I wrote the summary as part of a synopsis competition on r/noveltranslations, some people wanted this to actually be a thing. Why not. Updates infrequently. Synopsis: Tein Kim. An absolute lover and otaku of card games. Two-time YGO World Champion. One-time MTG World Champion and two-time semifinalist. A US Open and JCG Shadowverse Top 4 player as well as a prominent Hearthstone streamer. Former Pokemon TCG Junior World Champion, and former VGC Master Division Top Cut. A player who built a name for himself through his exceptional Aggro, Rush, Swarm, and Hyper Offensive decks and builds. When an earthquake 1) destroyed his house, 2) Loosened the brakes of the truck parked on a really steep hill which 3) rolled into his destroyed house, which 4) dislodged the brick that 5) hit him square on the head that 6) finally killed him, he got an offer from a goddess: “I offer you a second chance, in a world where card games can alter lives. However… I prohibit your Aggro builds, for you must play Control.” In a world of Swords, Magic and Card Games, how will our protagonist live with this unplayable meta! Genre: Action, Adventure, Comedy, (eventual) Romance Table of Contents: Prologue Chapter 1
Spoiler: Prologue On the fourteenth of October 20XX, just before the first university exams were about to start, the Hearthstone fandom were shocked to hear that the well-loved streamer Sarah Tsubaki Lila, aka FiraLily, had been run over by an overworked truck driver. The community mourned her death, and vowed to keep her name in their hearts as one of their own… It’s dark out. No, like seriously, looking around, except for the floor and my own body, I can’t see shit in front of me. What the hell? Okay, no matter how the floor lighting works, I’m pretty sure it’s meant to illuminate more than what’s directly above it. Okay, calm down Tein. You’ve seen enough isekai to know where this is going. Calm down. Calming down So, if I’m remembering right, I crashed at around 3am last night, streaming Hearthstone the night before at a stupid hour of the morning for the sake of US viewers. Yep, and you lost miserably too. Shut up brain. You’re not meant to be awake at this time of hour. Yogg-Saron is bullshit, always have, and with my luck, always will be, nerf or no. Looking around, I can see, well, darkness. Everything is as dark as night, except for a circular section of the floor, which is oddly luminescent, ‘oddly’ meaning that the floor was the only light source in the room, yet I was lit up like you would outside on a sunny day, and I could see nothing else of the surroundings, the light completely ignoring physics in terms of NOT travelling in every direction from the source as it should, and lighting up only that small circle. “Ano… sumimasen?” What Someone just tapped my shoulder And you’re ignoring the fact that that was in Japanese? That doesn’t matter what does matter is that she wasn’t there when I looked around two seconds ago goddammit Spin around, take distance to avoid engagement, identify random Japanese-speaking woman. How do you know it’s a woman? Oh I’m sorry I don’t get voice actors or an out-of-frame shot of feminine hand for the reader’s convenience. Having said that, in response to my sudden jumpiness, she flinches back, and opens up her hands to show she means no harm. Or at least, I think that’s what she’s trying to convey. My knowledge of body language cues is shit aside from card game tells, but I can’t possibly be that bad at communication. You called your best (female) friend fat when she asked you ‘how does this look.’ Ignore inner monologue, notice the (really very pretty) woman who appeared out of nowhere and invaded your personal space. She was a beauty. Even a 2D convert NEET like I could appreciate that. With long, straight auburn hair that flowed smoothly down her curvature, accentuating her V-neck dress that did very well in its emphasis of her D-cup breasts, a warmth exuding from her black eyes, complementing her inhumanely pretty Asian face which really borderlined on something straight out of 2D. US D cup, not JP. Ergo, bigger. “Aaa… daijobu desu ka?” Help this pretty woman is speaking to me in moonrunes and I should have watched more subs not dubs – eh? In the midst of my internalised panic, I remember something. 1) 7.8 out of 10 too much isekai. Now, remind yourself. In the ‘Hero’s Journey’ archetype of storytelling, what is the very first element of the story after the initial exposition? To save the inevitable Wikipedia search: it’s the call to adventure. And so: 2) With the modern proliferation of fantasy fulfilment not-so-subtle author self-insert reincarnation/transmigration, who or what else could be responsible for what happens in this particular realm, for example, say, the blatant disregard for the way light travels. Also: 3) She had a subdued but noticeable smug intent in her otherwise peaceful gaze. One that I’ve seen on many of my opponents… right before I nuke their field with End Hostilities or Raigeki. Open hostilities without any shred of reason or logic except for a single gaze from someone self-admittedly bad with