“I-I… I can’t breathe,” Meri gasped, fingers grasping at her throat.

  Robert couldn’t even answer as his face quickly turned red under the pressure.

  “Ah, shit, sorry!” Eik spluttered, the pressure fading instantly. “I got a little lost in it for a second there and let my aura out a little bit subconsciously! I’m sorry!”

  Meri tried to get a coughing fit under control while Robert fell to his knees and drew in deep, relieving breaths. “That was… That was only a little?” she breathed. “Then how bad is a lot?”

  Eik drew a finger across his own throat and stuck his tongue out in a gesture that could not be misunderstood. “I’m guessing you’re not curious enough to give that a try?”

  “Nah… I think I’ll pass. You?” she asked Robert. The man just waved feebly in refusal. “So? How powerful is the ordinary grade 6 Potion of Mighty Strength?”

  Studying his own fingers as he clenched them into a fist, Eik felt the power already begin to fade. “It’s… incredible.”

  With a flex of his overpowered muscles, Eik appeared at the end of the twenty meter deep hallway before his figure had even vanished from the place he had been standing, the stone floor crumbling under the force of his extreme speed. On each side, the walls, now unable to support themselves began to fall, spiderweb cracks spreading up toward the ceiling.

  In the blink of an eye, copious amounts of glittering, crystalline Profound Toxin snapped into existence throughout the broken construction, immediately filling in and sealing every single imperfection and creating a structure a hundred times more durable than what had been destroyed.

  Eik rapped a knuckle against it, a glassy clink echoing down the hallway. “Phew. I did not think that one through. Robert, can you do me a favor and get someone to fix this?”

  The assistant glared through narrowed lids before eventually sighing. “Yes, boss…”

  “Meri, can I get you and your two colleagues to start creating recipes for the next grade 6 potions in line?” Eik said as he walked back, careful not to break his own floor any more than he already had. “How about we start with two more for now? Let’s go with Potion of Magical Empowerment and Potion of the Metal Body. They will both be great for survivability.”

  “Y-Yes, certainly. We’ll start collecting and testing materials right away!”

  “Great! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some levels to take care of. Robert, walk with me,” he said and headed back for the main office area.

  “What’s up?”

  Eik pulled up his sleeve and let the messages come. “How are our finances looking these days? I know I’ve been away a bunch, so thanks for keeping the ship sailing in my stead.”

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  “Honestly, we’re doing better than ever. There’s nothing to worry about in that sense.”

  “All right, good. And these experimental efforts that Meri and her team are doing isn’t a problem?” Eik asked.

  “It’s fucking expensive no matter how you twist and turn it but no, not a problem at all. Eik’s Excellent Elixir Emporium isn't drained much by it,” the administrator grinned. “Even just gradually selling out of the remaining inventory of Legendary Mystery Medicine is bringing in more money than we could spend in ten years. And since you’re so busy with fighting these days, rumors that our stock will eventually run dry has punched all of the prices up an additional few notches as well—all without any rumor-mongering from our side.”

  “Damn,” Eik muttered.

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  “Yeah,” Robert said as they stepped out onto the front lawn of the main building of Eik’s Excellent Elixir Emporium. “We’re making even more money than our most optimistic predictions showed. It almost doesn’t make any sense.”

  “In this world, people are willing to pay the white out of their eyes just to become marginally stronger. But, say, do you want to make even more money?”

  Robert’s ears perked up. “Do bears shit in the woods?”

  Eik snorted. “Get me as much of all the materials your girlfriend determined as you can. I’ll sell every fifth pill I make and take the four others myself.”

  “She’s not…” The young man cleared his throat.

  “Ever heard of willing something into reality?”

  Robert contemplated that for a moment. “I will get everything that my, uuh… girlfriend wrote down for you within the next couple of days. I can’t promise that I will be able to get a lot of each. Unless you go hunting yourself for some of the rarer and more dangerous stuff, it will probably arrive in batches as they become available.”

  “I know,” Eik sighed. “It’s a different market at S-rank. Just get me everything available in Gimleh right now. Don’t be afraid to let it be known that we are willing to directly buy up any of the rare materials on the list. If there is a guaranteed demand, it might encourage someone to go find what we need for us.”

  “As you wish,” Robert said with a nod.

  “All right, cool. If you could get right on that, that would be great. The further ahead of this thing we can get, the better.”

  ***

  Eik spent the next few weeks buried in his work, creating and experimenting while Meri’s team worked on more grade 6 recipes.

