Ricky joined Tapper in examining the monster up-close. Its eyes stared off in different directions and its mouth hung open, with razor teeth gleaming unnaturally in the cloudy sunlight. Smears of orange, black, and white twisted within the yellow flesh, as if a pile of rubber ducks were melted down and poured over the gremlin to make its skin.

  The result was a sort of organic rubber that remained unmarred from the fight, aside from the gaping hole in its chest. Otherwise the only things that damaged the skin were whatever bits of half-chewed technology that had burst out from within the gremlin.

  It was fascinating but disgusting, and Ricky was more interested in more important things. With the two of them a safe distance away, Ricky lowered his voice and asked, "So what did you get for hitting Level 4, Tapper?"

  Tapper was also more interested in more important, but different, things and waved the question away. "Not right now, I can't read anything until I get my spindle back!"

  Ricky sighed and pointed to the gremlin's body. "Well, I know we digest food in organic stomachs, so your spindle is probably still in its belly. Don't know how long it'll take to cut through this skin, or you could just reach down its gullet now. Should be easy."

  Tapper's hands made small clanking noises as he clapped with excitement. "Excellent, thank you Ricky! Please hurry and retrieve my spindle."

  "What? I don't even have gloves! It's your spindle, you reach down and get it."

  Tapper involuntarily whined at the notion of touching monster gore, there had to be another option. "Wait, we don't need to touch the monster at all! I can just magically loot it!"

  "Shh!" Ricky cut Tapper off, and the two looked over their shoulders to share an awkward moment with Salazar staring at them from the shade of his wrecked vehicle. They turned back into a small huddle and Ricky hissed, "Keep the magic a secret, we can't explain to him why the gremlin just takes itself apart for you. Oh calm down, it looks like you bore through its chest all the way to its esophagus. So you can at least skip the mouth."

  Ricky conceded to at least hold the gremlin still and Tapper made sure to completely numb his sense of touch, so that only cold calculation would register when he touched any metal. Tapper spared a moment to look at his slender bartender arm; it wasn't made for such gruesome work, but his clunky miner arm would never fit, so he braced himself and dove in.

  Instant regret. "Oh no, I forgot to disable my other sensory systems! All I hear is... squelching, it's horrible!"

  "Then why don't you turn them off now!?" Ricky half-shouted over Tapper's wailing.

  "It's too late! I already heard it, I can't get it out of my mind!" Tapper cried. The further down he reached the closer his microphone got to the gory mess. Squelch. Smoosh. And then his olfactory sensors chimed in to make everything worse. "Ugh, so gross! Why must I be cursed with a gag reflex when I have nothing to gag!?"

  Phanya leaned back against the side of the pillbug and crossed her arms, watching the show next to Salazar. "Sure wish he was easier to gag most days," Phanya said, laughing at her own joke.

  One of the goggle's eyes swiveled over to study Phanya. Salazar didn't share the humor, and after a moment of awkward silence he asked, "How did you three kill that demon, really?"

  Phanya instead held up a hand, fingers splayed and thumb curled in. "Four actually, the baby octolusk counts too. Don't worry, he's domesticated. I think?" Phanya shook her head before she got off-track, she needed to sort everything out while Ricky and Tapper were distracted. "Look, let's try this again. Salazar, right? I'm Phanya, that other dork is Ricky. What do you say we work out a deal that benefits both of us?"

  Salazar didn't answer or give Phanya anything to work off, so she weighed just how much she could reveal. "See, we need to meet someone in CyraCity 3, and get there without running into any other bounty hunters. So you can help by getting us there while avoiding any traps, and we can help by protecting you from any other baddies out there." Still nothing from him, and Phanya fought to temper a spark of frustration without it showing on her face.

  Salazar eventually gave in and offered her a tiny lifeline. "Not even going to try offering me money?" he asked, and the hint of a smirk made Phanya give a tight-lipped smile in return.

  "Can't exactly match a §10k bounty, no. But isn't life itself priceless?"

  That earned an actual laugh from Salazar, even if it was at her expense. "Exactly, so what do I get out of it by babysitting some insane kids out here in the tar?"

  Salazar was still standing inside of his armored car, so he stood at almost eye level with Phanya, but she still glared down at him before directing their attention to the dead gremlin. Ricky and Tapper were still digging around inside, the latter now fully up to the shoulder without yet finding the stomach. Tapper had pivoted from whining about his misfortune to complaining about the spatial impossibilities, while Ricky happily encouraged him to keep going.

