"Well, then I'll get you one. Good?" the beautiful stranger concluded, shaking her head as she walked away.
A grim expression lingered on her face as she dismissed her weapon.
Kyle grimaced, watching her leave.
'Did I fucking say I needed one...? Maybe,' he thought, glancing back at the corpses before slowly following after her.
***
At that point, they pressed on along a devastated roadway leading towards the district where the market operated.
The tarmac lay shredded as if ripped apart by a missile strike.
Burnt-out vehicles were overturned in heaps, and a jackknifed trailer sprawled across the thoroughfare, forcing them to crawl beneath its rusted belly to pass.
"That bloody trailer pisses me off every time I come through here," Kyle muttered under his breath, recalling a disastrous run-in with it.
Two months earlier, he had conned a trader by bartering counterfeit brass, moulded for hand-forged armour but packed inside with cement dust and metal shavings for heft, then walked away with a shipment of genuine industrial batteries.
Rather than spend them outright, he dismantled the casings, siphoned half the charge, resealed the shells with epoxy, and brushed them over with fresh paint to appear untouched.
Word spread soon after that he possessed a cache of "military-grade power cores," allegedly recovered from an abandoned bunker and claimed to outperform anything else on the market.
Survival gangs, raiders, and scavenger crews descended like vultures, scrambling to get their hands on the haul.
Of course, everyone wanted power; for radios to keep communications alive, for pumps to drag water from poisoned wells, for weapon modifications that demanded steady current.
Kyle offered only "bulk exchanges," insisting on food supplies, medical reserves, and entire crates of antibiotics.
To make his pitch convincing, he wired a handful of genuine cells into the casings, letting lamps burn for days in front of eager buyers.
Within a fortnight, he had drained the traders of medicine, swallowed nearly every spare ration, and even stripped rival crews of their ammunition caches, all under the illusion of selling endless energy.
By the time the trick unravelled and the first counterfeit units sputtered out after only a few hours, he was already on the run, and this trailer had blocked his escape.
Weighed down with plunder, he was forced to discard much of it, turning weeks of calculation into almost nothing.
He shook the thought aside as new threats surfaced.
From the direction of the market, a swarm of beasts pressed forward, nearly thirty Spineback Boars, each was far larger than the Glassfang rats, and enough to make the road itself a death trap.
"Uhh… don't tell me the market's already been attacked and wiped out? Are they that weak in there?" Na-Ri asked rhetorically, summoning her weapon as she braced for the charge.
Kyle scoffed under his breath.
"In your head. Honestly, yes; those lot could easily be overrun by this many Spineback Boars, so it wouldn't surprise me. But not everyone will be dead. The market might be damaged, sure."
She blinked twice, wondering why he was hanging back, before reminding herself he was just a weakling.
Except he wasn't retreating.
He was lining up the same tactic he had used to bring down a single of their kind before, but this time with an unintentional ally.
The trailer's low undercarriage made a perfect choke.
A stampede this size would either jam themselves beneath it or smash the whole frame down, crushing some in the process.
That was his plan, elegant in its cruelty.
Na-Ri only thought he was about to bolt.
She tensed, ready to blitz the herd at inhuman speed, when Kyle stopped her.
"You shouldn't be that stupid. If you didn't know, which is shocking really, these beasts can summon fifty more with just one cry. But of course, that only happens when you attack," he said flatly.
Her dead gaze cut back to him, realising he actually had a point.
For all their stupidity, the boars still had wild instincts, and once pressed, they would call reinforcements.
And she was not so confident that she could face an army.
Even if she began using her elemental affinities, she would eventually wear out her spiritual energy.
However, the creatures were fast approaching, and their essence cores were what she really needed, so she was not going to run away just because of their numbers.
"So what do you suggest?" she inquired without emotion, pointing her dark blade forward while remaining in her stance to attack.
Kyle's eyes flicked between the charging horde and the trailer, then he explained flatly:
"Alright, here is how this works. Look at that trailer. We will not drop the whole thing on top of them. We just have to use it like a press gate."
Na-Ri blinked, frowning as she turned her gaze to the trailer.
"A what?" she asked, a bit dazed by his suggestion.
"Think of a door slamming sideways."
He jabbed a finger toward the lower edge of the trailer.
"We knock out the supports on the downhill side only, and when the idiots pile in, their own weight will force the frame down at an angle, not flat. Half of them will be pinned and broken against the rocks, and the other half will be jammed into each other like trash in a compactor. And the best part?"
His forced grin sharpened.
"Their cores will still be reachable, so we do not have to bury the goods. We just trap the delivery."
Na-Ri tightened her grip on her blade, feeling a bit sceptical.
"Okay. And if the frame collapses all the way?"
"Uh? Then congratulations, you get crushed under a trailer before even touching your precious cores. But since you are quick, we will be fine."
He bent low, wedging a bent iron beam he had picked up recently under the trailer's midsection.
"We pull this when they are close, and gravity and panic will do the rest."
The pounding of claws grew louder, echoing through the ruined highway.
Kyle glanced at her with a scowl.
"And before you open your mouth again, I take seventy percent of the essence cores, you take thirty. Besides, this is my plan, and you already promised me the next kill, remember? This counts."
Na-Ri's face darkened to pitch black.
She had indeed promised such, figuratively shooting herself in the leg, and now he was wringing her dry with it.
The beasts then crashed forward like a tide of snarling bodies funnelled through the choke.
Kyle yanked the beam without hesitation, and the trailer sagged sideways with a metallic screech.
The first wave of creatures slammed into the rock wall, their bones snapping like twigs.
Those behind them shoved forward mindlessly, jamming the front line even tighter.
Within moments, the narrow path became a living grinder, spines cracking and limbs flailing uselessly as the horde crushed itself against the half-fallen hulk.
Na-Ri exhaled sharply, realising the weasel had been right.
'...He is smart, I see.'
The bodies lay exposed and bleeding, their cores practically glimmering to be taken once the frenzy ended.
The manual did not affiliate any kill to either of them, due to the known reason that they had not directly killed the beasts.
Kyle dusted his hands as though it had been nothing, then said curtly:
"There you go. I just made everything efficient, low energy, and best of all accessible merchandise. Now, shall we start counting my seventy?"