"Ability?" Mathew repeated after the merchant only to shake his head. "Wait, does that have anything to do with my mind and arcane stats?" he asked, hoping to sneakily steal some knowledge from the merchant.
"Fifty cores," the cold voice of the merchant sounded extremely pleased with itself.
"Fuck," Mathew cursed, only to turn around on his feet and attempt to walk away from the shop. Yet, no matter how many steps Mathew took... he didn't move from his place at all.
'I don't feel any force pulling me back,' Mathew thought, surprised by the unexpected outcome of his attempt. 'It's like the space here... is curved in a way that disallows anyone to leave!'
This was a groundbreaking discovery.
'If only I could make a space like that, I wouldn't need to fight those monsters at all!' Mathew thought, eager to find out a way to establish such a place.
He turned around on his feet, ready to talk to the merchant again...
Only for the young man's enthusiasm to die on the spot when he realized the downside of the idea.
"Just out of curiosity," Mathew called out, shaking his head over his momentary naivete. "How much would it cost for me to learn the spell allowing establishing areas like your shop?"
Mathew had no hopes of receiving an answer. And even if he were to receive one...
'I'm sure it would just say that it can't tell me,' Mathew thought, long parting with the idea that he actually asked about.
And then, for but a moment, something changed.
'Huh?'
The young man only managed to shrug when everything went back to normal, as normal as standing in a separate dimension of the shop could be.
'What the hell was that?' he thought, staring towards the place where for that single moment, Mathew could swear he could see the real figure of the merchant reveal itself.
This figure appeared out of nowhere... and just stood there with a small smirk on its lips before it disappeared altogether as if it never appeared in the first place.
"Five hundred cores," the metallic voice of the merchant appeared, slapping Mat hard with both reality and the subversion of my expectations.
There actually was a cost associated with learning this ability. But assuming that Mathew's guess was correct...
Then all the cores spent at a merchant would end up accelerating the apocalypse. In other words, by spending a whopping five hundred cores, a number that Mathew wasn't sure he could cough up in the first place, he could obtain an ability that would likely no longer be useful.
"I guess I will have to get a bit more cores for that first," Mathew stated, hoping that the merchant couldn't really read his thoughts.
This was the very reason why he didn't want to reveal his line of thought to Leila before. Because ever since Mathew noticed the possibility of a link between him using merchants to their fullest and the monsters evolving a lot sooner than they should, he could no longer happily thrust those merchants.
"I wish to go back," Mathew stated a moment later, content with what he had achieved so far.
And since he couldn't get the question of whether or not his guess was correct from the merchant directly, he was now ready to learn the news from his indirect method.
"May you come back to do more business soon," the metallic voice of the merchant appeared right as the entire subspace started to collapse, ejecting Mathew back into reality.
"Haah!" Mathew exhaled all the air from his lungs before desperately breathing in the fresh air.
'This was nervewracking,' he thought, falling to his knees as he desperately fought to regain his breath.
Yet, the world wouldn't leave Mathew alone, even for a moment. Before he could even stand up, a new, powerful roar shook all the air in the school, only to be followed by the very walls of the building cracking.
'It's not going to last long!' Mathew thought, alerted by the rate of degradation of the building's structure.
Wary of the potential collapse of his footing, Mathew rushed down the stairs. Yet, the second he made his first step, his body suddenly refused to follow his commands.
'What the...'
Mathew couldn't even utter a curse when his consciousness suddenly wavered, only for a strange vision to appear before his eyes.
In it, a man held something shiny in his hand. He then raised said hand... only to smash it down to the ground.
Snap.
Within a single frame of his perception, Mathew appeared back in reality, now free to go wherever he wanted. The strange force that stopped him before was now nowhere to be seen.
"What the hell was that?" Mathew asked out loud, once again taking a moment to take a breath and calm himself down. Yet, this time, the new roar didn't appear once, only to then vanish and refuse to repeat itself.
This time, the roar continued to shake the air in the school, forcing Mathew to enter his urgency mode.
