This unexpected move was crazy... crazy profitable. After a bit of scavenging... I found all the bodies and calcinated them.
Excluding the treasures and Cocytus' corpse, a total of 145.000 Chaos Points just with calcination.
Not only that but there was even more. The Great Tomb of Nazarick was buried under piles and piles of debris on the floor, some having collapsed on top of others. There were plenty more powerful monsters that had been buried underneath that I didn't have access to.
It put into perspective how extremely difficult it will be for me to rank up from now on. Azrael estimated that the strength of the Nazarick we fought was equivalent to that of the heavens before I made them evolve into Starlight Angels.
And that's considering that we didn't fight their leader, Ains Ooal Gown; Albedo, Aura, and Mare. There was also my customer Solution, another of the Pleiades; Narberal Gamma, the head butler called Sebas Tian. And lastly, the one they said was the strongest Floor Guard, Shaltear Bloodfallen, a vampiress.
I didn't care about the rest, but I didn't have the face to look Solution Epsilon in the eye. We may have to end up fighting, as I have now undoubtedly become their mortal enemy. But I don't care. I took all those matters into consideration before making this decision.
Aside from Chaos Points, I also learned some useful skills in the shop.
- Summon: Arachnoid Priestess, obtained from Aureole Omega.
- Summon: Werewolf, obtained from Lupusregina Beta.
- Summon: Dullahan, obtained from Yuri Alpha.
- Summon: Demonoid, obtained from Demiurge.
I also received a pendant from Aureole Omega. Azrael missed it; she didn't think it was important, but with Energy Records, I could see the energy it exuded. I didn't know what it was but decided to store it.
Except for Demonid, which costs 5,000, all of them cost 3,000 chaos points. I decided not to think much about them since I can't even use them due to the system capacity's restrictions. It's a pity that I didn't get the skill to summon Cocytus; I wonder if that's because he was way stronger than the rest. I would never know.
The girls accompanied me to the collapsed 9th floor, where there was yet another corpse waiting for us. Someone Hasshaku-sama took care of. Franky... he looked like some German Nazi, bleeding all over; she wasn't merciful.
"Master, this disgusting pierrot just kept making jokes and acting downright rude, evading me instead of fighting as he made fun of my height and big breasts... I got upset and massacred him," Kuu harrumphed.
It's understandable; Kuu is quite sensible regarding her height.
I obtained 3000 chaos points from him.
- Summon: Greater Doppelganger, obtained from Pandora's Actor.
A doppelganger could be quite useful in certain circumstances. Just like Disruption, my summons are also altered by my nature as a sun god, so I'm looking forward to seeing how powerful they will be.
...
*BOOOMMM!!*
We blew up the gate protecting the treasury. When I first entered this dungeon, I noticed the energy flow. It seems the eighth floor possessed some device controlling a complex web of arrays that ran the dungeon like an auto-sustainable system.
The moment Yasaka started expanding, and I blew up the upper floors, that system collapsed. One of the branches of that system was an array that protected the treasury. It was gone; the only thing separating it from me was a gigantic steel gate resembling the safe door.
The fact that Azrael gasped watching those treasures was enough to foretell how amazing it was.
Each one of them was releasing a tyrannical energy, and there were more than forty of them. I identified the majority of them as mythical items, but some items released an energy signature equal to the pendant that I got from the Arachnoid Priestess.
Something higher than a mythical item.
'Can you do an appraisal, Horus?'.
[If we were to label those as Ancient Items, to put an example... then any of them, if used as a sacrifice, should grant at least an X7 session. They're worth more than thirty thousand chaos points].
'Thirty thousand...' I have at least five of them here. A pendant, some gauntlets... a sword. Holy shit, I'm loaded.
[As for the mythical items. Each should grant an X4 or X5 session, depending on the item, ranging from ten thousand to fifteen thousand chaos points. I recall that time I gauged Ains Ooal Gown as one of your most valuable future customers. I wasn't wrong. Still, thinking about matters would take such a drastic turn. I believe you made the right choice, Ray].
