Following the creature onto the roof, Kepa Ying fumes silently at every single possible thing going wrong. All the artifacts, stolen. She had enough power with just the arm to damage someone at least one stage higher than she was, with a regular hit, and now she was completely below body refining again. Without the arm, she was down to commoner levels of strength, and without the helmet she couldn’t understand the beast when he spoke what was probably important wisdom that would lead to immense personal growth if she could understand what he was saying. That was a lot of words, and at least some of them were probably important.

The beast pokes her, and points at some kind of shiny thing across a rooftop gap, inside an alchemist’s shops’ second floor. It looked like it was probably some sort of medicine, and in a glass bottle, probably expensive since it wasn’t on display down in the main area below. What he wanted her to do about it, she had no idea.

Walking up to the edge of the roof, she tries to get a better look at the shop as a whole. Down at the ground level, it had a fairly standard entryway, with absolutely no accoutrements or flash to draw in customers, which was suspicious. What merchant didn’t want to bring in people to spend money? Only one up to no good, that’s who. They had to be doing something illicit, which would be why the beast was trying to take the thing from them. It made perfect sense.

Suddenly standing next to her, the creature in question puts his stick in front of her, and wiggles it a bit. Instinctively, she grabs onto the rod, and the beast walks forward to the edge of the roof. He starts pulling it with his tail while facing away, so she sets her feet and pulls back, standing her ground.

Somehow, without the stick moving or the tail moving, the beast leans forward. The force on the stick increased a bit as the creature fell slowly off the roof, but Kepa Ying wasn’t so weak as to be unable to keep a person from falling over when they start leaning. It’s a bit harder once they’re pretty much flat over nothing, being held up by a single girl holding onto a stick, but when she starts doing something, she’s going to stubbornly keep doing it until she at least hits a minor setback!

With how engrossed she was with the fight against gravity itself, she didn’t even notice the bottle flying over into the beast’s hand. She did notice when he started pulling itself up using her as a brace though, particularly since she almost fell over when the force needed began to exceed what she expected. That wasn’t even close to a minor setback, so she just pulled as hard as she could.

Having the beast come all the way up and into her was an unexpected side effect of pulling him directly backward though. They both fall backward, and miraculously the bottle does not go flying. Kepa Ying pushes the beast off of her, and takes a look at the shiny object that seemed oh so important.

Stoppered with a shaped chunk of glass, which looked to be sealed in place with wax, was a thick purple substance. She assumed it was a liquid, but the container was too full to tell for certain; it could have been a very dense gas. Since the contents were most definitely not shiny, Kepa Ying figured that the part of the bottle that had been glittering from so far away was in fact the stopper. That might or might not be valuable, but the label on the side below that stopper had ‘death’ written on it, so it would probably not be the best idea to try and take it out.

“That looks like a dangerous poison, maybe in gaseous form for throwing in battle,” she informs the beast, which had already stood up and started moving along the rooftops, presumably to another hidden treasure it had located. If nothing else, by the end of this heroic interlude, she was going to be rich.