Isekai Speedrun

I forgot to mention that I named our new horse Crazy Horse after the iconic Lakota chief – new continent, new horse-naming scheme. All rites reversed. I will name our next horse Michael Horse.

Anyway, agricultural slavery. Serf peasants working on vast wheat fields from child to old age, never allowed to leave their place of birth. A small step up from dungeon mine slaves, but at least these farmers could mingle with traveling merchants and other visitors in their slave towns, trading their meager resources to krúricks or other resources.

Majority of the people passing by on the minor roads were elders and kids, as expected. Young men often grasped to their one and only opportunity to leave their slave farms by joining Caliph's army, and young women often followed or were forced to follow.

Small fishing towns on the coast, vast slave farms immediately outside town gates.

The positive thing was the weather. The constant mass of gray clouds hovering over this world had more cracks over Mu Continent. The temperatures were relatively warmer, and instead of constant fall season or gray winter season, they had two seasons: sunny summer season and rainy fall season. We were near the end of the summer season.

After several ramshackle slave villages, we stopped at a larger town called Unity Town. Our Letter of Trade was checked at the gate and we were allowed in.

Unity Town was the central market metropolis for all the surrounding slave villages; a trading hub at the center of minor roads connecting to the coastal highway. The atmosphere reminded me of Edo period post station towns – an elongated town snaking in a valley surrounded by forested hills, and a long and narrow main street flanked by two-story shops, craft workshops, inns, taverns, brothels, bathhouses and breweries.

The place wasn't originally called Unity Town, by the way. Caliph Tze renamed it from Genkai Town after annihilating the Genkai clan that owned the town before his rule. Now everyone paid protection money to Caliph's officials instead of the small syndicate clan.

Unity Town was right at the edge of my game knowledge, but it was good to see familiar scenery again. When you played Mu Continent missions for the first time, you stopped at Unity to collect info about stuff like Shadow Gods gang, or rumors about the location of Bone Dune Station. But when you knew that stuff already, info wasn't necessary anymore and Unity Town could be skipped.

There wasn't any particularly interesting items to collect or characters to meet, but there was one thing in Unity Town I was looking forward to: the hot spring bathhouse. A volcanic hot bath was why I insisted that we spend a night here, even though we could have continued traveling forward until sundown.

I sat inside the coach with Dancer and Kimono while Crys took care of driving. I wasn't too confident about my driving skills inside a busy town.

Every passerby looked poor and famished. It was the same in the game too, but the game had a layer of censorship and whitewashing required by law that dampened the morbid realism to acceptable levels. I felt a twinge of guilt from the fact that we could have probably fed every hungry child in the town with the money and assets we had in our coach.

The women and children weren't here shopping for souvenirs or toys. They were pulling handcarts with their skinny arms and bringing in harvest for Caliph's officials, noble purveyors and wealthy merchants.

I was reminded of a documentary I watched once. It was about some East Asian factory where teenage girls were forced to work sixteen hours a day, six days a week, and use hazardous chemicals to build toys and games for western markets. The girls tried to support their poor families with a pay of half a dollar a day and ruined their health in the process. All that just because some kids in USA or Europe wanted to play a miniature board game once or twice before throwing it into some storage unit to collect re-sale value aka collect dust.

They didn't call it slavery because it wasn't technically slavery, but yes, it was pretty much slavery.

“Gary, you look like you're going to cry again.” (Dancer)

“What? No... It just breaks my heart to see so many starving ki– ooh?”

Call me halfhearted hypocrite, but my eyes wandered over the starving kids and stopped on a merchant wagon parked on a street corner because I saw an interesting article on sale.

“Stop the presses and hold your horses! Phileas, pull over!”

There was a black jacket hanging on the side of the wagon that looked exactly like the jacket Rainwoman had in the anime: old European-style cavalry uniform with high collars and two rows of black buttons. High-level skin.

“What is it?” (Crys)

“We should buy that for Rainwoman. That jacket over there. She wears one like that in the future. We already have the right guns for her, let's get her a trendy jacket as a gift as well.”

