Space stitched itself back together beneath Viktoria’s wings as the five of them stepped out into the teleportation atrium of Seoul’s spaceport. Many cities were perfectly okay with portals being used wherever the user wanted, as long as it didn’t cause any problems, but, well, Seoul wasn’t just a big city with a vast number of inhabitants, but also one filled with people who could do all sorts of things. If teleportation were allowed without restriction, there’d have been utter chaos, or so the lawmakers claimed.
Judging by how full this place was, it had been quite a reasonable concern. If people popped into the middle of the sidewalk with equal nonchalance …
Anyway, they quickly navigated their way out through the crowd, the fact that most people here were solidly into the realm of superhuman capabilities making that process far smoother than he’d experienced at school, though it was simultaneously rather terrifying, speaking as one of the few people who didn’t have the ability to easily follow along with what was happening around him.
They swiftly passed by both passport control and customs, which had apparently been quite the pain in the ass in the past, but now consisted solely of a single uniformed individual observing the crowd, using some manner of [Skill] to make sure there wasn’t any hanky-panky happening.
Once outside, Dad waved down one of the dozens of taxis loitering around, and they swiftly drove towards the city, with Derek all but pressing his nose against the glass of the windows as he watched Seoul grow larger as they got closer, towering skyscrapers that seemed to stretch into the heavens, with positively medieval, fantastical constructions sitting at their feet, some simple, others practically gilded with precious metals, the entrances to the city’s countless dungeons built up purely for the hell of it.
Having built so many dungeons within Seoul proper was something that could go wrong, even in today’s day and age, but they’d had well over a century to make it work. And on the backs of said dungeons, Korea had become one of the big movers and shakers of the modern world.
Though they’d also impacted the city in other ways, with at least half the people he could see out and about wearing some variation of adventurer clothing, or, at the very least, clothing that could be perceived as being usable in a dungeon. Even if at least some of them were more likely to be fashion statements rather than actual equipment.
Derek and his parents were wearing “normal” clothing, for example, while the twins had on cargo pants and heavily reinforced shirts whose primary attribute was being easy to move in, with a secondary focus on protection, even if they probably didn’t need what little mere clothes could offer.
Eventually, the taxi pulled up to what seemed to be an apartment building, only a couple of blocks from the academy.
“Wait … did you guys rent an apartment for me?” Derek asked, surprised. Once again, it wasn’t like they couldn’t afford it, but they were rather frugal, and there were the dorms …
“No, it’s Isaac’s place,” Tanja told him. “But he cleared it out when he went exploring and told us we could use it if we ever decided to go to school here, or teach, for that matter …”
She shrugged, so Viktoria finished for her. “... but as long as the place is still standing when he comes back, he’ll be happy for you to use it too.”
As per usual, “Isaac’s” was everywhere, his touch ubiquitous on everything in Derek’s life, yet also … yet there was also absolutely no way for Derek to predict just what shape his influence was going to take.
“When do you think he’ll be back?” Derek asked, not for the first time.
“Eventually,” Tanja said. “He left ‘cause he got bored, and when he decides he needs to be back around people, or when he finds something he has to talk about, he’ll come back.”
“At some point,” Viktoria added. “Isaac … when he gets into something, he really gets into it, and just up and vanishes for a while. I mean, it’s usually not this long, but considering how long people live nowadays?”
“He’ll be back when he’s back,” Mom summed it up, unlocking the apartment door they’d reached while they’d been talking, and began pulling out things from her spatial storage once inside.
***
While the apartment had been utterly barren when they’d entered, two bedrooms, a massive bathroom, and a kitchen-dining room combo, after an hour of moving stuff in, it … drumroll please … slightly less barren.
Even after having brought over most of the contents of his room, there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff to go around, even with Mom and Dad having thrown in a dining room table, couch, coffee table, Tv, and the like, but in a way, that was actually preferable.
After all, it meant he’d have space to expand into as he found more stuff he liked and was interested in.
“… and if you need anything, call,” Dad said, causing Mom to shoot him an irritated look before she focused back on Derek, eyes warm.
“Just call, will you?”
“Sur - … oof,” Derek gasped, suddenly feeling himself get crushed from both sides as the twins wrapped him in a hug that was just a tad too forceful before letting him go.
“And if anyone gives you trouble, give ‘em hell,” Viktoria said, slapping his back with a broad grin.
“And if they try the whole ‘don’t you know who I am’ bullshit, remind them that whatever influence they can draw on, you can draw on more,” Tanja added. “But only if they start it first. I’m not helping you start shit, but I’ll sure help you end it.”
“Girls,” Mom sighed, while Dad laughed.
Derek just rolled his eyes. He’d heard the whole “if you can get yourself into trouble, you can get yourself out of it, but if anyone who’s too strong for you starts punching down, I’ll show them how far they are from the peak of power” speech before.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Granted, it was the sort of thing that needed to be said, especially with his personal circumstances, but it was also not something he needed to hear more than once.
“How about we just hope nothing of the sort is needed?” Dad asked as he began to herd them out of the apartment. “And instead just go to dinner?”
***
Dinner came and went relatively quickly, leaving Derek standing alone in “his” apartment a couple of hours later, and five days to kill before it was time to “go to school.”
Granted, his sisters could, and most likely would, pop in quite a few times, after all, unlike him, they could relatively freely travel the globe with their own abilities, but for right now … holy. Shit.
He could do whatever the hell he wanted, couldn’t he?
He could order food via his phone without having to ask for it, he could stay in bed all day and play video games, hell, he could move his bed into the living room, play video games from there, and eat takeout without risking getting yelled at by mom … except eating in bed would leave a mess he would have to clean up, moving his bed would be dumb, especially since there was a couch there already, and he’d literally just eaten, getting takeout just because he could would be quite juvenile.
