Dungeon Exploiter

Rent was due Friday. That's the only reason I let Rob talk.

Rob has been my friend since the third grade. He's the smartest guy I know, and he has never once aimed it at anything that matters. He aims it at coupons. Angles. Fine print. He was in my doorway at seven in the morning, holding a printout like a warrant.

"Night clear," he said. "The MegaDepot on Route 9. If the clear logs before the first of the month, it pays a completion bonus. Double rate. We go in at ten, we're out by eleven-thirty, we get paid twice for one job."

"What's in it?"

"Night Crew. Shelf monsters. Grade-D. Teams clear the front aisles all the time."

"And the back aisles?"

"We're not going to the back aisles."

I had sixty dollars, a gold ring I was never going to sell, and a goblin at home who eats chips. And I'd learned my lesson about renting gear the day NexoDrive kept my crowbar deposit, so I went to the closet and got my hockey stick.

Liya heard the whole pitch from the couch and didn't move. "A warehouse. At night. On Rob math. No." Some conscience. So it was just me and the stick.

* * *

Rob had filled out the party. That's how I met Tim.

Tim was at the gate in brand-new gear with the sticker still on the chestplate, waving at us the whole time we walked up, in case we missed him standing alone under the only light.

"This is Tim," Rob said. "Tim's cheap."

"It's my first night dive!" Tim said. "My mom thinks I'm sleeping at Kevin's."

There were three others. Marcus, our tank, whose gear glowed even in the parking lot — every piece of it had a little gold badge that said ULTIMATE TIER.

A streamer named Kayla, who was already live, and whose gear was free because she ran it on the ad-supported plan.

And a healer the gig had assigned us, who didn't give a name and didn't ask for ours.

Marcus looked at my hockey stick the way you look at a dead bird on a porch.

"Is that a hockey stick?"

"Yeah."

"What's the loadout subscription?"

"There isn't one. I own it."

"Like, lease-to-own?"

"No. I bought it. Twelve years ago. It's mine."

Marcus glanced at Rob, then back at me, and decided not to stand near me.

At the kiosk, the gate charged a night-access convenience fee. From behind me came a short sound. "Nu." That's Rob's noise. He makes it when money leaves him, and the length tells you how much. This one was about twelve dollars.

Inside the doors, an old monster in a blue vest stood at a podium and waved at each of us as we passed. Gray, stooped, tusks worn down to nubs. Its tag read GREETER — NON-HOSTILE — DO NOT ENGAGE.

Nobody waved back except Tim.

* * *

MEGADEPOT — SECTOR 12 Grade-D

Sponsored by NexoDrive — "Dungeons, Delivered."

Clear Condition: Thin the Night Crew (40).

Month-End Bonus: ACTIVE until 12:00 AM.

And the quiet screen under it, the one nobody reads:

NIGHT CREW: blind. Hunts light and sound.

Exit: loading dock, rear.

The store was dark past aisle three, and the aisles were canyons — shelving going up fifty feet, loaded pallets, blackness on top. The plan was simple and loud: fight straight down the main aisle to the loading dock, kill forty on the way, log the clear before midnight.

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For the first hour, it worked, because the gear worked.

The Night Crew came off the shelf-tops — pale, eyeless, fast, running the steel up there like it was flat ground, then dropping.

Marcus met the first drop with a shield that lit up blue and played a little chime on impact, and his sword swept three of them off him in one arc.

It was genuinely good gear. That's the thing nobody tells you about the premium guys. The stuff works. You're paying for the logo, but the logo is stapled to a real sword.

Kayla fought and narrated at the same time, which sounds useless and isn't — she was quick, and her aim was better than mine.

Every few minutes she'd freeze mid-aisle and say "ad," and the whole party had to form up around her for fifteen seconds while she stood there watching something we couldn't see.

That was the price of her free gear. We covered her. You get used to it.

Tim swung at everything and hit some of it.

I played the edges. Poke-check to the throat when one got close, and when one dropped in on Kayla's blind side, I one-timed a can of wood stain off the floor and put it through the thing's head from twenty feet.

It went down and it stayed down. Hockey is a real sport. Nobody believes me until the can.

And here's the thing I noticed by the second fight: the Night Crew never came at me. They'd pour past me to get to Marcus's glow, to Kayla's ring light, to Tim's chestplate beacon. One ran straight by close enough to touch.

"They can smell rank," Marcus said, and everyone laughed, and I let them have it.

The count was the problem. The screen said forty. We'd dropped better than twenty, and there were more on the shelf-tops than when we started, because every chime and every muzzle-flash was a dinner bell rung deeper into the store. The fights were getting bigger. The dark between them was getting shorter.

