Chương 156: Interlude: The Curtsy

P. O. V.?? [error…]"Left side!" I yelled. Only half the people with me listened.

"And this is how we die. You fucking idiots. I said left side!" The rest of my party finally fell in line and moved out of the way. There it was. The Mimic King's spit splashed across the section of floor they had just been standing on. I knew it. This fucker was so predictable. Mimics, man.

"Heals, head to the designated area." All but one of them moved.

"Wooly! I said designated area!" I watched her turn in place while apparently trying to remember where that was. She finally spotted the marker and hurried toward the other healers. God damn, I hated paid carry jobs. Why we kept doing them, I didn't even know. It wasn't like we were hurting for money. Half the people we dragged through these things seemed determined to prove they sucked.

"Sorry about..."

"Don't worry about it," I replied. That wasn't what I wanted to say. I wanted to call her several things that would probably get me in trouble from the guild leader. Unfortunately, he had already warned me that repeatedly insulting customers was a great way to get removed from the lead progression team. The Mimic King lashed out with its tongue. Our tank took the hit and went sliding backward until he ended up behind several ranged players who had been standing far too close. Why the hell did everyone suck at this?

"Get back up there! Quick!" I yelled. I wasn't dying here. This fight was so far beneath me that wiping on it would be embarrassing. I watched one of the melee warriors suddenly grow in size. I scoffed. Yeah. I was fucking done. He was popping cooldowns during second phase? I pulled off my headset and threw it onto the hook beside my monitor.

"Idiots. Seriously, this isn't even on heroic difficulty." I mumbled at the screen. My stomach growled as I leaned back and stretched. I looked at the raid still unfolding on my screen for another second before reaching beneath the desk and pulling the Ethernet cable from the back of my computer. Problem solved. I grabbed my phone and sent the raid leader a quick message saying I was having internet issues before heading toward the kitchen. The house was quiet. It had been extra quiet since Chelsea bailed on us.

Since then, I'd been having to make my own dinner because Mom had apparently started throwing herself at the husband emporiums even harder than before. I stopped halfway down the hallway. Actually, when was the last time I had seen Mom? I thought about it. Huh. Not since the police questioned us about Chelsea disappearing. That had been a while ago. Whatever. Why the fuck Chelsea had run away still made no sense to me. She had it pretty good. It wasn't like we lived in the inner city or anything.

Hell, she'd even been fat. Bitch knew her way around a tub of ice cream. Wherever she had run off to, I bet she was struggling in this economy just to afford one now. I laughed to myself as I opened the refrigerator. There wasn't much inside. I found a bag of shredded cheese, then checked the pantry and discovered an unopened bag of tortilla chips. Nachos it was. I put the cheese on the counter and grabbed the bag. Then something happened that practically everyone who was in the know dreamed about.

It appeared directly in the center of my vision. I dropped the chips. Alert: F-Tier Summoning Has Commenced. P. O. V.?? [error.] I lifted my drink when my song came on.

"Hell yeah!" The guy who had been chatting me up for the last twenty minutes held out his hand. I took it immediately and let him lead me toward the impromptu dance floor. I hadn't seen him there before. He definitely worked some kind of trade. Construction maybe. Whatever he did kept him outside enough to give him a good tan, although I could still see lighter skin where his protective equipment normally covered him. As the song ended, another started. Oh, hell yes! This one was my song too.

I turned around and pressed my back against him when Freek-A-Leek came on. This DJ knew exactly what he was doing. I was absolutely taking this guy home. Halfway through the song, I turned around, grabbed his hand with both of mine, and started pulling him toward the exit. We were both laughing by the time we made it outside. I pulled a cigarette from my purse and lit it while we started walking toward my place. He pulled one out too. A Winston man. You didn't see that every day. Hell yeah.

We kept walking while I smoked and enjoyed the attention. Then something appeared in front of me. I stopped.

"What the fuck?" Alert: F-Tier Summoning Has Commenced. Steven If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. The light finally subsided. I had expected a king. Maybe a princess. At minimum, I expected a throne room full of people staring at me while some court wizard struggled to remain standing after using forbidden magic to drag a legendary hero across dimensions. The summoning circle beneath me was okay. I had expected more. Video games had probably ruined this for me.

