Chapter 24
Chug! Chug! Chug!
Chug! Chug! Chug!
Chug! Chug! Chug!
Chug! Chug! Chug!
For the fifth time in a row, under the rhythmic pounding of a crowd gathered to watch him take on a challenge issued by a small but muscular man, Shiro, eyes squeezed shut, chugged until he'd annihilated everything in the flagon.
He opened his eyes to a crowd staring at him with expectation, waiting for him to collapse the way his challenger had, two flagons ago. Instead he only burped, releasing a smell that reeked of cheap honey wine, earning a collective groan from the crowd, especially those who'd bet against him.
"You good, white hair?"
"Hey, thanks guys, told you this'd be my win. Where's the owner? Where's my beautiful prize?"
"You good?" a gentle voice asked, concerned. Shiro turned to find a girl, a redhead with freckles, her face matching her voice, seated on his lap. "That much ale, downed that fast, can't be good for you."
"Don't worry none, sweetie," he said, standing up, the world tilting strangely as he did. “See? Completely fine.” He took a few clumsy steps before stumbling into someone at a nearby table.
"What the fuck are you doing, ma—" A tall man he'd bumped into stood up, followed by the three others he'd been sharing a table with.
"My bad, didn't mean that," Shiro apologized immediately, noticing the spilled ale.
Fishing through his pouch for a Deor coin, he accidentally pulled out a Baelor, tried again, and after three more attempts finally landed on a gold coin, an F.Deor, more than enough to cover the spoiled drink and then some.
"Take this, no offense meant," Shiro said, patting the man's shoulder before turning to leave, intent on collecting the reward the owner had promised him, the chance to have another pretty twin-tailed tavern girl sit on his lap.
Speaking of her, where'd she gone? He was still looking around for his prize when a voice barked behind him.
"Where do you think you're going?" He turned to find the man still standing there, insisting, "It's not enough."
"Yeah, it is," Shiro argued. "That was an F.Deor coin, twenty-five Deor, more than enough for—"
"It's not enough," the man said, grabbing him by the shirt.
"Drop it, Reg," called the tavern owner from behind the counter. "You know he didn't mean it. Just take what he offered and let it go."
"Mind your own business, old man," barked one of the men at the table, which somehow silenced the owner right there in his own establishment.
That's mean, Shiro thought, considering sharing a piece of his mind with the rude bastard, but before he could get a word out, a burp interrupted him, one that quickly degenerated into something that actually splashed across the man in question.
Wiping his face, the man screamed, "That's it, I'm beating your ass! "
"Take it outside, not in my tavern!" the owner shouted, probably picturing his establishment in ruins. "Please!"
Surprisingly, the man obliged, dragging and shoving Shiro outside, his friends trailing behind.
The shove nearly cost him his balance, sending him into a stumble he barely recovered from, though it wasn't going to matter for long, judging by how these gentlemen were flexing their fists in preparation.
"Come on, I'm sorry, I really didn't mean to puke on you. I can pay for it."
"Yeah, you can pay with that whole pouch," said the man Shiro had vomited on, swinging at him. Shiro dodged easily. Purging his stomach had apparently reinvigorated him, since he dodged the follow-up swing just as easily.
"So you know how to fight, huh?"
"Yeah,” Shiro confirmed. "That's why I know for a fact that it always ends with someone hurt, sometimes both.
That's—" Another swing came his way, which seemed to be the signal for the other two to join in.
Shiro did what instinct told him to do against multiple opponents: take one out of the equation as fast as possible.
He started with the one who'd just swung and missed.
Grabbing the man's arm, Shiro drove his knee up into the elbow, the joint giving off the distinct sound of dislocation. Before the man could even react, Shiro's palm slammed into his face, sending him flying back several feet, with a passing hope that he hadn't just given the guy a concussion.
The other two, still furious, charged. One came in low with a breaching kick like he meant to kick down a door.
Shiro made quick work of it, slamming him to the ground by targeting his other leg, then finishing with a stomp.
The last one, a boxer type, swung, but Shiro locked him in close and greeted his face with a backhand that scattered a few teeth to the floor, following it up with a knee to the same spot.