Also, even if there was no formal draw on his time … he could, for the most part, be a free spirit later. Way later, when he’d leveled up enough and his lifespan had increased to the point of near-absurdity.
Which meant that, for right now, it was time to “be responsible,” head out and stock up on groceries, plus go explore the local area. And, most importantly, figure out where he had to go in five days, so he wasn’t late when it counted.
Derek headed over towards the heavily reinforced wardrobe that had been the only piece of original furniture left, which was meant to hold equipment and weapons, and retrieved the storage ring Tanja had gotten him, slipping it onto his left ring finger.
He probably wouldn’t be able to use it properly for a bit yet, this was one of the older, shitty versions that needed proper mana control to activate, but the fact that it was hard to use wasn’t due to his sister being cheap. Rather, these were used as a training tool nowadays, so Derek would bring both it and a backpack and keep trying to store stuff in the magical item on the way back.
For a brief moment, he also grabbed a sheathed knife, a kabar, to be precise, before opting to leave it because, A, this was Seoul and it was as safe as any metropolitan city could possibly be, B, running around armed might be taken as an indication that he wanted to throw hands, and C, considering that he was basically powerless at the moment, being armed wouldn’t make any difference.
Though even as he headed outside, part of him wished he’d brought it. Because now that he’d decided to go to a school for what broadly fell under the umbrella of “adventurer,” left him feeling like he should, in fact, be armed. It wasn’t like there weren’t a whole lot of people running around with weapons outside, all without ever intending to use them …
In the end, though, it didn’t wind up mattering. He headed out, found the local supermarket, bought what was likely far too wide a variety of kimchi, was then advised to get himself a kimchi fridge to separate the fermenting food so it didn’t make non-kimchi food smell, found himself an electronics store, and arranged to have a second, smaller fridge, and then headed back to the apartment.
Of course, he hadn’t just bought the countless spicy fermented vegetables, he’d also grabbed the pastes that formed the basis for many different complex foods, such as the gochujang chilli paste or doenjang soy bean paste, and what felt like a literal metric ton of Korean rice cakes, tteokbokki, plus normal rice …
All stuff that would both keep and be needed in the future, almost irrespective of what he wound up cooking.
Which left him in his apartment an hour later, a whole lot of ingredients stuffing the pantry … and only a handful of meals that he could actually make with what he had. Meat or vegetables would have to be bought on an ad hoc basis. Although … actually, grabbing some SPAM would be a good idea, plus the ingredients for some western food he actually knew how to cook would be a great idea.
It wasn’t like he was unused to Korean food; in fact, he loved it, he just hadn’t had very much practice at cooking it himself.
So, second shopping trip.
Then, he found himself back in the apartment, trying to figure out what he could cook from there … and then it turned out he’d forgotten to get cooking oil.
Out again he went, only to get turned around and return after another half hour.
All told … well, he’d learned that planning was important, but, more importantly, he’d gotten comfortable actually speaking Korean in a real-world environment.
But at this point, it wouldn’t matter if he’d forgotten anything else, or how much he’d forgotten, for that matter, nothing would get him back out there today because, by God, he was tired.
Derek opened the door, hung up his jacket, took off his shoes, threw his backpack into the kitchen, flounced down on the couch, and switched on the telly, only to immediately get blasted with an emergency break in the programming.
“News Alert: Class Rampage in downtown Los Angeles!”
A stupid name, for a horrifying concept. Though one that was also a teensy bit stupid as well.
In essence, in the old days after the [System] had first appeared, things had gotten very chaotic, and the people working to get a handle on things, as long as they actually put in effort and, you know, survived, wound up with excellent [Classes] and wound up in the upper echelons of today’s society.
Nowadays, however, things were mostly, well, calm, and as a result, very few people wound up with high-rarity [Classes] purely by surviving, not unless they’d deliberately gotten themselves dropped on some inhospitable hellhole out in the edge of civilized space.
Which had resulted in a certain subgroup of the population, mostly on the younger side, deciding that, because the chaos during the initialization had been caused by humans, then wouldn’t it be “fair” if humans were to make some more chaos that could fuel good [Classes] now?
Yeah. There were people who wanted the world to become chaotic so they could profit off that, either by being the instigators or the ones who fixed the chaos.
And the most extreme version of that was what had been termed the “Class rampage,” aka someone stuck at Level 150 stockpiling a whole lot of XP, filling every reasonably obtainable Aspect Slot and so on, getting as ready as possible … before comitting a literal massacre of unspeakable proportions, the kinds that would wind up in the history books, until the [System] offered a suffiently “worthy” [Class].
A [Class] that would then be leveled as high as possible using the stockpiled XP, and then the perpetrator would run like hell, hoping they could get away with their carnage-flavored [Class] before they got turned into a grease stain by an angry S-Ranker, which was how things usually went.
But it had worked. Once. And even though that particular bastard was still running, quite literally heading towards the Andromeda galaxy, trying to cross a gap of around two million light-years, there were still people who somehow thought that that had been an example worth following.
His lip curled down. Sometimes, the world sucked.
Derek watched for a bit longer, then switched over to browsing entertainment channels until he found one streaming a show called “Firefly.”
It was an old one, obviously, being devoid of magic and having very different technology from what Derek would be working with when he headed off Earth, to explore the parts of the void not stuffed with Isaac’s legacy, but it was still a highly entertaining show. A “Space Western,” perhaps?
Either way, Firefly was good. Too good. By the time the credits from the movie that had ended the series scrolled by on the screen, it was already four in the morning, and he had a crick in his neck from the awkward position he’d slipped into at some point.
Eh, worth it.
