“So so, one hero appeared and acted tough…?”, the guy said with a laughter escaping right after, throwing Rineri on his side to the ground, coming right up with a kick against his stomach as the others left the girl be and looked over to Rin—Who was now on the edge of puking or screaming in pain—and joined in further with the fun.

Rineri rolled sideways, looking to everyone around as he did, with most of them even stepping back now. He realized a simple fact, he wouldn’t need to expect a single hand of help—with these cowards—right now. Getting up on his knees, two from the group slowly approached him while giving on various insults, but from the still lingering pain his ears didn’t really pick those up.

“Cowards, all of you are worth less than the dirt on my shoes…”, Rineri said to himself in silence, with a soft change of shade in his eyes, they gained a slightly darker tint. Standing back up—fully on his feet—he stared directly into one of their eyes, making his right hand into a fist.

The seemingly oldest of the group stepped forward, winding up a straight punch as they went for Rineri. The other three took their steps back to the girl—which had attempted to flee the scene—and brought her closer to see her hero fall. But Rineri wasn’t planning to go down that easily—

Swipe! The bear’s claws swung right by the now de-accelerating Shii.

“That’s an issue”, he thought with a highly surprised expression before hopping back in order to avoid another strike from the angry bear. The bear aggressively charged forward in an attempt to take out Shii for good.

“That’s enough playing around”, Shii told himself and lunged forward towards the attacking bear.

[ Waterblade ]

Shii activated a spell, causing a sharp blade of water to appear on his left forearm. Using his left arm for defense, Shii swung back his arm and cut through the claws and even the very arm of the bear.

He accelerated himself even further forward and rocketed his fist towards the forehead of the bear.

[ Waterblade ]

Right before impact, he used the waterblade to form a sharp projectile on his fist that left the bear with no time to respond defensively. The blade impaled the forehead of the bear and delivered a deathly blow.

Shii caught his breath and finally began to behead the bear after a brief moment of rest, feeling slightly accomplished.

Afterwards Shii then returned to the entertainment district, now having his hands covered in blood, and entered the tavern to prove a point.

—standing straight in front of the incoming punch, Rineri’s eyes shown a slight glimmer before a sudden release of static force, using the palm of his hand to apply a shock effect to the other’s arm before the punch arrived, due this the muscles retract and make their running function either stop or have no real effect due to slowing down. 

As Rineri now had a chance to dodge, he took it to dash forward to the three others. Knowing he couldn’t use a martial arts trick here, he depended on his strategic thinking. Using various skills together, he formed his signature effect..

[ Rune Discharge ]

From his fingertips a purple like static array of bolts connected to any surface nearby, creating an acceleration which allowed Rineri to combine that with his self taught sleight of hand. He learned various tricks that a magician would claim to never use, like cards in the sleeve and more, but instead with daggers, smoke bombs or like now—needles—as he uses the accelerated motion to place needles on various pressure points of the targets body, making the use of muscles to them, very painful.

The crowd around had already made space, their fear for the sudden outbreak of a fight allowed Rineri space for the next part in his plan. He signaled the girl—still poorly dressed and in a catastrophic state—to make her escape out of the area, she forced herself out of the partly paralysed guy's hands, making the run for it. Rineri however forgot about the first member, which as soon as Rineri took off to flee, swiped the left leg right from under him, making Rineri fall face flat down.

With the situation in an even worse state than before, he was forced to think more recklessly, having failed his first objective, he made coming out here alive his new one. Holding another set of needles, he creates a static energy current on them with a magnetic value. Throwing them in the air as he stood up, followed up immediately by throwing metal pellets to the attacker’s face, making the needles home straight in. 

“Free surgery for you, back off or else..”, Rineri exclaimed—not really knowing how to win further—as his inventory of needles was close to being empty already. He didn’t really expect a fight, making him only take a minimum. 

“Urgh”, One of them said, as they used their arm to catch both the pellets as the needles, leaving a small grunt of pain before pulling each one out. Grouping up as four again, they slowly started to approach Rineri, not having the bullying expression, but a murderous animosity…

Until suddenly it came to him, what he had learned the very first time he used his magic. Static energy has a conducting effect on metal, which is how his pellet x needle trick worked. But what if he reverts that effect to make all the metal objects behind the attackers come towards him, striking his enemies while doing so.

[ Static conduction, Reversion ]

Eventually, Rineri’s pool of energy dropped low, his vision slowly started to blur out as sparks of static energy uncontrollably spiked off his body at  various places, before suddenly the metal pellets, needles—but also metal cups and the other—started to come flying in their direction. But not only that, the building closeby had a sign hung up, placed there with various metal bolts, which were now slowly being unscrewed.

