Mark lounged beside Danica at the rough-hewn table, radiating his usual confidence and something that looked a lot like relief. His familiar lay coiled across his shoulders like the world's most fabulous fire-stole, tail flickering with violet flame.
The others had slipped into seats around them with a quiet certainty that made something in Danica's chest unclench. They weren't running. Despite everything, despite the danger, despite Beth's exit, they were here.
Rhea. Atlas. Nia. Mark.
Who would have thought I’d be making friends?
Mark's familiar sat up, and Danica was surprised to see the little foxbat looking frustrated.
‘I have been exceptionally patient while you two caught up’, the rich, completely self-assured female voice echoed in her mind, and from the expressions on everyone else's faces she wasn't the only one hearing it. But this is getting ridiculous.
Mark immediately straightened, adjusting his familiar with the ceremony of a man settling something irreplaceable. "Oh! How rude of me!" He turned to face the table with full theatrical energy. "Everyone — allow me to introduce—"
‘FABULOSUS INFERNUS,’ the voice purred. ‘But of course, you may call me Fabi. I'm sure you are all excited to meet me.’
Nia made a strangled sound somewhere between a gasp and a system reboot. Atlas froze, mouthing the words it's talking. Rhea's hand twitched toward her weapon before she caught herself.
Danica activated Identify on pure reflex.
—
[Race: Foxbat — Flarewing | Class: Familiar Level 11]
—
Level eleven. Twice their level.
Looks like Mark wasn’t the only one who leveled up.
She took Fabi in properly: sleek black fur with crimson streaks that shimmered like cooling metal, wings tipped with living ember that was somehow purple, everything about her radiating the easy confidence of someone who had never once doubted her own value.
She's a pampered princess. Perfect for Mark.
Nia, meanwhile, had shaken off the shock and latched onto the more interesting problem.
"Oh my gods — are you elemental or animal? Or both? I have Mana Sight so I can see magic, but yours is so complex it would take hours to decode. Wait — you're running an independent mana flow, aren't you? That heat signature isn't even normal combustion—"
Fabi, clearly delighted, preened. ‘Ah. An intellectual. This is acceptable. You may keep her.’
Atlas, still working through it, turned to Mark. "Your familiar speaks."
Rhea cut him a look. "That's what you're stuck on?"
"Yes!" He threw up his hands. "I'd come to terms with him—" a gesture toward Mark, who was now adjusting Fabi's wings with the focused attention of a show-dog groomer, "but now there are going to be two of them?"
Mark, utterly pleased with himself, nodded. "And you're welcome."
Fabi fluffed her wings. ‘Indeed. You should feel honored.’
"Mark," Danica said. "Fabi."
They turned to her in unison.
"This is Atlas, Nia, and Rhea." She pointed in sequence.
The introductions ran their brief, chaotic course, Mark radiant, Fabi gracious, Atlas still processing, Nia already composing follow-up questions, and then Rhea, with the efficiency of someone who had waited long enough, redirected.
"We need a plan. And information. Before we spend a credit."
Danica nodded. "Agreed. I'm going to talk to Bert."
Atlas looked across the room, where the compact, quill-covered figure was sending another frustrated would-be customer away empty-handed. "He doesn't look like he's sharing. He ignores everyone who goes up to him."
"He's not sharing because nobody can understand him, so he's a little grumpy." Danica pushed back from the table. "I can fix that."
Mark perked up. "Ooh — mysterious merchant with plot-relevant information—"
"You and Nia stay here. Sell whatever loot we have and the things you told me you stole from the city level." She glanced at the suspiciously full pack Mark had appeared with. "And we'll have a conversation about the phrase 'selective redistribution of NPC assets' later."
Mark pressed a hand to his chest. "I prefer to think of it as—"
"Later." Mark pouted. Danica rolled her eyes. "Atlas, Rhea."
They went.
Bert's eyes lit up the moment Danica approached.
"Ah," he said. "You. The only smart human here. Ja, this is better."
Atlas blinked. "You understand him?"
Rhea looked at her. "You never told me how."
"Universal Translation skill."
"How long have you had that?"
"Since about five minutes into the integration." Danica kept her voice mild. "The System handed it to me free."
Bert snorted. "Ja, it's free to everyone. It is right there in the help menu if any of you humans bothered to look." He regarded Atlas and Rhea with bored expression. Then, apparently deciding they'd earned a shortcut, he tapped something in his interface and it translated his next words. "Go in. Request 'help' on translation."
