When we entered, I looked around and found some more of these retired Mercenary-Guards scattered inside the shop as well, nursing cheap shochu as they morosely played their never-ending board games.
Normally, places like this were also usually crawling with a lot of gang bangers, worn-out prostitutes, and various regular street punks, all from widely different age groups and affiliations.
Daigo walked straight up to a grimy, scarred counter that had a thick, reinforced, tempered glass barrier protecting the old bastard who sat behind it.
"Kiba-san, my man! I have a good friend here with some real top-notch, fresh elixirs to sell today," Daigo said with a wide, practiced, charming smile on his face, addressing the person concealed behind the protective glass.
The person behind the glass was a very, very old man, with so much wrinkled, sagging skin that it almost felt contagious just looking at him.
He had two noticeably crossed eyes (both terribly, comically out of focus), with a lot of his remaining teeth stained as brown as dried human shit, and huge, unsightly moles dotting his bald head and sagging cheeks.
"Hmph. That's what you young punks all fuckin' say… Back in my days, the shit that we sold, that was fucking top-notch, primo shit. Nowadays, you pussies are all too damn scared to even walk into real Gates" the old man said, his voice weak and raspy, yet somehow still dripping with disdain and disgust.
"Bullshit. Back in your days, you old geezers didn't do jack shit either. No Mercenary-Guard from these slums, then or now, can get their grubby hands on any elixirs from D-Grade and above Aggressors in a legit Gate run, except, of course, if they somehow manage to steal 'em from some poorly guarded Tower reserve or some other equally risky shit. Shit has always been the exact same, old man," Daigo responded back easily, his tone light, almost chuckling.
"Hah! At least we had the balls to actually try and break into those guarded places and steal those D-Grade elixirs and other valuable shit!" the old man replied, his voice cracking, as he idly scratched his leathery left cheek with a gnarled finger.
"Yeah, well, when YOU finally find a place where the goddamn military and the rich Towers keep all their good elixirs, and it's somehow not security-tight like my asshole after a bad curry, then you can fuckin' call me to steal some of that good shit," Daigo retorted sharply, his good humor fading a bit.
"Pussy," the old man just said, mostly under his breath, before finally asking, his voice all business now, "So, what the fuck do you actually have for me today, then?"
Daigo threw me a quick head gesture, a silent command to show the old bastard my elixir.
I walked closer to the counter and squatted down to put my heavy bag on the filthy floor, carefully taking out some of the more… presentable elixirs first.
I would have preferred to sell all my hard-won elixir back in the 'UnDerGrounD,' apart from maybe keeping two of those cyan short-swords (or daggers, whatever they were) for myself, since I desperately need a new weapon and sure as hell can't afford to spend any precious coins on getting a new one.
And especially if I want to even hope to meet Kuro and Jiro's unspecified (and outrageous) demand.
But, unfortunately, I don't really feel like this greedy old man here will give me anything close to a reasonable, fair pay for my elixirs.
The bastard will almost certainly try to scam me blind, especially because he'll know I don't really know their true street value either.
The moment I touched the still-chilled heart of the 'elf-queen,' I felt another sudden, intense rush, like I was instantly getting high as a cloud, but it thankfully lasted for barely two seconds this time.
Then, I noticed new, strange objects, or rather, writings, had suddenly appeared in the top right side of my vision, superimposed over whatever I was looking at.
The first object was the clear, blocky writing 'Elixirs:' and the other object, floating directly underneath it, was the equally clear writing 'Coins:'
Then, numbers began to appear and started incrementing with blinding, almost incomprehensible rapidity in front of those two words, until, after some impossibly short nanoseconds, they just stopped, frozen.
The writings were now: 'Elixirs: 1120' and 'Coins: 15'.
The really fuckin' weird thing was that when I deliberately rolled my eyes around, trying to focus on them, I could still see my normal environment perfectly clearly, without these new 'things' in my vision actually obstructing my sight in any physical way.
It was like they were definitely there, a part of my vision, but somehow also not there at the exact same time. Weird as fuck.
I quickly, forcefully, recovered from my momentary daze.
Even if I am finally runnin' stark-raving mad, I still have a goddamn family to feed and crippling debts to pay.
Life is still fuckin' hell, visions or no visions.
I carefully brought out the severed head and the pulsating core of the infant Aggressor, one of the better-looking cyan short-swords, all four of the spear heads, and a large, dense chuck of that weird 'black tear drop' meat.
"These here are what I got. How much you offerin'?" I asked softly, my voice carefully neutral, as I placed my collected elixirs one by one onto the grimy, scarred counter.
