The next day, I made sure to hug everyone in the house and earn some LP before school. Admittedly, hugging my family didn’t earn me much LP, but that made sense. I didn’t exactly find them attractive. Although…why had I earned a ton from Alice stepping on me that one time? It remained a mystery.
Over breakfast, I struggled to come up with ideas for how to earn more. Olivia seemed to intuit as much and offered me some advice.
“You can earn LP by satisfying hunger, lust, or greed. But in the great Olivia’s case, the order was something like lust, then hunger, then greed. And since you inherited Olivia’s powers, it’s probably the same for you.”
“Sounds about right. I have noticed a bit of a bias.”
I could earn decent LP from food, but it dropped significantly the second time I ate something.
“Now, my mom?” Oliva said. “She was all food, all the time.”
“Your mom? Now that’s hard to imagine. Wait, does that mean she had the skill too?”
“She sure did. And she was as dangerous as me too.”
Apparently, when Olivia was a child, Meluna Servant had scolded her daughter all the time and made her cry. I couldn’t even imagine it.
“As far as greed goes,” she said, “especially the immaterial kind, your best bet is to set yourself a big goal and achieve it. You can earn LP that way too.”
I had earned a lot of LP when I earned admission into the Hero Academy. Well, the obvious choice was right under my nose: I decided to win the King of the School Year Competition.
“Why don’t you convert some enchanted items while you’re at it?” Olivia asked. “You haven’t used that skill much.”
“Good thinking. You have the best ideas.”
“I know one way you can thank me!”
Olivia closed her eyes and pursed her lips. I chuckled and stuffed my face with breakfast, which only made her whine and call me stingy. After that, I said my goodbyes and headed off.
Converting money and items was another way to earn LP. I didn’t get much of a return from money, and besides, I needed the cash to buy Olivia that house, so items were the way to go. I could search for good ones in the hidden dungeon or while taking on adventuring requests.
At school, my classmates were getting excited about the upcoming tournament, so I listened in to gather some intel.
It was a short day, and class ended at noon. When we were done, Emma and I headed to the guild.
“Are you giving the King Competition a serious shot, Emma?”
“Heck yeah, I am!” She almost seemed too enthusiastic. Emma pointed at me. “Even if I have to go up against you, I’m not pulling any punches. So, uh, good luck, I guess?”
“I’m angling to win myself, so I won’t hold back either.”
“Let’s both give it our all!” Emma said happily, locking arms with me.
It wasn’t really the kind of atmosphere you’d expect between two people destined to do battle.
When we arrived at the guild hall, Lola was talking to a group of four adventurers. When she noticed us, she waved and ran over.
“Mr. Noir! I’ve been waiting for you!”
Lola giggled and tried to hug me, but Emma slid in between us with her arms stretched out. “Perv thief block!”
“Who are you calling a pervert?!” Lola shot back, incensed. “I’ll have you know, I’m extremely vanilla!”
“All right, then, vanilla pervert block.”
“That’s an oxymoron!”
As they bickered, the party that Lola had been talking to approached timidly.
“Um, excuse me, Lola…but about that request?”
“Oh, right. Listen, I have something more important to tell everyone first. This is Noir, and he’s going to be our next ace. Well, honestly speaking, he already is our next ace.”
Lola winked at me. She was exaggerating, so I denied her claims as I introduced myself.
“Noir, what’s your adventurer rank?” a man asked.
He looked like their leader. When I told him I was B-Rank, they all looked shocked.
“Wh-whoa! You’re so young! If you have a moment, would you mind giving us some advice?”
“Please!”
They looked at me with gleaming eyes, but I was a little stumped. Honestly, I was still more likely to be on the receiving end of advice, but I supposed I did have more experience than them.
“When the going gets tough, you should get out of there,” I said. “Don’t push yourselves beyond your limits.”
“Thank you so much!”
My cowardly heart had kept me alive thus far, so that advice wouldn’t fail them. Once we were done, I asked Lola for an item-related request.
“I’ll gather some information just for you, Mr. Noir. But…do you think you could check in on Luna today?”
It seemed Luna had taken a request by herself, it being her day off from her cleric work. She’d set out early to exterminate monsters, and Lola was getting a little anxious.
“The request was to take care of some goblins in a little farming village, but it’s strange that she hasn’t come back yet…”
Most farming communities were about an hour’s walk away from town, and it was almost two in the afternoon. If Luna had left that morning, then she should have already come back.
“Are you asking us for a favor?” Emma asked.
I suspected the same thing as Emma did; it really seemed like Lola was just worried about her friend. I was a bit concerned myself. Even if it turned out to be nothing, it was worth checking out. And Emma was familiar with the area.
As we left town, Emma started looking proud.
“Noir, watch this.” She fired a powerful blast of wind at the ground, lifting herself up into the air. She went so high that I had to look straight up to keep track of her.
“Hiyaaaah!”
She swung her daggers as she dropped. It was a truly impressive move. Emma giggled as her skirt fluttered in the wind.
“Did you look?”
They were white! No, wait. Why had my eyes immediately been drawn there?
“That was really cool,” I said. “Is that a new technique?”
“Hee hee hee. Why don’t you take a peek?”
At her invitation, I used my Discerning Eye. The new skill was called Shockwave. Also, her level was higher than it had been the last time I checked. She really was training in secret.
“You’ve been working hard lately, huh?”
“Maybe one day I’ll be the one protecting you.”
She had a spring in her step as she walked. Emma had an affinity for wind magic, so it was easy to Bestow those kinds of skills on her. And she’d been providing me with a steady source of LP, so I figured I owed her something in return. I’d have to think on it.
We arrived in the farming village about an hour later and took a moment to survey the area from a distance. After all, there could have been monsters or bandits around. I didn’t see anyone in the general vicinity, so we approached the village.
A large crowd was gathered in the town square, so something had to be going on, although I couldn’t tell what it was through all the people. We entered cautiously and found someone at the back of the crowd.
“A friend of mine came here on an adventuring request earlier,” I said. “Did something happen?”
“Who’s this friend of yours?”
“A woman named Luna.”
“Something definitely happened. She started taking out goblins for us, but…”
Apparently, some other adventurers had arrived and insisted that the goblin extermination job was theirs. When some more goblins arrived, they defeated them. Unsurprisingly, Luna wasn’t having any of it. She got into it with the other adventurers, and it snowballed from there.
Had these other adventurers tried to snipe her job? I didn’t know enough yet to make the call. It was a tricky situation. I headed toward the fight at the center of the crowd.
Luna was standing in the middle of the town square with her firearm drawn. Opposite her was an adventurer with a gnarly-looking morningstar. There were two other people in his party, but he seemed to be taking Luna on alone. Maybe they had agreed to go one-on-one.