Scrolls were precious things, especially to commoners. Busca might be the local rich man on this street, but when it came to standing, he was still a commoner—just a little better off than the ordinary sort.
And that little bit wasn't enough to let him or his son casually burn a fifty-copper magic scroll in a fight. Such things were for emergencies, and in a proper duel—a situation like the present one—a magic scroll's effect was limited. By any ordinary reckoning, a brawl between commoners would never come down to magic scrolls.
So when Ye Chui's very first move was to throw a flame scroll at Kairui, and that scroll had plainly hurt Kairui's hand, Busca was not worried in the least.
Kairui, of course, wasn't worried either.
"Let's see how many scrolls you've got on you!" Kairui waved his longsword with his other hand. "However many you've got, bring them all on!"
"Sure!"
Ye Chui looked as agreeable as could be—well, if that's what you want, that's what we'll do—and promptly pulled another scroll out of his bag, ripped it open with a rrrip, and casually tossed it at Kairui. His hands didn't stop: another scroll, then another...
In the blink of an eye Ye Chui had thrown five scrolls.
Two of them were flame scrolls, two were lightning scrolls, and one was a dust scroll.
Lightning scrolls worked like flame scrolls: once activated they spat out bolt after bolt of lightning to attack nearby enemies, with power on par with the basic attack spell 【Lightning】. The dust scroll was for confounding enemies—once activated, it threw up a sky full of dust and blocked their line of sight.
The scrolls sold at Anthony's Magic Cottage came in five kinds. Only the flame and lightning scrolls had real attack power; the rest were support attacks. So most of the scrolls Ye Chui made were flame and lightning scrolls.
And as those scrolls flew at Kairui, flame and lightning flying together and a sky full of dust clouding everyone's sight, the onlookers around them were struck dumb in an instant. Five scrolls thrown in one breath—and five scrolls were worth two and a half silver coins...
Three silver coins!
Kairui was on his guard now, so the scrolls didn't hurt him again, but his dodging was a rather sorry sight.
Watching his son crawl out of the dust with dirt all over his head and face, Busca bellowed, "Kairui, scrolls cost a fortune, he can't have many left! Attack him now!"
Hearing his father, Kairui immediately swung his longsword, bared his teeth, and charged straight at Ye Chui.
Ye Chui was calm as ever. He reached into the bag and pulled out a whole fistful of scrolls, then used both hands to rip them open one after another—rrrip, rrrip, rrrip—hurling them forward without so much as a glance. One handful gone, he grabbed another, and another, and another...
Each fistful was five or six scrolls, and every offhand throw was three silver coins. An ordinary household got by on only a silver coin or two a month, so watching Ye Chui fling scrolls away like this, it was as if he were standing there throwing money into the street.
Even a squanderer doesn't squander like that...
The most important thing was that several of those scrolls he flung out had plainly never been ripped open at all. They simply hit Kairui and dropped to the ground.
Was he straight-up using the scrolls as bricks to bludgeon people?
Was he trying to beat the man to death with money?
Silence fell all around—silence, because they were stunned. Ye Chui's barefaced money-burning, wealth-flaunting behavior had stunned them.
And thanks to that way of fighting which treated money as nothing at all, Kairui, for a while, simply could not force his way in close. In that stretch he was burned by flame a few more times, struck by lightning a few times, had a head and face of water splashed over him by a water scroll, then got a head and face of dirt from a dust scroll; he had just wiped his face when a gale scroll blew him staggering.
Kairui had been through plenty of fights, big and small, but he swore he had never faced an opponent who casually threw out dozens of scrolls.
In one breath Ye Chui threw out several dozen scrolls—thirty-nine of them, to be exact, because Busca had stood there counting them off. Thirty-nine magic scrolls, fifty coppers each: nearly twenty silver coins!
And at last the man who had thrown several dozen scrolls stopped, panting hard, and looked at the bedraggled Kairui.
Kairui threw his head back with a roar and charged at Ye Chui again. "You're out of scrolls now, kid! I'm going to kill you!"
So saying, he raised his longsword high in one hand, his momentum overwhelming, as though he were about to begin a massacre...
Then Ye Chui simply set the bag down on the ground and started scooping scrolls out of it with both hands, a dozen or more to a scoop. This time he didn't even bother opening them; he just hurled them straight into Kairui.
One scoop, then another, then another...
At that moment countless people around them turned to stone. They felt sure they must be dreaming.
Was this any way to treat scrolls? Not even activating them, just hauling them out and throwing them—was he flat-out using scrolls as bricks? And the most important thing of all... just how many scrolls were in that bag? Bulging like that... could they all be scrolls?
And although the scrolls flying at him weren't activated, Kairui didn't dare catch them head-on. He leapt and hopped about dodging, and in a blink at least fifty-odd scrolls had been thrown before Ye Chui finally stopped.
The ground was littered with scrolls, and in many people's eyes that was naked money lying there...
"Hah... now you're out of tricks, I see... what an idiot... throwing scrolls at me just like that..." Kairui shouted, gasping for breath—tired out from dodging scrolls—as he raised his longsword once more to attack Ye Chui.
But Ye Chui only grinned, drew his magic wand from his waist, traced a circle through the air with it, and pointed it forward. "【Breeze】!"
The everyday-life magic 【Breeze】, the one that brings people cool breezes.
Used with skill, this spell could levitate small objects with the wand; an adept could even use it to make paper figures dance in the air... and the original Hammerhead had been one of the latter sort—how bored did a person have to be to become that proficient in this spell? But right now it was a great convenience to Ye Chui, for he had fully inherited Hammerhead's precise control over it.
Under Ye Chui's 【Breeze】, a scroll at Kairui's feet suddenly ripped open—rrrip—and with a boom!, a ball of flame burst out.
Kairui yelped and sprang backward.
And then the scrolls scattered across the ground began to stir faintly, one after another, and hopped up from the ground and flew at Kairui...