Past Life Hero, ch 40

I'm a little late on this chapter, but it wasn't my fault.  I promise. :)

(okay, it's only half true)

***


Max left the alley and headed straight for the portion of the central area where weapons and armor were sold.  He felt conspicuous as hell carrying his loot, especially the three long spears. Luckily, he didn't have to go far. Even though he hurried, he still attracted a few curious glances.

Once he was on the main street with the weapon shops, the store where he'd done business before.

Amy was working again, which was probably a lucky break.  She also seemed to pick up on the fact that today, Max was all business.  He tried to project that he didn't want to engage in small talk or make up excuses or explain how he’d come by all the weapons he sold.

He managed to offload all the spears and most of the knives that he'd obtained from the Mystic Spear Path students he'd just killed. He only kept one knife for utility. None of the gear had been exceptionally high quality, but selling it all together had netted him six hundred mana units. He was pretty sure that he hadn't gotten a very good deal and also pretty sure that Amy knew that he knew, but he didn't really care at this point. Max got a feeling she knew that too. Despite the fact they were friendly with each other, she was still obviously very good at her job. He figured it’d be good to keep that in mind the next time he dealt with her.

As he left the shop with even more money in his pouch, he shook his head, thinking about how the system protected these sorts of stores.  Otherwise, crooked upperclassmen would have robbed them all blind by now. At least, Max assumed so.

A small greedy voice in the back of Max’s mind wanted to stay, wanted to keep making money off of hot-headed idiots.

He was fairly confident at this point that he could deal with first and second year Mystic Spear Path Academy students.  But there could always be exceptions.  Not only that, there were more advanced, more powerful students. Word was going to spread really fast that he had just appeared in the central area and left three body-shaped blood pools in an alley.

He thought of how the man who’d killed him in the Mystic Spear Academy had destroyed his body so badly nobody had been able to loot it.  Max didn’t run into that guy.  At least not yet.

Should I stay?  No.

Logic prevailed.  The longer he stayed, the more risk he’d be in.  If he died, he had no idea how long he’d stay dead.  If he was dead, he couldn’t plan, couldn’t do anything to fix his situation.  That train of thought led to how he had been hiding his combat abilities with Lavinia’s summons so far. From now on, he decided to use them.  Having an ace in the hole would matter less if he lost time from being dead.

Max made his way back to the Summoner Academy grounds.

When Max was almost at the Summoner Academy gate, he heard running footsteps behind him.  He turned to see a group of over ten students sprinting towards him. In the mob, he spotted Prince Regal. Max grinned. He was close enough to the gate now that he didn't even need to speed up his pace to make it inside in time.  He barely made it through the gate and the check-in personnel before anyone in Regal’s group could do anything but curse at him.

Max ignored them, secure in the fact he was on Summoner Academy grounds while the gate personnel watched the ongoings with their full attention.  The nearby guard golems bristled.

One of the staff at the gate raised a wand.  That made the Mystic Spear Path students back up but they kept yelling at Max.  "We're gonna kill you, shitter! How dare you attack our academy? There's nowhere you can go. There's nowhere you can hide. You cowardly bastard! Come out here and face us!"

Max made a funny face at all of them, turned around and wiggled his ass in their direction. Then he pointed at Prince Regal and mimed choking and throwing up.  He made a silly face and pretended to stab with an imaginary spear.

The Mystic Spear students and the Summoner gate personnel both looked at him in stunned silence.

Truly formidable, muttered Lavinia in his year.

Then he sauntered down the road towards the academy, raising a single hand with a single finger, flicking off Regal.  Even if the other man didn’t know what the gesture meant, he most likely had to understand the feelings behind it.

Apparently the message communicated itself because Regal and his friends somehow got even more furious.  They screamed insults and curses and even louder as Max walked away.

Some new, different commotion made Max turn again to watch.

To the sides, Max caught sight of motion and noticed some of the perimeter golems moving closer. The Mystic Spear Path Academy students must have noticed too, and he saw one actually point. They began to back off again, but instead of quieting down, somehow grew even more angry.  Regal looked like he was about to throw up in sheer frustration and hate.  Some of the others were shaking their spears at Max, describing in detail all the ways they were going to torture and murder him. Max blew them all kisses. And then, he remembered a Drake song from back on earth, played it back in his mind, and began dancing in the middle of the road.

Eventually Max got bored of tormenting them, shrugged, spit in their direction, and began walking back to the Summoner Academy again. He watched them over his shoulder in amusement.  This seemed to be the last straw for some of the Mystic Spear Path students though. They went absolutely bonkers and slammed their spears against the ground over and over again, destroying their own equipment.

In the distance back in the central area, Max could see a group of people watching and some even approaching to get a better view of the drama. One of them was holding a crystal ball that Max now recognized as some sort of magic recording device. Once he'd seen it, Max waved at the recorder, who hesitantly waved back. One of the Mystic Spear Path students turned and saw what was happening before screaming at the recorder and angrily stalking towards them. It was absolute chaos.