communication? Yolo. English motherfucker do you speak it “イングリシ, マダファカ, ヅ ユ ユピク イト?” She blinks, visibly shocked at the words that came from my mouth. Yeeeeaah maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all, welp, shit, that’s my life, I’m done, pack up, go home, gg no re, aaaahahahahaha “ha ha ha ha HAA!” *Snort* It took us a wee while to realise that the laughter and snort out loud was actually NOT ours. “You’re an interesting one, aren’t you?” she asked. “A change from my usual reincarnation nominees.” “As in…?” “Oh, the usual, either an accelerated version of the five stages of loss, or some of the more genre-savvy ones ask what powerup are they going to get and where I’m going to drop them off.” Huh. So the weeb fandom has been encroaching a lot into the western verse a lot more than I gave it credit for. Granted, the isekai genre’s been booming lately, and all sorts of random crap’s been getting manga and anime adaptations. Although I never understood why Smartphone got an anime before Death March. Like, seriously. The sizes of the fanbase alone on both sides of the Pacific would justify a DM anime waaaay before Smartphone. Hold on a second that means I’ll never actually get to watch the Death March anime “NOOOOOOOO!” The woman jumped back, obviously shocked at my sudden 360 in demeanour. I grabbed her lapels and yelled, “Why did you have to kill me before the Death March anime was released! Or Konosuba Season three! Or Spice and Wolf season three! I’d been waiting for it for fucking years for them you fucking asshat goddess!!!” “You know, out of all the NEETs and randoms that I’ve reincarnated, you’re the first to react like this. Are you really that much of a weeb?” The words ‘NEET’ and ‘reincarnated’ triggered something deep in my subconscious that reminded me that this was a fucking goddess I had by the lapels. Said goddess, still in my grip, smirked, and pointed downwards. “Dogeza.” I didn’t have the balls to even try saying I didn’t know what that meant. Head down, knees tucked in, bum… NOT raised high, yes, the well-known posture of submission in the east, the dogeza, and I was in a prime example of it. “Now then, as I was saying… but before that, you were one hell of a hard target to claim, you know? I sent at least half a dozen Trucks of Reincarnation your way, but somehow all of them either got lost or claimed the wrong targets. Seriously. You know how I finally got you? I had to trigger an earthquake to roll a truck into your house, and even then I needed a brick to finish you off. I was this close to losing my right to transmigrate your soul because of my having to use a goddamn brick as a proxy.” So THAT explained the ridiculous amount of heavy freight on the roads lately. I was wondering why the daily sheep truck went by back and forth so much in the middle of the city. The active mind did, in fact note a goddess blaspheming. “And because of that, do you have any idea how much time and effort I wasted negotiating with firstly, the Earth deities, but also your local taniwha of all things? Bloody hell, I didn’t even know New Zealand still had them around anymore, aside from when the Māori wanted to claim possession rights.” She rolled her eyes, and continued, “Sure, at first they didn’t ask for much, what with you being a recent immigrant and all, but when you kept dodging all the trucks, they kept demanding for ‘compensation’ for the ‘carnage’ my trucks kept causing. Seriously, you want to know why I kept at it?” Well, I’m kinda dead, so I don’t really care anymore, but I kinda would like to know as to why the fuck I’m here instead of wherever bad people go. Bad people? Blasphemy, swearing, contraceptive use, accidentally pissing on religious scripture, etc. etc. The usual standard. How the hell do you ‘accidentally’ piss over religious scripture. “In short, I need TCG players.” Wait what? “Yep. Not kidding. Look up.” We lift our head up And promptly take a kick to the face. “That was for calling me a ‘fucking asshat goddess.’” She said as I rolled on the ground clutching my face, before magically conjuring up a Powerpoint presentation out of thin air, complete with laser pointer. … So long story short, a thousand of her world’s years ago, sick and tired of wars, she descended to the land and introduced card games as the new method of international dispute. This also held true for almost all personal disputes as well, under the new ‘sacred duel’ system provided by the goddess. Her problem was that in a thousand years, the meta of the world had stagnated under nothing but pure aggro, either as cheap swarms or big fatties dominating the field and hitting face. To remedy that, over the past two-ish hundred years she had transmigrated and reincarnated over a number of people from our world, but through shitty RNG or her just being too lazy to actually pick proper people, most of them fell prey to their own OP blessings™ and ended up dyed in the common sense of that world, doing nothing to actually alleviate the problem, only create more serial escalation than a Chinese xianxia. As to where I fit in? Well… “Now, your record