  "Because we did that," Phanya said, forcing a serious tone at odds with the two boys goofing off. "We really killed that demon. We have, uh, black-market enhancements. Yeah. And that's a wild robot with a nanobot relic, that's why he has a bounty. Trust, we can do some serious shit."

  Salazar crossed his arms to mimic Phanya and scoffed. "Yeah right, as if relics would pass through Skratsville. Prove it."

  Phanya's face went flat. Before she could lose her temper she felt a mental tug, as her system skills trickled in some minor suggestions. It was concerning that her Deputy background came with some basic knowledge on how to intimidate people, but it said that Phanya just needed to pull off a good trick, so she leaned into it.

  She stood up straight and showed both of her hands to the bounty hunter, proving that Phanya wasn't wearing any gear besides the rags wrapped around each palm. She didn't say a word, she just waited until Salazar was focused on her hands before she dropped to a boxer's stance and threw a haymaker punch into the side of the pillbug.

  Salazar flinched away, so he didn't see her wince, and gawked at the new dent she left in the armored plating. It was a small dent, but Salazar knew what his own car was built to withstand. When he turned back the same hand hovered a few centimeters from his face, completely unmarred where any human would have shattered their knuckles.

  He gulped, and she tried to smirk like a jackass bully.

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  "Subdermal armor, baby. Think I got that from a random mutation? What we did to that gremlin we can do to you, but instead I'm offering cooperation where we all walk out of this happy and alive. Now, why don't we make a deal?"

  Tapper was staring down the open mouth of a gremlin for the second time, much to his increasing dismay. He couldn't look anywhere else without first pulling out of the monster's chest cavity, and now his determination was turning into spite. This couldn't all be for nothing! Yet the creature was somehow larger on the inside, its guts a seemingly endless labyrinth of half-digested things and Tapper had no choice but to feel around each and every mushy lump.

  Finally, the numbed tactile sensors registered a metal tube the correct diameter and Tapper yanked, but it wouldn't budge. With a static burst of frustration Tapper realized he never formally claimed the loot, and once he sent the mental confirmation the treasure came loose. The gremlin's body heaved with the force of Tapper's pull, its yellow skin writhing as a great many things just below the surface shifted all at once.

  A wave of pride hit Tapper as he held the spindle in the free air, followed quickly by a wave of revulsion. "Oh, the smell! Why is the smell so much worse??"

  Ricky covered his face with his hands and laughed through his own gagging at Tapper's expense. "Because you're covered in its juices now!"

  A long chain of half-melted metal and plastic components dangled from the end of Tapper's spindle, and everything from the end of the chain all the way up to Tapper's shoulder was covered in a thick layer of acrid digestive juices and shredded intestinal matter. Disgust overwhelmed Tapper and the robot doubled over, unable to do anything but retch at the juices covering his body. Kakisi sprang to the rescue, darting over for the chance of a free meal, and the little familiar gobbled up every bit of organic entrails entangled in the chain. After a short minute of loud slurping, both Tapper and the loot were freshly cleaned.

  Tapper calmed down and mimicked taking a deep breath. "That was disgusting, thank you Kakisi. But in the future, could you please try to not eat so... noisily?" Kakisi answered with a trilling whistle that sounded suspiciously like blowing a raspberry to Tapper, before he ducked back into the tank for shelter.

  "Hm, looks like a clean cut," Ricky said, who had leaned in to examine the spindle while Tapper talked to his familiar. "It's actually pretty crazy how the gremlin managed that without any shearing. Good thing too, I should be able to weld it back on. Where's the connector?"

  Tapper pulled the missing piece out of his chest cavity, now little more than a plug with a nub. He had collected it right after they defeated the monster, and nervously handed it to Ricky. The emotion was so visible in his body language that even Ricky noticed it, and he wondered why as he quickly welded the spindle pipe together. Not like this was the first time Tapper lost a limb, and just recently he gave his arm to Aazran completely of his own free will.

  Ricky was about to ask Tapper why as he worked open the back port, but the plug had filled with something dark and viscous. "Tapper, why are you leaking oil?"

  Tapper bent around to look at his own back, and groaned a huff of static. "Oh, well that brings context to my level up message."

  [LEVEL UP!]

  [Welcome to level 4!]

  [Ancestry Perk: Blood of the Minor Demon

  Golems of a higher class are sometimes oiled with an essence harvested from gremlins and other denizens of the netherworlds. It's pricey, but the resulting lubricant never wears out, keeps joints operating at peak efficiency, and even renews itself in small quantities.]

