Chương 8: Shameless

Ch 8: Shameless It was early in the morning, exactly one night after Elitha had teleported me out of jail, and I looked terrible as I stepped out of my room, the glow of the rising sun hurting my eyes. My hair was a mess, my back ached from spending the entire night sitting in a chair, and the dark circles under my eyes told anyone familiar with human body language that I'd been doing something other than sleeping. But all that effort hadn't been for nothing.

Inside my jacket pockets rested the newest iteration of the system.

Or more precisely, three complete copies ready for activation, each assembled into a sphere with every modular spell already in place. It was something I could finally afford to make now that I had enough credits to buy a lot of mana conductive ink. Well, that and because my poor CEO brain kept telling me that widespread fear of Mimics was the perfect environment to drive demand for my product. And if there was one thing high demand meant, it was high margins and high prices.

I glanced at Sahirah's dorm room and smiled. The day I could casually buy her a raw meat meal whenever I felt generous wasn't far away. If I played my cards right, it might even be today. With that ambitious thought in mind, I walked past her door without knocking and headed for the food court, our agreed meeting place after yesterday's deliberately brief conversation. Since the food court was the only place I visited every single day, I followed the familiar route almost absentmindedly.

It didn't take long to notice the school felt very different this morning. For one thing, there were far more Grey staff members than usual. They were everywhere, engraving new magic circles onto doors, staircases, and even at the intersections between corridors. The second thing I noticed was impossible to miss. The line. By the time I reached the food court, it stretched far down the hallway, and I could already tell I was going to waste a good chunk of my morning waiting in it.

"Move to the red circle." A short Grey man stationed at the entrance was controlling the flow of students, forcing everyone through what looked like a lengthy four-step inspection before allowing them inside. I listened to the complaints around me.

"My scales are cold, and I'm hungry. Do we really have to do this?"

"He's right. That girl will eat all the good meat if you keep us here any longer." The scaled people and the furballs were by far the loudest, clearly more concerned about breakfast than the Mimic threat. That probably meant they either didn't know what had happened... or they were complete idiots. I was betting on the former.

"If anyone tries to skip the line, be warned that the security staff has been authorized to use disproportionate force." Principal Dickhead had apparently overheard the complaints. He walked over to the bottleneck, and to my surprise, when his gaze landed on me, he simply ignored me. His expression was nothing like the composed principal I'd met before. His left eyebrow moved constantly, and his entire body visibly tensed whenever another student stepped into one of the magic circles.

As the line crawled forward, I quietly reassessed my sales strategy. One thing became obvious almost immediately. The inspection was incredibly invasive. First, students had to step into a glowing magic circle that consumed enough mana to make the air glow. Next came a full-body inspection with specialized handheld devices. Finally, each student had to provide a drop of blood before opening their mouth for a visual examination. None of them seemed to know why they were being subjected to the procedure.

And while the fact that keeping everyone in the dark about a potentially lethal Mimic infestation was ethically questionable, it also created a problem for me. If no one knew Mimics existed... how exactly was I supposed to implement my fear-based marketing strategy? The minutes dragged by as my mind wrestled with that question, and when my turn finally came, Principal Dickhead intervened personally.

"This one can go ahead. He's already been inspected by her." He didn't bother explaining who her was, but I knew he meant Elitha, even though I'd never actually seen her cast any kind of detection spell on me. As I walked inside, one of the elves protested.

"How is it fair that the human gets to skip the inspection?" I glanced back to find several pairs of green and blue eyes glaring at me as though I'd personally cheated them. I simply flipped them off and kept walking, not particularly concerned whether they understood the gesture. The food court looked very different in the morning, and it had nothing to do with the Mimic threat. For one, the usual line of large pans resting over heating circles was gone.

Instead, a single long table displayed more strange fruits than I could identify, while the selection of hot food was far more limited than it was at lunch or dinner. My gaze barely lingered on the food. I already knew the one thing I wanted most, coffee, wasn't on the menu. Instead, I searched for Sahirah. As usual, she was sitting in our corner at the little table we shared every day.

I knew she ate there three times daily, since her need for raw meat made it impossible to take meals back to her room the way I usually did. This time, though, something immediately caught my attention. She'd already gotten food for me. I walked over and sat down without ceremony, quickly realizing she'd picked what looked like a square hamburger, a piece of meat tucked inside a thick slice of bread.

"Why did you get my breakfast?"

