Only Villains Do That: An Isekai Adventure by D. D. Webb

Author:D. D. Webb [Webb, D. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Podium Publishing
Published: 2024-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

25

In Which the Dark Lord Unilaterally Declares Naptime

Silver, black, red, gold, blue, and white,” I recited, slowly tilting my open hand so that the coins piled in it glinted in the dim light. They were very shiny. Ephemeran coins, aside from being made with an exquisite precision that matched and exceeded modern Earth metallurgy, never seemed to get dull or scratched. They also all had bands of vivid color just inside their outer rims. Whatever it was made of, the colored parts remained as glossy and apparently as impervious as the rest. The actual engravings depicted either abstract shapes reminiscent of sunbursts or Sanora’s face from a variety of angles depending on the coin. She was immediately recognizable; whoever had designed these had clearly seen the goddess in person, as I had.

“Yep, that’s the ascending order,” said Aster. “Don’t forget they’re in pairs, too.”

“That’s how you calculate the values,” Donon added. “There’s discs, halos, and stars, see?”

There were indeed three styles of coin, each available in all six colors. Plain round coins, and then others with circular holes in the center.

“So, within a shape group, each color up in the chain is ten times the value of the previous one,” Donon lectured. “So a black disc is worth ten silver discs, and a red disc is ten black discs, and so on up. But! To get the value of the next shape group, you gotta consider the positions of the pairs. The halos are the second tier up from discs, right? So you count from the second pair—but from the first coin in the second pair, cos it’s from the first tier. Once you’ve got your starting position, you double it, so a silver halo is worth twice what a red disc is worth. Then they go up by tens; a black halo is ten silvers, and so on. Then! For the stars, it’s the same deal—they’re the third tier, so you calculate from the third pair, but you’re counting from the second tier, so it’s from the second coin in the third pair. Therefore, a silver star is worth ten white halos.”

“Yeah, you’ll notice a complete lack of star coins in your bag there, Lord Seiji,” Sakin drawled. “People like us will probably never see one of those in person. There was almost no point in Donon explaining how to count them.”

“Hey!” Donon protested. “It’s important to know this stuff! Just cos we don’t get to handle stars doesn’t mean Lord Seiji won’t.”

“I’m not a hundred percent convinced white stars even exist,” said Harold.

I carefully stowed my handful of coins back into their pouch, hung the pouch back on my belt, and only then clapped both hands to my forehead and dragged them down my face.

“That’s the expression he makes whenever somebody mentions limns,” Donon stage whispered.

“No,” I said, hearing the deep spiritual exhaustion in my own voice, “no, this is much worse.”

Eighteen different denominations of coins? No linear progression of values—or rather, three different ones, separated by weird arbitrary leaps? Not to mention the scale of them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.