The metal pellets and needles didn’t really do much, as they reached Rineri and gave him a kick to fly off with, rolling a couple times before his face was clear to be seen again, already covered in the tears of pain. He was at the edge of giving up, right as the sign above them gave a squeaking sound. It came loose, falling between the group and Rineri, creating a moment of confusion and disorientation to them, which allowed him to force himself back up and run off in a nearby alley—

“Ah! What is this?!” The bartender exclaimed as Shii placed the stinking bag containing the dead bear’s head on the counter.

“You told me to bring the head of a bear, so I did. You can tell by the blood that I did in fact kill it”, Shii responded and looked into the surprised bartender’s eyes.

However, his expressionless face didn’t last for long as he was unexpectedly delivered a punch by the bartender,

“I hate it when stupid humans like you dirty my property. Not only that, you don’t even know when to get lost! Tell me, who the hell wants to see a stinking animal head in a tavern?!” She scolded him before kicking him in the diaphragm, causing him to become startled and fall onto the floor.

Two more people arrived at the scene—seeming as employees of the same tavern—and stared at Shii with animosity. Shii, having realized first hand that racism exists even in the rich places, quickly stood up and assumed a defensive stance.

“I made a grave error”, he told himself in his thoughts. “I can’t use my skills, they will get an excuse to prosecute me for violence and I might even kill them by accident!” He remembered and panicked even further now with his limited options.

The bartender along with the two elves are a match that physically overpowered Shii but his technique and some experience kept him on equal footing with the attackers. They exchanged blows while Shii used [Air Acceleration] in smaller quantities to smoothly dodge various attacks.

However, that didn’t fare for long as a sudden shockwave of intense magical energy hit Shii. His heart sank and movements froze due to his modestly above-average senses becoming overwhelmed. That same pause removed all of his advantage in the battle as he was caught up in multiple blows and struck to the ground, unable to fight back.

People watched with varying expressions as Shii was kicked and beaten up. He watched the faces of the people from the ground as if they were the audiences taking the enjoyment of a tragic play. His mind remained numb from confusion and nervousness.

It wasn’t uncommon knowledge that there had been long term conflicts between elves and humans. The elves even earned the nicknames of being arrogant and prideful beings at times. Shii had well overlooked this, or at least had put it on the back of his mind, which led him to such a fate now.

“S-stop…please”, he managed to get a few words out but received nothing but more violence as an answer. “I have to use magic, there’s no other choice”, he concluded and looked towards the exit of the tavern.

[Illusionary Light], he shot a shard of light into the attackers’ field of view, stagnating them for a brief moment as he unleashed a second skill,

[Air Acceleration], with full energy put into it, he thrusted forward and blasted through the doors of the tavern in under two seconds, before collapsing on the ground from sheer exhaustion a few meters ahead.

—in a dark alley, our young boy Rineri had lost his consciousness from both fatigue of overusing skills, with the factor of the overwhelming pain of being beaten up by grown up douchebags. By his side was a small figure, around the same height as Rineri himself, dressed in simple and shredded cloth—indeed, it was the girl from before—as her hand rested on Rineri’s head. 

“No elf, elf no elf?”, the girl spoke, being unable to really comprehend the language due the education she had was in a whole other field, something a bit outside the box, or rather inside. Dragging to a wall, she did her best to get him over her shoulder.

With that, a slight bit of Rineri’s consciousness responded, taking support of her shoulder before directing towards the fence he came from before, right when he should’ve turned back to avoid this mess. Together they would finally reach the fence, Rineri being unable to use any form of skills, had to rely on whatever she could do… As his eyes started to blur out again, leaving his life in the hands of an illiterate stranger.

She had the alignment to earth and air, being able to make a platform and use a levitation effect, mainly used for holding certain positions, but now it came in handy dandy to bring Rineri over the game, entering the first room she saw with an open window, luckily being that of Rineri.

Shii slowly made his way back towards the academy, bruised up and bleeding. However, his heart sank for a brief moment right as someone grabbed the back of his robe and lifted him up in place.

“!!! I’m in trouble!!!” , he panicked extremely hard and quickly tried to think of a skill to use—

“Kid, you should be more careful”, a deep voice from behind him spoke. “You can’t just walk into another race’s territory and drop a carcass. It’s legit asking for a beatin’”

“I…I realized…” Shii replied slowly

“Now, if you’re looking for work, sign up as an adventurer. Adventurers don’t have the time to care about race. They just want money and skill”, the man said and dropped Shii. He threw a certain metallic token in his direction that Shii barely managed to catch.

“Token of…referral? Withered Rose?” Shii questioned in confusion after reading out the contents aloud.

“Withered Rose is the best guild in this region. Token of referral is a special thing you give them. Just bring this token to them and register, they will handle the rest”, the figure told him and disappeared in the blink of an eye…

“Wow… An assassin-class adventurer? Way out of my league…” Shii slowly said and made his way back into his dorm after a hectic day…

The two of them had collapsed as the clock ticked on in late hours while the night watch hadn’t suspected a thing.