Chapter 144: Ill Be Back! (1/2)

“Jessica, I recall you have a dancer outfit, right?”

Edward turned to the cleric who was quietly keeping up behind everyone.

“Yes, I do have it…” Jessica was startled since she never expected that Edward would talk to her, but she quickly answered all the same. “But that’s basically a collector’s item to fill my collection page, and it has no stat buffs.”

“That dancer outfit, does it look nice?” Edward asked directly.

“Eeeeeh?” The girl couldn’t quite keep up with Edward’s train of thought, and could only answer with a red-face. “Well… it’s not a matter of nice, there’s just too little cloth… I-It’s not something you wear for others to see!”

As a matter of fact, the reason Jessica completed that collection quest alone was because she heard that other female Players mentioning that the outfit seemed to delight their partners, doing it out of curiosity and the naïve hopefulness of a pubescent mind.

In the end, when she had finished the quest and saw the revealing, breezy bikini-like attire over the upper half, the demure village girl had almost died from embarrassment.

She did not even dare to place the risqué dress in her room as she had thought that she must not let anyone see it. As such, she could only stuff the whole outfit underneath her bag (the dress has scarcely any cloth and therefore takes a lot less space)—but despite her reluctance to ever wear it out of embarrassment, the item itself was very beautiful and she quite liked it.

On another note, male Players had a ‘prince outfit’ as a counterpart of the dancer outfit in the collection page. It looked nice too, but it weighed six kilograms including all the attached decorations and jewelry to make it as bulky as heavy armor, which made it a self-debuff item like the unpopular Fishman Helm.

Meanwhile.

“Wonderful!” Edward looked delighted.

His reaction left Jessica even more stunned, and she felt a little fainting as blood rushed up to her brain, and her heart was thumping restlessly…

Could it be that Edward—

“Give the outfit to Joe,” Edward said then.

The girl felt her heart stop.

‘What???’ Jessica thought.

‘What???’ Joe thought as well.

“If I’m not wrong…” Edward did not notice Jessica’s perplexed look, and was instead smiling as if he had everything under control. “The fishmen probably prefer a mouthful of… I mean, they prefer fatter prey. That is why the others couldn’t lure them out, but Joe could!”

Jessica glanced at Joe’s robust chest and looked down to clap her hand over her own.

A crisp jingle tingled.

[System: Jessica was checking her own chest only to find nothing.]

She looked at once repenting and regretting.

***

Around ten minutes later.

When Gou Dan returned to his party’s temporary hideout after checking out the fishfolk’s movement, he found a stranger amongst them.

His dress seemed to be weaved out of skyglow, half-transparent and unbelievably light. It was a divinely short skirt sewn from dreamlike colors, but it’s also clearly a full dress, not to mention that it was even more revealing than the girls vying for customers in the red-light districts of Lancaster.

In fact, no, the upper part of the dress could not even be called clothing—there were only two pieces of triangular clothes covering the important parts, tied to very thin threads.

And then there was the chest hair over those huge pectoral muscles that danced in the wind.

The tiara over the stranger’s head was even more dazzling than the most expensive crown: all the gems embedded on it reflected nothing, but were shining their own blindingly enchantingly radiance, with the gem at the center even holding the profoundness of an entire universe. Just looking at it would leave anyone mesmerized, but the platinum tiara was also so dainty that it felt a little cute.

And then there were the sideburns and beard on his highly pronounced face that doesn’t match his age.

Over the stranger’s body were colors that kept changing amidst light and shadow. It was like the clouds above, light, delicate, illusory and beautiful, the dresses of goddesses in myths with long, silk bands that flowed in the air behind the wearer. There was clearly no skirt holding them, but they were maintaining a puffy impression as they hung, split on two different sides of the dress that the gaze could not help but linger upon.

And then there were the leg hairs beneath that wafted amidst the wind.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaah—! Eyes!” Gou Dan fell to the ground, clutching his eyes and screaming. “My eyes!”

Joe, in the dancer outfit was fuming in embarrassment from Gou Dan’s reacting and kicked him (causing a -1 sign to appear over Gou Dan’s head). “Doggone it, don’t think I don’t know you have your pain level adjusted to 10%!”

Gou Dan was roaring with laughter even as he danced away. “We can’t have me blinded by myself! I’m going to upload this image on the forums!”

“You dare?! You’re dying right here!” Turning pale in shock, Joe promptly whipped out his sword and swung it at Gou Dan who guffawed even as he proficiently dodged the blows.

At a corner, Jessica had turned gray-white completely, holding her knees and looking like she had no more attachments in life even as she mumbled away quietly. “…I don’t want that dress anymore… I’m just a moving closet anyway…”