Chapter 52: Two Girls, One Rock
Barbosa was still on the floor. His eyebrows were gone, burnt off, actually. A guild master who had walked into this chamber forty minutes ago with three hundred men and an attitude was now a man lying in catacomb dust, while his former prisoner ran a soup stall three feet away, and the worst part was that the soup smelled incredible.
"Camp here," Liam said, looking back at the group. "The Ruby Eyed guys can watch the door. They seem to be good at lying on the ground."
"Gladly, Chef," Mirra said, her lion ears at full height, her voice carrying the specific warmth of a woman who had watched someone she disliked get used as a ghoul-delivery system and was still processing the joy of it.
What followed was not a dignified camp setup. Noir and Berry arrived at the same large flat rock at the same time from opposite directions, both of them holding cleaning implements they had produced from their inventories with suspicious speed.
"Liam, sit here," Noir said, already wiping the surface with the edge of her cloak in fast, aggressive strokes, her cheetah tail going at a pace that suggested this was a matter of national importance. "I cleaned it, so sit here."
"No, here," Berry said, physically blocking Noir with her hip and applying a Warmth buff to a different section of the same rock with the focused energy of a woman who had decided this was a competition she was winning. "The buff will keep your core temperature stable in the lower levels; it’s tactical, sit here."
"They’re fighting over a rock," Rogue said, from somewhere in the shadows where he had been since the ghoul fight ended, his voice carrying the hollow quality of a man who had recently learned he was in another dimension and was processing this by sitting very still.
"You’re one to talk," Mirra said, not looking at him, adjusting one of her bracers with the unbothered precision of someone who had been managing chaos for decades. "What exactly is your contribution to this camp setup?"
"Moral support," Rogue said.
"Your moral support smells like someone who ate their own son and cried about it for forty minutes."
"I’m still grieving, Mirra. Have some respect for the bereaved."
"The egg was never your son, Rogue."
"He would have had beautiful scales."
"It was an ingredient."
"HE HAD A SOUL."
"It was an egg."
"You don’t know that," Rogue said, with genuine emotion, and the shadows absorbed the rest of his feelings on the matter.
"I see two rocks," Liam said, looking at the single rock.
Both women stopped, then looked at each other. Looked at Liam.
"Mana drain," Elizabeth said, appearing at his shoulder with the timing of someone who had been watching this and had decided enough was enough. "Sit down before you embarrass yourself further."
Liam sat on the rock, which was warm from Berry’s buff and clean from Noir’s cloak, and pulled the pan from his inventory with the unhurried efficiency of a man whose priority had always been obvious and had not changed because of a minor detail like being in another dimension. He looked across the chamber at the Ruby Eyed remnants, twelve of them, sitting against the far wall in various states of physical and emotional ruin, their red emblems catching the purple moss light.
"Anyone hungry?" Liam said. "Fifty gold a bowl for anyone with a red emblem. Business is business."
The silence that followed had texture.
"Fifty gold," River Soul said, from the wall, his voice the hollow register of a man who had lost his eyebrows and his dignity in the same ten minutes. "You’re charging us fifty gold."
"You hurt my party member," Liam said, already heating the pan. "Consider it a convenience fee."
Three of them paid immediately. The smell of the chicken soup hitting the hot pan reached the rest of the chamber within thirty seconds, rich and savoury and aggressively real in a way that nothing else in the catacombs was, and four more paid before the first bowl was finished, and by the time Liam had served the eighth bowl the remaining four were sitting with their gold out and the expressions of people who had made a decision they weren’t proud of and had accepted this.
[Chicken Soup consumed.]
[User Effect: +50,000% Melee Resistance — 24 hours.]
[Party Effect: +500% Melee Resistance — 24 hours.]
While the soup was distributing itself around the chamber in exchange for gold, Liam pulled a second pan and started on something else, pressing dark berries from his inventory through a fine cloth, adding carbonated water and a measured reduction of toad venom that had been sitting in his inventory since Day 1, waiting for exactly this kind of environment.
"What’s that?" Elizabeth said, watching from her rock.
"Berry Soda," Liam said. "The catacomb mobs use poison as a primary mechanic. This makes that irrelevant."
He poured it into cups and handed them around the party without ceremony, the deep purple liquid fizzing quietly, smelling of fruit and something older underneath.
[Berry Soda consumed.]
[Effect: Complete Poison Immunity — 5 hours for normies]
[Flavour Text: "Tastes like a summer that never happened. Also, you cannot be poisoned for five hours, which is arguably more useful."]
Midnight took hers with both hands and stared at it. "You just made a poison antidote from berries and carbonated water."
"And toad venom," Liam said.
"You put poison in the poison antidote."
"Trace amounts," Liam said "for flavour."
Berry watched the gold stack up next to Liam’s inventory with the expression of a woman updating her assessment of a business partner. Noir watched with her tail doing the slow, deliberate movement it did when she was impressed and didn’t want to show it.
Elizabeth sat two feet to his left on her own rock, close enough that the warmth from his shoulders reached her, far enough that she could claim it was coincidental, and watched him work with the expression she wore when she was trying to look like she was doing something else.
[TOOL TIP: THE "RAID" POP-UP SHOP]
Status:Business as Usual (In Another Dimension)
Description: While the Ruby Eyed Guild is currently undergoing a mandatory "ego-restructuring" (and eyebrow regrowth) on the floor, Liam has successfully turned a literal tomb into a five-star lounge.