Leon slung the woven sack over his shoulder and followed June.
After making it back to camp without incident, Leon suddenly realized there was a serious problem.
All those supplements he’d collected were basically useless.
What they needed most right now was food and water, and supplements weren’t exactly something he could live on.
Still, considering he could use them to feed Feebas, Leon felt a little better about it.
June realized the same thing.
Feeling that she’d shortchanged Leon, she said somewhat apologetically, “You can ask around later and see if anyone wants to trade some basic necessities for them.”
“If that doesn’t work, you can come to me and trade some for food.”
“No need for now. The camp provides two meals a day.” Leon waved a hand, deliberately acting as though it didn’t matter.
He still wanted to use those supplements to feed Feebas, so naturally he wasn’t going to trade them away.
After putting the supplements he’d collected back in his room, Leon shouldered the woven sack again and headed to the second floor.
This time, he went straight into the skincare store closest to the emergency stairwell and specifically gathered products for whitening skin, treating acne, and reducing scars.
After completing his second round of zero-dollar shopping, Leon got to work.
First, he mixed some fish food with a few of the supplements and fed them to Feebas.
Once he was sure Feebas wasn’t going to suddenly attack him, Leon scooped it out of the fish tank.
Feebas wasn’t very big, only about ten centimeters long.
Leon remembered that a normal Feebas could grow to around 0.6 meters.
In other words, was this Feebas actually still a juvenile?
Of course, it was also possible the thing had been starving for so long that it had shrunk.
After Leon lifted it out and placed it on the counter, Feebas lay there flat, its vacant eyes staring straight at him without resisting or struggling.
Leon even suspected that if he took a kitchen knife and gave Feebas a couple of slashes, it still wouldn’t fight back.
Leon had no idea whether any of those skincare products would actually work on Feebas, but he grabbed them anyway and gave it a full-body skincare treatment.
Pokémon were incredibly resilient creatures.
They could stubbornly survive even out of water.
More importantly, Feebas didn’t resist.
“You really don’t give a damn whether you live or die, do you?” Leon lightly tapped Feebas on the head before putting it back into the fish tank.
Maybe it was just his imagination, but after the full-body treatment, Feebas really did seem to look a little better.
At the very least, it didn’t look as dirty as before.
“Hopefully I’m not imagining it. And even more importantly, I hope you’re not the kind of fish that repays kindness with betrayal,” Leon murmured.
By lunchtime, the others gradually began returning to camp.
But with them came bad news.
Only six of the seven teams had returned.
Across from Leon, Ray couldn’t help muttering, “Blondie’s team still hasn’t come back. You don’t think something happened to them, do you?”
Ray’s concern wasn’t unfounded.
The mall was only so big, and if they still hadn’t returned by mealtime, something must have happened.
It wasn’t as if they’d simply forgotten it was time to eat.
This was the apocalypse, and the camp had only just established the rule of two meals a day.
Miss one meal, and you’d be going hungry for an entire day.
June asked, “Ray, do you know what floor Blondie and the others went to?”
Ray replied, “I don’t think they went downstairs. I heard Blondie say they were planning to search the arcade and see if there were any supplies we’d overlooked.”
That only left everyone more confused.
The sixth floor had already been checked once, and aside from the aquarium, there was basically nothing dangerous there.
Puzzled, June asked, “Are you sure they went to the arcade and not the aquarium?”
The middle-aged man beside Ray said flatly, “Blondie’s not stupid. He doesn’t even dare go downstairs, so why would he dare go into the aquarium?”
“Mr. Miller’s right. Blondie values his life way too much. There’s no way he’d go somewhere that dangerous,” Ray agreed wholeheartedly.
Blondie was one of those people who firmly believed the Federation would send someone to rescue them.
People like him lived by the principle of surviving one more day whenever possible, so why would he ever go searching for supplies somewhere dangerous?
June fell silent for a moment before slowly rising to her feet.
“Let’s leave it at that for now. After we eat, I’ll go take a look.”
Leon volunteered as well.
“I’ll go with you. It’ll be safer if there are two of us watching each other’s backs.”
June was a decent person.
When Mime Jr.
had frightened them into fleeing, she’d deliberately slowed down to cover Leon’s retreat.
Leon hadn’t forgotten that.
June gave Leon a grateful look and didn’t refuse.
Just as Leon had said, two people were safer than one.
After eating and resting for half an hour, the two of them headed to the arcade together.
The arcade’s exterior glass had been completely sealed off, without even a sliver of daylight getting through.
The entire place was so dark that they couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces.
They carefully searched the arcade with their flashlights.
Wherever the beams swept, there were signs of things having been rummaged through everywhere, while several patches of long-dried, blackened blood stained the floor.
June explained from beside him, “Those should be from three days ago. They’re not fresh.”
“A monster killed people here?” Leon asked in surprise.
June nodded.
“Apparently, it was a steel monster that looked like a Triceratops but could walk upright. It suddenly appeared inside the arcade and started attacking the visitors indiscriminately.”
“But apparently it didn’t eat people. The casualties happened because the monster went on a rampage and rammed into a lot of people, killing them.”
As she spoke, June pointed toward a completely wrecked token machine nearby.
“That monster ate all the arcade tokens in here, then smashed through a wall and left.”
‘A Triceratops…
an upright steel monster, and it eats metal.’
Leon had a pretty good idea what monster June was talking about.
Aggron.
A monster in the truest sense of the word.
After all, it was literally classified as the Iron Armor Pokémon.
The two meticulously searched the entire arcade.
Forget finding any trace of Blondie and his team—they didn’t even find a single corpse.
June frowned as she analyzed the situation.
“Could Blondie and the others have changed their plans at the last minute and gone somewhere else?”
Logically speaking, even if Blondie and his group really had fallen prey to a carnivorous monster, there should at least have been some blood or remains left behind.
But there were no signs of any recent destruction in the arcade, nor could they find so much as a trace of fresh blood or any other clue.
“Hm?”
Leon suddenly stopped.
The beam of his flashlight swept across a claw machine.
Leon’s pupils abruptly contracted.
He immediately moved the flashlight away, pretending nothing had happened.
“There’s nothing here. Maybe we should just leave for now?” There was a hint of urgency—even fear—in Leon’s voice.
June, who had been analyzing where Blondie and the others might have gone, also noticed that something was off about Leon’s expression.
Thanks to her professional instincts as a former law-enforcement officer, June didn’t ask any questions and instead played along.
“Then let’s check somewhere else first.”