Rimelion: The Exploiter

So this was where Korven lived.

The building rose in front of me as I tucked my hands into my pockets and tried to look like a person who had not specifically rearranged her morning around the convenience of a man who killed Poundcake.

Luna spotted me first.

She was standing near the planter by the entrance. “Charlie,” she said. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Um.” Her right hand traced a tiny ghost-line through the air, and she made it stop. “Why are we here?”

“At the building?”

“Or,” Yuki said brightly from beside her, her hair catching the light off the lobby glass behind her, “is it because the others are all taller than you, and you wanted somebody more your size for this one? Because I have actually been meaning to mention—statistically, the average height of the inner circle is—”

“Yuki.”

“—really quite well above the kingdom mean, which is—”

“Yuki.”

“—not a complaint, just an observation, and I think it’s quite sweet if you—”

“Yuki, oh my god.”

I felt heat climb up my neck with the conscientious slowness of a thermometer recording for posterity, Luna grinned, and Yuki blinked at both of us like a person who had said a perfectly reasonable sentence and was now trying to work backward through it to find which clause had broken the room.

“No,” I said, more firmly than I felt. “No. That is not why we are here. At all.”

“Oh. Okay,” Yuki said, but was still oblivious why I reacted that way.

“This is where Korven lives.” Luna’s face went through several expressions in quick succession, none of them landing, and Yuki made a small “ohhh” sound.

“He agreed to meet,” I said before she could start. “At home. Because he couldn’t be bothered to go anywhere, and if we wanted something, we should come to him. His phrasing. And you are historian who should know this, and Luna knows him the best.”

“Big sis—” she opened her mouth to protest, but I cut her off.

“You met him; I didn’t. I want this to be over with and finally go to the capital, so I’ll lead the conversation, don’t worry.”

Luna nodded.

I gestured at the doors, which slid open as the building’s threshold scanner caught my pre-cleared visitor token.

“Come on,” I said, walked in and knocked on apartment 2.

Toxica opened the door.

I had not been expecting that, a doorman maybe, an assistant, an algorithm at minimum, but here she was in a soft gray cardigan with her hair pulled back, and she didn’t meet my eyes. She nodded at Luna, nodded at Yuki, and stepped back to let us in.

“He’s in the living room,” she said. “I’ll bring tea.”

She led us down a hall floored in dark wood, which opened into a room with a long window overlooking the city. A cat was sleeping on a chair, ignoring all of us. And in a heavy armchair angled toward the window, was Korven.

He was smaller than I had been expecting.

Heavier too. Indoor pallor, stubble starting on his jaw, a long-sleeved shirt under an open hoodie. The mass he poured into a greatsword in Rimelion sat on his shoulders here, and his hair was darker than his Rimelion side had implied. He looked up.

“What the fuck do you want?” he said. Then the corner of his mouth crooked, and he added, “And couldn’t the little girl come al—”

He saw Luna.

Or, more precisely, he saw the exoskeleton. His mouth stopped on the half-finished word, and his eyes narrowed. “Oh.”

Luna’s right hand traced a tiny ghost-line. She made it stop after I pointed at it. “Hi,” she said.

“...Hi.”

Yuki had been examining a small jade carving on the entryway table. She looked up at the silence, registered nothing of what had just happened, and said, “Oh! Is this Tang dynasty?”

“Reproduction,” Toxica called from the kitchen.

“Oh, good, then I can pick it up.”

I sat in the chair Korven gestured at. Luna sat beside me. Yuki sat last, holding the jade carefully on her knee.

“This is the last opportunity I’m going to give you. Last,” I said.

Korven leaned back. The smirk arrived on schedule. “Last opportunity,” he repeated. “Cute. You realize you’ve already won, right?”

“I’m sorry?” Luna said. “You are—”

“The tower fell. The boss is dead. Veranthos’s whole little vanguard pipeline is dead.” He gestured. “The miasma’s purification is already in motion. Every spawned undead drains it now, and nothing’s regenerating it. The corridor has a timer. You don’t need to negotiate anything with me. You won.”

He smirked.

Yuki said, “Oh, that’s really interesting from a thaumological perspective, because the saturation gradient would—”

“Yuki,” I whispered.

“—right, sorry.”

Toxica came back with a ceramic tray, chipped at one corner, the cups on it small and lidded in a Japanese style, the tea inside a pale gold that smelled like roasted barley. She set a cup in front of each of us, set Korven’s beside his hand, and then perched on the arm of his chair, tucked tight against him in a posture I had not seen from her in the cave.

Korven’s free hand came up and rested on her hip without him looking. He kept his eyes on me.

“So,” he said. “What’s the pitch?”

I didn’t really want to be here. I didn’t want to offer him this, but Lola insisted that ending the meme war was the best. I closed my eyes. “I have a way to make the corridor permanent.”

He blinked. “The miasma?”

“It’ll be a leveling ground. Right now, it’s on a timer. What I want to do is designate it inside the kingdom as a formal zone. Permanent spawn rates, balanced encounters, scaled difficulty by sector. Players come from level one to max level inside my borders, and I need something for every level; the corridor can become the mid-game stretch.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s possible because of the world fragment.”

He stopped and looked at me for a long moment. The smirk had not gone away, but it had shifted into something more attentive. “You can do that.”

“I can do that.”

“...Okay.” He sat back. “Then what do you need me for? We’re done here.”

“Final offer,” I said. “Baron of the tower. You already have experience running it and have a guild at your back.”

