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Chapter 425: Raiders of the Lost Bark - Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2025-08-07 07:41:11 +0000 UTCSince we had a few minutes of time before the man was likely to arrive, Felix got to work setting up several traps. We also grabbed a variet
Since we had a few minutes of time before the man was likely to arrive, Felix got to work setting up several traps. We also grabbed a variety of random supplies from the kitchen, especially blunt weapons. We hadn’t gotten much information from the first girl we had fought, but I hadn’t given up on extracting information yet. Anything we could learn about the other group of people, or the Market itself, would be valuable.
The four of us set up an ambush right in front of the hallway, before we hid. We waited with bated breath as the sound of footsteps drew closer and closer. I felt my heart start to beat faster, until the man finally drew close enough that I could analyze his soul with my soul sight.
The tension bled out of my shoulders a moment later.
Based on my estimate, the man walking toward us had about the same quantity of life force as Amelia, the woman we had just fought. While her force spells had been dangerous, and her mist-step had made her a difficult enemy, she had been far from the most dangerous threat we had ever encountered in the Market. More importantly, this time we would be ambushing the enemy, instead of the ones getting ambushed. That made a huge difference in the flow of battle.
The man continued to move towards us, and as he strode closer, his voice became louder and louder. Finally, he seemed to realize that something had happened to Amelia. Instantly, he stopped yelling at the room - instead, he crouched down, and began to tread far more carefully. Fortunately for us, he didn’t turn around and flee, nor did he alert any other compansions. Instead, he kept moving towards the room, though he looked like he was sneaking.
Another minute passed, before the man stepped into the room. I finally realized that the man wasn’t just walking slowly and quietly - he was invisible. Unfortunately for him, whatever he was using to become invisible didn’t help much against my soul sight. Since I had been sharing my vision with my friends, it didn’t help him escape their vision, either.
A split second after he stepped into the room, Sallia dropped towards the back of his head, aiming the pommel of her sword at his cranium. Anise used a spell to conjure a giant flash of light and a loud crackling sound, disrupting the man’s vision and hearing. Meanwhile, Felix took a small kitchen knife and used it to slice a nearby string in half. A moment later, a few loud hisses erupted from within the hallway, unleashing a cloud of harmless but extremely foul-smelling gas into the hallway. Felix’s first trap was just a distraction, rather than a real threat.
The man gasped in pain as bright light filled the room, but somehow managed to dodge out of the way of Sallia’s sword slam. The moment he smelled Felix’s rotten fruit gas, he gagged, and then immediately held his breath as he tried to maneuver out of the hallway.
Sallia used that split second of hesitation to great effect, and kneed the man in the stomach. The man gasped in pain, before his mouth opened. Then, the most awful screeching sound I had ever heard in my many lifetimes emanated from his mouth. It felt as if someone had taken a hammer and slammed it directly into the core of my very being - not just the mundane, physical flesh that half of my body was comprised of, but the concept of ‘hope’ that the eldritch half of my being was tied to. It was an on the deeper, conceptual level of my being.
I gasped and fell to my knees, but I managed to raise a quivering hand towards the man. Then, I used several flecks of absorption essence snap open two portals near the man’s cheeks, then ruptured them with a rift from {Spatial Rifts}.
The man’s scream abruptly cut off as my spatial ruptures tore through the man’s jaw. The man gurgled wetly, and even though the awful screeching sound had disappeared from the room, I could still hear the disbelief and pain in the man’s voice as the ruined bones and flesh of his jaw tried to form noise.
Sallia tried to slam him in the head again with the pommel of her sword, but I felt a ripple of essence. A moment later, the man’s figure vanished, and reappeared several meters closer to me. The man glared at me, and then raised an arm at me - but a moment later, the floor erupted into another flash of bright light, as Anise blasted the man with another loud and painful distraction spell. I ducked anyway, just in case the man’s aim was still good. A moment later, I saw a beam of red light soar above my head, before it hit one of the nearby walls and vaporized it into dust.
I used another set of spatial tears to try to cut apart the man’s knees, but he ducked backwards, only to fall back in range of Sallia’s sword. Sallia gave him a heavy punch to the head this time, and the man failed to blink out of the way. He staggered forward, only for Anise to hit his throat with a force missile. The force missile didn’t quite crush his airpipe, but the man still started wetly coughing after Anise’s spell hit him.
That gave Sallia enough time to grab him by the hair, before she slammed his face into the floor. The man grunted and tried to wriggle away, but Sallia repeated the same motion, over and over again. The man failed to teleport away, and his wriggling become less and less coordinated, until he slumped into unconsciousness.
“His scream attack was scary,” I said, after Sallia confirmed the man was truly unconscious. “I could feel it, ripping and gnawing at the very essence of who I am and what made me… well, me. I think the attack had some kind of borderline eldritch principle backing it up.”
My friends nodded. “Weirdest attack I’ve been on the receiving end of recently,” said Felix. “Good thinking with the spatial rift.” Then, he turned his attention back to our new prisoner. “I think we should interrogate him too, but first, we should have everyone except for one of us wear earplugs, and tie the man up securely. As far as I could tell, his attack is based on sound, so if we can’t hear him, we might be able to immunize ourselves to the sound attack. As long as we tie his hands properly afterwards, we should be able to shut off the disintegration beam, too - he seems to need his hands to aim that properly. We can just use the communication bracelets to relay questions and answers back and forth.”
“Sounds good. I want to be the one without earplugs,” I said. “I’m low on alteration essence anyway, and since my build is so reliant on essence to fight, me being knocked down at the start of the fight has the lowest impact on our overall combat strength.”
