Kaijin Fighter: So I Have to Make Monsters, So What?-Chapter 1541: Lucky Spoils

<Huh...you know...I’m actually kind of proud of our Lord, right now. It takes a surprising amount go guys to admit when you’re tired and in need of a break. Remember what happened to the Tireless Engine?>

=Finishing every race by...finishing it. I remember him. Surprisingly uptight, even by my standards. =

<Honestly, it made sort of sense that the man died of a heart attack when he did. Dude should’ve gone on more mental health retreats. >

=Indeed.=

<...>

=...=

<So...how badly do you think our Lord tempted fate by making that declaration of his? >

=I’m going to go with...the karmic equivalent of slapping a sleeping bear on the ass with a paddle. =

<Yeah...wait a minute, making weird comparisons is my thing!>

=The fact that I made one should probably tell you just how fucked I think our lord is. =

<That...makes too much sense. >

...

"Hmmm."

When Zhen Liu and his friends entered the former Redoxa Fortress, the former had some expectations on what he and his friends were going to find inside.

Zhen Liu had figured that there was going to be a cache of weapons that were either too powerful to be wielded properly or a couple forbidden aether arts that were deemed too dangerous to be used properly, or aether medicines that were essentially poisons to most normal people.

Hell, given the fact that the Redoxa were essentially predatory money lenders, he figured that this place would be stuffed to the brim with a fuckton of money.

Alas, he was only partially right across the board.

There were some dangerous aether treasure weapons, but they were only Silver-tiered at most.

There were some powerful aether arts, but the strongest was a major Ethereal class aether art.

There were some aether medicines, but they were only effective on people that were at the Aether Grandmaster stage and below.

In other words, the vault of the Redoxa Family was impressive to most people but was severely disappointing to someone like Zhen Liu and his merry band of monsters. Well, there was technically one piece of loot that was of interest to Zhen Liu, but it was also something that caused his internal alarms to go off like an air raid siren.

Either way, the rest of Zhen Liu’s party was pretty ecstatic, though.

For starters, Zhen Xing and Zhen Tai both found aether treasures that paired wonderfully with the ones they received from the main Zhen Clan’s vault and fit their respective motifs as well.

Zhen Xing found a Silver-tiered aether treasure weapon called the [Kitsune Fire Beads], while Zhen Tai found one called the [Sun Serpent’s Pauldron].

"Alright, I’m starting to understand why Zhen Liu thinks of himself as being both cursed and blessed, because how the hell else do you explain these aether treasures just being here?" Zhen Tai asked as he admired how wonderfully his new pauldron paired with his knuckledusters.

"I...actually do know the answer, but I’m afraid of what might happen if I share that kind of information around," Zhen Xing admitted. "Wait... I think I can do something weird with these two treasures if I channel my energy through them correctly...."

"Chaos or aether?"

"Yes."

In this same vein, Rianna managed to find materials that could be used to upgrade her bow from its current status of being a homemade piece of repurposed insect parts into a proper aether treasure. Granted, there was also a Bronze-tiered aether treasure bow in the mix but she didn’t like the way it felt in her hands.

"This is too small and weak," Rianna complained as she held the ornate-looking bow that radiated Luxarii aether in her hands. "I feel like if I tried to notch one of my regular arrows in it, it would snap in half."

"The arrows you use are about the size of spears," Jinju Ren pointed out as she dug through the aether art scrolls of the Redoxa’s vault. "Also, that bow appears to be a short bow."

"What the fuck is a shortbow?"

"They’re bows that you use in close-range combat. You trade power for speed and better fire rate."

"That’s...weird."

"I don’t think any of us qualify to make that sort of statement," Jinju Ren pointed out as she tossed aside another scroll until she found something that looked a touch more interesting than the rest. "This doesn’t feel like an aether art scroll...oh! It’s a map!"

