Infinity Is My Affinity?!?-Chapter 67: On To The Grind!

Morning descended upon the ancient capital city of Shinkotsu, painting the dark, sloping tiled roofs of the northern district in hues of soft gold and pale amber.

But the usual serenity of the historic streets was shattered by a suffocating silence that trailed behind three figures walking down the middle of the pristinely paved road.

Shopkeepers froze with their long pipes halfway to their mouths, and children stopped their games of tag mid-sprint, their eyes widening as they stared at the trio cutting through the morning mist.

To the left walked a nightmare draped in the skin of a beauty.

Nom-Nom hummed a happy, formless tune as she walked along the cobblestones, her violet eyes crinkled in delight while she tore off massive chunks of pink cotton candy from the stick in her hand.

To the locals, however, the sight was mind-bending. They weren’t seeing a girl enjoying a sweet treat; they were watching a Dragon, one of the most arrogant and powerful species on the planet, happily munching on a cloud of sugar like a toddler.

To Nico’s right walked a vision of absolute grace.

Peko moved with steps so light they barely seemed to touch the ground, holding her own stick of cotton candy with delicate fingertips. She brought small, precise tufts of the pink fluff to her lips, nibbling at it with an elegance that made the simple act look like a sacred ritual, enchanting every gaze that looked her way.

And walking right in the middle of this terrifyingly beautiful storm was a man who barely seemed to know where he was going.

Dressed in a fresh set of light blue Samue and casual woven sandals, with the shotgun hanging loosely from his left shoulder by the sling, Nico shuffled forward on autopilot with his own untouched cotton candy slowly deforming under the wind while his eyes remained glazed over, glued to the translucent blue screen floating in front of his vision.

He didn’t even notice the terrified whispers or the stunned silence of the crowd.

His mind was entirely occupied by the glowing text of the Main Quest.

[Unbelievable...] Nico thought with a frown as he scrolled through the mission parameters for the hundredth time.

After escaping the burning wreckage of Nom-Nom’s containment zone, liberating Peko, and somehow lying his way into citizenship to finally enjoy his ideal isekai life... it hadn’t even been twenty-four hours before the System decided to ruin it.

And the terms were absolute.

He could either embark on this supposedly ’destined’ mission to the City of Heroes, or he could die.

[Talk about a forced narrative,] Nico mentally scoffed, feeling the phantom weight of the executioner’s axe hovering over his neck. [I finally managed to secure us a bed, and the universe immediately puts a gun to my head.]

But then, his eyes drifted down to the rewards section again, and his frustration hit a wall.

[But then again... the rewards.]

He read the description of Temporal Collapse for the nth time, and his imagination ran wild.

[That magic alone is overpowered enough to solve ninety percent of my problems... collapsing time into a singularity? Not to mention that sword...]

His fingers twitched, almost reaching out to touch the text describing the Regalia, a weapon that could cut through fate itself.

-Ding!

{So what are you going to do, Host?}

"Look, I’ll be real with you, I got no interest in playing hero," Nico muttered under his breath as he finally pulled his gaze away from the rewards. "But if the life I wish to live takes me down that path... I’ll walk along. Guess destiny’s got its cut out of it... Besides, my plate is full enough as it is."

With a heavy sigh and a mental command, he swiped the interface away, before taking a massive, aggressive bite of his cotton candy.

The sweetness hit his tongue, grounding him back in reality as the trio continued their stroll through the pristine streets of the Northern District.

But while Nico had returned to the moment, the world around them seemed desperate to escape it.

Nom-Nom was having the time of her life with her head swiveling left and right like a metronome as she marveled at the traditional architecture.

"Look at that roof!" she chirped, pointing a finger toward a clothing store with intricate wooden carvings of cranes.

To her, it was an innocent gesture of appreciation.

To the elderly shopkeeper sitting on the porch, it was a Greater Dragon singling out his establishment.

