Chapter 56: Bargain Shopping

  The aether around him began to churn. His channels howled in warning as he began the aether manipulation to cast the [Vita-Surge Cloak], the spell that would set his body ablaze from the inside out.

  Azure light erupted into being around his skin as Alex’s form ignited and the spell took hold, his very veins erupting with what felt like liquid lightning, pure vital intent swimming throughout his body. His aura rippled outward, a storm of azure-blue aether swirling violently as it fused with the blue-black of the [Demon Asura Style]. The clash of energies roared like colliding storms, and his [Wyrm-Heart] hammered in his voidspace so hard it rattled his teeth.

  The ground at his feet spiderwebbed into cracks. His muscles bulged and his bones creaked audibly under the strain. His skin shimmered with too much power coursing through too few channels, draconic scaled patches flickered in and out of existence on his skin like half-formed armor.

  But Alex didn’t care. He locked his eyes on the Queen, and the world narrowed to her alone.

  “RRRRAAAAAH!”

  He launched forward, every step exploding into shockwaves.

  The Queen unfurled her wings completely, screeching with delight. Her own energy flared to meet his charge, and then they collided. The chamber thundered with the violence of feral beasts.

  Alex’s [Flare]-wreathed fists smashed against her body, each strike detonating like a shaped depth-charge and sending shards of carapace flying, blood spraying.

  She countered with quick wing sweeps, slashing across his shoulders and arms, drawing toxic blood that hissed as it splattered the cavern floor.

  He ducked before driving a knife-handed [Flare] into her abdomen, and the Queen staggered back a step, mandibles clacking in irritation. She retaliated instantly, her own claws swiping across his chest and opening a jagged gash from shoulder to hip.

  Alex roared in her face, ignoring the wound, [Wind Lance]s screamed from behind him in a spiraling flurry. Dozens of razor-sharp focused projectiles whistled through the air, carving furrows across her wings, forcing her to recoil and defend.

  As he pressed forward, she suddenly slammed a kick into his torso that launched him into a wall. His head snapped forward as her shadow fell over him, only for him to return fire. Scales gleamed under the shimmering cloak spell on his arm as he drove an uppercut into her jaw so hard it sent a shockwave through the chamber.

  Her mandibles clicked shut, gore dripping down her chin.

  The fight devolved into pure carnage.

  Punch met claw. Fang met scale. Her tail cracked the air like a whip, slamming into Alex’s left leg hard enough to crack bone but he grabbed it mid-swing, dragging her forward, and drove his right knee into her chest with enough force that it splintered part of her carapace.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  His vision blurred. His body was giving up, his aether was running dry almost to the point of empty. And yet he kept going, spurred on by the injuries he had already managed to give her. [Wrath Siphon] keeping him going just a bit longer. Another punch, another kick. His fist crunched through exoskeleton and into soft tissue, and she responded in kind.

  Savage blow after savage blow, they went at it.

  And then it was over...

  Alex found himself heaving, looking down at the Chimera Queen in anger, barely able to breath…

  As she held him aloft by his throat.

  The Queen laughed a grating, insectile rasp that scraped against Alex’s ears. To her, he wasn’t a threat, just food that had tried too hard to bare its teeth.

  He writhed in her grip, but the [Vita-Surge Cloak] was now gone, his aether energy spent, and his channels all but burned out. His body was wrecked, every limb broken and almost useless. Even his toxic blood sputtering across her chitin didn’t bother her; her strength was unshakable.

  Mandibles flashed in his vision. Agony tore through him as her bite ripped into his right arm, nearly severing it above the elbow. The limb dangled, barely clinging by threads of skin and muscle. She chewed, flesh sizzling across her jaw where his blood ate into her.

  As she chewed, her eyes widened. A shudder passed through her from mandibles to feet. “What is this… tastes like…” Her expression began to look almost too eager, too delighted by what she was experiencing. The hunger in her voice transformed into ecstasy. “Inside you… this energy. Where did you—ah, thank you, human. You might have saved me years of evolution.”

  Alex sagged in her grip, too spent and broken to answer. His head lolled back, his vision fading towards black as he fought unconsciousness. Until her mouth opened wider, her throat almost convulsing in front of him. A proboscis shot forward, plunging into his chest.

  It missed his heart by inches.

