Chapter 32: Shopping! (1)
After a long walk back to the mall, alone.
He sucked in a breath and rolled his shoulders once, the payout chit pressing into his stomach like a slap.
He muttered under his breath, "Alright, Zero Drip 2.0, let’s see if we can buy enough black fabric to keep people from calling me the Discount Ninja for at least a week."
Just to be safe, he fished the chit out and triple-checked the balance, squinting like the numbers might’ve somehow dropped just because he looked too long at a pair of tactical gloves earlier.
"Still there," he whispered, nodding like a stressed-out accountant. "Definitely not a hallucination. Probably."
He shoved it back in his hoodie pocket like it was radioactive and tapped the spot twice for good luck.
Lanz finally stood at the front door of Velmordop’s biggest mall like he was about to storm the gates of some high-level fortress. Well, if you look at it from the perspective of a broke idiot, this mall was a "high-level fortress"
"Sheesh, this looks insane," he muttered, eyes glancing all over the building.
"And people say that this isn’t the biggest mall in world? Then what the actual f*ck does the mall in Galdara look like." As he said that, he could feel the payout chit burning a hole in his belly, pressed so tight to his stomach it was like a second organ.
He almost wished he’d stashed it in his sock after all, at least then he wouldn’t keep tapping it every ten seconds to make sure it hadn’t evaporated on the train ride over. "But nah, that’s doing too much,"
The sliding doors whooshed open, and he was hit with that sharp, cool blast of indoor AC and the smell of floor polish mixed with overpriced cinnamon pretzels.
’This place smells richer than my actual existence... nah, I’m a valuable individual. I’m definitely worth more than a building...’