Markets and Multiverses

As we continued walking through the Market, we kept a wary eye out for skeletons. After all, they could be an easy way to acquire some new weapons, and they were also a notable threat to us right now. Even if they were incredibly stupid, if a lot of them gathered together, we would have a hard time dealing with them. And right now our only weapons were pots and pans. Of course, if we found only a few skeletons, we could kill them and steal their weapons. A group of skeletons was a threat, but a lone skeleton or two was an opportunity.

During our journey, we didn’t find any undead for quite a while. Instead, we just kept walking. It took us about ten minutes to get out of the residential area, where we once again found large quantities of places selling entertainment items, such as alcohol and board games. Most of the environment was still scarred by magic and battle, just like the area we had arrived in during our first trip to the Market.

Finally, after about ten minutes of walking, we found our first skeleton. Since we knew how easy to trick these things were, Sallia, Felix and I grabbed a few roof tiles from a nearby building and dispatched the skeleton from the roof. My roof tile clipped its shoulder, before Sallia killed it with her own roof tile.

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 first time.

Influence: Contributed to the defense of the Market by an [extremely negligible] amount.

Achievement +2, Achievement +0.00

As I got my notification, I frowned. Hadn’t I already gotten a reward for assisting in killing a skeletal foot soldier for the first time?

Then, as I double checked my notification, I grinned.

While I had seen a few System messages already hinting that each reincarnation might reset some Achievement rewards, I was both surprised and pleased to find out that this applied to the Skeletons of the Market as well. It might not be much of a reward, but it was nice to see that we could replenish our Achievement by doing some actions over and over again. I wondered which other rewards reset every reincarnation. Could we get Achievement for forming runes every life? Could we get Achievement for retraining our weapon skills? If so, I would need to rethink how much I valued weapon Abilities. I would still probably hold off on buying them, since I wanted to leave some glut cap open for my main magic system in the future, but I might think about buying beginner swordsmanship again.

After killing the skeleton, Sallia grinned and picked up its sword. She gave the weapon a few experimental swings, and frowned. And so did Felix and I.

Even I could see the problem. Sallia’s movements were far inferior to what they had been back on the islands. A big part of it was probably because she wasn’t used to her current body. She had suddenly added four or five years to her age when she returned to the Market, and her physical features were also a blend of her first life and second life. While that wasn’t a problem when it came to basic walking and movement, when it came to Sallia’s carefully honed years of swordsmanship experience, it threw her abilities way off. She was a little weaker than beginner grade in swordsmanship right now, although I suspected with a few days of training, she could get back to Beginner Grade.

“Should we stop?” I asked Sallia. “While the odds are low, if we run into skeletons, having you able to fight could make a big difference in how likely we are to survive. We can wait a few days if you need to retrain your swordsmanship or something.”

“I can still fight like this, ” said Sallia. “Let’s just be careful. I don’t want to hold you up since you’re about to buy a bunch of Stats, and you’ll need some time to get adjusted to your new physical abilities after buying them. As long as we use the rooftop trick we should still be able to handle some groups of skeletons, as long as no spellcasters show up. And if spellcasters appear, we probably don’t have a chance either way.”

Felix paused, before he nodded. “If you’re all right with that, I guess we can push onwards. But don’t strain yourself. Let’s make sure we’re as cautious as possible, so that we don’t lose a life while in the Market. All right?”

Sallia nodded, and after some hesitation, we continued moving forward. We only had a few months before our new bodies decayed, so if Sallia wanted to keep pushing forward, we needed to be careful about managing our time.

After another twenty minutes of walking, we left the entertainment section of the Market. Quickly, I identified a much more interesting building. This one was called “Basic Transmigrator’s Kit; Stats, Abilities, and Items for those less than three worlds old!”

It sounded exactly like what we were looking for. The shop was riddled with much more damage than the average shop in the Market, and had seven giant holes in the side of its walls. It was a little difficult to see inside, since there was a bunch of clutter and wreckage blocking each giant hole in the wall, but there were signs of battle everywhere around the shop.

Oddly enough, there were no bodies nearby. Most houses and shops we had seen in the Market that went through battle had several copies of the same corpses littered around the site. This one, however, was devoid of corpses. Which probably meant they had all reanimated and had either left, or were waiting for unlucky transmigrators to get killed by them.

In other words, it was perfect as a spot to farm a little Achievement and then buy our Stats.

