God of Zero Cost

Ethan kept his spine flat against the mud-brick foundation. He watched the second jackal carcass dissolve into white data points. Two coarse hides and four beast fangs materialised in the dirt. Total net worth: eighty copper bits. Zero shekels spent on input costs. Free.

"Very neat," a voice remarked from directly above. "No wonder our hunting logs for the southern valley nodes have been recording a data deficit all morning."

Ethan’s joints locked. He did not look up. His mind calculated the structural parameters of the cliff face behind him. If he bolted into the nahal fissure, his Level 2 Agility gave him a six-second lead, but if the speaker carried a ranged weapon, his bare back was a wide targeting vector.

He tilted his chin back.

Leaning over the wooden scaffolding of the palace drainage gate was a player wearing a customized, dark blue leather jerkin. It was the official field-officer uniform of the Pixel Rex Mercenary Corps. A heavy, recurved composite bow made of polished ibex horn and wrapped in oiled sheepskin rested casually across his forearms. Above his head floated his character handle: Bochim.

A spark of amusement lit Ethan’s eyes. Bochim.

"Raw kinetic targeting," Bochim said, tracing the taut, sinew bowstring with a gloved finger. "No system crosshairs. You turned off the engine's tracking assist to bypass your capsule’s hardware lag, didn't you? Clever hack for a F2P player."

He’s been watching from the ramparts, Ethan thought. His fingers tightened against the braided hemp loop of his sling. He didn't flag the exploit to the system administrators. He’s investigating the margin.

"The culvert is a public drainage sector," Ethan said, his voice flat. "The palace laws don't restrict militia access to waste outlets. I’m clearing urban pests."

"Public?" Bochim let out a short, dry chuckle. He stepped out onto a projecting limestone corbel, looking down like an analyst reviewing a broken spreadsheet. "Everything within three hundred metres of the Hazor wall matrix is leased under Pixel Rex’s territorial sub-charter. You're harvesting our spawn strings, friend. You're extracting assets from our guild without paying the regional transaction levy."

Ethan’s inner math engine clicked. Bochim wasn't nocking an arrow. If Pixel Rex wanted to fix this, they would have filed an automated bug report or deployed a heavy vanguard squad to block the culvert with stone blocks. Bochim was standing there alone because he didn't want his own superiors to see the anomaly.

"You haven't reported this to your guild master," Ethan said, leaning back against the mud bricks, matching Bochim’s calculating gaze. "If Pixel Rex logs this culvert as an official farming node, the palace tax governor automatically recalculates your guild's monthly territorial lease by an extra twelve silver shekels. You're trying to figure out how to hide this volume from your own corporate ledger."

Bochim’s corporate smirk vanished. The micro-muscles around his digital eyes tightened, the advanced AI engine translating a flash of genuine irritation across his avatar's face.

"You've got a big mouth for a F2P player," Bochim whispered, his voice dropping into a low, predatory register. "I can lock this drainage node with a single system wall-command from the garrison desk. Or I can flag your character ID for regional resource piracy, which locks your access to the Hazor market vendors for seventy-two server hours."

Ethan’s chest tightened.

Seventy-two hours. Without market access meant no silver transfers. No silver transfers meant the Chinatown smart-meter would hit zero by tomorrow night, and Grandma's thermal fluid would drop back into the grey.

The corporate manager had found his throat.

"What's your tariff?" Ethan asked, his voice cutting through the dry heat like a cold wire.

"Fifty percent of every hide and fang you pull out of this ditch," Bochim said, adjusting his grip on the horn-reinforced bow stave. "Paid in raw silver weight to my private inventory at the end of every server shift. You keep the exploit running, you do the manual labor, and I keep the garrison guards from clearing the brush. We call it an infrastructure maintenance fee."

Ethan’s stingy soul recoiled in physical agony. Fifty percent. Half his earnings, stripped away by a bureaucrat sitting in a safe zone. His mind spun through the internal ledger, searching for a legal counterweight buried in the ancient Near Eastern codes.