As he slammed his knee down, something in his ears made him instinctively draw the Vanguard. "Fireball!" The front and rear sights of the revolver lined up perfectly with the man's head, finger on the trigger, one squeeze away from obliterating him.
It was the same man who'd told the owner to shut up earlier, now repeating "Fireball, fireball" while making an odd hand motion as if expecting something to shoot out of it.
"You know I could've killed you right there," Shiro mumbled, walking over and casually knocking him unconscious.
He probably should've left that last one awake to look after his friends, but the guy had almost turned him into an actual killer.
Not that Shiro wasn't already one, as far as he knew, having already killed two people, but that wasn't a reason to add to the count.
Glancing back at the tavern, he found a full audience had watched the whole thing, including the tavern girls, who'd retreated inside in fear, along with the owner and the men he'd been drinking with earlier, leaving him alone outside with the four idiots.
He gave them one last glance before heading back in to claim his prize, since he wasn't leaving without it, the owner had made him a promise, after all.
It was then he noticed movement from the first man, still a broken mess on the ground.
Shiro walked over and said, "you guys should've just accepted my apology.
Now look at you. I almost feel bad for you, even knowing your intent was clearly to mug me.
" He was fishing a coin from his pocket when something caught his peripheral vision, movement in the alley to his right.
A dozen meters off, in the shadow between two buildings, stood a silhouette, a woman's, and from it he heard a familiar name called.
"Hiro," right before something crossed the distance between them at impressive speed.
His reflexes, surprising even him, sent the coin he'd just grabbed flicking through the air to intercept it, deflecting the projectile into a nearby wall, chipping off an arm's length of brick.
A second projectile followed instantly, this one aimed at his face, and he snatched it out of the air, then returned it to its owner in the same smooth motion.
It turned out to be a kunai. One moment she was standing in the alley, lamenting, "How!
How, how are you still alive?" the next she was climbing, using both walls of the alley like a ladder, gone from the ground to the rooftops in an instant.
Shiro was confident his throw hadn't missed, though he couldn't see well enough to confirm it.
She didn't so much as scream, just vanished over the edge of a roof.
He rushed to follow, but the sudden burst of speed made him clutch his stomach, where he could hear liquid sloshing.
"Shit, I shouldn't have—" It was only as he doubled over that he noticed something on his hand.
A slash, one he could only have gotten grabbing that damn kunai.
"I really should stop trying to catch thrown weapons.
What if that thing was coated in poison? I'd be in real trouble if it was."
???
"That's not much," Shiro reported, "but it's one more piece I'm starting to remember from that night. Got a small cut trying to catch that kunai, which, like I said, is a kind of dagger."
As he filled her in on this new detail he'd just randomly unlocked mid-afternoon, a moan drifted over from beyond the thin curtain separating him and Chaska, which was really doing nothing to separate anything.
She let out another moan, one that genuinely made Shiro imagine something else entirely was going on. Thalia's words didn't help either.
"Did that hurt?"
"No," Chaska said. "It's fine. Keep going, you can even go rougher."
Shiro sat on what he considered the wrong side of the curtain, glass of something cold and faintly coconut-flavored in hand.
He'd been assured it wasn't strong enough to actually get him drunk, which, given his recent track record with relief in general, came as its own kind of relief.
He stared at nothing in particular for a while, tempted to peek, until he eventually gave in and looked through the gap in the curtain.
In the room, Chaska lay stretched out on her stomach, chin resting on her arms, a towel doing the bare minimum to cover her. Above her, in the loosest sense of the word, Thalia, in her underwear, worked oil into Chaska's back with practiced confidence, clearly knowing exactly what she was doing.
"Don't look," Chaska barked, the moment Thalia pointed him out.
"I'm not looking," he denied, pulling his head back from the curtain.
"He was," the other girls of the VIP floor of Satin and Silk immediately ratted him out, which felt like betrayal. They just laughed before returning their attention to whatever had already captured it.
"Thalia."
"Hm."
"I'm gonna need a massage too," Shiro said, "after Chaska."
"Sure," she chuckled.
"Absolutely not," Chaska cut in.
"Why not? And why do you even get a say?"
