Anise didn’t say anything, but I saw her squinting at the Spatial Fair. Her eyes were scrunched up in thought, and she looked as if she were trying to solve a difficult problem.
I said, after a few moments of thought.
Anise nodded.
Felix frowned.
Then, Felix turned towards me and raised an eyebrow.
said Sallia.
Felix nodded.
I nodded. I felt some of the pressure I'd been feeling start to dissipate. It was going to require some tricky timing on my part, but we had a plan.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Since we knew what we needed to do, we got to work. To start with, I needed to buy more stats. We scouted the area, killing a few skeletons along the way. After about ten hours of searching, we found another intact shop that looked as wealthy as the Soul Emporium.
There was no Guardian inside of this shop, which was unusual for higher end shops. Furthermore, all of the items and the cash registers in the shop were empty. The only thing we found was a corpse of a monster in the front. It looked kind of like a giant mole rat, although the head was missing. I frowned. We had found a corpse of a monster and an unguarded shop. That was... odd.
Monsters in the Market seemed to know when an area was undefended. Last time we had been in the Market, skeletons had come to replace the ones we killed after we cleared out a pool of reincarnation. It hadn't taken very long, either.
That meant one thing. This mole rat monster had been killed recently.
“This thing was decapitated with a sword,” said Sallia, as she touched its neck. “The swordsman wasn’t very skilled. I see lots of little wounds on the creature’s body, so the fight went on for quite a while. The swordsman inflicted several small wounds until they managed to strike a decisive blow."
The four of us scanned the interior of the store again, before Anise sighed. “I wish we had caught the other group. The people who did this must have been other Market residents, right? It would have been nice to see if they had any information we didn’t have. Or if there was a way to work together. I wouldn’t mind having more allies in the future.”
“They might not have been friends, though,” said Felix, frowning. “The Market doesn’t care about the morality of people who join. Otherwise, people of the Market wouldn’t have gone around exterminating worlds for Achievement.”
Anise, Sallia and I flinched at his words. I had no interest in meeting someone who would massacre a world just for Achievement. They would probably consider us free money if they met us. We would fight back, obviously. But that didn't mean we would win.
“Let’s just buy what we need and get out,” I said. I was no longer interested in trying to meet up with the other group of people. The sooner we got out of this area, the better.
The cube selling third tier Soul Fragments for Perception was easy to find. I immediately boosted my Perception up another grade, spending 2,600 Achievement in the process. I also bought a grade of Absorption essence, for another 2,600 Achievement. This brought me from 12,703.42 Achievement to 7,503.42 total. This raised my [Perception] to Grade 9 and my [Absorption] to Grade 8. I was a bit regretful about spending so much Achievement right before entering the inner districts. However, I needed to condense my second rune as fast as possible. Every day I wasted was a day we could have spent hitting up shops in the Market or the inner district, gathering supplies and Achievement. I knew for a fact that a higher [Absorption] stat would make my rune creation faster, so even if it felt a bit bad, I was willing to spend Achievement on it. I just had to hope that I would still have enough Achievement for something useful later. Worst case scenario, I would borrow from Felix.
After that, we moved out of the inner district and took over a nearby house. I got working on my rune, while Sallia, Felix, and Anise got to work rebuilding parts of their own magic systems.
Time began to pass. We spent a few weeks training, in order to rebuild what power we could. Spending so much time training was frustrating, when our objective was right in front of us... but we needed to be careful. Thankfully, nothing unusual happened during our training. We didn't run into any other groups of market members, or any powerful monsters.
The first one to build more of her magic system was Sallia. Since we knew the spiders had incredible speed, Sallia focused her second rune on countering that ability. Sallia’s second rune let her 'harden' nearby air. She could make an ordinary patch of air into something that felt more like thick, sludgy gelatin. It also slowed us down, but it didn't slow down Sallia. That made it a little bit prone to getting in our way, but that was fine. Our plan was to get off a curse with my tarot deck, then blast the spider down with spells from afar. Sallia was the only person we expected to fight on the front lines anyway.
Felix, meanwhile, made several more batches of bombs for Anise to throw. Sadly, Anise’s magic system would take too long to rebuild. This was a problem we would need to address by next world. Hopefully, after an ability evolution or two, Anise would have a faster and more optimized magic system. In the meantime, she would still be able to use magic missiles, her sword, and all of the bombs Felix was giving her.
Felix built himself a pair of prosthetic knees, which gave him the ability to unleash a massive burst of speed. For having such a short time to work with, and lacking materials, he had done a pretty good job of improving himself where he could. Most of his time was spent building more bombs for Anise and himself to throw, though.
As for me, after two weeks, I managed to build my next rune. I didn’t work on anything else, because I knew what I needed to focus on. For my rune ability, I rebuilt my dimensional sight. I had used it often last world, and I felt it was a pretty good choice for our current needs. Since the spider was so fast and hard to track, giving myself a bigger range to see it was the obvious solution. If I got really lucky, maybe I could kill it before it noticed us.
Power: Condense your second rune out of absorption essence
Achievement +160
After two whole weeks, our group was getting antsy. Time was ticking away, and we had only barely scratched the outskirts of the spatial fair. We had a little less than a month and a half left before our bodies would start to deteriorate. By that time, we needed either a way to extend our time in the Market, or a way to reincarnate. We had to get moving.
It was time to see if our plan worked.