The Welcome Center had curdled.
People were no longer grouping into parties, they were forming something looser and more dangerous, the kind of loose alliances built on fear rather than logic, held together by shared desperation and the human instinct to find someone to blame when the world stopped making sense. Arguments had moved past supplies and space. Now they were about authority. Who was in charge. Who deserved to be.
Danica was watching all of it while trying not to look like she was.
"Now listen," Mark said, voice smooth and persuasive as he leaned dramatically on the merchant's counter, "we both know that this price is a crime against commerce. I'm practically doing you a favor by taking these off your hands."
The virtual NPC, a materialized being summoned as the System's response to Mark complaining too loudly and for too long, gave him the look of a man who had been doing this job for too many years in bad circumstances.
"The price," the NPC droned, "is fair market value."
Mark placed a hand over his heart. "Fair? Fair? Sir, my good man, my dearest associate in capitalism, you wound me. Are we not both men of business? Must we be shackled by the tyranny of preset values?"
Nia, without looking up from her interface, said, "Why does he treat bartering with an AI like performance art?"
Atlas said, "It's working, though."
Because, much to Danica's ongoing discomfort, the merchant's price dropped. Again.
Mark snapped his fingers. "Now that's a deal."
The haul was catalogued and distributed between them. Atlas watched the items disappear and said, "You are going to explain the endless bag at some point, right?"
"As soon as we're not surrounded by several hundred prying —" Her voice cut off.
Beth was moving through the room.
Not frantically, not urgently but with the calm, practiced ease of someone executing a plan. She moved from cluster to cluster, voice low, hand resting briefly on shoulders with the practiced ease of someone who had studied warmth and taken notes. The people she spoke to looked up, steadied slightly, and then followed the direction of her attention toward a growing cluster at the far side of the room that was, even at a glance, clearly hers.
Danica had seen Beth do this before, in smaller rooms, on single people. She'd never seen her do it at such a large scale.
The room had a different shape than it had this morning. She couldn't pinpoint when it had changed. The people nearest Beth responded to her, leaning in, faces soft with the relief of someone who has been offered an answer in a moment of no answers. The ones who hadn't responded were still present, still fine, just somehow at the edges of every conversation that mattered. Not removed. Just gradually, quietly outside the circle. Danica recognized the pattern distantly, the way you recognized the name of a song you couldn't quite place. Beth had always been an expert at working a room.
Beside her, Mark had gone still. So she looked to see what he was staring at.
Danica went still.
"Mark." She kept her voice low. "Is that Jake Mercer?"
Mark had already seen him. His expression had done something complicated and settled into a flatness she recognized as the face he made when something was worse than he wanted to say out loud. "Yeah. I knew he was coming to the convention. We ran into each other at the bar Thursday night." A beat. "I don't know what he's doing with her."
Danica did. She'd watched Jake Mercer work a room before. Corporate retreats, charity dinners, he thrived in the kind of events where someone needed to be convinced to write a check even if they hadn’t planned on it. He was good at it. Effortlessly, uncomplicatedly an expert in selling products no one needed but somehow wanted anyway. If there was someone she never wanted to see team up with her ex it would be, Jake.
Standing at Beth's shoulder like an anchor or a weapon, depending on the angle. Gone was the corporate-salesman polish, he was wearing the kind of warrior armor that looked impressive on a convention floor and would be a nightmare to fight in, heavy plating and fur-trimmed shoulders and gauntlets that had clearly been chosen for silhouette rather than function. The man from earlier, the one who'd tried to shake down Mark, stood just behind him, along with a cluster of others in similar overbuilt gear.
Atlas's expression had shifted into something quiet and watchful. "That's the group she's been building."
"Looks like it," Danica said.
Nia had been listening. "I'm still surprised the system isn't penalizing her. Using that spell on strangers should trigger a response from the safe zone. I need a better understanding of these rules."
Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
The table went briefly quiet with the weight of that.
Rhea said, "The System either doesn't categorize what she's doing as a violation, or it does and it's watching."
"Either way, warning people would be a good way to get a mob after us," Atlas said.
Danica had already reached the same conclusion. It wasn't morally right, but it was correct. They couldn't start something in a room this volatile, and warning people about a priestess of a god they'd never heard of using magic they couldn't feel or verify was going to read as exactly the kind of paranoid power grab Beth would use against them. "Agreed. We need to leave."
Before anyone moved, Jake stepped onto a table.
His footing was too smooth, his posture too practiced, he had the confidence of a man who had given a hundred convention-floor pitches and knew exactly how long to hold the pause before speaking.
Beth moved up beside him, one hand resting on his shoulder. The gesture read as support. Danica saw it differently. He was a married man getting ready to play savior to strangers under the control of her ex.