is interesting. Numerous World Championships and Top Fours, all by playing nearly pure aggro. And when you weren’t playing aggro you were instead playing Hyper Offense which is pretty much the same thing, even in cases where it was neither meta nor anti-meta. Of all the people I have sent over, you are probably the most suited for this world, funnily enough.” She flipped through a memo she had again, procured from nowhere, and looked up at me. “Now, I bartered the rights to your soul from the gods of your world, that is to say, I currently own your very existence. Either I destroy you in your entirety right now, or you come to my world and overturn the metagame.” …That’s a shitty way of bargaining. Seriously. Like I could just opt for the-hey! All of a sudden she reached up, placed both her hands on my shoulders and looked me dead in the eyes. “I am aware that you were entertaining the notion of self-destruction just to screw me over. Here, I present to you an opportunity. A divine being I may be, but I am not an unreasonable one. I know you had more than your fair share of problems back in your world, problems that you could not solve yourself. In return for playing Control against the aggro menace, I offer liberation from your previous life, to a new life where you can live doing what you do best. The common sense of my world is too restricted, and I want you to free her from the preconceptions that bind her and break her to submission. If it is by card games, surely you can do just that.” All of a sudden she felt to me like an actual goddess, earnest, regal, as if a word from her had the power to bathe a continent in faith in her. I half-remembered agreeing, awed by her divinity. Then I was struck in the face again by a flying table. What does this goddess have against my face, damn it. On the table were a giant assortment of cards, all very familiar to me from my past card games. “As your transmigration bonus, I’ll let you choose whatever cards you want. Naturally, you won’t get the cards themselves, but their approximate equivalents in my world.” Because after all, copyrights are the bane of all deus ex machina. Remember, you must play control. If you end up trying to play aggro once you head down, well… divine punishment? :3” She actually said colon-three. Anyways, since I can choose… Alright then… so any half-decent control deck needs board control, draw power, healing and some form of burst. So… three copies of Raigeki, Harpie’s Feather Duster, 3 copies of Tribunal of Good and Evil, couple of copies of Compulsory Evacuation Device, Elf Queen, Healing Salve, Dark Dragoon Forte, good ol’ Leroy Jenkins, Pot of Greed (easy 2 cards there), Ancestral Recall, Howling Mine ahahahahaha, Reno Jacks-wait, I’ll have shitton of repeats in my deck. Nope, scratch that. Hey, I can actually use Lysandre’ Trump Card here? Although I don’t see Next Destinies Shiftry. I swear I felt the goddess give me funny looks as I chuckled to myself like a maniac, but fuck it, half of these cards that I’m picking right now are either banned, Limited or considered insanely good if not outright broken, and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to abuse these as much as possible. Now then… Since most of my control mechanisms are settled in… Aim for face! What. Just because I have a giant amount of board clear doesn’t mean that I can’t run aggro. Heck, even when I was playing Seraph in Shadowverse – a pure control deck where all you really have to do hold board, drop Enstatued Seraph on turn eight, and win on turn nine - I still won literally half my games by turn 7 just because I kept hitting them in the face. Besides, even when I was playing proper aggro lacking the appropriate board clear against stall decks screwed me over like no tomorrow. So that’d be closer to tempo than a straight aggro deck? Call it ‘convenient answers’ to stall to keep aiming for face. Ooh, a Patches the Pirate. Ima grab that- All of a sudden a barrier sprang up and the table disintegrated, leaving only a shocked Korean clutching his draft pick and looking round everywhere. What the fuck just happened? Also, where did that goddess vanish to? “I figured you’d try to pull something like that,” a disembodied voice echoed around the empty space. “I didn’t even have to read your mind to guess you’d pull some proper control cards before going up and resorting to aggro again.” Weelll shit. There goes that plan. Wait, read minds? “I don’t know how you ‘accidentally’ pissed on scripture, but for the sake of decency, do try not to excrete your waste product on my writing.” And let that mark the first case of a god actually writing his/her own scripture since Anri. Wait that’s not the point “That reminds me, the cheats I gave to all the others I sent before you… you’re not getting them.” Wait wat “I did it for them simply because they’d die within hours otherwise. Honestly, when you can’t even break the world’s common sense, it’s just a waste of my time and divinity to even bother. You’re good enough at card games – or at least, you should be – so you probably won’t die that quickly.?” What the