I was going to blame them. The room in front of me was just a room. It was a bedroom. A medieval-looking bedroom, but still, just a bedroom. There was a wooden bed against one wall and several shelves that looked handmade. A washbasin sat near a small window, and candles provided most of the light. This was not how an isekai was supposed to start. Then I noticed the people. There was a shocked-looking man standing several feet away. Beside me was someone confusing.

"Mom?" Yeah. There she was. She still had a lit cigarette between her fingers.

"Steven, what's going on?" she asked.

"Where are we?"

"Ah. You both must be so confused," the man started to say. He looked more surprised by our presence than I was by his.

"You are both summoned champions. My name is... Well, you can call me the great Teelo. I have summoned you here, to my house in the Holy City under the watchful eyes of the gods." Summoned champions? I barely heard anything after that except those words. Actual fucking isekai. I looked down at myself. I was still wearing the same clothes and still had same body. I flexed one hand trying to will a sword into being. No sword appeared. No glowing interface appeared either. There had to be a trigger word. Maybe status.

Maybe menu. Maybe I needed to think of it. The great Teelo was still talking which I stopped listening to.. This guy obviously wasn't important. Nobody named the great Teelo was important. He was probably the starter NPC whose entire purpose was explaining the world before I moved on to the actual plot. Mom was paying even less attention than I was. She had turned toward the window and was inspecting the view while occasionally taking a drag from her cigarette. Teelo continued trying to explain something.

I checked myself for hidden jewelry or some sort of SSS+ tier god item. Nothing. Fuck. What the hell? I tried focusing on my vision again. There was still no interface. Mom wandered toward the bed and sat down. I started examining the room for anything valuable enough to function as starting equipment. Teelo followed me around while continuing his explanation. What did F-Tier summoning mean?. I decided to ignore that part. There was no reason to take an initial ranking seriously.

Everyone knew the supposedly worthless skill or bottom-tier class was always secretly overpowered. I had watched enough anime to know how this worked. Teelo had no idea who he had summoned. Neither did this world. Two Months Later I hated this world. I sat against the outer wall of a building with my right arm resting across my stomach and an empty wooden cup near my feet. My left sleeve had been tied shut a few inches below the elbow. That still pissed me off to think about. People passed us without looking.

Mom sat several feet away, her back against the same stone wall. She looked worse than I did. Neither of us had eaten since yesterday morning. This was not how an isekai was supposed to work. Teelo had turned out to be exactly as useless as I originally thought, although apparently I had been wrong about him existing to guide us toward something better. He was just some idiot with enough magical ability to perform a low-level summoning. F-Tier really had meant F-Tier. There was no hidden meaning or cheat skills.

I had spent the first three days waiting for something to happen. Teelo had eventually made it clear that feeding two additional adults wasn't something he could afford indefinitely. At the time. I had modern knowledge. I had thousands of years of technological advancement sitting inside my head. Making money in a medieval society should've been laughably easy. My first idea had been gunpowder. That lasted until I realized I didn't actually know how to make gunpowder. I knew there was charcoal involved. Sulfur too?

In the books I read they also used… Salt? There was another ingredient. Knowing that guns existed turned out to be significantly less useful than knowing how to build one. Then I tried electricity. That was worse. I knew electricity moved through wires. I had absolutely no idea how to generate enough of it. Mom suggested we invent things people actually used. That resulted in us spending several days trying to recreate basic household products. Neither of us knew how soap was made.

I had used soap every day of my life and never once considered what was actually inside it. We tried candles before realizing the people here already had better ones. We tried selling the idea for a printing press. They already had one. It was magical. I even went to a carpenter to explain a bicycle. We tried introducing pizza. Somehow there was not only pizza… But there were restaurants that specialized in cheap premade pizza. They had fast food. Mom briefly thought cigarettes might make us rich.

