(Oct 21)

“What if The Grinch doesn’t show up? What if The Grinch just decides to not leave his house tomorrow? Our plan will go down the drain and we won’t even get to see The Grinch.”

William’s plan seemed quite solid and might work… that is if we are assuming The Grinch actually shows up, but what if The Grinch doesn’t appear at all?

I don’t think William is dumb, but his plan was clearly incomplete.

Were we rushing too much at trying to capture The Grinch? Should we delay the subjugation date?

Of course not. William isn’t stupid enough to have a such a flawed plan.

“Anthony, you underestimate me. I had a week to plan this out, of course I would’ve thought of that.”

William went to the far end of his office and showed me a board with a bunch of numbers, writings, drawing, notes, and calculations that a person wouldn’t understand at a quick glance.

“It is true what you say, The Grinch might not show up. But that’s extremely unlikely. Why? Well, there are several reasons. According to the data we gathered, the maximum amount of time between the killings was 2 – 3 days.

Usually The Grinch kills every 1 – 2 days, but the longest timeframe without any killings is 3 days. I suspect that The Grinch needs to or relies on killing people for some reason, because even on days where security is extremely tight and it would be unfavorable for The Grinch to do a killing, The Grinch still shows up and attacks.

The good thing is, the past two days, The Grinch hasn’t appeared. Meaning, tomorrow, there is a very high chance that The Grinch will come out and kill.”

So based on data and past information, William calculated that there would be a high chance of The Grinch actually showing up and planned it on this specific day.

He’s been studying the patterns and behaviours of The Grinch very seriously.

“But I’m not done yet. I told you that I was doing an experiment using your dragon essence, right? Well, after reviewing the data, I noticed that The Grinch appeared more often and killed more people during the time I left your dragon essence. For some reason, your dragon essence is causing The Grinch to become more active and aggressive.”

“Wait a second. You knowingly caused The Grinch to become more aggressive in your experiment…?”

William stayed silent for a moment before he shook his head.

“I only noticed that after conducting the experiment. I didn’t know that while I was still doing it.”

I stared at him suspiciously, but I let him continue.

Although William methods may differ from mine a bit, he is still a good person, and he does wants to help people.

So I trust him when he says that he didn’t know about The Grinch being aggressive until afterwards… or so I hope.

“As I was saying, The Grinch becomes more aggressive whenever your dragon essence is involved. Not noticeable when looking at the crime scene, but there is a strong trend when looking at the data.

After analysis all the information with your dragon essence, the time frames between attacks, and a lot of other factors to consider, I and a small team of professionals calculated that there’s a 93.27% possibility of The Grinch showing up.”

93.27% is a very high rate… it’s nearly certain then.

It’s a percentage that’s worth trying.

A solid plan, not perfect, but it has potential to work.

William and I continued discussing and laying out the minor details for the plan.

After we finished talking and right before I was about to leave, there was one more thing William wanted to do before tomorrow.

“Wait a second. I have something I want to give you, two things in fact.”

William pulled out a medium sized leather pouch and tossed it over to me.

The moment the leather of the pouch touched the skin on my hand, I knew exactly what it was in an instant because of the magic it was emitting.

It was the hot sauce from the training that I did before.

The same hot sauce that I was forced to eat if I spilled any water from the bowl. The hot sauce that caused me to have explosive diarrhea and caused me to release dragon essence.

“William… I thought you apologized, but…”

“It’s not what you think Anthony. Hear me out. Remember during your training and you ate the hot sauce? Well, you started glowing and we realized that the hot sauce is actually causing your dragon essence to become more active thus giving you a temporary power boost.”

I do remember that.

During my training, I would eat the hot sauce and yes it was super painful, but I wasn’t getting tired.

In fact, I was becoming more energetic.

The hot sauce was the cause of this, the immense heat has resonated with my dragon essence within me and gave me energy.

Heat would only make a fire breathing dragon more powerful and it was the same in my case as well.

“That’s why I had an idea, to take the hot sauce and turn it into consumable pills.”

When I opened the pouch, I saw dozens of tiny crimson red pills that were brimming with heat and magic.

“Oh! And don’t worry… I removed the laxatives… that was unneeded… however, it is still very hot and spicy, I couldn’t remove that if I didn’t want to lower its effects. But if you can resist its heat, it’ll help boost your strength.”

This’ll be quite useful.

I already have a power boost from my mental thinking exercise and stack it with the temporary boost from these spice pills, I might even be able to reach A rank for a time…

And as I’m writing this, I’m reminded of my conversation with Alisha yesterday where Alisha asked me if I was using drugs to boost my magic.

I haven’t used any drugs before, but these spice pills that William is giving me… are technically considered some type of drug.

They are pills that temporarily give me strength.

I dunno, just a random thought I had that’s unrelated.

“The other thing I wanted to give you…. is this.”

William reached under his desk and lifted up a sword in its sheath.

“This is a longsword created by the bones and materials from the wyvern that attacked our city. It’s made from a wyvern so it should react to your dragon essence and boost its strength even further.”

William handed it to me and I gazed at it’s craftmanship as I removed the blade from the sheath.

It was beautiful.

A sharp edge, durable blade, good grip, magic imbued into it and bursting with energy.

It also had a nice design, with magic markings running up along the sides of blade.

Although I’m no blacksmith, I’ve used my fair share of swords and this one was a good one, it’s at least a B ranked sword, maybe even A ranked. Needless to say, it’s the best sword I have ever held in my hands.

“It’s very well made.” I told William.

“Of course it is. It’s made from a wyvern which is considered high B ranked or even A ranked material, and it was also personally made by Mona as well.”

“Wait… Mona?”

“Yeah. Mona made the sword. She’s a blacksmith.”

Bruh.

What in the golly gosh darn did I just hear?

“Yeah, you didn’t know? Mona’s a blacksmith. I assumed you knew because you met her and worked with her, but I guess not.”

So, it turns out Mona is a blacksmith who creates weapons.

She’s decent at fighting, but she’s not strong enough to be considered an A ranker.

However as an A ranker, she creates powerful weapons with special abilities to make up for her lack of combat abilities and thus allowing her to qualify as an A ranked.

Now that leads me to question myself, I fought Mona during capture the flag and she was powerful, strong enough to nearly overwhelm... but she’s only a blacksmith…?

This would’ve lowered my confidence in myself if I had found out about this a few days ago, but after achieving enlightenment, such an insignificant thing no affects me anymore.

However, this is interesting to know. That would explain why she was using a different weapon from the tournament.

I am indebted to Mona. Not only was she the one who indirectly caused me to achieve enlightenment but now she has created a magnificent sword for me.

It’ll definitely be useful in the fight against The Grinch tomorrow.

“Go home Anthony, get some rest. 5 AM tomorrow we start, we’ll be waiting the entire day for The Grinch… we plan on capturing The Grinch, but if things go bad, then we might have to kill The Grinch. I need you at full power tomorrow, got it?”

Of course I’ll be prepared, both mentally and physically.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow is the day.

The day I finally bring an end to this.