actual fuck. You’re telling me that you bought off my soul, and dropping me in a world where I know literally nothing with not a scrap of assistance as to get by, as well as limiting what I can actually do there. This is actually fucking bullshit. “Oh, so someone’s angry?” She re-materialised again, smirking like the proverbial cat with the cream. “Remember, card games can determine everything in my world, even between gods. Are you angry? Then stay angry, and channel your rage into your card games. Lol, how ironic, since I’m not letting you play aggro,” she cackled like a witch. She then stepped back, arms folded, still smirking, and continued, “Amuse me. Prove to me that it was worth the trouble of bringing you over, that you are different from those self-important NEETs.” The light surrounding me intensified, and I vanished from the world between worlds with the goddess’ final words ringing in my ears. “Return to me one day, and challenge me to my own game. Then and only then will you overturn your ‘injustice’.”
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Spoiler: Chapter 1 *Three years later* Wait, what the fuck’s up with the timeskip. I arrived and all I did was settle myself down within that time period. What else did you expect me to get up to. I don’t know, explain what went on? Fine… *Three years ago* The bright light died down, and I noticed that I was in a cathedral of some sort, judging by it’s incredibly high roof and stained glass windows, as well as the statue of a goddess holding a deck of cards in one hand and a sword in the other taking centre stage on a pulpit of some sort at the back of the hall facing the inside of the building. Body systems check? Eyes… still fine, arms and legs all functional, fine motor units good, twelve squared is one forty four, the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell and F = ma, except at speeds approaching the speed of light. Oooh, my shoulders aren’t stiff anymore. Judging by the fact that I’m not an infant, it looks like I’ve fallen under the transmigration rather than the reincarnation trope. And good thing too. One only has so much patience to read about how OP a baby is. “Are you alright?” The owner of that voice belonged to a black haired middle-aged woman, dressed in ye typicale nunnery robes, but minus the shawl over the head. “Everything in working order?” she continued, apparently mildly amused at my self-test run. “So you’re the latest child sent by the goddess? What’s your name?” I blinked at how casually she was taking this, before I finally noticed she’d been waiting for me. “Tein. Kim Tein, Kim my surname, Tein my first name.” “Another Japanese then? They’re the only ones who really ever bother to point out the order of their names.” Without waiting for a reply, she went on, “My name is Aerin, matron of the Lilianne Temple. The goddess warned that she’d be sending you about a week ago. Come with me, I’ll show you around.” And show me around she did. Well, at least as much as she could get around, given the temple and its grounds were about the size of a university campus by itself. We walked around for about four hours-ish? Before she showed me to the dormitories and my communal room, whereupon I collapsed onto the bed (a woollen mattress on top of a straw pallet, more than satisfactory for a poor former uni student) and went over the course of the day. Where to begin… Although it isn’t a skill as praised widely as its counterpart, Aerin was a very good speaker. So the temple I’m currently lodging in is known as the Lilianne Temple, the religion which was best-known in its advocacy of card games as a settlement of conflict, the presence and playability of said card game a sign that THIS particular god is very much real and active. More on this later. It also happens to be the main religion of the Maeris Kingdom, aka the country which I am currently in, as well as apparently the most-followed religion on the entire continent. So the temple is primarily based off its religious activity (no shit) but unlike other religions in fiction and Earth, the Lilianne religion has a doctrine of staying very firmly out of secular politics and maintains neutrality regardless of whatever bullshit goes on in the ‘outside’ world. Because of that, the temple runs, by necessity, on a policy of self-sufficiency, and somewhat ironically, as a result, has its fingers in all sorts of pies as a result of trade the temple conducts. As a certain hawt demon king once said, profit motive is the second strongest force in the world, after all. The first being the Strong Nuclear Force? No. Well… Anyway, remember how this world runs on card games? One of the temple’s greatest assets are that their priests, both male and female, are very good at crafting cards. The cards for the card game in this world are quite special: it’s hard to explain, but a person’s cards are actually not physical copies that exist in the three-dimensional plane as either a solid, liquid or gas. Rather, they’re ‘soulbound’ to a person’s soul, and only the soulbound person can use that card, wherein a card will materialise