Humility

"Kneel," said the Behemoth simply, rolling his shoulders as his racial ability went on cooldown.

"That's right, girly. If you kneel, then the duel will end, without you needing to get hurt. Otherwise you're going to be nursing some serious wounds to try and get your HP back from 1," said the pig head.

"Ice Shard!" I roared, throwing my hands out in front of me.

I know I was just throwing shade at Kosuke for being illogical, but... kneeling...to such a guy...

It was simply unthinkable.

This time he smacked my Ice Shard out of the air.

Deflect.

Well, that told me the first one hurt him enough for him to actually try to avoid getting hit by another one. So he couldn't just stand there sneering at me with his arms folded. A small victory, but in this situation I had to take what I could get.

"Go ahead, throw it all at me. You have another 20 seconds until Bestial Slash is off cooldown, I'll give you until then to try and get my HP to 0..." said Reems. That stupid sneer had returned to his face.

"Wait, please! Just cancel the duel!" Leilei had found her nerve to speak up. Unfortunately it was only to plead with her aggressor. "I'll dance for you, however you like... please, just don't hurt her...

"Oh yeah honey... that mailbox is waiting for you!" jeered the rooster head.

"Might have to find something to mail just to get in for a closer look!" said pig head.

"No need for that, its not like she's modest!" said Reems.

All the sycophants roared with laughter.

"P-please Sir Reems, I'll do it for free, no need to pay me..." begged Leilei.

"Oh? But we already paid you," he gestured to the pieces of copper scattering across the ground. "Now get up there and dance." His tone was cold, yet his eyes were fierce, like some kind of reptile.

"Let's get her on the lamppost instead!" said rooster head.

"Yeah, she can use it as a pole!" said pig head.

"Okay, I-I will, okay?"

"Not so fast, first you need to pick up the coins we gave you," said Reems.

"Yeah, it's disrespectful to leave them lying around on the ground like that," chuckled the pig head.

"That's right, show some gratitude!" added rooster head.

"Yeah, crawl on all fours!" demanded pig head.

"I got some more coppers to throw down..." the rooster head reached into his purse.

"If I were you I'd stuff it directly into her inventor—"

I interrupted Reems' vile remark with another Ice Shard.

"Agh!"

It hit him right between the legs

Crit. 10 damage.

92% HP

I couldn't suppress my own smirk, despite everything.

Unfortunately, it was short lived.

Reems had his arms stretched out to the side, and all his veins and muscles were bulging, especially around his eyes. "Avalanche!" he roared.

I was knocked onto my backside as an enormous mound rose up from the ground before me, it grew over two, three, four meters tall before it toppled over.

Directly on top of me.

***

An hour later, we found ourselves back in the Faunhaven Inn. We postponed our excursion for the sake of recovering our HP by eating and drinking. The game mechanics favored defeating enemies without yourself ever being struck with an attack. They did this by making it extremely inconvenient to recover lost HP. It almost took as much time to heal actual wounds in the magic-devoid world I came from. 

I was sipping on a vile tasting medicinal tonic, and Leilei was pushing an amber pea around on her plate. There was a dense brooding silence hanging in the air between us, over the shredded corpse of Kosuke Satou.

I was in so much pain—literally on the verge of death. Funny, how we never seemed to think about the character's pain when their health bar is moving down, but I can assure you, being reduced to 1 HP was not pleasant.

I was 1-shotted, as you probably guessed. Not only that, but the move Reems used, Avalanche, also stuns the target. That was another thing we tended to never think about, how the status effects in games might actually feel in real life. Well, take it from me: being stunned was essentially the same as being knocked unconscious.

When I came to, Reems and his gang of butt-kissers had already left, thankfully. But I was hardly able to jump with joy, in light of everything that had happened.

It was miserable. The physical pain was surpassed only by the profound shame and humiliation we'd been subjected to. The whole village had witnessed the spectacle, and people in the inn were throwing all manner of looks in our direction: some mocking, some pitying, some even looked concerned.

I'd failed to protect the honor and dignity of my only friend. Yes, your heard right: Leilei was my friend. 

"Oh Minori, you've grown and matured so much...."

Blah blah, woopty doo—I don't want to hear it.

I was finally willing to give friendship another try, only to immediately fail at it in the worst way imaginable.

The most humiliating part of my humiliating defeat was the fact that Leilei used the coins they threw at her in order to buy the expensive healing tonic I was now sipping on. So both the taste of the drink and the thought of how it was procured both worked to make me unbearably nauseous. 

All I wanted to do was to puke, then crawl into a hole and die. Yet I forced the rising bile in my stomach back down and continued drinking the foul drink. I could only hope that the vile taste would permanently linger on my tongue, like a scar, so that I may never forget the poignancy of this defeat.

Then there was the matter of Kosuke. I didn't even know how to begin to process that issue. It was like, in that exact same moment, where I'd started to view him as anything other than a nuisance, when—poof—he was gone.

Maybe I was exaggerating my cold feelings toward him, just a bit. I don't want you to think I was a completely heartless monster. I wasn't always annoyed by his presence. Like I said, we had lunch together in our school's courtyard. Although I originally sat out there to be alone, and would have preferred solitude, it wasn't like I wanted him to leave.

It was just... honestly, I don't really know what it was.

All I knew now was that there was certainly something wrong with me.

Definitely something social, maybe even something psychological, but that wasn't what I meant.

There was something physically, tangibly wrong with me, something I could fix, which meant that I needed to, without any further delay. 

My problem was that I was weak.

And the only solution was to get stronger.

It was time to stop screwing around, and time to start grinding XP.

I downed the rest of my gross tonic in a single swallow, then slammed the wooden mug on the table. I picked up Kosuke's remains in one hand, then took Leilei's hand in the other. "Come on, we've got some leveling to do."