"I need to hurry," Mathew muttered, grasping at the corpses on the floor only to gain a little bit of momentum. He then finally managed to get back to his feet and rush towards the stairs.
Mathew reached the staircase and instantly took a leap. Rather than trying to walk down the stairs like a normal person, he jumped all the way towards the ending wall of the corridor, only to bounce off it and jump down another set of stairs.
By using this method, Mathew managed to reach the second floor of the building in no time, only to see two of his companions with desperate looks on their faces.
"What happened?!" Daria screamed out, looking at Mathew in hopes of actually receiving an answer.
Yet, instead of sating the girl's thirst for an explanation, Mathew looked over at Leila.
Maybe it was her coldheartedness, maybe her unnatural calmness... But the girl somehow managed to notice Mathew's stare despite all the commotion caused by the roars.
In here, on the second floor, with just a single set of stairs separating them from the source of those roars... The sound alone was so powerful it made Mathew doubt his ability to fight those evolved monsters.
"Now you know why I didn't want to talk about the cores before," Mathew said before pulling out his ax from underneath his hoodie and looking down the last set of stairs left for them to clean.
"My bad, sorry for that," Leila muttered, not having any problems with accepting her mistakes.,
"Mathew!" Daria shouted, infuriated by his attention going to her partner. "What's going on?!"
"Nothing much," Mathew replied, only to shake his head. "The monsters are just that eager to see those who fed them!"
"HAAH!?" Daria opened her mouth wide, uttering a loud shout without a care in the world about potentially attracting zombie attention to them. "What the fuck do you mean?!" she screamed out, slapping her fist against the concrete wall of the building.
Thud.
The dull sound of the impact initially played a trick on Mathew's senses. Only when his eyes followed after the movement did he realize that the girl actually smashed the concrete in, nearly making a hole through the entire thickness of the wall!
"I can't give you any proof," Mathew said, fixing his grasp on the handle of his ax as he took a step down towards the hell that he had no other choice but to conquer.
"But it seems that using stones at the merchant boosts the strength of monsters and zombies alike!"
And here it is, bonus chapter for today.
Once again: if we reach top7 in the monthly PS ranking, 1 bonus chapter for tomorrow.
If we fail to do so, I will go lower and ask for top8 for bonus chap tomorrow. But ultimately, chances for bonus chapters only exist within the top10 :D
Mathew descended down the stairs. Following after him were two girls, each holding a machete in their right hand.
They moved down the stairs, one step at a time. Yet, no matter how each of them wanted to prolong the moment before the fighting would resume...
The world continued to move forward regardless of their wishes.
"Take the sides!" Mathew commanded, bringing his hand up the handle of the ax, grabbing it pretty near the blade mount.
"Yosh!" Daria breathed out only to take a deep, long breath. And then, just as she started to let the air flow back into the atmosphere, she moved forward.
Her machete drew a wide arc in the air, only for the girl to decapitate one of the few monsters that had already made their way towards the staircase.
On the upper floors, clearing the corridor and the staircase adjacent to it would give Mathew's group at least ten to fifteen minutes of rest. But now that they were invading the very bottom floor of the building, that time shortened to just five minutes.
"I'm on it too!" realizing that she was late for the party, Leila shouted and rushed downstairs.
"Go on," Mathew said, nodding his head.
As ungentlemanly it was for him to move behind the girls, he had to save his strength for the fight with evolved monsters.
It was a challenge he never encountered and, all the more, never accomplished during his first run of the apocalypse.
But now, Mathew had little to no choice regarding this matter.
"Let's go!" Mathew said out loud, shaking his shoulder to warm them up.
And then, he took the corner on the staircase, officially entering the space considered to be the ground floor.
'I can see...' Mathew ignored all the zombies swarming below, focusing his attention on scanning the place of battle. 'Four... No, five of them!'
The monsters were there, just like Mathew guessed.
Each of the monsters took a separate spot in the open space of the bottom floor, each of them banging their massive bodies against the concrete walls supporting the building.
'What the hell?' Mathew thought, shocked by what he saw.
