The night after talking with the leadership of the local survivors, Silva, Lia and I were once more heading into the city. Not to actually hunt more undead, but to see if we managed to find even more survivors. And to gather some more tea, I needed to make sure that my stock remained high. It would run out eventually, but I wanted to push that day as far back as possible, maybe I would find some sort of locally grown alternative in the meantime. It was strange, how the little things, like delicious tea, didn’t seem to be so important until you had to go without. But then, that was true for nearly everything, the value of things only became apparent due to their scarcity. Even air, you only realised just how important it was when you couldn’t get enough.

Moving through the city was remarkably simple. It seemed that the presence of the Undead caused the attention of the Shattered to drop a bit, allowing Silva, Lia and me to sneak about virtually unhindered. Unless we walked within a metre of two of a Shattered, they couldn’t detect us and the vast majority of Undead would only find us if they ran into us. Trying to fool the sense of touch was somewhat possible, at least if using the shadows to travel as I had on Mundus counted as such, but it just wasn’t worth it. Not running into slow-moving, stinking corpses was something I was willing to focus on, if only so I wouldn’t, well, run into the rotting flesh. Even without the potential for violence, that was just disgusting.

Our hunt for tea was somewhat amusing. All the large stores had long since been broken open and looted, with what little was left behind falling to decay and getting spoiled by roaming Shattered or Undead. Just because those creatures didn’t actively break into buildings unless there was something alive attracting them, didn’t mean they wouldn’t roam into an open door, for example, one that was left open after people looted a store.

But the looting had, obviously, focused on stores where you could get the stuff you needed for survival. A few idiots might have broken into electronic stores during the first night or even tried to crack open an ATM, but after that night, people likely realised that money, electronic luxury goods and all those things that used to be expensive and status symbols weren’t important any longer. What counted were things that could keep you alive, food, clean water, solid clothes, sturdy weapons and manual tools. Everything else was, pretty much, useless baggage to be discarded as soon as possible.

Due to that focus, one of the most expensive, fanciest tea stores, one that was selling important teas from all around the world for a price that could almost measure up to rare metals or gems, was untouched. Sure, it was also secure enough that one had to know what it sold, otherwise one might mistake the store for a jewellery store of something similarly high-class but that was neither here nor there. It was an incredible store and one I wouldn’t have shopped without some sort of highly improbable windfall. I had always been comfortable, thanks to my inheritance, but that didn’t mean I was willing to pay some four-figure price for a small pack of tea.

But now, with people removed from the city and enough time and a bit of motivation? Now, I was willing to break open that store and get to the good stuff. Just to see how much tea that had a price per kilogram that could compare to the price of a new car would taste.

Amusingly, the first attempt to break into their store actually failed. My first idea was to try bludgeon the place open with my Ice Magic, hoping to at least make a small hole through which I could send my magic in to crack things from the inside but the glass was secure enough that I didn’t manage. Not even by carefully conjuring hailstones and sharpening them with my Ice Magic before slamming them into the glass, it was simply harder than anything I could throw at it. I even tried to use my other types of magic, Water, Earth and even Fire but nothing worked. The best result I got was by heating the glass as much as possible with FIre Magic before sending blasts of freezing air against it, trying to use the rapid shift in temperature to induce cracks but nothing. The store was secure. But on a positive note, trying to crack the glass increased my Fire and Earth Magic by one each, bringing them to two and four. Progress, of a sort.

Amused at my failure, Lia tried herself but she, too, failed to penetrate the glass with her claws. She managed to make a few scratches and was gloating at her success, at least until she broke a nail on the glass, leaving her howling at the sky in anger. Her next attempt, the classic brick through the window, simply bounced off the window, failing to leave more than a scuff mark, where some of the rock had broken off. If we wanted to try breaking the brick, we might succeed but the window seemed to be impervious.

If it wasn’t so vexing, I would have laughed at the situation. But I wanted to get to the tea, so we had to be creative.

And ultimately, creative we were.

Our first bout of creativity was to try breaking down one of the doors. Alas, the lock was tight enough that I failed to get any magically conjured water in, so I couldn’t even try to move the lock by turning that water to Ice. Not that I truly expected that to work, there was an electronic, now broken, keypad serving as a secondary lock and I had no idea if that had failed in a way that kept the door open. Trying to simply batter down the door failed just like trying to smash the window had failed, forcing us to look for another point of ingress.

Next, we looked for the ventilation shafts. Crawling through them worked in movies, so it might work here, too. Sadly, unless one was a spider or something similarly small, the ventilation shafts were far too small. Even breaking them apart wouldn’t help as the openings in the brickwork were smaller than my head. So, another way was needed.

Just to make sure we didn’t overlook something, we tried breaking down one of the outer walls but the only thing we managed to destroy was the fancy facade. Beneath, there was a solid layer of bricks, thick and sturdy. I tried to use my Earth Magic to induce movement into the rocks but there was just too much of it, it was simply too thick. We couldn’t quite measure it, but by the looks of it, the wall was almost half a metre thick. At least the exterior wall.

But it gave us an idea, namely to move through the side. Not an outside-side but the wall that was shared between the tea shop and the neighbouring electronics store. That store had, amusingly, been broken open at some point, exposing it to the elements and destroying what merchandise hadn’t been destroyed by the change or looted. Either way, it gave us a point of ingress, one that we shamelessly abused.

Ripping off the wallpaper, the drywall and everything covering the interior wall of the store was weirdly amusing. There was a cathartic feeling that came with pure, malicious destruction, one that I couldn’t quite describe. Intellectually, I knew that nothing we did actually mattered but there was a part, buried deep within my psyche, that revelled at the destruction. What that said about me was not something I wanted to contemplate at that moment, but it was filed away for later consideration.

Luckily, the interior wall was positively thin, just a simple, single layer of bricks with some insulation, drywall and covering. The ceiling was held up by a few pillars within the wall, nothing that I couldn’t avoid, and with a combination of Earth Rune Mastery and Earth Magic to amplify my runes, I managed to make a sufficiently large hole in the wall, earning myself a point in Earth Rune Mastery, bringing it to two. And it opened the way into the store as a side benefit.

From that point on, things became easier. We still had to contend with temperature and atmospherically controlled cases that held the tea and a vault holding the larger bags but with some more destruction of property, this time using Ice Runes alongside some Fire Magic. Stressing the metal with repeated cooling and heating worked quite well and by the time the vault broke, I had earned myself a point in Ice Rune Mastery, bringing the skill to a neat thirty and opening the way to my next rune. And we got tea. Lots and lots of stupidly expensive tea, enough that Lia went to get a shopping cart from a nearby supermarket.

When she returned with it, she mentioned that she had noticed quite a few small creatures watching us. Clearly not undead, nor showing the faint flames of Shattered, making it likely that those creatures were alive. But it wasn’t something we could investigate now, primarily because they obviously had noticed us, making it difficult to follow them unseen. But we could return another day, with more time to spare.

For now, we simply packed as much tea into the cart as we could, without completely compromising our stealth, and made our way out of the city. It was still a frankly absurd thing we did, but with a bit of luck, and a few killed undead to help our luck along, we managed to get out, laughing all the way to our lair.