Busca hurried off with his son, who had been beaten out of any semblance of human shape, but the onlookers showed no hurry to disperse. They crowded around Ye Chui instead, their voices tinged with awe. Mages had always been a highly respected profession, and a rare one at that. True, the old Hammerhead had built his mage skill tree into a worthless class, but Ye Chui's performance just now had been so astonishing that people were seeing him with new eyes—so a round of praise was naturally unavoidable.
"Hammerhead, since when has your magic been this good? I was sweating bullets for you back there."
"If you ask me, Hammerhead's best move just now was his scheming—brains and brawn, that's what that was. A rank-two mage actually finishing off a rank-four mage outright, and conning a hundred gold coins out of the man on the side! Tsk tsk, that boy's got a future. See, I always said I never misjudged Hammerhead!"
"What do you mean, conned? Busca got that money through swindling and cheating—he deserved to have it taken!"
"Busca throws his weight around on our street every day, and it's all because of his son. Let's see how cocky he can be now."
"To hold any post at the City Lord's estate you need to be at least a rank-four swordsman. Kairui just used War God's Protection, that warrior secret art—his rank is bound to drop. That rank-four of his was propped up entirely by Busca stuffing him with every tonic under the sun; his foundation's the shakiest there is. He's finished now!"
The crowd chattered on happily, piling on a man already down—Busca's reputation on this street had never been any good.
Just then the crowd was suddenly shoved apart, and Debbie squeezed in from outside. Her petite frame worked its way over to Ye Chui's side with some effort, her little face covered in a brilliant, excited smile, as pretty as the magic sunflowers planted in the yard.
Seeing the little girl, Ye Chui instantly grew smug and waited for her to praise him. So what if I look like a weakling? When it comes to a fight, what counts is brains—brains!
"Where's that gold-coin card? I'm the one who calls the shots in this household—that money goes to me for safekeeping!" Debbie stuck her little hand right out at Ye Chui, her eyes sparkling.
Ye Chui: "..."
Can't this girl focus on anything else? Like how brilliant and dashing I was just now—courage and cunning in equal measure, and so on?
Ye Chui wasn't about to hold a grudge against his little junior sister over that, so he handed the gold-coin card to the girl.
The moment she had it, the girl cradled the card and studied it with a face full of adoration, then carefully tucked it into her bosom beneath her armor, patted her flat-as-a-board chest, and went on giggling to herself in sheer delight...
Once the crowd on the street had gradually dispersed, Debbie dragged Ye Chui back to Anthony's Magic Cottage. The girl stretched her whole body with a sigh of comfort, her face full of the relief of having survived a great disaster—disaster averted, and a pile of money gained on top of it. There was nothing finer than that.
Of course, there's always something that can make things even better. For instance, Debbie suddenly thought of something, rubbed her belly, and said to Ye Chui, "Hammerhead, I'm starving. I just threw up everything I've eaten these past two days. Let's go eat."
"What do you want to eat?" Ye Chui asked with a smile.
"Heh heh, let's go eat at a big restaurant." Debbie patted her own chest. "We're rich now!"
What a hundred gold coins actually meant in this world was something Ye Chui had no intuitive grasp of. In truth, when he'd jacked up the price and demanded a hundred gold coins from Busca, he'd just said the first number that came to mind, never thinking of it as any great fortune. But... judging by how pained Busca looked, this is probably quite a lot, right?
Thinking it over carefully... earlier, to handle Old George's funeral and the medical bills they owed, they'd had no choice but to borrow ten gold coins from Busca, and to repay that debt they'd even been about to mortgage Anthony's Magic Cottage. Seen that way, a hundred gold coins was definitely no small sum.
Three days had passed since his rebirth in Hammerhead's body. In those three days Ye Chui had shut himself up inside Anthony's Magic Cottage the entire time, and he'd long since wanted to go out and wander, to see what this magical world looked like.
So he nodded with a smile. "Sure, sounds great."
Half an hour or so later, Ye Chui and Debbie were sitting in Stan City's biggest restaurant, the Molan Flower Restaurant, at a table by the window. The table was laden with all kinds of delicacies—dishes Debbie had never been able to eat before—giving off an enticing aroma.
Debbie had changed into a long white dress, and her hair was done up in two ponytails. With her rosy little face, at first glance she looked like a harmless, pure and innocent little loli—but a second glance would flip that opinion a hundred and eighty degrees, because this little loli was lugging a greatsword as big as she was, and the way she casually hoisted a hundred-plus-jin blade onto her shoulder was enough to shake anyone's soul.