The old man laboriously pulled open a small, sliding part of the thick tempered glass barrier, like a fortified service window, and slowly, deliberately, grabbed the infant's small, severed head first.
He then asked, his voice a suspicious rasp, "Why the fuck did you skin off its entire face?"
I froze for a second, genuinely confused, because I clearly remembered cutting its head clean off at the neck, nothing more.
And I seriously doubt that the infant's delicate face somehow got accidentally peeled off when that Black Bird gangster bastard tossed me like a garbage last night.
I am also absolutely sure that no one from my home, not even Ayaka, would have done something so pointless and gruesome to it.
Eiji might a little shit, but he wasn't even around when I brought the bag home.
So how the fuck did it get peeled off like that?
I just hope, I really fuckin' hope, that me steadily losing my damn mind doesn't mean I somehow did it myself sometime last night, in a blackout, and now just don't fuckin' remember it.
And if I did somehow do it, then why the hell did I do such a fucked-up thing?
I questioned this disturbing new oddity silently, deep in my own troubled mind, and tried my best not to show any outward expression of the sudden panic or utter confusion I was feeling.
Since I had no freakin' clue how it could have possibly happened, I quickly just shrugged my shoulders, a gesture of feigned indifference, like I hadn't even noticed and, more importantly, didn't fuckin' care one way or the other.
The old man just sighed in exasperation, a sound like air leaking from a rotten bellows, while slowly shaking his head in obvious disapproval.
Then, he reached under the counter for a strange-looking, heavy goggle, one apparently made of tarnished metal.
It had a much longer, telescopic-looking lens on the side of its right eye.
The lens itself had some faint, glowing arcane markings etched onto it.
He put the contraption on and then meticulously examined the infant's curiously altered head with the aid of this goggle for a long moment, before finally putting it aside with a grunt.
He then grabbed the large chuck of the 'Black Tear drop meat' and said, his voice now distinctly annoying, "This one here is already rotting badly and clearly falling apart at the edges. When exactly did you say you got these… elixirs?"
"Yesterday," I replied without any hesitation, looking him dead in his mismatched, shifty eyes.
He examined it briefly, poked it a few times with a dirty fingernail, and then dismissively put that piece of meat aside as well.
Next, he grabbed the harvested core of the infant.
As he brought it up towards his goggle to examine it more closely, he made a grudging statement, "Well, at least this one here is not actively falling apart yet, I'll give you that."
He went slowly, deliberately, through all of my offered elixirs in this same painstaking, agonizingly slow manner.
After he was finally done (which felt like a goddamn eternity to me, standing there), he lifted up his wrinkled, big head and said to me, his voice flat
"Alright, boy. I will give you 240 yen for these four little trinkets here (he dismissively pointed towards the spear heads with a crooked finger), 3700 yen for this rotten black meat, 4000 yen for the small arcane-core, 3000 yen for this damaged Aggressor's head, and a final 4500 yen for this… dagger."
I am absolutely fuckin' sure that this greedy old bastard is trying to royally scam me.
I suspected as much even before comin' in here, and for the old cock-sucker to offer me such a pathetically low total amount for these obviously rare elixirs, it could only mean that those things were actually far more valuable than I currently know, or can even imagine.
Those things could easily be worth two times, maybe three times, hell, possibly even five or ten fuckin' times more than what he is actually, brazenly offering me right now.
But I don't fuckin' know for sure, do I?
And I certainly can't read anythin' useful off his inscrutable, leathery old face (which isn't really a surprise, seein' as lying is practically everyone's second nature in this shithole).
But I can't just back out now.
Refusing his insulting offer outright, and then defiantly packing up all my shit to try and go sell it somewhere else, that's completely off the damn table as an option.
Firstly, I don't trust any other low-life, back-alley elixir peddler in this part of the city to give me a price that's any fairer than what the UnDerGrounD usually offers, and they're crooks too.
Secondly, I might not even be fuckin' welcomed back in the UnDerGrounD for a good while now, after that little incident with Asuka and her new bodyguard. I really don't want to test my luck there again so soon.
And lastly, this old bastard here, Kiba-san, will definitely, without a shadow of a doubt, send some of his local punks, to end both me and Daigo the moment we try to walk out that door with my elixirs.
They'd jump us before we got halfway down the street, steal all my shit, and leave us bleeding to death in the gutter.
"I can't sell all my hard-earned shit for a measly 15,440 yen. They are clearly worth at least five times fuckin' more than that, old man," I said swiftly, trying to sound more confident than I felt.
Since I barely have any other viable options right now, I will just have to try and wing it, to bluff my way into gettin' as much as I possibly can out of this thievin' old bastard.
"Hah-ha-haaa…" the old man suddenly cackled, a dry, rattling laugh that was truly awful, painful to hear.
