Unleash the Salt!

"Do you need help?" Hearing of Victor's problem with his tent, Luka turned around from his own and looked at Victor, who was currently looking around himself.

"Yeah, I might need some help here…" Victor muttered before his eyes narrowed, seeing some shadows shifting among the bushes and the trees surrounding the camping zone.

"Well, there is only one way to do this…" He muttered before he wheeled towards the border of the camping zone, approaching the wall of trees while going through his Store, and pulling out a deodorant spray out of it at the price of 42 Gold Coins.

He currently had around 1'500 Gold Coins, as his tent cost around 1'300 Gold Coins. Kinda pricey, but he didn't have any problem buying light stuff like a deodorant spray. By the way, he also obtained an achievement called 'Bronze Trophy', which came out when he bought a product that costs over 1'000 Gold Coins.

"Where are you going?" Luka asked, seeing Victor going for the edge. However, his eyes widened in surprise when he caught some movements out there.

"Be careful!" Luka called out as he rushed to Victor's rescue, but it was too late when a Monster Girl jumped out of her hiding spot behind a tree and raised her arms towards Victor.

"I got you!" The Slug Girl shouted, but the only reply she got back was a wave of fire on her face, coming from a lighter being sprayed with the deodorant.

"FUCK!" A curse came from the wave of flames and the Slug Girl retreated back in the woods. Meanwhile, Victor began to wheel back to the center of the camping area, standing away from the borders.

"I fucking knew it." Victor muttered and watched the Slug Girl who tried to attack him grasp her own face in pain.

"FUUUUCK!! FUCK! FUCK-FUCK-FUCK-FUCK!!" Muffled curses flew out from the Slug Girl without any pause between each of them. The natural mucus that she excretes and her physiology as a monster helped her tank the flames, but it still hurt a lot and probably even left a scar on her face.

When the Slug Girl pulled her hands away from her face, Victor cringed at the sight of her charred black face. She started to glare at him with her blood-red eyes and black irises and gritted her teeth.

"You bastard! I'll make you feel every kind of pain possible!"

"You will pay for what you did to Kelly!"

"Kelly, does it hurt too much?"

Other Slug Girls came out of the woods, revealing a total of seven of them coming from every direction, and surrounding the small group of two.

Luka went into a panic and unsheathed his custom-made sword, while Victor simply looked at the Slug Girl named Kelly. One of the other six Slug Girls reached for Kelly and tried to comfort her.

For a moment, Victor glanced at Luka who was ready to fight and thought about escaping, due to the difference in numbers, before he shook his head.

They have left their items here, and it was getting too late. Also, Luka might be too tired to keep walking, and the chances of his wheelchair supporting almost 200 kilos in great conditions is small.

They can't escape, and they most certainly won't be able to win in the normal way. Looks like they must use the salt for this… A lot of salt.

"Stay there." Victor warned Luka, taking the latter by surprise.

"What do you mean? We are surrounded! If they all come at us at the same time, we will lose, so I must deal with them one by one before then!"

Victor sighed, as his guess of Luka holding the intention of charging forward was real. "Luka, at your current level, an Imp has better chances of victory than you in a fight between you two. Put down that sword until you know how to use it for real.

You would need to get pumped up with muscles if you want to hurt any one of them. Staying here or going forward, they will bring the same result, which is loss. Running away is possible, but that will make all of our stuff unreachable for the short time…"

"But where is Alice?" Interrupting Victor, Luka finally realized that the snake woman wasn't there with them. Luka gritted his teeth in anger and shouted. "Don't tell me that she chickened out!"

Victor raised an eyebrow, staring at Luka from the corner of his eyes. 'Damn, he is really snapping away little by little…'

Whatever happened to him this morning, it must have dealt a big blow on his willpower. Then there is the fact that Alice entered their group without him being unable to stop her, and now she abandoned them here after a long complaint of being hungry on the way to here.

"Get them!" One of the Slug Girls shouted and they started to advance in their direction. Luka tightly gripped on his sword's hilt but didn't make any random move. He looked at Victor and asked.

"What should we do then? We can't run, we can't fight, and I certainly don't want to break one of Ilias' Five Commandments to have intercourse with monsters."

"That's easy…" Victor went to his store and pulled out a large package of salt at the price of 120 Gold Coins. The box was blue, around the size of a human head, although it wasn't anywhere close to it in width.

Victor opened the box's lid and dramatically shouted. "Unleash the salt!"

Those words made the Slug Girls stop crawling at their direction and look at Victor with hesitation and fear. Even though it won't certainly kill them with that meager amount of salt, it would leave a really ugly scar on their bodies; and as girls, their looks really matter to them. Especially since none of them are warriors, and are afraid of death more than others. They are here only to hunt for men, after all.

Luka saw them hesitate, including the one with a seared face, and finally realized what was going on. "That's right! A slug's weak point is salt!"

