"YOU, you're the one who's being taking customers away from my shop!" The other person who was standing in the room challenged me in a very abrupt and unceremonious way. She was slightly shorter than me and was wearing a red and white dress which finished just below her knees in a frilled manner, she wore tanned leather boots which were visible blackened with soot in some places, however her most striking and unique feature was her short bubblegum pink hair which accompanied her vivid pink eye colour.
She moved around one of my display cabinets and stood directly in front of me with her hands held in fists on her hips. "You and your fancy ways of forging swords alongside the fact that you seem to have some form of black market trade line for rare and expensive materials is cutting down on my business. I've had a number of customers ask me about this shop and weather or not I sold items of the same tier and quality that you had been creating. And just now looking around your displays, none of them look any better than what I can easily create, yet they are supposedly better than my passionately forged and maintained weapons and armours."
As she spoke with a confident and stubborn attitude I flicked my eyes up towards Sky who was still sitting on the counter looking quite pleased with herself and enjoying the entertainment in front of her. With an annoyed sigh I decided to interrupt what could have been an on going rant to try and set things straight with this random pink haired girl. "Firstly, I do not have a black market trade system, or whatever you want to call it. I'm part of the front line and so I have easy access to rare items as and when they are found, without having to worry about fighting over monster spawn points for the drop. Secondly, to be honest I have no idea who the hell you actually are or what you mean by stealing business, I'm just doing my job. Thirdly, you could have come in here nicely and asked politely like a normal person would do so we could have a normal civilised conversation about it. And I seriously doubt you could forge a sword as good as any of my more recent swords, even if you had the best materials and equipment." I put that last comment in with a slight arrogant smile just to see what her reaction would be to my cockiness.
"Really now!" She exploded at my last comment. "If your so sure that you area a better blacksmith, not that there's much chance of that fact, why don't we have a little competition, its what I came here for anyway. You versus me, rules are simple, make your sword however you like, with whatever you want. Once they've been made we get some people to stick them through a number of tests, the one who passes the most tests win." She barrelled out this set of rules at such speed that if she had to have practised it a number of times before now. However before waiting for any response she turned her back to me and walked over to a set up armour which was standing at the side of the room. She yanked the right gauntlet from out of its place, turned back to me and chucked it so that it landed just in front of me on the floor with a heavy clunk.
"What stakes to you propose for this duel of sorts then." I asked very bluntly before accepting her medieval sign of a challenge.
"What are you willing to lose Woods, as there's no way that I'm going to lose this." She replied as bluntly as I had asked the question.
"The person who loses has to hand over their finest piece of armour and their finest sword, the winner can do whatever they wish with the items from there on and they will be named the better of the two blacksmiths." I set down the stakes after a few seconds of thinking what would be most humiliating for prideful blacksmiths such as this girl and very much like myself, handing over our best works of our art would be a crushing and devastating loss.
"Done." She didn't hesitate to accept the stakes that I had set down for this very impromptu duel of skill and sheer bloody determination. She stood there, still staring at me looking as if she wouldn't back down until I picked the gauntlet up from the wooden floor. At that she shook her head and folded her arms tightly, still staring me down as if she was trying to look through and into me to find any form of weakness of flaw, like a smith would inspect a blade for imperfections. "When and where do you want this to take place then? That and are you ever going to introduce yourself? As as far as I know you're just a random smith who doesn't like to have someone who is better than themselves." I asked very bluntly, trying to stay as indifferent as I could so that her probing stare came to nothing.
"I want it to happen tomorrow, noon tomorrow. Lets also have it at my blacksmith shop on the 48th floor, its on the outskirts of the main town which the floor portal is located in, it shouldn't be too hard to find or recognise, but if you do get lost, I'm a well known smith on the floor and so people should be able to easily point you in the right direction. If you don't turn up before 1 however, you forfeit, no buts, no complaining. If you forfeit you lose the wager and you have to give me the items no matter what sort of trouble stopped you from turning up. Got it?" She narrowed her eyes at the last comment, as if I wasn't paying attention to her or that I should be taking this much much more seriously than I actually was.
"Yer, got it." Was my very short and blunt answer to her demanding tone.
"Good." At that, without another word she walked back around the display cabinet, past me and straight out of the door.
After seeing her disappear through the glowing light of a teleport crystal I turned round to face Sky. She was still sitting on the wood counter with a smug look on her face directed straight at me. I instantly knew that she must have had some involvement in the meeting and that she wasn't just a simple innocent bystander, this thought was obviously conveyed with my less than impressed facial expression as she burst out into laughter. "I knew you had something to do with it." I said in a somewhat defeated way.
"Come on Steven, you need a distraction away from the front lines, we both know this fact. After what happened a couple of weeks ago you've literally been up on the front blasting your way through areas as if you were daring or wanting the game to find some inventive way to kill you. You need to move on and a distraction such as this will help you. I mean come on you manage to stay calm and level headed when you're making something in metal and I haven't seen you in here apart from making sure that nothing has been stolen." She came out with her opinion on the matter very openly, obviously not wanting to lie or hide what she thought.
"There are other ways of distracting someone." I said slightly annoyed but knowing that what she said was probably true and that there was no way out of this duel of sorts now.
"Yer, but this is the first one that presented itself. Now lets go home, you need to rest before your big battle tomorrow with Lisbeth." She said in a hurry before jumping off the counter and waiting for me at the door.
I took the gauntlet which I was still holding and locked it back in its proper place on the standing armour set when I realised something in what she had just said, "Wait, you know her name. Why am I the one doing the actual thing, but not knowing who she actually is or how she got into the shop, I mean come on I didn't know her name until you just slipped it."
"Oh stop complaining for once in your life and lets go home." She replied with a laugh and shake of her head. Seeing no point in even trying to pursue the subject with her now I just walked up to her, held her hand tightly, and opened the heavy wooden door to the cobbled path outside.