God of Trash

The two of them arrived at the arena as the first spectators arrived. Rhys threw down the red-and-white robe he’d found earlier, tucking the sleeves underneath so it appeared as nothing more than a backdrop. He and Bast quickly set up their wares atop the sheet, setting their bags to the front. Rhys reached for the potions, then hesitated. He and Bast were stronger and faster than a mortal child, but there wasn’t much else that could be said about them. Bast could probably fight an adult on even footing, maybe even overwhelm an adult, while Rhys figured he could land one good punch and run for it, but if someone seriously snatched their potions, much less a contestant, they’d be shit out of luck. He twisted his lips. Maybe it was best to keep his potions close and only offer them to honest-looking people, no matter how shady that made him look.

“Good morning, boys,” a familiar voice said. Straw wrapped an arm around each of them, grinning left and right. “How goes it?”

Rhys let out a silent sigh of relief and set out the potions close to himself. With Straw here, he didn’t have to worry. Even if Straw wouldn’t actually lift a finger to help them, just his presence would ward off those who might think to rob a couple of kids. And he wasn’t sure that Straw wouldn’t help them, if someone tried to steal from them. The man had his limits, and understood his place in the world, but something like blatant theft would give him an excuse to intervene regardless of any self-imposed limits.

Bast shrugged away from Straw’s arms, and Straw released Rhys a second later. He peered at their wares approvingly. “You’d never know those bags were made from garbage. They look fine, fine indeed!”

“I’ll have to thank the mages for throwing out so many perfectly functional robes,” Rhys replied. If he were a person from this world, from this timeline, he was sure he wouldn’t understand it at all. But having a modern perspective, where he himself wasn’t above tossing out an old, perfectly functional t-shirt for no other reason than he was bored of it and had too many t-shirts, or the t-shirt having a tiny, fixable hole… he understood it completely. Once one became rich enough, fixing clothes wasn’t worth the time and effort. Not to mention that other people of the same socioeconomic class would look down on you for having mended clothes. It was absolutely ridiculous and a waste of good fabric, but he understood the forces behind it, even if he didn’t agree with them.

Straw chuckled. “Mages will throw out the most ridiculous items.”

There were more well-dressed spectators today than yesterday. Not only nobles, but also mages, adventurers, and martial artists milled among the crowd. Yesterday, he hadn’t quite understood it, but today, he did. Many of the battlers in the tournament were unaffiliated with any school, mage, martial, or otherwise. Now that they’d come to the second round of the tournament, all the battlers could be considered minor talents at the very least, with some rising to the level of true talent. The mages and their like were here to recruit those talents, or at least watch for rising power in unfriendly schools. Rhys didn’t need a formal education in this world to understand that one school’s rise meant another school’s fall. If one school showed off a powerful new skill, or displayed the strength of an exceptional prodigy in the tournament, the rest of the regional schools would want to know.

Rhys hadn’t seen anyone that shocking in the tournament so far, but what did he know? He wasn’t a mage. Maybe one of the fighters had fought with unusual skill, and he’d simply been too blind to the ways of battle to understand that.

Of course, none of that mattered to him. Putting on his public service smile, Rhys sat up, folding his legs under him. “Come one, come all! Fine bags, sewn by skilled artisans from the rarest fabrics! Come, buy one of our town’s specialty bags, and return with a souvenir to remember the tournament by!”

“These bags are the town’s specialty?” Bast muttered, confused.

Rhys leaned in. “Of course not. And we aren’t skilled artisans, either. But they don’t know that.”

Bast grinned. He nodded, slowly, as understanding dawned. “I see now.”