"My friends," Jake began, and Danica winced. He used the same synthetic warmth she recognized from a dozen uncomfortable work dinners, now layered with something that hadn't been there before, something that pressed slightly too hard at the edges. "My fellow survivors."
Beth's eyes moved across the crowd without moving her head. Monitoring. Adjusting. Her hand settled more deliberately on Jake's shoulder as he continued.
"We've all lost so much. The System tried to break us. Tried to make us feel alone." His voice found its rhythm, falling into the cadences Beth preferred, measured, weighty, designed to hook into grief and hold. "But we are not alone. We have each other. We can become something greater than what we were. Something stronger. Something unified."
Mark said, low enough for only Danica to hear, "Is he—"
"Selling us a timeshare in a cult compound," Danica said. "I'd put the odds at yes."
Jake spread his arms, the heavy armor catching the light in an almost deliberate way. "Join us. Let us show you how to turn your pain into power. Your fear into strength. Your isolation into family."
Beth's small, satisfied smile was visible only from the right angle.
"I know what you're feeling," Jake said, and then his natural register broke through, the corporate closer surfacing through Beth's careful script like a reflex he couldn't entirely suppress. "It's like when you think you can't afford that dream home, but then the right person shows you how to make it happen! We're offering you a limited time opportunity to—"
Beth's fingers tightened on his shoulder.
Jake corrected course with the smoothness of someone who had been corrected before and had learned the cue. "—to become part of something greater. Something eternal."
"What's the down payment on eternal salvation these days?" Mark murmured.
"Just your free will," Danica said. "I'm sure she offers financing."
Atlas said, quietly and with some finality, "We need to leave. Now."
But the crowd was shifting, hungry expressions replacing desperate ones. Beth had found her market, and Jake was closing the sale. Whatever Danica intended to do, they were going to need to do it somewhere outside these walls.
They were halfway to the door when Beth appeared at Danica's elbow.
Not dramatically, she didn't step into the path or make a scene. She simply materialized in the easy, practiced way of someone who had learned long ago that proximity was its own kind of pressure. Close enough that turning away would have to be a deliberate choice. Her expression was soft with concern, which Danica knew better than to trust.
"Look at you, being antisocial again." Beth's voice was low and warm, pitched for Danica alone, the way it always had been when she was making a point she didn't want witnessed. "Without me you're going to end up an outcast." Her eyes moved briefly over the group, cataloguing, Danica understood now, not acknowledging, before returning to her face. "It's such a dangerous world. I hope you don't end up regretting your choices."
She said it the way you said I'm worried about you when what you meant was, you'll be sorry.
Danica looked at her, really looked, for exactly one second, the way she'd learned not to in the last year of their relationship because it was easier not to see clearly, and said nothing.
She walked out.
Behind her, she heard Beth's footsteps not following. That was the thing about Beth. She never chased. She just waited for you to come back.
Then the System message hit.
—
[SYSTEM ALERT]
ATTENTION ALL REMAINING INITIATES OF REGIONAL TUTORIAL DUNGEON 1357
The last Initiate assigned to Regional Tutorial Dungeon 1357 has died in their personal dungeon.
As a result, the Welcome Center will cease to exist in 48 hours. Please make necessary preparations and vacate the premises before the shutdown occurs.
NOTICE: Regional Dungeons are designed to support between 1,000 – 10,000 users. Due to low survival rates, this dungeon does not meet operational requirements.
Of the 10,000 assigned users, only 457 survived their personal trials.
As such, the System will begin merging Regional Tutorial Dungeon 1357 with another underperforming dungeon as soon as a suitable match is available.
During this transition, you may experience an increase in hostile creature activity if you are not within the boundaries of a sub-dungeon or settlement.
Remain vigilant.
Further notifications will follow when the merge begins.
—
The room went very quiet.
Not silence, there was still sound, the ambient noise of hundreds of people breathing and shifting and existing in the same space. But the quality of the room changed.
Nine thousand five hundred and forty-three people. The number of deaths seemed too large to be real.
Danica looked at the notification for exactly as long as she needed to understand it. Then she looked at the five people around her.
"Forty-eight hours," Rhea said.
"Less, if the merge starts before then." Danica was already running it. Hostile creature activity in open terrain. Unknown dungeon variables merging with known ones. A powder keg of frightened people with a System countdown and no instructions beyond remain vigilant. "We leave now."
No one argued.
Behind them, through the door they'd just come through, she could hear the Welcome Center beginning to fracture, voices rising, someone shouting, the particular sound of four hundred and fifty-seven people discovering simultaneously that the clock had been running without them.
She didn't look back at Beth.
She didn't need to.
"We're done here."