Chapter 52: The House Gryphon

This wasn't Nathan's first time on Lombard Row, but last time he'd only come to handle business at the Greyhaven Wardens' Office—he'd never actually strolled this street steeped in that layered, time-mottled atmosphere.

The street had a dozen-plus shopping malls.

Wren had told him that the genuinely high-end relics never surfaced in these malls—they circulated at private clubs' internal auctions.

But he had no thoughts of buying priceless relics anyway; what he wanted were the ordinary things he'd long eyed but, given his family's means, had never even dared to dream about—say, the newest phone and computer, the latest Nike shoes, new-release comics and novels, that kind of thing, stuff that didn't even touch on bloodborn.

So Nathan didn't pick his mall by class—he picked by size, choosing the biggest one, the Gryphon Court Emporium, and walked in.

The Gryphon Court Emporium was, by all accounts, opened by a great bloodborn of the Concord—one whose strength didn't even lose out to Lord Warden Aurelius, with chains worldwide and eighteen locations in the Commonwealth alone.

Nathan had no particular agenda, but the House Gryphon was simply too enormous—half an hour of walking and he still hadn't finished one floor.

Only then did the boy realize he couldn't keep drifting like this, or he'd never cover the mall before midnight.

He found a directory board and checked what each floor sold. He'd originally meant to look for the latest electronics—but the moment he saw that the House Gryphon's eighteenth floor, the very top, was one entire story of war-beast counters, he immediately couldn't hold himself back.

Ordinary malls rarely topped seven or eight floors, because human stamina couldn't carry you through them—even with escalators.

Bloodborn stamina, though, outclassed humanity's by miles, which is why the House Gryphon ran eighteen floors, dwarfing any human shopping center in scale.

Nathan skipped the escalators, found the elevators, rode straight to the eighteenth floor—and the moment he stepped out, everything before his eyes stunned him.

The entire floor was war-beast counters: mostly the Concord products, but also goods from the Four Hosts and the Eighteen Towers, and even Western Hidden Order lineages' wares.

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Nathan had seen Sebastian's Comet-Gem Mantis, Hundred-Refined Ironweave Grub, Fire-Swallowing Snake, and Insect Nest, plus the Totem Hare and the Phantomveil Vine he'd gotten in the Hourbound Grove, and had assumed all war-beasts ran in that style—but this time his eyes were well and truly opened.

The Eighteen Towers' war-beast design philosophy mostly matched the Order of the Deathless's: no alteration of the host's body, just arcane conversion—turnkey solutions for the paired ascendant-path martial arts, letting a host master a full art without training it.

The Western Hidden Order lineages' war-beasts mostly took the form of assist implements—magic wands above all, with a sizable share of familiar-style pets too.

The Concord's and the Four Hosts' products were far cruder—nearly all of them came with flesh-fusion, new-form-generating designs.

By the elevator, for instance, sat a new product called the Giant Spirit Dragon: fuse with this war-beast and you could transform into a dragon over fifty meters long—and the paired bloodborn-kindred martial art had to be performed in dragon form, utterly unusable with a human body.

And the Giant Spirit Dragon wasn't even the most massive product. Not far off stood a "Giant Sun God," a hulk pushing seventy meters, whose paired weapon was a giant spiked mace—one glance and it just radiated brutal dominance.

Virtually every bloodborn-made war-beast leaned this "Attack on Titan" direction—each one huge, each one styled toward the ferocious, supplying not just bloodborn-kindred martial arts but brute-physique enhancements besides. On raw force alone, every one was a first-rate war machine.

Nathan browsed with relish, lingering and lingering. Interesting as he found the bloodborn-kindred war-beasts, buying one never crossed his mind—things that huge and body-altering were flat-out unsuited for city use, and he didn't exactly see himself fighting anyone out in the wilderness.

The Western Hidden Orders' implement-type war-beasts didn't grab him much either. Maybe in the West a magus toting a magic wand was classy, a status symbol—but that aesthetic didn't fly back home.

After a full loop, Nathan found he liked the Eighteen Towers' war-beasts best—and a few of them fit his needs absolutely perfectly. It was checking the price tags that gave him the fright.

The ones he liked ran shockingly expensive. A war-beast pairing the ascendant-path art "Gravefrost Palm"—the Frost Cicada—actually went for a hundred thousand starlings, a good chunk of his entire net worth.

Comfortable as Nathan's finances now were, he couldn't bring himself to drop that much on something he merely liked rather than truly needed.

The Gravefrost Palm's power was nothing to sneeze at, but what Nathan really liked was its distinctive freezing attribute—and that it paired decently with his black-light vitae. Strictly on power, though, it didn't beat the arts he'd already mastered: the Star-Swallowing Form of the Titan Godslayer Canon, the Quakefist Strike derived from the Ennead Crucible, and the Adamantine Body seized when his Mystic-Gold iron thread heart-seed devoured the Hundred-Refined Ironweave Grub—if anything, it fell a bit short.

After several more loops, at an unremarkable counter, Nathan spotted something that lit up his eyes.

This counter was run by the Far West Order—and what lit up his eyes wasn't the merchandise but the salesgirl.

A petite, delicate girl in a maid outfit; had Nathan not caught sight of the black greatsword standing against the wall beside her, he would never have recognized her as the girl he'd run into last time.

The girl spotted Nathan and actually looked rather excited, waving him over and calling: "What are you doing shopping here? Everything here's super expensive—and it's all mass-market stuff."

Nathan reckoned his strength had climbed plenty since their last meeting, so he summoned his nerve: "You're the vendor here! Isn't talking like that a little off?"

The girl gave a delicate little laugh: "What's wrong with it? It's not like the Far West Order makes its money off this. As the strongest fighting order of the Eighteen Towers, we prefer the black market! The black market lets you sell all sorts of banned goods—everything sold here has to stay within the rules, so plenty of our Far West Order products can't even be put on display."

Nathan's face promptly sprouted exasperation-lines. He made a show of browsing the counter a moment, but the girl said, a little impatient: "If you actually need something, come with me to the warehouse! Everything out here is for show—none of it's much good."