Since we only had two to three months in the Market before our bodies started to decay, we wasted no time searching for a target. Taking one day to settle our emotions was already stretching the ‘optimal’ way to make use of our time, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to become so utterly locked into our fear of the future that we never spent any time settling our emotions and spending time with each other. But one day of rest and a few weeks of training was enough. Now that we were settled and ready to fight again, we needed to start improving our gear and searching for a library.
We decided to start by hitting up an easy store, just to get Anise a few easy kills and assists, as well as some basic gear. The skeletons were particularly fragile now that Sallia and I could crush them in moments, so cleaning up the seven or so skeletons inside of the building was basically just a matter of spotting the enemy and then breaking their arms and legs, before Anise or Felix finished them off.
As we rounded up the skeletons in the first store and massacred them all, I got the reward for five Skeleton Assists, before immediately handing the Achievement off to Felix, along with my share of 19 Achievement from the store’s cash register.
You have slain an invading low-level troop. As defined in article two of the emergency city defense fund act, Eluxia distributes your rightful rewards.
(Error – Entity ‘Eluxia’ cannot be found.)
Achievement distribution failed. For further information, please contact the administrator of your current city.
Slaughter: Assist in killing a skeletal foot soldier for the fifth time.
Influence: Contributed to the defense of the Market by an [extremely negligible] amount.
Achievement +5, Achievement +0.00
I had paid about 500 of my 4,000 Achievement debt to Felix at this point. I planned to give him another 4,000 Achievement, at least, before calling it even, because Felix had lent me Achievement in my time of need. I wanted to give him back a little bit more than he had lent me, if possible. Fair was fair, and I wanted Felix to have a build he was happy with the moment it was possible. Hopefully, that would be the next life, if we got lucky and hit a binding essence planet.
After that, we got Anise a decent set of starting equipment. It was nothing special - this shop, unfortunately, didn’t have any outstanding items like my dress, Sallia’s noodle bowl, or Felix’s monocle. However, at the very least, Anise now had a proper weapon like the rest of us. Specifically, we found her a pair of shortswords, a suit of armor, a spatial backpack, and a better friendship bracelet that gave her access to location tracking. Since the shortsword pair only counted as one item, this left her with one free item slot open. I had no idea why two Anise’s shortswords only took up one item slot, while two swords normally took up two item slots. This made me wonder what exactly an item slot was in the first place, but I had no idea how to even begin answering that question right now.
Anise noted she planned to ditch the dual-wielding swords as soon as possible, because she didn’t like them much. But until now, she had only been borrowing weapons from us for training purposes. Having any weapon of her own was better than no weapon.
With my share and Sallia’s share, Felix did have enough Achievement to finish maxing out his Binding Essence Stat, so the four of us quickly hit up another shop. Felix pushed his Binding Stat up to +40, leaving him with around 400 Achievement left over. If we raided enough stores, it might be possible for Felix to also push his Alteration stat up to +30, or even +40, but that would have to wait for a while.
After that, it was time to do something I had really been looking forward to.
Sallia and I had pretty explicitly built our runes and attunements to counter spatial manipulation. After all, last time we had been in the Market, the wooden butterflies had handily crushed us and sent us fleeing for our lives. The only reason we hadn’t lost a life in the Market was because the creatures were limited by range.
Now, the four of us were hoping that we could knock down a bunch of wooden butterflies and the tree root they lived on: and potentially raid a shop that had much more valuable items inside of it. Doing so would give us a good amount of Slaughter Achievement, and would also prepare us well for future fights in the Market. If the fight was successful enough, we might even be able to harvest a good amount of Achievement during our time in the Market, which might let us pump our Stats to even greater heights before our next life. While stats didn’t single-handedly determine how well we did in a specific life, they certainly helped a lot.
We spent several hours scouting out shops until we found a good target.
The three of us also tried to convince Anise to hide and wait for the end of the battle, since she simply didn’t have any abilities or items that would let her survive the fight with the butterflies.
