Chapter 353: Registering For The Tournament [I]
Evelyn went completely quiet as she stared straight ahead at the cracked pavement.
’Here it comes,’ Evelyn thought bitterly, bracing herself for the inevitable verbal blow.
Did Silas want to call her pathetic?
Did he want to mock her for crying in an alleyway over a college kid who didn’t even want her around?
Did he want to point out how desperate and broken she looked hiding behind a stuffed kraken?
She would take it silently... Because in her own mind, she was pathetic.
"Your brother is quite an ungrateful piece of shit," Silas stated bluntly.
Evelyn physically stumbled mid-step.
She caught her balance, her Kitsune mask turning to stare at him in jarring disbelief.
That was the last thing she expected him to say.
Silas kept walking with his hands in his pockets. He looked like he was judging... judging a lot...
"Not everyone can be the perfect supportive sibling in this kind of high-stress situation," Silas continued. "And while I don’t know the specifics of what happened between you two in the past, given the way you were desperately following them through the festival and acting surprised, I assume you had wanted to go to this place with him for a long time?"
Evelyn swallowed hard with her throat tightening. "Yes."
"And instead of coming with the sister who clearly loves him, he blew you off and brought a random civilian girl that you didn’t even know existed?" Silas summarized the situation cleanly.
Evelyn nodded mutely, staring up at him. "Yes."
Silas nodded to himself.
He stopped walking and turned to fully face her.
He puffed out his broad muscled chest with his dominant older-brother instincts taking over the conversation.
"Well, whatever," Silas dismissed the boy’s feelings with a wave of his hand. "Since he is being so incredibly stuck-up, even though you are the one who is most probably paying all of his expensive civilian bills, why don’t you just cut him off? Stop trying to win his approval. Just spend your money on yourself..."
Evelyn blinked behind her mask.
Her brain stalled.
She had never, not even once in the past years of grueling combat and bloody dungeon dives, actually thought about that specific option.
Cutting him off?
"College fees in Valoria City are notoriously expensive," Silas complained, speaking from personal experience of looking at the brochures for Lia.
The additional stuff was cost and he was being billed by the principal straight up.
"The fact that he isn’t worshipping at your feet every single morning for keeping him debt-free, and is instead giving you arrogant attitude in public, is genuinely insane to me..."
A short sudden laugh escaped Evelyn’s lips.
It was a real laugh.
"It really is insane," Evelyn muttered, the heavy crushing guilt in her chest suddenly feeling incredibly light and stupid.
She was spending staggering amounts of blood-soaked money on him.
Sure, she was not here on Earth all the time, and her duties as a Lord kept her away for weeks.
But he wasn’t making a single effort on his end to bridge the gap.
Did he even know how painfully expensive his specific college was?
Regular civilian college in the outer districts was a shit-ton of money.
But Matt was attending the prestigious Valoria Institute.
He was going to a top-tier college that would eventually land him a lucrative job as an Awakened Scientist... a specialist who prepared the magical weapons, runic items, and defensive gear that Lords used in the field.
The tuition for those specialized mana labs was two, if not three times costlier than a normal degree.
It required the constant purchase of raw monster cores and refined mythril just for his homework assignments.
She was literally bleeding in the mud, fighting monsters and Lords alike, just to pay for his textbooks. And he was still giving her attitude because she didn’t smile enough?
If he wanted to play the independent arrogant adult who didn’t need his older sister hovering around his perfect normal life... then he could pay for his own normal life.
Since he wanted to stay happily with his pink-haired girlfriend, he could do so on his own goddamn money.
’Yes... I should be ruthlessly stingy with absolutely all of my money,’ Evelyn thought.
A slow wicked and villainous smile spread across Evelyn’s pale face behind the Kitsune mask.
The heavy burden of being the desperate seeking older sister was gone.
It was replaced by the cold ruthlessness of Lord Sky.
On the exact opposite side of Shogitown, standing safely in the brightly lit, crowded central plaza with his girlfriend...
Matt suddenly stopped eating his kraken skewer.
A violent freezing chill shot aggressively down the length of his spine.
All the hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up in terror. He looked around the festive, beautiful square, suddenly feeling like an impending catastrophic doom was rapidly approaching his bank account.
Why did he feel like hell was on its way to him?
’Scary,’ Matt thought, shivering in the warm night air.
...
They finally arrived at the exact coordinates the terrified sniper had frantically choked out.
Silas came to a slow halt with his heavy combat boots crunching softly against the gravel and broken glass littering the narrow unlit street.
He didn’t know anything about this specific sector of Shogitown, but his instincts hummed with a dark undeniable certainty.
This was the place.
The exterior of the building looked like a condemned forgotten warehouse, its rusted corrugated metal siding practically rotting away under the acidic Valoria City rain.
But despite the dead quiet facade of the structure, Silas could sense them.
Beneath the surface, hidden behind layers of reinforced steel and sound-dampening runes, there were dozens of people on the inside.
He could feel the dense volatile cluster of overlapping mana signatures, the heavy thud of elevated heartbeats, and the simmering aggressive tension that always accompanied a gathering of killers.
Silas and Evelyn turned their heads, sharing a slow knowing nod in the dim light of the alleyway.
Evelyn reached up, pulling the thick fabric of her oversized gray hood tighter over her head to further obscure her features, making sure her Kitsune mask was securely fastened.
Silas reached up with a gloved hand, adjusting the cold metal jaw of his terrifying Oni mask, making sure the straps were locked tight against his skull.
Silas let out a deep sigh with the sound vibrating through the mask.
He truly didn’t want to do this.
When he woke up this morning, his plans had been simple.