At the same time this was happening, Olstenna and Lythero decided to work together to parse through all of the aether medicines and elixirs that the Rexdoxa Family had squirreled away for one reason or another.

Hilariously, they found a bottle of medicine that Olstenna recognized as being a powerful anti-parasitic.

"Wait a minute, if they were using Armor Puppet Parasites as a fucking guard dog down here, then why the fuck are they packing anti-parasitics?" Lythero commented as he looked over the vial that Olstenna handed to him.

"If I had to hazard a guess? I guess they figured they could use the Armor Puppet Parasites to capture intruders and use this to extort the captured. That or because their men got caught up by these parasites more than once and they needed a way of freeing them once they were caught," Olstenna suggested. "A fat lot of good it did them, though."

"Yeah...say, what do you think is inside of that jade bottle over there covered in phoenix carvings?"

"Probably something good..."

Last, and certainly not least, Antonio found a weird art scroll in the inner archive of the fortress.

An art scroll, that for reasons he wasn’t entirely sure why or how, was radiating [Chaos].

"What the hell...?"

Needless to say, if he sensed this oddity, then so did the foremost expert of [Chaos] in the room.

As such, when Antonio began to look over the scroll and realize he was able to fully comprehend it, he was only caught mildly off guard when Zhen Liu looked over his shoulder and began to comment on the quality of the scroll’s contents.

"Huh. When I heard that those Calamity Triplet guys had apparently used a bastardized [Chaos] art as an aether art, I was curious how they learned in it in the first place...interesting..."

The [Chaos] art in question was known as, [Grand Calamity:Unknown].

This [Chaos] art worked a bit like the Primordial Scripture that the Zhen Clan had been practicing, in that it allowed the wielder of the art to create a personalized version of the attack that would be the equivalent of condensing an entire natural disaster into the size of a cannonball.

However, this was only the case if the user of the art was a Kaijin, who always had their [Chaos] keyed to a certain element.

In Zhen Liu’s case, hell, in the case of any Kaijin Lord, they were technically able to adjust their [Chaos] on the fly and have the nature of the attack change almost in an instant.

One second, the [Grand Calamity] could be focusing the power of a tsunami, only to suddenly change to match the power of a tornado or even a wildfire.

In a way, it was kind of like Zhen Liu’s [Imeprial Crusher], but keyed towards more the chaos to be found in nature, not in humanity.

"Wait, how the hell did those three manage to convert this into using aether as opposed to [Chaos]?" Antonio asked Zhen zliu after they had both finished looking over the scroll. "This damn thing looks complex as hell!"

"It’s actually really easy to do that," Zhen Liu began to explain what Anton, Logos, and Pathos had once taught him "[Chaos] is the origin of universe, ergo, things that use it as a power source can easily substitute it for its offshoots and vice versa. It’s just a matter of changing a few pathways inside oneself."

"Huh?"

Evidently, Zhen Liu’s explanation didn’t do shit for Antonio.

"Okay, I think a live demonstration is in order," Zhen Liu determined. "Alright, see if you can use your senses to determine how I’m doing this."

After sharing his instructions, Zhen Liu pointed a palm towards a wall that was about ten feet away from and Antonio.

A moment later a fired off a baseball-sized fireball towards it, which then dispersed into a small cloud of smoke and embers.

At the sight of this ball, Antonio wasn’t impressed.

"That’s a basic aether blast. Everyone and their mothers know how to fire off one of those."

"Exactly," Zhen Liu confirmed, albeit, he was actually mildly hurt because he was proud of himself for being able to do that sort of trick now. "Now, see what you can sense when I use [Chaos]."

Once again, a fireball formed in Zhen Liu’s hands but the aura it was emitting felt...different.

Really different.

And it was this feeling that caused Antonio’s eyebrow to raise. Especially since, when he tried to sense how Zhen Liu was pulling this off, he couldn’t determine the precise channels that were used.

Instead, it felt as if reality was just... bending in on itself.

"What the fuck..."