Anise, however, strongly objected to this. While Anise might have a hard time helping with the more difficult parts of a battle with the wooden butterflies, she had a rather interesting argument that I hadn’t considered.
“What do you think the Market itself is, Miria?” she asked, glaring at me after I suggested that she sit out the fight and be prepared to run if something went horribly wrong.
“The Market is… the Market?” I said. I wasn’t sure what answer she was looking for.
“What I’m trying to say is that the Market itself is probably a dimension, as well,” said Anise, giving me a look. “I mean, apart from the fact that the way the Market doesn’t seem to have been that worried about birth rates, and instead works off of artificial bodies and souls… it seems to fit most other descriptions of a ‘dimension.’ Or at least, that’s my assumption right now. So I’m thinking maybe it’s possible to get a keyword ability just by doing stuff in the Market, even without going to another world first.”
“Huh. That’s… an interesting idea,” said Felix, giving Anise an appraising look. “I hadn’t thought of that. I mean, the odds of getting to a keyword ability when we only have a few months in the Market seem pretty low, but… maybe it’s worth a shot?”
Felix, Sallia and I thought about it for a few minutes, before eventually, Sallia nodded.
“I think it’s worth letting her try. Miria and I should be able to mitigate the risks a fair bit, and if Anise can get any useful keyword that would be a huge boost. I mean, I doubt it’ll be a magic system, but maybe she could get a support based keyword ability? It’s something to think about, although I have no idea if it would actually work or not.”
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I didn’t like the idea of Anise being in danger with us when she had no keyword abilities at all, but I had to acknowledge that she and Sallia made a decent point. Maybe Anise could pick up a more support-oriented keyword ability that would fit her build once she finished it. If so, the next world could be much easier for all of us - and also help Anise catch up with the rest of us. Even if it was unlikely to work, as long as Sallia and I did the majority of the work during the fight it was something worth trying.
Thus, Ansie was placed at the back of the group, after she swapped weapons with Felix. Anise was now wielding Felix’s bow, and Felix was now wielding Anise’s dual blades. Since Anise was very fragile compared to the rest of us, we all agreed that she should be furthest away from the front line.
Felix was also placed in the back of our formation, since he only had one ability that would be useful for the fight, while Sallia and I were both firmly in the front, since our builds were explicitly tuned to win this fight. I found it endlessly amusing that despite wanting to pivot to a more ‘mage’ esque role in the group, I was still at the front of the group with Sallia right now.
Then, the four of us started searching for a good target. It took us a few hours to find a shop that looked beatable, and also looked like it had promising rewards. As far as I could tell, the store was filled with two kinds of souls: ones that strongly resembled the souls of the wooden butterflies, and one much larger soul that resembled a giant tree root.
The store name was “Books and Items for the Amazing Swordsman!” Which sounded like it would be right up Sallia’s alley. Not to mention, if the store had books, we might finally figure something out about how and why the Market had collapsed - or, at the very least, we might get some good information about the multiverse and how to improve our builds. Since we had so little information about our situation beyond what we had discovered through trial and error, any new information we could acquire might be what kept us alive in the future.
After settling on a target, the four of us took a few minutes to scout out the area and make sure nothing dangerous would interrupt us if we had to flee from the store. Then, Sallia kicked open the door.
Just like the last time we had entered a higher level shop, I saw a giant tree root coiled around the innards of the shop. The top half of the tree root was covered in moss and flowers, and the bottom half of the tree root was covered with blood-red smears of mana. The tree root didn’t seem to be attached to anything - it was almost as if the part of the root that should connect to the main tree had simply cut off in midair.
Unlike last time, I immediately realized that there was a massive amount of spatial manipulation happening right where the tree root cut off. It was attached to something - and that something was ginormous.
I felt an ominous sense of dread as I tried to follow the spatial contortion at the base of the tree root. It was almost like I was looking at the living universe that had killed us at the end of our last life. However, it felt… distant.
