Past Life Hero, Ch 15

At the edge of the Summoner Academy, Max only saw one or two other students in the very plain, grubby medieval style clothing that he and Lance were wearing. He realized now that others would likely be able to tell they were new arrivals in the central area. Oh well, screw it, he thought. Even if everybody knew they didn't have any money, it would still be interesting to see what the central area was like.

It turned out that getting to the central area was not as straightforward as he had imagined. Instead of the college grounds ending and the central area immediately beginning, Lance and Max found themselves at the edge of a forest once they left the academy. There was a road through the forest, a nice paved one actually, and they followed it. But before they got on the road, Max noticed several trails to either side heading in their own slightly different directions.  He wondered what they were for.

Max assumed that most outdoor activities for the Summoner Academy would take place in the grounds behind the school, not between the college and the central area. But he had to admit he just didn’t know much of anything yet.  Maybe he was wrong. He’d find out eventually.

There were no other students from the Summoner Academy on the road to the central area.  Lance and Max walked in easy silence for a couple of miles. They could actually see some sort of guard shack or sorts in the distance before spotting any of the central area itself.  The shack turned out to have some sort of gate attached.

There were a couple professors and one martial-looking staff there.  Max slowed, wondering if there’d be problems, but there weren’t any.  There really wasn’t even much conversation.

Before the new students could pass through the gate, one of the professors put a stone wand above our hands, just like a staff member did every time they went to the cafeteria. The woman raised an eyebrow at them, looking at their newbie attire but didn't say anything out loud. A minute later, Max and Lance  were walking past the gate, down another shorter stretch of road, and through a couple pillars that were lit by an otherworldly light blue glow.

On the other side of the pillars, they both stopped and just looked around. For the second time in the last two days, Max’s expectations had been turned sideways. He had expected the central area to be rather shabby, like a quaint small town in the English countryside or something like that.  Maybe a market with simple stalls.  Or maybe look like a set from one of the Harry Potter movies. Instead, the central area actually reminded him of a weird mix between Albion and malls and strip malls of Earth. In fact, the mall comparison was right on the nose since at least one of the really large buildings in the distance probably was an actual mall.

All of this made sense in retrospect because Max had formed his assumptions based on the Summoner Academy, which didn't have very many student Challengers. But the other academies were larger. How much larger, Max still didn't know, but they had to be significantly bigger in order to justify the number of shops and other buildings he could see in the central area. The area legitimately looked like the shopping area of a decent-sized city.

"I could get used to this," said Lance. He grinned.  "Next time we come back here, we need money though." He pointed with his chin at a distant building and said, "Whatever that restaurant is selling, it smells delicious."

Max nodded in silent agreement, and the two of them headed down the street.

To both sides was a large parking lot that had all manners of vehicles parked within. Max hadn't seen any vehicles at the Summoner Academy, and I wondered if they weren't allowed or if something else was the reason. Either way, the vehicles parked here might be for people at the Summoner Academy to use in the central area.  Maybe.  It was another of the hundred mysteries that he put in my mental list to follow up on later if he could remember.

The restaurant that Lance had pointed out really did smell good, but the fact was they didn't have any money.

"Where do you want to go?" ask Max.

The other man gave one more wistful glance at the restaurant as they passed and said, "How about we just check out that mall or whatever it is?"

"Works for me."

The two of them headed for the conspicuously huge building, which even looked so much like a mall on Earth, it gave a strong sense of nostalgia. One of the only differences Max could see was how much smaller the parking lot around this building was than any mall on Earth.  At least in the United States.  Considering how much smaller the clientele might be and the fact that so few people seemed to have vehicles, that definitely made sense. And the latter was something that he had reasoned after watching other groups of people walking around the central area while he and Lance headed towards the mall.

If everyone was driving, there wouldn’t be so many pedestrians.

Once they were inside, the sense of familiarity increased. None of the people working in the food court struck Max as professors or failed Challengers.  They were…regular people.  Max wondered how a normal person would even sign up or be chosen to work in a Quartet.

As he walked through the food court, suddenly, something caught Max’s foot.  He was able to hop and catch himself in a spin, avoiding falling.  Since he was facing the other direction so quickly, he caught the person who tripped him putting their foot back under the table.

The table was full.  Students.  There were four of them, and they stilled their smiles and snickers fairly quickly, but slowly enough to show they weren’t apologetic in the slightest.  Max noticed all of them had Academy badges that matched Mystic Spear Academy, at least he thought so.