"Oh, come on, Eric. You don't have to pretend you didn't spend your last credits on mana-conductive ink yesterday." Understanding dawned on me. I hadn't told her Elitha had paid me five hundred credits for my idea. Sahirah still thought I'd blown the last of my allowance on ink... Despite the misunderstanding, I smiled. It felt good knowing she wouldn't have let me go hungry if I'd actually been broke. It felt even better knowing she cared enough to have my back without me ever asking.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. No matter how today's sales went, I'd already decided I was paying for both of our meals. I just wasn't going to tell her that yet.

"Thanks," I said, already taking a bite.

"By the way, can you tell me the names of the species of the furballs and the scaled people? I want to use the Mimic crisis as a marketing opportunity, and I figured it'd be rude to keep referring to them by what they look like.'""You've been here for a month..." Her mismatched eyes sharpened as they lifted from the bloody piece of meat on her plate to meet mine.

"Are all humans this socially inept, or are you a special case?"

"Do all Nadiri have different-colored eyes, or are you a special case?" I shot back. She let out a mirthless huf, and her gaze returning to her plate. As she sliced off another piece of meat, she asked, "Are we going to discuss what happened during meditation class?" Yeah, I had cornered her, and she had resorted to the big guns.

"Maybe later, somewhere more private," I said, looking away.

"I've got too much to do first, and today I really need to build a bridge with the other species. If everything goes well, I might even invite you and a few of them to help me test some powerful defensive spells against the Mimics. But first, I need to establish a friendly relationship with them." I watched in silence as she brought another bite to her mouth and chewed thoughtfully, her expression revealing absolutely nothing. Then she spoke.

"The ones you call the scaled people are the Granar. Their homeworld doesn't have mana, and I don't think they ever figured out how to make fire on their own." Wait. No mana... and no fire? How had they survived? Had being brought to Navar by the Riftstorm actually improved their quality of life? Before I could sink deeper into that line of thought, Sahirah continued.

"The others you call furballs are the Zufi. I think their world has mana, but they never discovered runes. Their experience with mana mostly consisted of running away from monsters that used it against them. Because of that, they tend to distrust anything related to mana." That was another surprise. The Zufi had mana all along, yet had never learned to use it. How much useful knowledge had I missed by locking myself in my room and obsessing over runes?

"Does your world have mana?" It was the first time I'd asked her something about her planet, and I had no idea how she'd react. I'd avoided talking about Earth just as much as she'd avoided talking about her own home, and despite everything we'd been through together, I still knew almost nothing about her beyond that suspicious lie about her surname. She stopped eating and looked at me for a few quiet seconds.

"Does yours have mana?" So that was the game the Mana Bomb Girl wanted to play. Fine. She'd been far too kind to me for me to refuse her.

"No. We humans found other ways to accomplish things without mana." She smirked, resting her elbows on the table and folding her hands together.

"I knew it! You sound far too knowledgeable about everything for it to be any other way." She leaned forward, her eyes shinning.

"As for my world... we used to have mana. Far more than Navar. But we don't anymore, and many of my people believe alchemy is a dead-end science, that no civilization can truly prosper without mana." That was... a lot to process. Her world was declining? Had it suffered some kind of magical apocalypse? Before I could ask, she excitedly changed the subject.

"Who do you think is stronger? Humans or the Grey?" That question froze me. I had no idea what an Archmage's upper limit was, and I certainly didn't know everything humanity kept hidden behind classified military projects. Still... I had a feeling a nuclear weapon would give even the Grey something to worry about. Unfortunately, that wasn't something I could tell her. Yesterday, Elitha had already demonstrated that the translation spell left us with virtually no privacy.

"I can't answer that while we're relying on the school's translation spell," I said.

"But once I implement translation into my own system, ask me again." Her eyes widened. Then the excitement faded into something quieter, and she lowered her voice almost to a whisper.

"When your system has its own translation... there are things this girl wants to tell you too, human." She had no idea what those words did to me. Translation had just jumped to the top of my long-term roadmap. Well... almost. Calculating levels was probably still the higher priority when it came to new features, given the current limitations of my skills and the sheer complexity of implementing translation. Even so, our conversation left me feeling strangely energized.

For the first time since arriving on Navar, I felt ready to push past even my already high tolerance for social anxiety. So I did something utterly unthinkable. I slid my plate aside, picked up my tray, climbed onto our table, and began banging the tray like a drum. Within seconds, every eye in the food court was on me. Voices erupted all around.

"What is the human doing?"

"Wasn't he arrested yesterday? Why is he even here?" And, worst of all:"The weird couple is making a scene in public again." Somehow, I managed to ignore every last comment. And pretending this was nothing more than another game, I raised my voice until it reached across the entire room.