Rhea and Atlas exchanged a look. Both went briefly unfocused.
When they came back, Rhea's jaw had tightened in the way of someone confirming a suspicion they hadn't wanted confirmed. "That was right there the whole time."
"Ja," Bert said, with the satisfied air of a man who had already made this point four hundred times and expected to make it four hundred more. "People do not say hello first. It costs nothing. Nobody does it." He folded his small clawed hands on the counter. "You said hello. So — what do you want to know?"
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Danica asked about the wildlands first. Terrain, creature levels, what to expect once they left the Welcome Center's safe zone.
Bert answered the way he did everything — directly, without decoration, with editorial commentary that cost extra.
"Creature levels scale with distance." He pulled up a schematic she couldn't fully read from her angle. "Near here — manageable. You go further, things get larger and angrier. No warning markers at the zone boundaries. The warning is that the creature trying to kill you is suddenly twice the size of the last one."
"How do you know when you've crossed a zone?" Atlas asked.
"You don't," Bert said pleasantly. "That is the point."
Rhea's expression didn't change. "And the terrain?"
"Temperate. No seasonal shifts. Storms are manageable with preparation." He paused. "Do not be caught in a storm without preparation. Unless you like being miserable."
Danica moved to towns. What kind of welcome they could expect, whether skills or credits mattered more, whether being an outsider was going to be a liability.
Bert considered this with the weight of someone whose answer came from observation rather than policy.
"Tolerant," he said finally. "The towns near here are tolerant. But tolerant of the useful. You have money, skills, something worth trading — they will work with you. You have nothing—" He spread his paws. "If someone stabs you in the street they will watch it happen."
"Hospitable to the useful," Atlas said.
"Ja. If you're smart." Bert's eyes moved over all three of them with the calm assessment of someone pricing inventory. "You look smart enough. Mostly."
Danica asked about the sub-dungeons. The shape of them, how they compared to the personal dungeon they'd each just survived, whether the time dilation worked the same way.
"Better time ratio," Bert said. "Better combat experience. But they don't give you everything. Towns give you skill teachers, employment, beds, allies." He tapped his counter once. "Smart initiates do both. Use the dungeons for experience and the towns for everything the dungeons can't give you."
He gave that room to land, then: "Anything else?"
"Hidden stores," Rhea said. "You mentioned them to her before."
Bert's expression shifted — the sharpening of someone accessing a topic they considered worth discussing. "Ja. Wandering traders, black market shops, some fixed locations the System doesn't advertise. You need tracking skills to find them. Most people don't have tracking skills." He glanced at Danica. "Most people don't think to look."
Danica pulled up her interface.
—
[SKILL: ETHEREAL TRACKING] Grants the ability to sense energy disturbances, hidden movement, and lingering auras. Can track recently traveled paths and detect residual traces of magic. More effective in highly magical environments.
—
"Would Ethereal Tracking find them?"
The moment she said it, Bert's eyes locked onto her with attention that had nothing casual in it.
"You have that." His voice had dropped a register. "At this level."
"Yes."
He was quiet for a beat that felt longer than it was. "Do you understand how rare that is?"
"Enlighten me."
He leaned forward slightly, quills settling. "Ethereal Tracking doesn't follow footprints. Doesn't follow scent. It follows mana itself." He pointed to one of the yellow gems inset into the counter. "Touch it. Focus. Let's see if your skill actually works."
She did.
—
[System Interface Crystal — Store] Status: Active [MANA SIGNATURE ACQUIRED — System Interface Crystal]
—
She kept the surprise off her face. The last line was new. She'd touched these crystals before without seeing it — she must need to be actively focusing on the skill.
"Now find another," Bert said.
She let her focus expand, reaching out the way she'd learned in the dungeon — not looking, just listening for the shape of things in the dark.
—
[Ethereal Tracking — Activated] Select Mana Signature System Interface Crystal — Selected Number of System Interface Crystals detected within range: 193 Display on minimap?
[Yes / No]
—
One hundred and ninety-three.
She selected YES and watched a hundred and ninety-three dots resolve across her minimap — scattered through the Welcome Center, yes, but extending beyond it in patterns that were too deliberate to be accidental. A cluster to the north. A string running east like a trail of breadcrumbs.
In a dungeon that liked secrets, that many hidden doors.
She didn't let the excitement show, but she felt Bert watching her face.
