Unlike Dr. Patchwork’s practice, the armor shop had a long line of players waiting for service.

  I sighed. “Dick, mark the next armorsmith.”

  “I’m afraid there isn’t another one.”

  “Are you telling me there’s only one armorsmith for 3,000 players?”

  “Uh, yep.”

  “This is some bullshit,” I muttered as I stepped up to the back of the line.

  In front of me stood a clockwork beetle limping on five legs. Just past them was a molten red slime, undulating in place as the ground sizzled underneath. I felt the heat radiating off them.

  I leaned sideways to scope the rest of the line. An albino ogre wheezed under a stuck breastplate. It had been crushed flat against his chest. Next was a haunted suit of armor cradling its own dented helmet in the crook of its arm. In front of them, another half dozen sorry cases waited for service.

  There were other clockwork varieties, too. One was a clockwork knight with a cracked shield. Another was a person-sized clockwork dragon with a bent wing. A spindly clockwork spider clicked as it shuffled, gears grinding and skipping teeth. Every few seconds, its abdomen dropped as cogs slipped.

  There were nearly a dozen players in front of me and only one armorsmith. Built like a chitin-plated tank, she had jagged mandibles, four bulky arms, and two stocky legs. She was an umber hulk.

  A deep, feminine voice called out, “Next!”

  The way she handled her customers reminded me of my butcher back at Southside. That broad was all business.

  I watched her motion for the ogre to spin in place with one claw. She nodded and then used one pair of hands to pick the player up by his arms and her other pair to reach up and grab a set of glowing cables.

  After hanging him on the chains, she went about jamming flat bars between him and his breastplate wherever they’d slip in. The chains ran along some kind of organic crane above the foundry, and she scooted him over to an open torch, heating the metal as she rotated him like a vertical rotisserie. With a few well-placed whacks of her smithing hammer, the breastplate snapped back into shape.

  The very nervous ogre landed on his feet, sweating profusely, and said, “Thanks.”

  “Next!” the umber hulk called.

  Toward the back of the shop were several bubbling vats of molten metal, sunk into the floor. More glowing chains that pulsed with the beat of the town hung above them

  The wait was longer than I had wanted, but shorter than I expected. One of her customers mentioned her name when they tried making small talk. They called her Ferrexia.

  Eventually, she called me.

  “Next!”

  I stepped up, but before I could talk, she greeted me with a Trade Menu.

  “I need a repair,” I said. “You buy armor here?”

  Ferrexia added repairs under the buying section. “Fix it, buy it, and even make it when I get the chance.”

  I added the plate armor that I’d looted off Sir Royale.

  “Need anything else?”

  Her question gave me an idea. “Would you be interested in this?” I took Sir Royale’s corpse out of my inventory and dropped him at her feet.

  One of her massive hands came up to cradle her jaw as she appraised my offer. “Armor’s bound. Best I can do is scrap value.”

  I agreed and she adjusted the Trade Menu. The repairs would run me 500 gold, reduced to 493 thanks to my Bartering skill. I tossed the binding plate armor of sworn protection and the solirium scrap on to the Buying side. After all was said and done, I'd walk away with 739 gold.

  “How much would it cost for you to crack him open and give me his head?”

  “Just the head?”

  “Yeah.”

  Her entire armored torso lifted when she shrugged. “On the house.”

  Pleased with the freebie, I tapped on Accept.

  [Your Bartering skill has increased to level 4.]

  Ferrexia grabbed the knight’s helmet with one set of her clawed hands, his shoulders with her others, and yanked. It buckled first and then popped off. A torrent of blood splashed onto the ground as his head came off, still inside the crumpled helmet.

  She peeled back the Solirium helm like a damn orange and handed me the mushed remains of his head.

  I saw why it was on the house and tossed the leaking head into my inventory for later.

  Her giant bug eyes appraised me directly. “Living iron?”

  I nodded.

  She motioned for me to follow her over to one of the bubbling vats.

  “Strip,” she said once we got there.

  I raised an eyebrow at her, but she just repeated the command.

  “Strip, or I’ll toss you in and ruin your clothes.”

  I frowned but quickly undressed. I didn’t have room in my inventory for everything, so I tossed them in a pile on the floor.

  Ferrexia eyed my clothes but didn’t say a word. Instead, she grabbed me by the waist.

  “Hey now!” I shouted as she tossed me onto the chains.

  Wrapping them under my arms first, she secured the chains across my chest like a harness. Using hand gestures, she had me lowered into the vat of molten iron until only my head remained above the liquid metal surface.

  “You soak while I handle my next customer.” She walked away and yelled, “Next!” before I could reply.