  The suction hit immediately. Every cell in his body felt as if it was clenched, squeezed, and wrung out like wet cloth. His vision shook as he looked inward, and dread hit him. Golden energy—that golden energy—was being dragged out from deep inside of him, pulled from where it had hidden in his cells. It was ripped away, flowing into the Queen’s mouth and down into her stomach.

  “Alex! Stop her! Stop her NOW!” Obby shouted in his skull, louder, more afraid than Alex had ever heard him. But he couldn’t do anything. He had no aether left. No strength in his limbs. Too beaten up to even raise his head, he couldn’t fight her, couldn’t overpower her.

  But he had prepared for this.

  His remaining good arm shook, trembling as he forced it down at his waist, fingers fumbling into his pocket. They brushed bare metal, the coin.

  The golden light inside him was nearly gone by the time his hand clenched. The coin snapped between his fingers. Surprise flickered across the Queen’s face for only an instant.

  And then Alex was gone.

  ***

  The Queen’s claw closed where Alex had been a heartbeat ago, her mandibles dripping with his blood. For the first time, she looked unsettled, perhaps disappointed. Her proboscis curled back into her throat with a wet snap, clicking teeth grinding in frustration.

  “Gone… my meal… gone!” Her shriek echoed through the chamber, shaking dust from the cavern ceiling. The toxic Wyrm-blood that was already eating into her jawline hissed and smoked, but she ignored that. Her attention was inward, her body writhing in its carapace as if it couldn’t decide whether to revel in the stolen energy or tear itself apart from it. “But no matter… I have tasted it. It is mine now…”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  She turned to the body parts and blood still decorating the cavern floor and smiled.

  ***

  Alex stumbled forward, landing hard on stone that wasn’t dirty cavern floor. The tunnel chamber, the Queen, the blood, it was all gone. He lay in a dimly glowing space, air thick with static, the coin ash trickling through his bloodied fingers.

  The wound in his arm burned, his chest felt hollow where the proboscis had stabbed him, and worst of all, he could still feel the hole where that golden energy had been pulled out.

  Obby spoke again, but he sounded strained, shaken in a way Alex had never heard before. “Idiot. Fool. You almost gave everything away.”

  Alex pressed his forehead to the cold floor, every breath coming in heaving hitches and gasps. “What… what the hell... did she take... from me?”

  Obby seemed to simply fume inside his mind for a few seconds. For a long beat, there was only silence. Alex almost thought the pebble would ignore him, or refuse to answer. But eventually the rock spoke. “It was your only real chance at overcoming this place. The one thing tying you to a future you don’t even understand yet. And now…” Obby’s words grew harsh, the sound in his head grinding like tectonic plates beginning to shift about. “…now she has a piece of it.”

  He didn't know what the enchanted rock meant by that. Obby always got very strange around the topic of the golden energy. But, he didn't have time to be playing ten riddles with the pebble, there were other pressing matters he had to deal with.

  Alex looked blearily about against the blinding white, his vision swimming with afterimages of mandibles and claws. The angry screams of the Queen still rang in his ears, but when the blur cleared, he realized he was no longer in that cavern of death.

  The floor beneath him was polished marble-white, sterile as a surgeon’s dream. The walls were curved in smooth perfection, pulsing faintly with System runes like veins beneath skin. And at the center of it all—standing proud and indifferent to the blood dripping off his mostly-severed arm—was the pedestal. A simple stone column capped with a shimmering glyph interface, waiting for him.

  The Dungeon Shop.

  Alex’s cracked lips twitched upward and reveal crimson stained teeth as he gave the faintest laugh. “Still… alive. And... Still… got my points.”

  He tried to stand, to drag himself over to the pedestal, but his legs gave out instantly. Pain detonated across his ribs, his limbs, his vision flashed black, and he collapsed sideways with a choked grunt. His body was nothing but ruin. Broken bones, torn flesh, a hanging limb… and that hole in his chest where the Queen had pierced him. No potion could regrow the golden energy she had stolen.

  He was an aether-less meatsack. But, he could still heal the meat.

  With shaking fingers, he fumbled with his storage bracelet, pulling free a crystal vial of glowing crimson with a toenail suspended at the center. An elixir of “Troll Regeneration”, one of the items from the large haul he had earned with his fight against Beithin. One that he knew he would hate drinking.

