I'm the Bad Guy

by Kenneth Arant

  I stepped back through the portal and quickly closed it behind me before someone saw what I was doing and went back to reading through my pile of books while I waited for Lucian to return with my journal.

  * * *

  Chapter 7: Let the training begin

  * * *

  It was three hours past sundown and the emperor,and I were sitting across from each other in 'my' room. Ever since my parents left two-weeks ago, I'd spent my days arranging the furniture inside to my liking, reading anything I could get my hands on in the library, and trying to reduce the cast time for my 'Open Gate' spell.

  So far, I'd gotten it down to nine seconds. An obvious improvement, but one I had no intention of bragging about. Shortening the casting time by one second in two weeks was embarrassingly slow. Maybe, just maybe, if I can get the casting time below five seconds, I will start telling people. Until then, this will just be something I need to keep to myself.

  But back to my conversation with the emperor.

  I stared at the emperor in confusion as he waited for my reaction with a crooked grin on his face. He knew I wouldn't say no to what he was offering, otherwise, he wouldn't have brought it to my attention. That's just the kind of personality our 'dear' emperor had. So, the fact that he even bothered to put on this charade of asking if I wanted to go was kind of annoying.

  It's not every day that you get an all-expenses-paid scholarship to a magic academy, after all. Reincarnated or not, that's just not something you turn down.

  "You're serious?"

  "Of course, ...Although, there is one minor stipulation."

  What? No, say it isn’t so~

  "While you're there, I'm going to need you to keep an eye on Kami and protect her if the need arises."

  ...

  I was already going to do just that, but... I wasn't going to tell him that.

  "Throw in a summons of my choice and you've got a deal."

  The emperor quirked his left eyebrow at me and his grin stretched into a full-blown smile.

  "That's not how this works. If I'm paying for you to go to the academy, then you must pay me back. That's just how things work in the adult world."

  "Good point, however, I'd like to counter that argument by pointing out that my parents already paid for my tuition to the imperial academy. So, you're basically trying to get extra work out of me for nothing."

  ...

  "Surely you're not suggesting that this small favor isn't worth saving your dad some money?"

  "My parents ran off in the middle of the night while leaving me, their twelve-year-old son, in what is basically a strangers house for the last two weeks. So no, I'm not particularly interested in saving them money."

  ...

  "I didn't realize you were the type to hold a grudge."

  "And I didn't realize you were the type to help throw a boy into your underage daughter's bed. I guess we’re both surprised."

  The emperor scratched his cheek in what I could only assume was embarrassment.

  "Yes, well, isn't it a little too soon for a summons? Can you even summon a gate yet?"

  I wordlessly traced the necessary pattern into the air beside my chair and intoned, "Open." The portal formed in the expected nine seconds and I held out my hand and waited for the target of my summons to appear. A second after the gate stabilized, a dark leather-bound book flew out and landed in my hand without much issue.

  The emperor stood up from his chair and casually made several revolutions around the gate.

  I noticed him glance at me out of the corner of his eye several times during the first revolution, so I opened my journal and pretended to be bored.

  "How long have you been able to do this?"

  "A few days."

  Fifteen, to be exact.

  "Interesting... Very interesting."

  The emperor made another revolution around the gate, then he returned to his chair and sat down. This, I took to be my cue to close the gate. Which I did after tossing my journal in.

  "What kind of summon did you have in mind?"

  "Hmm...Preferably something with low mana cost and high attack power. An Imp or some form of undead would be ideal, but I doubt those would be easy to find in Ziral..."

  The emperor seemed to think over this for several seconds before he came to a decision and nodded his head in acceptance.

  "Normally, that would certainly be the case. However, I believe I know someone that can help us out."

  "We have a deal then?"

  The emperor stood up and held out his hand for me to shake.

  "We have a deal."

  We shook to finalize the deal, then he left, and I went back to doing what I've been doing for the last week or so.

  I left my room and headed outside the palace to the nearby training field.

  Training field two was the 'infantry' field. It's where newly recruited soldiers of all ages are taken to be trained in the ways of combat and survival. Currently, there was a class of forty-two recruits being trained by a young man in his middle to late twenties named Gabriel Evari. With his good looks, long blonde hair, silver eyes, and tall stature. Gabriel looked every bit the 'knight in shining armor'.

  Which he was... to a certain extent.

  However, from what I remembered of his character arc in the anime, the Gabriel of this time is in desperate need of money to support his dying mother and two younger sisters. Of which, all three live with him in his two-bedroom apartment in downtown Zilren. If left unchecked, and to his own devices, Gabriel will eventually give in to his desire for money and will ultimately become a spy within Ziral.

  ...

  While I truly wish such a nice guy didn't have such a cliché character arc. It's the way his character was written into the story and it's just what I have to deal with. So, for the past week I've been paying him one gold piece a day, taken from the allowance given to me by the emperor in place of my parents, to help me lose weight. The gold piece had an actual name, though I couldn't remember what it was. Now, maybe a gold piece a day is too much, but I look at it this way. If I overpay him now, he is, hopefully, less likely to be swayed by money in the future.

