Chapter 195

After a day of running around, the girl’s storage rings were full of stuff. I was sitting in the common room with the fire blazing. It wasn’t that chilly, but I always liked to hear the roar of a fire. It was something relaxing for me. Lydia was rubbing my feet as a thank you for the date. Celeste was rubbing my shoulders. Miki was working on creating a poultice she read helped with muscle soreness.

I had only casually said my body was sore, and the girl’s decided this was necessary on their own. Well, it was okay to be pampered once in a while. I took a drink of the ice-cold beer. Of course, this world didn’t have the ability to get the beer that cold, but with fire and water control, I managed to come up with a method of cooling it using mana. It probably used a lot more mana than a cold skill, but it did the trick for simple things.

While I was relaxing, I casually equipped the dark priest job. I had been ready to immediately switch it away. For some reason, I thought equipping it might cause a dark miasma to float out of me or immediately alert the guard. I was glad it was just unfounded paranoia. Instead, Dark Priest seemed to be just like any job. It was hated by the church, but that wasn’t really an issue for me. I planned to avoid any encounters with the church. The first skill of the dark priest was actually Steal Life. It feels a lot like the Slave Master skill.

However, Slave Master is accepted by the priesthood while Dark Priest is evil. I didn’t know how I felt about that. Meh, I wasn’t planning on toppling any regimes or reforming this world. After meeting the Bandits, I understood how unfair the system could be, labeling people and not giving them much choice. You were pigeonholed into any job you started with, and changing jobs was a complicated process that required money.

Well, in that respect, I supposed things were the same in my old world. Those with money had more options, and those that were poor were often forced into lives of crime. Something about this world though just felt a little pushier.

I was starting to drift off in front of the fire when the door outside burst open. The noise was enough that I woke up with a snort. There was a commotion as a man limped into the room and collapsed at a table.

“Adventurer! What happened?” One of the bartenders asked the man as he panted for breath, grimacing as he bled on the floor.

“Bandits! There are bandits surrounding the city!” The man called out.

My eyes opened immediately, and I glanced over at the man. This wasn’t something I had brought on the town, was it? I mean… Balrack did say they’d send others, but would they really attack an actual city? How many bandits would they need to amount an attack of that level? Was Balrack really worth that effort? Or… was there something else they were after?

It looked like my day off ended early.