Kingdom of battles ✓

Chapter 40

I walked to the other side of the dining room in the guild house. My eyes flew to one the left every few moments. The walls were still missing there and there were piles of collapsed rocks lying everywhere, but Shiemi already started leading the reconstruction of her guild. She was standing on some of the wooden boards, with a construction worker's hat on her head and yelling orders, while Izuno was running around and trying to do the best he could to help everyone understand what Shiemi wanted. There was a lot of ruckus and I was pretty sure that something was going to go wrong with the reconstruction of the guild. The members didn't really seem the kind to be able to properly build something like this, but Shiemi still insisted that they'll be able to do it and not only that, she said that they'll finish even before Rea and I would come back from the guild showdown. Because of that we were supposed to travel to level 2 alone, without anyone from the guild to cheer. Shiemi said that right now she wanted everyone at the headquarters and that maybe she was going to allow some guild members to come after us later. 

I didn't even meet Rea yet and that was why I was going to the other side of the dining room. From what I heard she was somewhere there and I wanted to meet her and tell her that I was ready to leave, my backpack full of junk that I thought could be useful was already prepared on my shoulders. I hoped that she was a strong player, maybe someone with a lot of muscles. 

I stopped between a few tables and looked around. The closest person to me was a girl, sitting at a table that was covered with a pile of books. I took a step closer to her and noticed how she was reading one, with a thoughtful frown on her face. I had nothing against bookworms, I liked reading too, even if it was mostly just manga, but I still prayed that she wasn't the girl I was looking for. That was because she was one of the tiniest creatures that I've ever seen, she was even smaller than me and I was the one that had barely a meter and fifty five centimetres. 

'' Hey, I'm looking for some girl named Rea. Do you know her? '' I seriously asked. When she raised her head and looked at me with pretty yellow eyes I knew that there was a ninety nine percent chance that Rea was her. And I had a feeling that the other one percent wasn't really on my side. 

The girl awkwardly smiled, scratched the back of her head and closed the book she was reading. '' I am Rea. You must be Natsumi, right? The one that is going with me on this month's showdown? ''

I sighed and nodded, scanning her for a moment. She was a small, pale and fragile looking girl. Her light green hair was long in the front and two strands of it were falling down on each side of her head, while the rest was tied up in the back, with the help of a braid. She was wearing a simple dress that stopped a little bit higher above her knees and had a little puffy shoulders. It was white, with a blue line going down through the middle and around the end of the puffy sleeves. There was a brown belt that was wrapped around her chest a few times, with a golden buckle. She also had high boots on her feet that were matching her dress. She was wearing grey gloves that covered her whole arms and smaller dark blue ones on top of them.  

Seeing her clothes was enough for me to know that she wasn't really the biggest fighter. Or maybe she was, fighting with a special was stopping her dress from getting ripped. Or maybe that was her special technique. It was possible, I just never really thought about it since I would never do it. 

'' How do you fight with that? '' I directly asked with a serious expression on my face. 

She flinched then she let out an awkward laugh and shyly lowered her head. '' I... I-I... I-I'm n-no-not r-really strong, I admit. That's the reason why I'm not good for a lot missions because I just get in the way, so I end up going on the showdown every year. No one else wants to go, but I do it because I want to be useful... Someone gets dragged down with me every year and at the end we never win... This is going to be the third time that the guild showdown will be held and the previous two times we were fifteenth and nineteenth... ''