I looked at Sallia and Felix, and they nodded back at me, before we clambered up a nearby building. We spent a bit of time getting some roof tiles ready to throw, and then we started.

I threw the first brick in front of the store, to draw out any undead lurking in the store. After that, I quickly reached towards our pile of ammunition, preparing to kill whatever ran out.

Nothing happened.

I frowned, and turned towards Felix and Sallia.

“No Skellies?” I said.

Sallia shrugged. “Maybe they’re too far in to hear us properly?” She took a look around at the other ruined buildings in our area. Then, she threw a brick directly at the building. It smashed into the door, creating a much louder banging sound than my throw, which had landed just outside of the door.

Once again, nothing happened.

“Maybe there aren’t any skeletons inside?” Said Felix, after a moment of hesitation. “The first time I was here, the skeletons all responded to sound whenever it appeared. If there aren’t any skeletons responding, maybe we’re already safe.”

“Let’s try a few more times,” said Sallia. “If nothing comes out, we’ll keep a few tiles ready as ammunition and enter the store.”

After a few more bricks throw at the wall and several minutes of waiting, nothing happened. With some hesitation, the three of us clambered back down the side of the building, and then slowly approached the building. After cracking open the door, I peeked inside, half-expecting to see a giant horde of skeletons that had somehow ignored our attempts to lure them out.

Inside of the building, I could see four rows of Cubes laid out in the store. The first three looked like they were devoted to Soul Fragments, and allowed customers to purchase any type of Soul fragment, all the way up to Tier 3. This was two tiers higher than the ‘maximum’ tier of soul fragments we could buy at the first store we had found. The row of cubes behind the soul fragment cubes were even better. They were Ability cubes. I wasn’t close enough to read what kinds of abilities one could buy from them, but I could still see the sign advertising that the store sold most of the well known and sought after Abilities new Transmigrators wanted. Evidently, this store was much wealthier than the first store we had visited.

Inside of the store, however, there was something very different from the undead I had come to expect.

Sitting about halfway inside of the building was a tree root. Rather than an ordinary tree root, however, this tree root set my teeth on edge.

The top half of the tree root looked normal, if rather large. It was covered in green moss and flowers. If I had seen it anywhere else, I might have thought it was an inviting place to sit down and take a rest while hiking through the woods.

However, the bottom half of the tree root was instead covered in smears of blood-red mana, which glowed in the dim light of the store. It looked like the bottom half of the tree root had taken a dip in a pool of blood before resurfacing. Oddest of all, I couldn’t see where the tree root came from. Tree roots were usually attached to trees; however, this one was not. Past a certain point, the root seemed to just… vanish into thin air. The patch of air where the tree root came from gave me a familiar feeling. One that I had encountered many times before on the islands.

It was as if there was a distortion in space near the body of the tree root. Even though I couldn’t see the rest of the tree, I got the strangest feeling that I was looking at something massive that was hidden in a way my eyes just couldn’t uncover. However, the feeling of dread it gave me was unmistakable.

I stopped, and Sallia and Felix stopped as well.

I looked cautiously at the tree branch.

“What is that?” I whispered, in case the tree branch could hear us. The tree branch didn’t look like it was an undead creature at all. The skeletons, liches, and flesh giants we had seen in the Market so far were all distinctly undead in nature. But the tree branch we were looking at right now didn’t resemble the undead at all. It looked like some sort of four-dimensional tree covered in blood. The top half was even covered in flowers and moss, which somehow made me even more nervous.

“I’ve never seen something like that before,” said Sallia, nervously gripping her sword as she peeked through the door as well. “Should we ignore it? It might not attack us.”

“I have a bad feeling about this. Maybe we should just-” before Felix could finish talking, the tree branch twitched.

From the top of the tree branch, chunks of wood started peeling themselves away from the tree branch. Wooden cutouts of tree bark ripped themselves away from the rest of the root, before their bodies slowly started to ripple and distort. Moments later, they turned into strange, wooden butterflies. Despite being made entirely of wood, they still seemed alive. Their wings flapped gently in our direction…

And inside the shop, the world tilted in a sickening direction, as space broke around the butterflies. I grabbed Sallia and Felix and started running for my life as the front of the store was shredded apart by a wave of spatial demolition, and the seven massive holes in the walls of the store became eight.

By the slimmest of margins, I managed to flop out of the way of the attack before losing a limb or dying, throwing Sallia and Felix out of the way of the attack as well.

