Chapter 22
I roared, my fury so intense it felt as though my eyes would spin right out of my head!
“How much is it now!!!!!! You fucking piece of shit!!!!!!!!!!!!”
It was the rage I had built up over more than three years of behaving myself after coming to this otherworld—the fury I felt toward the otherworlders who had gone insane from the absurdity of it all!!!
“F-fuck! You want to throw down?!”
But then the stone-scalper suddenly swung a fist at me, as though the roundworm he was raising in his brain had suffered a seizure! Even with my vision blazing red, I easily caught the punch with the hand that wasn't using Beast Regression.
Clack!
“You fucking piece of shit!!!! Who taught you to answer someone asking a question with a punch!!!!!!!!”
I had only asked a question, but the stone-scalper had thrown the first punch! What kind of bastard just punched a customer who asked about the price?! He was the very definition of a stone-scalper!!!
Whatever deranged thought process had led him to that conclusion, I had no reason to stay quiet after being sucker-punched. I dispelled Beast Regression from my right hand and pulled on his fist.
“If you're selling it as a set, why did the price go up instead of down!!!!”
“Uuuaaagh!!!”
Whoooosh!!
Crack!!!
My fist connected with the stone-scalper's face. The contact lasted only an instant, but a satisfyingly meaty impact ran through my hand and sent a thrill all the way up my spine.
“You fucking bastard, hitting you feels damn satisfying! Die and be reborn as a punching bag!!!!”
“Ugh-guh-guh!!”
─Wham! Wham! Wham!
A merciless barrage hammered his upper body. His legs had gone completely limp from the very first blow. With his brain rattled and blood pouring from his face, he couldn't breathe, so his stupid head had apparently decided to say, I'm done, and started snoring.
“Get up, you piece of shit!! It's hard to hit you!!!”
I cursed my own shallow judgment! I shouldn't have gone for his head first!
With his legs giving out and him slumping to the ground, it was hard to throw punches. My punching power had been far greater than expected.
Working out with rocks had trained my strength and grip. Grip strength in particular contributed greatly to punching power. Adding Beast Regression's passive enhancement to the strength I had gained from swinging around a rock larger than a washbasin had made my bare-handed attacks far too powerful to control.
“Get up!!! A customer came in, so why aren't you getting up!!!”
“Uuugh…!”
Judging by his groans, he wasn't dead or unconscious. And yet he still wouldn't get up!! If you were too tired to serve a customer, you shouldn't have opened the shop in the first place!!!
“You spineless bastard!!!!”
I was genuinely enraged by the disgraceful display of that weak, fake macho man!!
Unlike the clichés of RPGs, many blacksmiths in this otherworld were mages. Enchanted leather armor was lighter, cheaper, and more cost-effective than iron armor.
Metal was difficult to enchant, so beyond a certain point, it was avoided as an equipment material. It couldn't compete with enchanted leather or cloth, let alone monster materials.
It was only natural. If anyone and everyone could enchant metal, what would be the point of mithril or orichalcum? If you enchanted an alloy, it would be adamantium.
Also, mana-infused metals were scarce, so they were generally used for weapons rather than armor, which required an enormous amount of metal. People did occasionally splurge on armor made from rare metals, but that was unusual.
As a result, blacksmiths only needed a certain amount of physical strength; after that, their skill came down to enchantment magic and dexterity.
But magic was, as I had said several times, an advanced skill.
That was why many blacksmiths knew how to work iron but didn't know how to enchant leather armor. This stone-scalper was the perfect example.
A self-proclaimed artisan (moron) who couldn't use combat magic and barely knew how to enchant!
A fossil overflowing with swagger and self-importance despite being woefully lacking in both physical strength and magical skill!
He looked like the kind of man who had slaved away at some crappy small or midsize company, been fired because of office politics or his lack of ability, and then opened his own shop. Some people like that still lived decent, hardworking lives, but this bastard definitely wasn't one of them.
“You fucking neighborhood computer-shop scammer!!!”
I roared, remembering my middle-school days!
