This time, the pretty ladies of the red-light district didn’t call out to him, but stared in jealousy or dismissal, depending on whether they judged him better or worse than themselves. Rhys kept up his strut, quietly clocking their reactions. Okay, good. I meet the standards of an attractive woman. I mean, I know I’m hot, but there’s a difference between guy-hot and girl-hot. Guy-hot is the bare minimum. Qualifying as girl-hot is to go even further beyond.
He reached the butterfly-sign brothel and strutted right on in. When he’d scoped it earlier, he’d noted that it had two sections: the lower floor, for smoking, drinking, and chatting with the girls, and the upper floors, for ‘private rooms’ and funny business. It operated on a two-part model, where patrons could either come in, ask for their favorite girls, and head directly upstairs, or linger in the communal downstairs and get to know the girls before they picked one. The girls wandering the floor were naturally the cheaper girls, but some of them were up-and-coming talents, so cheaper didn’t necessarily mean low-quality.
As Rhys paid the cover charge with Tooru’s cash, he scanned the room. Most of the downstairs patrons were the poorer types themselves, the ones who couldn’t afford a reservation with the top girls. Most of them. Against the back wall, a young man had installed himself in the corner with a kind of dug-in finality that Rhys recognized from his basement dwelling era. The man wore the finest robes and lounged in the greatest luxury, occupying an entire bench laden with pillows and attended by the best girls the floor had to offer, and yet his eyes were still dead, locked on nothing at all. He lifted a long-stemmed pipe to his lips and took a slow breath, letting the noxious fumes out in a thin stream. Rhys instinctively called them to him, absorbing all the impurities in the air at the same time. It wasn’t a massive boost, but it was more of a boost than he expected it to be.
Then again, a chemical potent enough to have an effect on a Tier 5 mage is going to be powerful in all sorts of ways, he reasoned. Powerful in its chemical composition and in its impurities both. Besides, if it was the kind of herb he suspected it was, it qualified as trash anyways. Lots of people hated psychoactive drugs. Lots of people loved them, too, but the people who hated the drugs considered those people trash, so he got to double dip on that one. The room didn’t smell like skunk, so it wasn’t the exact herb he was thinking of, but then again, that stuff probably wouldn’t even tickle a Tier 5 mage’s nose. This had to be Mystical Star Five Blossoms Dew of the First Wind Weed or something like that.
I really don’t know much about high-tier herbs in this world, but I do know that they all have absolutely insane names. He’d kinda stopped doing potionmaking when he’d decided to pivot those skills to making potato chips instead, so the one flower he’d bloomed for his teacher back in his first sect whose name he’d forgotten was probably the highest tier herb he’d personally handled. Either that, or the vitality tomatoes, but he’d created those, so they didn’t count. Also, they were vegetables, not herbs. Fruits, whatever. Biological fruits, culinary vegetables, either way I’m right.
He sashayed his way to the bar and ordered a fruity drink (no alcohol; serial killing was serious, sober business) to sip while he considered his next move. He didn’t want to be too forward. Ideally, he’d somehow entice the prince to come to him. Unfortunately, he had no idea what would get the prince out of the hole he’d buried himself into, if anything. He could be coy, take the indirect route and just end up at the prince’s table ‘by happenstance,’ but then, he was a prince. People almost certainly showed up at his table ‘by happenstance’ on the daily.
Rhys raised a brow as a thought came to him. If that’s the meta, then isn’t the countermeta obvious?
He had an idea; time to execute immediately. Rhys tossed back what remained of his overpriced sip of fruit juice and set the glass down resolutely, then marched directly over to the prince’s table and sat down opposite him.
A large man lurking in the corner stepped forward, but the prince lifted his hand languidly, and the man dropped back into shadow. Rhys glanced at him, quickly gauging the bodyguard’s strength. Higher than his, but not by far. He could deal with him, if push came to shove.
The prince took another drag from his pipe, then turned to Rhys and breathed out, exhaling a plume of smoke directly into Rhys’s face. Rhys, who’d trained by burning his face off on the toxic fumes of the filth beneath the world, absorbed all the impurities and filth without blinking. Seeing him take it without so much as a flinch, the prince raised his brows, mildly impressed. “So. What are you after?”
I know this tone! Rhys realized it instantly. It was the same exact tone he used on people who cold-messaged him on cosplay apps with the ever-suspicious “Hi!” or “I saw your work and I think it’s really impressive! My team would love to collaborate to create an artbook of your work!” or the yet more classic “Hi cutie <3”—classic chatbot, AI “persona” bullshit. The open suspicion and hostility he’d responded to those not-people with was the exact same emotion he saw reflected in the prince’s eyes.
“You either die getting scammed, or live long enough to see yourself become the scammer,” Rhys muttered under his breath.
“What?” the prince asked.
Rhys raised his hand. He was in a bad spot, but he could still escape from it. Not with an “I don’t want to sell you anything teehee anyways would you like to purchase my totally-not-AI art?”, but instead, by proving his humanity. In this case, by breaking out of the “everyone around me is scheming to steal something from me” mentality this prince clearly had. Probably with good reason, but that didn’t mean Rhys had to like it.
“Listen, I don’t know what you’ve got stuck up your ass, but seriously, what’s the big deal? Can’t a girl sit where she likes?”
Meet aggression with aggression! It’d set things off on the wrong foot, sure, but he was trying to kill the man, not actually fuck him. Secondly, the one thing scammers never, never did, was snark back at their target. He’d snarked enough to know that the sure sign of a scammer, was someone he could come at aggressively and with infinite snark, and still get no snark in return. Even the real person scammers operated on the “customer is always right” principle, and chose to bow their heads rather than bite back. It probably won them more scamees, but yet again, he wasn’t here to scam anyone. His objective was to become a “real person” in the prince’s eyes rather than remain a base scammer, and he was willing to bet that the prince hadn’t met many people like him—willing to spit directly in the face of authority.
