"Gwen!" Valda said. She was concerned. Obviously. I just lost my hand.

  "Valda! Help!" I said.

  "I can't!"

  I looked over to see that Bartok was grappling her on the ground. I was on my own. She was in enough trouble without having to save my ass. I'd have to figure this one out by myself.

  Cul's body glowed with dark energy. Paladins usually glowed white. He must have been a dark paladin. Most paladins gained their power from their oath to uphold some kind of virtue, like justice or compassion, but dark paladins were the opposite.

  They gained their power through their oath to a sin, like wrath or avarice. The magic was just as powerful, but it often tended to twist the mind and control it. It often led to more than just self interest. It led to the intentional harming of innocents.

  Which may or may not explain his behavior. Who knows? Maybe he was just a butt of a person before he became a dark paladin. Either way, he was powerful, scary, and about to kill me.

  Holstering my gun, I pulled out a handful of Molotov cocktails and threw them at him. They exploded into flames, covering his chest and shoulders.

  "Agh! What is this?" he said, as the flesh burned off his face.

  He pulled out a large health potion and poured it all over his head. It somehow doused the gasoline flames and healed his face back up.

  "What?" I yelled. "Health potions don't work like that!"

  "Not on unbroken skin," he said, "but on open wounds, they do. The potion just has to enter your bloodstream. It doesn't matter how."

  "That's good to know." I pulled out my gun with my left hand and pointed it at him. "Now die!"

  I pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. "Damn it!"

  I forgot to reload it. I started the process with my mind. My gunpowder flask poured in gunpowder into the pan and down the barrel by itself. It got tamped down with a piece of cloth by the ramrod. A steel ball floated out of my bag to go into the barrel, but Cul grabbed it before it could go in.

  "Hey, that's mine!"

  "Not anymore. Now you can't shoot that thing, can you?"

  I pulled the hammer back on the gun. "That's not entirely true. There's just no ball."

  I aimed it at his face and fired. A small explosion hit him in the face and a ton of smoke billowed out of the barrel.

  "Ah! My eye!" He dropped his sword and his hands went up to his face.

  I grabbed the sword off the ground and tried to stab him with it, but he grabbed the blade with an armored fist. I looked up. He was blinded in one eye, but his other eye was fine and it was looking right at me. Creepy.

  I pressed against his grip with my whole body weight, trying to stab him with his own sword. He glowed red and shattered it in his grip. He kicked me in the stomach, sending me flying back. He continued to glow red as he jumped on top of me and tried to strangle me.

  I didn't know for sure, but he felt way stronger than before. It made sense. It was probably some sort of dark paladin power. I pressed against one of his hands with my gun still in my hand. His other hand glowed red, but this looked different.

  It was like his hand had turned into embers. He grabbed me by the throat and the searing heat burned my flesh.

  "Ahhh!!! Get off me!"

  "I will when you're dead."

  As I pressed my gun hand against his other hand, I remembered the weird rock's shapeshifting properties. If it could become a gun, certainly it could become other things too.

  'What would be a good weapon in this situation?' I thought. And then it hit me. A drill. He might be able to grab a blade, but not a drill. It would shred his hand to bits.

  In this tense situation where I was actively dying, I tried my best not to think about the oxygen I was losing or my searing flesh. I visualized the gun in my hand becoming a drill. And then suddenly, it did.

  I mentally focused on it turning, and it spun to life. It quickly drilled through Cul's hand.

  "Ahhh!!!"

  I pressed against his hand, and his strength waned. His hand recoiled from the pain, and I was able to press the drill into his cheek. It shredded through his flesh and bone, farther and farther, until his face went slack and he stopped moving.

  His grip on my neck went away. I gasped for breath. I tried to push him off of me, but I couldn't. With him being such a large muscular man and being in a full suit of heavy armor, I couldn't move him. I wasn't small or weak, but he was huge.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  I drank a health potion, so I didn't die from bloodloss. My stump healed over and then I went back to trying to get Cul's body off me.

  "Get off me, you ugly piece of shit!"

  "He's not ugly," Valda said.

  "What?"

  "He's disgusting!"

  "Oh. Yeah, that makes sense."

  Valda kicked Patriculus' corpse off me and helped me up.

  "Thanks."

  "No problem. I'm sorry I couldn't get to you earlier. Bartok just wouldn't go down, no matter how many times I hit him."

  "I understand. Luckily, I was able to think my way out of it."

  "Clearly," she said, looking at the drill I had in my hand. "What is that? Another thing from your old world?"

  "Yeah. It's called a drill. It…drills things."

  "That's descriptive."

  "It makes holes where there weren't holes before. Better?"

  "Yeah. That is better. Now what do we do?"

  "Right now, I need to find my hand and reattach it."

  "Right."

  I looked around on the ground until I found it. I made Valda cut the end of my stump open and reattach the hand. Knowing that we could pour health potions directly on open wounds, I had her pour it onto my wrist and the end of the hand. We had to use a rare health potion, because lower quality ones wouldn't work for something this serious.

