Chapter 22. Graduation

“Well, I guess it’s goodbye Naoko. Thank you for taking care of me all those years. I hope you find yourself a nice boyfriend and maybe cut down on the booze.” I said to Naoko as I completed my last day of work.

“Take care Ken! Don’t be a stranger and come visit me once in a while. I will treat you to whatever you want from the store!” Naoko replied while giving me a nice big goodbye hug.

While she isn’t my type at all and drinks way too much, she has been a good manager for me and I will miss the nights where I can tell her all my secrets since she will be dead drunk by the next day and won’t remember a thing.

A couple months have passed since I defeated the necromancer dungeon boss and during that time, I naturally got my interview at Tokyo Academy. The interviewing process was rather simple. They asked me some generic questions on why I wanted to be a hero and what goals I wanted to achieve and a bunch of other worthless random bull shit.

At the end, I simply told them that I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was. I know it's my destiny in a world we must defend. Every challenge along the way, with courage, I will face! I will battle dungeons every day. to claim my rightful place!

They were quite impressed and clapped after my soliloquy and I too was impressed how I remembered the opening song to Pokemon after only watching a few episodes during my pikachu hunt.

I received my enrollment offer 2 weeks ago and of course, I enrolled immediately and with the final days of my highschool life coming to an end. I look forward to my winter break and start the new year as a student attending the one and only Tokyo Academy.

Obviously, my trusty sidekick Emma got accepted as well so we will be continuing our lifelong partnership into the foreseeable further and to the dismay of the stalking butler, since we will be living on campus, he really can’t interfere if she decides to come over to my dorm room and spent the night.

Peasant 1 and 2 also ended up making it to the academy and to my dismay, they seemed to have gotten closer with Emma and the three would often hang out and those two would even tag along for our private dungeon hunts like the 3rd and 4th wheel that’s ruining a perfectly fine bike.

Even worse, instead of just being my penpal online where we would chat about random shit on the forums over messages, peasant 1 decided it’s better to just call me instead and somehow thinks it’s fine to call me almost everyday like we are actual bffs irl.

After learning that I have been accepted to the academy, I put in my resignation to Naoko and told my landlord that I will be moving out by the end of December and with everything set, I am fucking ready to start the next arc in my life. And as the protagonist, I am sure the next arc will be filled with excitement and adventures or else this shit story needs to end.

If you are wondering what I have been doing for the past two months. Obviously I have been grinding them dungeons. What did you expect? Obviously I couldn’t get into Emma’s pants with how tight she keeps them on and with that butler around, I will wait until the academy arc starts.

Unfortunately, in preparation for the exam, Emma and I have exhausted most of the high density mobs that spawned here in Tokyo in level E dungeons and in the past two months, we had made slow progress on many mobs but I am nowhere near getting that 100k kill on any specific mob.

Does that mean we might go on vacations and hunt shit elsewhere? I fucking hope so. I am sick of looking at generic girls here in Japan and need a change in scenery at least once in a while.

With the two peasants tagging along in most of our dungeons, we did end up doing many boss fights and with our experience from the level C dungeons. Those level E dungeon bosses were a cake walk to fight and only took time due to the amount of hp they had.

Sadly, even with me landing the killing blow on every single boss we have fought, we have yet to get another itemized soul to drop and my only working theory for now is that the stronger the boss, the more likely for it to drop a soul and since we are only killing weakass shits like king slime and shit in level E dungeons, it might take a while before I could get another boss soul or maybe the drop rate is just shit low and we just got fucking lucky. Who the fuck even knows, all we can do is keep on hunting as Emma could level up more while I can get closer to get more passive skills.

Heading back home on the familiar streets that I have walked down almost daily for the past 3 years. While I am obviously excited for what’s to come, I couldn’t help but feel a slight bit of sadness as I looked around the streets and neighborhood that had treated me so well.

Having an early morning tomorrow for our graduation ceremony, I forgo my normal late forum browsing and went straight to bed after a quick shower.

“Why are you calling me, peasant?” I demanded as my screen lit up with an incoming call from peasant 1.

