Chapter 4 Chapter 4: The Unboxing and the Bidding War

The reek of blood in the cave was suffocating. Torn limbs littered the ground in every direction, and the pools of green venom still hissed softly against the stone.

Julian stepped around a still-smoking puddle of acid and walked to the spot where the Scaled Rat King had gone down.

A metal chest sat wedged in a crevice in the rock, its surface etched with intricate silver filigree.

He crouched, hooked two fingers under the clasp, and forced the lid up.

No dramatic light show. Just the crisp click of a mechanism releasing. Inside, resting on black velvet, sat a heavy, yellow-edged book bound in dark red leather.

Julian picked it up. The instant his palm touched the cover, heat rolled up through his arm.

A blue data panel bloomed across his vision.

[Firestorm Area-of-Effect Skill Tome]

[Tier: Silver]

[Requirements: Level 5, Spirit 20]

[Effect: After a 3-second cast, calls down a meteor storm across a 10-meter radius for 5 seconds. Each second deals (2.5x Spirit) fire damage and applies Ignite.]

[Cost: 100 Mana]

[Note: Once learned, this skill cannot be dropped or traded.]

"Boss, we hit the jackpot!"

Duke shoved his head in close, wiped his bloody hands on his uniform, and stared at the red book like it might disappear if he blinked.

"That's a mage's ultimate right there! Full-on area damage! Learn that thing right now next time somebody tries to jump our claim, we just rain fire on their heads and turn 'em into bacon!"

Duke rubbed his hands together, practically drooling.

Julian weighed the tome in his palm a couple times, fingers tapping against the leather.

A ten-meter blast radius, this early in a server that had been live for less than an hour that was borderline nuclear. Toss it into the crowd outside and it'd be a fireworks show of free experience and Life Points.

But he had zero interest in learning it.

Three-second cast time. A hundred mana a pop. This thing was a resource sink dressed up as a weapon. His whole combat strategy ran on Warden of All Beasts overwhelming numbers doing the fighting for him while he stood back and collected the payout. Standing still for three full seconds mid-fight was just painting a target on his own spine.

In a landlord's ledger, anything with a bad return on investment was garbage, full stop.

"Learn it? Not a chance."

Julian stuffed the tome unceremoniously into his inventory.

"A hundred mana a cast means I'm bone dry after two uses. My rats can bite through that many people faster and cheaper. This thing's real value isn't as a weapon."

"Then what's it good for? Propping up a wobbly table?" Duke scratched at his messy hair, baffled.

"Harvesting suckers."

The words had barely left Julian's mouth when the dark-gold text at the corner of his vision started flashing hard.

System Loophole's detection grid snapped into place uninvited, spreading itself over the dark passage ahead without being asked.

A wash of angry red bloomed across what had been a calm green grid moments earlier. The red mass was compressing fast, funneling straight toward the narrow crack they'd come in through.

Julian zeroed in on the largest, reddest marker of the bunch.

Hidden data pried itself loose.

[Target: Corbin Teague Guild Master, Skyreach Guild]

[Level: 2]

[Class: Berserker (class change complete)]

[Status: Extremely Greedy leading fifty core guild members, intent to kill and loot]

Julian's eye twitched.

Even with a shattered wrist, that bleach-blond kid had sprinted straight back and dragged his boss over. Fifty core members that wasn't a shakedown, that was a small army.

And the more important detail: Corbin was already Level 2 and had already class-changed. That only meant one thing during the pre-launch exchange window, this guy had dumped a genuinely huge amount of real cash into Life Points and bought a class-change scroll straight from the store.

"Duke. Weapons up."

Julian gripped the dagger reverse-hand, dropped low, and pulled back behind a boulder.

"What's wrong, Boss? Something else spawn?" Duke snatched the rebar off the ground, glancing around wildly.

"Worse than a monster. Fifty guys just parked themselves outside our exit. And their leader already class-changed."

Duke's breath caught. Big as he was, he was still flesh and blood he'd nearly bled out fighting the Rat King ten minutes ago, and now there were fifty living, armed people camping the only way out. This cave had exactly one exit. They were fish in a barrel.

"Damn it Boss, you fall back. I'll hold the passage. It's narrow, they can only come two at a time, I'll take 'em down one pair at a time with this stick and drag as many with me as I can!" Duke's jaw was set, his eyes hard.

"Quiet. With your health pool, they'd carve you into cutlets in under a minute."

Julian crouched behind the rock, mind racing.

A straight fight was off the table completely.

He still had the freshly contracted Scaled Rat King in reserve, but its HP had been gutted in the last fight summon it now and it'd last ten seconds before collapsing back into its base form. The four surviving Bloodfang Rats wouldn't even dent an organized fifty-man crew.

They needed a distraction. Something to redirect fifty angry dogs somewhere else.

Julian pulled up the system display and swiped through the interface, opening the Marketplace Auction House.

The feature had been live since launch, built for high-tier trading except right now, most players couldn't even afford lunch, so the auction floor sat completely empty.

Julian dragged Firestorm out of his inventory and dropped it onto the listing shelf.

[Confirm listing: Firestorm Silver Tier?]

[Set starting bid.]

Without hesitating, Julian typed a number into the price field: 10,000 Life Points.

[WARNING: This price far exceeds current average player purchasing power. Proceed?]

"Proceed. Auction window: 20 minutes. Seller ID: Anonymous."

[Listing confirmed. 10 Life Points deducted as handling fee.]

The instant the listing went live, a thunderous system announcement detonated in the mind of every single player inside Origin Camp #10086.

[SERVER ANNOUNCEMENT: The mysterious player "Undertow" has listed the first-ever Silver-Tier AoE skill tome Firestorm on the Marketplace Auction House!]

