Chapter 16 – First Friend
Max and Jessie were pleasantly surprised and intrigued by the arrival of a lovely peer.
“Hey, why were you in the ball pit?”
“Didn’t want to play with the kids?”
“Dummy, girls are shy, you know? She was probably embarrassed.”
“Hah, shy my foot. She’s just a noisy brat.”
“What?! If you talk like that I’ll scold you!”
“Yikes, stop! I got hit!”
The kids started bickering amongst themselves.
I couldn’t help but feel envious as I observed them.
“Are you two friends?”
“They’re forced to meet because of their parents. Their families are neighboring baron families.”
“Talking big while saying that…”
Max, who quickly pouted, and Jessie, who teased him with “What? Do you like me?”, looked like quite the pair.
“Sorry for startling you earlier. I just like to hide when I go to unfamiliar places…”
“Oh, I get that feeling. It’s annoying when strangers bother you, so you want to run away.”
“Are you also on your way to the entrance exam?”
The two little ones tilted their heads in unison.
“We?”
“But we’re only ten!”
“Not happening?”
“How can a ten-year-old take the entrance exam?”
“Even twenty-year-olds find it difficult.”
A sense of disbelief filled the two kids’ eyes.
“Are you really on your way to take the entrance exam?”
“Seriously?”
I felt like I had slipped up.
As I cautiously nodded, they exclaimed “Whoa!” and “No way!” with awe.
It was a look I had seen a long time ago.
Back when the remastered Pokémon stickers came out, and people were green with envy while collecting the rare seals to stick in their notebooks.
“What’s your name?”
“Oknodie.”
“Your name sounds weird.”
“How can a person be named Oknodie?”
I mean, seriously.
“My brother is going to the entrance exam at fifteen. It’d be great if Oknodie passed in his place.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to tease him for losing to a ten-year-old.”
I don’t want support based on such dubious motives.
Regardless, chatting with the two kids surprisingly turned out to be enjoyable.
Before I knew it, time had flown by, and it was already late at night.
“Oops, we should get going.”
“Hey Max, bring your little brother here quickly.”
Like a cafe bell ringing, Max picked up the tired little kid who seemed barely over one year old and started to doze off.
“Daddy!”
“Hey, put that down. You can’t take the ball pit home.”
“Daddy-baby!”
“Ow, don’t push with your hands!”
“Pfft. You’re terrible at taking care of kids.”
Max’s face turned red from Jessie’s mockery as he went to snatch the ball from the baby, who desperately clung to it and pushed back.
“It’s like a security blanket.”
Jessie chimed in from the side.
“My mom said that after turning one, children tend to have a comforting object they pour love and attention into instead of their parents. Since there aren’t any toys or things to attach to here, the ball pit became theirs.”
“You’re pretty smart, Jessie.”
“Tch, nothing special comes out of compliments, you know?”
If she had a tail, she’d be wagging it.
However, something felt off about that ball pit.
I had this strange urge to confirm it.
“Want me to hold it for you?”
“Hold the ball pit ball? Why?”
“Because I still have to stay here.”
“Didn’t you come to take care of the kid?”
“Rief said she’d come if she waited.”
“Rief?”
“That’s the maid’s name.”
“Sounds cute. But that kid seems really greedy, you think you can manage?”
“Guess we’ll find out.”
I locked eyes with the baby.
“Hey there, little buddy?”
“Uhm? Gyaa!”
The baby’s eyes sparkled as she reached for my golden hair.
In the chaos of grabbing her hair, the ball pit ball naturally fell to the ground.
Thanks to that, I easily obtained the ball pit ball, but I think a few strands of Max’s hair came off as the baby fiercely held on.
“Sorry. Our little one can be quite rough, huh?”
“It’s fine. This isn’t even painful.”
“You’re really mature. Is that why you’re taking the entrance exam? We’re the same size, but you seem like such an adult. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from being super annoyed.”
Well, being an adult does have its perks.
Anyway, I said goodbye to Max, the baby, and Jessie, and picked up the ball pit ball the baby had been holding.
The ball, which was covered in saliva and shiny, felt oddly different from the other ball pit balls.
To be exact, it felt weightless, as if it were something else shaped like a ball pit ball.
How familiar.
I know the identity of these things.
‘Isn’t this a stat stone?’
It’s quite possible.
The kids’ zone was a place I hadn’t entered at all during my muscular male character player days.
Even if there’s a stat stone I don’t know about, it wouldn’t be surprising.
‘I’ll find out if I eat it.’
I wiped the saliva on my sleeve, opened my mouth wide, and swallowed it whole.
Gulp.
It went down smoothly.
I was right.
This feeling confirmed it as a stat stone.
‘What stat did I gain?’
Once I enter the academy, even without the player’s status window feature, I should be able to view my status window using the academy’s magic.
I want to enter quickly.
