The research facility

Eo looked around the installment. Everything smelled musty and old. He wondered when the building was last used. Weary and tired, Eo let his body hit the floor, passing out almost instantly.

When he woke up, he decided it was about time he explored his new shelter. Eo felt mentally refreshed, though his appearance was a mess. After consuming some canned food, Eo decided that he would try to find a clothes store later.

The first part of exploring the facility consisted of desperately crawling around inside dusty black rooms until finding a light switch. After Eo found one, he flipped it on and looked around. The entire place was concrete and metal, with dangerous sharp protrusions coming out of the walls. Wires were strung across the room, and pipes created a maze right under the ceiling. Messy tables littered the place, and instruments of varying degrees of danger screamed at Eo to touch them.

Hanging on the wall was a large corkboard with various notes and pictures pinned on it. One of the pictures caught Eo's eye. It was a plain white brochure with red lettering on it. It read in bright bold text: "Power Battles! Fight your way to the top! Prove your worth!" In smaller text below it read: "Apply at the intersection between 48th Street and 29th Avenue", like giant death arenas would have proper addresses. Under the brochure the message "Where???" was pinned. Kind of strange, given that the address was literally written out.

Eo wondered about what kind of new adventure this would be if he joined. Of course, knowing he was barely out of the recruit stage, Eo guessed he'd get flattened in an instant. The inside of the brochure opened up to show Eo glorious pictures of violence and destruction. There were even spectators to egg on the combatants, and scenes of victors getting rare prizes.

Eo stuffed the brochure into his pocket and decided to check out the rest of the facility.

There were five floors to the facility, and three floors under. Counting the ground floor, that would be nine in total. In the building he found a lot of strange vats, trays of test tubes, and boxes of strange glowing crystals. He also found mountains of paperwork just lying around. To Eo it didn't make much sense.

After all, if this building was abandoned due to the flood of monsters, why weren't all the materials taken? Or, at the very least, locked up safely? It seemed almost as if everyone working in the facility had simply vanished. Given the distances involved, there should've been more than enough time to prepare.

On the top floor there was a large conference room. There Eo could see what the director of the facility had planned to research and study. There were notes and diagrams outlining the future of the research, and Eo decided to study them. He didn't have anything better to do.

☆

The sun had already set some time ago, and Eo was trying to focus on reading. The noises and grunts of the monsters that were crowding around the building was distracting. Because it was night, the amount of wandering monsters increased tenfold. Eo just hoped another wave wouldn't come and flatten everything. The waves were another thing entirely. If just the ambient roaming of monsters could flatten residences, entire waves could flatten military installations.

From the assortment of discarded information Eo had managed to glean the basic information of the researcher's findings. They were essentially trying to find out a way to convert stored essence to be added to someone else's essence pool. Eo found the idea extremely useful, as he had what was essentially a giant essence battery in his backpack.

As exciting as that sounded, the researchers couldn't accomplish it because they were missing a key component: the Inaril Gem. According to what Eo read, the Inaril Gem was an unusually rare gem dropped by the Inaril, usually a Phase VI or higher. Looking back at it, it sort of made sense why the facility had a brochure for the death arena. They were trying to obtain the gem. Looking at that required Phase number, however, made Eo shiver. He couldn't fight a Phase IV. No, he couldn't even fight a higher Phase III.

Eo resolved his will to become stronger and then clenched his fist in a very typical self-motivating kind of way. He decided that starting from now on, he would train, research, and shop for new clothes.