Marketplace Gallery (1)
(Photo: a bottle of water)
It's bottled water, sure — but this thing is genuinely handy. Light enough to carry anywhere, it bumps up your efficiency in combat and hunting alike, and it never gets in the way when you run. We can explore longer distances safely now, so our village's range of activity has stretched a fair bit.
"Huh? The container's getting better reviews than the water."
After selling a few bottles, I'd turned around and sold another hundred or so with the points I'd scraped together — and to my surprise, the praise for the bottle was even louder than the praise for what was in it. The most common comment by far was that the thing had made fighting easier.
Fitting for a place called the Otherworld Destruction Gallery, perhaps there was hardly any intact civilization left here at all. Whatever the reason, it seemed the humble water bottle — so practical for combat and exploration — was stealing the spotlight.
'Is this world really in that bad a shape?'
All I'd laid eyes on so far was one ruined capital. Even now I was holed up inside the warehouse, with no idea how the world beyond was actually getting on.
So naturally, I wrote a new post.
Folks, I haven't been here long, so I don't know how things run outside. Going by the mood in this place, it all seems pretty bleak — is this continent seriously on the verge of collapse?
The comments were anything but civil. Just as I was concluding I'd never get real information this way, a summary post conveniently surfaced on the concept feed.
Three-line summary:
1. Rifts appeared out of nowhere
2. A metric shit-ton of monsters poured out
3. The allied army got rolled and the continent died, yeah
Humans = backstabbed each other
Elves = got scared and bolted for the forest
Dwarves = smacked the elves
Dark elves = smacked the elves
Beastfolk = smacked the humans
Everyone else = too few to know
"So in the end, they lost because they were too busy fighting each other."
More than anything else, though, the elves kept catching my eye. There was plenty of elf-hatred — outright elphobia — floating around the gallery too. On Earth terms, were they basically Britain?
When a problem gets too complicated, just blame the pointy-eared bastard. That's the correct answer.
You again, pointy-ears?
"Heh heh. Guess life works about the same here too."
I laughed for a moment, then stopped and lifted my head. Shift your gaze even a little from the bright system window, and the mold-splotched warehouse interior filled your view. Judging by how deeply the darkness had settled, it had long since turned to midnight outside.
"This is no time to be screwing around."
Not that I meant to step outside right this second. Being cooped up in here was, by definition, the safest place to be. The problem was that the defenses were sorely lacking. That rickety shelf propping the door shut would burst into splinters the moment any one of the monsters from the gallery's rankings paid a visit.
"First things first, I should shove something heavy against that door."
The shelf alone wouldn't be enough. But I had neither the strength nor the mental bandwidth left to manage it. After much agonizing, I opened the shop window and started rifling through it.
🧃 Energy Drink "Red Boom" — 2 Points
"Ooh! Knew it'd be here."
Thankfully, the vast majority of Earth's goods were still stocked. Among them sat Red Boom, the energy drink that had once shared the spotlight with Monstr. I bought a single can and gulped it down — and then, midway through barricading the entrance, I suddenly found myself staring at the gallery feed.
Ah, there's no strength left in my body at all, fr
I think this might actually be it for me
At this point I couldn't even kill one goblin...
"...Should I list it, maybe?"
It did seem like it could genuinely help.
News of the new arrival drew the gallery's attention in an instant. Those already enjoying the fruits of the bottled water bought the cans without a shred of suspicion, and the reactions began pouring in soon after.
I've been running from zombies for half a day straight now.
And then the Head Mod goes and sells some strange object, of all things?
Figured I was about to die of thirst, so I took a quick swig — and now my legs won't. stop.
Th-the z-zombie bastards are eating my dust way back there, losing their minds
Wh-what is this thing, for real?
It feels as though the golden days of my past have returned, you see.
One sip and my mind simply snapped awake!
I'd grown too weak to even climb a tree, but now I can sprint clear across the forest, I say.