  Surprisingly, it was nice and relaxing, like a hot tub cranked up to just below scalding. Something about the rhythmic tinking of her hammer as she went to work straightening a blade made my eyelids heavy.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The next thing I knew, I was hanging above the vat, naked as the day I was born. Compared to the vat, it was freezing.

  Ferrexia undid the chains, lifted me up, and set me down on my feet.

  “Get your clothes and get out,” she said. Not the first time I’d heard that from a lady.

  I must have nodded off in the vat. My mind was groggy and still coming to, but I did as she said, slipping on my clothes as I woke up.

  Repaired and good to go, I left. The shop was more of an open foundry with organic scaffolding than a building. I found the boundary when my tab cleared.

  [You’ve gained: 739 gold. Total gold: 5,186.]

  I knew it was probably a waste of money, but I stopped by the clothing shop anyway. I stocked up and bought ten sets of jeans, t-shirts, boxers, and socks. The vendor didn’t have a bag, and I hadn’t thought to bring my own, so I had to stuff the socks in my pockets after running out of inventory space.

  [You’ve spent: 196 gold. Total gold: 4,990.]

  Covered in awkward, bulging pockets until I could swing by my Lair again, I went over to the notice board. There were more weekly quests I could do, and I was getting close to buying my franking word back.

  That damn golden dragon was back at the notice board again. I was about to march up to her and tell her to frank off when I noticed players trading each other some weird stuff behind her. There was an actual hill of raw and refined materials stacked behind her.

  “Hey,” she said to me. “You’re Frank, right?”

  I gave her the side-eye and said, “Who’s asking?”

  She looked at me more closely as if she weren’t sure if she had the right person.

  “I don’t remember you being so… shiny? Never mind.” She brought a claw to her golden-scaled chest and introduced herself.

  “I’m Priscilla. I think we got off on the wrong foot the other day.”

  “The other day, when you were extorting people?”

  She shrugged. “People tend to underestimate me. I find it useful.”

  “Lady, you’re a dragon…”

  “I know! It’s the best!” The ground vibrated as she twirled in place, showing off her wings.

  I put my hands on my hips and asked, “So what’s your angle this time?” I lifted a finger, pointing to all the supplies behind her.

  She glanced away, her golden-scaled cheeks turning rosy.

  “I wouldn’t call it an angle… Do you know about the town amenities?”

  To me, they were poorly masked gold sinks, but I said, “Yeah. What about them?”

  She turned to me, biting her lip in excitement. It looked odd on a dragon.

  “The next one is rumored to be a pet store!”

  “A… pet store? Like ferrets and shit?” Taking care of a pet was the last thing I needed.

  “Ooh, I’d love a ferret!” she practically squealed in delight. “You can assign one of your pets to collect loot for you.”

  Now she had my interest. “How much can they carry?”

  “The pets? Nothing; it all goes directly into your player inventory.”

  …And I was back to not caring.

  “How does all that”—I pointed to the hoard behind her again—“unlock a pet store?”

  “The weekly quests,” she said as if it couldn’t have been more plain. “I got the idea from you, actually.”

  I chuckled. “Sure, so how does it work?”

  “The more weekly quests everyone does for the town, the more amenities get unlocked. So I’m buying and selling the stuff to hand in.”

  “And there’s the extortion,” I said, unamused.

  “No, no. I’m buying and selling at the same price. It’s basically a deposit.”

  “No one does anything for free. What do you get out of it?”

  “Access to the pet store, hopefully. I’m a collector.”

  I glanced around her at the impressive pile of materials. Hoarder looked more accurate, but I kept that to myself.

  Turning back to her, I asked, “How much?”

  “That depends. You can swap one shipment for another if you’ve got raw or refined materials to trade. Or I’ll pay you fifty gold for a shipment’s worth of materials. If you don’t have anything to trade, I’ll sell you a shipment for fifty gold.”

  “What about the crafted hand-ins?”

  “You should be able to craft them yourself, assuming you’ve been following the tutorial questlines. I can sell you the materials to craft them if you need.”

  I went and re-checked the notice board, picking up all the gathering, refining, and crafting quests. I’d planned on getting them done anyway. My notifications flooded with quest starting messages as I walked back to Priscilla.

  “So, if I pay you 300 gold, you’ll trade me everything I need to complete six quests?”

  She frowned. “I’d prefer to trade for more materials so we can get more hand-ins…” She glanced back at her pile and sighed. “But yeah, I’d sell them to you.”

  “How do we trade?”

  Priscilla held out her huge, clawed hand. I took it, and a Trade Menu appeared. I loaded it up with gold and waited for her to post her items.

  “The System says you don’t have enough inventory space to accept the trade. I’ll have to hand them to you manually.”

