The streets of Blackwater Town were quiet in the dead of night. The noise and bustle of the day had faded away, leaving behind only the hush of a sleeping world.
Here and there, candlelight flickered through windowpanes, throwing warm pools of gold onto the cobblestones below.
Orum moved through the empty streets. A cool night breeze rolled against him, only to be turned back by the warm flush of alcohol rising from within, unable to push through. Instead it curled around him gently, like soft fingers brushing against his skin.
The grand flower float parade that had set off at dusk had wound its way to the Adventurers' Hall, and with that, the celebration officially came to a close.
Under Felix's arrangements, Orum and his companions had gone to the Emerald Dragon Heart Inn to clean up and change, then settled in for a lavish victory banquet.
The feast stretched on for hours, finally breaking up well into the night. Carrying a pleasant, comfortable buzz, Orum made his way back toward the Oak Inn.
The spread had been something else entirely. Mountain game and fresh seafood, course after course, each one more impressive than the last.
A whole forest deer roasted to a perfect golden crisp, tender deep-sea octopus tentacles, and a rich, fragrant Venom Harpy egg chowder had all left a lasting impression.
The Emerald Dragon Heart Inn had also brought out a specialty wine they claimed was brewed by elves: Forest Moonlight Wine. Every cup ran clear as moonlight, crystalline and almost luminous.
The Forest Moonlight Wine was light in alcohol, and the first sip carried a bright, sweet floral-fruit flavor. But the kick crept up on you, slow and sneaky, the kind of wine that made it dangerously easy to keep drinking.
On Felix's enthusiastic recommendation, Orum had let himself get swept up in it and drank more than he intended.
Raygore, the half-orc, and Ronald had nothing but contempt for the stuff. They stuck firmly to the rough dwarven spirits they loved, waving away the Moonlight Wine with barely concealed disdain.
Half-orcs were a hot-tempered, intense people by nature. Their idea of a good time was simple and loud: eating, drinking, boasting, singing, arm-wrestling, drumming, and wild dancing.
Not unlike the dwarves, nearly every half-orc had the soul of a brewer, with an almost fanatical love for ale, mead, and anything with a higher proof than either.
As for Ronald, while he served as a cleric, the doctrine of the Lathander church had no prohibition on drinking. He had made that abundantly clear.
By the middle of the banquet, he and Raygore, splint cast and all, had settled into a full-on drinking contest, matching each other shot for shot without blinking. And with every cup Ronald knocked back, he launched into another story, cycling through his past adventures with relentless enthusiasm.
Even the time he had spotted a red dragon at the Black Gate had become one of his greatest hits.
Somehow, even deep in his cups, Ronald could still deliver every detail with vivid, theatrical flair. He was, in the truest sense, a story-generating machine that ran on alcohol.
The whole room was wrapped in the gentle strumming of a half-elven bard, the music flowing soft and easy beneath the noise of the feast. The atmosphere was warm, loose, and genuinely good.
By the time it was all over, both Ronald and Raygore had drunk themselves flat, slumped sideways on the table, completely out cold.
Orum had put away a fair amount himself, working through no fewer than three large bottles of both the smooth Moonlight Wine and the throat-scorching dwarven spirits.
In his previous life, one drink had been his limit, thanks to a lifelong alcohol intolerance.
This time, though he had drunk plenty, the constitution his monster organs had given him had processed the alcohol with ease. What should have left him spinning and sick had instead burned off into something mild and pleasant, a warm, rolling tide with no headache and no real discomfort.
"I... I can still drink, hic..."
Niya's drowsy voice drifted up beside him, broken by a soft hiccup. Even drunk, her voice was soft and sweet enough to make anyone feel a little protective of her.
The two women who had fought in the battle, the diviner Niya and the artificer Midi, had both joined the victory banquet.
Midi, who was two hundred years old, had politely declined every bottle put in front of her, citing her health, and spent the entire evening nursing wellness tea without a single drop of alcohol touching her lips.
Niya had been another story. She had been drawn in by the Moonlight Wine, starting with just one cup out of curiosity, and then she had been completely done for. Cup after cup followed, until her body was swaying and her cheeks had gone a vivid, flushed red, and it was only then that she seemed to realize, too late, that she had maybe overdone it. She had folded into a reclining chair and passed out.
Because Niya had drunk herself unconscious, Felix had someone reach out to her guardian. Before long, a gaunt elderly man came hurrying to the inn. He checked that Niya was unharmed, then carefully hoisted her onto his back and started the slow walk home.
Now, in the dark street, that was exactly what Orum was watching: Niya draped over the old man's bony back like a ragdoll, limp and completely dead to the world, while the old man shuffled step by step toward home.
The night was too dark and too quiet to leave them alone out here. A girl too drunk to walk and a frail old man made for easy targets in Blackwater Town's streets. Felix had asked Orum, who was heading the same direction anyway, to escort them home.
The old man's steps were unsteady, each one slow and deliberate, the weight of carrying Niya clearly taking its toll, but he pressed on without complaint.
"Hans... is that you, Hans? Are you carrying me?"
On the old man's bony back, Niya surfaced briefly, a thin thread of awareness breaking through. She felt her cheek pressed against sharp, bony shoulders, hard and uncomfortable against her skin.
