Ruin

The distant shouts of multiple men and women rang out from the distance. Listening to this, Noah only chuckled before glancing at the scene before him. On the ground was a young girl about 16 years old. It was the same girl he had saved from disgrace last time. Even now, she looked bruised and battered, her muscles severely aching but there were two differences from what happened the last time.

The first was that her clothes were intact. The second being that this time he was the cause of her pain.

Staring at her with a contemptuous look in his eyes, Noah sighed as he looked at his friend/rival, Ian. "Aren't you going to stop this?"

The handsome fellow shrugged, showing his indifferent attitude to all this. "It's her choice. You nor I can do nothing if she chooses to disturb the hell out of us. Plus..." He smiled with a sly look as he spoke further. "... You seem to have a slight fetish going on there."

Noah's lips twitched. It seemed no matter how steeled his mind was, this bastard always had a way to infuriate him. Turning his head from him, he stared once more at the girl slumped on the ground, desperately gasping for air. This girl has been persistently disturbing him ever since the day he had saved her like a deranged woman asking - no, begging for him to teach her.

But unfortunately, he had neither the time nor the intention to do so. "You know, if you keep disturbing me but I choose not to teach you anything, you will fail the weekly assessment and get kicked out." He paused as if to let his words sink in but all he got were a pair of determined eyes that stared at him, unmoved. "In fact, I could request that you could get kicked out." He paused again, only to receive the same silent response and then sighed. "I could get tired of this and just straight up kill you."

This time his words seemed to awaken a primal fear in her as her body visibly trembled. Because she knew. She knew that the person before her could and would do it and at the end, still not suffer any punishment for it. He was called the Devil after all. But the tremble only lasted about 3 seconds. Her determination reaching higher now more than before was reflected within her eyes as she stared at him once more.

This finally won him. The person before him wasn't bad anyways, and her aptitude towards Martial arts wasn't that bad.

So, reluctant as he was, Noah sighed. "Okay, I'll teach you what I can but it's not like I know much anyways. It depends on whether you have a strong enough will to not break while I train you."

And like that, her hell-like training began.

And the nightmare he would suffer in the future was set in stone.

***

Noah groaned as he sat up. His face was painted with a mix of emotion. Grief, sorrow, loneliness and hate. He stayed still for the next few minutes before sighing. 'The past is the past.'

With that thought he got out of bed and freshened up. After eating his breakfast, he put on all the equipment he needed and headed for the Mercenary Association branch. He was ready to go hunt another Fiend, after all he had become stronger and knew more about those monsters now.

For some reason, Noah's entrance into the Mercenary Hall attracted quite a number of eyes focused on him. This caused him to frown, his eyes landed on the nervous wreck called Rey that shivered and dared not meet his gaze. Sighing, he already knew what happened. The news of him single-handedly killing Fiends had been spread out by the receptionist.

But Noah didn't care, he had expected something like this after all. As long as these people knew their places and chose not to disturb his peaceful life, he would choose to ignore them and cause trouble. The past month had been like this. With the use of the resources he bought, he was already almost at the point of saturation for his 7th level core, not far from advancing once more

"Get another two elixirs of the same kind." Saying this, he handed some money at the moment: totaling 130,000 essence coins. He had gotten a lot from hunting Fiends for a full month.

Actually, with the money he had, he bought the Middle Grade Essence Gathering Elixir. But his intuition told him that although using two Lower Grade Essence Gathering Elixirs would not match the Middle Grade one, using two Lower Grade Chaotic Essence Gathering Elixirs would be very closely as effective as a Middle Grade Essence Gathering Elixir or even possibly, more effective than it.

"Hmm." Rey nodded with a weak smile as he accepted the task given to him, he could only hope that the calmness and indifference 'Ron' showed was true and that he wouldn't be beaten half-dead once most of the members of the association left.

Noah nodded then turned around. He walked towards the exit of the Hall but was stopped. It seemed people were interested in his feat a little too much.

***

Three people had blocked his path to meet him. Noah recognized the first two. The first male among them was Jason, while the female was the girl he had suspected of hiding her power, of whom he had later discovered her name, Alyssa. The third man, he knew nothing about him, this wasn't surprising as he had only begun working here for a week.

He recognized two but that didn't mean they were familiar with him, so his hand inevitably was drawn to the hilt of his sword.

Seeing this, the unknown man smiled, a thick air of masculinity, pride and arrogance being released from his body. Noah frowned feeling this. This wasn't normal arrogance, it was the type that came from those who possessed strength to back it up, and so these fucker could very well be within or infinitesimally close to the Adept Stage.

But even so, Noah remained calm. Because he had not done anything untoward to receive the attention of a powerhouse like that, so it was because of his recent feat that the man had approached him. More importantly, he was calm because he possessed the ability to run away!

"Cautious I see." The man smiled as his eyes glanced towards Noah's sword holding hand. "My name is Ivan, nice to meet you! You can relax your grip on that sword of yours." Yet, hearing this, Noah kept his hand on the sword while staring at him with dead calm eyes. "Okay, suit yourself. I'll get straight to the point. I wish for you to join my Mercenary team."

"No thanks." Noah's answer came almost instantaneously. The air around them seemed to tense. Even the expert Ivan didn't expect he would be turned down so blatantly.

The man frowned as he stepped forward. "Are you sure?"

"Yes." Again, an answer left Noah's lips without any sort of hesitation. At this point the air around them was already boiling as Noah anticipated his first fight with someone two Stages above him.

Yet, the man only laughed as he stared at Noah. "Okay then. I just hope you'll be careful if you wish to visit the latest found Ruin. If you're lucky, we'll meet within it and you'll change your mind..." With that, he turned around with a smile and began walking away.

Jason followed him and glanced back once with an apologetic smile while the cold girl named Alyssa stared at Noah for a bit before taking her leave too.

Noah, on the other hand, frowned. He didn't know what the man was talking about. To his knowledge, Ruins were sort of like inheritance grounds where a high level Battlesoul master once lived while they were alive. The things found could be weapons, Elixirs, resources or battle techniques. He didn't think that his three-day absence would cost him some valuable intel.

So after hunting the next Fiend and collecting his money and Elixirs, Noah was able to get the information out of Rey. Turned out that a Ruin was discovered on the second day of his training session. It belonged to a Battlesoul master at the Grandmaster Stage! This stage was very high, meaning that the items within the Ruin were of high quality!

Noah could barely wait, even he, a transmigrated, knew the importance of all this. As for the 'advice' Ivan had given him...

... That piece of shit could rot in hell for all he cared about. Right now, Noah's mind was only fixated on the profits he would get for successfully raiding the Ruin. When great opportunities such as this popped out, who in their right mind would not accept it.