"I can't say I expected the response to be that quick… But I suppose I should be grateful…" The store owner muttered after we finished off the thugs.

Amber nudged the body of one of the thugs with her foot, "Yeah, I'll bet. He would have blown your brains out if it weren't for us. You're lucky we were already coming here in the first place."

"Are there people who clean up these dead bodies here?" I asked, remembering the cleaners back on Theeve station.

The store owner nodded, "Yeah, I already called them. They'll be here to get rid of them in a few minutes. Anyway, since you said that you were on your way here, I assume you have something you want to buy? Some White Powder perhaps?"

I turned to Lea and she nodded, taking over the conversation.

"We need some hundred and ten millimetre pipes, brackets to support said pipes, a hand drill, nails and--"

"Woah, woah, slow down. I do have a hardware section at the back, I can bring you over there to take a look."

Lea nodded, "That would be preferable."

The owner then turned to me, "I'll take her there. Feel free to browse around if you want. Give me a holler if you need anything."

"Sure. But I guess I'll just be looting these thugs first."

"Knock yourself out."

The owner guided Lea to the back of the store while Amber and I set to looting the dead bodies of the thugs for anything valuable we could use or sell.

Hey, I already said I'm a loot goblin, I'm not going to just leave all this free loot to waste.

Besides… I'm actually helping out since I'm dragging out all the corpses outside the store so that we could better organise the stuff we get from them.

I also managed to pull out the dead thug inside the car which left us with seventeen corpses in total.

Unfortunately, only half of them had guns while the rest were using melee weapons like a bat or a knife which wouldn't really sell well. The good thing was that three of them had personal shields and those were worth quite a bit of money at least.

I also looked through the two vehicles that they had driven in and looted them clean.

In total, we've got four handguns, one rifle, two shotguns, three shields and several Credit Chips from looting which coupled with the reward for saving the store owner added up to six thousand Credits in total.

Pretty poor thugs if you ask me… But I guess I shouldn't complain considering where we were.

While we were dragging the corpses out of the store, I also noticed a couple of armed individuals who showed up and stuck around to watch for a bit before walking away.

At first I thought they were also thugs belonging to another gang or even comrades of the thugs we just killed but I realised later that those were just Mercs who had also wanted to respond to the job but were too late in reaching here.

They most likely wanted to see who completed the job before they could or maybe they just wanted to see what they missed out on.

Amber dumped the last corpse in the pile before dusting her hands, "I think they're the local thugs around here. Most likely just a small gang that claimed this part of the street as their territory and collected protection money from shops like these."

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I turned to her, "I'm guessing we should prepare ourselves for their retaliation or something?"

She scoffed, "Pfft, I'm pretty sure we wiped out most of their group with this. They probably sent out everyone they have just to make a statement but I'm guessing that they'll only have like two or three people left in the gang at most. They're pretty much disbanded at this point."

I suppose that's a piece of good news at least.

"What do we do about the cars though?" I asked.

"The cleanup crew will take care of it. We can't sell it easily anyway so that will be part of their payment. Not that it has anything to do with us anyway."

Soon enough, a rather large truck sped down the street and stopped a short distance away from us and several masked men got out, armed with what appears to be cleaning tools.

One of them who was at least a good foot taller than me approached us, "You the client?"

Amber jerked her thumb at the store, "Nah, we're the Mercs who took the hustle. Client's the owner back there."

The man nodded and went inside, prompting the other guys with him to start cleaning up the corpses and the blood stains.

I leaned over to Amber, "I'm guessing that it's normal for everywhere to have cleaners like this?"

She shrugged, "There's a corporation behind it actually. They're all just workers working for subsidiaries of it. Anything you need cleaned up, you just need to give them a call and they'll take care of everything, no questions asked."

"Even crime scenes?"

"Even crime scenes."

"That's bad for the police or whatever, right?"

Amber grinned, "In the inner colonies, they would have agreements made with the local security forces on what they can and cannot clean up before they get to it. But for fringe systems like this? No one really gives a shit. It's not like there aren't people dying pretty much everyday, right?"

I guess she has a point.

No one's going to try and find out who's the murderer of some poor nameless smuck that got done in by another random thug because they looked at them wrong. If they did, they might even find that the perpetrator got done in by another random thug because they looked at them wrong too, wasting your time and efforts.

We put aside the loot we got from the thugs and went back in the store, taking the chance to see if there was anything that we needed for purchasing here.

Amber already assured us that if there was something we needed but wasn't found here, we could just place an order at the Trader Union for the stuff to be delivered to us.

The only reason why we weren't doing this from the start was because buying from the Trader Union would be more expensive and it would take several days for them to deliver the requested items.

The good thing was that we were planning to stay here for a bit and do some Merc jobs around here so time wasn't an issue.

I wasn't really looking for anything in particular but the store did sell some synthfood that I've never seen before so I decided to grab a couple of them to test their taste. Maybe they could serve as replacements for some of the organic ingredients that are harder to get like meat and fish.

The shop also had some spare parts but I wasn't knowledgeable about ships to know how to fix one myself.

Hmm… If I get myself a larger ship, I might need to hire a mechanic or something.

It's not a big issue now since we don't spend that long out in space since we don't have the supplies to last that long without making stops at a station so we could always just have the station's mechanics do the maintenance and repairs if needed.

But when we have a larger ship capable of doing long haul missions, we'll definitely need someone who can maintain the ship while we are far away from civilization.

While looking through the other shelves, I found the entertainment section of the store as well.

Oh~ They have poker cards! Seems like even in the future, cards like these are still a thing huh?

I should grab a few of these to store on my ship in case I get bored and we can play with Lea and Amber.

There's also some cartridges that look like you can plug it into a machine to play games but I don't recognise any of the games that are displayed on the cartridges. They also don't look like they would slot inside a personal terminal either and I don't see any machines being sold on the nearby shelves that would suggest it to be the machine these cartridges were designed for.

But taking a look at the pictures printed on the cartridges, I could tell that some of these games were sci-fi RPG type of games which I kind of found it ironic since it would be considered a modern day realistic RPG in this universe instead.

I decided to just grab a couple of the interesting looking ones anyway just in case. I could ask the store owner later about what can be used to play these and I could order the machine from the Trader Union if I need to.

Alright, that's all I need for now… Is Lea done yet?