The prince blinked, taken aback. Once more, the large man lurked forward.
Well, it was a gamble, Rhys considered, preparing to flee. He could take the bodyguard, but he’d rather not leave his fingerprints all over the prince’s death in the form of a flashy bar brawl. One, he still had princes to kill, and two, flashy. He was trying to avoid flashy.
Once more, the prince lifted his hand. Rhys settled back into his chair, waiting while the prince lazily set his pipe down in its custom-fit resting plate, then interlaced his fingers and looked over them at Rhys. “You do know who I am, no?”
“A waste of a man looking for a good time, I hope?” Rhys countered. He actually didn’t know who this was, aside from “a prince” and “someone Az wouldn’t mind seeing die.” He trusted Az’s judgement—Tooru had been a real piece of shit, after all—but face to face with the man himself, he had to admit, full-throated, from the bottom of his heart: he had no idea who this guy was.
The prince scoffed. He waved his hand, and all the other girls scurried away faster than the cockroaches from Rhys’s gaming chair when he unexpectedly flicked the basement light on at 4am. He’d been insomniac and hoping to do a little gaming to pass the time, only to find out that the cockroaches weren’t eradicated—they’d just memorized his schedule. It was kind of scary how smart cockroaches were, honestly. He still had no qualms over killing the little horrors, but it was scary how smart they could be.
If the girls are the cockroaches in that analogy, then how dumb am I?
Dumb enough to stick around when all the other cockroaches fled. Dumb enough to end up dead on the bottom of a half-empty energy drink.
Gods, I hope not. At least not an energy drink. Could he ask for that much?
His approach with this prince was different than his approach with Tooru. Tooru was the little guy, the nervous nerd standing in the corner who desperately wanted someone, anyone, to notice me, senpai. He was a truly F-list celebrity, who still needed to be approached carefully, but once they got that out of the way, he was just another guy. Acknowledging that Tooru was a prince was admitting the truth they both knew to get it out of the way so Rhys could address the weird little nerd underneath.
This prince, on the other hand, was more like a small-time celebrity, B-list tier. Acknowledging that he was a prince (celebrity) was just going to piss him off. Everyone knew he was a prince (celebrity), duh, you don’t need to point it out. And as a result, everyone wanted something from him. Rhys, therefore, was playing the countermeta of pretending like he thought the prince was just another guy, which would be refreshing to the man (he hoped).
So far, it seems to be working.
“A waste…? Then you really don’t know,” the prince murmured half to himself. He sat up, or at least adjusted himself in his slump. “You should take care who you approach in these dark venues.”
Rhys gave him an unimpressed look, but at the same time, his stomach pulled toward his spine just an inch. I really thought I was going to saunter in here all sexy-like, we’d wander our way to the rooms upstairs, and then I’d give him the surprise of his life, by which I mean my literal metal sword through his heart and not… the other thing. Instead, I’m starting to feel like I maybe could or even should have come here as Rhys instead of Rina. I don’t think I gained any sort of advantage by crossdressing.
He thought it over for a second, then shrugged. Eh, whatever. It’s not like I have anime conventions around here that I can dress up for. I gotta express my hobbies somehow.
“Tell me more,” Rhys said, crossing his legs and sitting back as if he didn’t care in the least. He kind of wanted a glass or a pipe to pose with, but he really did not want to get chemically addled right before a potential killing, so he resisted the urge to call something over for the sole purpose of using it as a prop. It would look really cool, though.
“Are you sure you want to know? It’s not easy to turn back once you take this step.”
“I’m sure.”
“And yet, you don’t know who I am, or what I do.”
“And yet, I want to know.”
“I do not think you are ready to—”
Losing his patience, Rhys slapped the table and looked the prince in the eye. “Out with it, or I’ll drag it out of you.”
The prince widened his eyes and sat back an inch. Rhys froze, sweating a bit. Did I get to comfortable with ordering around Ryota, to the point that I’d snap at this guy after just a little faffing about?
“…Oh,” the prince murmured, and something strange flickered in his eyes.
Ah, fuck. He’s into it, Rhys thought, fighting the urge to roll his eyes. It did make the guy easier to deal with, though. He now had the liberty to order him around and snap all he wanted, and the prince would eat it up. Now I’m going to have to make sure he doesn’t actually fall for me, or else we’ll be speedrunning the doomed yaoi, part two.
And then he snorted. Doomed yaoi percent? Hell, if ‘wedding percent’ and ‘nipple percent’ are real speedrun categories, why not? Those two had even been fairly competitive categories, requiring a successful horsetilt in the first and a pixel-perfect series of hat jumps in the second. Just because a speedrun had weird conditions didn’t mean people wouldn’t take it seriously.
“…control many of these fine establishments around us,” the prince continued, and Rhys realized he’d zoned out for a bit. Not that it mattered; he’d just barely zoned back in in time to get the key points. It was an essential skill he’d polished back during his office worker days, when meetings where no one said anything could stretch on for multiple hours. Maybe it just felt that way, but either way, it was a skill that had saved his sanity back then, and it saved his skin here and now.
Right, I wasn’t tracking, but I think bro just confessed to being a mob boss? Which is an executable crime from the kick, if every super hero comic I ever read isn’t wrong, but then if he deals drugs or abuses his underlings or, you know, civilians, I think I can get a complete and total moral victory to justify his incoming death. Rhys nodded, raising his brows. “How interesting. Tell me more.”
The prince smirked. “Since you insist…”