Brandon spent the next two hours looking like a dog who had just been forced to hand over his favorite bone.
He shuffled back and forth between the front counter and the cellar stairs, muttering curses under his greasy breath while Phillip sat on an overturned wooden crate, eating a hot pork pie that Brandon had been forced to go out and buy with his own coin.
It was the first hot meal Phillip had eaten in three years, counting his past life. The meat was a little tough and tasted mostly like cheap onions, but to a guy who used to eat discarded fast food behind dumpsters, it tasted like absolute heaven.
Phillip learned that he was reborn as a young child in the Kingdom of Clovaria. However this worlds mana is getting extinction on human mages, making them lesser natural born with magic and needs synthetic mana cores to protect the kingdom.
"You can’t just take over my shop like this," Brandon whined, leaning against the counter with a pathetic scowl. "I built this place! I paid the bribes to the city guard! I’m the owner!"
"And you’re doing a fantastic job boss," Phillip said around a mouthful of pork pie, grease dripping down his chin. "You handle the customer service and I handle the product development. It’s a modern corporate hierarchy. You should be thanking me."
"Thanking you?!" Brandon gasped, his face turning red again. "You stole half my gold!"
"I took my twenty percent commission," Phillip corrected him, holding up two fingers. "Which is very reasonable considering I’m the one risking my lungs for your business. Now stop crying and show me where you keep the really dangerous stuff."
Brandon narrowed his tiny eyes. "What dangerous stuff?"
"Don’t play stupid with me old man," Phillip snickered, dusting pie crust off his tattered tunic. "A shady black market shop like this always has a back room or a locked chest under the floorboards. Where do you put the items that are too cursed or too volatile for the regular shelves?"
Brandon hesitated for a long second, his eyes darting toward the dusty corner behind the stairs.
"I don’t know what you’re talking about," Brandon lied, his voice dropping an octave. "Anything unstable gets tossed in the river."
Phillip stood up from his crate, cracking his knuckles with a series of loud pops. Sparks of faint blue and orange light still flickered under his fingernails from his earlier dose.
"Brandon," Phillip said, taking a slow step forward. "Do I look like a guy who enjoys having his time wasted? Because back in New York, guys who lied to me usually woke up missing their car sideview mirrors. Show me the items."
Brandon swallowed hard, his neck fat quivering. He reached into his shirt, pulled out a tarnished brass key hanging on a greasy string, and shuffled over to the dark corner beneath the cellar stairs.
He pulled away three heavy sacks of rotten grain, revealing a heavy ironbound trunk covered in glowing red sealing runes. The metal was pitted and black, like it had survived a house fire.
"This is the scrap from the advertures," Brandon warned, his voice barely a whisper. "Scythes from dark cultists, shattered thunder core spears, broken shadow gems. Most of it is so unstable it gives off toxic fumes just sitting there. I haven’t opened this box in three years."
"Perfect," Phillip grinned, rubbing his hands together. "Unlock it."
Brandon inserted the brass key and turned it with a heavy metallic click. The iron lid creaked open, releasing a thick puff of icy grey mist that smelled strongly burnt copper.
Phillip leaned over the trunk, his eyes wide with pure delight.
Inside lay a tangled pile of shattered silver weapons and glowing purple fragments. Right in the center was a broken spearhead made of light blue metal that crackled with tiny yellow static sparks every few seconds.
Phillip reached down and picked up the shattered spearhead. The moment his fingers touched the metal, a sharp electric shock shot up his arm, making his elbow jump.
"A thunder-bird core spear," Brandon muttered, keeping his distance. "The tip broke off during a raid on a stormy peak. It’s totally ruined. The lightning magic inside is trapped and volatile. If you try to melt that down, it will blow your head clean off."
"Melt it down?" Phillip laughed softly, tossing the metal spearhead from hand to hand like a baseball. "Who said anything about melting it down?"
He grabbed a heavy steel mortar and pestle from the cellar table, dropped the spearhead inside, and began smashing it with violent rhythmic blows.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Blue static sparks erupted from the bowl with every strike, illuminating the damp stone walls in flashes of electric light. Brandon backed away toward the stairs, covering his ears and praying the cellar didn’t collapse.
Within ten minutes, Phillip had reduced the volatile thunder metal into a fine, sparkling silver powder that hummed with a low buzzing sound.
"Alright," Phillip whispered, his heart hammering with absolute thrill. "Let’s see if we can get some lightning speed in these legs."
He didn’t even bother mixing it with earth powder this time. He was feeling ambitious. He leaned down, lowered his face over the stone mortar, and took a deep, aggressive breath.
SNIFF!
The reaction was instantaneous and completely terrifying.
Phillip’s entire body jerked violently as if he had grabbed a high voltage power line with both hands. A blinding flash of yellow light exploded behind his eyelids. His hair stood straight up on end, crackling with bright blue arcs of electricity.
He fell to his knees, his jaw locked tight as every single muscle in his body contracted at the exact same time.
"HOLY MOTHER OF A TRANSFORMER!" Phillip screamed, though it came out as a strange high pitched buzz.
It felt like someone had replaced his blood with liquid lightning and set his nervous system on fire.
His pulse went from eighty beats a minute to about three hundred in less than two seconds. Everything around him suddenly seemed to move in extreme slow motion.
He could see every individual drop of moisture falling from the ceiling. He could hear Brandon’s heavy heart beating inside his fat chest from ten feet away.
He could literally see the dust particles floating through the air like frozen specks of gold.
Phillip stood up in a split second, moving so fast that his body left a faint blur of blue light behind.