  The liquid shimmered as though it were alive, its essence writhing against the glass. Without ceremony, he popped the cork with his teeth and dumped it down his throat.

  Fire blazed through him. His back arched, breath tearing out of him in a scream that echoed unnaturally in the sterile chamber. He gagged, coughed, and swallowed more, the potion spilling past his lips and onto his chin, hissing against the floor like molten acid.

  It burned like drinking magma, but beneath the agony, sinew began knitting. Flesh crawled back together. The ragged muscle on his dangling arm began to pulse and pull tight, though the limb still hung grotesquely limp. His ribs creaked and snapped into place, bruised organs finding life again.

  The pain didn’t stop. He lay there for some unknown time, waiting for the effect to finally fade away, for his agony to end.

  Alex’s breath rasped in and out, each inhale shallow, each exhale bubbling faintly with copper. He lay still for a long time, waiting, riding the ebb of pain until it dulled into a steady throb that he could live with. His body was still wounded, but he was no longer seconds from bleeding out. The potion had done its job, barely.

  With a grunt, he rolled to his side and dragged himself forward. One elbow at a time, boot scraping against the sterile floor. The closer he got, the louder the hum of the pedestal became. Finally, with one last desperate reach, Alex’s bloodstained hand touched the glowing glyph.

  The sterile chamber vanished.

  His vision exploded into color and data, the white of the world peeling back like paper to reveal an infinite screen of shifting menus and luminous text. Rows upon rows, categories within categories, the System’s Dungeon Shop unfolding in vast complexity. Weapons, armor, talismans, cultivation pills, spell tomes, even raw stat-boosting fragments—millions of items cascading downward like a digital waterfall.

  His lips pulled into a grin. His eyes lit with a fevered excitement, a fire only the System’s endless promise could stoke.

  “Finally,” he whispered, his words were hoarse but full of anticipation. “Finally, I get to spend them.”

  He leaned against the pedestal, body trembling, blood dripping as he scrolled through the endless options. His vision tunneled in on categories he had dreamed about, planned for, obsessed over during every fight, every rest, every brush with death.

  His squad was gone. His body was barely mended. But his mind, his ambition, was still razor sharp.

  He knew what he needed. Not just to survive, but to pursue the insane, impossible goals that had burned in his chest for weeks now.

  Alex checked the System notification;

  Alex licked his cracked lips, his eyes narrowing as the first list of items came into focus. The modifiers looked great. That is, until Alex read the penalty for failing to complete the dungeon entirely. Losing a quarter of all the points he earned… that was a big hit. He wished it wasn’t so high, but he sort of understood why the System made it so.

  “Alright,” he said to himself. “Let’s start building a future.”

  ***

  His shopping spree was rather short this time around. Alex already knew the things he was after, and simply needed to filter the menu down to find them. The Pearl was his debt to Allie being repaid, a potent Dark-Attuned natural treasure that would help in her cultivation.

  He had yet to see any true dark element spells or skills from her so far, but he assumed that would be a matter of time, same as Garret with his potential magma spells.

  The three elixirs were simply the most potent healing items he could find while still being able to afford them. The items wouldn’t bring someone back to life, or regrow limbs—even the Troll Regeneration potion couldn’t do either of those—but it was powerful enough to be effective even with his demanding body.

  The Hydra, Lindwyrm and Manual were all items he wanted to continue pushing his [Wyrm-heart] constitution to new heights. He still wasn’t absolutely sure he liked having the thing in his soulspace, but he was also still unsure about Obby. So he would keep feeding it, for now.

  The Etherium ingot and aethergem, were things he needed to hopefully continue shoring up his aether pool problem. The aethergem itself was the most expensive item he had gotten, by a far margin. And to anyone else, it would seem insane as it merely was able to hold aether energy, and nothing more. But for Alex, it was a god-send, especially as the System’s “D-grade” designation was just another name for “Magus Tier”. Meaning Alex could use this new gem to potentially store 3rd Tier aether in the future.

  The rest of the items, the draught, pome fruit, beast core and others, were simply items Alex found that might contain the largest amount of aether energy for their price. They were still vastly expensive, but for him, their energy contents were worth it.

  With everything purchased and stored away, he had no reason to continue sticking around. Alex took a final look at the sterile environment of the Dungeon shop room, and turned to the portal that was the exit.

  He stepped into it without another second thought.