"I have decided!" Esdeath declared finally as she looked up at Kars, who stood in front of her with smugness on her face, while everyone in the training ground turned their attention toward the tribal girl with curiosity.
"What did you decide on, brat?" Kars looked down at the smaller girl with his brow raised up. He hoped it was not something like "I'll be your wife, lol!" or something worse...
People could call him a lustful beast all they wanted, but Kars was not going to let it slide if someone called him a PDF.
"If you duel with me and win, I'll be your slave just like the people you kept all over your domain!" Esdeath made her reasonable offer after thinking hard for two minutes.
"Hmm? That's fair." And Kars immediately nodded his head with a satisfied expression since it was not something outrageous. "I accept your wager, girl!"
"That's good!" Esdeath smiled like she didn't just sell herself off.
"Is this okay...?" Juri, who was witnessing the dubious scene, mumbled quietly while questioning their sanity in her mind. She didn't understand how that girl could even offer herself to be Kars' slave...
"Oh my, you aimed quite small, didn't you, girl?" Elsa, on the other hand, felt disappointed that Esdeath chose such a boring wager. If she were in the Esdeath position, she would have chosen to be Kars' sex slave or something.
"W-What? But he already accepted..." Esdeath felt confused by the disapproving tone of the woman behind her while her cheeks were being played with by Elsa.
The assassin had taken a liking to the challenger girl, it seemed.
"Mmh? Being cucked, I am?" Kruri, who was behind Elsa, said as she saw her mommy being chummy with another girl, then she made a pouty face and sent a jealous gaze at the back of the blue-haired girl's head.
"Alright, brat, let's go into the ring." Kars smirked and jerked his chin back toward the sandpit before he walked there. He would see how good the girl was first before he would then put her in her place later.
If she impressed him enough, he wouldn't mind keeping her along with the other brats.
As Kars and Esdeath now stood facing each other in the sandpit with the other girls watching them from outside, Kars chose to use a wooden staff from the rack filled with training weapons this time while he spun it like helicopter blades in his hand.
"What weapon do you want to use, Brat?" He asked, stopping spinning the staff before he pointed the tip of the stick at the tribal girl.
"I'll use this." Esdeath grinned and raised her hand above her head before an ice dagger suddenly generated out of thin air in her palm. Then she grabbed the dagger and entered a fighting stance with the face of a seasoned predator.
"Ice magic, huh?" Kars hummed and entered a stance that put his staff horizontally in front of his chest. "Come, show me what you're capable of."
"Sure!" The girl cried out as she conjured up another ice dagger in the air while she suddenly threw the one in her hand at Kars' face.
Kars saw the dagger coming to his face and casually slapped it away with his staff, then he had to dodge the tribal girl who lunged at him by a hair's breadth, her dagger cutting through empty air as her blue eyes locked onto him.
Kars noted that Esdeath's speed was a lot faster than a normal girl's, showing her impressive physique prowess. Now Kars would have to use 2% of his power.
"Nice try, Brat!" Then with a swift movement of his hands, Kars thrust the tip of his staff at the girl's neck like a spear and made her immediately jerk her body to the side to dodge the attack.
Esdeath then used the momentum to make some distance with her fur boots sliding across the sand. Then in a quick motion, she slammed her palm onto the ground before a jagged pillar of frost erupted from the ground in front of her. It thrust toward Kars fast with its jagged tip.
As the pillar of ice was coming, Kars didn't show any surprise, and with a casual, explosive burst of strength from his legs, he leaped high upward above the pillar. Next, he twisted his body in mid-air with the wooden staff whistling as it made a full rotation and descended toward Esdeath's head.
Esdeath's eyes widened in a thrill as she didn't scramble backward, and instead, she drove her shoulder into the sand and launched herself out of the trajectory of Kars' staff that impact on where she was previously, kicking up a cloud of sand.
Kars watched as the tribal girl rolled over the sand and quickly got up on her feet before she swept her arm in a wide arc, conjuring up three sharp icicles in the air that she launched directly at him.
"Heh..." Kars felt the rush of cold air against his skin and immediately pulled out the staff from the sand as he spun it in his hand to perform a rotation shield to deal with the attack.
The fast-spinning staff in Kars' hand then met with the incoming icicles and shattered them into glittering shards with minimal effort as he reinforced the wooden stick with magic.
As the attack was neutralized, Kars stopped rotating his staff and stood still for a moment, his amber eyes locked on to the small frame of his opponent with interest. This girl possessed quite a mastery over her magic, and he wondered how far she could take it if he trained and buffed her with extra souls.
"Do you know only how to throw things at people, girl?" Kars remarked, his voice sounding quite provocative to Esdeath as he put the wooden staff on his shoulders and raised his chin to give off an arrogant look. "If so, then you wouldn't be able to fight back when I actually push you, you know?"
"Is that so?" Esdeath replied with a feral grin, then in a sudden explosion of movement, she vanished from her spot, only to reappear a moment later directly above him. She had created a momentary platform of ice in the air, and from that height, she dove downward, her ice dagger transformed into a long, shimmering spear.