“What do you mean? I call you around this time every night!” She countered, like I answered her calls because I wanted to.

Yes, I have blocked her ass after getting annoyed by her calls but guess what happened afterwards. She fucking showed up to my fucking apartment and started banging on my door harrasing me asking me why I blocked her and annoyed my neighbors until I fucking unblocked her. Psycho Bitch…

So what’s the lesson here? Don’t go make friends with psychos online or else if they happened to come into your life for real. Those fuckers are impossible to get rid off and are annoying as hell!

“My graduation ceremony is tomorrow, China girl… I have to get up early to get ready for that shit so I’m off to bed early. I can’t be chatting or gaming with you tonight.” I answered.

Why the fuck do I have to explain and justify myself to the fucking peasant? Who is she anyways to be calling me so fucking much? I asked the fucking forums and they said I am a fucking scum for wanting backup plans and here is this China girl who won’t leave me alone!

“I will come with Annika to congratulate you two! Then we can go hit up a nice dungeon and hope for a good boss kill.” Peasant 1 replied without giving me a chance to reject her proposal as I just want to fucking sleep so I can get up early.

“Say CHEESE!” The teacher said annoyingly to me like I am fucking 3 years old as I stood next to Emma to get our graduation pictures taken.

The day dragged on forever with the principal giving some boring ass closing speech like anyone cares what he says while sobbing classmates pretended that they will miss each other after graduation because they won’t be attending the same college or going down different paths in life.

Like do you people not have phones? Of course not. It’s not the year 2000 or whatever the fuck when people still used that phone thing. With the brain chip, you have the invisible display that no one else could spy on and make calls or chat with whoever you want so I don’t understand why those people are all emotional like they won’t ever see each other again.

Like she promised, China girl showed up with meatshield version 2 as the pair of slackers were already done with highschool. Since neither Emma or I had any friends or really talked to anyone else in school, having peasant 1 and 2 showing up was actually a welcoming surprise as they made Emma happy. And as they say, happy Emma, happy life or something close like that.

For meatshield version 2, I am just going to drop the version 2 from now on. She has supposedly been in Japan for the past 3 years on a scholarship studying at a boarding school and doing dungeons to earn some allowance and unlike my public school that just got done today. Her private boarding school was over a whole week ago! Lucky bitch!

Since the 2 peasants had become fast friends, when her semester was over and the boarding school kicked her flat ass out. She has been freeloading at China girl’s apartment and I could hear her in the background making snarky comments on our already unwanted daily calls for an entire week.

“So no one from the orphanage is coming to congratulate you?” China girl asked.

“Nope. I haven’t had any contact with any of them in over 3 years. It was a shithole anyways. I barely talked to anyone. Maybe like 2 or 3 of them were kinda cool but yea, my blondie was pretty much all I got. Those at the orphanage were no closer to me than complete strangers.” I replied, not feeling a single bit of disappointment. I don’t even think I remember more than a few of my supposedly siblings' names now, that’s how much they don’t matter to me.

“Guess you are just a cold person. Most people would develop some feelings even if you aren’t related by blood.” Meatshield added as the peasants ganged up on me with the insults.

“Peasant 2! Don’t pretend like you can understand how shit my situation was. The staff didn’t give a shit about any of us and they were just there to collect a paycheck. My “siblings” were a bunch of druggies and gang members. If I actually hung out with them, I would probably be running with some underground gangs and be addicted to drugs and either be dead or in jail right now.” I replied.

“Good thing he found me! It was destiny for sure.” Emma joined into the conversation happily.

As much as I don’t want to admit it. That chance meeting and eventual friendship with Emma probably did save me from going down the wrong path. But I doubt it. As the protagonist and hero, I would have overcome any obstacles no matter what might have happened but having the blondie was obviously the best outcome possible.

After finally getting done with the last day of school, the four of us went and had an early dinner before going for a dungeon boss to celebrate but the piece of shit boss didn’t drop shit worth mentioning and the day ended anticlimactically without anything exciting happening.