by Charles Dean
“Nice change of attitude,” the guard said to Su Ryeon, “and I trust you know that if I see you near my mother, we’re fighting.”
Su Ryeon shook her head at the guard. “I have no idea to what you may be referring, good sir. I am an absolute peach around women, especially the elderly ones that deserve both our respect and care for their hard work and sacrifices in raising us.”
“Really? Is that so?” The guard laughed. “And here I thought you were going to . . . What was it? Heave your fist up her backside and out her mouth as—”
“Sir! While I may dress like this, it is not by choice. I am not the type of disreputable woman that deserves to be talked to like that,” Su Ryeon scoffed, throwing a hand in front of her mouth as her eyes flashed with utter disgust and revulsion at the guard. “Master,” she continued as she turned to Lars, “I know it’s rude of me to ask this, but I would very much like to vacate this area once you’ve collected your winnings. I do not want to be around here when this young man continues allowing such foul words to escape his lips.”
Lars hesitated over how to react, but before he got a chance to say anything, the guard, chuckling at what Lars could only imagine was the silliest possible expression, spared him the question. “Since the fight was fun to watch, I won’t hold what your woman says against you. When you head past cyclops and back up the stairs, go up another floor to the ballroom. On your right is where people cash out. Your claim has already been processed, and someone will be waiting with your cash . . . or perhaps tokens you may wish to gamble with instead.”
“Thanks,” Lars said.
“No worries, mate,” the guard said with the most simple-looking, friendly expression Lars had seen in a while. “Best of luck with the crazy girl.”
“I never!” Su Ryeon grumbled as she faked storming off, moving obviously slowly as she was likely waiting for Lars to catch up.
Lars thought about just standing still and waiting to see how slow her pretend angry-walk-off steps could become before she turned around to see if he was following her, but he decided to give her a break. She’d had a rough year—years, life. He didn’t know how long she had been messed with, but he figured it wasn’t his place to add to it.
“Can you believe the nerve of that guy?” Su Ryeon demanded as Lars walked up next to her.
“You know I could hear the whole thing, right? From where I was lying on the ground. I heard every word . . .” Lars finally decided to expose her lie the moment he was sure they were out of earshot of the guard.
“Whatever. It was his fault for not letting me tend to you,” Su Ryeon explained.
“Aww . . . I didn’t realize you cared so much,” Lars said, flashing a playful smile. He knew she didn’t. She just wanted to live, but he couldn’t help but mess with her. He was feeling good, after all. He had so much money that he was positive he could save his mother. He had a bodyguard that would easily keep him alive in his future endeavors—one that was stronger than anyone he had known his entire life—and if all went well, he’d be a disciple to a royal power within the city. He had gone through one life or death situation after another, but for now, finally, he could take a break. He could relax.
The thought of relaxing, however, quickly came to a halt as his arm started to sting.
“Are you freaking stupid?! You almost got yourself killed!” Su Ryeon said as she smacked Lars on the arm again, still not hard enough to actually hurt him. “It’s not just your life you’re in charge of anymore; it’s mine too. Don’t go risking it like that if you can’t win.”
Lars looked over at her like she had said something wrong. “I won though.”
“BARELY! I saw how close you were to dying. That poison almost killed you, didn’t it? How are you even still alive? You should be dead. I should be dead. How could you gamble with my life like that?! Not just mine either. You realize people depend on you breathing, and yet you’re off fighting in life or death matches like it’s no big deal at all!? Ugh! I trusted you, Mr. ‘I’m so confident I can do anything.’ Mr. ‘I can raise my cultivation level whenever I want.’ Mr. ‘I don’t have any issues at all because I’m cool, calm, and collected even as monster guts cover my body from head to toe from a fight I almost died in.’ You freaking . . .” She didn’t finish whatever sentence she had started.
After silently walking through the underground waiting area toward the stairs, Lars decided to speak again. “Are you done?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“It’s fine. You’re right. I’ll take fewer risks,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“Okay . . .” she responded, a dejected expression on her face as she stared at the ground. Then, after another long pause in the conversation, she continued, “I just . . . I don’t want to die, Lars. I don’t want to die before I’m free. I . . . I want a chance to prove my whole life hasn’t just been a single colossal mistake.”
Lars looked over at her as they got to the stairs and let her walk in front of him as he continued to dwell on what she had said.
“It was . . . It was one of the only things that kept me going when I was a slave. On those days where I couldn’t see, where I couldn’t hear, where I was stuck like a blind and deaf woman with only my nose to tell me anything, through the pain of my cultivation, through the lonely nights of silence as I stared up at a wooden ceiling . . . I kept imagining what I’d have done differently. What my life would have looked like if I hadn’t been such an idiot, such a trusting moron,” she said. “I thought I’d die before I got free, so I at least let my brain paint a beautiful fantasy world, one with stories of knights and damsels that I could live in without having to wake up.”
“So you created stories you could escape to, of a world where you . . . hadn’t been captured?”
“Yeah . . . and in those stories, I wasn’t powerful. I wasn’t a mercenary. In the best of the stories, I was just an average girl working the fields on a farm. I spent my days tilling the land, reaping the harvest with friends and loved ones, and, well”—she sighed—“enjoying the sun. The light. The sights.”
