After Akuma and Takara were officially accepted to the squad, they left the evaluation site and Akuma said goodbye to Hitogoroshi and Asaka.
"Hey beautiful", Akuma finally saw a new, sleazy side to the captain. "I'm captain Akiyama, you'll be serving under me."
"I'm Takara Mori, nice to meet you." Takara was able to remain polite and even shake Akiyama's hand, despite his behavior- she must've been used to it.
"You two have both got your starting pay, right? How about we take you two shopping."
"Yeah, you'll both need proper gear", the private added. All three of the privates seemed more polite once Takara joined the group.
"Okay", Takara's cheery, excited tone once again reminded Akuma of his cousin.
The squad of six then descended onto the market to buy new equipment.
"Okay, so you've both been given forty silvers, that should be enough for some good gear. Oh, but Kuro, don't buy any weapons. I don't want to be responsible for you killing anyone. Focus on armour instead."
"I'm not getting armour. I'll get cores instead."
Akuma's logic didn't make sense to the captain. "Why exactly wont you get armour?"
"I don't plan on getting hit." Akuma sounded arrogant, but had the rite to.
"Confidence", one of the guards commented. "You'll fit in here just fine."
As he had said, Akuma left the others so he could focus on cores. As he had never looked before, he had never noticed the sheer diversity in cores before.
They varied from a D tier goblin core costing only a few coppers to a massive S* tier dragon core costing thousands of gold.
Akuma wanted neither of these.
A weak core would be useless, but a core too powerful would be dangerous, and could possibly take over his body if he absorbed it.
What he needed to do was find a core roughly equal in strength to his own, and hope that he could afford it.
He trusted the royal guard's evaluation, placing him at A rank, so he decided he would look for an A tier core.
Surprisingly, there were very few A tier cores, and most of them didn't interest Akuma.
He quickly narrowed it down to four cores: a lesser dragon core, a cyclops core, a dire wolf core and the core of a creature Akuma had never heard of - a black griffin.
Upon asking the assistant, all she could say was that it was a powerful A tier monster and a variety of griffin. She did offer to tell him its skills in advance for one silver, but he declined.
He already knew what most of the core skills would be.
The lesser dragon would likely have an illusion skill as a counterpart to a real dragon's shapeshifting skill.
The cyclops would likely have skills to do with digestion or super-strength. Its second stage would also likely be useful.
The dire wolf would almost definitely have an intimidation skill or two.
Meanwhile, while he didn't know what a black griffin was, from the name alone, he could safely assume it could fly and would have a stealth skill.
But skills were not the only thing to consider.
He also needed to consider how useful each stage would be.
Stage 1 was automatic. It allowed the user to access the creature's skills, energy and consciousness.
Stage 2, the fusion stage, would be unlocked when the core had had time to settle down. It would allow the user to share the physical traits of the creature.
Stage 3 would be unlocked even later, allowing the user to fully manifest the creature whenever they want, while still using stage 1.
This would be what really made the decision.