This wasn't a random rampage of monsters unable to find the prey despite sensing it.
It was a coordinated effort clearly aimed at taking the entire building down!
"Take care of the small fry!" Mathew shouted his order, rushing ahead.
The experience of clearing the upper floors with the girls quickly proved to be quite useful.
Mathew didn't pay any mind to the zombies. He simply rushed ahead, aiming for the nearest of the evolved zombies.
Even though each of the zombies and evolved ones as well had distinctive traits that made it one of a kind, all the basic evolved zombies had a pretty similar frame.
They all looked like massive piles of meat and bones. And from what Mathew could tell by staring one of such monsters down, the evolved ones actually were made from several zombies.
'They couldn't move like that without any sort of skeleton,' Mathew thought, using the fact that the monster didn't notice him yet to pave a way towards it.
'Still, that skull armor is going to be a pain,' Mathew thought, noticing where the rest of the bones from the five bodies of the evolved zombie consisted of go.
The evolved zombies looked as if someone had taken a man, plastered flesh of four more people all over him, only to then enclose the subject in a cage made of bones.
There was only one special element about the monster, save for all sorts of organs hanging on the outside of its skin.
And it was a gentle-shining crystal whose shine could be seen even from through the folds of fat of the monster that covered it.
It was the monster's crystallized heart. An organ allowing its form to operate, yet so overused due to this task that a single scratch was enough to make it go into overdrive.
'Disgusting,' Mathew thought, swinging his ax to the side and allowing the handle to seemingly sweep out of his grasp.
Thrown to the back, the ax's blade pulled the entire weapon along. Mathew only closed his hand when nearly the entire handle brushed past his fingers.
And then, with the greatest possible leaver on the weapon, Mathew swung it forward, right against one of the few exposed vitals of the monster.
"RAAOOARAR!"
The monster unleashed a hectic scream when one of its organs squeezed and then exploded, covering everything in the vicinity with dark blood.
'Again!' Mathew shouted in his mind, retracting the weapon only to swing with his entire body and pull a downward slash right against the monster's shoulder.
"SCREEEEE!" once again, the monster released a powerful cry. Yet this time, Mathew's attack turned out to be successful, digging deeply into the monster's flesh and reaching all the way to its crystallized heart.
The second Mathew's blade touched the crystal hidden by lumps of flesh and bones, the entire thing exploded, shredding the body of the evolved monster apart.
'I guess it couldn't rely on muscles alone to keep that kind of mass up,' Mathew thought, shaking his head and looking around to take stock of the situation.
The girls did their job well, holding all the other enemies at bay. Yet, the screams of the monster that Mathew defeated already alerted all the other ones present on the ground floor.
And then, Mathew saw it come out.
It wasn't anything that he had seen in either of his lives before.
Just like the simply evolved monsters, it was constructed from flesh, blood, and bones, making it look pretty grotesque. Yet, its form alone was enough to nearly send Mathew into a frenzied puking.
From afar, the new kind of monster looked like a centipede, standing on ten pairs of legs and hands alike while flailing four more pairs in the air like some sort of weapon.
Its legs were constructed out of bones connected with lumps of flesh.
'What the hell is this?' Mathew thought, feeling all the satisfaction and euphory from killing an evolved monster disappear in the heat of a moment.
He had encountered the evolved monsters before. This was the one reason why he dared to go against them with only three souls in his group.
Yet, in the face of this new opponent... Mathew could feel something warm spreading over his legs and crotch.
'FUCK!' Mathew screamed inwardly out, shaking his body to get rid of the terror that froze him in place.
For a second, everything except Mathew froze in place.
The zombies stopped moving, and the evolved monsters dropped their charge.
Then, every last undead being on the ground floor of the building turned their eyes towards Mathew.
"ROAAAAR!"
With what seemed like an order from the undead centipede, all the undead rushed forward, eager to tear Mathew's body apart!
As we are reaching the pinnacle of the opening arc, I want to take my time writing those chapters. I'm not going to fck them up just to write more of them.
You can expect another chapter soon!
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