...And as the years passed, the boy kept walking, walking forward, not stopping even once, all for... Thud! Thud! Thud! “Wake up! I said wake the hell up, you son of a bitch! If you don’t get out here in the next five seconds I’ll beat you to a death with a really big stick! Get your lousy ass out of bed, dammit!” Orphen turned over in his bed as the loud thudding and cursing continued from the other side of the flimsy bedroom door. It was a cheap inn that he was staying in, so the sound echoed easily throughout the whole room. Orphen didn’t mind that it was a cheap inn, though. In fact, he felt more comfortable staying in a place like this.
“We’ve got business to do, you lousy freeloader! I’ve been putting this plan together for days, and you’re gonna ruin it by oversleeping!? If that’s your plan then I’ll put you to sleep so hard you’ll never wake up again, how’s that sound for a plan, asshole!?” The thunderous roaring gradually roused Orphen from his slumber. He rubbed his tired eyes and gazed up at the old, worn-down ceiling of his room. After being so unpleasantly awoken by all the racket, he turned his gaze to the room’s window. Judging by the angle the light was shining in from, he supposed it must be just before noon.
While Orphen was getting his bearings, the intensity of the yelling and thudding on his bedroom door increased.
It got to the point where it almost seemed like the person on the other side was trying to break it down.
“Oh, so you wanna stay holed up in there all day, do you? Fine! Then that room’ll be your coffin! I, Vulcano Volkan, will even do you the honor of lowering you into your damned grave if you just get the hell out here!” If I go out there... He’s gonna kill me, he says? thought Orphen to himself, still half-asleep.
Who, Vulcano Volkan? That little brat’s gonna kill me? He’s got some nerve, the little bastard— Orphen sat upright in bed and moved the sheets to one side, and in an annoyed voice, “Shut up!” he yelled in the door’s direction. The room instantly returned to silence as Orphen finally got out of bed, scratching his bare chest. He spat in the direction of the door before deciding to get dressed. He grabbed his shirt that had been flung over the back of a nearby chair and slipped it on. Hanging from the same chair was a familiar silver pendant, which he picked up and examined for a moment. Hanging from a thin silver chain, the pendant’s design was that of a downward-pointing sword with a one-legged dragon wrapped around it.
The pendant glittered slightly in the light as Orphen spoke to it as though it were an old friend.
“You hear that? Sounds like I’m about to get killed,” he muttered. With a bitter smile, he hung the pendant around his neck.
The moment he did that, there was another loud THUD on the door.
“Who the hell are you telling to shut up!? Here I come to this stinky old shack to bring you a business proposal and this is how you treat me!?” Ignoring the noisy brat, Orphen walked over to the mirror in the corner of the room and took a quick look at his reflection. The face that greeted him was that of an irritated young man somewhere around his early 20s. The cynical look in his black eyes may partly have been because of his rude awakening, but his facial features suggested that this was just the way his face looked. His short black hair matched his eyes, bringing his whole look together.
Meanwhile, the person on the other side of the door sounded as though they were about to pop a vein.
“If I have to tell you to get out here one more time, I’ll flatten you to death with a rolling pin and make a cake out of your corpse! Now hurry up and get your ass—” Finally having had enough of this nonsense, Orphen thrust his right hand out towards the door and with a practiced movement, rapidly chanted something.
“I release thee, Sword of Light!” With that, the room was suddenly illuminated by a pure white burst of light. What shot out of Orphen’s hand was a strip of burning light. It flew like a swift, raging torrent, blasting the room’s large wooden door into tiny fragments with a thundrous boom! The remains of what was once a door now danced in the air as tiny fragments as they fell to the ground, leaving a cloud of dust in their wake.
On the other side of the demolished doorway stood a small, stout teenage boy roughly 130 centimeters in height. His large, round eyes — somewhere between brown and black in color — were wide with shock as he stood there completely dazed by the unexpected explosion. The fur cloak he wore was clearly quite filthy, and not just from the cloud of dust. His messy black hair also looked as though it hadn’t been washed in several days — if not weeks.
Orphen turned to the boy and, narrowing his eyes, he spoke.
“‘Get your ass out here,’ was it?”
“...If you could please find it in your heart to humble us with your presence, I feel it would be mutually beneficial to all parties present...” The boy corrected himself in a timid voice from within the dust cloud.
“Much better. See? Is it really that hard to ask politely?” remarked Orphen with a satisfied smirk on his face. As the dust settled, he got a better look at the boy before him. He was a short, stout, almost plump-looking dwarf, roughly 18 years of age. His short stature of a mere 130 centimeters was actually about average even for a fully-grown dwarf. His fur cloak was also the conventional outfit of most dwarfs, beneath which Orphen spied the bulky-looking scabbard of a longsword.