Thinking this, I turned my head and met Jessie, who was covering her mouth with both hands, locking eyes with me.
“Uh, I just left behind something…”
In Jessie’s hand was a small pouch.
In short, my timing was bad.
“Oknodie…? Why did you swallow the ball pit ball?!”
“Ah, um, that… because…”
“We need to get you to a healer right away!”
Jessie gripped my hand, yanking me forward.
Even with an assumed strength of 29, I wouldn’t be dragged along like that, but fearing that Jessie might get hurt in the process, I relaxed and let her pull me to the emergency room.
What if Rief comes back?
Well, she can return any moment.
It should be okay, right?
Rief found a means to invade the gambling den.
Upon returning to the kids’ zone, Rief realized the empty ball pit meant the young lady’s chronic game of hide-and-seek had started again.
This time, it seemed like she was hiding quite cleverly, but she was also an assassin instructor dispatched here.
Confident in her ability to find hidden people.
“Hmm, I can hear the young lady’s breathing. Are you perhaps hiding behind the curtain?”
Swish
“Not there… So you wouldn’t settle for the cliché of hiding in the wardrobe, would you?”
Squeak
“If you’ve hidden under the bed here, considering this is the kids’ zone nap room, I might just have to commend you.”
Scrape
“Today’s young lady has some serious hiding skills… This will be a good game. Hehe.”
The one-person game of hide-and-seek continued for a while in the empty kids’ zone.
The emergency room, set up for emergency patients, featured various equipment and specialized healers.
From priests casting healing magic to doctors performing surgeries, all specialists for different ailments were present.
‘In games, just rushing into the emergency room for treatment often leads to a random doctor being assigned and receiving absurd treatments or even incorrect ones.’
A skilled priest might reposition bones, but not a lower-ranking priest.
Knowing the risks, to me, the emergency room was a shortcut to becoming a busted character, and the lower-ranking priest on night duty, Edgeo, was the tormentor of broken bones and an approaching fear.
“You said your friend swallowed a ball?”
“Yeah! Please do something quickly!”
“Hmm. It seems they’re at least over five years old, right? Have you registered? Please place your palm on the mana board.”
What in the world is this? A non-existent feature in the game?
As I pressed my palm onto a stone slab like a cast board, my hand sunk in, leaving an imprint.
An intricate magic circle began to hover above the stone slab, followed by familiar symbols like ‘communication,’ ‘recording,’ and ‘analysis,’ forming a geometric pattern.
What kind of magic is this?
“This is unbelievable!”
“Why are you saying that, doctor?”
Is this perhaps a combat power measuring spell?
What if my combat power is actually 530,000?
“By this age, an unregistered stateless person?!”
It wasn’t a combat power assessment; it was an identity verification spell.
“No way?! Is there some sort of mix-up, doctor? Oknodie is with a butler and secretary, and she’s preparing for the academy entrance exam!”
At Jessie’s words, the doctor chuckled as he rose from his seat.
“Yeah, it’s more likely a malfunction in the relay device that’s causing the search not to work properly. Surely, there aren’t any parents who would leave a nearly ten-year-old kid unregistered.”
As the doctor laughed, he left the room, not long after serious-faced doctors began conversing outside the glass wall of the room.
A few nurses peeked in, glancing nervously before awkwardly waving their hands.
“Uh, Oknodie. Are you really not registered?”
“I don’t know!”
“Eh? You’ve never used the identity registering magic circle that provides free aptitude tests?”
“Not knowing means I just don’t know. No one ever taught me about this magic.”
“What about the butler and maid who came with you?”
“Yep.”
Jessie’s expression turned just as serious as the doctors outside.
[Ah, um. A brief announcement.]
[The guardian is searching for the child. A girl around 10 years old, with blonde hair and roughly 133cm tall, wearing a set of adventurer clothes and a ribbon headband.]
[If you see the child, please hand her over to the nearest staff member.]
Oh no.
“Rief must be looking for me. We should go back.”
“Don’t go.”
“Jessie?”
“My mom and dad said a family that doesn’t even register their child isn’t a normal household. Oknodie’s household isn’t normal.”
“Hmm.”
I was starting to think the same way.
But isn’t it fine?
They provide support and training.
A ‘Random Daddy’ event providing this much help is hard to find.
In my personal evaluation, he’s one of the top-notch daddies I’ve encountered throughout my playthroughs.
“Daddy isn’t bad. I’m thankful to him. And I also appreciate Jonnas and Rief for always helping out with the training.”
“Training? What kind of training are you doing without basic identity registration?”
“Duel training? Sprint intervals of repeating dashing and walking? Shooting arrows at squirrels tied to targets or bunnies in cages?”
Jessie’s face turned pale.
Her focus wavered as if she were looking at a child from an abusive household.
“We should run.”
“What?!”
“If we get caught, Oknodie will be in big trouble again.”
The fire of mission ignited in Jessie’s eyes.