Even though Ye Chui felt he had long since grown used to such things, at this moment he still found this utterly discordant picture hard to accept.
"A swordsman must never forget their sword, no matter where they are; they have to keep it with them at all times, just like a mage has to keep their wand on them..." When Ye Chui, baffled, asked her why she'd brought her greatsword along, Debbie had told him this with tremendous gravity. Then her eyes traveled over him. "Where's your wand?"
"Forgot it at home..." Ye Chui said, sweating.
Debbie: "..."
When Debbie had marched through the streets with that greatsword on her shoulder, apparently nobody had shot her any astonished looks, so this must be normal in this world.
On the way to the Molan Flower Restaurant, Ye Chui had also taken in the scenery of this magical world to his heart's content. It felt to him a bit like the medieval style in movies, only more opulent and splendid, saturated with magic at every turn—and that magical flavor was like a cool guy on a motorcycle suddenly roaring like the wind past on the quaint old street of a costume drama.
Magic-driven things were common here: flame magic worked into shop signs to make them flicker, horseless carriages driven by wind magic, and magic puppet shop assistants with eerily lifelike looks in some of the stores. And of course, most of the people on the street were human, but there were no shortage of other races: fierce, warlike orcs, beautiful, aloof elves, and short, sturdy dwarves.
From Hammerhead's memories, Ye Chui knew that as early as five thousand years ago, during the famous War of the Forebears, humans had already established an alliance with the orcs, elves, dwarves, giants, and other races.
That alliance had lasted to the present day. Granted, some orc tribes in the north were said to be on poor terms with the human population, the dwarves and elves had plenty of friction with humans too, and the giants had vanished from the Aigendas Continent a thousand years ago—but none of that hindered humans and other races from living in harmony in little Stan City.
All of it filled Ye Chui with a sense of novelty.
Luckily Debbie, small as she was, had nerves thick enough that she made nothing of Ye Chui's endless exclamations of wonder—in her heart Hammerhead would probably always be Hammerhead. Even if he'd just used a shameless, money-burning scroll tactic to take down a rank-four swordsman, he was still the Hammerhead who had grown up beside her and whom she was, without a doubt, going to marry one day.
The dishes the restaurant's chef turned out were delicious. The Molan Flower Restaurant stood on Stan City's Stardust Avenue and was truly the finest restaurant in the city. Every dish on the table was unfamiliar to Ye Chui—in fact, unfamiliar to Debbie too—but that didn't stop either of them from eating with gusto. They both enjoyed the meal enormously.
But a moment later, Ye Chui's gaze suddenly went to the window, as though he'd spotted something interesting, and for a while he couldn't look away.
"Hammerhead, what are you looking at? This food cost us several silver coins—if you don't eat it, it's wasted." Debbie grumbled, and her gaze followed his out the window. Her eyes suddenly lit up. "Oh, Miss Aifeiya! Looks like she's heading out of the city to train today."
"You know her?" Ye Chui blinked and gave Debbie a strange look.
Outside the window, on Stardust Avenue, a handsome white horse was slowly passing by. Pedestrians stepped aside to clear the way for it, clearly because the rider's status was lofty. Carriages were forbidden on Stardust Avenue, and so were horses or any other magic beasts used as mounts, yet this white horse moved unimpeded with people making way for it—proof enough of just how extraordinary this person was.
Astride the white horse was a girl—a very pretty girl. A cascade of wavy auburn hair, silver armor wrapping her whole body, though her slender, well-proportioned figure still showed through. She looked fifteen or sixteen, with a very fair face and a captivating charm, an aloof manner, and a piercing air of valor radiating from her.
Ye Chui admitted he was a little captivated by this pretty girl—or rather, the original Hammerhead had been quite smitten with her, and Ye Chui had been affected by that somewhat, finding this beautiful human girl very charming.
Behind the girl followed four fully armored swordsmen: three of them human, and one green-skinned orc warrior of enormous bulk.
"Of course I know her. That's Aifeiya, the daughter of Stan City's City Lord—a genius swordswoman. She's the same age as us, but she's already a rank-five swordsman; becoming a high-rank swordsman is practically a done deal." Debbie gave Ye Chui a very strange look. "Hammerhead, I've noticed you're acting a little weird. Isn't Miss Aifeiya your dream girl? I even dug a portrait of her out from under your bed once."
Ye Chui: "..."
Well, now he knew why the sight of this girl had struck him as so charming...