If I had to put into words what I felt, it was almost like whatever the tree root was attached to, it simply wasn’t paying attention to us.
I felt a few moments of crushing anxiety, as I realized that whatever the tree root was attached to could probably kill us just by looking in our general direction. At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder if every single tree root we had seen in the Market was attached to some giant creature in the distance.
At the very least, it wasn’t looking at us now.
“The tree root is attached to something much more dangerous,” I hissed. “What do we do? Do we still fight? If its main body attacks us, we’re just dead.”
Sallia remained silent for a few moments, staring at the same chunk of dislocated space that I was looking at. Finally, she shuddered, and then turned back towards the tree root. “I feel like it’s not looking at us,” said Sallia. “And the fact that it’s connected to something greater could mean that your spatial disabling pulse will just shut off the connection between the root and the main body, killing the root instantly and also removing any way for the main body to attack us?”
I sighed, and then chuckled. “That’s pretty optimistic.”
“But we also need to find a way to fight against the defenders of better soul fragments, or we will have a very hard time growing as quickly as we need to in the future,” said Felix. “We only have three lives left to outgrow whatever is defending the spots we need to buy lives at. If we’re too scared to even try to win this kind of fight, should we just roll over and wait to die? I don’t see us outgrowing the main body of this tree root in the next three worlds, so we need to hope that it doesn’t care about one tiny tree root in the middle of nowhere, I think. I vote that we still fight, and see if we can make the main body ignore us, or turn the spatially distorted biology of the creature and turn it into an advantage for us.”
Anise thought about it for a moment, before she turned towards me. “I think I agree with Felix. I have less experience than all of you, but if we turn back now, we’ll lose when we need to win the most anyway.”
I shuddered as I looked back at the tree root, but nodded.
“Fight it is.”
Sallia poured a bit of absorption essence into her first rune, and I felt space lock down around us. Just as the top of the tree root began to tremble, I tried firing a pulse of spatial manipulation disabling essence at the base of the tree root. Just to see if I could cut off its connection to the main body.
The pulse of essence I shot at the tree root did absolutely nothing, which didn’t really surprise me. The main body was way too powerful to be bothered by my attack. Luckily, even after blatantly trying to attack the main body, it didn’t seem to notice me or respond in any way. It looked like we might be able to get away with this fight.
As I thought about possible retaliation from the main body, chunks of tree bark and wood began flaking off of the tree root, before spinning themselves into the wooden butterflies we had seen last time.
I raised my hand towards one of the butterflies, and fired an extinguish at it. With two and a half of my keywords active, my essence pool was much larger than it should be for my Grade - the extinguish only ate about 1% of my alteration essence for a single extinguish. A drop of water materialized right above the wooden butterfly.
It splattered onto the wooden butterfly, and the creature’s candle of life disappeared instantly. It dropped dead.
I grinned. The creature wasn’t resistant to alteration essence at all.
You have slain an invading low-level troop. As defined in article two of the emergency city defense fund act, Eluxia distributes your rightful rewards.
(Error – Entity ‘Eluxia’ cannot be found.)
Achievement distribution failed. For further information, please contact the administrator of your current city.
Slaughter: Kill a Butterfly of the Dreaming Void for the First Time
Influence: Contributed to the defense of the Market by an [extremely negligible] amount.
Achievement +50, Achievement +0.05
Endless Hunger of the Ocean has devoured Butterfly of the Dreaming Void for the first time. New Skill created.
Being of Bound Wood:
Manifestation Stat increased by +10. Your limbs gain as much resistance against physical damage as a thick plank of wood.
I immediately accepted the new ability, since I had lost all of my previous skills upon death.
And as I did so, twenty-three wooden butterflies flapped their wings at us, causing Sallia’s stabilized space to bend like a spoon in the middle of a hydraulic press. The massive root shimmered and then disappeared, and through my spatial senses, I felt the air around us start to narrow and shrink as the tree root started moving in ways that most definitely didn’t conform to Euclidean geometry.
The fight for the store had begun.