“That sounds nice,” Lars said. “Just . . . you know that dream sometimes ends up the same way you did.”
“With me as a slave?” she asked.
“It’s what happened to my mother,” he replied, nodding despite the fact she was in front of him on the stairs and couldn’t see him at all. “A wonderful life, a farming life, an honest life . . . and yet she and everyone else ended up either reaped the same as their crops or enslaved.”
“I know,” she said.
Thinking about everything that had happened to him and those around him, Lars felt he understood her. Even if her dream was hopeless, even if it would likely end in tragedy should it ever be realized, just the hope of being away from it all must be what she really wanted. “To be free from the sin of beauty in a world of thoughtless takers . . .” Lars mumbled as he watched her butt sway back and forth beneath her skirt with each ascending step. With a figure like hers, she really would have to leave the city to get any peace and quiet if she ever gets her freedom. Otherwise, people would always be after her body . . . An image of Ruri, her gentle, hope-filled smile and her delicious rurkis, flashed through his mind, and then one of Maggie and her daughter crept in too. None of them were unattractive either. They didn’t have the perfectly proportioned, callipygian figure of the woman in front of him, but they had beauty any passerby with eyes would covet. Yet, they hadn’t gone through what Su Ryeon had. They hadn’t been ripped off the streets and abused in a tragic betrayal as she had.
Your first thought wasn’t wrong. If a powerful enough man chances upon any of them, he might take them, but time is a commodity that cultivators will rarely choose to give up, and risk is why others never try. It’s like that bag of gold that was in your hands. While you’re in the establishment, where security and others will interfere, who will take what is valuable to you? Only the truly powerful would dare risk upsetting the overlord of an es
tablishment that can afford to throw three-tailed beasts and Stage 7 Qi-Gathering Cultivators into an arena for amusement.
And if someone were truly powerful, strong enough to break the paradigm of this world and take that bag without worry of consequence . . . then why would they bother? Nothing in that bag could gain them something that another wouldn’t bring them for free—and without them having to even lift a finger—just to please them and keep their favor. No matter how gorgeous those ladies are, how pretty Ruri is . . . there are dozens more eye-catching that come with better qualities than just looks lining up to cling onto the coattails of those who have the strength to just take a beautiful person by force.
Right. You’re not safe because there are no threats or because you have nothing others want. You’re only safe right now because, to those that threaten you, it’s inconvenient to pursue you. You’re safe because the risk versus reward, effort versus gain, that people do in the backs of their heads keeps telling them you’re not worth it.
Lars gulped. If . . . If she hadn’t been taken as a slave, she’d still be a mercenary, wouldn’t she?
And if she were still a mercenary, she’d still be the type to gut you, if the chance arose, for the bag that was in your hand. Her dreams of the farmland, her dreams of a peaceful life, are just her stuck in a losing race and wanting to give up since this city’s cruelty has beaten the competitiveness out of her. It’s neither her true nature nor her true want.
And you are an expert on her true nature?
I’m an expert on knowing that she can’t be trusted. That none of them can be trusted, Lars.
Only you can? Lars repeated the idea that he had heard her assert more than once now. It was becoming Ophelia’s mantra at this rate: “Trust no one, just me.” The more she said it, the more Lars both wanted to believe it and wanted to rebel against it. The silence that followed his question didn’t stop him from feeling uneasy as he ascended the final stair and stepped into the large second-floor room to collect his winnings.
The room was, much like the right half of the entranceway to the lobby, barren of fixtures. However, unlike that empty stretch between the door and the stairwell leading up to where Lars was now and down toward the arena fighter’s dungeon, this particular room was nearly packed with people. Most of them were swarming near one of the sides where large booths were built into the wall, and a tacky, nearly out-of-place, lit-up sign was hung up. “Chip Turn In” was written in a strange, glowing bright yellow light across the top of the booths. Just in case someone couldn’t read, there was even a magical animation of a chip turning into a coin in the same yellow light underneath the words constantly playing on repeat.
The other part of the hall, the part where people weren’t lining up to collect their winnings, was filled with well-dressed people wearing the nicest robes Lars had ever seen. They all smushed together and talked loudly over one another, somehow ignoring the notes from a somber song’s melody that flowed into staccato-like walls before ebbing back and repeating in haunting waves around them.
Yes, only I can be trusted because only I need you to not just be alive but be happy too.
Even though he heard the words breaking through his thoughts just as he normally heard Ophelia speak, this time was different. This time, they didn’t come from all around him. They came from in front of him. There he saw a woman, pale as falling snow with a million silver strands of hair framing her face and eyes like a sparkling pair of amethysts laid in a bed of diamonds. They lit up Lars’s desire as they gripped his reason and held his attention captive.
Blinking, breathing, and beating of the heart had ceased as he stared at the face of the woman who had just spoken to him, but then someone else walked in front of her, and her image vanished before his eyes, leaving nothing but confusion in its wake as he desperately scrambled to see where she had gone.