in a solid form that simultaneously does and doesn’t actually exist, and summon the monster/follow the card text. You have no idea what you’re talking about right I’ve read enough fantasy to handwave inconvenient laws of reality. Anyway, imagine Yu Gi Oh’s Battle City arc with all the duel disks and that jam, minus the actual hardware, or something like that. Anyway, the temple’s priests harness magic power to create the card, which can be then ‘used’ by a person, or taken away and sold/given away/whatever. And what does this have to do with us, you ask? Well, after the first week I made myself known, for the next two years, the vast majority of my work at the temple consisted of… *** “Boy! Twelve minutes! Get the next batch of print ready!” A grizzled old man yelled from a corner of the bustling workshop. “Yessir!” I carefully lifted the giant sheet of card off the roller, and set it down on my own worktable before clicking my knuckles, resting my hands on the card and channeling my magic power through it. I spread mana through the cardboard, being careful to not suddenly spike the card with magic power in random spots. Although this step technically wasn’t necessary, the priests and other crafters claimed that card pre-treated with magic was easier to handle when making cards, although no one had any real way to verify this. Okay, amidst all this skipping around, care for an explanation? What explanation, I’m making cards. Fine. Aside from my first day summoned, I spent the next week and a half invalid in bed, gasping for air, only barely not throwing up numerous times. The nurses told me that it was a sign of mana overdose, which was, apparently, extremely rare, and had only been diagnosed once in the past four years, and I was so far the only summoned person on record of having had this condition. I simply took that as a sign that my body was getting used to this ‘mana’ or ‘magic’ permeating this world, although I most certainly didn’t appreciate it when I was gasping for air and barely keeping my intestines in control. After I recovered somewhat, I noticed an odd feeling circulating through my body, which the nurse confirmed was the presence of magic. I could only wryly compare myself to some fantasy protagonist which were either blessed with OP magic right from the get-go or grinded for years to even get a feeling for it. Now, on magic: there were several terms that were used somewhat interchangeably for it, but the three most common were ‘magic,’ ‘mana’ and ‘magical power.’ To be really picky, ‘magic’ was the term describing the phenomena that occurred as a result of manipulation of mana, such as the common fireball, healing spells, etcetera. ‘Magical power’ was a term EXTREMELY similar to ‘mana,’ but differed in that magical power referred to “output,” for example the ‘aura’ of swordmasters or a ki blast, whereas ‘mana’ referred to magical ‘energy’ or the cost to cast magic, and was also the SI unit for ‘magical energy,’ wherein 1 MP or mana point referred to the expenditure of mana required to lift a 100g mass of pure water one metre off the ground at sea level. Yep. I was amazed they actually had a defined value for mana in what were effectively Early-Renaissance European conditions. That aside, all beings that could manipulate magic in this world had an organ that could generate it. In most modern light novels this would refer to the ‘magic stone’ that stood in place of a monster’s heart. Here, humans were no exception. Unlike humans from our world, here, heart muscles were modified to generate mana in addition to its regular function of pumping blood around the body, thus providing humanoid creatures with the mana needed to do shit. Humanoid? Later. As for myself, since I did not receive a growth cheat, my internal organs were not stupidly modified to give me OP magic power. I suppose I could be blessed that I got access to magic at all, despite other LN protagonists seemingly taking it for granted. So instead of my heart, the source of my mana is…. my appendix. ……what Mmmmmhm. Apparently I have insanely LOW magic running through me, to the extent that a common brick could store more mana than my body could. Aerin, who had the ‘Much-Seeing Eyes’ skill, supposedly an inferior derivative of the ‘All-Seeing Eyes’ skill, had to squint long and hard before finally finding traces of mana circulating out from my lower right abdomen, where I had nothing really except for said normally-useless organ. Pointless note: although ‘All-Seeing Eyes’ can see more things both metaphorically and literally, due to its increased versatility and effectiveness it’s mana cost to activate and use it shoots through the roof. As such, ‘Much-Seeing Eyes’ is considered the better form of the skill for everyday life. Now, although genetics provide the major influence on magical affinity, both of type and size, mana capacity COULD be increased by training, either by jacking yourself up with more herbs and legendary ingredients than a xianxia protagonist or good ol’ fashioned use and replenishment of magic. Now apparently, following the theory of magic training, the