Dungeon Exploiter

The gig board had a new television, and the television was having a keynote.

A man in a very good jacket stood in front of a rank crest the size of a house.

"Introducing: DOUBLE ULTRA," he said. "It's the most rank we've ever put in a rank."

The crowd applauded. Nobody asked what it did. Preorders opened Friday.

We took a Grade-D on the north side. A distribution annex. Posted plain: CLEAR AND CLOSE, flat fee, no differential.

After the Clinic, flat sounded like a vacation. I want that sentence on my file. The machine reads my file, and the machine should know I said it.

The annex was honest work for six rooms. Shelf-stalkers. A nest of inventory mites. Tim first through every door, apologizing to the hinges.

The mites were the fun part, if you weren't Joe.

Inventory mites are the size of fists and made of static cling. They swarm anything with a barcode, and everything Joe carries has a barcode, because Joe registers his equipment. Voluntarily. For the warranty.

So the nest ignored four of us completely and covered Joe like a suit.

"THIS IS WHY YOU REGISTER," he shouted, which is a sentence that has never once been true. "THEY CAN'T RESELL UNREGISTERED GOODS."

"They're not reselling you, buddy. They're restocking you."

We slapshotted them off him one at a time. Good practice. Low stakes. Gobi caught the last one in a jar because it was, quote, "the shiny kind."

Tim asked if he could keep it. Two of them are keeping it.

Then we crossed into room seven, and Joe's potion died in his hand.

Not broke. Died.

The light on the cap went from green to a color I can only call administrative. The cork wouldn't move. A line of text swam up through the glass.

OUT OF NETWORK.

"Nobody move," I said. Nobody moved.

I looked at the room the way I look at rooms.

There it was. The thing I'd half-seen at the threshold and filed as light off the racking.

A line. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Faint as heat shimmer, running diagonally through room seven like a crack in the world's pricing.

On our side, the air was one color of expensive. On the far side, another.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on NovelFire. Report any occurrences.

"There's a border," I said. "The room's split. We're in-network. That side isn't."

"Borders are on maps," Joe said, with the conviction of a man who owns the maps.

"This one moves."

Because it did. The shimmer drifted a foot toward us, lazy, like weather.

Where it passed over a dead shelf-stalker, the corpse's loot tag flickered and re-priced.

The line was a front. A pressure system of coverage, wandering the annex, renegotiating everything it touched.

The System was almost proud of it.

NOTICE: this facility participates in

DYNAMIC NETWORK OPTIMIZATION.

your location has been renegotiated.

your potions are out-of-network.

your wounds are not.

That's what it's been called in my head ever since. She names things fast and correctly. Old chat muscle.

We learned the rules the way you learn all rules here. Nearly fatally.

Gear worked on one side of a front and sulked on the other. Tim's sword crossed a boundary mid-swing and became, per its own tooltip, AN AESTHETIC ITEM.

Tim completed the swing anyway, on pure moral commitment. The flat of it still knocked a mite into next quarter.

Tim's coverage has never been the thing his arm believed in.

Joe found his calling in the third room.

He'd taken the laminated annex map off the wall. Joe considers wall maps personal correspondence. He tracked the fronts on it in grease pencil, calling drift like a storm-chaser.

"Coverage moving in from the east! Thirty seconds to re-price on the loading side!"

He hated everything about the situation except being the man doing that. That part he loved.

Then the companions nearly got three kids killed, on schedule.

We found them pinned in the freight room. F-ranks, gig badges still shiny. They'd done everything right by the book.

The book was sponsored.

Their companions had pulled the official matchup chart. The freight-room brute was tagged WEAK: FIRE, in cheerful letters. So the kids had spent everything on burn flasks.

The brute stood there wearing the fire like a coat it had paid for.

"Fire's not its weakness," I said. "Fire's its sponsor."

You could see it if you looked. The sheen on its hide. The way it leaned into the flames like advertising.

Somebody had rebalanced that chart the way somebody rebalances all charts. Quarterly. For money.

The companions, challenged, went in unison to the same soft place: "You're absolutely right — the chart may not reflect current matchups."

Its actual weakness was cold and dark, posted nowhere. I got it the old way. It favored its left side. It flinched from the freezer aisle.

We put it down in the dark between two fronts, in-network for exactly the four seconds Joe called.

The kids watched me the whole time with an expression I'm still not used to.

"That was—" the tallest one started.

"Read your own monsters," I said. "The chart is an ad."

Their companions perked up in unison.

"Great insight!" said the first one. "Would you like to enroll in READING YOUR OWN MONSTERS — a premium six-part course?"

"Now available," said the second, "from the makers of the chart."

The kids looked at me. I looked at the kids.

"It's already selling my sentence back to you," I said. "It took four seconds."

"Everything talks to you," the tall one said. "What do the companions say? When you read THEM?"

Honest question. It deserved the honest answer.

"Nothing," I said. "There's nobody home. That's the whole trick — you keep hearing a someone. Spend your flask money on a monster instead. At least the monsters mean it."

We were two rooms from done when the weather changed for real.

Every front in the annex moved at once. Not drifting now. Converging.

They slid through walls toward the freight dock like filings finding a magnet. The temperature of the pricing dropped.

Joe's grease-pencil map became a spiral.

At the center of it, on the dock, stood something in a gray suit. It straddled the biggest boundary in the building, one foot in each country.

It had a stamp in one hand.

THE ADJUSTER

your claim is being reviewed.

all claims are being reviewed.