The poor fox-man stiffened so hard his pipe snapped in his grip while his tail fluffed up to three times its size as he prayed to his ancestors that the beast would find his roof inedible.

"It is certainly... distinct," Peko commented, noticing the terror but choosing to critique the craftsmanship instead. "Though I believe design is too outlandish even for a clothing store."

"Give them a break, Peko," Nico chuckled, wiping a smear of sugar from his lip. "That design is doing its job just fine... It’s there to attract attention, and give how we’re talking about it... It’s succeeding."

"I see, then I take my words back..." Peko said with a nod, analysing the philosophy as she stepped over a puddle that Nom-Nom happily splashed through a second later.

Nico shook his head at the gazes directed at them while they walked, chatting and joking as if they were on a Sunday picnic.

Nom-Nom’s aura, even when she wasn’t trying to project it, rolled off her in waves of apex dominance.

Every time she gasped at a flower arrangement or cooed at a stone statue, the nearby guards gripped their spears until their knuckles turned white, convinced that the ’Injured Greater Dragon’ they had heard about was about to strike.

"You’re terrorizing the locals again, Nom," Nico teased, nudging her arm.

"Am not!" Nom-Nom protested around a mouthful of candy. "I’m just looking! And gently too!"

"Yeah, well, your ’looking’ feels like ’being sized up for a meal’ to everyone with a survival instinct," Nico quipped, earning a playful shove from the dragon that nearly sent him stumbling into a Zen garden.

As he regained his balance, Nico smoothed out the front of his light blue Samue, suddenly acutely aware of just how much attention he himself was drawing while walking between two devastatingly powerful women.

The terror he had sensed earlier was beginning to curdle into something else... curiosity.

He paid attention to the hushed tones of the observers that carried across the quiet street.

"That’s him... the human everyone is talking about..." a voice murmured from behind a paper fan.

"The one chosen by a Greater Dragon? He looks so... frail,"

"Frail? Look at the Soul Armament on his left shoulder," another whispered back, eyeing the Shotgun. "I’ve never seen a design like that... the kid’s dangerous."

"But look at her... She is just a Tier 5. Greater Dragons are at least Tier 7. The rumors of her injury must be true."

Nico kept his eyes forward and his expression neutral even as the whispers drifted toward Peko.

"And the other one? Is that his sister? She has the same air..."

"She’s breathtaking... truly a flower of the high courts..."

[The General really works fast...] Nico thought, impressed despite himself. [It hasn’t even been twelve hours, and he’s already spread my ’supposed’ background.]

It was a masterclass in information control. By framing Nico as a human "chosen" by an inured Greater Dragon, the General had turned him from a suspicious foreigner into a local celebrity, all the while explaining away Nom-Nom’s low tier compared to other Greater Dragons.

With a shake of his head, Nico pushed the politics to the back of his mind as the atmosphere began to shift again.

The pristine silence of Old Shinkotsu, which had felt like a heavy blanket, started to fray at the edges.

Ahead of them, looming like a mountain range, stood the massive internal gates that separated the Soul of the city from its Body.

Even from a distance, the change was palpable.

A low, vibrating hum began to drift over the high walls from the collective sound of thousands of voices, rattling wagon wheels, and the clatter of commerce and adventure.

The crisp scent of pine and incense that defined Old Shinkotsu was slowly choked out, replaced by the charcoal smoke, savory perfume of the deep-fried street food, and the metallic tang of adventure that drifted in from the south.

Nico stopped just before the gatehouse’s shadows swallowed them, taking a deep breath of the greasy, vibrant air.

"Smell that?" he asked with a grin slowly spreading across his face as the noise of the New City washed over him.

Peko’s hand was already on the bridge of her nose as she said, "... I smell only a headache."

"Na, that’s the smell of adventure!"

Emerging from the shadow of the gatehouse, the trio stepped directly into a kaleidoscope of life that seemed to vibrate with the very essence of fantasy.