Remembering how I had been swindled out of 60,000 won as a formatting fee when I took my computer in for repairs made me feel like my head was going to explode! How many Pikachu pork cutlets from the neighborhood snack bar could I have bought with 60,000 won back then?!
“Get up!!! Reboot your left and right brains before I format your whole head, you piece of shit!!!”
Just as I grabbed the stone-scalper by the collar and tried to pull him up from his peaceful sleep, it happened.
─Crash-bang-bang!!
Boom! Boom! Boom!
“W-what's going on!”
After a series of loud noises came from the back of the smithy, a woman came running out.
She had brown hair tied at the nape of her neck. Her dark-brown work clothes, shaped like an apron, reached down to her knees. Not a patch of skin was exposed, ensuring that sparks flying from the smithy could never touch her flesh.
Could she be this stone-scalper's daughter? Her speech seemed far too rough for that. I regained my senses at the appearance of a third party and spoke.
“I don't know who you are, but I'm in the middle of negotiating the price with this gentleman, so please don't interfere.”
“W-what?! P-price?! What did you sell, and for how much, to make someone do this to you…!”
The female blacksmith looked flustered. I let go of the stone-scalper's collar and straightened my clothes.
“He says a whetstone costs ten coppers. Since that's rather high, I was asking whether he knew how to count.”
“…That can't be!”
The woman cried out with a horrified expression, then rushed toward the fallen stone-scalper without paying any attention to my stare. She was holding a small box. Was it some kind of first-aid kit?
“Mr. Jason!”
Once she reached the stone-scalper, she raised the box she had brought and then—
“You’re really trying to run my shop into the ground, aren't you?! Just fucking die already!!”
─Whack!!
─She drove it straight into the stone-scalper's balls without hesitation.
“Holy shit.”
“Uuugh…!!”
The stone-scalper, having been nailed in the balls, collapsed with a scream of agony. Like every man whose dick had been fucked up, he clutched his genetic bank with both hands and writhed across the floor.
But the brown-haired woman didn't stop there. She stomped even more mercilessly all over the stone-scalper's back.
“Ten coppers?! Ten coppers?! Are you people from the Merchants Guild or something?! No, even those bastards don't sell whetstones for ten coppers!!”
“Ugh! M-Ms. Clara! I'm sorry! P-please stop hitting me!”
“Stop?! What gives you the right to say stop!! Just because you're from the guild and I speak to you politely, you think I'm a pushover?!”
The hatred in her words and actions was every bit as intense as mine. Startled by the sight of the female blacksmith stomping the stone-scalper like she was crushing a fly, I shouted.
“What?! Can I hit him too?!”
“Yes! Join in!”
“Thank you!”
I happily ran over and stomped the stone-scalper bastard with all my strength.
Right! There was no need to bother pulling a fallen bastard to his feet when I could just kick him while he was down!
I had been too furious to think of that. Letting your body surrender completely to anger wasn't good for you.
“Gyaaaaaah!!!”
Anyway, I stomped the stone-scalper together with the woman I had just met.
Since I was a man myself, I couldn't kick him in the balls. Not because I felt sorry for the bastard, but because I didn't want to touch someone else's balls.
Slump….
After being stomped for a while, the stone-scalper sprawled there motionless. I think we had stomped every part of him except his head, since kicking it would have killed him. It was a deeply satisfying result.
Just then, the female blacksmith caught her breath and spoke.
“Ah, I'm sorry, sir! I was late introducing myself, wasn't I?”
Apparently married, she wore a ring on her left ring finger and spoke in a bright voice.
“Hello! I'm Clara Smithson, the owner of this smithy!”
“The owner?”
I blinked at Clara's introduction.
“Then who is this old… man?”
Could he be a part-timer? She probably wouldn't kick her own husband's balls, so the old man must be one.
He had far exceeded my expectations, turning out to be an even bigger moron than I had imagined. He was working part-time at a shop run by a girl young enough to be his daughter while scamming customers as a stone-scalper!
What kind of mental state would someone have to live in to imitate a macho artisan under those circumstances?
“This old… man is a bastard… I mean, a man the Blacksmiths Guild sent us because our shop's sales were low!”