“Ophelia?” he called out, the word not loud enough to break the horrendous blanket of noise built by the hundreds of gossipers and reach anyone that wasn’t within a few feet of him already. “Ophelia?” This time, he spoke more loudly and more confidently. His eyes darted around, wondering where she had gone. It was the first time in his whole life that he could see her, that he could imagine what she looked like, and he didn’t want to give it up. He had to find her.
“Master, do you want me to go collect your winnings for you while you . . . look for your friend?” Su Ryeon asked from Lar’s side.
“Uhh . . .” Lars paused, his attention barely with the woman that had led the way into the room to begin with. “Yeah, just . . . get them and wait for me,” he finally said before turning his focus back to the crowd and looking for the woman he was sure was Ophelia, the woman that, even if she wasn’t Ophelia, he had to find, he had to see again.
“As you wish,” Su Ryeon said before vanishing from Lars’s field of vision.
Undeterred, he began to make his way toward the throng of people, giving up his outside vantage point as he pushed his way between a couple of people talking.
“Eww . . .” the woman closest to him groaned as Lars got near.
“That smell,” a man said as Lars brushed past him.
It was at this point that Lars remembered a detail he had forgotten: he was likely gross to be around. He was covered in dried blood from his invasion of Bok Kyu’s compound, and to further enhance his disgusting visage, he was showered in a rain of goo, muscles, and blood from his fight with the three-tail earlier, a thick misting that likely contained the three-tail’s famous foul toxin within. While this normally wouldn’t bother him, and the repulsed looks of those he didn’t know would be just as easy to shrug off as they had been his entire life, this time was different. This time, he wanted a particular someone to view him favorably.
“Don’t leave. You should know it’s too late to turn back now.”
The soft sound of the gentle voice wrapped around him from behind. “You’ve already committed to the dance, your partner is on the floor, the music is playing, and the crowd has moved to give way. Surely, you don’t plan to run, do you?”
“Ophelia . . .” The word escaped Lars’s lips with longing and bewilderment. He tried to understand how her voice could sound so different. He attempted to touch the silk-skinned face smiling sadly at him. It was the same face that had spoken to him earlier, but the voice this time was again different. It had none of the authority nor comfort of Ophelia’s normal tone.
“Is that the dance you choose? I’m not familiar. Can you lead?”
The question rang through his head as the speaker’s face distorted, shifting from light to dark skin. A yellow amber glossed over the amethyst eyes, and the woman’s hair turned red like autumn leaves for a moment, but then her appearance snapped back to silver and snow, and her piercing stare once more enthralled him.
Dance . . . dance . . . dance . . . Lars was lost for not only words but also etiquette and form. He had no idea how to dance, but he felt, as if it were the only feeling he had ever known, that he didn’t want to disappoint this woman. That thought caused his arms to extend to her. He gave a graceful bow, a tilt of the head he had never done before, and then his legs began to move.
He could see himself within her eyes, his motions fluid, a waterfall of movement reflected across the ground as his body continued to match the melody’s meter. He had no idea what he was doing as he took her hand and led her into his maddening movements, step by step threading her feet through his, dipping and twirling as if they were two leaves stuck together and falling upon a lake at night, only to be blown back into the air by a gust of wind just before they could settle on the water.
They came to a stop with the music, and Lars’s heart was beating faster than it had ever beaten before, smashing into the walls of his chest as if threatening to explode out of his body. His gaze never left her eyes; he had not once stopped studying her expression, memorizing every detail as he continued to search for something. Yet, her expression never changed no matter the pace of t
heir movement. It was static, a picture that did not shake or bend.
“That was . . .” She held a hand over her chest, and her words were filled with more emotion than her face. “Something else. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen or done a dance like that.” Her image flickered once more when she spoke, cracking and shattering at the edges as strands of red burst through the silver sides that framed her face. “I do believe you’ll have to teach me.”
“I’ll teach you my tricks if you teach me yours,” he responded, the confidence in his conclusion shattering her white veneer and revealing the red-haired woman underneath.
“So soon?” she said, the right side of her lips curling up in a twisted smile as she stared at him.
“It was a pleasant dance,” he sighed, closing his eyes as he tried to perfectly recall the face she had been wearing moments ago and wondering how true the image was. Is that really what you look like, Ophelia?
“If it was so pleasant, what gave me away?” she asked.
He laughed. “There was something you didn’t know. For my . . .” He paused, hesitating to say her name to someone else. “For my master, I’m not sure if such a thing even exists.”
His response caused the woman’s eyebrows to rise, her mouth to partially open, and her eyes to widen in surprise. “You saw a specific person? Your teacher?” She pursed her lips. “How . . . odd. You should have only seen me as an incredibly beautiful face of the same cultivation type as you, ears and tails to match your kind.”
“Oh . . .” Lars frowned. Just as he was about to give up hope that what he saw was actually what Ophelia would look like, the amethyst eyes and pale white skin reappeared, giving Lars a wink even as the foxy woman underneath shared Lars’s frown for a moment.
“Well, I didn't mean to trick you like that,” she said. “I was only curious about the man who fought a three-tail alone in my arena and survived its sting. It’s not often that someone can resist its deadly toxin.”