Rebate King: Every Beauty I Spoil Makes Me a Billionaire

Stan tried to scream again but his throat produced only a wet, ragged sound.

The werewolf smiled and tossed him aside. Stan hit the ice again. He did not have the strength to roll. He lay on his back in the snow, his blood pooling around him in a spreading circle, and stared up at the pale Antarctic sky.

The werewolf stood over him.

The other three watched from a distance, statue-still, their expressions carrying the small, contemptuous amusement of hunters who had confirmed that the prey was not worth their personal effort and were content to let their leader take his time.

The werewolf’s smile had not changed. It had not changed at all.

For the entire duration of the mutilation, the throwing, the dragging, the scoring, the crushing, his face had held exactly the same calm, faintly interested, faintly amused expression. As if none of what he was doing was of any consequence to him. As if breaking Stan into pieces was simply an aesthetic exercise.

’It’s nothing to him,’ Stan realized distantly. ’Nothing. This is nothing.’

He lay in the snow.

His body was not functional in any meaningful sense. His abdomen was open. His chest was open. His face was ground down to the bone in patches. Blood was leaving him in volumes that his physiology, even in its enhanced state, could not sustain. He was breathing in short, wet, gurgling gasps.

He should have been dead.

He was, distantly, aware that the only reason he was not dead was that the werewolf was letting him remain alive. The wounds should have killed him.

The blood loss should have killed him. The werewolves’ pride, apparently, had been offended enough by his attempt to fight back that the lead one had specifically decided to prolong the killing to teach him a lesson. But that didn’t change the fact that he’s at his last breath...

’Am I going to die like this?’ His mind was drifting.

He thought of the ’Introduction to Earth’. The book had said the vampires and werewolves had vanished during the Night of Vanishing. But the book had also said something else, that no one knew where they had gone. That they might one day return.

The werewolf standing over him had spoken of a Realm’s portal.

Stan’s fragmenting mind, working on whatever cognitive fuel remained, made the connection.

The system’s scan had detected a portal. A divine portal. The book had implied that the vanished races had gone somewhere. What if they had gone to a realm, a separate space, connected to Earth by portals, where the ambient Qi still existed at the levels the old world had known?

What if the recent appearance of the Spirit Pool was not just the return of Qi to Earth’s surface, but the bleeding through of that other realm into the world Stan had grown up in?

It didn’t make sense but this was just Stan’s guess.

The werewolves were not returning humans. They were coming through.

He filed the theory away with the small, dim clarity of a mind that was running out of time to think about anything.

No matter what he had to survive somehow... He shouldn’t die here in the middle of nowhere with his girls waiting for him...

The lead werewolf kicked him again. This time, the kick landed directly in the open wound of his abdomen. Stan felt his insides shift. He coughed a great mouthful of blood into the snow beside his head.

The werewolf laughed appreciatively.

”You’re still conscious. That’s actually impressive. New Age humans usually stop responding around this stage. What are you made of, kid? That Divine bronze pill you took is pretty good stuff even for trash like you...”

Stan did not answer. He could not answer. His mind was doing the last calculation it was capable of.

’The inventory.’

The thought arrived like a distant, quiet whisper.

He had used it earlier that morning without qi expenditure. He had willed objects into it and out of it. It operated at the speed of intention. The system had said, when he purchased it, that it required no qi consumption.

He tried it.

His mind reached out toward the werewolf standing over him. The werewolf’s body was, functionally, an object. The inventory was, functionally, a spatial pocket that could store objects.

Stan willed.

The system responded instantly.

[The object possesses will and resists spatial storage.]

Stan cursed silently. ’Fuck... Damn it! Of course.’

The inventory could not simply eat a sentient being. The werewolf had a will. His will was actively resisting the storage attempt. It was, in retrospect, obvious.

If the inventory could just consume any being that Stan chose to target, then he would have been able to eliminate every threat he had ever faced with a single mental effort. That was not how the world worked.

The werewolf’s smile widened suddenly. ”...Now what was that?”

His nostrils flared. His eyes narrowed. He tilted his head at Stan with an expression that had shifted from casual amusement into something sharper and more attentive.

”What was that little spatial technique? That was interesting.”

He crouched down again. He grabbed Stan by the collar and hauled him up until Stan’s face was inches from his own. His breath, when he spoke, smelled faintly of bronze and something wilder, the specific animal warmth of a predator.

”You just tried to store me, didn’t you.” His voice was very quiet now. Very intent. ”Live-stock actually dares to attempt a spatial technique on me. You’re quite stubborn, I just thought you a lesson but you just won’t learn.”

He looked genuinely offended.

He blitzed sideways in a blur that Stan’s enhanced perception could not track and reappeared behind Stan, one claw pressed lightly against the base of Stan’s neck. The tip of the claw was cold against Stan’s spine. Stan could feel it touching his neck bones, the werewolf had cut through enough of Stan’s neck tissue to actually be resting his claw against the bone itself.

”I could take your head right now,” the werewolf said conversationally. ”But I want to know what you did. What was that? I didn’t even sense any Qi fluctuations. Where did you get a spatial storage technique of that quality? Answer me, and I’ll make the ending quick.”

Stan did not answer. His mind was working on one last theory.