"Really?" Kars didn't move until the ice spear was inches from him, then he moved as the ice spear dropped past his nose as he dodged Esdeath's attack with just a step backward.
And before Esdeath could recover from her dive, Kars' hand shot out, gripping the shaft of the spear and wrenching it aside violently, throwing the girl into the sand.
"Gah...!" The impact was so sudden that Esdeath grunted in surprise while she bounced on the sandy ground before she rolled up and recovered back to her feet, but she was met with a wooden tip of Kars' staff poking firmly against her forehead.
"Ah...?" Esdeath uttered in surprise as she took a step back and held her forehead while looking absentmindedly at the man who just defeated her so casually. The lost was so anti-cinematic that her mind couldn't quite catch up yet.
"You're dead," Kars, who had somehow gotten close to the tribal girl and poked her head with a long stick again, said as he pulled back the staff and smirked at her. "Now you are mine."
"Muu... fine..." Esdeath pouted cutely as she reluctantly nodded her head, accepting her defeat like a warrior. She didn't really mind losing, but she felt a bit reluctant being Kars' legal slave, as she now can't just go wherever she pleases anymore.
"Hehe, he just said, 'Now you are mine,' how deviously romantic..." Kruri on the side whispered to Juri as they gossiped and pointed at the man, who claimed he was not a pedophile but ended up saying a dubious thing to an underage girl.
"He said he is not interested in little girls, but he sure loves grooming them..." Juri slandered him next while hugging her own body in exaggerated disgust.
"..." Kars glanced at the two annoying brats and wondered if he should double their training tomorrow.
"Congratulations, you managed to impress the boss with your skill." Elsa walked in the sandpit as she patted Esdeath's head with a gentle smile. "I'm looking forward to seeing you around here, girl."
"Mmh? This can't be tolerated..." Kruri spotted her mommy being chummy with Esdeath again and felt her jealousy spike, so she went to them and inserted herself in between them. "You already have me, Mommy..."
"Oh my, is my daughter feeling left out?" Elsa giggled at the jealous dupe girl who hugged her tight and not-so-subtly tried to push her away from Esdeath. The assassin felt amused and hugged the girl back to pacify her.
"Alright, settle down! We're done here, so let's go back." Kars said with a huff before he placed his hand on Esdeath's shoulder. "You come too. I'll give you a room in my mansion so you can start living and working there from now on."
"I understand..." Esdeath nodded her head dejectedly before all of them moved out of the training ground to the mansion while talking with each other.
Now these girls needed a bath before they could have breakfast, and Kars needed to introduce the tribal girl to Siesta, who badly needed a helping hand...
÷×÷×÷×÷×÷
In the dimly lit room somewhere in the outer district of Jinkai City, a group of people were having a secret meeting as they gathered around a round table and faced each other with a tense atmosphere.
"Damn that fucker, Kars and his minions!" A wide-bodied man with a bald head and dressed in an ostentatious purple robe swore before he drank a wine straight from a bottle.
"My businesses were being raided left and right!" He grumbled after he gulped down the wine while the others stayed silent, but they also experienced something similar to the bald man.
"What did the councilors say?" A tall and thin-built man with long black hair in a classy navy blue robe asked as he leaned forward with his arms placed on the table.
"They don't give a fuck about us anymore, and all attempts to contact them were ignored." Another man on the table, an old man in leather armor, scowled while he answered.
"Those son of a bitch!" The bald man gritted his teeth and threw the wine bottle to the ground with the glass bottle shattered and wet the floorboards with red liquid.
"They always demand a cut, but when trouble came, they immediately cut us off to fend for ourselves!" He continued to rage while the other made a thoughtful expression.
"I'll leave Jinkai." Suddenly a mature feminine voice sounded in the dimly lit room and silenced all of the men in the room.
They all turned to see a pale-skinned woman with long blonde hair tied in a ponytail, blue eyes that had a mole under her left eye, and large scars around her body and on the right side of her face.
She wore a wine-colored skirt suit with black pantyhose and matched-color high heels. Her nails were long and painted pink, and she also had pink lipstick on her lips.
"The situation here is too volatile for me to conduct my business here any longer." She elaborated before she stood up as the other men clicked their tongues while they grumbled to themselves about how cowardly or hasty she was, but the woman didn't care about them.
"If you have some brains in your skulls, you better leave while you still can." She warned as she walked away from the table before one of her subordinates offered her a cigar and lit it for her. She accepted it, and then with four of her men, she left the room with a smoke of cigar trailing behind her.
When she was outside in the street in the outer district, the woman stepped inside the carriage that was waiting for her.
"Kevin, go to the Silver Bird residence." She called out to the driver before she relaxed against the plush velvet seat inside the cabin.
"We are going to pay our way out, boss?" The voice of the driver came back from the outside and made the woman chuckle.
"We do have to... if we don't want to disappear in the middle of fucking nowhere." The woman hummed as the carriage started rolling forward; their destination was the house of the certain greedy bird of Jinkai that got morbidly fat with money this year...