more you emptied out your mana pool repeatedly, the larger your mana pool when you recovered, kinda like cardio and weights for conventional muscle training. Now for me, with my shit mana pool, the latter wasn’t too hard. However, as I expected, much like conventional growth, the majority of mana pool growth would occur around the ages of infancy to puberty, and the extent of growth was directly proportional to however much you burned while training to begin with. So. Age 22. Magic growth effectively stunted. Mana pool less than a brick. Nothing to burn. At least I never suffered from mana exhaustion caused by total mana depletion. Considering I could burn my entire mana pool literally just setting up for a spell without actually getting anywhere near the actual cast, it was just as well. So after burning through my entire mana pool around six or seven thousand times a day, after around two years I finally grew enough to be able to fill a brick with mana. Or for an alternate use of measurement, enough to fill a sheet of the special cardboard needed to craft ‘those’ cards. The hilarious part about all this the fact that my mana RECOVERY was actually through the roof. A mixture of my crappy mana pool, body mostly untouched by mana, and a MASSIVE difference in magic power between my body and the surrounding environment meant that my body somehow learnt to absorb the latent mana from the surroundings with frightening efficiency, at a truly insane rate of approximately 80085 MP per second, give or take a couple thousand for measuring tiny measurements with crappy instruments. For the record, a Fireball spell (as a card, 4 mana 6 damage) cost around 40 MP to cast, a ‘standard’ healing spell that restored greenstick fractures (6-8 weeks for non-magical recovery) cost around 400 MP, and reportedly, the Meteor Shower spell (yes, THAT map-clearing Armageddon spell) supposedly cost 1000000 MP. Yep. If my mana pool was enough, I could wipe a country off the map roughly every 14 seconds. Buuuuuuuuuuuut since that wasn’t how it worked, with a grand total mana pool of an absolutely whopping 2 MP, I could conjure up a tennis-ball sized mass of ‘darkness’ in my hand, but that was it. Infuse something with energy through direct contact, yes, but if I tried to throw it, it wouldn’t go further than 5 centimetres before fizzling out, if I tried shooting it, the mana requirements (35 MP to cast for being very well favoured by the dark attribute) meant that it fizzled out the moment I tried to do anything with it. If I tried to punch people in the face with it, it actually did something. Huh? Hitting someone with a my 2MP mana-infused fist inflicts a grand total of 2 MP worth of dark mana’s effects on the target area. Who knew, and anyway, he punched me first. All I did was punch him back and get him to ground. I say a fire mage heating his body up while I had him in a textbook triangle lock is more of a dick move than wrestling in a fisticuffs fight. Anyways, long story short, my magic very slowly grew to the point where it could actually be used for something instead of just continuous wastage, and my control over it got to the point where the supervisors could let me infuse the cards with magic unsupervised, and here we are again. “Okay…” Magic power settled Gather it, spread it gently through the cardboard like butter on toast “Settling and distribution of magic power complete…” Hold for a second “Pause….” Disengage magic power, wait five seconds “And done. BOSS!” My yell brought over a brunette man clad in a t-shirt and breeches. As for the difference between the eras of clothing: The hero had been wearing a shirt when she was summoned, which summarily got reverse-engineered to the extent something was produced locally. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been wearing pants but a skirt, so no dice there. Rumour has it that modern female lingerie also had a lot to do with the hero’s- “You’re good.” Having inspected my work, the foreman half-nudged, half-pushed me off my working stool. “We’re about to finish up in here, so you might as well clock off early.” “You sure? Didn’t we need to finish up that last pack for the Jonstan’s as-” “They went under. Sold the last of their assets and moved away from the city. Bank’s possessed most of their livelihood, and the family’s gone to whimper to the father’s baron brother to see if they can beg for his scraps.” “Damn.” While they liked to throw their weight around and generally act like a dick like most of those side characters with relations to nobility, they were for the most part reasonably law-abiding, and pretty good to the temple as well, donating frequently and ordering multiple batches of cards at a time. Gave me the opportunity to practice my card crafting as well. “So boss, in that case, my pay?” The foreman rolled his eyes. “Normally people wouldn’t directly ask for their pay right to the paymaster’s face.” “Well yeah, but you’re a fair and generally all-round good cunt boss, so, pwease?” He visibly shuddered at our puppy dog eyes. Damn it. “Please don’t do that again. Also, one day I will find