“The guild sent him? Someone like this bastard… I mean, person?”
“They said he was famous for having high sales at a guild-run weapons shop! But I never imagined he'd be the kind of bastard… I mean, person who sold whetstones for ten coppers!”
Clara looked around, then took a whetstone from one of the shelves. It was wrapped and tied in cloth. It looked as though someone had taken care with the packaging.
“Here, this is the whetstone you were looking for! It normally costs four coppers, but since we made a mistake, I'll give you the oil and cloth too for three coppers this time!”
A 70% discount, seriously? I thought I was looking at a Steam sale. My chest swelled at the quack's markup, enough to make even Gabe Newell cry.
Anyway, there was no reason to refuse something being offered so cheaply. I didn't know whether the discount story was true, but three coppers had to be the fair price. I removed the cloth, confirmed that it was a proper whetstone, and paid.
“Thank you for your purchase!”
When I handed over the money, Clara greeted me with a smile. I was even moved by how smoothly the transaction went.
Selling at a fair price and buying at a fair price. Something so utterly ordinary was incredibly rare in this otherworld.
It was like someone who had been relentlessly scammed on Joonggonara receiving a bottle of Bacchus along with a smooth face-to-face deal.
“Is there anything else you need?”
At her words, I looked over at the stone-scalper, who was still snoring. That bastard showed no sign of getting up, as though he intended to hatch his balls by cupping them in his hands like a hen sheltering an egg.
‘Come to think of it, I don't have lower-body armor either.’
Lower-body armor was rarely seen because of the limitations of its design.
Usually, people wrapped chain mail around themselves like a skirt or attached a plate that stuck out like boomerang panties. The former was generally favored, while the latter was the province of perverts out of step with modern trends.
But seeing that stone-scalper made me feel as though I should wear something around my lower half. My balls were precious, after all.
Beast Regression supposedly increased my defense too, but if it wore off at the wrong moment and I took a ball-buster kick, my dick would end up just as fucked as his. If someone managed to kick my balls, that meant they were strong enough to defeat me before Beast Regression wore off.
Taking all those factors into account, I figured I needed some kind of countermeasure before my balls turned into the Shikon Jewel.
A future in which my dick left my groin and set off in search of freedom!
I didn't have the confidence to endure such a future. The day my dick left to seek freedom would be the day I hung myself.
If my dick got cut off, I'd be a eunuch even if I escaped with a master's degree. If I earned a doctorate, I'd be a PhD eunuch. When I became a professor, I'd be a eunuch professor. Even if I found a way back to Earth, I'd be a dimensional-traveling, otherworld-returning eunuch.
In that sense, my dick was a vital point on par with my brain.
My dick was another heart and a second brain. Wearing armor to protect something this precious was completely logical. In fact, I could hardly understand why I had left it exposed all this time.
“Do you happen to have any lower-body armor? Something made of leather─”
“Our shop specializes in metal armor, sir.”
She said it in an utterly deadpan tone. Not a trace of expression remained on her face. She had transformed into something like a mannequin from a coloring book that had been colored in exceptionally well.
“Uh, no, but I can't afford iron armor right now. So I'll buy iron armor later, and for now, something leather─”
“Our shop specializes in metal armor, sir.”
“Okay.”
Apparently so.
“I'm sorry. But I don't like leather armor. Ah, don't misunderstand—I do know how to enchant.”
Haaah─.
Clara let out a sigh that seemed to shake the whole shop. I looked around the smithy again at her words. There wasn't a single piece of the leather armor commonly found in smithies here.
“Metal has an appeal all its own! I'm sure that someday, someone will develop a technique for enchanting metal too!”
Clara clenched her fists as she argued her point. Her eyes glittered with fierce enthusiasm.
“Sure, armor made from it clanks noisily, it's heavy, and above all, expensive! But nothing in this world is cooler than the gleam of steel!”
“That’s a pretty brutal lineup of drawbacks.”
It was practically the Suicide Squad.
Like Clara's—inadvertently accurate—self-criticism, metal armor had far too many flaws to choose it for its cool factor alone. It was expensive and offered poor value for money, so it probably wouldn't sell well either.