"Ja," he said quietly. "You see it."
Rhea had been watching in silence. Now she looked at Danica — not a question, the same assessment she'd run in the first thirty seconds of meeting her, now being updated with new information.
Atlas exhaled through his nose. "Okay. I'm glad we came over."
"You could have come sooner," Bert said, already turning back to his ledger. "But. Ja. Better late than never."
They threaded back through the crowd, which had thickened while they were gone and had not improved in temperament. Danica checked her MP out of habit and winced.
—
[MP: 3/170]
—
She'd been running Identify on everything she passed — lamps, crystals, ambient architecture, without paying attention to the cost. Ten MP per signature acquisition. Seventeen attempts since she'd left Bert's counter. She'd hit the floor, and a headache was forming at her temples.
Note to self: Ethereal Tracking is not free. Use it with intention, not reflex.
The Welcome Center pressed around her, warm and crowded and subtly wrong in the way of spaces not designed for this many frightened people with nothing to do but wait. She'd been half-aware of the arguments all morning. Now, moving through the room, she could feel their shape — the same grievances phrased the same way by people who didn't look like they'd spoken before, the same questions cropping up in clusters. It wasn't organic panic. It had a pattern.
She tracked it without looking like she was tracking it, which was a skill she'd learned long before the System had anything to say about it.
By the time she spotted their table, she'd found at least one source.
Mark had relocated slightly from where she'd left him and somehow had gotten a new set of sapphire blue mage robes that looked expensive. He was now at the edge of a loose confrontation with a broad-shouldered man whose body language said he was looking for a reason, not a resolution. Nia stood to one side with the expression of someone observing an experiment that had passed interesting and arrived at inevitable. From what Danica could read of the scene, Mark's posture, the man's angle, the small audience that had formed without quite admitting it, whatever had started this had already run past the point of easy resolution.
Danica, Rhea, and Atlas stepped into view.
The dynamic shifted the moment they arrived, not a threat, just presence. The man held his ground for one beat longer than was comfortable, then exhaled sharply and turned away, disappearing into the crowd with the muttered exit of someone choosing not to finish a fight they'd started.
Mark watched him go. "Ah. My reinforcements."
"What happened?" Danica asked.
"Wealth redistribution dispute." He gestured at himself. "I was very reasonable."
Nia, without looking up from her interface, said, "He argued with the System's pricing logic until it spawned an NPC to negotiate with. He was not very reasonable. It was still the correct outcome."
Mark pointed at her. "She's leaving out the part where I got a free translation skill and better sale prices than anyone else in the room."
Danica stared at the pile and the robes he was wearing.
"We said don't buy anything yet."
Mark looked completely unbothered. "I know. But we're going to be very comfortable."
‘He also has a point’, Fabi offered, from her position curled atop the pile, eyes closed, flames banked. ‘I ensured he prioritized value.’
Atlas stared at the foxbat. "So the familiar is the brains of the operation."
Mark placed a hand over his heart. "Rude." A beat. "Also accurate."
Danica almost let the thought of the confrontation go. Then she looked up, not quite by instinct, not quite by intention, somewhere between the two, and found Beth watching her from across the room.
In the hour since she’d landed in Danica’s lap she had somehow found a clean white outfit that skirted the line between priestly robes and a slutty college Halloween costume, and she was standing at a distance with her arms folded and a small, knowing expression on her face. As Danica watched, the man who'd just walked away from Mark pushed through the crowd and stopped beside her. Beth's chin dipped, not quite a nod, just an inclination, and her smile widened slightly as he arrived.
Two seconds. Then Danica looked away.
"Alright," she said, turning back to her new friends. "Bert gave us a picture of what we'll be facing out there. Let's figure out what we have, what we still need, and how fast we can leave." She kept her voice even. "I'd like to be gone before this place gets any louder."
Rhea was already nodding. Atlas cast one last look across the room and nodded as well.
Mark, still pleased with his pile, clapped his hands together.
"Welcome, everyone, to Mark's Magical Merchant Haul."
"Please don't name it that," Nia said.
"Already named," Mark said.
Danica sat down and looked at the five of them — the familiar shape of Mark across from her, the new weight of the others beside him, the violet gleam of Fabi's flame steady at the center of it all.
She thought about one hundred and ninety-three dots extending beyond these walls.
She thought about how far they went.
"Start talking," she said. "We have a lot of ground to cover."