  I grumbled. “Fine, but you’d better not screw me.”

  I tapped on Accept.

  [You’ve spent: 300 gold. Total gold: 4,690.]

  “You’ll need at least one inventory space open; that’s how the System accepts hand-ins,” she said.

  “Give me a minute.” With limited options, I figured it was time to eat one of the princes.

  Priscilla gasped as I dropped Prince Diamond’s body on the floor. Her draconic lip curled in disgust. “Why are you carting around corpses?”

  I ignored her judgmental question and used Skullcracker to pop his top, scoffing him down in record time.

  [Your Intellect has increased to level 9.]

  I glanced down at the mostly intact body and frowned. “What to do with you?”

  A drooling ghoul scampered over to me, eyes locked on the corpse. “If you uh… need someone to take that off your hands… I could uh…” He rubbed his greedy little palms together in anticipation.

  “Go for it. I’ve got—”

  The motherfranker pounced on the prince’s body, tearing through his leather pants to get to his legs.

  “Jesus,” I said, stepping back.

  It was like he hadn’t eaten in a week. He chewed through the flesh and was halfway to the bone already. Gross.

  That gave me the idea that I could easily free up some more space.

  I looked up at Priscilla and said, “Better make that ten minutes.”

  She returned a horrified look. To her, I probably looked like that ravenous ghoul, but I didn’t really care. That was her problem, not mine.

  One at a time, I emptied all the corpses from my inventory. I gorged myself on their brains, earning another attribute notifications with each one.

  [Your Intellect has increased to level 10.]

  [Your Intellect has increased to level 11.]

  [Your Intellect has increased to level 12.]

  Sir Royale had been particularly messy. A hooked horror gladly took his skull off my hands. I watched as she used her floating helping hands QoL to pluck out the eyes while she held the head between her hooked arms. She ate them like grapes before sticking the rest of the misshapen head into her open beak.

  “I like the crunch,” she mumbled before chewing.

  It only took a handful of monsters ten minutes to dispose of four dead bodies.

  Priscilla’s face was a shade duller than usual. Not sure what she ate, but I’m guessing it wasn’t people. Lamb? Or maybe she preferred a cooked meal?

  “I’ll take the first hand-in now,” I said.

  She handed me the shipment of iron ore first. I had to navigate to my Quest submenu to find the option to hand it in. There was a new section.

  Quests

  Pending Completion

  [Choose] Hand in 1 shipment: chunks of iron ore.

  I tapped Choose and read the notification.

  [Weekly quest: Hand in 1 shipment: chunks of iron ore complete.]

  [You’ve gained: 1 common chest.]

  I repeated collecting and handing in the remaining five weekly gathering and refining quests. That had earned me six common chests in total. I didn’t have a spare bed or small storage chest on me, but I could craft those once I got back to my Lair.

  I just knew Dickhead was loving all of this. Players working to help other players were probably a wet dream of his. But as long as it helped me get what I wanted, I didn’t mind.

  A nagging question kept me from leaving. I turned to the enterprising dragon and asked, “How do you stop people from stealing from you?”

  Two puffs of smoke shot out her nose, her version of a chortle. “Who’d steal from a dragon?”

  My palms turned up as I shrugged. “I don’t know. Other dragons?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. There aren’t any. Not in this town anyway. Besides, it’s not like I leave it lying around. I make sure to pack it all up before heading out.” She made it sound like it wouldn’t take days’ worth of cooldowns to get this pile of stuff back to her Lair.

  “Pack it all up? How big is your damn inventory?”

  “Same as everyone, I suppose. But I can access my Lair’s inventory as a NCA from anywhere.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Yeah, it’s a dragon thing,” she said, continuing excitedly. “Also, we get buffs based on the value of everything in our Lair.”

  “Franking dragons,” I muttered.

  I squinted up at her. “I knew it… Bet every shipment’s worth more than fifty gold, too.”

  She shrugged with a sly grin. “They might be… But I’m not cheating anyone. I buy and sell them at the same price. Remember? I just want to unlock more town amenities.”

  That was hard to argue against. Sure, she was making out by converting gold into materials, but she was just working with what the System gave her. I’d have probably done the same. Also, it’s not like she was hurting anyone this time.

  Hell, I almost admired her gumption. Almost. She’d still tried to bully other players into paying her to run an Instance when we’d first met. It’d take more than one good deed for me to believe she’d turned a new leaf.

  With my curiosity sated, I hit my gravekey.

  [Exiting the Overworld. Please wait…]

  [Welcome to your Lair.]

  I emptied my inventory except for the hearthrunes, Hope Doll, and sparkler. It was time to hit the next Instance.