"I'm sorry for interrupting your breakfast," I said, "but I think all of you have noticed that this isn't a normal morning. Things are different than they were yesterday. The Grey are demanding a great deal from all of you with these inspections, yet they're offering no explanation for any of it." To my own surprise, the speech sounded far better aloud than it had in my head. Maybe because, for once, I wasn't simply trying to sell something. I was simply sharing my own frustrations and telling the truth.

"And what all of you deserve to know," I continued, "is that this school is infested with Mimics. Creatures that jump from body to body without any regard for life, and that, as far as any of you know, could be inside the bodies of your friends right now." Many remained silent, but voices soon rose throughout the crowd, some curious, others fearful.

"Mimicssss?" hissed a Granar.

"My nose could tell it! It smelled something wrong in the air," said a brown-furred Zufi. And finally, one of the elves, the pointy-eared people whose species name I still hadn't bothered to learn joined the questioning.

"How does a human know all that?" The question didn't scar me. In fact, it came at exactly the right moment. I'd introduced the problem, which meant it was time to sell the solution.

"I assume some of you were present when Principal Zorik wrongfully arrested me yesterday," I said, proudly puffing out my chest when I noticed Zorik himself watching from a distance. Not wanting to provoke the man any further, I omitted a few details.

"But, being the competent man he is, Principal Zorik quickly realized he'd made a mistake, and that the real culprit behind the murder was a Mimic, and not any explosion." I had just exposed a security crisis the administration was trying to keep quiet. But I had already factored in the fact that Principal Dickhead now knew Elitha and I had some kind of relationship.

And if the demoness planned on charging interest for the help she'd given me yesterday, then I was damn well going to capitalize on her name as currency from now on. Finding no readable reaction on Principal Dickhead's face in response to my actions, I continued.

"And as for how we discovered the Mimic... the answer, my friends of other species, is right here in my hand." I reached into my pocket and pulled out one of the spheres.

"You should already be familiar with this, my system. This version can identify a Mimic, and unlike the previous one, it displays the target's name for everyone to see. That means it can confirm your friends are really who they claim to be, and not some monster wearing their skin." When I finished, I heard several gasps and saw more than a few pairs of widened eyes. My sales pitch had definitely reached at least part of the audience.

But unlike them, Sahirah looked genuinely upset, realizing this version of the system could accidentally expose her secret surname. Well, there were only three spheres, so it shouldn't be too hard for her to avoid getting caught by one. Still, judging by the look on her face, I was definitely going to hear about it later. But luckily, before she could say anything, one of the tall elves, simply crossed her arms and stood up, glaring at me as if I'd committed a crime.

"And why should we trust someone who never proved he wasn't lying about his own status?" Another elf, a male this time, stood as well.

"You certainly enjoy the spotlight for someone so weak." A third one rose.

"You can't even avoid committing indecencies in public. Why should we trust our safety to you?" I frowned, losing my composure for a brief moment, and flipped all three of them off with both hands. Only after taking a deep breath did I manage to return to my usual self: Eric Nevermore, the adult in the room.

"This gesture you just saw," I said, "means peace among species on my planet." Yeah. I delivered that entire sentence with a perfectly straight face, remembering the TV show and the joke I'd shamelessly stolen just to avoid looking childish.

"And to prove these aren't just empty words..." I raised the paper sphere high enough for everyone to see.

"I'm offering every one of you the chance to own a copy of my system. And I'm selling it cheap." I smiled, and when I glanced down, I found Sahirah frozen in place, staring at me as though I were the most shameless person in the world. Honestly, I couldn't tell whether she'd seen right through my little performance, but it didn't matter. Looking back at the crowd, I continued, "The price is only 250 credits per unit.

A small price to pay when it gives you a way to protect your people from Mimics and a reliable way to track your own progress." After one last look at the audience, I climbed down from the table.

"If anyone wants to do business, I'll be in my dorm room all day. Room 267, the rare-species corner." With that, I smiled once more to Sahirah and headed for the counter to pay for both my breakfast and Sahirah's, ignoring the various complaints about the price of my system. My reasoning was simple. The individual complaints were not important because my initial target clients were the cliques, not individuals.

And since I only had three spheres, and wasn't about to spend another sleepless night making more, the high price was exactly the safeguard I needed against running out of stock. As for the rest of the day, I'd be skipping classes, and Sahirah would almost certainly ask where I'd gotten the money. But neither of those things mattered. Skipping classes was just another Thursday, and I didn't mind telling Sahirah what had happened yesterday.

Everything else could wait since the first step toward long-term profits had already been taken. Now all I had to do was stay in my room, study the defensive spells from Fire Moon, and wait for both customers and future friends of fur and scale to come knocking at my door.