  I put my shirt in my mouth to bite down on. The flesh, muscles, and bones healed together. It was excrutiating, but I made it through alive and with a working hand. I moved it around to make sure it was fully healed and it operated like normal. Like a hand would. Doing hand things.

  I looked around at the bodies of the Culling Party scattered around. "We loot their bodies and look for evidence of their crimes. Then we take evidence of killing the spider queen and head back to the city."

  We looted them of all their gear and placed them in an infinity bag. We didn't take their underclothes, because leaving behind a bunch of naked bodies just seemed weird.

  In games I didn't care because oftentimes, the people weren't programmed to even register the bodies were there, but these were real people, and if they checked out the dungeon afterwards, they'd probably care.

  "Actually, on second thought, let's bury the bodies."

  "Good idea."

  I tried using my Excavate ability for the first time. I dug a big hole that we could throw all the bodies in. It cost me all my mana. I drank a potion, and then after we had tossed the bodies in, closed it up with the same ability. The ground came out flat and packed down, like a hole had never been there in the first place.

  Good. That's exactly what we needed. Now it was time to get our evidence of boss defeat, and get out of there. There were probably more spider people in the other tunnels, and I didn't want to kill any more relatively innocent people than I needed to.

  They were half monster, but they hadn't attacked any settlements. They just killed the people they thought were ok to kill.

  When we got over to Elise's body, I knew what I had to do, but I didn't want to. Handing it off to Valda felt cowardly, though. So I got out a knife and slowly cut her head off. I put it in a bag by itself.

  Then, with less guilt in my heart, I cut into her spider body and filled several vials of the venom she luckily never used on us. She was too busy throwing herself at us to try. Which sounds funny now, but was very much not funny at the time.

  I also collected spider silk in as respectful of a way as I could. When I was finished collecting things, including the cannon, we walked out of the cave through the tunnel we came in. When we came to the part of the tunnel that I had blocked with crafting supplies, we stopped.

  I used my Brilliant Inventor perk to invent an enchantment on an infinity bag that created a vacuuming effect for non living material. I used that to vacuum up the massive pile, and then I deactivated the vacuum with a counter active circle.

  We made our way back to town, with clear evidence in the form of a journal Roger had on his body that detailed all of his and the group's crimes. He even signed his name at the bottom of every entry. What an idiot.

  When we made it to the city's adventurers' guild, we showed them the journal and the head, and told them there were still spider people in the cave, but that as long as people left them alone, they would leave us alone.

  The adventurers' guild officials looked over the journal and had a handwriting expert examine it, who verified its authenticity. We were given 1,000 gold for killing the spider queen, and 500 gold for taking out the Culling Party. Valda and I had also picked up a little over a couple hundred gold from the Culling Party's bodies, but we didn't tell the guild that.

  The guild asked if we were going to stay for the fair. We didn't know what they were talking about. They explained that there was a fair held in Sunnyvale once a year where there would be games, events, and booths designed for adventurers to show off what make them special, in the hopes of securing a wealthy patron to support their adventuring or their business.

  "Oh, we should do it!" Valda said.

  "Really? It sounds fun, but do we really need a patron?"

  "Fun is a good enough reason, but a wealthy patron could help you secure working space, tools, endless crafting materials, teachers, books, and all sorts of other things you wouldn't be able to do in Skimbal."

  I scratched my chin. "That's a fair point. I'd have to close down the shop or give it to Sam, though."

  "Not necessarily. You can keep being the owner. He would just be the primary manager."

  "That's fine, I guess, but we'd still have to go back to Skimbal to get our stuff. And I want to take care of Barton Traxby while we're there."

  "We can still do that. I'm sure if we did somehow secure a patron, they would be willing to wait for you to wrap up your current affairs before coming to work for them."

  "Work for them? Right. And then there would be expectations for me to produce things for them, and all kinds of other stress that I don't need. Then they would sell my inventions and I would become useless as an adventurer! I don't want to become useless, Valda."

  "You won't become useless, Gwen. I'll make sure of it. If it ever gets to be too much, I'll get us out of it. I promise. Besides, you don't have to give them all your inventions. You can keep the best stuff secret, I'm sure."

  The wheels in my head started turning. I could create a secret workshop within the workshop that no one else had access to. A place where I could work on what I wanted to.

  I could do that in Skimbal, but I wouldn't have access to the kind of money and materials I needed to create advanced machinery. I would still have to do blacksmithing out of my furnace and alchemy with a kids' training set.

  With a patron, I could build massive vats and processors and all kinds of things. Hell, I could probably make inventions that were coded to me so only I could use them.

  "Ok, I'll do it. But you promised. If we need to get out, we get out."

  "I promise."

  "Not to be discouraging, but you talk like it's guaranteed you'll find a patron," the girl at the guild counter said.

  "He's a brilliant inventor. He'll find a patron."

  "Finding a patron won't be a problem. Finding one that's not evil will be the challenge."

  And with that, we paid to participate in the fair games, events, and we also secured a booth to show off my inventions. This vacation was turning out to be exciting and full of surprises. And I was sure there were still more surprises ahead. Good or bad.