Catania glanced up from behind her enormous shield. “HEY! Are you going to fire it off or what?”

  “Are you sure you’ll be fine?” I hollered back.

  “Bah!” Catania scoffed. “I said I wanted to stress test a new ability, didn’t I? Besides, you only deal damage to things you want to hurt!”

  “That only works with magic!”

  “This is magic.”

  I let out a sigh. “The things a guy does for twenty Qualms.” I smacked Crapshoveler against his ability screen.

  {Activated : ERROR.{Grind/Crapshoveler} : Shovel Affinity.Error.SignType +784000%}

  This was it. Several billion strength, roaring through my shovel, shaking with unimaginable power.

  Catania didn’t carry much for awards, so Master Tentazui offered to evolve one of her abilities. Her Parry got turned into some sort of reflector, where a perfectly tied block redirected damage into another direction of her choosing.

  But against several billion—

  [Status ended : -52 seconds remaining.]

  [Windup has begun its twenty four hour winding period.]

  I swung Crapshovler around. Nothing happened. I cleared my throat. “Excuse me?”

  Catania tossed the enchanted metal shield on the ground, cracking the stone beneath our feet. “What? New power isn’t working how it’s supposed to?”

  “No,” I grunted. “‘One minute duration’ my eye.”

  Actually…

  I gave the screen another look. “Negative fifty-two?”

  Catania stared. “How’d you manage to get a negative duration?”

  “It’s probably something to do with the hundred and twelve copies of the ability that I have. The windup is already pretty bad, but if the payoff ends that short, and is time sensitive, then the whole ability is pretty much a bust. At least in terms of practical use.”

  I summoned Crapshoveler back into my inventory. “Too much work to deal with.” I shrugged.

  “Tough.” She tore off her helmet. “All things considered, you seem to be in a pretty good mood.”

  I beamed. “Of course. I’ve simply got too much to look forward to. As for the abilities, I’ll think of something.”

  I waved goodbye.

  Catania blinked. “You know you could still use a normal attack, right?”

  I was already in the distance. “Sorry, but I have breakfast with Ardenidi in four minutes!”

  Catania bit her lip. “Then what are you doing around here?!”

  Now that all the luxury merchants had left to gather supplies, smaller opportunists seized the open market, particularly those who hadn’t started shops yet, unable to handle the stiff competition. Without that competition, there was an explosion of little local restaurants and stores, drawing in massive crowds, as most everyone had the day off Union tasks and absolutely nothing to do.

  “DO YOU LIKE YOUR FOOD?!” Ardenidi shouted over the roar of the hundred-something customers packed into an average sized family diner. ”

  “YES!” I screamed back, grabbing another smoked sausage. “IT’S VERY GOOD!”

  “GOOD!” She sipped a stack of pancakes under her scarf, giving a big thumbs up.

  A new rush of customers burst through the doors, deafening as thunder. Staff struggled to build new booths fast enough to house the customers they were getting, stuffing the tables they had closer and closer.

  That was part of the issue with these smaller businesses. They just didn’t have the land to handle this many people.

  I pointed at the door. “DO YOU WANT TO EAT OUTSIDE?!”

  Ardenidi squinted, leaning forward. “WHAT?”

  “DO YOU WANT TO EAT OUTSIDE?!”

  “Do I?---WHAT?!”

  “I—”

  I threw my hands in the air.

  This’d be so much easier if I just learned how to project my voice with mana.

  “WE SHOULD EAT OUTSIDE!” Ardenidi shouted.

  “YES THAT’S A GREAT IDEA!” I shouted back.

  “WHAT?!”

  “I SAID—”

  “WE SHOULD EAT OUTSIDE!”

  “YES!”

  “THEN WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY SOMETHING!?”

  Five minutes later, we sat on the corner of the street with our trays in our laps.

  Ardenidi munched on a breakfast brisket while I had some bacon.

  The silence was deafening.

  “I feel so loud,” I whispered. “Don’t you?”

  She nodded.

  I nodded back. “It’s like we’re in the middle of the wilderness.”

  Ardenidi smirked. “We are. This place just has people in it.”

  I dabbed my face with a napkin, making a scattered few players wander the streets. “There’s just not a lot going on these days.”

  I’d also noticed a sharp decline in the number of people with slaves. Most had probably died during the monster’s attack, and simply couldn’t be revived.

  Ardenidi smiled. “I don’t mind quiet. You could use more of it.”

  “I know.”

  She tightened her scarf. “Not to sound nosy, but you’re pushing yourself too far. I heard you were testing an ability with Catania.”

  I scoffed. “After I was so clearly instructed not to train in any sort? What would ever make you think that?”

  “Catania told me.” Arednidi blinked. “Actually, Catania mentioned it to Toya, who told Soise, who told me. What were you thinking? You’ll fall apart if you keep pushing yourself like that.”