out what ‘cunt’ means out of your mouth.” Apparently despite the SI language of this world being English, the word ‘cunt’ had never been introduced, either in the native or Southern Hemisphere form. “Don’t worry, it’s what we called our friends back home.” I can say for utmost certainty confirm that fact as truth. I held my hand out and he dropped four silver bits into it. Is this where we go into currency conversion exposition? Later. “And the other half of my wages?” The foreman pulled out four blank rectangles of cardboard out of his breeches pocket, and laid it on top of the coins. “Although I have to say, what on earth do you need those blank cards for? It’s not like we never let you play with those every once in a while.” The foreman asked. It was true, although I wasn’t allowed to actually craft cards myself due to my low mana pool being insufficient to craft anything but waste cardboard, I still did a lot of work in the crafting process in helping stabilise the crafter’s mana while producing the cards. Apparently after two years of literally nothing but mana manipulation, I had good fine control over mana, especially that of my own, and was good enough to help stabilise others’ mana while crafting as well. Well, I had my own needs for those cards. “I have my own projects,” I answered, stretching out my limbs. “Anyhoo, I’m off, boss!” “Out to your normal haunt?” he asked. “Yep!” I skipped out the door. “F’ fuck’s sake, stop trying to act cute! And don’t fleece the patrons for everything they have this time!” My head poked back into the doorframe. “Hey, I can learn, you know? And how would your congregation take to the news that their respected priest still swears like the former knight he is?” And I ducked my head back out of frame. *** The foreman-cum-priest facepalmed. And then a shudder ran through his entire body. “I swear, one of these days, I will convince him that a grown man trying to look cute isn’t fucking cute at all…… if you want to act cute, at least be a girl, damn it! At least then headpats would be on the table and-” “What was that about headpats?” An icy voice cut through the foreman’s imagination. A cold sweat started to flow down his back as he looked downwards towards his wife, who had snuck up right up in front of him, unannounced and unnoticed. Considering the goddess’s flings back when she was mortal, it was very fine for priests of the Lilianne region to take wives and husbands. And our dear foreman’s wife had two attributes that a small but very passionate group in Tein’s former world would kill to get their hands on. Loli. To specific: Oppai loli, and more importantly; Legal loli. “So what exactly were you imagining, hm? Headpats? Where exactly, would that lead to? Holding hands? Petting? NSFW petting? Bent over in the kitchen with – hey!” The foreman had lifted his wife up and sat her down on Tein’s workbench. “I’m not done with y-mffmm~” And promptly sealed her lips with his own. “~mmmfwha!” the loli’s eyes glazed over for a brief second before she glared at her husband again. “This doesn’t let you off, you know! So you were thinking of giving other girls headpats! Am I not enough for you or something!” “Of course not! Headpats out of cuteness is one thing, of love is another!” “Then prove it!” she locked her husband’s shoulder in a joint lock, dragging him through the main entrance of the workshop in front of the wide-eyed stares of the remaining workers, including Tein who still hadn’t left the building. “Three weeks,” she whispered into her husband’s ear as she dragged him down the street. “That’s how long you’ve denied me for. And if you want to earn my forgiveness anytime soon you’d damn better well make up for them. Unless you’d like to pay up in kicks instead.” The legal loli came from a long and extensive line of body-strengthening magic users. As such, given the sheer concentration of healers in the temple, it wouldn’t be the first time he was punished for his wife’s drought. At least he was given a choice this time. As they approached their house some streets away, the foreman twisted out of the joint lock, swept his loli wife’s feet out from under her, eliciting an ‘eep!’ from her, assumed the classic bridal carry, and whispered, “I’m sorry. I’ll be sure to make up for those three weeks.” “Mwwuu…” his loli wife could only blush, drawing out a hearty laugh from before he crossed the threshold of his home with his woman in his arms, right in front of about half the temple’s populace, some dropping their popcorn. *** …… You know, I was going to explain how I was off to the tavern, but in front of that performance, anything I’d say here would seem pretty pointless, wouldn’t it.
Maybe. Probably when I've got more chapters under my belt. At this point in time it's just me dicking around seeing what I can do with this. Also, does anyone know how to hide the chapters behind a spoiler tag or something? Edit: Nvm, found it
Spoiler: novel First click the plus sign in comment area {} 2. Click on the tab and write the name for it like ch.2 {} 3.Write or copy the ch between the spoler ][ {} 4And now you know {} {}