  "Huh, that's weird. You don't even have lubricant like that in the first place," Ricky mused. Without waiting for an answer he disconnected the other spindle and more oil flowed out of that port, too. "And right after you were doused in gremlin blood."

  Tapper watched Ricky work, and his curiosity still demanded that he confirm the strange change to his body firsthand. So he popped off his hand and watched oil pool in the wrist port, flowing in from the microscopic holes used by his crystalline fibers. "How curious. It does not cause any physical discomfort, and my limbs do feel at least 5% more responsive. I was worried that it would look like the gremlin's blood!"

  Ricky didn't have the heart to tell him that the oil looked even more like blood for a robot. Instead he nudged the pile of other loot from the chest, and stomach, of the gremlin and said, "Uh, right. Now what else did you pull out?" The two adventurers looked at the detritus and found that the other technology eaten by the gremlin fared much worse, all of it melted and partially digested past the point of use. Everything except for the long chrome horn, which had somehow caught on the spindle and was pulled out of the body from within.

  Tapper dislodged the horn with his free hand and held it between them: Approximately 60 centimeters of chrome tubing, flared at one end and tapering down to a squat cylinder on the other. Ricky leaned in to study it, the cylinder was made of metal but also strangely organic, like a bug's chitin. It had to be some kind of minor relic, that would explain how such a small thing powered the massive sound that helped lead him and Kakisi from the jitney. Ricky couldn't see fine details about the horn, but his class instincts were thrumming with excitement at seeing such a powerful weapon. Maybe if he...

  "How interesting, I believe this is special!" Tapper said, before taking the horn in both hands and breaking it in half without a second thought. Ricky felt the magic pop and dissipate in an instant, leaving him too stunned to do anything except make tiny whimpering noises from the back of his throat.

  Tapper dropped the horn and presented the speaker box, helpfully reading out the description for Ricky's benefit: "'Demon's Breath, essence of fire and brimstone.' This should be a very powerful ingredient for a future potion!" Tapper popped the component into his chest cavity for safekeeping, and only then noticed Ricky cradling the horn like a lost treasure. "Oh my apologies, I forgot about the loot system. Hold on... there we go, ownership should be set to the full party now!"

  Ricky mumbled thanks as Tapper walked away, sulking over the loss of a relic. Destroyed without a thought, just like when Kakisi ate the first and only magical gemstone anyone had ever seen. This system and everything it interacted with ran on rules, and neither Phanya nor Tapper were even trying to learn them. Why didn't they care? Yet through the angst, Ricky replayed the scene in his mind and noticed something: Ricky sensed the relic get destroyed and then felt nothing afterwards, but Tapper was the opposite. He didn't seem to notice the relic until after he broke the horn, so... maybe the system filters out magic that isn't compatible with that class.

  Maybe they were surrounded by magic all the time and Ricky just couldn't see it.

  Ricky accidentally smacked his knuckles with the tube, shocking him back to reality just as he made the realization. And with that clarity of mind Ricky finally noticed that the disassembled horn was still special. It was no longer a relic, but the simple horn was made from a metal alloy of such high quality that his blacksmithing skill had no possible chance of identifying it. And Tapper said the gremlin had grown it out of the monster's own body?

  Making sure to don his rebreather mask for the smell, Ricky leaned over and peeked at the gremlin again. After Tapper's less than graceful extraction, the corpse was starting to look distinctly lumpy, and Ricky didn't want to touch it without good reason. Naturally, of course that meant he would notice something gleaming on the outer edge of recognition. A piece of metal jutted out from the side of the gremlin's wound, it was clearly special somehow but too obscured for Ricky to identify. He'd have to dive in, or risk leaving another unanswered riddle.

  Do it for the magic, Ricky. He gripped the slip of metal in his fingertips and mentally announced that he was claiming ownership. Then he did it again, just to be sure, and pulled. Tapper had struggled so much during his attempt that Ricky expected resistance, but the loot slid out with the ease of unsheathing a dagger and Ricky's overeager pull knocked him off balance.

  Seconds ago, this piece of loot was one of the gremlin's ribs. It was as wide as a finger and perfectly flat, and in the brief moment where Ricky whipped it into the air it was as long as his arm. Ricky watched the springy metal bounce, and even though his Blacksmithing skill still couldn't identify it a giddy feeling bubbled in his chest.

  Because his other skill had some excellent ideas.