I slew every monster that had been probing our woods for an invasion — my heart feels so refreshed, I say ^^
"Ooh... wait, it's THIS strong?"
All I'd wanted was for the worn-down otherworlders to regain a little strength. But for people who had never tasted so much as a fingernail's worth of Earth's civilization, caffeine was a nuclear bomb. A few who'd accidentally downed a whole can in one shot had even gone and beaten monsters to death with their bare hands.
And the ones reaping the most spectacular benefits of all were, unsurprisingly, the elves.
Looking at the elf posts, their stats seem to have multiplied several times over compared to every other race, for some reason...
Head Mod, don't tell me you're an elf too?
"Now that you mention it, why do elves get the stronger boost?"
They were nothing but skin and bones off a diet of grass and weeds to begin with.
And ever since losing the war, they couldn't even manage vegetables — just starved. No wonder the stuff hits them like a truck, no?
"Wait — dwarves too?"
I dug through several more concept posts, and sure enough, the dwarves were getting surprisingly solid effects as well. Wondering why, I kept reading.
Think of the fizz as a stand-in for ale and it's quite agreeable, indeed!
The flavor's not entirely far off, either!
The way it lifts the spirits is especially to my liking, indeed!!
"Huh. Unexpected. So they can make do without real booze?"
When it came to alcohol, dwarves were legendarily picky — the sort to dump an entire keg over the slightest off note, that was their image. But searching "dwarf" as a keyword told me it wasn't quite so simple.
I find myself missing the taste of the brew my mother used to make
Drinking this Red Boom, the flavor of ale I forced myself to forget refuses to leave my mind
The days before the Great War were good ones
They hadn't gone sober out of virtue — they'd been forced into it ever since losing the Great War against the monsters. Every so often I'd seen booze-lamenting posts and assumed they were just buntang trolls stirring up trouble; turns out they were laments steeped in a lifetime of longing.
"...Hold on. Booze?"
Something flashed through my head. Reflexively, I turned toward the shop window.
"Hah... hah! You wretched, godforsaken monsters!"
Shff!
Another demonic beast went soaring through the air, head and body neatly severed. His eerily gleaming sword had long since hewn through several hundred of the beasts — and yet that meant nothing resembling victory.
"Grrrrr..."
"Kyaaak!"
"Damn it all."
The monsters came without end, and he stood alone. Rox, knight of the fallen Kelton Kingdom, was inching steadily toward his limit. Even for a knight who had awakened his aura, facing a horde numbering in the thousands was beyond him — even if it was nothing but a rabble of lower demonic beasts.
"Still far, far too many of them."
Sheltered inside an abandoned cabin wedged between the valley walls, he muttered as he watched the hundreds of monsters encircling him from without. For a knight of a kingdom that had once shone bright, it was an ending shabbier than anything he could have imagined.
"Your Majesty... I beg your forgiveness. It seems this disloyal wretch will be coming to see you at last."
The king's dying request to Rox had been the restoration of the kingdom. But a man who had failed to protect his king had no right to speak of rebuilding it — such talk was a meaningless delusion. He slowly closed his eyes, certain in his gut that this was the end.
NEW ITEM IN STOCK!
🧃 Energy Drink "Red Boom"(NEW!)
Right up until that clamorous notification popped into existence.
"...?"
"An energy... drink?"
It was something to drink — so why on earth did the name contain energy, a word for strength? But he could not have cared less. If, in dying, he could drag down even one more of the monsters that had destroyed his kingdom, that alone would be enough.
Mana Dango −10
Item safely delivered!
"So this is an 'energy drink'..."
It was a thin vessel of hammered iron, wrought by a master's hands and painted with the image of two raging bulls locked in fierce combat.
"Why... this is no different from the emblem of the kingdom."
He gave a wry chuckle, wrenched the can open with some effort — and then downed five cans in a single breath.
"!!!"
And soon the valley rang with a rough, roaring battle cry, as mountains of demon-beast corpses began to pile toward the sky.