"We should move faster," I said.

"We're fine," Rob said. He was pulling a shopping cart.

He'd found it in aisle nine, along with what was left of the last few crews that came in here — and their gear. Swords, plate, half a launcher. All of it locked, all of it subscription-dead, dropped when the owners stopped needing things. Rob was loading it like produce.

"That stuff's bricked," Marcus said.

"It's bricked tonight," Rob said. "Hardware's hardware. I know a guy who knows the codes. Five minutes."

It was not five minutes.

* * *

Somewhere around aisle twelve, one of the Night Crew opened Tim's arm before Marcus could peel it off him, and the healer did his job. Quick, clean, good hands. Tim's arm closed up like it had never happened.

Then the healer turned his screen around and held it out, and stood there.

GRATUITY?

25% — 30% — 35% — Custom

The screen was the brightest thing in a hundred feet of darkness. Above us, the shelf-tops went quiet, which is worse than noise.

"Dude," Marcus hissed. "Just tip him."

Tim was already fumbling for it. Tim had tipped the kiosk on the way in. The kiosk. He hit 30%, and the healer nodded, and the screen went dark, and everybody breathed.

Twenty minutes later a claw got my shoulder, and the healer fixed that too. Good hands, like I said. Then the screen came around to me, glowing in the dark like a lighthouse for things with no eyes.

I pressed No Tip.

The sound the party made was worse than anything the Night Crew had made all night. Kayla's chat detonated — I could hear her reading it: "no-tip guy. NO-TIP GUY." Marcus looked at me like I'd spit on a church.

The healer said nothing, because the healer had also said nothing when he fixed me, both of which were fine with me.

He did his job. I'd paid for the job. The job was done.

"You're a psychopath," Marcus whispered.

"The screen's off, isn't it?"

It was. The dark came back, and the dark was the only thing keeping us alive, and I was the only one who seemed to have clocked that those two facts were related.

* * *

At 11:58 we were at aisle fourteen of twenty-two, because of the cart.

"Bonus window's fine," Rob said, hauling it around a pallet. "We log the clear at 11:59, worst case."

At 12:00, the first of the month arrived, and every subscription on Earth renewed at once.

Every piece of gear in the party chimed. All of it, together — receipts, renewal confirmations, and then the thing I didn't know was coming, the thing that comes with the first of the month: the mandatory update.

Marcus's sword stopped being a sword. The blade light died and a bar crawled across it. YOUR SWORD IS UPDATING. DO NOT POWER OFF YOUR SWORD. (1 of 4)

His shield rebooted with the little startup chime, bright blue, proud of itself.

Kayla's whole rig went amber. FREE PLAN: MONTHLY MINUTES REACHED. UPGRADE TO CONTINUE.

And Tim's sword — Tim, who had tipped everything with a screen since the parking lot — didn't even try to charge him. His account lived on his mom's family plan, and the family plan had opinions. His blade folded itself flat like patio furniture.

SAFETY MODE. BLADE DISABLED. ASK A PARENT.

"Ask a parent," Tim read, out loud, in the middle of a dungeon, at midnight.

The healer stood up in the middle of it, packed his kit, and left.

His gig ended at 12:00 sharp — the app clocked him out, and the app does not do overtime — and he walked back up the dark aisle the way we'd come, calm as a man finishing a shift, which is exactly what he was.

We never saw him again. His invoice beat us home.

We stood in a ring of glowing update bars, renewal receipts, and one upgrade ad, in a pitch-black warehouse full of things that hunt light, and the shelf-tops began to whisper with movement, everywhere, all at once.

Far across the store, some other crew was learning the same thing.

We saw the glow rise over the shelving three departments away — some guy's expired sword playing its farewell, a bright little slideshow with music, ENJOY THE MEMORIES, all his best kills fading in and out, fifty feet of steel between him and us and no way to help.

He was screaming at it to turn off. It didn't turn off. The slideshow had a runtime.

Then the glow went out, and the music stopped, and something up on the shelves made a sound I can only describe as satisfied.

We killed every light we had. Powered down mid-update, warnings be damned, muffled the chimes under bodies and armor. And we crouched there in the blackness, five people and a shopping cart, listening to the steel tick overhead.

Then, from inside Marcus's pack, bright as a flare, loud as a church bell, a phone lit up and started to ring.

The caller ID said NEXODRIVE CUSTOMER CARE.

They'd noticed his payment failed. They wanted him back.

Above us, the shelves started to move.