Dungeon Exploiter

The Gilded Court paid triple for a first clear. Rent had opinions. We applied.

Most dungeon listings tell you the grade and the death rate. This one told you the dress code.

THE GILDED COURT — Grade-B (PRESTIGE INSTANCE)

First clear bonus: ACTIVE.

Entry requirement: GLAMOUR THRESHOLD — minimum cosmetic value $25,000.

Come as your best self. Your best self is purchasable in the lobby.

JON’S DICTIONARY — glamour threshold: a door that checks how expensive you look. Not how good you are. How expensive you look.

The gate scanner was shaped like a doorman, and the doorman was a mirror. Raiders walked up one at a time. The mirror priced them head to toe and printed their worth in gold numbers over their heads. Skins that cost more than surgeries. It waved them through like a bouncer who worked in commas.

Then it read me.

COSMETIC VALUE: $0.

Entry: DENIED.

You are welcome to stand near the entrance for inspiration.

“For inspiration,” Joe read. “You’re decor now.”

Tim made the cut. His mom had approved one good chestplate on the logic that armor is clothes, and the mirror priced her taste at twenty-six thousand. He went in with the fashion raid, waving.

I called Bev.

Twenty-three years of loading docks means Bev knows every vendor crew in this city. Every caterer, every florist, every guy with a hand truck. She made two calls, and by noon I was a porter for the company doing the Court’s catering, with an apron and a day rate.

“Prestige raids eat lunch,” she said, handing me the badge herself. “Nobody prices the guy carrying it. Twenty-three years, box kid. Nobody ever once priced me.”

The inner door’s mirror read my new badge and did the thing I’d bet rent on.

CREDENTIAL: STAFF.

Glamour threshold: EXEMPT.

Staff are not seen. Staff are infrastructure.

Staff are not seen. Some days this world writes its own jokes and leaves them where I can reach.

* * *

Inside, the Gilded Court was a ballroom the size of a stadium. Chandeliers like frozen fireworks. Floors polished so hard that everything got two of itself.

That turned out to be the mechanic. In the Gilded Court, everything gets two of itself.

The fashion raid was already fighting when I came through with a tray.

MIRRORKIN (swarm)

Manifests as: your registered loadout.

Strength: scales with cosmetic value.

The Court reflects what you bring to it.

Every raider was fighting themselves. The polished floor stood up in the shape of each one, wearing every dollar they’d registered at the door. The more you’d spent, the harder your reflection hit. A man in a quarter-million-dollar flame skin was losing, badly, to a quarter-million dollars of his own flames.

This tale has been pilfered from NovelFire. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

His companion kept telling him to add damage. His reflection heard the same advice.

My mirrorkin found me by the dessert table. It stood up out of the floor: a guy in an apron, hockey stick, no armor. Its price tag floated between us.

MIRRORKIN (yours) — value: $0.

Hostility: none.

It’s just you.

It picked up the other end of the table and helped me move it out of the fight. I have no explanation. I’ve stopped asking for ones.

The fix was obvious, and I shouted it across the ballroom.

“Take the gear OFF! It’s only as strong as what you’re wearing!”

Nobody took the gear off. One man laughed at me while his own outfit dislocated his shoulder. The gear was why they came. The gear was who they were. You can’t ask a man to undress his self-image in the middle of a boss fight.

One woman did it. A rental-gear raider near the back, nothing to prove, quick math. She shed the rented plate, and her reflection thinned into a woman in a t-shirt, and the two of them stopped having a reason to fight. She found me after, by the kitchen door.

“I owe you a shoulder,” she said. “Possibly a spine.”

Tim trusts me more than he trusts twenty-six thousand dollars. Off came the chestplate. His reflection turned into a cheerful kid in a t-shirt and immediately stopped fighting him, and the two of them spent a confused second waving at each other.

The rest of the raid retreated with their reflections chasing them all the way to the gate. Millions of dollars of gear, running from itself. It wasn’t a battle. It was a fashion show in reverse, and the mirrors were winning it.

* * *

The throne room sat behind the ballroom. The quiet layer had already told me what the Court really wanted.

COURT ETIQUETTE — TRUE CLEAR CONDITION

Approach the throne. Outshine no one.

Outshine no one. The whales couldn’t clear it in what they wore. And they couldn’t wear less and still be whales.

I walked the length of the throne room in an apron, carrying a tray, shining at nobody. The Court gave me the small bow that furniture gives staff.

THE GILDED COURT — CLEARED.

Clearing party: 1 (staff).

First clear bonus: routed to vendor account (catering).

Method: [UNRECOGNIZED]

Note: the bonus went to the caterer. you did all of that and the caterer got the bonus. we need you to acknowledge this.

The caterer split it with me, because Bev vouched, and a Bev voucher is worth more than a contract in that world. Monsters and dock crews keep the same faith. It’s the companies in between that lose things.

* * *

Rob’s week happened at the same time, and Rob’s week deserves its own telling.

MegaCorp launched a skin that Monday. THE DEFAULT. A legendary cosmetic, $199, that made you look like you weren’t wearing anything special. It was me. They’d priced my nothing and put it in the shop.

It sold out in six hours. Eleven thousand people paid real money to look like a man who has never paid for anything.

Then MegaCorp’s lawyers found out what Rob did three weeks ago, at night, with fourteen accounts and a filing fee.

He owned it. The Default. The Bastard. The silhouette with the stick. Rob had registered the whole territory while everyone slept, and the biggest company on Earth had built a product on his land.

The settlement took two days. Rob wore a suit. The number had enough zeros that Joe sat down on the floor when he heard it.

JON’S DICTIONARY — settlement: when a giant company pays you to stop being right about them.

For thirty-six hours, Rob was rich. He was magnificent about it, by which I mean unbearable. He got a money clip. He called the settlement “my exit.” He called Joe “my guy in ops.”

Then he bought the rank.

S-RANK. Certified. Listed on a private exchange. The only thing he ever actually wanted, and he wired the money the way other men propose marriage.

The purchase triggered a source-of-funds audit.

JON’S DICTIONARY — source-of-funds audit: the bank asking “where did you get this money?” and not liking any of your fourteen answers.

They didn’t arrest him. They froze him. The rank, the settlement, the accounts, the empire — all locked, pending a review with no date on it. He was somebody for a day and a half, and the machine took it back. Not out of anger. Out of paperwork. Which he, of all people, should have seen coming.

He sat on my couch that night with the empty money clip still in his pocket.

“Thirty-six hours,” he said. “I want it noted that I was insufferable for every single one of them. No regrets.”

One thing survived the freeze. A vendor contract, prepaid in cash before the audit landed. A year of ketchup chips, delivered weekly, in Gobi’s name.

Rob says it was a hedge against snack inflation. Nobody argued. Gobi put the first bag in the drawer with the ring receipt and the registration, where he keeps the things that are his.

The courier page came at midnight.

BRAND VALUE: settled (third party — claim upheld).

ASSOCIATE LIQUIDITY: frozen.

IMAGE: unpriceable. Subject wears nothing.

VALUATION: IN PROGRESS.

“They put your outfit in a store,” Liya said from the couch arm, “and you cleared their palace in an apron.”

Rob, half asleep, from the other end: “I own the apron rights.”

He doesn’t. Bev checked.