"..."
[Right now, as Predator has evolved into Calcination, you have the possibility of consuming not only living beings but also non-living items. You could consume all these using calcination. But I advise you something better].
'What?'
[If you were to have your forces sacrifice those items. You could increase their strength at the cost of fewer chaos points obtained per session].
'So I could, for example... if I take this pendant and calcinate it, it would give me roughly thirty thousand chaos points, but if I have Kuu sacrifice it-'
[You would get around twenty thousand, but she could profit greatly from it... it depends on you. Which one do you think is the better choice?].
"Ray-sama?" Yasaka saw me there standing frozen; I was deep in thought.
I think investing in them will always be the best investment. Yasaka, Hasshaku-sama, Tsunade, Azrael... I couldn't have pulled it off without them. They may not have been able to kill me, but they could have sealed me.
Yasaka, even with all her strength, still became injured. Kuu, too, was also at the border of death. If Tsunade hadn't been here, I would have regretted it for a lifetime... so I'll follow what my heart tells me this time.
"I will take everything, girls..."
But we have a problem: it's not only items; there is also a humongous amount of money and chests here; it's too much to store in pocket spaces.
Then I recalled... I have an ability that works perfectly for this, which I obtained from Georg's sacred gear.
It allows me to move through space between spaces that I have already been to; this ability also has a private pocket space in it that I have never used... in fact, I have never checked what's inside it.
They were like clouds in the night with sparkling starlight, beautiful to the eye. All the treasures were swallowed within in a heartbeat. I didn't feel any backlash, meaning there was enough space inside for everything.
We left the tomb after taking all the goods, but our destination was unknown.
"Tsunade, I want you to flood everything again. I may need to return some other time in the future. I don't want people coming here to peek at my stuff".
"Understood".
She accepted my will without question, jumped on top of a tree branch and put two fingers together. She canalized the sun's energy perfectly and somehow, through an unknown process I don't know, managed to transform it into water.
The gargantuan stream of water jetted out for a few minutes, engulfing everything and transforming this collapsed clearing into a new lake. With our job finished, we decided to go towards the west, the camp of 'Baharut Empire'.
On the way, we may rest around and take it easy. It has been a day since we arrived, and Kuu and Yasaka were supposed to stay for just two days.
I'll make it worthwhile for them.
**
**
At the north-western side of the Great Forest of Tob was the camp belonging to the Baharut Empire. In the middle of the night, a small crowd of running soldiers arrived, haggard, burnt and yet soaking.
The soldiers looked at them a bit... confused; how could they be burnt and soaked? Who did they fight?
"What happened to you guys? Where is General Aaron?".
"General Aaron is dead! A gigantic fox! It is a gigantic flaming fox!"
The five soldiers started spreading the word around the camp like psychotic fellows. The second in command, Mark, gasped at hearing that General Aaron was no more. He wasn't weak by any means, and clearly, this squad had gone through some major hurdle.
"Have they gone insane?"
Nevertheless, the rest of the soldiers thought those people had gone insane, something had happened... but it was impossible that the gigantic fox was real. Mythical beasts were widely known in the region.
'I've never heard of some gigantic fox in the great forest of tob', they thought.
"Perhaps some sorcerer from the Re-Estize Kingdom used some high-tiered illusion magic to ambush them, " they theorised angrily.
"No, there is no way it was an illusion! Those monsters took the Armatista! More than half of our squad perished because of flaming rocks falling from the skies, there was a toxic flood, and monsters were fighting each other–"
"Calm down! Have you lost your mind? We will send a group in to investigate-"
One of the desperate soldiers grabbed Mark by the neck and yelled at him, "WHAT INVESTIGATION!? I'm telling you, we must leave right now and report this to the emperor! If that monster comes our way, the whole Empire will be in danger!"
"..."