Beside me, Yuki made a small “ohhh” sound that was on-topic for once. Luna’s hand traced a ghost-line and did not stop even after I pointed that out. I’d have to ask what all that hand movement was about.

Korven smirked.

I had expected him to laugh. I had expected him to call it bullshit again, or to demand more, or to do the routine he had run on Luna at the wall. Instead, he just sat there, watching me, with Toxica tucked against his shoulder and his thumb stroking once across the fabric of her cardigan.

I kept going. “There are obligations,” I said. “Call to arms. Tax structure. You’d be under a count, standard hierarchical—”

“Ha.” His teeth showed. “Under your control.”

I shook my head. “I don’t trust you enough to make you a count. That’s the honest answer. But the baron is on the table, and there’s currently no count over the tower territory, which means you’d be acting count by default until I appoint one. If you behave, that appointment is yours.”

“If I behave,” the smirk was back.

“If you behave.” He laughed. Similar to the wall laugh, short and contemptuous, and I felt Luna’s posture shift beside me, her right hand tracing a ghost-line that wanted to become a draw.

Toxica placed her hand on Korven’s.

The laugh died.

He was quiet for a long second. “What about our equipment?” he said finally.

“We sold most of it.”

Korven laughed again. “I knew it. I fucking knew it. Tox, did I or did I not say they’d—”

“It was a fund,” I said. He stopped. “For the families.”

Beside me, Luna twitched.

A small thing, a jolt across her shoulders that the exoskeleton caught and damped, so what reached the surface was only a half-flinch and a tightening of the jaw. I did not look at her. Looking would have made it worse.

“The families of the soldiers who died at the wall,” I said. “Their pensions are a one-time payout. The Crown supplements where it can. The gear from the tower was liquidated and folded into the supplement.”

Korven stared at me. Then he laughed. “It’s a game, Charlie. It’s a fucking video game. There are no families. You went into a tower with a guild raid and you sold the drops and you’re framing it as a charity. That’s some five-star bullshit even for—”

“Honey,” Toxica said quietly.

“—what?”

“They think it’s real.”

He turned his head to look at her, and she did not look back at him. She was looking at me, and the timid posture from the door was gone, replaced by careful attention.

Korven laughed again.

I set my cup down on the side table.

I focused.

The frost magic on Earth has always been thin. On Rimelion it flowed out of me. Here it had to be reached for. The frost on Riker’s glass last week had been easy, a film, decorative, a parlor trick. What I wanted now was harder.

I reached.

I felt it gather at the edges of my fingers like a draft under a door, and I pulled it through, and I put it in the two cups across the room.

The tea froze.

Korven’s cup, the small ceramic thing tucked beside his hand, went white at the rim and then white through the body, the pale gold inside seizing into a solid in the space of a breath. The lid cracked along one seam with a sound like a fingernail on glass. The cup against Toxica’s palm did the same a fraction of a second later, and the moisture on her fingers crystallized into a thin frost across her knuckles.

Korven’s mouth came open.

He looked at his cup. He looked at his hand on Toxica’s hip. He looked at the frost across her knuckles.

He looked at me.

Yuki, who had been about to say something about thaumological saturation gradients, did not say it.

“They...” Toxica said. “Hon. We killed them. We—”

Korven pulled her off the arm of the chair and into his lap, wrapped both arms around her. Over the top of her head, his eyes found mine. He had picked me to blame for it. What the heck.

He pressed his mouth against the top of her hair.

“We should accept it,” she said after a long moment. “Why not.”

“Tox—”

“We should accept it.”

He kissed her hair.

He looked at me, and the smirk came back, but it was a thinner version of itself. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll bite. I’ll be your baron.”

I exhaled.

I had not realized that I was holding it. My hands were freezing. Beside me, Luna’s hand traced one small ghost-line through the air again.

—

Once I got back to Rimelion, the cart was easy to find.

I rounded the fountain and there it was, Scamantha’s car squatting in the corner like an architectural complaint. Rectangular to the point of insult. Three chimneys jutted from the top at mismatched angles, each puffing a different color into the sun.

I pushed open the door.

The smell hit first; herbs and alcohol and sugar layered over the thin metallic tang of mana brewed denser than the room could really hold.

She had tweezers in one hand and was lowering something onto the pan with a concentration I rarely got to see on her. The needle quivered. She held her breath. The needle settled.

She looked up, saw me, and the entire performance reassembled itself in real time.

“Your Majesty!”

She set the tweezers down slowly, as if she were defusing them, and came around the counter at a moderate speed, hands clasped, every inch the Royal Alchemist. She still ruined it by curtsying. “Oh, don’t,” I said. “Please. We talked about this. You bowed once, and I had to look it up on Lola’s etiquette sheet.”

“I’m being professional.”

“You sold a girl a husband-finding potion last week.”

Her eyes sparkled. “Yes, but two girls. Sisters. Bulk discount.”

I sighed. “Do you have it?”

She brightened, the moderation evaporating in a single grin, and pivoted back behind the counter. “I have it. Of course I have it. The Crown asks; the Alchemist finds. The Alchemist also brews, harvests, and negotiates with a sky-spirit named Solvas who is—and I cannot stress this enough—a complete pain to deal with—”

She had already opened a small lacquered box under the counter, and now she produced two leaves.

They were small. Thumbnail-sized. The color of them shifted if I looked at them too long, settling somewhere between fresh green and the inside of a seashell.

“Two,” Scamantha said and beamed. “I cannot wait to see you exploit them.”

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t call this an exploit.”

“My queen.” She folded the leaves into a small twist of dark cloth and slid the bundle across the counter to me. “I have read the patch notes.”