After finishing up her shopping, Flum thanked her companions and parted ways with Eterna and Gadhio. She dropped off her supplies and made her way to their inn, where, stepping into her room, she stopped to look at herself in the mirror and sighed. Even with the added hands to help carry all her bags, Flum was exhausted.
Her stats were all zeroes, after all. Her strength of 0 kept her from carrying any heavy items, and an endurance of 0 left her feeling out of breath after walking just a short way. It wasn’t so bad that she couldn’t live a normal life, but she was definitely less fit than the average person on the street. Even Flum was constantly annoyed by her own weakness.
This was nothing new, of course. It’d been like this ever since she was a kid, and it was all due to her damned affinity.
Everyone was born with an affinity, the most common of which were fire, water, wind, earth, light, and darkness. Depending on your magical ability, these affinities influenced what kind of magic you could use. A few unique people were born with affinities other than these six. Jean, for example, had the “nature” affinity, granting him the ability to control fire, water, wind, and earth. Cyrill was a “hero,” which gave her access to exclusive spells.
These “rare affinities” were generally far superior to the standard six most of the population possessed. Alas, even these outliers had exceptions, and Flum’s “reversal” affinity was one. Strength, magic, endurance, agility, perception—her stats were zeroes across the board, and stubbornly refused to increase no matter what she did.
“At least the people back in my village were nice to me…”
Back in her hometown, no one made fun of her. The adults treated her like the other children, and the other children readily accepted her as one of them. In retrospect, maybe that had been the exception, not the rule.
Flum mentally cursed the hand fate had dealt her as she tumbled to the bed and hugged a pillow tight. It felt so good to just lay there and rest. She was well and truly exhausted, and was about to call it a night when she was startled by a knock at her door.
“Who is it?” Her brain was still fuzzy.
“It’s Jean. Listen, we need to talk.”
This woke Flum right up. She quickly sprang to her feet and ran over to open the door, stumbling and scraping her knee on the way. She fought back the pain and turned the doorknob with the faintest hint of tears in her eyes. The sage stood on the other side of the door, a solemn look on his face.
“This is certainly a surprise, Jean. What can I do for you?”
“Come with me.”
Despite being offered no information to go on, Flum didn’t feel like she was in any position to turn Jean down. She quickly locked the door behind her and hurried after Jean.
The sage left the inn and moved quickly through the streets, not once bothering to check to see if Flum was actually following him. This wasn’t because he trusted her but rather that there was no doubt in his mind that she would follow his every command.
Jean turned into a narrow alley lined with drunk, frail-looking men seeking what little warmth they could under threadbare blankets. Flum would never have come down here alone. Becoming more and more worried by the second, she finally spoke up. “S-so, umm, wh-where are we going, Jean?”
Alas, he didn’t even respond. She should have expected as much.
Flum continued to follow in silence as they wove through several alleys before ultimately ending up in a large, open area. They were in a part of the capital that she had never seen before—which wasn’t surprising, considering it was dozens of times larger than any other town she’d been to—but this area was dark and dingy. It almost felt like a different city.
“I-Is this where we were headed?” she asked.
Jean finally turned to address his companion…by reaching out and grabbing a handful of her hair. He dragged Flum toward a man with a hunched back and an insidious smile on his face.
“Ow, you’re hurting me, Jean! Stop it!!”
Her screams fell on deaf ears, which was the whole point of bringing her here. Flum thrashed about in a desperate attempt to break free of Jean’s grip but just wasn’t strong enough.
“Well, well, well, you really did bring me somethin’ purdy, dincha?” The stranger clasped his hands and narrowed his gaze, examining every inch of Flum’s body.
“Just taking out the trash, really.” With that, Jean tossed her at the man’s feet.
“Nnyak!” Flum hit the ground with a painful thud and lay there for a moment. Her feet burned from the scrapes she’d gotten from being dragged along the floor. She looked up at Jean, fear evident on her face, but was met with only a cool, emotionless expression in return.
Finally, he began to speak.
“You have no notable lineage to speak of, and you don’t even have the power to make up for that. All you’ve managed to do is waste our time and hold the rest of us back. Just knowing that I’m forced to breathe the same air as you makes me sick to my stomach. Quite frankly, I think I deserve some credit for having put up with you this long.”
“J-Jean?”
“Scum like you has no right to speak my name!!” In his rage, Jean cast a spell to send a rock shooting straight toward Flum.
“Eek!” The stone flew like an arrow past her face, slicing her left cheek. Flum brought her hand up to her cheek and felt something warm dampen her fingertips. Once she caught sight of the red liquid, she let out a cry of terror.
“Now, now, hold on there. You can’t go damagin’ the wares, y’know.”
“My apologies. I lost my cool for a moment. It’s a minor cut, at least.”
“You’re right, there. It’ll fade with time.” The man handed Jean a steel rod with a large lump at the end. “Anyway, you can decide where it goes.”
Jean took the rod in his hand and summoned up Heat—his fire spell. Ever so slowly, the heat ran up the shaft and caused the chunk of steel at the end to glow red.
“You should be happy, Flum. I’m going to assign you a role that you can actually fulfill.”
“I-Is that…?”
“It’s a branding iron—the mark of a slave, to be exact. Even a lowly creature like yourself must have seen it before, right?”
A slave—a human deemed legal for sale on the open market.
Slaves were generally restricted to those who had been born of slave parents or to certain classes of criminals as a form of punishment. Their overall numbers were on a gradual decline, but when land-owning nobles went to war, the losing soldiers and villagers were often brought back to the capital and enslaved, too.
The last such war had continued until the kingdom managed to lay claim to much of the continent. Soon after, there had been a wave of the newly enslaved rebelling against their awful living and working conditions, fleeing to survive in the shadows and ultimately leading to an increase in crime. As a countermeasure, the government passed a law to limit the use of excessive violence against slaves, ultimately improving their standard of living…or so people thought. The law also provided for the recapture of so-called “freed slaves,” thereby giving rise to unregulated slave markets run by black marketeers who purchased slaves and sold them for all manners of worldly pleasures.