The street before them was a chaotic canyon of mismatched architecture, where sturdy dwarven stone masonry sat shoulder-to-shoulder with elegant elven timber-frames, all vying for space beneath a canopy of colorful laundry lines that strung between the buildings.

Stalls lined every available inch of the side of the cobblestones, overflowing with a sensory riot of goods from baskets of emerald-green vegetables that sparkled with residual mana, to the crates of exotic fruits that smelled like honey and sunshine, and even with the racks of gleaming weapons that caught the light as rugged adventurers haggled over their price.

But it was the people who truly breathed life into the scene.

Here, the rigid lines of race and profession seemed to have dissolved entirely.

To his left, Nico watched a burly Dwarf with a braided beard deftly flipping a delicate omelette on a hot griddle, his chef’s whites stained with spices instead of coal dust.

To his right, inside a smithy, a slender Elf in soot-stained leathers hammered a glowing red blade on an anvil with a rhythmic precision, shattering every stereotype Nico had ever seen about them in Anime and Novels back on Earth.

And it all culminated in his very own isekai fever dream.

Yet, wherever they went, the chaotic bustle seemed to part like the Red Sea.

In the sea of leather armor, western-style tunics, and rugged cloaks, Nico’s appearance was a glaring anomaly.

His light blue Samue and traditional sandals marked him as a relic of the North, making him look more like the sheltered Young Master of some noble house taking a stroll among the commoners.

And his "escorts" only solidified the illusion.

On one side walked Nom-Nom, a towering seven-foot Greater Dragon with her wild, waist-length black hair shimmering with a violet sheen, commanding a presence so oppressive that crowds instinctively scrambled out of her path.

On the other hand was Peko, a vision of cold, fairy-like perfection whose elegant robes and detached gaze made her seem like royalty descending from the heavens.

The whispers trailed them like a wake behind a ship.

"That’s the Human from the rumors... look at his clothes... looks like some High Nobility has already adopted him..."

"Of course they have... talk about living the life..."

"Is that the Dragon? By the Gods, she’s huge..."

"Don’t look her in the eye, you idiot! Do you want to be eaten?"

Nico ignored the commentary; his own attention was far too scattered to care about his reputation.

His eyes darted frantically from side to side, drawn to the ears now that he was out of Old Shinkotsu, and he let his gaze wander.

And everywhere he looked, he saw twitching, fluffy ears and swaying tails of foxes, wolves, dogs, and rabbits, all moving with a mesmerizing life of their own that made his fingers itch with an overpowering, intrusive urge to reach out and touch them.

And then, he saw her.

Standing near a cart full of weapons was a cat-folk adventurer with sleek black hair and a pair of velvety, triangular ears that flicked casually as she laughed with her party.

Nico froze mid-step.

Time seemed to slow while the certain something that had been slumbering deep within his soul, something equally both profound and degenerate, awakened with a roar.

[Cat-girls... anime did not lie], Nico thought with a single tear of spiritual fulfillment nearly forming in his eye. [They are magnificent.]

He forced his gaze away before she noticed his gaze and landed it instead on a tall, ethereal High Elf with golden hair who was inspecting a staff at a nearby stall.

She was objectively stunning, a model of fantasy beauty.

Nico stared at her for a beat, appreciating the aesthetic, before his eyes drifted back to Peko walking silently beside him.

He took in her delicate profile, the way her chestnut hair caught the sunlight, and the regal intelligence burning in her violet eyes.

[Yeah... no contest,] Nico decided instantly as his gaze softened. [The Elf is pretty, but Peko is art.]

They eventually reached a bustling four-way intersection, dominated by a beautiful stone statue of a maiden at its center, who tilted a marble vase downward, creating a shimmering curtain of crystal-clear water that flowed endlessly into the basin below.

Stopping at the edge of the fountain, Nico turned to Peko with a hand pressed dramatically over his heart.