“It is fine. Go.” (Crys)

“Thanks. I'll be taking cash out from our strongbox. Kimono, Dancer, witness me.”

I opened the strongbox and took out a hefty amount of silver krúricks from our travel funds. Most of this money was from Linsapper's tavern.

“You don't want to spoil women too much, Gary. If you give many gifts, they expect more gifts.” (Dancer)

“Listen to this experienced ladies man! Do you want gifts, Mary Sue?”

“...” (Kimono)

“Silence means no? Or yes? Or does it mean you want it to be a surprise? Oh, you're a sneaky girl, Mary.”

“Take the money and disappear.” (Kimono)

“Aigoo, are you some evil mother-in-law in a Korean drama now?”

I left the coach in high spirits and went to talk with the merchant watching over the wagon. He was holding a spear, put my warm and friendly smile surely put him on ease.

After I expressed my interest in buying the jacket, the merchant was all smiles and shortly told me his whole life story. He was a peddler from the east coast and his wife was a skilled seamstress. The jacket was something his wife had modified from an old military uniform worn by Gray Caliph's mounted knights. So Rainwoman liked to wear the uniform jacket of Tze's predecessors troops? Interesting piece of trivia.

I bought the jacket without haggling.

When I turned around, I was surprised to see Kimono standing behind me. She was surely annoyed, but kept her expression neutral.

“What, did you want to buy something yourself, Mary?”

I couldn't see our horse coach on the main street anymore. Oh noes, they left us here! A sudden betrayal!

“Where did Phileas and Default go?”

“They will book a room from a merchant inn we passed on the way. Brother ordered me to look after you and bring you there after you're done.”

“Oh, we're not lodging in the hot spring inn? Well, we do want to keep a low profile, but... Okay, thank you for that. Is the setting now that you're a courtesan doing shopping and I'm your bodyguard?”

“Whatever.” (Kimono)

“You want to do some shopping, Mary-chan?”

“No. We will return immediately.” (Kimono)

Kimono turned and walked away with elegant, hurried steps. I rolled the jacket around my arm and jogged after her like a good bodyguard should. I tried to look menacing when passers-by stopped to look at her.

...I wonder if Crys was really trying to push her sister on me? Nah, can't be.

Kimono turned into an alley and stopped for a moment. Something was clearly wrong.

“What's going on?”

“Street rats. They saw you flaunting your money openly.” (Kimono)

“Oh... crap.”

What a blunder. I triggered an encounter. Gangslang probably won't help here because the bandits in Mu territories are not part of any war-gang network.

After another fast alleyway turn, I spotted the street rats too – three, no, four young rats following us through parallel alleys. They were trying to surround us and drive us into a corner.

I didn't know the layout of these streets and alleys, so I had to trust in Kimono's sense of direction.

After a few sudden turns, we came to a dead end.

“Crap, we need to–”

“Keep your back to the wall.” (Kimono)

Four bandits came out. Three of them held knives, one held something that looked like a homemade handgun with two barrels pointed straight at me. Young, lanky men wearing brown leather shirts and brown leather pants.

These were the kind of guys that became violent criminals when they were not accepted into army.

I should have kept my revolver under the jacket like a mafia hitman. Let's try bluffing at least.

“What seems to be the problem, officers? We were on our way to have a powwow about Shadow Gods gang with our local contact–”

“Put your hands up and throw over all your money, or you'll see the blood of this bitch!” (bandit)

“Go cry to your retarded whore mothers, eunuchs!” (Kimono)

“What did you just say, bitch?!” (bandit)

Kimono's taunt completely clashed with my peace talks. Safe strats went out of the window.

Now, the common sense of a real-life knife fight was encapsulated in the old saying: the winner dies in the ambulance. Kimono destroyed that real-life common sense.

The first bandit lost his cool from the first provocation and attacked Kimono like a raging bull. For a moment it seemed like Kimono turned sideways and got stabbed in the chest, but this turned out to be deliberate ploy.

