The World Dragon's Heir

Chapter 646: Working At The Show

The next morning, the crowd at the arena was absolutely insane.

It was the weekend now, and anyone who didn’t work retail or have urgent business had taken the day off to come watch.

Dominic even saw Mead and the store clerk from Pops forge in the crowd, which meant the Dwarf was likely enjoying the relative silence of being alone in the forge.

Most of the prominent business people of Wistover were here, as well as many of the Barons and Knights who had only just moved into their new homes.

One day away from home wouldn’t hurt anything, and half their residents were here in town anyhow.

Jack Merlot smiled as he saw what Dominic was noticing.

“You should see the chaos at the farmers market. Nobody can decide if they want to do their shopping first, and then somehow load their bags under their seats, or if they should shop after, and risk all the good stuff being sold out.

The only saving grace is that the Merchant’s Guild is on the way from the market to the arena, and they’re willing to hold parcels for a copper coin during the tournament.

It’s an easy few hundred coppers for the warehouse workers who couldn’t get out of their shift today, and it’s going to let the market sell out fast.” The Advisor explained.

“So, the crowd around the stadium is going to grow as the day goes on.

It looks like we didn’t make it large enough.”

Jack laughed. “No, it’s large enough. There is a standing area up in the nosebleed section, you see? If they want to pack that, we can get the entire population of the region in here, but half of the ones up top won’t actually be able to see anything.

However, the Adventurer’s Guild has a bard watching the jousts, and he’s doing narration through a magitech speaker for those outside.

They can hear what is going on, and with him narrating, they get a good idea without being inside themselves. It’s like a radio broadcast of the event, but just for the vendor area.”

“Oh, that is a great service. It looks like we’re in for quite the show today.”

Now that everyone had made it through one round, the arrangement was easy.

The winner of the first match went against the winner of the last match, the second against the second last, and so on. As the first round was randomized, this gave them a much more unpredictable set of matches than it would if yesterday’s matches had been arranged in any sort of logical order.

It also let the Knights who had to wait the longest yesterday go early today, while those from the middle of the day would go last.

However, with the halved number of matches, it would be close to the same time today.

And then there would be another round later in the day.

With the reducing number of contestants, they didn’t plan to shorten the days. Instead, they would have the Knights joust more than once.

Then tomorrow, there would be a few hours between morning and afternoon rounds, to encourage everyone to go out to the market. It would be good for the local economy, and give everyone a reason to socialize and get to know their neighbours.

Unfortunately for Dominic, being in attendance at the tournament didn’t give him a day off from work. It just moved the work outdoors, as every few minutes, he was presented with a new report from the Advisors.

Most of it was short blurbs of information.

Daily updates, the income and spending reports, documents for him to sign to authorize the transfer of wages. Dominic already knew what most of these were supposed to say, and there were very few surprises.

The only real surprise came from the airship factory. Not only had they sold their second airship, King Witheton of Axbridge had prepaid for the third one off the assembly line, with a number of extra safety and security features.

The most interesting one that Dominic could see in the list was a bloodline detector.

How he planned to use it was a mystery, unless he was hiring staff who were all related, or under the command of someone in a specific family. But he had paid the airship docks to have it commissioned and added to the airship’s internal design.

That was a huge chunk of cash for the Duchy’s coffers.

The fact that they were not charging any sort of taxes at the moment was very limiting for their budget, but with sales numbers like this, they were not going to run short on money.

Dominic had expected the number of magitech fireplaces to fall off after the initial rush of people who were waiting for one to come available, but it didn’t appear that they were.

The Merchant’s Guild was simply finding more and more destinations to send them to.

If they started shipping them into the southeastern nations, the demand would be insatiable, with over two hundred million residents between fifteen nations.

They made a lot of fireplaces and lanterns, but not nearly enough to cover that. Especially when the southern nations were much colder than the northeastern nations.

It was much more common for them to see snow during the cold season, though most of the population was coastal, so the snow wasn’t as bad as it was inland in the hills.

Dominic took a break from the paperwork to watch the match in front of him, and saw that Prince Damien was entering the arena for his joust.

The opponent had a Cygnian banner, but Dominic didn’t recognize it, so he wasn’t one of the Wistover Knights. Someone from the capital, then.

The King and the other Royals seemed to know who it was, and the crowd was just excited to see the Prince up again. The novelty of Royalty on the jousting field would never get old with them, especially when everyone was willing to be a good sport about it, and not withdraw under the excuse of avoiding injury to the Royal Family.

Jousting might be much safer than it had been, with so many potions and magitech devices with healing abilities.

But if you took a bad fall and broke your neck, the chances that someone could resurrect you were very slim. Healing was magic, not a miracle. Unless you had a high-level priest, that was. In which case, the healing was literally a miracle, in that it was Holy Magic.

And for that reason, even seeing a Royal dare to enter a joust was a rare thing. That sort of high-risk behaviour was not normally condoned.