"Oh, darling, my love, this world is cruel, and this is where we must part ways... Please remember me and all the moments we have shared... all the laughs and meals... and-"

Peko didn’t even slow down. Didn’t even offer a nod, a wave, or even a glance back to acknowledge his performance.

Without giving him the satisfaction of a response, she simply adjusted her course and continued walking straight past the fountain until her white robes disappeared into the crowd, on her way toward the Great Library.

"Cold..." Nico muttered, dropping the act instantly as he watched her retreating back, and feeling a sense of relief beneath the theatrics.

As per their agreed-upon plan, Peko was off to secure the intellectual front, i.e., gathering the geographical, political, and historical knowledge they desperately needed.

And that left the physical front to him and Nom-Nom

Nico turned his gaze to the massive structure of the Adventurer’s Guild looming down the street, his mind already calculating the grind ahead.

[Asking Elena for directions really did save us a lot of time...] Nico sighed.

Their objective was simple: register as adventurers and aggressively hit the local dungeons with solo dives.

It was the most efficient way to kill two birds with one stone. They needed a steady stream of money and Credits to fund their expenses, and more importantly, Nico needed the EXP to expand his mana capacity.

[Just 5 MP...] Nico thought, checking his status screen one last time. [I’m sitting at 55, and Aevum Trace demands a flat 60.]

Once he bridged that tiny gap, he would have access to genuine short-range teleportation magic.

But the grind wasn’t just for him.

Nico looked down at Nom-Nom, who was currently eyeing kebabs on a stall.

"Ready to learn how to properly punch someone?" Nico asked before she made up her mind.

Nom-Nom blinked before looking at her own hand with a rare solemn expression. "Yeah... What happened on that island will never happen again."

"Yeah," Nico nodded.

After all, Nom-Nom needed this more than anyone.

Despite being a Greater Dragon capable of reaching Mach speeds in less than a second, she had absolutely no idea how to fight.

Just a few days ago, she was a feral Wyvern consumed by her curse of Wendigo.

And that lack of skill had been made painfully obvious during their escape from Pantheon.

Luke and Thane, the Pantheon operatives, had been insects compared to her raw power, yet they had handled her with embarrassing ease. She could barely touch them, flailing around while they exploited every opening she left wide open.

[She needs to learn how to capitalize on her strength, Dragon Fire and Devour, while being in her human form...] Nico thought, analyzing her posture.

Because if the going got tough, she couldn’t just rely on her ace in the hole.

Nico couldn’t have her going ’Dragon-Up’ in the middle of a populated city.

The very transformation of expanding into a 100-plus-meter Greater Dragon released energy akin to popping a tactical nuke.

If she turned here, she wouldn’t just win the fight; she would flatten the entire district.

"Come on, Nom," Nico said, snapping out of his thoughts. "Let’s go get our licenses."

They navigated through the thick crowd until the Adventurer’s Guild finally loomed over them.

It was a massive, reinforced timber structure that smelled of stale ale, dried blood, and bad decisions.

Nico stepped up to the heavy double doors, adjusting the shotgun on his shoulder as he prepared his ’confident adventurer’ face.

"Okay, act cool. We just walk in, sign the papers, and—"

-CRASH!

The double doors exploded outward with a loud crash.

Nom-Nom didn’t even flinch as a blur of leather and steel flew past her head, missing her ear by an inch before slamming into the cobblestones with a sickening, wet crunch.

The "blur" groaned, revealing itself to be a fully armored orc adventurer, who was now sporting a broken nose and a missing tooth.

And the next second, silence fell over the street as heavy, thudding footsteps echoed from the maw of the Guild’s entrance.

Nom-Nom stared down at the groaning Orc, then tilted her head at Nico.

"Master?"

"Yeah?"

"Can I also punch someone if they mess with me..."

Nico stared at the now unconscious body, then at the approaching tank of a man in a mage’s garb, before letting out a long, already tired sigh.

"So long as you don’t kill anyone," Nico muttered before stepping forward.

"Yay!"