Chapter 100: ONE HUNDRED! FIRST MILESTONE MANY TO COME

“You can keep telling yourself that, I know well how important this is for you. Regardless its worthless to me. Tell me, do you need anything else?”

“I’ll keep looking through your wears, I don’t think you’ll chase me away?” Kael asked.

“As long as you have cores to spend, you can stay here all day, dear customer.”

The word dear landed like a knife with a ribbon on it.

The imp flashed him a devilish smile as he looked outside the shop.

Many of the Snakes were still waiting outside, waiting for Kael’s pockets to empty so he’s forced out to face them.

Kael could see their shapes through the glass, their shifting weight, the way they leaned in closer each time someone moved inside. Like wolves watching a rabbit inside a cage, telling themselves the cage would open eventually.

The latter, however, ignored them, because there was one thing they forgot.

Kael had a lot of money, well, cores, and he could use them to his benefit.

The situation outside wasn’t just a threat. It was a resource problem. And Kael had learned very quickly: in the tower, resources were survival. If he could buy time, buy tools, buy an angle, then those thirty faces outside weren’t an execution squad, they were just… inconvenient.

He opened the shop’s wears window and began scrolling down in the consumable section.

The interface slid into view clean and bright, a neat little menu in a world that wanted to tear him apart. Kael’s eyes flicked fast, cataloging. Not shopping, preparing.

The prices of most of the consumables were exorbitant.

Since most of them were actually priced not with normal cores, but Medium and even Higher Grade Cores. Something Kael hadn’t had the opportunity to even see yet.

Seeing those price tags was like peeking into a world above his paygrade. Items that were casually sold for currencies he could barely define. It was a reminder: no matter how stacked his stats looked at level one, he was still living in the shallow end of the pool.

But there were a few consumables that he could grab.

“Give me a couple smoke bombs… Oh, there are a couple grenades here… but the price is a bit….”

Kael sighed.

His mind ran the scenario anyway. Grenades would be clean. Loud, messy, but clean. They’d break the formation, panic the mob, maybe take a couple down if they were dumb enough to cluster at the door.

But a hundred cores a piece wasn’t a purchase, it was a gamble. And Kael hated gambles unless he was the one rigging them.

A grenade or two would definitely clear the way, but they were priced for 100 cores each.

That’s far too expensive.

Not to mention they can simply run away, or some might just have an ability to protect themselves and that’s money down the drain.

Smoke Bombs were 10 cores each.

Good enough to use and pair with [Presence] to escape, but he worried that he might get caught up the moment he opened the door. That gang was still there waiting for him.

Smoke could cover his movement, confuse their line of sight, buy him seconds; seconds were everything. But smoke didn’t stop a blade that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And Kael had seen enough “wrong place” moments to know luck didn’t like him.

“Fine, just the smoke grenades. Two of them. And how about some stat points?” Kael asked.

He kept his tone casual again, but he was already doing the math in his head. Tools, stats, exit money, bribe money, emergency money. If he spent wrong, he died. If he spent right, he survived long enough to spend again.

“You can only buy 18 stat points.”

“Are they that expensive?” Kael asked.

He didn’t like the sound of only. Limits were never for your benefit.

“No, they’re limited, each climber is limited to twenty stat points on this floor. You already bought two before.”

Kael’s eyes narrowed as he connected the memory: earlier purchases, earlier boosts, earlier pain. So it wasn’t just currency, it was cap. A controlled economy of power.

“How much?”

“60 cores.”

“That’s expensive, I thought it was 1 core per stat.”

He couldn’t keep the irritation out this time. One core per stat had been the first-floor lie that made sense. Sixty was the first-floor reality that hurt.

“Yes, but it gets incrementally more expensive the more you buy…also it’s something you’ll find very valuable once you’re out of the first floor.”

“Fine…”

Kael paid the price for the points and found that his pocket became lighter.

He had exactly 111 cores left.

The number sat there like a heartbeat. Still alive. Still enough to move. But not enough to be careless.

“I need to save fifty for leaving…” Kael muttered.

He said it to himself more than anyone, like saying it out loud would stop him from doing something stupid five minutes later.

“I can give you a departure ticket right now, if you buy it with 50 cores.” The imp said.

Kael’s eyes snapped to Baltak. The offer was too clean. Too helpful. Baltak didn’t do “helpful.” Baltak did “profitable.”

“And why would I do that? Will it allow me to leave right now?”

He kept his voice neutral, but his suspicion was loud in his skull.

“No, you still have to present it to the administrator, who’ll show up only when you kill the final boss of the floor.”

“Then why would I buy the ticket here? I can simply just give him the fifty cores then.”

“You could… but this way, with a guaranteed ticket in hand, you can focus on amassing even more cores and not worry about having fifty cores by the end of the time limit.”

Kael felt that something wasn’t right.

He couldn’t trust the Imp and had an inkling that if he were to really buy a ticket right now instead of waiting till the admin shows up at the end, he would lose on something.

Maybe the ticket bound him. Maybe it tagged him. Maybe it marked him for the other climbers. For them to see that he was an owner of a ticket to leave. Or whatever bureaucratic curse the tower loved to slap on people. Either way, it smelled like a trap disguised as convenience.

“Nah, I need the cores for trade and bargains with other climbers.”

“So you’re not buying anything else?” The imp sounded impatient.

“Hold on now, who said I won’t? I still have cores.”

Kael looked outside. The mob was getting angrier and angrier, while he was thinking of how to leave.

Using the smoke was probably the only way out, but he’ll need to somehow get them out of the doorway.

They were blocking it hard.

“Can’t you do anything about that? I mean, if I leave and they try to kill me, you’ll lose a good client.”

Kael didn’t beg. He just presented it as business. As if Baltak cared about “client retention” the way normal merchants did.

“Well, if they kill you, they’ll obtain your cores, and they have only this place to spend those. I lose nothing either way.” The Imp smiled.

Kael shook his head. Everyone belonging to the tower was fucked in the head.

He couldn’t blame them; the tower acted that way.

Kael continued scrolling through the items, hoping to find anything useful that he could use to get away from the situation.

And a grenade was looking more and more tempting now, it’ll push them away, and if he used it inside the smoke, it could also make it more lethal.

He hated that his brain kept circling back to it. One hundred cores. A grand majority of his current wealth. A loud solution with a small chance of being perfect. The kind of temptation that got people killed because they wanted to feel in control for once.

Suddenly, the whole mob seemed to shift.

Kael’s attention was drawn to the commotion; he couldn’t hear it since the Imp locked the place from outside sounds, but he noticed the shift.

Everyone in front of the shop turned and looked toward the upper street.

The direction of the Sun Clan base.

It wasn’t subtle. Bodies pivoted. Heads turned. The kind of reaction you only see when a new predator walks into the alley.

Taking a look at his map, he noticed another group, almost as big as the one in front of the shop, coming toward them.

Looking from the window, he recognized a couple there.

The Boss of the Sun Clan, and Peter on the side, Peter was pointing what looked like a club at the group at the entrance to the shop.

Kael’s mouth went dry. Not because he was scared, though that was part of it, but because it was suddenly obvious what this was: not rescue, not justice, not “Kael’s safety.”

It was simply two hostile clans meeting. That meant a fight was about to break.

“Guess that I’ll be fishing in muddy water.”

To be continued…

[Super big author note… please read it]

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