[Starting bid: 10,000 Life Points! Bidding closes in 20 minutes!]

The camp already buzzing from the first-kill announcement minutes earlier got hit with a second wave that landed like a bucket of boiling oil over an open flame.

On the outskirts of the camp, Vivian Ashcroft had just finished off a mutated wild dog with a plain iron sword, a few flecks of mud landing across her white blazer.

The announcement hit her mind and she looked up sharply, already pulling up the auction panel.

The second she saw the silver-glowing tome and its outrageous ten-thousand-point starting price, her grip tightened on the sword hilt until her knuckles went pale.

"Undertow. It's Undertow again."

She took a breath and turned to the small cluster of senior guild members behind her.

"Halt all farming. Get word to every online member of the Ashcroft Vanguard I want their Life Points transferred to me. I need twenty thousand points in fifteen minutes."

A bespectacled mage jogged over, sweating through his shirt. "Chairwoman Ashcroft, that price is insane! Ten thousand Life Points is a hundred million dollars in real terms! We already burned through most of our reserve during launch if we blow it all on one book, how do we cover the daily upkeep on everyone's Life Points?"

"Use your head." Vivian's stare turned cold. "This game was never about raw numbers. A single silver AoE tome lets us dominate the best farming ground in this entire zone. That's a strategic asset, not a luxury. Go borrow it, beg for it, scrape it together however you have to. We are not letting Skyreach walk away with this."

At the same time, deep in the narrow passage of the cave, Corbin Teague advanced with his men, a blood-red broadsword slung over one shoulder, torchlight flickering off the walls.

Bleach trailed just behind him, arm strapped to his chest in a makeshift sling, wincing with every step but still running his mouth.

"Mr. Teague, no mistake, I swear it! Those two rigged the wall mechanism to sneak in. Gotta be the first kill. Gotta be something huge waiting down there!"

Corbin sneered, already opening his mouth to answer, when the server-wide auction announcement slammed into his mind.

He froze mid-step, staring hard at the listing for Firestorm.

Starting bid: 10,000.

Seller: Undertow.

"Undertow's down there! That's his drop, right there on the board!" Corbin's eyes went bloodshot, breath turning ragged.

He'd expected black-iron scraps at best in this cave. Instead, a silver-tier AoE skill had just dropped out of nowhere.

If Vivian's people walked away with this book, Skyreach would never live it down in this camp not ever.

"HOLD!" Corbin threw up his broadsword.

Fifty-odd men behind him skidded to a stop.

"Sir, why are we stopping? He's right up ahead!" Bleach yelped.

"Shut your mouth! Kill's off, that book's still on the clock highest bidder takes it!" Corbin shoved Bleach out of the way and roared at the crowd behind him. "Transfer every point you've got, right now! Anybody hoards on me, I'll skin you myself when this is over!"

Chaos broke out in the passage as fifty men scrambled to funnel their Life Points to their guild master.

An entire fifty-man raid party had just been brought to its knees by a listing on a marketplace.

Deep in the cavern, Julian watched the red markers on his display the ones that had been closing in fast a minute ago stall out and pile up in a knot halfway down the passage.

He let out a quiet laugh.

That's the power of an anchor price.

Dangle a big enough reward at an outrageous enough number, and nobody's first instinct is to go kill the seller. Their first instinct is to panic-fund the bid, terrified of losing out on the jackpot.

Corbin was fully consumed with winning the auction. He didn't have an ounce of attention left to spend wondering who was hiding in the cave.

"Duke. Move. Stay close to the wall, keep it quiet."

Julian tapped Duke's shoulder and slipped out from behind the boulder first.

"Boss, we're leaving already? Aren't they still blocking the way out?" Duke whispered, falling in step behind him.

"They're busy getting fleeced right now. Passage is long. We're taking the scenic route."

Julian flipped his night vision back on and hugged the cave wall toward the exit, giving Corbin's fifty-man crowd a wide berth. Walking straight into that mess would've been idiotic.

System Loophole's grid had already mapped the whole underground space.

Less than twenty meters from the main passage entrance, a hairline crack in the rock barely wide enough to squeeze through sideways led straight up to the top of the outer stone wall.

The two of them climbed like geckos up the slick rock face.

Ten minutes later, Julian peered out through a screen of brush at the top of the wall.

The air up here was still murky, but a massive improvement over the blood-stink below.

He looked down.

Directly beneath him sat the entrance to the mechanism they'd triggered earlier. Four or five of Corbin's men still stood guard outside it. Bleach paced back and forth near the opening, clutching his ruined wrist.

Julian lay flat at the edge of the rock, gaze dropping lower.

A dense red grid bloomed across the massive rock outcropping directly below him. At its exact center, one node pulsed with a deep, angry red.

[Geological scan complete.]

[Target: Critical load-bearing weak point.]

[Trigger condition: 150+ points of instant physical damage.]

[Projected outcome: Collapse of roughly 10 tons of upper strata, sealing the lower passage entirely.]

Julian checked his own panel.

Level 4 now, with the stat boost from contracting the Rat King baked in his base Strength sat at a staggering 35. Combined with the Ratfang dagger and the free acceleration of a fall from this height...

150 points of instant damage was well within reach.

"Duke. Drop down first, find somewhere safe, and stay put until I call for you."

"Boss, what are you about to do?"

"Send Mr. Teague a going-away present. Since he's so fond of camping in that ca

ve counting his money, let's give him a reason to stay a lot longer."

Julian gripped the dagger reverse-hand, legs coiling beneath him like a cheetah about to strike, eyes locked on the deep red node in the rock below.