  “For the record, she asked me for help,” I huffed. “What else am I supposed to do? I couldn’t turn down a friend.”

  “And the hour of training you did before that?”

  I glanced away. “And who told you that?”

  “Educated guess. You’re limping.”

  If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  I smirked. “Look, I know you guys want the best for me, but I can’t just rest all the time!”

  “Why not?” Ardenidi snapped. “I don’t think you even realize how twitchy and irritable you’ve become. You’re always watching the street, like a scared little raccoon.” She flicked my shoulder. “Grind. Look at me. No one’s going to hurt you. Or me, for that matter.”

  “I know—”

  A blur in the shadows caught my attention.

  “Grind.” Ardenidi said.

  I took a deep breath. “Here’s the thing—”

  “Shh.”

  I blinked.

  She rolled her eyes. “Stop talking. Just listen.”

  “Why—?”

  “Humor me.”

  So I tried to listen.

  Ardenidi crinkled her paper wrapper. A piece of toasted bread crunched. The wind whistled over the road, dragging rocks along for the ride, clicking as they skirted against one another. Wooden buildings creaked and small birds and insects hummed to one another, hidden in cracks and pockets unseen by the cleaners.

  There was a screech of metal.

  My eyes snapped open to find Ardenidi glaring. “Calm down. Someone just opened the restaurant door.” She pressed her hand into mine. “Focus.”

  I was suddenly very aware of my racing heartbeat, accelerating.

  She squeezed my hand. “What?” Ardenidi chuckled. “Never held a girl’s hand before?”

  I blushed. “I don’t think you get how profoundly uncomfortable this is.”

  “Trust me and try to listen, would you?”

  I sighed.

  There was another heartbeat, far slower than mine.

  After several minutes, my pulse started slowing to meet it.

  I cracked an eye open. Ardenidi smiled. “Better?”

  “Yeah, actually. Thank you. You have good advice.”

  Arddenidi snorted. “Please. Soise gave me a self-help book, so I’m just going with that. You ought to get a therapist or something.”

  I opened my eyes, taking another deep breath.

  Ardenidi gestured toward the street. “You closed your eyes for a full minute and absolutely nothing happened. Nothing, nada. Zip. So, let yourself relax every now and then. It’s not the end of the world.”

  “But I can’t keep my eyes closed all the time,” I grumbled. “Even if something didn’t happen, it could, so I do need to be on guard.”

  She jabbed me in the side. “We’ll take shifts. I’ll keep an eye out and you take today off.”

  The two of us suddenly realized we were still holding hands.

  That was a good morning.

  After breakfast, I wandered around town, stopping at the hospital. It was fairly easy to find Sip’s room, given the mountains of clean robes set outside, taking up far more space than usual, since they’d been fluffed up.

  Hopefully the laundry worker would get a bonus.

  I cracked the door open. “Hey Sip—”

  “NOOOO!” Sip screamed, flinging himself away from bed. “NOOOOOO!”

  “You stay right where you are!” Soise shouted, pinning him down with one arm, struggling to keep the vial in her hand from spilling. “Oh all the stupid, stubborn, immature—DRINK YOUR MEDICINE!”

  “I don’t want to!” Sip wailed, thrashing helplessly.

  “Stay still!” Soise grit her teeth, glaring at me.

  I took a few steps back. “You know, I can come back another time—”

  “Give me a hand here!”

  “Sorry buddy,” I sighed, pinning him effortlessly.

  “Traitor!” He squealed.

  “Pipe down,” Soise snapped, grabbing his jaw and wrenching it open, dumping the vial down his throat. “There. Feel better?”

  He choked. “Let a dead man rest!”

  {Elixir of Regeneration : Sip}

  “Where’d you get an elixir?” I asked.

  I blinked. “You can use them on a person?!”

  “Of course you can,” Soise stated, planting her hands on her hips. “All they need is a source of mana, and they’ll work fine. People have mana. The hard part is actually getting one strong enough to make any difference. They’re stored in some facility up north, requiring a Silver rank to even buy one.” She nodded toward Sip. “You’re very, very lucky.”

  “What did you do to me?” Sip howled, grabbing his face. “I feel so…sleepy…and melty.” He crumpled up. “And it tasted bad too.” He gagged. “Watermelon flavor.”

  “Master Tentazui?” I guessed.

  She nodded. “It won’t cure the disease, but it’ll definitely help. After another three years, Sip may make a full recovery, he’ll spend more time asleep than usual, as a result of the drain the elixir’s going to have on his system.”

  “I think I can help a little.” I grabbed Sip’s screen, navigating to his affliction. “Hey buddy, how’d you like to be cured?”

  Soise clenched my wrist. “Are you sure this is safe?”

