🏆 THE AMBY AWARDS 2023 TOP PICK - DIVERSE LIT 🏆
It's Rin and Hye-jin against the world. Or so it should have been.
Nagara Rin and Joon Hye-jin, college sweethearts and passionate gamers, have lived a fairytale marriage. Not even a decade after did...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"You're not using the sword's full capacity," Mirani said as she stood in front of me with her arms like blades before her. Her eyes had never strayed from me since we began sparring. "You need to be one with your weapon or you'd never get anywhere."
I sighed and drove the hair off my face. Even in this world, it still proved to be a hassle. I lowered myself to a stance, the Butterfly Blade poised forward. Both my hands held the hilt. How did it come to this? Let me go back to a few hours ago.
After I won the match with Cavya, the leader had me go through the process of enlisting. It involved a ton of paperwork, with most of them requiring my thumbmark. The ink? Blood. My blood. By the time the receptionist in the enlistment booths filed my data as under the Dragnasand Knights, my thumb pulsed with pinpricks of varying depth. Cavya had to cast a quick healing spell to "prevent it from bruising" the next day.
When I asked if there was something happening by then, Cavya didn't feel inclined to give me an answer. "You should see soon," he said, striding in front of me towards the inner workings of the guild's building. The image of the guild's facade flashed back to my memory. I first craned my neck when they brought me to enlist right after the match. The multicolored scales nailed upon the huge, flat wall pocked with painted glass windows told me these people weren't fooling around.
"Don't worry about the scales," Mirani had explained when I asked where they got it and that many. "The Guardian Dragons shed twice a year. They're kind enough to give some to the old guild masters and to the Central Empire."
I remembered shielding my eyes against the glare of the afternoon sun. The spires resembled the spikes that would have decorated a dragon's hide. In fact, the whole building was modeled after a sleeping dragon, from the curved roofs to the dragon-head-shaped shed from the building's east side. So...Guardian Dragons existed in this place? Cool.
Then, after enlisting, I was passed to Nazran and Yaora. The former didn't let me know what he felt about the whole thing of me joining. His face was always kept neutral, throwing me an occasional smile whenever I became too amazed at Dragnasand's facilities. Because, seriously, who wouldn't gawk at the presence of a huge greenhouse filled with various flora and fauna I never even thought existed in the game?
Even back home, it was my duty to fill up the family vase. Due to its origin and its importance to the house we used to live in, I took it upon myself to make sure it's used and used well. Besides, I've always been attached to flowers since I was a child. My mother, back when she was still present, worked in a flower shop and would often teach me how to take care of them. I guess I was never really able to let go of that hobby, bringing it with me through high school, university, and eventually, inside the marriage. Hye-jin never complained about the flowers and the pots of small ornamental plants lining the sun window of our house.
At some point, I grew too familiar with all of the flowers back home that seeing new kinds told me life wasn't so bland after all. There were a multitude to discover, a sea of the unknown. Seeing those flowers made me feel like it's worth it to start living again.