His eyes glittered.  Nobody had tried to bully Max since high school, and that had not lasted long.

The four people were varying ages but were all in their late teens to maybe late twenties, which Max was realizing was the average age of all the Challengers in the Quadrant, at least how old they were when they first came to this place and stopped aging.  When he looked closer at the fours' badges, I noticed that all of them had two stripes.

So they’re second years. He knew from the handbook that new arrivals to the quartet all came at exactly the same time. So for these four to be in their second year meant that they had all almost been in the Quartet for exactly a year. The second year would be the year they were moving into.

“Excuse you,” said Max.  Lance stood to one side, his head on a swivel, not sure what was going on yet.

The tripper was the first to speak.  "Hey, newbie. Shouldn't you be waiting in line somewhere or something?" The man spoke with a mocking smile. "Plus, with nasty newbie clothes like that, you must be from the–" He held his nose like he smelled something bad. "--Summoner Academy, right?" The other three chuckled. "Bye.  Move along now.  Learn to walk where you step."

Max ran his eyes over the four people at the table and wondered if this was really happening right now. When he left the Summoner Academy, he'd figured there might be some tension between the different colleges, but he had figured that everybody would have more important things to worry about than hazing or being cartoonish dicks like this. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lance shaking his head and already moving away, ignoring the table that was making snide expressions and rude remarks.

Letting it go was probably the smart move.  Max was annoyed though, and instead of retreating, he took a step towards the man who tried to trip him.

"So let me get this straight," he said. "I'm new and don't have any money or clothes yet. My world is in danger of dying, people I know were probably just murdered by monsters, and you think that's funny? You tried to trip me. What are we, children? Actually, you might be. Go fuck yourself, fool."

The smirks were immediately wiped off the faces of everybody at the table: two women and two men. The surrounding tables all grew quiet too.

"What did you just say, Grub?" asked the man who tried to trip him.

"You heard me, dipshit. What are you, slow on top of being a petty bully?"

The tension was so suddenly high it was almost something he could feel on his skin.  Max remembered everything he'd read in his handbooks. The rules of the Quartet were very clear: If somebody was murdered, the person that died could not have anything they owned stolen. The system in place in the Quartet wouldn't allow it. And of course, like anybody who died in the Quartet during training the dead person would come back eventually.

Max hadn't witnessed any of these regenerations himself yet.  But based on his understanding, the only way somebody could die that would actually kill their borrowed body and send them back to their original body on their homeworld would be dying outside of the quartet, like during practical training abroad. That's what made it much more dangerous. Dying in the Quartet meant it would take some time for the dead person’s body to be rebuilt again and appear in a field again somewhere. At that point, they would wake up.

In fact, in the handbook there had been several pages of rules about how conflict and duels worked in the Quartet, too.

Not only were duels allowed, at some level they were encouraged. And it made sense since the entire purpose of all of the Path colleges was to create warriors that would fight literal monsters back on their homeworld. One other thing Max had learned was that self-defense was not only allowed, but if someone attacked and Max defended himself, killing them, everything the attacker wore could be looted.  Some of their money could even be taken.

Duels were a little bit different. If two people agreed to a duel, they could also agree to terms and prizes. A surprising amount of the handbook had been dedicated to property rights in the Quartet and how people could collect prizes from the loser in duels or other forms of combat.

Knowing all of this, Max was ready for an attack at any time, but he didn't back down.

The bully at the table didn’t speak.  His eyes bugged out and he was rigid, seemingly in shock that he was being talked to this way.  Max grimaced in disdain.  "What? Now that I'm talking back and I wasn't scared after you tried to trip me in the mall, like a little kid, you're not going to say anything? What kind of cowardly pissant are you? And if I'm pitiful since I’m new Summoner, why are you suddenly so quiet?"

The man who’d tried to trip him stood up. He snarled, "Do you know who I am?"

"Of course I don't.  What a dumb question," scoffed Max. "Like you just said, genius, I just got here, and unless you think that you're so famous all over every universe, on every world that anyone could come from, of course I wouldn’t know who you are. Are you delusional?"

People at a few tables surrounding them chuckled in response to this, and the bully's face darkened. "How dare you speak to me in such a way. I am a prince!"