Tobacco didn't exist. Hers ran out during the first day. Every brilliant idea I had about revolutionizing this backward world kept running into the same problem. I knew what modern things did. I didn't know how to make any of them. I still could've recovered. The real problem was that this place had magic. Anything simple enough for me to actually reproduce had usually already been replaced by something magical that worked better. Eventually, the money Teelo gave us ran out. Then came the jobs.

I wasn't about to do farm labor. That was ridiculous. I had been summoned from another world. I wasn't spending twelve hours a day dragging crops out of dirt for people who couldn't even understand what a computer was. I took the assessment to become an adventurer and I made F- Rank. Mom didn't even pass. Neither of us had useful combat skills. The guild suggested basic labor like farms or herb gathering. I declined. Things deteriorated pretty quickly after that. The hand had happened three weeks ago.

I still thought the punishment was insane. Yes, I had stolen something. That didn't mean cutting off my fucking hand was justifiable. It wasn't even anything valuable. I had been hungry. The shopkeeper had caught me before I made it out the door, a holy knight had appeared almost immediately, and apparently theft above a certain amount qualified for mutilation under local law. I would tell any one and everyone who would listen that I was a summoned champion. Nobody cared. I hated this world.

A copper coin landed in the cup near my feet. I looked up. The person who dropped it was already walking away. One entire copper. As mom always says, Hell yeah. Fantastic. We could totally get a whole loaf of bread witht his. Mom nudged me. Probably trying to alert me to the fortune we had just been handed. But she wasn't looking at the cup. Her attention had moved farther down the street. I followed her gaze. Something was happening. People were gathering along both sides of the road.

At first, I assumed it was some religious procession. Those happened constantly in the Holy City. Living this close to the Crystal Cathedral meant random parades broke out just because. The empress arose. Oooo ahhh cool. Nobody cares. Her coronation happened. I shook my head at the thought. Who gave a shit about some new ruler? Seriously? More people joined the crowd. Several shopkeepers stepped outside. A pair of knights in pearl armor began pushing people away from the center of the street.

I forced myself to stand. My legs hurt from sitting too long, and I had to use the wall for balance. Mom got up too. The pearl colored knights were the important ones. This must be some sort of important person. We moved closer with everyone else. I found a spot where I could see between two men. Holy Knights appeared first. Everyone in the city knew that armor. Fucking assholes, the lot of 'em. They moved down the street in an organized formation while keeping a clear route through the crowd. Then I saw children.

There were about a dozen of them. Some carried bags. Others had little more than the clothing they wore. They were coming from the direction of one of the nearby orphanages. People around us began whispering. I caught enough to understand what had happened. The new Holy Empress had visited the orphanage. She had been adopting orphans and this was her latest batch. I hadn't paid much attention to the rumors about the new ruler, honestly.

Politics weren't exactly high on my list of concerns when I was trying to find food from one day to the next. The crowd shifted. Someone near the front bowed. Then more people did. A bright white glow appeared farther along the road. There she was. The Holy Empress walked among the children instead of riding in a carriage. She was smaller than I expected. Young too. Really young. And hot as fuck. White wings were folded behind her, and horns curled around her head.

A tail moved behind her dress while the glow surrounding her made it impossible to mistake her for anyone else. Allegedly, she was a demon. She looked more like an angel than a demon though. One of the older girls walked beside her holding her hand. Another child carried some weird little chest. My mouth dropped open as I realized what it was. It was a baby mimic. The crowd started applauding. Mom grabbed my arm. I looked over and she nodded to two people conversing.

"...' s daughter. Apparently the silver sword adopted her. The rumor is she's the same Chelsea Wixx that became and overnight S-Ranker with the merchant's guild." My eyes whipped back to the empress. Chelsea? Her name was Chelsea? And she had been adopted by someone? I stared. She turned slightly as one of the younger children moved closer to her. My brain refused to accept it. The body was completely different. There were horns. Wings. She wasn't fat. But the way she walked. There was something familiar.

There was no way though… right? My stomach dropped as she did that Taylor Swift curtsy that she always sent as a gif to some old shop keeper lady. The girl who had run away from home walked through the Holy City surrounded by knights while thousands of people bowed to her. Chelsea. Chelsea fucking Drake was the Holy Empress.