Starting from the Dragon Tribe! - Chapter 104

Starting From the Dragon Tribe

Chapter 104: FSN

Next to Lu Chen, Caesar smiled, “Brother Lu, tell me, how’d it go?”

Chu Zihang still had the same paralyzed expression, but there was intrigue in his eyes.

Even Gen Chisei was curious. He leaned forward in Lu Chen’s direction, warning to know how he was feeling.

“How’d what go?” It wasn’t clear if Lu Chen was pretending or really didn’t understand what Caesar meant.

“The girl. You went out with her for two days. You can’t just say it was simply to help out an internet friend who ran away from home, right?” Caesar was direct when he needed to be.

“Huh? That’s exactly how it was,” Lu Chen said, but his eyes shifted away.

He steadied himself and prepared to deflect the fire, looking at Caesar, “Say, Caesar, what about you? You didn’t go on a nice vacation and spend time with your new girlfriend, instead coming to Japan to sort through this mess. Wasn’t she unhappy?”

He of course knew the news that Caesar got a girlfriend, though due to Caesar’s personality, if he was chasing a girl, he would go as far as letting the entire world know if he could, so everyone in Cassell College ended up learning of it.

Lu Chen remembered that it was a girl named Chen Motong and didn’t expect her to capture the “heart” of a man as good as Caesar.

“Oh, NoNo. The moment vacation started, she ran off. I can hardly even contact her,” upon mentioning NoNo, his eyes changed to a different look.

“Brother Caesar, aren’t you worried?” Lu Chen was curious. Even with his lack of common sense, he felt that this wasn’t the state that a new couple in a serious relationship should be in.

Zihang, who was sitting opposite to them, actually wanted to warmly remind Caesar that “When your girlfriend disappears when vacation starts, it probably means you’re getting cheated on,” but he stopped himself.

One can’t help but admit that talking about things at the wine table wasn’t without reason, for after three rounds of alcohol, the group began to talk more, and even Chisei started to contribute to the conversation.

“It seems that the college is much more lively than in my time. Sometimes, I really wish I could go back to my student days,” Chisei lamented, his eyes in a bit of a trance.

Chisei’s words, on the surface level, referred to his time back in Cassell College, but Lu Chen and the others somehow felt that his eyes, under the fragmented and colorful lights, reflected a more distant time, perhaps as far as childhood.

“Then maybe you can re-enroll again. We have a flunker amongst the student population. He hasn’t graduated after seven years in college. If you go back and re-enroll, you’ll find that your upperclassman is still your upperclassman,” Caesar had also drank a lot and started to crack jokes after the conversation livened.

But Chisei suddenly regained some sobriety as he looked at the glazed golden champagne illuminated by the colorful lights above and said softly, “Cannot go back.”

Then he raised his glass again, “We can only live in the present and walk toward the future.”

It was clear that they weren’t talking about anything seriously, but the look in Chisei’s eyes when he raised glass looked as if he had just made some sort of decision, like the look in a general’s eyes before he headed to war. In this place of entertainment, a solemn atmosphere instantly descended. For a moment, Lu Chen and the others.

But after, they all raised their glasses.

The sound of clinking glasses resounded in the air for a long time.

The more champagne they had, the more their conversation between them became more and more random.

***

***

Chisei, who was slightly drunk, asked, “Have you seen Fate/Zero?”

Caesar was puzzled, “What’s that?”

Zihang thought a bit. This name seemed familiar to him, “Seems like two years ago, there was an anime that had a name similar to this one’s.”

Chisei explained, “That’s Fate/Stay Night. It’s a series, which includes games, light novels, and anime. Fate/Zero is considered a prequel. I read the light novels.”

“I can’t imagine that you, the head of the yakuza, would still read this kind of stuff. I’ve seen FSN, it’s pretty good,” Lu Chen teased. He felt that this stuff was what otakus like Finger read. For him, anime was all right, but reading the books was just too tiring.

Chisei didn’t know what to say as he looked at Lu Chen, thinking, I myself didn’t really want to read those things, but Erii likes them. He always wanted to have something to talk about when he saw his sister, and the works that he read were really good…

“Since you brought this up, and Brother Lu has also watched it, then it seems like it’s pretty good. I’ll watch it when I’m bored these days in the hospital,” Caesar joined in. He basically never watched anime, but he didn’t want to be excluded from any topic, and besides, as he had said, since Brother Lu and the yakuza leader watched the anime, it should probably be pretty good.

“What kind of story is it roughly about?” Zihang thoughtfully asked. He knew what kind of embarrassment one felt after starting a topic only to find out that no one else didn’t know, so he spoke up and asked Chisei to describe it.

Chisei thanked Zihang with a glance and continued, “It’s basically a prequel talking about events before FSN. Brother Lu, since you’ve seen FSN, you should know about Emiya Shirou. The protagonist of the prequel is his adoptive father, Emiya Kiritsugu.”

No one interrupted Chisei, instead holding their glasses as they listened to him talk.

“Emiya Kiritsugu grew up dreaming of becoming a hero of justice, which was a very noble and childish dream. This is basically what all traditional hot-blooded manga protagonists want to be: heroes of justice, but Emiya Kiritsugu isn’t quite the same. He is more pure and extreme. This work exposes many things not discussed in detail in most hot-blooded manga.”

“For example, what is considered justice, and how far you’re willing to go for justice. The story talks about when Kiritsugu was a child, due to an accident that occurred in his father’s Dead Apostle experiment, Shirley, who was his father’s assistant, turned into a Vampire. A disaster broke out on the island, and because he didn’t want this kind of tragedy to happen elsewhere, he personally shot his beloved father as well as killed his childhood sweetheart, Shirley, to whom he was close to…”

Under the flickering lights, a heavy story slowly unraveled out from Chisei’s mouth. The others seemed to smell a sort of heaviness in the air and sipped their champagne in silence.

____

____