinds of rainbow colors. Shops displayed their wares in vivid hues, and overhead, a permanent, glassy rainbow arched over the capital. Everywhere he looked, there were bright colors, rainbows, and arcs of seven-hued bridges and other infrastructure marking the skyline.
“For the gays,” Rhys whispered to himself.
“What was that?”
“I said, it looks amaze…ing.”
Ryota nodded, a touch of pride to his voice. “The seven hues are the region’s banner. They represent the original seven tribes that combined to found the region. Over the years, those seven tribes fragmented further until there were over twenty of us, but the seven hues remained our calling card.”
“No way, you guys actually salute the pride flag? That’s so awesome.”
“We are… quite proud of our flag?” Ryota said, squinting a little in confusion.
“Don’t worry about it. But seriously, dude, this place is so cool. It’s like Lisa Frank herself personally puked all over the town. Very nineties-retro-girlpunk.” It wasn’t his aesthetic, per se, but one, his aesthetic was trash, and two, more importantly, it was an aesthetic. He loved a place that took an aesthetic and ran with it. Was it a little too far? Was it oversaturated and overdone? Were his eyes bleeding a little from how neon bright and colorful everything was? Yes, yes, yes, and he loved it. Anyone who was willing to take an aesthetic this far was a big thumbs up in his book, regardless of if he loved the aesthetic or not. Ryota’s entire region gained a good ten points in his book for this absolute mess of a gem of a capital.
Ryota just stared. “I have no idea what you just said, but I think it was a compliment?”
“Definitely a compliment. I had a friend who’d go nuts if she saw this place. Grew up with all the notebooks and folders and markers and everything. She still collected it as an adult, even.”
“Notebooks? Of… the capital?” Ryota asked.
“Well… kind of. The same theme, you know?” Rhys looked around him, then nodded at Ryota. “Why don’t you give me the walking tour? I’ve never been here before, and I’d love to see the sights.”
“Certainly. Come right this way.”
Ryota set off, leading Rhys through the streets. Rhys half-listened, more interested in scanning for his two actual goals: the fierce mana, which hopefully led him to the source of that entire plot, and Ryota’s trashy brothers, who were just begging to get mulched. He figured the walking tour would give him a lay of the land, and secondarily, that his brothers were likely to be living near the sights, or at least in high town. The tour would either teach him where high town was, or take him by Ryota’s brothers incidentally as part of seeing the sights, so either way, it was likely to lead him to a win on that front.
As for the fierce mana, he had literally no lead aside from stasis-boy in his core, and stasis-boy wasn’t talking, and not just because he was in stasis, either. He was canvassing the capital because Fifteenth was part of the plot, which implied the royal court was involved in the plot; plus, there was a lot of money behind it, if they were funding Fifteenth and scattering magic tomes all over the region. Rich people and royals lived in the capital, as proven by the prince (‘s garbage friend) and the merchant’s confrontation in the line moments ago. It was a reasonable place to start.
Of course, there was also the fact that the masked dudes the royals liked to hire were based out of the capital, but that was really just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Once he’d had some time to think it over, he’d realized it was kind of crazy to go to the masked guys’ base to find out who was hiring them—they’d all be trained to not speak, and whoever hired them almost certainly wasn’t kicking around at their base—but he’d continued to the capital nonetheless, because he’d had enough time to think about it that he’d realized it was just a good idea. Worst case, he had a little bit of that vacation he was looking for, and now he also had his secondary objective of eating… ahem, absorbing Ryota’s brothers into his trash star, too.
Actually eating them would be gross. Can you imagine? Eating people? Blood and bone and who knows what just everywhere? I mean, eating a person means eating their shit, too, and for someone like me, wouldn’t that be hyper-effective? I’d be forced to eat their shit, and… yeah, that’s definitely not a route I want to go down. I’m okay with blurring the lines between garbage and a lot of things, but we can leave the line between garbage and scat nice and wide.
But absorbing them, that’s perfectly ideal. I get all the bonuses with none of the gross, and I don’t have to think about which parts of the person are most effective for my trash star. My trash star can sort that out on its own.
Guy leaning away saying no: eating a person. Guy doing finger guns indicating yes: absorbing lots of bodies.
The capital, as it turned out, was full of sights. There was more to see than they could pack into one day. Ryota covered the highlights and the general regions of the capital, and Rhys sat back, taking in all the information and scanning the city at the same time.
It was kind of nice, honestly. He hadn’t expected to enjoy it, but he enjoyed it. He was actually doing standard vacation activities: travelling, seeing the sights, and he didn’t mind it at all.
Maybe it’s not so bad to take a break every now and again, he thought, wandering along after Ryota.
And then a hand tapped his shoulder. “Excuse me, sir?”