Leave a comment

“Right, so what did you come here for?”¹

After barely getting my mind straight, I changed the subject.

“Hmm, well I did come here to see Ellie, but I also have some interest in Merlin’s Staff as well~”
“I see.”

Seeing that she wasn’t willing to try and lie to me, I felt relieved.

“I was planning to visit your place, but because of your uptight butler worried about your health, I decided to bother you this way. Since the only way I can get any information about Ellie is by sticking around your mansion located in London after all.”
“Wait, so you were waiting all day long?”
“Hehe. Well, not really, I was around here for an hour or two and I just happened to see you. My intuition was correct.”
“Ah, I see.”
“So what I want to ask is, can you sell that Merlin’s Staff to me? I really really want it…”

Holding my two hands together and showing a pleading face to me, I felt my heart grow extremely weak towards her. Even though I should be making a logical judgment here, it was really impossible to do something like that when I’m weak against a beautiful lady’s plea.

“One million pounds.”
“Aww. Can you make it a bit cheaper? I’m not an heiress like you, Ellie, and… Huh? One million pounds?”²

Katalina, who was already making a crying expression predicting that I’d call for a crazy high price, suddenly straightened her face and asked with wide eyes.

“That’s right. I’ll have to pay 10% of the commission if I were to cancel the auction of the item after all. You can pay at least that much, right?”

“Huh? Well of course that would be good for me, but you’d be losing way too much money that way, Ellie. Now, let’s not do that price, and to be honest, I have exactly 50 million pounds in my account. Let’s negotiate around that! In my estimate it should cost around over 100 million pounds. Though I can’t ever hope to afford that much even if I were to sell off everything that I had. So please?”

“I won’t budge.”

Even though 50 million pounds is money that would make the eyes of any ordinary citizen spin, I already had an even more astronomical amount of money in assets so to me, it didn’t feel like it was a lot.

I may have reacted differently if it was 50 million pounds in cash right in front of my eyes. But right now, it was nothing more than just playful numbers to me.

“Then can I take it that it’s your gift for the marriage that will be taking place in the future?”
“… Why you!”
“Hehe, joking, joking. But in any case, thank you for the wonderful present.”

It didn’t sound like a joke at all!

In any case, I pulled out Merlin’s Staff from my inventory and handed it to Katalina. Since it is me changing the ownership of an important item, I needed to go through several digital processes of confirming my identity. But since I’ve already done this many times in my previous life, I went through the process without much problem and finished the trade.³

“And here!”

A different trade created. It was to receive a ring that’s usually in a pair. A ring with a simple design and a red jewel embedded in it.

A paired ring. No special effect until two people equip the same pair.
Able to teleport to the location of other user wearing the ring once per day (No delay)⁴

All stats +10
Luck +10
All magic resistance +10%
Health +5%
Mana +5%]　

I’ve given a legendary item, and now I’m getting another legendary item back. Of course, logically I am getting half the value of the pair of rings, but in other ways, it is much more worth it because it’s a pair.

On top of that, the special effects that it has on the item are all really great ones, so it’s actually kind of crazy that she had this just lying around the inventory this whole time.⁵

Also, Merlin is a leader of the guild. If she wished, she could have given the other half of the pair of rings to anyone she wanted to so that she would receive the bonus from equipping the ring.

Of course, I can’t say with 100% certainty that she was keeping the pair of rings to herself and was waiting just for me, but I couldn’t help but feel some kind of warmth in the corner of my heart as I received it.

“Hehe. Now my hunts will be more fun!”

Katalina took off her robe of concealment and equipped Merlin’s Staff. The silver-white robe that she originally wears along with the staff exuding a red aura went along well together, making her look like a proper powerful, and mystical mage.

As she looked like she was straight from a beautiful illustration or a portrait photo, I admired her beauty quietly inside my mind.

“Take off your robe of concealment too, Ellie!”

Although I did put the effort of wearing the robe of concealment, she had already figured out who I was from the moment I stepped out the door so I decided to take it off as well without complaint.

The appearance of silver armor and my Excalibur became revealed to her.

“Wow, you’re following my requests so easily. I’m amazed, Ellie~”

I am simply just too weak to beautiful woman…

“But hey, you’re not wearing your helmet. I see that you’re wearing a circlet instead now. So you’re not going to wear your helmet anymore?”

As Katalina looked over and all around me, she asked with curiosity in her voice.

“Yep.”