He just assumed that he would meet Evelyn’s underground contact, pay the broker a ridiculous sum of credits, have the contact forge his bulletproof background for Lord Vespera, and then go back home to his pristine Silverleaf apartment.
He wanted to start preparing for his inevitable high-stakes political meeting with the World Council auditors and make connections.
He wanted to spend some quiet mundane time with his little sister, Lia. He wanted to eat Martha’s incredible cooking without rushing.
Hell, he even wanted to follow through and go on that ridiculous spontaneous date with Harper.
But instead, his life had just done a complete violent one-eighty in the span of a few chaotic hours.
’It’s almost like I’m the tragic protagonist of someone’s goddamn novel, and they just desperately want me to do this specific side-quest...’ Silas thought bitterly, staring at the rusted warehouse doors.
If there was some twisted omnipotent Author out there somewhere jotting down the events of his life on a glowing screen, what the fuck was that guy thinking?
Why force him to compete in an underground blood-sport tournament with the ruthless mafia of this world?
Why couldn’t he just have a little bit of peaceful relaxing slice-of-life?
He had literally just finished conquering Sky’s army... He deserved at least that much of a break after a freaking Lord War!
Silas exhaled forcefully, pushing a stream of warm breath out through the metallic fangs of his mask to calm his racing thoughts.
He shoved those frustrating mundane desires to the far back of his mind.
Complaining wouldn’t get the fake identity forged, and it wouldn’t get Jax out of the syndicate’s clutches.
"Let’s go," Silas muttered, his voice dropping coldly.
They approached the structure, stepping up to the heavy rusted metal door marked with a faintly glowing Black-Ash syndicate emblem.
Silas didn’t knock. He just reached out, gripped the cold iron handle, and pushed it open.
The heavy hinges groaned in protest.
Immediately, Silas and even the hardened chain-smoking Evelyn were violently assaulted by a literal wall of thick suffocating smoke.
The smell of raw tobacco was so incredibly thick and pungent that it practically had a physical mass.
It rolled out of the open doorway in a gray toxic cloud.
It was blatantly obvious that dozens of people were actively smoking premium cigars and cheap cigarettes on the inside.
Layered beneath the choking ash was the sharp unmistakable stench of spilled high-proof alcohol and unwashed bodies.
Silas stepped through the threshold, Evelyn trailing closely behind his broad shoulders.
He looked around the dimly lit room.
It wasn’t the fighting arena itself. It was a grimy cramped antechamber that looked and functioned exactly like a sleazy dive bar.
Rough wooden tables were scattered across the scuffed floorboards, occupied by massive scarred men and women who were actively drinking from oversized glass mugs and smoking.
Off to the right side of the room, there was a designated receptionist corner secured behind a thick pane of scratched, bulletproof plexiglass.
But Silas’s golden-ringed eyes didn’t focus on the desk.
They immediately locked onto the strongest and most volatile mana signature he had sensed from the outside.
Sitting alone at a corner table, nursing a massive jug of dark ale, was a towering mountain of a man.
The guy was wearing a sleek and terrifyingly sharp Mantis mask forged from bright green alloy.
He was completely shirtless, his skin covered in jagged tribal syndicate tattoos.
He was so impossibly muscular that his veins bulged visibly against his dark skin like thick pulsing cables.
It was blatantly obvious the man was pumped full of illegal black-market combat steroids.
The Mantis-masked giant paused with his mug halfway to his mouth. He was looking clearly at Silas.
Silas stopped walking.
He turned his head, his Oni mask locking gazes with the giant.
The noise in the grimy bar seemed to drop a few decibels as Silas didn’t flex his aura, but he didn’t back down an inch either.
He simply stared.
Before the staring match could escalate into a pointless bar brawl, Evelyn grabbed the thick fabric of Silas’s sleeve.
"Ignore the meatheads," Evelyn muttered quietly, forcefully dragging him away from the giant’s line of sight and pulling him toward the bulletproof counter. "Stay focused on the objective."
Silas yielded to her grip, letting her lead him to the receptionist’s corner.
The woman sitting behind the thick scratched plexiglass counter looked incredibly rough around the edges.
Unlike almost everyone else in the building, she had absolutely no mask on her face, proudly displaying her identity.
She had sharp striking Asian features... more authentically Asian than most of the distant descendants Silas had encountered in this world but there was a wicked predatory glint in her dark eyes.
Her black hair was shaved close on one side and hung in a long messy fringe over the other.
She leaned back in her squeaking leather chair, taking a massive inhaled drag from the long, thin cigarette pinched between her black-painted fingernails.
She leaned forward, pressing her face near the circular speaking hole cut into the glass.
FWOOSH!
She unceremoniously spat a thick billowing cloud of gray smoke directly through the hole, blowing it straight into Silas and Evelyn’s masked faces.
Silas waved a hand in front of his Oni mask, coughing softly as he was assaulted by yet another terrible smell.
Though, to his genuine surprise, this specific smoke was significantly more pleasant and aromatic than the heavy pungent Black-Ash cigar Evelyn had procured earlier.
It smelled of clove and dark cherry.
"What kind of blend is that?" Evelyn asked immediately with her dark eyes lighting up behind her Kitsune mask.
She leaned closer to the glass, thoroughly ignoring the blatant disrespect of having smoke blown in her face.
The wicked receptionist smirked, clearly amused by the petite girl’s priorities.
"Red-Lotus synthetic," the woman replied. "It’s imported from the southern shipping docks. Burns fast, but it tastes like a dream."
"I need a pack," Evelyn demanded bluntly, reaching into her pocket.