“Oh, fancy.  But who gives a shit? We're in a Quartet. And there are how many worlds that people come from to wind up here? In my world, I might be an emperor. Or the Hero.  I don't give a shit if you're a prince. For all I know, you're a prince of... a canned fish factory. Actually, that's more believable based on how you've been acting. People with real power don't try to trip strangers in a lunchroom.  Even if they’re shit people, basic bullying like that is simply not worth their time."

There was more laughing at this. The entire time Max was shit-talking, he was carefully watching Prince Nothing's friends in case one of them tried to jump up and ambush him, but none of them moved. Two spears leaned against the wall behind the table.

“Prince Regal,” said one of the women at the table.  “Just ignore him.  He isn’t even worth looking at.  Just a fool and a powerless summoner to boot.”

At this point, Max knew he’d already crossed the line.  He’d more than stood his ground, and the smart move was to walk away.  It wasn’t smart to make enemies right after getting to this Quartet.  He was unclear on all the other student’s relative power levels, and even though Max had memories and skills from an entire martial lifetime, and was physically superior to a normal human, he still wasn’t sure if he could win against any of the Mystic Spear Path students at the table.

But something dark and ugly was welling up inside of him.  A ghost of his past life, something that had begun manifesting a bit back on Earth again, too.

One of Max’s major motivations to grow in power in his first life, when he’d been called Chasa de Milo, was to fight against injustice.  Those who had power suppressing those who didn’t had offended him so much he’d dedicated his life to stamping out the worst of it he could see.

The lazy cruelty of some who were born into privilege had been a trigger for two lifetimes now.  So even though he knew he shouldn’t, he was compelled to keep pushing.

“Regal!?" crowed Max.  "Is that really your name? Prince Regal? Oh my gosh." He rolled his eyes and covered his mouth like he was trying not to laugh. "Oh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say anything bad, after all, my parents named me Emperor Wonderful."

The people at the table behind him weren't even trying to hide their laughter anymore. Prince Regal took an angry step forward and said, "You have a big mouth, newbie. Do you have anything to back it up? Are you brave enough to duel me?"

Max briefly wondered why the hothead Prince wasn’t just attacking him, but then noticed the guards in a corner watching what was going on.  So he's not completely stupid, I guess," he thought. He's not attacking me. Max was sure that Regal believed he was talking to a flyspeck, a nothing, but if Regal were to attack Max first and murder him, not only would he get nothing out of it, but he would likely receive demerits too. He might even be attacked or restrained by the mall guards.

However, if he got Max to agree to a duel, not only would there be no punishment, but he might even be able to hurt Max even more. And rules made during a duel in the Quartet were enforced by the system of the quartet.

Luckily, what Regal was angling towards here was what Max wanted, too.  It would be a gamble, but he wanted more information.  And a lifetime spent honing his senses, sizing up opponents, made him feel he had a good chance against Regal in a fair fight.

Maybe.

"Oh, no. I'm so scared," said Max and he made a show of quaking in fear. "After all, King Precious – I mean, oops, Prince Regal – is angry at me after he started a conflict out of nowhere with me and then doubled down on it."

Regal began to angrily speak again, but Max winked at the other man and interrupted.  "Sure, I'll duel, but not for nothing. What do I get if I win?"

The self-proclaimed prince wordlessly unclasped a sheathed dagger from his belt and laid it on the table.  He pointed at it.

Max made a show of regret. "Unfortunately, like you have so intelligently pointed out, I'm brand new to the Quartet. I don't even have a badge. I don't have anything to wager."

Regal gave a nasty grin. "Oh, that's fine. All I ask is that if I beat you, you commit suicide twice."

There were gasps, hisses, and intakes of breath from the surrounding people who were listening to the confrontation. And Max understood why. In the Quartet, the amount of time it took to come back after dying was dependent upon how much power every challenger gathered before the next time they died. So dying too many times too quickly meant that it would take longer and longer for the Quartet to regenerate one’s body.

Regal’s set of terms were a nasty move, but not one that really surprised Max.

If Max got killed and lost the duel, it’d be bad. If he agreed and lost, it would not only be embarrassing, more importantly it would greatly set him back, forcing him to start classes a year later.  After all, if Regal killed him, and Max was compelled to die twice more, there was no way he’d be able to take classes with the rest of the newbies.  Even if he could, it’d cause a lot of hardship.

The only reason Max could even consider it was because he could still grow his mana body, reclaiming some of his lost power of a Blade Sorcerer whether he was taking classes at Summoner Academy or not.

