The radiant blue eye tumbled across the ground, clattering almost like marble against the moist wood. It didn’t feel like a real eye at all. There was no squelching softness to it. Instead, if Grey didn’t know better, he would have thought that it was a prosthetic as well.
However, if the witch had managed to get her hands on one prosthetic—unless they were truly rarer than Grey knew—he didn’t see a reason why she wouldn’t be able to get another.
This was, in all likelihood, her real eye. It had just mutated somehow. Or, maybe, this was exactly how the eyes of witches were.
He had no idea, but he was still watching it like a hawk, wondering if it would start rolling over and firing laser beams at him or something.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, there was a blooming light and slowly but surely... two Loot Boxes took shape.
[VICTORY: Grey Temolt AND Amunet Khepri]
Grey grinned. "Looks like we finally got the bitch."
He heard Amunet audibly sigh out in relief and she fell back, landing on her hands and ass. She took deep breaths, unwilling to move even a single inch.
"Hey, Cleopatra, no rest for the wicked."
He received a middle finger in return and honestly Grey didn’t blame her. He was on a time crunch, but to Amunet, they had just survived a battle they had no business surviving. The smartest thing to do right now was rest.
However, what was obvious to Grey was that the Instance was still not over, or else they would have gotten a notification. That meant that they still hadn’t defeated the one they were supposed to.
Somehow Grey got the feeling that that was the vampire pimp.
He groaned on the inside and pinched the bridge of his nose.
How was he going to do that with what? A few hours remaining? That thing was at least as strong as Esmeralda, and it had a horde of followers with it. And that was the measurement of Esmeralda’s strength before he blew up half her face and made her shed her flesh like some sort of skin walker.
So, Grey tried a different approach.
"You’re just going to sit there while two Legendary Loot Boxes hover here? Maybe I should just take them both."
"Do it."
Amunet didn’t even look up from her spot, giving Grey a response he had never expected. Confusion flickered in his eyes and he looked toward the two Legendary Loot Boxes.
He was sure they were. Epic Boxes were orangey-yellow, he had seen them from afar at some point during his first loop. It had led to quite the bloodbath. Unfortunately, he didn’t remember exactly how to get there. Remembering things from past loops in such detail was quite difficult. At least the tutorial zone had just been a short series of tunnels he had travelled so often they had no choice but to be imprinted into his mind.
That aside, these boxes were tinged with a silvery blue color. At first Grey had thought they were Rare boxes as Rare ones were silver. But the strong almost metallic blue felt too premium.
This was definitely a box above Epic.
"What are you talking about, woman? Get up. I need you in top fighting shape if we’re going to clear the rest of this."
"I didn’t do much. If not for you, we’d be dead." Amunet said.
Grey was speechless. He had seen shameless people before, but what was this? It was graceful, patient, and kind to the point of being idiotic.
This wasn’t a video game, this was life and death. Missing out on a Legendary Loot Box was as good as giving up a life saving grace.
For some reason, Grey found himself highly resistant to the idea of not giving Amunet anything.
He might have said that it was because he needed her to complete the rest of the Instance, otherwise he would die for missing his Canon Event. But that wasn’t the full truth.
He just wasn’t an asshole, and he thought that kind people deserved better than what the world gave them.
’Maybe that makes me the same sort of idiot she is, then...’ Grey thought to himself.
"What is your Neural Frame Type?" Grey asked.
Amunet’s head looked over toward him, the swirling shadows eating up whatever expression she had under there.
"... Recursive." She finally said.
Grey’s gaze flickered. That Type was the same as what was accepted by the Looping Necklace. So she would have been like May, being one of the few that could use it.
"If a Recursive Item shows up, you’re taking it." Grey finally said.
Amunet hesitated, but after a while, she slowly nodded. "Alright."
Grey nodded. "Good."
There was no need for him to be excessively greedy. Something told him that the most valuable thing here was actually the blue eye rolling on the ground. And the second most valuable bundle of items was actually the raw materials that Esmeralda had gathered.
If he tried to monopolize the Loot Boxes on top of that, the Producers wouldn’t even have to manipulate things to make him look like an asshole.
He just would be one.
Raising a hand, Grey pressed down on the first Loot Box.
There was a swirl of light and then a click. The box collapsed into a series of three dimensional jigsaw pieces that fell away into the abyss of space before revealing what they had housed.
A book. No, a tome.
Grey didn’t think he’d ever use such a description for such a thing, but the tome was... bloody. Not in the soaked through by an external source sort of way, but in the consumed by chaos and carved by sin sort of way.
It didn’t look like someone had dunked it in a vat of crimson liquid, but instead like the book itself was bleeding, years of scars and torn tissue accumulating into a half leather, half liquid bound cover that housed pages that felt just as surreal and eerily false.
Grey’s gaze flickered and he caught the tome before it could fall subconsciously.
The blue eye rattled from its place on the ground.