He coughed, then replied, his voice laced with amusement, "Do I look like some kinda fuckin' charity bank from Abeno to you, boy? Do you seriously think you can just walk in here and try to fuck me in the ass like I'm some kinda greenhorn? My final offer is 15,440 yen, take it or leave it."
He declared this with a tone that clearly suggested that there was absolutely no fuckin' room left to negotiate, none at all.
'I nearly fuckin' died for these damn elixirs, and I only even got them through sheer, blind luck in the first place! I can't just fuckin' bend over and take this kinda shit from him without a fight. He can go fuck himself sideways with a rusty poker!' I thought, my anger flaring.
I defiantly reached out and touched my elixirs on the counter, making a clear move to start putting everything back into my backpack, when the old man suddenly said, his voice now dropping to a low, sinister, threatening tone, "YOU will take this deal, boy. No one else around here will buy this particular assortment from you for a better fuckin' amount, I guarantee it."
He said that last part while giving a subtle, almost imperceptible nudge with his head, either to us or to someone else unseen behind us.
I wasn't quite sure who it was meant for, so I and Daigo, almost at the exact same synchronized moment, turned our heads around to see if that subtle gesture was indeed meant for someone else in the shop.
And, of course, it fuckin' was.
We immediately noticed six burly, crazy-looking men now standing there, blocking the exit.
Two of them seemed to be roughly our own age, maybe a bit older.
Three of the other men appeared to be in their mid-to-late-twenties, while the remaining one was at least thirty, probably more.
But they all had one distinct, unsettling thing in common – they all looked disturbingly like this old fucker behind the counter.
One of them even had his exact same unsettlingly crossed eyes.
They were very likely his sons, or at least close relatives, his personal muscle.
The entire atmosphere in the small, cramped shop instantly changed, growing heavy and menacing, as these men all simultaneously, silently, pulled out long, gleaming butcher knives from concealed sheaths at their backs.
Some of the other low-life punks who had been loitering in the shop immediately got the message and quickly, quietly, vacated the premises as the atmosphere shifted.
While some others, the more ghoulish types, simply ignored us and our unfolding drama, and a few others actually focused their full, eager attention on the old crow's kids and on us, their eyes shining with that sick, hungry anticipation to see some real bloodshed.
"15,440 yen is a very fair price, now, isn't it, boy?" the old hag asked again, his voice now dripping with a smug, condescending tone, one that made it abundantly clear that I had no fuckin' real offer or actual choice in this matter anymore.
Either I sell it all to him at his price, or we have a bloody, probably fatal, brawl right here and now.
All of his damn kids, or whatever they were, were clearly Evolves.
Four of them felt like solid E-Grades, while the remaining two, the older ones, were definitely D-Grades.
Both I and Daigo felt their individual power, it is a fight we absolutely could not hope to win, not against these odds.
Not to mention that they were all also a bit bigger, more solidly built in their body size, than either of us.
We could probably kill some of them, maybe even most of them if we got lucky and fought like cornered rats, but we were never, ever fuckin' walkin' out of that door alive in the end, not in one piece.
"Kiba-san, let's just…" Daigo attempted to interject, to try and persuade the old hag to be more reasonable, after he'd quickly scanned the now-hostile room with his own sharp eyes and undoubtedly came up with the exact same grim, hopeless conclusion as me.
But I quickly put up my hand to stop him from even trying to talk to this old fuck; it would be utterly futile.
The greedy old bastard wouldn't listen, and he clearly didn't fuckin' care about fairness or reason.
"15,440 yen it is," I said, my voice flat, devoid of emotion, effectively sealing the shitty deal as I pushed the elixirs back across his counter table towards him.
"You know, boy, I'm feelin' particularly generous today, so I think I will also love to buy everything else you might have in that little backpack of yours," the old hag then said, a sly glint in his crossed eyes, as he pointed a crooked, age-spotted finger down towards the floor, clearly indicating my backpack.
"I don't have anythin' else…" I tried to say, attemptin' to throw him off course since I knew exactly where he was fuckin' gettin' at with this new line of bullshit.
But he rudely interrupted me before I could even finish my sentence, sayin' smoothly, "Then you wouldn't mind if I just… checked it for myself, now would you?"
He gave one of his burly brats another subtle side nod, a silent gesture clearly telling him to take my bag away from me, by force.
As the designated guy roughly grabbed my bag, I couldn't bring myself to let go of it at first, my hand clutching the strap desperately.
Then the guy threatened, his voice a low snarl, "Let the fucking bag go, you little shit, or I will chop off your fucking hands, right here," which, needless to say, made me let go of it fuckin' instantly.