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“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.

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!”