Carmine was still three matches away. While she went to the preparation room with Salicia and her management team, I swung by a group of boys leaving the coliseum with a single woman at their center. She was fretting over one boy in particular while the others gave her a forlorn look. That was the iceman himself, who had been healed and hadn’t been that hurt in the fight, to begin with. If anything, it was his pride that took the most damaging blow.
“Harem… I thought I recognized your… um… friend?” I called out to her.
The girl looked up, no recognition appearing across her face. At the same time, the guys moved protectively around her, forming a protective barrier as they looked at me suspiciously. I wasn’t planning on moving in on their girl, but it was an action that would have been impossible even if I wanted it. One by one, the guys seemed to recognize me. At the very least, they remembered the meal I had once prepared, and they started to relax their guard just a bit.
Finally, after enough time passed that I was starting to feel a bit awkward standing there, Harem let out a cry of happiness, “Ah! Newbie!”
I was glad she didn’t shout out my name in an area where that could cause me trouble, but it was clear she didn’t use my name because she didn’t remember it. All the boys around her, even those that hadn’t been in the Mirror Dungeon when I met her, shook their heads. I didn’t get it. Harem was a really dense and thoughtless person. I just didn’t understand what appeal man or woman would have in a dense person like her.
“I’m sorry about the match…” I said.
“Ah… well, I wasn’t interested in winning anyway. I just wanted to see how my boys compare to the current stock of gladiators. If we didn’t happen to get this year’s champion early on, Harem’s Boys might have even made it to second place! Alas, we just ended with some more bad luck this month.”
“Has your luck been particularly bad?”
She shrugged as she went closer to me, but the boys still made a perimeter where I couldn’t get closer than three arms width to her. “I didn’t find anything in Mirror Dungeon worth our time. Then, with the destruction of Fort Pride, the Ost Republic border went quiet. Looking for a challenge, that inevitably led us to the only coliseum. Unfortunately, this season had already started and we had missed the preliminaries. Thankfully, my boy Evan here managed to loosen the rules with a 5-gold bribe, but after two weeks of battle, it ended .”
Mary had acted like she was granting us some great favor by getting us in ahead of the preliminaries. It looked like a simple bribe would have done the same. I still didn’t know how I felt about the church. They may be titty-focused, but they also did preach a bit of xenophobia and they may have been more powerful and more dangerous in the past. The church in Aberis had regressed to this point, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other factions and sects that were worth my worry.
“Where are you going next?” I asked.
“Ah… isn’t that obvious? The Ost Republic!”