  After all, at heart, he is a good man. It was the author of the anime that gave him such a crappy backstory and made him turn out the way he did.

  Gabriel spotted me as I walked onto the field and he called out for the recruits to take a short break while he ran over to greet me.

  "Hello, master Aren. Came by for some training?"

  "Of course. I'm not getting any thinner by sitting around the palace reading books all day."

  "I still have another twenty minutes with this class. If you wouldn't mind waiting?"

  "Nah, I don't mind. Take your time. I'll just get started on my warm-up while I wait."

  "That's what I like to hear!" He laughed.

  While he returned to the group and proceeded to drill them into the ground... Repeatedly. I sat down on the grass and started doing the stretches he'd shown me on my first day at the training field.

  I spent about ten minutes stretching my legs, back, arms, shoulders, and neck.

  Then I moved into the actual warm-up which consisted of ten push-ups, ten reverse sit-ups, planking for a full minute, and running around the one-hundred thousand square-foot training field as many times as I could.

  None of this was easy for my pudgy body, but I was sufficiently determined enough to get through it without complaining... Too much.

  "Sorry about that!" Gabriel laughed as he jogged over to my heaving form. "Are you ready to have some fun~?"

  "G—Give... Me... A minute..." I gasped in between breaths.

  Since the original Aren had never worked out or done anything to build muscle, I was having to build mine from scratch and Gabriel's perky attitude wasn't making this any easier for me.

  "Okay... I'm ready." I sighed.

  Gabriel led me through a moderate exercise regimen designed to burn fat and help me lose weight, then he led me through
a 'light' spar... Which is a polite way of saying he beat the ever-loving crap out of me. I didn't begrudge him, though. This world was nothing like earth. Here, a soldier is expected to fight to the death regardless of whether they're ten or a hundred and ten. To Gabriel, I was just another recruit he needed to whip into shape.

  Which is exactly what I wanted him to do.

  I didn't want him to treat me lightly, because my future enemies most definitely would not.

  As far as I was concerned, I was getting what I paid for.

  ...

  That train of thought was decidedly more masochistic than I'm comfortable with.

  I thought with a shiver racing down my spine.

  I climbed to my feet after being slammed into the grass for what felt like the twentieth time today and motioned that I'd had enough.

  "Great work today, Master Aren!" Gabriel cheered in that annoyingly perky voice of his.

  I took the gold coin I owed him out of the cloth pouch I'd brought with me and tossed it to him.

  ...

  No matter how I look at this, I'm essentially paying a man to beat me up... I felt the sudden urge to gag at the idea and quickly gathered my things, waved goodbye to Gabriel, then hobbled away from the training field for the day.

  My entire body was basically a giant bruise after the week I'd had, but I knew it'd be worth it later. I could already feel my stamina increasing as the exercises got easier with each passing day. And since tomorrow is my promised 'cheat' day, I can spend the entire day in my room practicing my magic and avoiding the princess, as I was wont to do.

  * * *

  Chapter 8: First Summons

  * * *

  Two days after my deal with the emperor had been struck. I was summoned to the courtyard behind the palace to view my 'payment'.

  "Couldn't we have done this, I don't know... after the sun came up?" I yawned.

  It was slightly past four in the morning and I'd only gotten to sleep an hour before the emperor threw me out of bed and told me if I wanted my payment, I'd have to accompany him.

  Needless to say, I gladly went... After comparing him to a rather unflattering image of a donkey's rear.

  He was mostly silent during the long walk, an oddity for him, and only broke said silence to ask about my goings outside the palace and if I'd kept up my spell training.

  Since it wasn't exactly a secret what I was doing, I explained why I was going to training field two and that yes, I had continued to practice my spell casting.

  Even managed to get my "Open Gate" cast time down from nine seconds to eight seconds... Still an embarrassing improvement, but any improvement was good in my eyes. I didn't care if it was decreasing in increments of point one seconds, because that was still an improvement.

  However, my steady improvement had me seriously confused about something I should have thought about earlier.

  Why, if he had access to the same resources as I, did the original Aren struggle so much? Surely It has nothing to do with talent because, quite frankly, I suck at this stuff. So Aren should have been at least as powerful as I and yet the anime claimed his MP level was only one-hundred and ten.

  What did I do, if anything, to change that fact?

  Could it be, because our personalities differ, I can bring out more power than he?

  Could it have been as simple as he declined to continue after failing to move his mana during the test, and so was given a random score to avoid angering his father or having to repeat the test?

  ...

  Could the author have truly written him in such a way? To doom a kid to a life of hardship, hate, and an ultimately tragic fate... Because he wanted him to be timid?

  ...

  I kinda want to punch him in the face now.

  The emperor and I stepped through the open doors into the back courtyard and I was brought up short on what I saw.

