Dungeon Exploiter

Bev spotted them first.

“Gray van, corner of Ninth,” she said, setting down the casserole dish. “Third day in a row. Two men who don’t buy anything, parked where the camera angles cross. I ran docks for twenty-three years, box kid. I know a stakeout. We used to get them before inventory audits.”

Rob’s alerts confirmed it an hour later, because Rob’s alerts ping whenever institutional money moves near my name. Four contractors. Matching unmarked gear. A support van with a cell in the back rated for live cargo.

Retrieval Solutions LLC. The bounty had grown legs.

“Capture-grade,” Rob read off the leaked manifest. “Restraint foam. Signal dampers. A medic. Jon, they budgeted a MEDIC for you. Do you know what I’d give to be worth a medic?”

JON’S DICTIONARY — institutional tier: when the person trying to buy you has a legal department. The price goes up. So does everything else.

The problem, for them, was where I was working that week.

Rent had opinions, and the only listing left at my new involuntary Grade-A was the one the queue had been dangling at me like a dare since the squeeze.

VAULT OF TEETH — Grade-A

Party minimum: 12. Currently listed: 1 (you).

Prerequisite: prior Vault clear credit, OR Sector 7 solo-clear credential (grandfathered, errata 7.1).

Casualty history: yes.

There is exactly one Sector 7 solo credential in the world. It’s mine. It’s bound to my account, and it cannot be bought, rented, carried, or faked.

I took the listing. On purpose. Walked to the gate slow, in the open, past the gray van, and waved at it.

If they wanted me, they’d have to follow me somewhere the rules were on my side. Bait works both directions. Bev taught me that too, back when dock thieves used to case her floor. You don’t hide the good pallet. You park it where the cameras are.

* * *

The hunters hit the gate twenty minutes after I went in. I got the story from the gate afterward, because the gate is staff, and staff talks to me.

Contractor one presented a rented S-rank and a purchased carry credit. The gate read it. The credit belonged to a man currently in another time zone. Denied.

Contractor two tried to buy a Vault credential off the exchange. There are none. Nobody clears the Vault of Teeth. The exchange listed exactly one qualifying credential — mine — flagged non-transferable, with a System note that Rob has since had printed on a mug.

this one is attached to a person. it does not come off. stop asking.

Contractor three filed for an exemption waiver. The waiver routed to compliance. Compliance asked for the insurance rider. The rider named the client. The client cannot be named. The paperwork ate him alive, and for all I know it’s eating him still.

Contractor four tried to bribe the gate.

He walked up with a discreet envelope, the way you’d work a doorman. The gate looked at the envelope. Then at him. Then it turned its badge around so he could read it. NON-HOSTILE — DO NOT ENGAGE. The designation cuts both ways. It can’t be threatened and it can’t be bought, because nobody ever gave it the fields for either.

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A thing without a greed slot is the most secure system ever built. He stood there holding money at a lighthouse.

* * *

Inside, the Vault was the Vault.

Whoever built it had thought hard about banks and then had a nightmare. Corridors of brushed gold. Teller windows with nothing behind them. And the walls — floor to ceiling — lined with teeth. Filed, cataloged, each in its own labeled socket. The vault collected deposits in the only currency it believed in.

The hoard was real. Pallets of gear. Gold in drifts. Dead men’s subscriptions still blinking in the heaps. Six figures of loot within arm’s reach at all times. Unguarded.

The quiet layer explained in one line.

THE VAULT OF TEETH

Hoard: unguarded. Withdrawal: triggers collection.

The Vault only attacks debtors.

Deposits welcome.

Take nothing. Owe nothing. Fear nothing. Every crew that died in here died rich, for about eleven seconds.

I’d love to tell you I walked through calm. I didn’t, because Rob was on comms.

“There’s a LAUNCHER, Jon. Left of you. Retail’s eighty grand. It’s LEANING on a pile of gold. You could pay rent for a decade—”

“Rob.”

“I’m just SAYING there’s a version of tonight—”

He stopped, because I’d stopped. There was a sound in the walls. Soft, dry, rolling — a thousand sockets turning at once, every tooth in the corridor rotating toward the launcher Rob had described, like a stadium crowd looking at one seat.

It knew. The Vault had heard the wanting.

I stood very still with my hands open and empty until the sockets rolled back, one wall at a time, slow, unconvinced. Then I breathed again.

“New rule,” I whispered. “Nobody describes merchandise.”

“Copy,” said Rob, in the smallest voice I’ve ever heard him use.

The clear condition was a bell on a teller’s counter at the far end. Green with age. Rope worn soft. Third one of those I’ve seen now. I’m keeping the list.

On the way to it, I made a deposit.

The gold ring. The first one, from the tunnel, from a goblin who was having a worse day than me. Mine, fully mine — which is the only reason it worked. You can’t deposit what you don’t own.

The teller window took it with a sound like a tooth clicking into a socket. The walls sighed. I want that on the record: a bank made of teeth sighed, contentedly, like something that had waited years for anyone to put something IN.

DEPOSIT RECEIVED.

The Vault remembers its depositors.

VAULT OF TEETH — CLEARED. Method: [UNRECOGNIZED]

Note: nobody has ever deposited before. we had to look up the sound it makes.

Gobi, told about the ring at dinner, was not upset. He views deposits as long-term getting. “It’s in a vault with teeth,” he said, with real admiration. “Nobody gets it now. That’s the best getting there is.”

* * *

Outside, the professionals had regrouped at their van. Rob was leaning against it, eating chips, mid-negotiation.

He’d spent the morning trying to claim the bounty on me himself. His pitch, delivered to the actual contractors, in the open: “I deliver him. I collect. We split sixty-forty. He escapes — look at his record, he ALWAYS escapes — and next quarter we run it again. It’s not a crime. It’s an annuity. The victim GETS forty percent.”

Joe arrived mid-pitch, read the scene, and didn’t panic. Joe doesn’t panic anymore. He photographed the van, the plates, the cell, the manifest on the clipboard. He emailed the photos to himself, to me, to Jane, and to an address he wouldn’t identify. Then he told the contractors, pleasantly, that he had a mortgage, a lamination budget, and nothing left to be scared of.

They believed him. So did I.

The contractors pulled out that evening. Retrieval Solutions bills by the day, and a target you can’t reach is a burn rate. But the listing didn’t close. It updated.

OPEN CONTRACT — amended.

Condition: INTACT. Venue restriction: SURFACE ONLY.

Note (client): stop trying to follow him down. Everything below the tile line is out of scope.

Rate: increased.

“He’s afraid of the basement,” Joe said.

“He’s afraid of whoever runs the basement,” Jane said.

Liya watched the empty corner where the van had been, and said the thing the whole page was circling, flat, the way she says load-bearing facts.

“Everyone’s afraid of whoever runs the basement. That’s why there’s an appointment.”

The date on the maintenance calendar sat where it had sat all week. Laminated. Patient. Nobody brought it up at dinner.

Bev counted us out at the door that night, hand tipping toward each head, and at the end she added one for Liya without being asked, and then she stopped, and frowned, and looked at the calendar on my fridge.

“Box kid,” she said. “Saturday. Whatever it is. I’m coming.”

It wasn’t a question, so nobody answered it. That’s how treaties work in my family now. I learned that from a woman with a minivan, and the woman with the casserole runs on the same law.