“I don’t know if I’m comfortable putting you at risk…” said Sallia, as she shuffled awkwardly. “Besides, you’re the group healer. If someone else gets hurt and can’t wake up, you can heal them. But if you get hurt, and you can’t wake up, nobody has the ability to heal you.”
“One of us has to be at risk. I’d rather it be me than any of you,” I said. “Don’t forget, I have my new Ability upgrade. While I don’t know how strong the concept of ‘hope’ that I embody is, my Ability does imply it can help me survive even the destruction of my physical body in the right circumstances.”
Sallia frowned. “I don’t think you are likely to survive the destruction of your physical body now, at least. I’m sturdier than you are. I should be the one to take that risk.”
“I have more lives than all of you, since I joined later,” said Anise. “If I die while we’re in the Market, it’s not catastrophic, because it’s not like I would succeed in the fight for more lives if we fail next time anyway. For me, losing a life right now is just losing a few thousand Achievement.”
Before we could start arguing further, Felix held up a hand to get our attention.
“I think Miria should be the one to do it,” he said. “That guy’s weird scream attack seemed to do something on the conceptual level that hurt us. The three of us were nearly incapacitated by it, but Miria managed to get a spell off anyway. That implies she has a greater level of resistance to conceptual attacks than the three of us. Perhaps it is because of her eldritch nature.”
Sallia and Anise glared at Felix, but after several seconds of silence, they grudgingly nodded their heads.
With our plan made, Felix quickly made some basic earplugs, sealed everyone's hearing except mine, and then tied our new prisoner up using some shards of metal that he quickly fashioned into makeshift handcuffs. I waited a while, for my essence to recover a bit, and then splashed a bit of water on the prisoner. The splash of water woke him up - and also gave me the chance to heal the damage I had done to his mouth. It would be hard for him to talk in his current state, after all.
The moment the man locked eyes with me and realized that his mouth was no longer shredded to pieces, he opened his mouth to scream again. I lobbed a glob of millennia-old rotten fruit mold down his throat. The man gagged, and then started coughing.
“No screaming, or you can taste more millenia-old food grime,” I said.
The man’s eyes widened in horror as he gagged and tried to cough out the moldy rot that I had stuffed into his throat.
“That’s millenia old rotten fruit, by the way,” I said. The man’s eyes changed from horror to true despair at my words, and he started violently coughing, gagging, and hacking as he tried to expel the repulsive food waste from his throat. After several seconds, he finally managed to get the food back out of his throat.
“Who are you? What do you want?” asked the man.
I raised my eyebrows in surprise. Amelia had seemed utterly convinced that we were transmigrators the moment she laid eyes on us. I had thought that meant that all members of this hostile group had some way to confirm we were transmigrators on sight, and that they would be immediately hostile upon identifying us. However, that clearly wasn’t the case, or the man wouldn’t be asking who we were. Unless he was trying to trick me. However, based on my understanding of facial expressions and body language, I didn’t think the man was lying.
“We’re -” I started to speak, before I realized I was supposed to be relaying the man’s words to my friends.
<He asked us who we were and what we wanted,> I said.
Felix raised his own eyebrows.
<Interesting. Tell him you’re the one asking the questions here, and then ask him what he’s doing here. Also, ask how many people are with him and how strong they are.>
I realized Felix was probably right. I also realized I wasn’t very good at interrogating people, but it was a bit too late to switch the person who wasn’t wearing earplugs at this point.
“We’re the ones asking questions here, not you,” I said, doing my best to make my tone cold and dismissive. “We want to know what your group is doing here. Also, how many people are in your group, and how strong are they?”
The man eyed me warily, before he shook his head. “I won’t tell you anything about my friends. You can torture me all you like, but I won’t say a thing!”
I was decidedly not eager to torture this man. I sighed. “Tell me why you’re here, at least,” I said, after I consulted with my friends about what to say next.
The man hesitated, before he carefully nodded. “We’re here to scavenge. Obviously. Why else would we be here?”
<He says he’s here to scavenge,> I said.
<Scavenge?> Sallia asked.
A new suspicion started to form in my heart.
“Do you mean that you’re here to take some wealth from this place?” I asked.
“Of course.” The man looked slightly confused by my question. “After the fall of the Market, who knows how much wealth is left behind. The greater cities were looted by the coalition forces, of course. However, there is still enough wealth floating around both the greater cities and the nurseries for bands of interdimensional scavengers to get very rich. Leftovers for a coalition of major multiversal factions could still be top-grade supplies for people like us.”
I blinked in surprise, as I honed in on two of the man’s words.
First, he had mentioned a coalition. That meant that the market had almost certainly fallen when multiple invading forces from different interdimensional factions besieged it. That was very valuable information. It meant that if we encountered another greater multiverse-level force, there was a high chance they would be hostile to us.
Second, it meant something far more surprising.
The group we were fighting wasn’t some sort of group that was deeply opposed to the Market at all, the way I had thought they were based on the conversation with Amelia. They were basically a group of interdimensional scavengers. They were basically comparable to low-level bandits. Even so, the girl we had met in the ballroom had seemed to harbor immense dislike towards the Market, and had managed to knock me unconscious during the fight.
I rubbed my forehead as I felt a new budding headache appear in my skull.
On one hand, based on this guy’s description, the people we were fighting weren’t actually part of a greater organization. We didn’t need to worry about new enemies coming for revenge if we removed them from the ruins of the Market, or even if we wiped them out and sent them back to the ocean of souls. On the other hand… if this was the level of an average ‘scavenger’, I had to wonder just how much more terrifying the coalition that had levelled the Market had been.
Author’s Note:
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