  A shifty looking man in a red/black pinstriped suit and a dark-red hood that obscured his eyes from sight, stood in front of two cages. The first cage was about seven feet tall, looked like a portable jail cell, and appeared to have been made of incredibly dark iron. Inside the cage was a grotesque creature I recognized as a Ghoul. It prowled around the cage as if it were a large dog or a wolf, though it was easily the size of a grizzly bear and stood over four-feet tall at the shoulder and was between six and seven feet long. It had hairless, pale-white skin stretched over a misshapen skeleton that bulged out at odd angles. Its face looked like someone had taken a wax figurine's face, melted it, then stuck it back on upside down.

  A truly gruesome sight, and one I certainly didn't expect. Ghouls were notoriously hard to capture due to their insane strength, high-speed regeneration, and overall disregard for their own wellbeing once they have prey within their sights.

  It truly was the perfect meat shield.

  However, not to be outdone by the first cage. The second cage was more akin to a metal box than a jail cell and stood at slightly over three-feet tall. But instead of dark iron, it was fashioned out of something akin to silver with glowing runes etched into the faces of the box. And a clear crystal window at the front of the box showed its occupant raging inside.

  The two-foot-tall hairless monkey with blood-red skin and bright cat-like yellow eyes slammed into the sides of the wall with as much strength as his little body could muster.

  Unlike Imps from some other works of fiction. The Imps from 'God's Favored Arcanist' lacked the typical bat-like wings, however, they maintained the over-sized ears, prehensile scorpion's tail, and short goat horns that stuck out of their forehead. Another thing that separated these Imps from their more 'Earthly' cousins, is their overall demeanor. The Imps of this world aren't tricksters, they're savage pack creature more akin to goblins or piranhas than fairies or pixies. In a particularly dark episode of the anime, the hero Masato and his party were charged with investigating a mining town that appeared to have been abandoned overnight... What they found instead was a horde of over a hundred imps had descended on the town and had eaten the men and were using the women to create more Imps. By the time the heroes arrived and vanquished them, their number had increased from one-hundred to over a thousand.

  Brutal mindset, Insane maturation speed, and can attack at either short range with their venomous tail, or at range with their fire magic.

  Perfect for disposable shock troops.

  "Your Majesty! It is truly an honor to see you again. ~" The hooded man exclaimed in a girlishly high-pitched voice.

  "No time for pleasantries, I'm afraid." The emperor replied stoically.

  The emperor and the hooded man stepped to the side and talked in hushed whispers for a few minutes. From what I could see, the emperor somehow managed to keep his face perfectly blank during the entire conversation. A truly shocking feat for the normally expressive emperor I'd come to know.

  "Yes... That is very interesting. ~" I heard the hooded man say in a too loud voice.

  A shiver raced down my spine for some reason and I felt goosebumps on my arms...I did not like this man. Call it instinct, or what have you, but he felt off to me and I did not like it... Not one bit.

  "Very well. ~ I'll see what I can do, your majesty.~" The hooded man loudly said.

  The emperor rubbed the bridge of his nose in what I could only assume was frustration as they walked over to me.

  "Decided which one you want?"

  ...

  "Well, go on, pick."

  "Is it too much to ask for both?"

  The emperor and the hooded man glanced at each other for a moment, then the hooded man shrugged his shoulders in response.

  "I was paid to bring them here. What you do after that is none of my business. ~"

  "Your debt to me will increase if you take more than we bargained for."

  ...

  "What will it cost me?"

  "Marria—"

  "Not happening. Try again."

  The emperor looked like he wanted to pout, but the presence of the oth
er man was causing his face to remain blank.

  "You're such a stubborn child. ~"

  Please, don't talk to me.

  The emperor sighed, "Fine, can't blame a guy for trying. Go ahead, take them."

  ...

  "Just like that?" I asked with suspicion clear in my voice.

  "What? Don't you trust your emperor?"

  "Not even remotely."

  ...

  "I wasn't expecting you to answer that quickly..."

  All I could do was shrug my shoulders at that. It wasn't like I planned to answer quickly or slowly, I just said the first thing that popped into my mind... Probably not a good thing to do around the emperor of a country, but it's not like I could change my habits overnight.

  I walked over to the cages, making sure to stay well out of the ghoul's reach, and opened my gate. The portal formed in the air in the expected eight seconds and quickly eclipsed the first cage in size. I motioned for the gate to pull in the Ghoul, cage and all, and the gate responded as if it were a massive vacuum and pulled the cage in.

  Because I cannot move the gate once it has been created. I closed the first gate and opened a second gate in front of the Imp's box and repeated my previous actions to pull it inside.

  "Interesting indeed. ~"

  The goosebumps returned en masse, and I shivered involuntarily.

  I really did not like this man.

  The emperor must have spotted my moment of discomfort because he quickly dismissed me and instructed me to try to get some sleep... As if that was going to happen anytime soon.

  Despite my instincts screaming at me to ignore the man and do as the emperor said. I bowed my head in thanks to the hooded man, then I raced back to my room and made sure to lock the door behind me before I opened my gate and practically dove in.