He made a nonchalant shrug and said, "Sure, that sounds fine, whatever. So where are we going to do this thing?”

“Here is fine with me!” said Regal.

“It’s not with me,” drawled Max.  “After all, what if I kick your pretentious ass into this pretty lady’s table and you mess up her meal?” He pointed to the side where a couple third year Replicator Academy students were sitting.  They two women smiled at him and there were more laughs from other tables.  “I think we take trash outside, so maybe we should use the parking lot instead,” he suggested.

Regal showed his teeth in an aggressive smile.  He looked at his friend who was still seated and said, "Leonard, let me borrow your spear."

"Oh no, no, no, no, no," said Max, holding a hand up.  "You must be insane. We haven't agreed to terms yet! And you are really too shameless. Do you really think it would be appropriate for you to use a spear as a Mystic Spearman against a brand new Summoner to the quartet? I mean, maybe you have no honor, but could you really tolerate what people will say about you if you use a spear, the weapon you train in, against a brand new mage?  We haven’t even started classes yet!"

Now laughter rang through the food court as it seemed everybody there was listening to the duel unfold. Regal reddened and hissed, "Fine." He picked up the dagger and showed it to everybody. "I'll just use this little knife. After all, it's poetic justice to put this moron in his place with the same weapon I’ve put up for the duel wager."

Max responded with mocking laughter. "That means you're still armed. So what do I get?”  He held up his empty hands.  “Superior intellect to yours?"

Regal gritted his teeth and said, "What do you want? Let's finish naming our terms."

"Oh, anything will do," said Max.  “I could beat you with a stick.”

"Anything?" said Regal. Max just nodded in reply. And Regal fixed him with a hate-filled stare. "Minka? Do you still…”  Regal looked down to one side of his table.  “Minka, can you loan this person your cane?"

One of the women sitting at Regal’s table, the woman who hadn’t spoken yet, Minka wordlessly bent and fetched a plain wooden cane from the ground.  Max noticed that she had a cast on her leg. She must have had a training injury. Luckily for her, people's bodies healed much more quickly in every training Quartet than in any real world.

Regal grabbed the cane and threw it at Max, who deftly caught it out of the air. He made a big show of studying it from every angle and then smiled. "This should do.”

“So do you agree to our terms?" said Prince Regal.  “System!  Attend us.”

"I’m not sure.  Let’s see," said Max. "We will fight in the parking lot.  You get to use that knife, and if I win, I get to keep it. Actually, I want your clothes, too.”  He winked. “I'm going to use this cane and return it back to your friend when I'm done. I have to commit suicide twice if I lose."

"Fine.  Clothing, too. I agree," said Regal.

"I agree," said Max.

Suddenly a screen popped up in front of him. It read:

Do you agree to this duel?

On the screen, Max could read everything he’d just said out loud.  Below the terms there was an accept and reject button. He saw Regal immediately press accept, or at least he assumed so, but Max didn’t do so right away.  He said, "How about we go out to the parking lot first before I hit accept. You know, just to make sure."

He didn’t know how, but the Quartet system shouldn’t allow them to duel outside of the agreed upon parameters.

The prince smirked and asked, "Are you scared yet?  Or are you just that ignorant?"

Max shrugged.  "Not really scared.  I guess I’m just ignorant, Prince Sillypants."

"Fine, let's go.  Insult me all you want.  I will get the last laugh." Then Regal began walking towards the entrance to the mall.  His friends got up from the table to follow him.

Max thought about handing his cane to the young woman who had it before for she could walk easier, at least until they all got to the parking  lot, but she was already being supported by her friend and they both gave him such a nasty look he thought better of it.

This should be interesting, thought Max.  One one level, he knew he was acting rashly.  But he also felt deliciously alive in the moment.  He couldn’t deny his excitement.  Back on Earth, he’d had to just suck it up and work within the system for the vast majority of crappy things that had happened to him and his family.

But here?  This was more like Albion.  He hadn’t achieved the level of power in his first life by being afraid to risk it all.  Of course, pissing off the wrong people was what had ultimately gotten him murdered.  There was probably a lesson there but he could learn it another day.

Max hated being honest with himself sometimes.  It was a hell of a feeling to know he was acting foolish but still being so excited and happy about it.

He noticed that more than half of the people who had been at tables around them were getting up too. For better or for worse, he was going to have an audience for his duel.