He approached his traveling bag and pulled out a bag of cooking salt. Then he glared at the Slug Girls and shouted. "Stay back, or I'll throw it to you!"

"Luka, what the fuck are you doing?" Much to his surprise, it was Victor the one who berated him.

"Huh?" Luka blinked in surprise and stared at Victor.

"There's no point threatening them like that, just throw the salt directly. In the end, the most that will happen is their face getting shriveled, it's not like they are going to die. I don't want to wake up in the middle of the night surrounded by Slug Girls who had the stupid idea of sneaking in the camp, make them turn back to home directly."

After Victor said that, he started to wheel towards one Slug Girl with the box of salt on one hand. "En garde! I have enough salt for everyone back to where I got it!"

"W-Wait!" Luka shouted. "If you do that, they will just get angrier!"

Victor stopped, letting the Slug Girl that he targeted run away in fear. He turned around and looked at Luka. "And what? I am not attacking the Monster Lord herself, who's going to care about the shriveled skin of a Slug Girl that she got by hunting humans?

Luka, I know you are all so much of a fan for interracial coexistence, but trying to act like some kind of messiah is not the most right thing to do in this case. She will get as angry as she wants to be, but that's entirely her fault for trying to rape me to begin with!"

"..." Luka remained silent, unable to retort to Victor's wild logic. He wants to achieve coexistence, but he knows he has no right to stop Victor from getting back to the people who want to hurt him. His fists tightened before he reluctantly ran towards one of the Slug Girls with his own salt.

"AHHH!!"

"RUN!!"

"MOMMY!"

"KYAAAA!!"

Screams came from the horde of Slug Girls as they were being chased by Luka. Of course, Luka didn't have the courage to harm them like this, so he ran slow enough to let them run into the woods and split his attention to all of them, while throwing salt weak enough that only a few granules would fall on their bodies, unable to harm them.

After making them all run away, Luka and Victor turned back with an empty bag and an empty box.

"...Well, we won two versus seven…" Luka muttered. Even though it felt bad chasing after the monsters to hurt them, he still won through these seemingly impossible odds.

"Well, that was kind of smart…" A familiar voice came from behind them, and both the two boys turned around to find Alice slithering closer to them.

"Huh?" Luka turned around and found Alice approaching them from nowhere. "Where did you run off to? Did you really chicken out?!"

Alice glared at Luka with one of the worst bad eyes Victor had seen in his entire life, making Luka flinch. "I didn't run anywhere! I just don't want other monsters to see me."

"What do you mean? ...Now that I think about it, Victor, don't you know something about Alice? That is the reason why she pulled you along, right?"

Victor shook his head. "It's better if you find that out yourself. I can only tell you that she has a good reason to not participate in a fight against monsters."

"If you say so…" Luka calmed down.

Luka acknowledged Victor as someone smart and wise, and also a friend. If he said that if there is an important secret that shouldn't be revealed, then Luka trusted Victor with that and will wait until either him or Alice will reveal the secret themselves.

It irked him that Alice doesn't want to help at all and still asks for food, but what can he do about it? He can't even say no, Lamias are a dangerous species among monsters in general. They are monsters that come from Sentora: Even if he doesn't know why there is one here, she is strong enough to split his body in half barehanded if she wished so.

"Anyway…" Alice hesitated while she faced Victor, surprised by the fact that Victor kept quiet about her identity. "...I decided to keep quiet as I thought it won't be something big, but… Who are you, Victor?"

"Hmm?"

"Even powerful monsters will find it difficult to learn how to open a pocket dimension, and yet you can do it leaving behind only mere ripples in the space, without using magic. I can't see through your presence, and you certainly look like someone who had been enjoying a good life until now. What is your identity?"

Victor raised an eyebrow and paused for a moment, before he replied. "That's going to stay a secret. Anyway, if it will help you be more comfortable, I can give you a summary of what I am able to do. I can make money without doing anything and I can use the money to buy anything I want."

"That's… Huh?" Alice blinked in surprise, unable to comprehend what Victor said. "...Elaborate."

"That's as clear as it will get, I won't go further than that. Just take it literally and you got the core of my abilities. If you are curious about this 'presence' thingy you speak of, I don't know what you are talking about; and yes, I had a good life until a week ago, when I came here and broke my left leg." Victor finished the conversation with Alice and turned towards Luka.

"Anyway, can you help me set up my tent after you have finished with yours? I could do it myself, but I am not really in the condition to do that now…"

"That's fine." Luka calmly nodded, as he already had an idea of the superpowers that Victor had. There is a lot of the external world that he doesn't know of, so he left it as something more common over Sentora.

Soon enough, with Luka doing the most of the job, two tents were set up near a campfire made of dried wooden logs, with some couples of metal bars holding up a boiling pot.