  “Oh course not,” I stated. “It’s magic. But it’s probably fine.”

  Sip groaned, covering his face with an arm. “Get it over with already! I’m already a goner.”

  I froze the screen and handed it to him. “Whenever this unfreezes, it means I’m asleep, so I’ll have to freeze it again.”

  He lifted a bare arm up, watching the patterns of shifting black lines.

  “I feel exactly the same.”

  “It’ll probably take a few months before you see substantial improvement,” I sighed. “You’ve had this disease for a while. I don’t imagine it’ll be easy to remove.”

  Soise grit her teeth. “Grrriiiiinnnndddd. You wouldn’t be using mental energy to keep that screen frozen, would you? Because you know what I said about that.”

  I blinked innocently. “Me? You know I have only the utmost care for my personal health. I would never so blatantly ignore the wishes of my doctor. This is merely a new ability of mine.”

  “I’m already well aware how your ability works, and that one ain’t new.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  I pointed at Sip. “But hey, he needs medical attention more than I do, right?”

  She threw her hands in the air. “Fine! Do whatever you want!”

  Soise left the room, closing the door behind her.

  It became instantly and deafeningly quiet.

  “So.” I sat on the stool beside Sip’s bed. “Have you been bored?”

  “Not really,” Sip stated. “Soise barges in every morning, afternoon, and evening to give me my medicine, so you know I have to make an awful fuss about that.”

  “And why would you do that to the poor woman?”

  “It isn’t obvious?” He smiled. “I think she’s into me.”

  That took me by surprise to such an extent that I fell off my seat, striking headfirst against the floor.

  He snorted. “You can keep your thoughts to yourself, buddy. I think it was inevitable. She was the caring doctor and I, the belligerent patient she can’t help but adore.”

  “I don’t think you have any idea how romance works.”

  Sip laughed. “Probably not. Maybe I get too much of a kick outta messing with people.” He leaned forward. “You heard Master Tentazui about the potions right? All that money for us, gone to pay the merchant’s bills.”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding somberly. “I would’ve thought you’d be a lot more upset.”

  He scoffed. “Stop underestimating your team’s personal accountant.”

  Slowly, he pulled a brown beaker from his inventory, just for a moment, before immediately desummoning it again. “That is an elixir of fortitude. It prevents one lethal blow per unique mana signature per hour at a cost of one hundred thousand mana each usage.”

  “And you didn’t think to use this during our battle with the nightmare?” I asked.

  He sputtered in disgust. “Do you know nothing? GRIND! Elixirs have a base cost worth a billion Qualms MINIMUM! That’s before any merchant upcharge!”

  He started rubbing his hands together, cackling under his breath. “Let’s think about this, shall we? Thanks to Master Tentazui’s payment to the merchants, we have claimed ownership of all potions lost during the Nightmare’s attack. Meaning this potion is ours. It is also the one and only surviving Elixir in the entire area, since literally every single potion was destroyed or used already.”

  Sip looked at me.

  I started nodding along.

  “Supply and demand, child,” he whispered. “Supply and demand. What was once a billion qualm elixir now has an estimated value of twelve billion, if not higher. The only limit is who in the Union has the money to buy it!”

  “You’re underestimating the value,” I snapped back. “Elixers are worth such a genuinely insane amount of money because they disrupt mana wells, weakening the monsters in a huge region will buff players. But because so many elixirs were lost, in addition to the recent surge of powerful monsters due to the mysterious infection, a billion qualm elixir may very well be worth a hundred times what it should be. The union is desperate to establish some defenses on the mana wells.

  Sip licked his lips. “Money. Money money money money.”

  I laughed, standing to my feet. “I’m just glad you’re in a good mood, Sip. Get healthy, okay?”

  As I started to leave, he grabbed the edge of my shirt. “Hey…Grind?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  He sniffed, wiping his face with his arm. “You know. For keeping me alive. That got a little scary back there.”

  Sip started laughing. “You…you saw me, right? Trying to challenge a billion health monster? As if that’d ever work. One billion. That’s a number so big it’s…ridiculous. It’s just ridiculous.”

  I smiled. “Get healthy, would you? There’s a lot more living left to do.”

  “And a lot more money left to be made,” Sip whistled, leaning back in his bed. “I wonder what kind of money they have in the third area, don’t you?”

  “It’s physical currency, I think,” I said. “I’ll ask Master Tentazui the next time I see him, alright?”

  We waved goodbye.

  My afternoon that day was good too.

  // {Notice} //

  Hi! Hope you enjoyed my fantasy story. But as much fun as a fantasy is, there’s things in the real world beyond what writing can fix. That’s where you come in.

  Want to fight human trafficking? Whether you’ve got money or time there are two organizations I wholly recommend.

  Race Day — Thirty

  Donate - Venture

  https://www.freeinternational.org