The tree root wasn’t done yet. With a crash, it ripped through the side of the store as if it were made of wet cardboard, before the tip of the root tried to poke at me. I got a very bad feeling that if the tree root touched me, I would lose a life immediately, but I couldn’t dodge fast enough.

I stared at the tree root, feeling helpless, but Sallia somehow managed to flip herself around and slice at the tip of the tree branch with her sword. The blade bounced off of the tree root, but Sallia still deflected the root, and instead of ripping through my body it swung over my head. I rolled out of the way before it crashed down onto the streets of the Market, ripping apart the pavement like it was made of mud.

The tree root reeled back, and the wooden butterflies streamed out of the hole in the side of the store. Their wings began glowing…

Felix threw his roof tile at a wooden butterfly. Before the roof tile connected, space cracked open in front of the tile Felix had thrown. The roof tile disappeared, teleported somewhere else. However, the butterflies seemed to react to the object closest to them, and so they sent the next wave of attacks towards the now-missing roof tile. Felix’s actions bought us enough time to get back to our feet and start running again. The tree root seemed to ripple and disappear, suddenly folding itself back into thin air. I lost sight of it, but the three of us had already nearly died. We kept running straight back towards the entertainment zone, keeping an eye out for the strange tree root or more wooden butterflies.

Thankfully, even though it had hidden itself from us, the tree root didn’t seem to be able to go very far. Once we fled a certain distance away, it reappeared, thrashing wildly at us as it tried to reach us and kill us. The wooden butterflies also weren’t able to move more than a certain distance away from the tree root. Which was a relief, because if they got another clean attack on us we would have died.

Finally, realizing we weren’t coming back to the shop, the tree root began to slowly slither back into the store, like a snake lying in wait. The wooden butterflies began to return to the tree root. Upon touching it, they somehow… melded back into the wood they had come from, disappearing into the bark as if they had never existed in the first place. Meanwhile, three of us collapsed on the ground. We didn’t need to breathe in these bodies, but after barely surviving our encounter with the strange tree root, all of us still heaved gasps of relief as we realized that we had survived.

“What the hell was that?” asked Sallia.

I shuddered, thinking about the strange tree root, and the wooden butterflies that could use magic and bend space.

“That…” I said, “Was not an undead creature.”

“Some sort of… spatial creature? The tree root reminds me of some of the denizens of the islands,” said Felix, frowning. “I think it was a little stronger than most land beasts. And we don’t have an ocean nearby to conveniently get the tree root to drown itself.”

I shivered. “At least we don’t need to fight it. We can find a different shop to buy things from. I don’t think we can fight that thing yet.”

Sallia sighed, before she frowned. “You know, I’m starting to notice a pattern. The poorer shops are often guarded by weaker enemies, like skeletons, while more important buildings, like the pool of reincarnation, are guarded by skeletal mages and flesh giants. Then, the shop we just entered was guarded by that strange tree root. Do you guys get the feeling that the hostile creatures of the Market congregate around places we find important? There are almost no undead laying around the residential area, but there are a few skeletons in the entertainment districts. Then, shops and important areas have more dangerous enemies, like spellcasters. I could overlook it a few times, but I’m starting to wonder. Is this intentional?”

I frowned. “Maybe.”

Felix nodded. “I do wonder if a civilization as powerful as the Market could really disappear from a natural disaster. If they were destroyed by an outside faction, that makes much more sense, at least to me.”

“A faction that uses undead and trees, perhaps?” I said, frowning. “Or the undead could just be the result of a few Mages on their side, or a spell or something. Honestly, the tree root seemed several times more dangerous than the skeletons were. Considering how powerful average residents of the Market were supposed to be, I’ve been wondering how the weak skeletons we’ve encountered so far could have possibly destroyed the Market. That tree root and those butterflies… they were much more dangerous. If the Market faced lots of creatures like that, I would have a much better idea how the Market fell. Of course, I could be wrong. I’m just guessing right now, after all.”

Sallia frowned. “Either way, we can’t let our guard down. If the market was destroyed by an external force, and they left behind things like the tree roots and the skeletons to guard the important bits of the Market, who knows what else is laying around? And more to the point, do you guys also think that the most important facilities will have the strongest guards?”

“Probably. Why?” I said.

“How strong are the guards are going to be in places where we can buy lives?”

I paused. “Shit.”

acaswell

Reminder that I might have jury duty next week, which may cancel all of next week’s chapters or delay them or something. If you don’t see any chapters next week, that’s why.

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