Chapter 57: Money
Hide kept walking, but his pace slowed slightly as the realization fully bloomed in his mind.
’Anchors.’
He replayed the battles in the black citadel. The Ossian skeletons that guarded the courtyards, the terrifying Wolfthralls. They didn’t have lungs or blood. They were powered by dense, pulsing points of crystallized dark mana.
Which of course was controlled by the Lesser Calamity Lord. To whom this talent actually belonged.
The anchors he realized were the literal cores of the Calamity Beasts.
When the Lesser Calamity Lord had built its army, it hadn’t resurrected the dead. It had forged physical bodies out of dark mana, and then placed beast cores inside them to act as the engines, giving them life and driving their feral instincts.
If he used his dark mana to form a faceless manifest—a Phantom Court knight or beast—and placed an E-Rank core inside it as an anchor, the construct would essentially become an E-Rank beast under his absolute command.
It wouldn’t feel pain. It wouldn’t hesitate. And if it was destroyed, it would simply dissolve back into dark mana, which can be used again, if he could find a new core to act as an anchor.
’I can build an entire army,’ Hide thought, a quiet thrill vibrating in his chest. ’An army of beasts to hunt beasts.’
But as intoxicating as the idea was, it brought him crashing back to his immediate, mundane reality.
Money.
He couldn’t just keep hoarding everything in his inventory. While he intended to keep a substantial portion of the cores to experiment with the Phantom Court, he still had a mountain of excess loot that he got as a reward for clearing the dungeon and also the things he got after leveling up so much.
Rusted weapons, shattered armor pieces, excess chains, and useless materials that he had absolutely no use for. And he had some very very rare and exotic things too.
He needed to sell them. He needed proper gear, a place to stay that wasn’t a cheap hotel, and funds to sustain himself while he figured out how to navigate his new reality.
But Kai had warned him back in the cafe: the underground market was brutal. They took a massive thirty to forty percent cut off the top, exploiting unregistered hunters who had no other choice. If Hide wanted to sell his loot at full market price, he needed access to the official Exterminator channels.
And to access the official market, he needed to be officially registered with an agency.
Hide pulled a crumpled, slightly bent business card from his pocket.
It was the card given to him by the strange, young-looking man at the Gate Training Facility. The card bore the National Exterminator Agency crest, with a handwritten number on the back.
Hide didn’t know exactly who the guy was, but if he was recruiting for the NEA, getting his foot in the door might give him the market access he needed.
Hide looked up.
Looming at the end of the avenue, piercing the clear sky like a massive spear of dark glass and chrome, was the NEA Headquarters.
It was breathtaking. The building was a fortress disguised as an architectural masterpiece. Heavily armored security drones circled the perimeter in overlapping patterns. The sprawling front plaza was guarded by elite Exterminators whose mana signatures bled into the air, heavy and oppressive.
Hide stopped at the edge of the plaza. He pulled out his new communicator and dialed the number on the back of the card.
The line didn’t even ring. It clicked open immediately.
"Ah! The boy with the silver hair!" a cheerful, cultured voice echoed through the speaker. "You took your time."
Hide’s eyes narrowed. "I’m standing outside the front plaza."
"Excellent. Excellent," the voice hummed happily. "Look toward the east entrance. The VIP lane. There should be a lovely woman with a terrifying scowl walking out to meet you right about... now."
Hide lowered the communicator and looked toward the eastern side of the massive plaza. A set of heavily guarded glass doors slid open, and a woman in a crisp, dark grey assistant’s suit stepped out. She looked around the plaza, her eyes locking onto Hide almost instantly.
She did, in fact, have a terrifying scowl.
Hide slipped his communicator into his pocket and walked across the white marble to meet her.
The assistant looked him up and down, her expression radiating a profound sense of disapproval at his cheap jacket. But her expression changed as she glared at his pretty face.
"Hide Volter?" she asked, her tone clipped and efficient.
"Yes," Hide replied.
"Follow me. Do not wander. Do not speak to the guards and do not touch anything," she instructed rapidly, turning on her heel and marching back toward the glass doors.
Hide raised an eyebrow but followed her without a word.
The interior of the NEA Headquarters was even more intimidating than the outside. The lobby was a cavernous expanse of polished stone, well it was of course, continent’s most powerful organization. Hundreds of Exterminators moved through the space, their auras mingling into a dense, almost physical pressure.
Hide deliberately dialed back his Perception stat so he wouldn’t get a headache.
The assistant bypassed the massive front desks and the standard security checkpoints, her ID badge flashing green at every restricted gate.
They approached a set of private, heavily reinforced elevators at the far end of the lobby.
"Step in," she said, pressing her thumb to a biometric scanner.
The doors slid shut, and the elevator surged upward with stomach-dropping speed. Hide watched the floor numbers blur on the digital display. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty.
The elevator stopped at the twentieth floor with a soft ding.
The doors opened to reveal an opulent hallway lined with dark, rich wood and golden accents. The ambient mana up here wasn’t just dense; it felt suffocating, as if the building itself was trying to press him into the floor.
The assistant led him down the long corridor, her heels clicking sharply against the polished floor, until they reached a set of massive, double oak doors at the very end.
Hide stopped, his eyes locking onto the brass plaque mounted on the wall next to the doors.
Commander Maddox. 3rd Division.
Hide stared at the plaque, his heart giving a single, hard thump against his ribs.
Commander? The 3rd Division? He had read enough to know the basic hierarchy. A Commander of the NEA was an S-Rank powerhouse. There were only ten of them in the entire country.
’That guy was an S-Rank?’ Hide thought, a slight chill running down his spine. ’The weird guy who complained about his back?’
The assistant didn’t bother knocking. She simply pushed the heavy oak doors open, gestured for Hide to enter, and then walked away.
Hide took a slow breath, steeled his nerves, and stepped through the threshold.
The office was sprawling, framed by floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a panoramic view of the entire city. Behind a massive mahogany desk sat the man from the training facility.
He looked exactly the same. Messy, unkempt hair, a relaxed, boyish face.
"Welcome, welcome!" Maddox grinned, clapping his hands together and dropping his boots to the floor. "Please, take a seat. We have a lot to talk about, Hide Volter?"