chapter 2

O(I)O(I)

While plebeians have to work until their shoulders are dislocated and they treat water as an elixir of God, a king could spend his days in bed. One king, King Yakime, had a severe case of bipolar disorder. He was so bad he would spend two days in bed straight-alone with no servants stepping inside.

Yakime was on the paunchy side, his pajamas/king's robes were tailored samite, red goatee with muttonchops, and his feet are comfy in his open-toed heavy-soled sandals he wears during bed. To the villagers dismay, they were all seeking an audience with the king but he—

"Focus. All I wanted to know is how I can buy anything when you don't accept yen."

Saitama didn't like people who talk too much and the food vendor he approached was a good example of who he couldn't stand.

Didn't take Saitama long to enter the white pavement of a city. The city smelled like fresh paint, the people didn't look much cleaner than the peasants from the rural village he just entered, and a lady just left following a ten year old looking boy with an axe in his hands. The woman was wearing a red maroon dress with a white apron, black shoes, orange hair in a braided ponytail, and hazel eyes with emerald irises. The boy was wearing black wolf pelt, had a knitted green and yellow had with bull horns protruding from both ends, gray eyes with amber irises, and he wielded an axe in both hands.

This city had a multitude of different bipedal creatures roaming around. He passed a furry hybrid or as their called in the comic books he reads "demi-human" carrying a large plank of wood with both hands. He had a silver metal collar, new and gripped tighter than a walnut cruncher while a man with a whip followed behind him. The demi-human seemed to be overexerting itself, on the verge of passing out, but Saitama's only thoughts were on his stomach.

He walked up to the vendor handing him the five hundred yen coin for a small green clementine with a strange sprout looking fruit. Thinking he purchased the fruit he reached for it, only to be slapped in the hand by the vendor.

"I don't accept this currency." He fiddled in his teal pants for a coin. Unlike the yen it was made out of orichalcum with the insignia of a man with an eyepatch, bristles on his chin, and flat messy hair. "Do you have any smik?"

"No. You need more for this fruit or something?"

"Ye does not understand—no one has seen this foreign coin before. It's useless to us."

Thus began the rambling of his king, lazy but fair and how all foreigners who seek occupation go to him for their grand introduction.

"Is that every job? What if I want to do a job where I aptly kill monsters?"

"Ehm?" He gasped. "You? But you look so...your not even wearing any...you don't carry a sword...Take a long walk up ahead and make a right, then walk North for two paths before taking a right on the third. You'll find a building full of people who might have what your looking for."

"Thanks. I'd tip you for the information...but I'm technically homeless right now."

Saitama followed his advice walking down the path. Along the way he saw a buxom purple haired woman in a bar wench getup surrounded by knights. When he reached the building itself he saw the whimsicalness that was color in this white brick city. It was two stories high, it's architectonic style was that of a tool shed with banners and many windows on the top floor, painted mostly blue on top and yellow on the first floor, and the front door was flanked by a banner of a man looking through binoculars in triangular position because he needed three cylinders.

The inside of the building had a parquetry floor and a blue parquet ceiling; in Layman's terms it was like walking into a rectangular prism.

In all the fantasy comics Saitama read the first floor always looked like a cafeteria and would have someone serving them mutton or ale, but this floor had rows and rows of men and woman with bandana's and itchy cotton shirts using typewriters and jars of ink toiling over stuff probably to do with the missions unless he walked into the wrong building.

"Welcome." A cheerful woman welcomed him. "I take it your a new adventurer hoping to join us?"

Saitama came face to face with the receptionist of this guild. Her hair was tawny brown while it was mostly covered by a white bandana. Her skin was completely clean other than a few specks of dirt on her cheeks, she was red eyed, and wearing a dress like a velvet would in his world only with a green sash around her neck going down her shoulders. She seemed bubbly but maybe that was just how all people treat customers with c.a.s.h.

"I am. Where is the...?"

She circled her finger over her left ear. She made a facsimile to a tourist to Japan who thought they knew Japanese but were just too hooked on the dialogue on an RPG. She quickly put her hands together and manifested a green orb that floated towards Saitama. When it reached him it circled around him like a pixie in those kids cartoons. It was circling him fast but not fast enough he couldn't see it moving in all directions, even when it touched the top of his bald head. Finally, it reached her.

"Terribly sorry, your language just wasn't what I'm used to. Luckily the Speech Sphere helped me pick up your bilinguals in no time." She said in a perky way.

"You were speaking my language thirty seconds ago." he retorted.

She blinked, musing at him like he was a pretty little fox, but that was just her gingerly trying to tell him he was wrong.

"No I wasn't. Anyways, we should start the three feats of an adventurer test: Courage, Strength, and Magic.

While Saitama was being lead down the stairs leading to the basement in this bizarre guild, he wondered how the receptionist couldn't understand him yet the villagers, the knights, and the vendor could understand him perfectly fine. It would be sexiest to say she was dumb, but maybe the people before her were just smarter than her.