The gate guards must have called for backup because not only were more golems outside the perimeter now, Max spotted two Summoner Academy professors hurrying over, one of them actually floating above the ground. As they passed him, one of them, a middle-aged woman that Max hadn't seen before, snarled, "Get to the Academy, troublemaker!" Max gave a bow at her retreating back before turning and doing exactly that.

The rest of his walk back to the academy was uneventful except for the occasional chuckle he could hear from Lavinia. The spirit was not even trying to hide her glee at all the heartburn Max had caused for the Mystic Spear Path students. As he neared the Academy buildings, he saw a number of professors conspicuously outside and watching in the direction of the road to the central area. When they saw Max, they presented a number of different expressions, from amused to infuriated. He ignored them all.

He was still in a great mood when he got back into the academy. The only way he could possibly be in a better mood was if he was able to kill the bastard Wiley.  That would have to wait, though.

There was still something important  he had to do. He thought he had enough money to secure himself a rental apartment in the central area, but he didn't know how good it would be, and doing so wouldn't exactly be the safest option for him right now.

Also, his short term goals required that he stay in the Summoner Academy for now.  Max headed towards the “alternative dorms,” where he was going to be staying for the rest of his time at the Summoner Academy unless he did eventually get a central area rental. Now that he was actually in this area of campus, he was a bit confused.  He’d been envisioning something different than the reality.  The alternative dorms didn’t look trashy or run down, or at least half of them didn’t.  There were definitely several dorms of varying quality that all seemed to be part of the alternative area.

Max went into the first floor of the first alternative dorm he happened upon and noticed immediately that it was set up differently than the standard dorms. There was an upperclassman student in a reception area, but instead of an open and inviting desk, it was more like a …medieval bank teller set up. The receptionist was protected.

On top of that, inside the protection, Max saw a couple golems similar to the ones he'd seen on the perimeter of the academy grounds. It didn't take a rocket scientist, or a reincarnator for that matter, to figure out that the student could use the golems as enforcement.

Max walked up to the desk and politely said, "Hello, my name is Max Cuningham.  I've been told that I'm going to be living in the alternative dorms from now on."

The bored-looking student, a round-faced man with short hair, held up a hand and began flipping through some papers on the desk. He apparently found what he was looking for and said, "Yes, oh that's right, you're that kid that was starting fights with the spear idiots. Well, there's four alternative dorms. They vary in cost. The one you're in right now is free. There's a twenty mana unit maintenance fee to officially get a private room in the second dorm. That one has an attendant on every floor. This dorm only has me on this bottom floor. The third dorm has a hundred unit maintenance fee every five years. Those rooms are much larger and have golem attendants on each floor meant to defend the residents and also prevents any fighting. And lastly, the fourth dorm has a one thousand mana unit fee to pay for upkeep and earn residency.  In that dorm, a resident gets an entire floor to themselves in addition to concierge services and each floor comes standard with high security and personalized locks."

The student recited all of the rates with the air of it being memorized, and like he expected Max to take the free dorm.

Max asked, "How much does it cost to get a secure lock on my room in any of the other dorms, or the first three, I guess?"

Even though the man was not hiding that he thought Max was broke, he still answered. "It's ten mana units to get a door lock and make your room secure in the first dorm. It's twenty mana units in the second dorm, fifty mana units in the third dorm, and the last dorm already comes with it, although if you spend an extra hundred units, you'll get two more guard golems for your entrance."

With a pleasant tone of voice, Max said, "I would like to get a room in the fourth alternative dorm and I will go for the extra two golems. Who do I need to pay or talk to about making this happen?"

The man stared at Max and said, "Are you joking?"

"Nope, serious as a heart attack."

“Stop messing around.  You've got to be joking right now," said the man. He hesitated and looked around.  "But just in case, those dorms are all first come first serve. If there's any room available right now, you would have to talk directly to the golem on duty outside."

Max nodded politely and left the dorm, heading for a much larger building to one side that also seemed better built–the fourth and largest building that he assumed was the last of the alternative dorms. Now that Max knew more about how some of the other academies ran, he could guess what kind of students some of these alternative dorms had housed before.  Namely, students who were rich enough or well-connected enough to not follow the rules.

He shook his head. Max could imagine that with as bad of a reputation as Summoners had, that many students from established worlds, or with wealthy parents, would have taken steps to avoid “randomly” getting chosen to be a Summoner.  Although the angels were very unlikely to be corruptible, all a Challenger really needed was enough advancement on any other Path to go to that Quartet automatically.

But if that were the case, why have such expensive alternative dorms in the first place?  Max remembered Lavinia’s theories, that Summoners used to be stronger.  The alternative dorms situation was definitely a bit of evidence that things used to be different for Summoners.

As Max got closer to the dorm, he stopped thinking about unpleasant things or feeding more fuel to his rampant speculation and instead approached the first golem guard that he could find to ask if any of the posh rooms were available.