  After the first encounters with the monsters spawned by the Expulsion, the frequency of spawning ground discoveries fell. That didn’t mean that they became weaker in any way, however. For some reason that Eik didn’t fully understand, as time passed, the energies released by the Chasm concentrated further before actually materializing anything, which meant that they got the same number of spawns as before but all at once.

  “What has it been at this point,” Eik asked Robert as he handed over five pills to be sold to the highest bidder in Gimleh. “four days since they last detected anything? What the fuck is going on?”

  “Something like that, I think, yeah. And I don’t have a clue why. You know a whole lot more about that than I do.” Robert stuffed the pills wrapped in a soft piece of cloth into his personal bag of holding.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “I don’t even get why we have to send people to cull all of those monsters. Why not just leave them be?”

  Eik sighed and slid down the cool stone wall by the door to the laboratory into a sitting position. He had been working all morning and early afternoon. “I asked those exact same questions as well, young one. Apparently, because those bastards that spawn during the Expulsion do so in an environment literally overflowing with Ak’ki , they have a tendency to grow stronger the longer they are alive. That’s fine if they’re B-rankers or below—or even A-rankers—but it’s not great if they’re stronger than that.”

  “Why not? If we just leave them be, then wouldn’t it be just fine?”

  “Well, on Earth it’s not a problem we’ve had to deal with yet because our world is so freshly integrated into the Unified Mass, but it is not at all unheard of for high-ranking monsters to be able to travel in ways that achieve the same as fractures do for us.”

  Robert’s face paled a little at the image that conjured forth. “So you’re saying… they grow stronger and stronger indefinitely and that they could possibly come here?”

  With a grimace, Eik tilted his head from side to side. “More or less. It’s a little more complicated than that, but yeah, it’s essentially not great to just let them do whatever they want.”

  “Fuuuck,” Robert groaned as he slid down next to Eik. “What’s going to happen to us, Eik?”

  Eik clapped him good-naturedly on the shoulder. “Mate, what’s going to happen is that we are going to beat the absolute living shit out of every last one of those stinking pieces of garbage.”

  Robert couldn’t help but burst into laughter at that. “When you put it that way, somehow I feel a little better.”

  “See?”

  “But have they actually made such a big difference? The grade 6 Legendary Mystery Medicine, I mean. How many have you taken at this point anyway?”

  “Well,” Eik muttered, pursing his lips in thought. “I honestly haven’t been keeping count but I’ve ingested at least forty of these little miracles at this point, I reckon. And yes, it’s actually insane how effective they have turned out to be. It kind of like the gap between A-rank and S-rank Awakened—it’s in a completely different league from the grade 5 pills.”

  “You think we have a chance of winning?”

  “Of course!” Eik chuckled, not quite as convincingly as he had hoped. “Not to mention, I still have a little trick up my sleeve called Chop the Blade,” he said and got to his feet, heading out.

  “I thought he had refused to help unless it was a direct confrontation with the Lord of the Moon.”

  “He did, but you have no idea how persuasive I can be,” Eik said and rolled a chromatic pill between his fingers, flashing his teeth before popping it in his mouth. “He’s actually been along for the past couple of expeditions, although he’s gotten grumpy as all hell since nothing big has been happening recent. He refuses to lift a finger.”

  “But isn’t it a good thing? You know, that these special monsters aren’t appearing as much as they did in the beginning.”

  “Because what if it’s not a matter of fewer special-type monsters appearing? What if, instead, they are simply evading our detection?”

  “That’s… concerning.” Robert admitted and swallowed hard.

  “I couldn’t agree more, which is another reason why we have to respond to any major spawning ground we locate.”

  “Yeah, I totally get that, then. Where are you going now?”

  Eik smiled and beckoned for Robert to follow him. “I’m going home. Regardless of the urgency of the situation, I think I’ve earned the privilege of spending a bit of time with my family. Why don’t you go and see if Meri has time for you?”

  Robert bit his lip. “She’s spending time with her parents tonight—and the guild master, her grandfather.”

  “So? Go and join them.”

  “What do you mean so? We’ve only been dating for a few weeks!”

  “Ack! Just tell them that’s what we do in our culture. Then you’ve got an excuse if nothing else.”

  The younger man’s jaw worked as he chewed on that. “Huh… I suppose it can’t be worse than nearly killing one of her family members, can it, boss?”

  “Don’t remind me of that bastard, Gilim,” Eik muttered and massaged the bridge of his nose.

  “How is he these days, anyway?”

  “Silent and frightened, as far as I know.”

  “Fair enough. When do you think the next spawn site will be detected?”

  Eik cocked his head to the side. “Hopefully not before I’ve had the chance to tuck in my sweet daughter and son for the night in a few hours.”

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