“Ooh~ Good thinking! It’s not like you’re a loner anyways, I always wondered why you had to hide your face the whole time. Hey, be honest with me, how many people do you have in your friend’s list? None, right?”

“Yep, it’s empty.”

Seeing as how Katalina was pointing out exact details about myself the whole time, I no longer had the feeling that she could be lying to me at all.

“Yep, I knew it. Then I’ll be at the top of your friend’s list, right?”

Realizing my weakness to her beauty, Katalina pushed her face close to mine as she asked. She was completely right, as I backed up all the way to the wall and just nodded my head.

“Okay okay, I’ll make sure to add you.”
“Hehe, all right!”

Seeing her ball up her fist and make a slightly sly smile, it made her look like a very lively girl.
So after adding Merlin to my friend’s list by half-threat and half-request, Katalina asked me with a smile on her face.

“Actually, where were you planning to go just then while wearing all that concealment robe and everything?”
“I was planning to look around London for a bit.”
“It amazes me that you logged into the game even though you lost your memory though…”

She certainly did catch a hole in my logic, but I replied with a relaxed voice.

“It’s only certain memories that I have lost. It’s not like my memories were completely wiped clean.”
“I see. I kept thinking you were trying to pull a trick on me because even though you were the same Ellie I knew, you were acting quite differently.”

The way that she was suspicious of me was the same in that I was suspicious of her.⁶

“But in any case, are you going to go out and take a look around now?”

Seeing that I didn’t say anything back to her, Katalina hurriedly changed the topic. I was able to tell that she was trying her best to avoid any awkward mood.

“Well, I had gone through the trouble of disguising myself yet you found me out immediately, so I kind of don’t want to go out now.”
“So you’re saying it’s my fault?”

I didn’t reply right away.

“But actually, you’re the guild leader of one of the biggest guilds, can you really spend your time here with me like this? Shouldn’t you be out hunting as well?”

High ranking players usually are the type of people who’d be out there hunting and raising their levels instead of lazing around like this. So my question was a very obvious and understandable question.

“Ah! Well, I was actually planning to go out hunting, yeah. I promised to go with guild members. Do you want to join me?”

“With your guild members? Are you going to go through a raid?”

“Hmph! Raids? As opposed to you who can just hunt monsters while sucking on potions as much as you want, I have to have the monsters rounded up for me. Because of my low health, I also need a tanker who can protect me as well. Plus a healer of sorts that can buff my magic power. It’s not like I have a lot of limitations or anything.⁷”

“But you’d be splitting experience points then. Your efficiency would go down.”

“Mmhmm. So that’s why I’m hunting in a straw method where I receive help from guild members that I didn’t party up together with.”

A straw method, which is called that because you’re sucking away the potential experience points that the one helping you could get, is a method of receiving help from others while not putting them in the same party as you so that you’d get all the experience points for yourself. Doing this is mostly only possible for guild masters or leaders since the members have to be willing to give up their portion of experience points in order to help the leader level up faster.

“Straw, huh…”⁸

But it’s definitely regarded as an abusive method of exploiting your members.

“Ugh. Unlike those other terrible guild masters, I give adequate amounts of items or gold as compensation for their work, so don’t make that kind of expression!”

Katalina snapped at me, even though I wasn’t sure what kind of expression I was making. If she is compensating for their loss of experience, then it’s pretty fair.

“If that’s the case, how about you and I go together?”

Katalina’s frowning expression quickly changed to a bright one.

“Really?”

She may have planned all this out just to make me say that. In any case, I fell for her trap.⁹

1. Robinxen: 5am sleep deprived Robinxen comments! LETS A-GO!
2. Robinxen: Euros….? D-does Korean person think all of Europe uses Euros? Or is this translators fault? Do I correct this?! WHAT DO I DO?! That would be about 950,000 I guess so it’s not a huge price difference if I just change the term right? Yup. I’m changing it to pound.
3. Robinxen: Power couple formed!
4. Robinxen: T-that’s a crazy stalker ability. Oi you’re not gonna wear this are you?!
5. Robinxen: No no no she clearly got this as a wedding ring!!!
6. Robinxen: Yes stop just accepting her words at face value! Well I mean she seems to be just a clingy girl that idolises you so it’s not too bad in this case but she could be fooling you for her own gain too!
7. Robinxen: Wh-what a tsundere…
8. Robinxen: I’ve never heard this term.
9. Robinxen: She might be a talented orator…what a Merlin like ability.