The preparations took another hour, and due to Victor's plan, he had to buy another box of salt so he won't be eating crap for dinner. With that, the total of coins he currently possesses are 1'761 Gold Coins. With a thousand of them, he finally bought the last upgrader, the refiner, and something happened.

[Current Production: 529 Gold/Hour]

[Basic Production: 423 Gold/Hour]

[Current Multiplier: 1.25x]

[Automatic Wood Cutter: (1 Gold/Hour)]

[Automatic Stone Retriever: (2 Gold/Hour)]

[Coal Mine: (5 Gold/Hour)]

[Copper Mine: (10 Gold/Hour)]

[Iron Mine: (15 Gold/Hour)]

[Steel Mine: (30 Gold/Hour)]

[Silver Mine: (1 Gold/Minute)]

[Gold Mine: (5 Gold/Minute)]

[Platinum Mine: 2'000 Gold]

[Cleaner: (+0,05x multiplier)]

[Purifier: (+0,05x multiplier)]

[Polisher: (+0,05x multiplier)]

[Refiner: (+0,1x multiplier)]

[Super Purifier: 5'000 Gold]

[Super Refiner: 30'000 Gold]

So the next two upgraders are a better variation of a purifier and refiner… The latter especially cost quite a bit… For now he will focus on the productors.

Well, now he can obtain a lot of gold coins just by breathing, that's getting better and better as time passes.

For dinner, although Alice complained about Victor not buying food for her, she simply stood silent and gave a judgemental look at Luka when he said he would be cooking for this night so that his food rations won't spoil for nothing.

After all, this is the first time Alice will eat Luka's cooking, so she was dubious about it when Victor told her that he could cook good food.

Fortunately, she wasn't disappointed by that. Rather, she found Luka's omelette truly delicious, which was a surprising opinion to hold for a villager of a small country like him.

"Hmm… It is really great." With a surprised expression, Alice commented as she placed mouthfuls of food in her mouth.

"You think so?" Luka asked with a smile on his face. A compliment was a compliment, and he willingly accepted it even if it was from someone like Alice. "I practiced how to cook in preparation for my journey. I'll need to know how to cook for times like this."

"You DO know that cooking won't do you any good in the long run to the Monster Lord's Castle, right?" Alice asked, making Luka blink a couple of times in confusion.

Victor sighed and elaborated. "He trained with the sword for five years, but he was unable to go past the level of 'first-time swordsman'."

This time it was Alice who stared at Victor in confusion, while Victor turned towards Luka. "Show her what you can do."

Luka was completely red from embarrassment, and slowly got up while holding up his sheathed sword. Then, he pulled the sword out of his sheath and let go of the said sheath, before he grasped his hilt with both hands and swung it around.

Even if he was embarrassed at what he was doing, Luka's swordplay wasn't affected in the slightest… After all, it can't be any worse than now.

"...Oh my Founder…" Alice swore and shook her head in disappointment. She looked to Victor and asked. "Did he really train for five years?!"

Victor simply nodded and said. "You can stop, Luka."

With a red face and a closed mouth, Luka stopped and sheathed back his sword before sitting down.

Alice stared at Luka with a terrified expression and asked. "How in the name of the Founder did you manage to not get any better after five years of training? Did you laze around the entire time?"

"N-No!" Luka sputtered to defend himself. "I… I asked some travelers about their experiences and tried to mix their different suggestions into my own sword style…"

Alice sighed in exasperation and shook her head. "Crappy skills learned from crappy people will be crappy even if combined. Besides, creating your own sword style? Do you take yourself for a genius? You have to better focus on a single sword style before exploring other paths."

"I… I know that already… Victor told me about it…" Luka shyly answered Alice's speech. Meanwhile, Alice grasped her own forehead in exasperation, rubbing her blue-purple skin.

"...Whatever, I'll teach you a little." With an exasperated look on her face, Alice stood up on her tail and put down her empty dish. Luka stared at Alice in surprise before he awkwardly rubbed the back of his head.

"It's… It's alright, you don't need to. I can just ask some veteran Heroes in Iliasburg or Iliasport… Learning swordplay from a monster seems odd, too."

Alice scoffed at his words and replied with another question. "Is that discrimination? 'I want to coexist with monsters', but apparently not enough for you to learn from one? Unlike those short-lived humans you spoke with, I have a great deal of experience with a sword from better experts that you won't even be able to imagine."

"No, that's not really what I was saying…" Luka said with a soft voice, but he also knew that she was right with her assumption, as the idea of discrimination was implanted in his mind by the religion he was following.

After making up with himself, Luka took a deep breath and stood up with a sword on his hands. "Alright… Please teach me."

A satisfactory smile appeared on Alice's face as she crossed her arms. "Good. I'm not your ally, but it would be pretty boring if you got eaten quickly. I'll train you to fight against monsters."

"Please do…" After some hesitation, Luka replied.