The bandit screamed and pulled his hand away, but his thin arm was already bleeding from multiple cuts. Kimono had somehow locked the bandits knife between pieces of her fake kimono and slashed his right arm several times with her own blades.

The bandit couldn't hold his knife anymore, so Kimono just stabbed him between the ribs before moving on to the rest of the group.

“Waxen bitch!” (bandit)

The bandit holding a firearm dropped the gun and pulled out a knife as well – wait, the gun was just a prop? Kimono probably saw immediately that it wasn't a functional gun and moved accordingly.

She moved into melee like a wildcat attacking a group of dogs. She quickly stabbed and slashed all of them with her claw-shaped karambits, aiming for wrists, thighs, groins, and armpits.

In a few seconds, all four bandits were writhing and bleeding profusely.

Kimono wasn't an overpowered character in the same way Rainwoman or the twins were overpowered, but she was still a main character with special skills. Four small-town bandits were an easy prey to a deviant-blood girl who grew up killing Suleiman's soldiers in a war zone.

After killing the bandits, she collected their weapons. The fake firearm went into my bag (Crys probably wanted to examine it) and the knives disappeared under her fake kimono. I was reminded about the backstory rationale given to her expertise in knives: she didn't want to burden her brother by constantly asking for more ammo. Short blades were the cheapest disposable weapons you could collect from every dead soldier.

I looked around and saw an old woman smoking a pipe, looking down on us from a second-floor window.

“Sorry about the mess, auntie!”

The old woman just stared at me without saying anything. She didn't seem particularly afraid or surprised about the bloodbath she had just witnessed. Was she senile?

“Move. There's more of them.” (Kimono)

“There's more? Ouch, I'm moving, I'm moving...!”

My bodyguard act wasn't very convincing when she pushed me around like a ragdoll.

Kimono zigzagged the alleyways like a pro and left her obsessive local fans behind. I had just enough stamina to stay in her pace.

“Impro or strat?”

“What?” (Kimono)

“Did you improvise that eunuch line or did you plan it beforehand?”

Kimono didn't answer. I guess it was an improvised line.

---

When we finally reached the small merchant inn called Magic Insect and entered our room for the night, I was drenched in sweat and panted like a fat guy in a treadmill.

Crys and Dancer were cleaning their guns. I thought I saw a trace of a smile on Crys' face when he saw us, but he didn't say anything.

“What's with that look, Gary? Did you get passionate together?” (Dancer)

“Yeah, too much passion – ouch!”

“Brother, this fool was followed by a group of street rats. I killed four of them on an alley, but there were more following them from further away, either part of the same group or a different group of vultures. I left them circling the carcasses, but we were seen by locals.” (Kimono)

“I see. We will leave the town immediately.” (Crys)

Oh no... Our hot spring bath got canceled because of me. We have to leave the town and spend a night at the next caravanserai.

“I'm sorry, everyone, I got careless because of a jacket.”

“Did you get the jacket?” (Dancer)

“Yeah, got it.”

When I placed the jacket on my bed, I saw that some of the stitching on the seams was already unraveling.

...Damn it. Should have guessed.

Either they tricked me deliberately, or the standard quality here was so much lower than in the real world that they really thought this cheap knockoff jacket sewed with paper yarn (or whatever yarn was available for poor peons) was a high quality product worth dozens of krúricks.

No warranties, no refunds. I need to learn how to check the quality of items myself instead of trusting manufacturers.

Kimono turned her head away and covered her mouth. She was straight up laughing at me.

“Rainwoman will certainly treasure your gift...” (Kimono)

“Thanks a lot for adding insult to injury.”

When we left the town, I gave the jacket to a beggar.

I'll post a negative review about that merchant couple to the next public bulletin I see.

So, in conclusion, can I recommend the filler areas of southwestern Mu? Nope. Visited the area with my friends, food was plain, atmosphere was uncomfortable, slavery was depressing, and there were far too many bandits and con artists.

Not recommended. One star out of five. Would not visit again.