Age of Summoner

“Humm....”

The sigh belonged to someone none other than Mister Joke, a man wearing a pair of large framed glasses, a white shirt, slack pants, and a wide necktie—looking like a replica of an about-to-retire middle-aged uncle. He was sitting on a marble bench, looking slightly strained, with a folder containing his personal information held in his hands while glancing up at a wall-mounted clock in a quite modern-looking office building.

It was ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning, a day he had to, once again, endure the headaches of job-hunting. Just like today, he was currently in a publishing company somewhere in Sukhumvit. He had arrived here at nine in the morning, arriving even earlier than some of its employees. After speaking with the receptionist, he was told to wait in this spot for the person responsible for his interview.

It was the same every time…

Joke could not sense any anxiousness as if the job application process was a part of his daily routine.

The same old well-selected speeches and answers, just like everybody else's who made it through. But Joke was aware that it might be because of his own character that caused him to never be able to pass a single company’s evaluation. The young man sighed upon those thoughts while thinking that he would soon be looked down upon by the interviewer.

He needed to find a way to distract himself from stress—thinking of other things to calm himself down—so he would sound as normal as possible during the interview.

“Heh...”

A faint smile slowly crept upon the corner of his mouth. The sudden thought that distracted his tension was none other than the events that occurred only yesterday. Within only a few hours that he visited a card store called “Butterfly”, he had lived an extraordinary experience—an experience he had never seen before in his entire life.

Whether the fascinating world of Arcadia, battling with game cards for the first time, the excitement, and thinking of ways to obtain victory even if the opponent was merely a bot; it all made him feel truly amazing in overcoming difficulties until reaching the finish line.

Joke was not a person who was familiar with the word “success”.

Even though it was not a big deal to him, it sure fulfilled something in him.

“Are you sure that you’ve never played a card game before, Joke?”

He thought back to the words of that adorable young lady, “Rin”.

Last night after he defeated the bot (which he came to know later was on the hardest level), everyone in the store began to look at him differently—even the young lady, Rin. She approached him excitedly to ask him that question, which of course, he was not lying about how he never played the game before. That seemed to make her even more amazed.

“If this is really your first time with these cards, then it is really amazing. Whether your decisions with mana time calculations, selection of cards to attack the opponent, and your calmness during battle. It’s not something of a new beginner, don’t you know that?”

She blurted out a long monologue of compliments, which he did not feel much delighted about. The truth was, he did not even know how extraordinary it was to win against that bot. Of course, it was not easy to fight with that bot as he had to work his fingers to the bone during the time when he was about to lose. In fact, he had to thank Rin for being patient with him in explaining the details of every single card in the deck. She spent almost an hour telling him what each card was for and during what types of situations it should be used. He was just acting as a good disciple who applied that knowledge at the right time.

But it seemed that Rin was skeptical of his answer. Instead, she looked at him strangely.

Plus, she was also asking him strange questions such as…

“You should consider being a pro player, Joke.”

He did not reply anything back and laughed in his head.

How could someone like him—a person who had only once touched those cards—be a pro player?

"No way..."

Joke muttered as he thought of this before the wooden door located diagonally from him slid open along with a figure of a man in a brown shirt walking out with a sheet of document. He glanced around the room before noticing Joke in the chair in front and giving him a smile.

“Mr. Pitaksilp, right? I’m sorry for making you wait for such a long time. Please come in for the interview.”

“Yes, sir.”

The young man replied calmly before standing up. He sighed to shake off all irrelevant thoughts from his head. The most important thing right now was to go through with this interview first.

Although he did not expect much from this interview, he at least would give it his all again this time around.

"Okay, back to reality again, Joke..."

.

.

“Ah, your educational profile is not bad at all, Mr. Pitaksilp.”

These first words heard after the twenty-minute-long interview were surprising to Joke. This might even be the first time he received a compliment from an interview in such a friendly tone. In fact, this man did not seem to be disrespecting at all from the time he poked his head out of the room till now. Conversely, he was even smiling broadly with politeness.

He seemed to be a kind man in his early thirties, short-haired, wearing comfortable clothes that looked kind of cool along with a pair of glasses; his office looked clean and organized.

“Let me be honest, Mr. Pitaksilp,” he said before smiling broadly. “I want to accept you, truly. Your ideas and passion match with our publisher’s, and your language skills are considered outstanding, but…”

That was right… there would always be a “but”.

Joke sighed quietly. No matter how good it was in the beginning, it would all end in rejections.

“Every position in our literary translation department is now filled up, so…”

‘I am sorry to inform you...’

“Could you wait for about four months?”

‘There you go… another rejection—huh?’

Wait for about four months?

Joke was slightly stunned. He made eye contact with his interviewer, who was now smiling sheepishly. With this strange offer, something that he had just heard for the first time here, he forced himself to smile and ask a question.

“Can you please elaborate?”

“There is an employee who is about to resign because she has to move abroad to live with her family, but she will be working here for just six more months. Currently, our company does not have the policy to accept more employees. But if you wait for around four more months, I might be able to convince the company to have you on board even before she resigns. With that, you could also start learning from her and fill in that position.”

This was a great opportunity for Joke.

He was still dumbfounded by this strange offer, but this was not a rejection but instead an employment proposal. If he had a job right now, he would of course immediately have accepted this offer. But because he was currently out of work, waiting for four months with nothing as a guarantee seemed to be a little too reckless.

Still, it was hard to decline the offer because this place was one of the leading publishers that he wanted to work with. Although it was not his first choice, it was a publisher that was always in his top three favorites.

“I know that it was a hard decision because you are not yet a full-time employee,” the interviewer smiled at him as if he knew what he was thinking. “But I want to add a young member to our team because I believe that someone like you will be able to come up with fresh ideas for our publisher. And don’t tell anyone this...”