LTW Book 3 Chapter 11: Gains and Cards [First Draft]

Naturally, Lone was the victor. It was a surprisingly close fight though since Lone was limiting himself so much. However, despite how close the match was, Malt eventually ran out of stamina and could no longer sustain his wolf transformation, so he chose to forfeit before any serious damage was done to himself.

"You really are one hell of a healer," Malt exclaimed as he stared at Lone carefully healing each of his own wounds.

"Yeah, I suppose I am. Healing is one of my many talents," Lone replied with a grin as he made a vicious claw mark on his cheek disappear with a light touch of his hand.

Malt looked down at his, and his companion's wounds before a somewhat shameless expression took a hold of his face. "Em, Lone. Do ya think I could ask a favour from you?" he said with while he lightly scratched the back of his head.

"Hmm?" Lone replied as he stretched his back and stood up. 

Currently, they were all sitting in a resting room of sorts that was connecting to the fighting hall. It was surprisingly luxurious and had its own mini-bar.

"Well," Matt said with an embarrassed tone as he looked at Lone with a strange glint in his eyes, "Do you think you could heal me and my companions? We're not seriously hurt, but we were in the middle of a quest, so being like this is kind of..." he trailed off, implying that he and his companions weren't in the best of conditions to accomplish the task of their quest.

Lone grimaced. He looked torn emotionally. 'Should I help them? I wanna, but I also wanna snap their necks...besides, my mana is only five-thousand points away from hitting rock bottom...ah, fuck it. I'll heal them.'

"Come here and be fast about it. I wanna get back to my friends as soon as possible," Lone stated passively.

Malt looked surprised and quite pleased before he nodded his head and got his companions to line up in an orderly fashion. Lone then healed each one of their wounds as quickly as he could. 

Thankfully for Lone, only Malt had a few bad injuries. The rest of his fellow Adventurers only had shallow cuts or light bruises since Lone had ended his fights with them as soon as he could.

"I really appreciate this, Lone. I might experience a breakthrough soon. The fight was enlightening," Malt said with a toothy grin unbecoming of his middle-aged face.

"Sure. I gained a lot too, so don't worry about it," Lone shrugged in response.

"I noticed," Malt said with a knowing smile.

"Well, catch you later. Maybe we'll meet again in the future?" Lone said with a dismissive wave while he walked away, all the while, trying his best to ignore his urges to attack the group again.

"I hope so," Malt replied with a light tone.

When he had made it back to the table that he had left Eolande, Breena and Swind at, Lone was stumped speechless by what he was seeing.

"Damn it! I refuse to believe I lost! You cheated!" a Dwarf with a rough face and a scruffy beard shouted across the table while he slammed down the cards he was previously holding.

Eolande who was sat opposite to him smiled while she looked at the royal flush she had laid out in front of her. "The cards don't lie, Mister. Now, your gold?"

"I-I don't have any," he claimed with a stutter. The Dwaft then stood up and tried to leave.

Mere seconds later, he found himself on the floor with a small Foxkin straddling his back. She was holding a fat pouch that rattled with the osund of metal. 

"My money! You dirty thief! Get off of me!" the Dwarf screeched.

The Foxkin, who was obviously Breena, smacked the man on the side of his head with the butt of one of her daggers, knocking him out. She then got up and returned to Eolande before dumping the pouch of coins into a pile of similar pouches, all full of coins or jewels.

"Thank you, Breena. As I've said before, all of this wealth is up for grabs if any of you can beat me at a card game of your choice. However, you have to pay up if you lose," Eolande stated while she shuffled the deck of cards.

The nearby crowd of people that had obviously been attracted by the money, gulped. This wasn't the first person that had tried to leave without paying up, but no one could blame the Dwarf. Afterall, the price to play was one-hundred gold and the prize was nearing ten-thousand.

"It's crazy that she hasn't lost once. That's the ninety-fifth person she's defeated in a row," an onlooker said.

"Right? She has to be cheating. Either that or she's the luckiest person alive," another agreed.

Lone approached Eolande who was carefully sipping a glass of wine now. "What the hell is going on?"

"Hmm? Ah! Husband, welcome back!" Eolande exclaimed before she flew up and hugged Lone's chest faster than he could dodge her.

All of the onlookers, whether female or male, regardless of race, looked at Lone hatefully.

"Tch, so she's married?" one muttered.

"Even though he's quite good-looking, she deserves better," another grumbled.

Clearly, Eolande was quite popular amongst the tavern-goers even if they doubted that she was playing fairly. Her charm was simply too high coupled with her beauty, it made looking at her in a bad light a very difficult thing to do.

Lone's eyes started shaking with anger. Clearly, he was upset at Eolande. He pried her off of him and shooed the crowd away by saying that the games were over and that his group were retiring for the night. The crowd unwillingly dispersed with mild grumblings.

Lone then returned to his room with his three companions and took a seat on the sofa. He took one of the bags of gems that Eolande had earned earlier out from his inventory where he had stored them and inspected the jewels.

"Heh, some of these are types of jewels I've never seen before. Good job getting them, Eolande. But did you earn them fairly? I'm curious," Lone asked as he fiddled with his glasses, making a magnification lens pop out to help him.

"Of course I did, Husband. I'm a sub-species Fairy so I'm naturally luck. You shouldn't have stopped me. I would have earned even more money. Plus, you've seen my status screen. My luck is really high," Eolande replied with a pout as she hovered around Lone.

"We don't need money. I can just create more. Sorry to spoil your fun, but I need you to do something for me," Lone said with a light shrug.

Her eyes them regained some focus. Clearly, she had somehow negated the effects of her prior tipsy state. "Let's forget about what I've been doing in the past hour though. I'm far more interested in how you managed to break through the D-rank barrier to become a C-Ranker. Did you fight with those wolves?"

"Well..." Lone then went on to explain what has happened with Malt, including his unexplainable anger at the Wolfkin to Eolande, Swind and Breena. After telling his story, he once again told Eolande that he wanted her to do something.