Grey’s eyes flickered with thought, his mind whirring with possibilities until his irises lit up like lanterns.
"Hey," he suddenly said.
The barkeep hesitated, a bad feeling welling up in his belly for reasons he didn’t know. Well, it wasn’t like it took much for him to get a bad feeling anyway.
"I’d like to make an exchange." Grey grinned like a devil.
The octopus man’s whole body seized. He wanted to turn away and run for some reason, but he couldn’t. If he left Grey to his devices and Grey destroyed something, he would be the one punished for it.
The barkeep gritted his teeth and held strong, making the decision to ignore Grey’s words until the teleportation platform was safe and secure again. This would be a real money-making machine soon, especially with the second arc coming up.
Of course, the barkeep was a little bit of a fool. He was in the zone of a Cracked World, even if the platform became useful, it wouldn’t be nearly the benefit it was in other zones. And the only person who could change its fate was the one person he was stopping right now.
Still, the main job of a barkeep was to make and extract money. The participants would gain credits from the Genesis Game and by extension the Genesis System. These would be spent on the outpost, and the Monelay would skim some off the top.
This was why there was so much flexibility in who could be chosen as a barkeep and where they appeared.
By now... Grey understood too much about how the games worked. So... despite the fact the barkeep was tuning him out, his grin only widened. Instead, he started to speak.
"Baby oil," Grey said. "All of it. However much you’ve got, I want it."
The barkeep froze, the parameters dictating his actions twisting. Then a retrieval animation started.
"HAHA! I FUCKING KNEW IT!" Grey boomed, then he rushed to continue changing the teleportation platform while the barkeep was occupied.
Grey turned back to the pad and got both hands into it while the barkeep was still bowing and scraping.
"While you’re at it, get me a bunch of simple containers to hold it. Clear containers, if you would. I want to be able to fit exactly a third of a baby oil bottle into every one. And then I need a label for each one that reads baby oil. And then I need a marker, one for each label. A new one I mean. Wouldn’t want to run out of ink, right?
"Oh, and get me a bunch of silk robes too. Sized from petite to large and everywhere in between. Ass is ass, you know? And now I’ve got to chase some alien tail too. Who knows how big they can get? I really want to see how far I can push death by snu snu.
"You think the CEO of Muse Incorporated would be pissed if I drowned his wife in baby oil and fucked her in the ass? I bet he would, huh?"
"What if she’s a woman?" the angel lady asked with a frown, seemingly finally recovering from her prayer session.
"Oh, true, I’ve been sexist. Do you have any 80 foot strap ons? I don’t swing that way, but I’m sure she’d be pissed if I lathered her husband up and gaped his asshole."
The animation kept resetting and resetting as the barkeep was forced to find everything Grey needed. The problem was that if Grey didn’t have the money to afford it, nothing would happen...
But he did. He had every penny he needed.
And because he kept asking for such mundane things, they had them all in stock too, and not a single one of those things put a dent into his wealth at all.
Blue credits simply stretched much too far.
"You—" the barkeep managed to squeeze out, before his own arms folded him back into the presentation posture.
Grey had come out of Barkeep Ji’s outpost with more credits than he even knew what to do with, and he had exactly zero attachment to any of it... because he could make so much more with so much ease. He burned through it without a care.
Crate after crate began to appear in the room until he couldn’t even see the octopus man anymore. Every single order dropped a fresh animation on top of the one still running, and the barkeep never got a free second to reach the pad.
Even a man so cowardly had his breaking point. His arms kept moving, and his eyes kept glaring, but it didn’t change a single thing.
Grey twisted the last glyph into place and stood up, rolling his shoulders.
"You’ve been great," he said. "Genuinely. I thank you for your service. In fact, you can keep a lot of this, I don’t need so much. Whoops."
He stepped onto the pad.
Grey raised a hand and waved as the light climbed his legs.
"Bye bye."
The barkeep, still bowing, watched him disappear. Funny enough, many of the crates and clear containers of baby oil went with Grey because there simply wasn’t enough space to stack them. So many had ended up on the platform itself.
Grey vanished along with them and the barkeep finally broke out of the animations, collapsing to the ground with gasping breaths.
A flicker of fear danced in his eyes. This Grey Temolt... he was truly uncontrollable.
He really hoped he never came back.
...
Grey appeared on a familiar teleportation platform, feeling a heavy frost in the air. It felt like a winter storm had just passed through and there was even snow falling from the ceiling despite the fact there was definitely no sky above him.
His expression changed. That definitely couldn’t be good.
The cold didn’t even begin to affect Grey. He realized now that he had suddenly become immune to cold in general, likely due to the rebirth waters.
But the appearance of this cold meant that something had likely gone wrong. Very wrong.
He raced out.