Thrown Out of the Hero Summons for a Worthless Haggling Skill, He Struck a Deal With the Dragon novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: The Fifth Place
The hall was waiting for him to kneel.
Ryota stood in front of the black stone with his face perfectly still.
His mother kept that face for customers who brought in stolen bicycles.
Under the terms, the small line had come up too.
He wants the count full by the Day of Ash, and the Lowmarket singing about it.
He read the last words again: one fifth of its debt.
The heroes were coins, sent up a mountain to pay a dragon.
Every name on the river wall had been a coin.
The woman with the tiger had been a coin, and she'd known it at the door, and somebody had cut those pages out.
And on his first day the crown had paid him twenty silver to take himself off the roll.
He'd thought he was being thrown out.
He'd been the only one of the five they let go.
He looked up at the high table.
Tsubasa was holding his cup in both hands.
Asako had her strawberry hair tie wound so tight around her fingers that the tips had gone white.
They had sworn their lives on that roll in the king's hall, with their hands on this same stone.
"Well?" said the king.
Ryota made himself smile.
"Your Majesty," he said, loud and warm, in the voice he used on the shop floor. "Where I come from, a man who says yes to the first price gets laughed out of the shop by his own mother."
The hall laughed.
The nobles liked a foreigner who knew he was being funny.
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