"Because I do. Because Thalia is all mine," she declared.
As far as Shiro was concerned, there was no real basis for that claim.
Ever since two days ago, when things happened between him and Chaska, he'd been the one covering everything.
He'd paid for his VIP membership, paid for Thalia, hell, he'd even paid for Chaska's VIP access and today's whole activity.
He had plenty of retorts available, but sensing anything he said would end up landing on Thalia instead, he let it go.
"Sooooo, back to what I was saying, which you clearly weren't listening to—"
"I was," she muffled. "You said you got a small cut and think it might've been poisoned, which is why everything after that's so blurry."
"Yeah," Shiro conceded. "Which makes me question the Morpheus Brew's actual effect.
I kind of blamed the memory loss on that, but there's a decent chance that's not it, or at least not entirely it.
Maybe it was a mix, two poisons combining to create the mess I woke up to that morning.
My point is, I was doing fine on just the aphrodisiac alone. "
At that, Shiro, who was peeking, caught Chaska lifting her head to look back at him.
"Remind me again what you were doing right before getting poisoned by this mysterious woman.
I believe it involved broken teeth and dislocated shoulders, things you already admitted were overly violent, even by your own standards. "
"I'll give you that one, but my point still stands. I wasn't so far gone that I was randomly shooting people, the way I'd originally assumed."
At that point, though he'd told her he couldn't remember what happened after meeting the mysterious woman, she almost certainly already knew he knew it had been her, not him, blasting people in that tavern. The fact she didn't argue that point now was proof enough.
"Why don't you just admit you want to try the aphrodisiac?"
"What—"
"Oh, spare me. I know that's what you actually want. Ask Thalia, she probably clocked it too. It's that obvious."
He glanced at Thalia, who just shrugged before offering, "If you really want to, I can help.” She motioned toward her little cabinet on the side. “It's twenty percent off right now, so it's only—"
"Thalia," Chaska cut her off, "don't encourage him. You haven't seen what he's like on that stuff. He's—"
"He's what? I'm genuinely curious, since you have seen what he's like on it," Thalia asked, voicing the exact question Shiro himself was curious about. His recovered memory hadn't quite covered whatever had made her act so strangely around him afterward. He really wanted to know.
"Don't. You're supposed to be on my side. And you stop peeking."
"Aw, come on."
Shiro didn't really see the point in her modesty at this stage, considering he'd already seen everything she was hiding. He kept that thought to himself, though.
He turned his attention back to the room in front of him instead, the rest of the VIP floor's girls sitting shoulder to shoulder on the carpet, reading, or rather closely examining, what he'd promised to bring the day before: the magazine he'd gotten from Nazim.
"—no, don't turn it, I wasn't done looking at that—"
"You can look again later, we're moving to the next page."
He heard pages rustling, along with commentary of every kind, including one remark about the size of a certain something that let him guess exactly which of the three magazines they were flipping through.
That was about when a head popped up, a magazine held out, finger pointed at a particular picture. "Shiro, look at this thing in your book," she laughed, pointing at a nicely designed pink piece with a flower-woven pattern and one very questionable feature: the crotchless part.
"This was intentional, right?"
Shiro gave her a nod. "Definitely."
"Why? Why would anyone do that? The fact that it's almost see-through is one thing, but having you—wait, there's one for the nipple too."
"What?!"
"Show me!"
"Shiro," he heard again, before another girl, whose act of bringing the book over drew complaints from the others, asked, "What's this?" The magazine had opened to a very naked, very busy couple in a living room, but her finger was pointing precisely at something in the background, inside a screen.
"That'd be a car," he explained, taking the book to look closer.
"A car. Like a carriage?"
"Yep, like that, but without draft animals, and better.
More comfortable, and it gets you to your destination way faster.
You won't see one anywhere around these parts, but—" He stopped there, confused.
His memory was playing tricks on him again.
He knew what cars were, felt like he'd seen one and rode one before, but for the life of him he couldn't place where and when exactly.
"Zaraha, bring the book back so we can all see the picture, you can talk to him later," another girl demanded, quickly backed up by the rest. Amused by the whole scene, Shiro handed the book back over.