Unwillingly Summoned: Chapter 17 – Discerning Eye

“Well, that was awful,” griped James as soon as they were out of the guild.

Sig gave him a sympathetic look and said, “I’d like to say it could have gone better, but I’m struggling to imagine how that might have happened. At least, short of you being someone else entirely.”

“Is the boring stuff over?” asked Seiran, appearing out of nowhere right next to James.

He would maintain for the rest of his life that while he might have jumped a little at that moment, he in no way shrieked in surprise. Once the Seiran, Sig, and Chrosan got the laughter out of their system, the mage answered the question.

“Yes, the boring part is over. Although, it was a bit more entertaining than usual this time.”

“It was? How so?” asked Seiran.

She buried her face in her hands as Chrosan gave a pretty faithful retelling of events.

Seiran moaned, “I forgot about that whole summoned hero thing. I should have known his results would send one of those counter girls into a fit.”

“That’s okay. We’ve still got to go and do your favorite part,” said Sig.

“Wait,” said James. “What do we still need to go do?”

“Gear,” said Seiran with a big smile.

“Gear,” repeated James.

“Yep. We’ve got to get you some gear. Your swords are fairly high quality for non-magical blades, so they’re probably fine for now. These clothes of yours, though,” she said, tugging at his shirt disdainfully, “you’ll get injured constantly trying to fight in these.”

One brief stop at The Verdant Field to get some money and a walk into a part of the city James didn’t recognize later, he found himself being led into a relatively sizable building that showed no signs of being a business. If anything, he suspected it would have been condemned back on Earth. As dilapidated as the exterior looked, however, the interior was clean, well-lit, and contained carefully arranged displays of weapons, armor, and even what looked like jewelry. James briefly feared he’d been dragged through another portal, but no one else looked concerned. He looked around for some kind of staff and found no one waiting to help them.

“Doesn’t anyone work here?” he asked.

“Yeah, but he kind of… He hates everyone,” said Chrosan with a mild shudder. “He hates them a lot.”

“He’s exaggerating things,” said Sig.

“I’m not,” said Chrosan with an emphatic shake of his head.

Sig continued as though Chrosan hadn’t spoken.

“Exaggeration aside, it is best to ask us most of your questions. You don’t want to pester the owner with things we could have answered. That might make him grumpy.”

“If he hates everyone so much, why does he run a store?” asked James quietly, thinking that there must be something else the owner could do for a living.

“Because I like money,” growled a deep, gravelly voice from some hidden location farther inside the store, “and I don’t like giving other people a cut. So, I put up with you damned adventurers because you’re constantly breaking your equipment. Repeat customers, boy. Remember that. Repeat customers are where you make your profit.”

James kept craning his head around and trying to find the source of that voice. His efforts proved fruitless until a squat figure that couldn’t have been more than five feet tall or less than two hundred and fifty pounds of pure muscle lumbered into view. He had a wide face that was mostly hidden by the most magnificent beard that James had ever seen. It was dark with a handful of silver hairs threaded through it and stretched down to the man’s waist. It’s a dwarf, squealed some part of James that was still an excitable ten-year-old boy fresh off watching a Lord of Rings movie with his father for the first time. That memory yanked hard on those fresh wounds, but the sight of a living, breathing dwarf was enough to temporarily quell that pain. The dwarf looked James up and down and sniffed.

“So, you lot finally brought the summoned hero in here to see Alvarence.”

Alvarence’s casual display of knowledge about James’s true origin as someone from another world, as well as his rejected role as a summoned hero, seemed to catch everyone off guard. Sig eyed the dwarf like he was reassessing the man. Chrosan gaped openly. Seiran’s eyes narrowed.

“How did you know about me?” asked James.

He worried that the tone of the question came dangerously close to a demand, but the words were in the air already. He’d have to live with the consequence.

“Please,” said the dwarf with a roll of his eyes. “I can tell by taking one look at you. I’ve got the Eyes of Discernment skill. Plus, I can practically smell the divine magic on you. The question isn’t how do I know, but how many other people already know?”

The panic in James that had gone dormant not so very long ago threatened to claim supremacy again. Chrosan, Seiran, and Sig were all fixated on the dwarf like he’d suddenly become a strange, alien monster they’d never seen before. That lasted for about five, incredibly tense seconds during which James’s body couldn’t decide if it should start hyperventilating or not. Then, the dwarf burst into laughter that seemed to fill the entire building with the sound. The dwarf howled at his own joke, bent over at the waist, and slapping his knee. When his mirth finally subsided, he thrust a finger as big around as a sausage at the group.

“Your faces. My gods. At least that one has an excuse,” said Alvarence with a jab of his finger at James. “He’s not from here. But you three should have known better.”

James looked over at the more experienced adventurers and all three looked various shades of embarrassed. Shaking his head, he focused on the dwarf again.

“Okay, so you didn’t use magic. How did you figure it out?”

Wiping a tear from an eye, the dwarf said, “I just listen. I got a lot of adventurers in here. There was a lot of talk about you after you knocked that big brute over there through a wall. Plus, a bunch of castle knights came in here with a girl who kept saying things like, James would hate this or James would like this. She sounded really certain about it when she was talking. Those knights weren’t shy about introducing her has a summoned hero. That meant she couldn’t have been here long enough to know someone’s tastes that well. It didn’t take much to figure out she must have been summoned here with someone. Since I know just about everyone who could have put Chrosan there through a wall, and none of them are called James, I figured it must be you. I was guessing a little, but it was worth it.”

The mention of Maggie left James feeling a bit flat-footed. He hadn’t pushed her out of his mind, but he had been pushing her to the back of his mind. It was easier not to think too much about her or what kind of terrible circumstances she might be in at any given moment. The fact that she had been actively thinking about him while shopping for whatever she’d come to the dwarf’s business for made him feel like a shit. At the end of the day, though, he wasn’t some expert at processing his feelings. He’d taken a couple of psychology classes as electives, and that was the extent of his wisdom on the matter.

Those classes had in no way, shape, or form prepared him to deal with what had happened to him. And there was only so much he could do with emotions that fresh and raw. He needed to give himself the time to get a little or maybe even a lot of distance from it all. Like it or not, Maggie was all mixed up in that. So, once again, James pushed all of it to the back of his mind to be dealt with at the very nonspecific time of later and put his attention back on what was happening in front of him. He was pretty sure that he’d watched some online video where a Buddhist monk called that mindfulness. Yeah, he thought. I’m just being mindful. It’s totally healthy. He ignored the voice in the back of his head that called bullshit on that.

The dwarf was still eyeing all of them with amusement in his eyes. James tried to shrug it off. He iddn’t know the dwarf well enough to call him out on screwing with them like that. The fact that no one else had done it told him he was likely making the right choice. Alvarence turned an assessing gaze on James.

“I don’t normally do this, but I also don’t make customers the butt of my jokes as a rule. So, I’ll help you pick out some gear. Let’s see. You’re using short swords. Odd choice. So, you’re probably not a thief or an assassin. They like daggers. Hmmm. I can usually tell what someone is just by looking at them, but you don’t have any gear. Are you looking for something specific?”