Chapter 25:

  Bjorn and I examined the bodies. There were five badger corpses. I wasn't sure what more to expect. Maybe something like in my son's video games, where the characters faded and dropped shiny orbs or items.

  "Um," I said intelligently, then shrugged and looked at Bjorn.

  He looked down. "If I had a knife, we could skin them," he said. "We could try using their teeth, but I don't think that's going to work."

  But he walked over and stomped on one of their faces anyway, knocking several of his teeth out. He picked up the canine's incisors.

  "Sometimes animal teeth are worth something. You remember what the loot table said?" he asked, and I frowned, closing my eyes, trying to remember something.

  "No, just that the smallest items were worth one point each."

  Together, we gathered ten badger canines and split them up, each putting five into little pouches on our belt. I shrugged, my forearms killing me. My hands were barely able to move; they were so stiff.

  "Should we continue on?" Bjorn poked at a wound on his side without flinching and nodded.

  Together, we trudged out the exit. Blackness surrounded me in a second as words appeared.

  Progress: 0.75%

  The blackness receded, and we continued trudging back up the tunnel. "Only three-quarters of a percent," I grumbled, "And we need to get through twenty? So we would need to get through, what, thirty groups like that?"

  Jonas and Bjorn each just gave me a tired-looking shrug.

  "Well, assuming that each room counts the same amount, perhaps leader rooms count as greater percentages," I continued.

  Bjorn shrugged. "You get as far as you can."

  "Yeah," I nodded in agreement.

  The next cave had ten badgers that were significantly larger than the previous ones, and I groaned. We didn't last long.

  ***

  My head spun some indeterminate amount of time later as I stepped out of the black portal, stumbling slightly. I caught my balance right as Bjorn and Jonas appeared beside me. Shaking my head to clear the cobwebs, I shivered as I remembered the feeling of teeth sinking into my throat while something ate my intestines. I pushed the gruesome memories to the side and felt at my belt pouch where the five teeth were still there.

  Jonas looked around. His tone was filled with a mixture of relief and sarcasm. "Oh, good. I'm alive."

  I nodded, having not honestly believed that we wouldn't respawn.

  "Tell me we got something out of that," Jonah said. The raven cawed from the corner, and we walked over. With his beak, he nudged over a small stone tablet that had "Team unnamed completion percentage, 0.75%" on it. I touched it, and it vanished into light, disappearing into all three of our medallions, which presumably would store that information, though it wasn't very useful. Maybe it was just to keep a record of what happened.

  "Um," I pulled out one of the badgers' teeth. "Can we sell loot?" I asked the raven, and the bird nodded, tapping a scale where I placed all five of the badgers' teeth. Bjorn did the same.

  The raven moved one coin at a time from a pouch that looked empty onto the table until there was a stack of ten in front of us. I grabbed it and divided it up, giving three to both Bjorn and Jonas and putting three in my own pouch. I held the 10th coin up in between my fingers. "Drinks?"

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  They nodded, and we went out and walked down a random street until we found one of the many bars. When we walked in, the bartender gave us a nod, and the mostly empty establishment was quiet. We walked up and placed the coin on the counter.

  "As many drinks as that can buy," I said.

  The bartender looked, picked up the coin, nodded, and poured us each a cup. The money here didn't quite make sense, I guess. The minimum for room and board, as in food and shelter, was one coin, but presumably, you could pay more. Three drinks weren't that many. But how would I buy one drink? Would I need to use just one coin? Or perhaps there was some sort of secondary currency?

  We took our drinks over to a table, and Bjorn was half done with his before we even sat down. Jonas was looking around at the other customers. I followed his gaze. "We need to get weapons badly. And we need to find other teammates so that we have some ranged support and maybe magic."

  Jonas nodded. "Yes. We should go talk to women. They have different skills."

  Bjorn just shrugged. "I think with just weapons, we could have done all right."

  "Yeah, but we don't have nearly enough money for weapons. Three coins aren't even close to how much we need for the most basic ones we saw," I said, remembering the hundreds of coins that each of them cost. "Even knowing ahead of time what's going to happen, I don't imagine we'll be getting much farther than we did today without some changes, and I don't really want to repeat that more times than I have to."

  Jonas nodded, but Bjorn just shrugged. "It only took us an hour. Give us two days of grinding, and we could afford weapons."

  I didn't like the idea of getting eaten that many times. Bjorn wasn't done, though.

  "Well, if we pool everything, we get ten per. We could do five runs before one of us could get a weapon. Then we could work focused on getting the rest of us weapons," Jonas and I nodded, mutually agreeing that Bjorn would get whatever weapon we had. I imagine it would be a small dagger, but hopefully, it would be enough for him to take on three at once or something.

  "Perhaps we could also get creative and throw rocks or something. Not tonight, though," I said tonight. I held up my cup. "We should celebrate a bit. And also go talk to people."

  The three of them met my glass with their own, and Bjorn drank him down while Jonas and I sipped. It wasn't bad. It was definitely better than the stuff in the Lesser Hall, but still nothing special, more like a standard lager.

  We continued talking. I asked them a bit about how the Colosseum and duels worked. Maybe we could get involved in some sort of low-level fistfights to earn some money. But Bjorn and Jonas didn't seem particularly sure that that idea would have any merit. At least, they hadn't seen any when they were hanging out there yesterday.

  Eventually, my stomach growled, and I decided I was going to head back home. I wished them a good night as Bjorn stood to order some more drinks for himself, and Jonas was trying to talk him into heading back towards their own newbie house for some food.

  I walked through the streets by myself, surprisingly not concerned about my safety. Perhaps it was just a misplaced confidence in my new skills compared to the other denizens of Valhalla around me, even though most were probably stronger than I was. Or perhaps it was just that I so far hadn't seen anything in the city that even remotely resembled crime, even though everyone was heavily armed and knew how to fight. The most that we had seen was some commotion coming from a tavern we had walked past. No dark alleys or anything.

  On my way back, I saw something that made me stop: hidden in the design of a shop sign was a little jester's hat. Interesting. Maybe that was how I was supposed to talk to Loki, and I did need some answers.

  Pushing open the shop door, a little bell rang, and the mannequin-like avatar sitting behind the counter looked up. I looked around and found that this was not like a general shop. It was highly specialized in poisons. And very, very expensive.

  The mannequin looked at me slightly and looked around to make sure I was alone. I pushed my sleeve back and showed the inside of my elbow and the jester's hat. The mannequin whirred to life and opened a door that appeared behind it. It led into that same hallway that I was familiar with, and I nodded my thanks as I walked through.

  I didn't have to go downstairs this time, but soon, I was at the host's station.

  "Is the proprietor in?" I asked, and the man looked up at me and nodded.

  "There's a little bit of a wait right now, but we can have you seated in about twenty minutes."

  I nodded and found a padded bench off to the side, where I sat down and relaxed, stretching my legs out and crossing my arms over my chest. Blinking my eyes, I struggled not to fall asleep as the man went back down to doing whatever he was doing on the desk in front of him. I considered trying to have a conversation with him. Still, he seemed very professional, and I didn't want to disturb him. Instead, I counted the tiles on the floor to keep myself from falling asleep. 336 bricks later, the man cleared his throat.

  "Mr. Miles, we can see you now." I stood up, glad that it hadn't been the full twenty minutes, and stretched before following him into the restaurant. As always, it was empty except for Loki's familiar green-jacketed form, sitting at a table off in the corner of the once more upscale steakhouse. The host left us with menus, and Loki already had a glass of wine poured for each of us.

  "Miles," he said. "Congratulations are in order. I'm surprised you came to find me so soon. What's on your mind?"