Meanwhile, since they will be distracted with each other for a while, Victor finally pulled out his phone from his pocket along with the powerbank, and separated the two.

His phone was now charged at the 100%, so there was no need to hold on the powerbank and USB cable. He tried to place them in his inventory, but surprisingly they didn't enter.

"...Hmm?" A new notification appeared in front of Victor's face.

[Inventory is full, please make some space or buy an extra slot at 100 Gold Coins.]

"...What…?" Victor narrowed his eyes as he stared at the notification. He had a limited space of 10 slots? Who made this system, EA?

Victor sighed and then bought two slots, but when he saw the price, he narrowed his eyes even further. Why did the price of two slots increase to 300 Gold Coins?

"...You're kidding me…" Victor muttered under his tone as he approached his tent and crawled inside it to stay comfortable. Using his arms to support his head, he stared at his system.

The price of a slot actually increased by 100 for each slot you bought… What the fuck is this robbery? So if he wanted to buy 100 slots together, he would have to pay much more than 20'000 Gold Coins?!

"Asshole…" Victor muttered before he decided to sell his other set of clothes for half their prices, freeing five slots. If he had to pay for it, he might as well sell clothes that he won't use at the moment and buy more when he needs them. It will be more efficient like that.

After that, he bought two soft pillows at the cost of 97 for each and a fluffy blanket for 139 Gold Coins. He put the blanket around his body and a pillow below his head, while he used the other to rest his arm in.

The tent he bought was pretty big, as large as a double bed. He could fit in Alice and her long tail in and still sleep without many problems. For now, he left the exit of the tent for the fresh air of the night to come in while he closed his system and started to play with his offline games on his phone.

It has been a while, but he can finally play again…

…

Victor Luis' (future) Trivia Book: Nephilim

Nephilim, an unique species born from the intercourse between a human and an angel.

There isn't much to say that is already said before. Unlike monsters and angels, Nephilims are not restricted by the female gender limit when they are born, and can appear both male and female.

They will also have an entirely human appearance and habits until they are provoked to show off their powers. Depending on their angelic descendance, their power will also grow up accordingly. An Angel and a Human will give birth to a Nephilim on par with strong races such as Elves.

An Archangel and a Human will give birth to a Nephilim on par with more elite species such as dragons, and it keeps going further from Principalities to the Seraphims, with a range of power extending further from a vampire up to the Monster Lord.

Still, that doesn't mean that it's easy for a Nephilim to acquire that kind of power.

First of all, there are only three Seraphims existing, and their locations and status will be kept a secret to respect their privacy.

Second, I dare you to attempt to rape any one of them and come out alive.

Third, the Nephilim themselves will have to work hard to develop a body adapted to combat.

Fourth… Well, here is where things will get hard.

A Nephilim is a being born from human flesh and angelic energy condensed in a humanoid/monstrous form. And thus they will have a much greater concentration of Holy Energy.

Because of that, their bodies of flesh will not be able to hold the immense holy energy in their bodies and then it will start to erode to a lump of deformed flesh corrupted with holy energy.

You might think that it will end there, right?

Hohoho, absolutely fucking not!

When the holy erosion reaches its peak, it will consume the Nephilim's body and turn them into mindless beasts working through with their instincts and sheer force of their willpower. No brains, no humanity. Don't ask me the sources, you will not believe me if I told you anyway.

If you want your Nephilim child to escape from this sort of fate, you have… HAD two possibilities.

One was to let Ilias control the Nephilim's balance of Holy Energy, but she is permanently gone for now, until another Administrator takes her place to observe over the presence of light like the Four Spirits also do.

But not to worry. Because your child has no chances of reaching the power of a Seraph due to the scarce variety of them in this world, there is at least one monster who can use her Dark Energy to suppress the Holy Energy in the Nephilim's body.

If the mother is an Angel, you can simply go to the north of Sentora and ask your monster friend there. Beyond that, you will have to go to Hellgondo.

If your Nephilim child is particularly powerful, to Cherubim or Dominion level for example, I can suggest you to go to Yamatai Village and look out for a Kitsune named Tamamo. She will be able to help you suppress the Nephilim's holy erosion.

But if you are poor and can't permit yourself to go there, you can either go there by your own feet(I did it, my friend did it, you can do it too so shut up); or you can simply prevent the holy erosion from happening!

How? Well, there is a special medicine called Dagger, and it goes on the throat...

Jokes aside, if you want to prevent your Nephilim child from facing the Holy Erosion, you simply have to make sure they don't use Holy Energy at all. If your child is facing difficulties understanding that simple command, head to Enrika Village and ask for a Suppressing Ring, which is capable of hiding Holy Energy.

Be careful because suppressing powerful Nephilims cost a lot.

I named it first so I get the naming right, you hoes. If you want to fight me for it, come at me bro.