The first test was picking a weapon; range or melee. The objective was to try beheading a straw head with a sword where he only gets five swings or shoot between the cobblestone eyes in a different strawman where he only gets three shots. Saitama didn't pick any of them, he just punched the strawman.

"That's not how the test is suppose to be-"

She was interrupted seeing the strawman burst into tiny strands of straw while the other strawmen met the same fate. This was such a spectacular event it made her gawk, but she composed herself.

"Very good. Now I take you to the Courage test."

She led Saitama to a wall, no doorknob not even any lines etched in to push the door open. However, she disappeared from the room just by walking into the rock wall, ergo, the wall must be a magic door. Saitama stepped through into a field with a dark sky without any stars, a hedge maze, and a weapons rack with swords and arrows.

Wouldn't he know it the secretary was beside the rack about to explain things to him.

"For this test you must go through this maze. No matter which path you turn it will lead you through the maze, but be warned: It's not just the dark sky that will be difficult for you. There are things lurking in there strong and bloodthirsty. But no matter which horrific beast you met you must face it head on...just know that if you want to turn around and flee you can, but this maze has no backtrail. You ready?"

"Sure, just walk forward like those haunted house rides in amusement parks." Saitama said dryly.

And so he entered the maze. At first it just seemed like a long narrow path to tread with only two paths to turn in the maze, until he kept veering to the right path and walked into a long horizontal path with eight vertical paths to walk through. Without taking any time to think about them he walked down the second path.

The air down this path was breezy like walking through the park at night when he ran out of ramen or noodles. Most of those times some monster would jump out saving he was dead: a relish creature made into a hulky thing, a monster that was a man obsessed with the lore of mythology that he became a basilisk, and a sentient engine.

This time he walked until he came face-to-face with a six armed nine feet tall greenish monster with a hunched over body, an oval shaped head with six ghostly white eyes on it aligned with four beady ones and two bigger ones positioned three on the left and three on the right in a vertical line; the big ones in the middle, and twelve eyes staring at him.

"Hey." He said. "I take it I took a wrong turn?"

The creature grinned relishing the ignorance of this "fresh meat".

"ON THE CONTRARY! IT WAS A GOOD TURN FOR I, HECATONCHEIRES, WILL ENJOY DEVOURING YOU FINGER BY FINGER, TWO IN FOUR ARMS AND ONE IN TWO SMALLER ONES, BEFORE I SUCK YOUR SKIN OFF FROM YOUR FACE!"

He heckled Saitama something both scary and weird. With no other choice he waited for those six spindly arms to reach out for him, and then he punched him without even thinking which spot to hit, turned out to be behind his head where the twelve eyes were.

Like most punches it completely punctured his opponent and caused nothing to be left but the visage of what happens when you eat a bagel. Despite being dead the creature was still standing, so Saitama brushed him aside and continue trekking down the narrow path.

Saitama walked down the long narrow path until he reached the end, a wooden gate that looked like the shrine's in City D awaiting him upon his exit. He walked through the gate, caught up with the receptionist holding an orb in her hands. The moment he appeared she opened her eyes, and like someone playing the piano who was so enthralled with music she awakened to look startled.

"Y-You defeated our strongest monster with one punch?" She asked, a question she was too mystified to see it as rhetorical.

He shrugged his shoulders. "He didn't scare me and he wouldn't let me through."

She couldn't tell if he was joking or not. She shuddered to think what would happen if he joined Niaz Aaol Gown's side. Taking a deep breath, massaging her head and more importantly her mind, she walked the way to the dark path.

"Right this way please. It's time for your final test, Magic."

Saitama followed her through the path with no direction since the duskiness of it was hard to see but somehow found himself in a room with a fortune teller's orb on a pedestal of mahogany. All around him were all kind of witches' trinkets: cauldron, potions, black books, and even cats...stuffed...mostly white with brown and black over pure black fur. How he keeps finding himself in these strange places boggled Saitama's limited intelligence.

"Have a seat, please."

Saitama didn't know if this was suppose to be for a test or just she wanted to give him a makeover. Speaking of, she had on a black witch hat with a black kitten purring on her shoulder. The chair was red and made of mahogany like the pedestal. He sauntered up to the chair and sat down, then stared at the ceiling reflecting on how easy the tests were and how this one would be just as easy.

Then, he felt something warm like a campfire on his back. He wiggled his toes hoping this would be over soon and he could start the job at a higher level than when he started the Hero Association, but something went wrong, she was murmuring to her cat.

"This can't be...how can someone who is so strong not even have fifty MP. I'll try searching deeper." The heat on Saitama's back intensified, felt like he was having a scalding hot shower, but when he wiggled his ten toes the pain just resided. To his dismay, she had some unsettling news. "You don't have any MP inside of you. That means...you've failed this test."