"I'm glad it's you..."
She reached out a small hand and felt around on his back for a moment, slow and searching. Her expression softened, settled into something peaceful, and then she was out again, sinking back into a deep sleep.
The old man never responded to a single word she said.
Orum walked alongside him and said nothing either, keeping the silence of the dark street undisturbed.
Because Orum knew: the old man walking ahead of him, Niya's foster father, was deaf and mute.
Orum didn't know how a deaf-mute man living at the bottom rung of medieval society had managed to raise an abandoned baby girl all the way to adulthood. He didn't want to ask. The hardship that must have taken was something he couldn't begin to imagine.
But the look in the old man's eyes whenever they rested on Niya, a look of fierce, quiet pride, the kind a person gets when they're looking at something they would do anything to protect, made it clear that every difficult year had been worth it.
Some people, once they find something truly worth holding onto, become capable of more than anyone would expect of them.
Half an hour later, Orum and the old man finally reached their destination.
It was a small barbershop, narrow and plain, easy to walk past without a second glance.
Niya's divination shop was tucked behind it, the two businesses sharing a single storefront to split the rent and funnel foot traffic to each other.
The old man carefully unlocked the door and carried Niya inside.
Through the open wooden door, Orum caught a glimpse of the barbershop: a few old barber chairs, an assortment of blades, washbasins, and cloth bandages arranged along the walls.
Those last items were for bloodletting.
In this era, bloodletting was standard medicine. Most people genuinely believed that controlled blood loss could treat just about anything, from a common cold to epilepsy to plague. A barbershop wasn't just a place to get a haircut. Bloodletting, tooth pulling, cupping, and other services were all part of the trade.
Orum had watched one of those sessions during a previous haircut. The barber had the patient grip a wooden rod in both hands, made a small cut over a vein, and let the dark, near-purple blood drain into a basin below. Afterward, he studied the color and flow to determine whether the treatment had done its job.
He was still turning that over in his head when footsteps broke the quiet. The old man had settled Niya in and was already walking back out.
He stepped through the doorway and looked at Orum, and even without words, the gratitude in his eyes came through clearly. This was his thanks for the escort.
The old man held something in his trembling hand: a piece of aged sheepskin, worn at the edges and darkened with time and handling. He extended it toward Orum and offered it to him.
"What's this?" Orum accepted it, puzzled.
He looked it over carefully. It was a hand-drawn map, dense with circles and shapes of all kinds, and he quickly recognized it as a map of the area surrounding Blackwater Town. Near the center, a bold red dot marked one specific location, clearly the focus of the whole thing.
"Is this... a treasure map? An actual treasure map?"
His eyebrow went up. The curiosity was immediate.
He had no idea where the old man had come across it, but the sincerity behind the gesture was obvious. Whatever that red dot marked, it was probably worth checking out.
After he'd made the right preparations, of course.
---
Back at the Oak Inn, alone in his room.
This was a space Orum had called home long enough that it had stopped feeling like a place he was staying and started feeling like a place he actually lived. Something about it settled him whenever he came back to it, a quiet sense of calm that rose up without him thinking about it.
Once he confirmed he was alone, Orum summoned the panel in the dim flicker of candlelight.
A translucent blue notification box, visible only to him, appeared and hovered at the center of his vision:
[You have slain 1 Minotaur Troll]
[Stage reward available: Minotaur Troll Skeleton!!]
There it was.
The skeleton-type monster organ he had been waiting on.
With the Minotaur Troll's dense, reinforced bones replacing his human skeletal frame, the bugbear tendons already running through him would have a worthy foundation to build on, and his raw physical strength would reach a completely different tier.
"Okay. Hopefully this doesn't hurt as much as I think it will..."
For some reason, his mind went straight to that scene from the Wolverine movie, the one where the adamantium gets grafted to his bones, pure agony, nearly killing him on the table.
He pushed the thought aside.
"I've already come this far. No point backing down now. There's nothing to be scared of."
Orum set his jaw, steadied himself, looked at the prompt, drew a long breath, and thought:
Claim.
The instant that thought landed, the blue notification box at the center of his vision exploded apart with a thunderous crack.
A bestial roar tore through him, the kind of sound that seemed to come from the very beginning of the world, ancient and savage and furious, detonating somewhere deep inside him where he had no defenses left.
"HRAAHHH!!"
The roar hit like a shockwave, like thunder going off inside his skull.
Orum's entire inner world lurched. He caught a vision of it: a Minotaur king, vast enough to hold up the sky, Baphomet himself, looming out of a bottomless dark, hoisting an enormous greataxe overhead and bringing it down on Orum's consciousness with the full weight of annihilation behind it.
Then the pressure hit. An unstoppable force detonated from the inside out, crushing and grinding across every inch of his body like something trying to push through him from all directions at once.
Creak... creak...
A bone-deep, teeth-clenching cracking sound started in his fingers and spread up his arms, across his back, through his entire body. Not fractures. Something beyond fractures. His bones weren't breaking; they were being obliterated, ground down to nothing, and he could feel every second of it.
The agony of a million needles twisting through his bone marrow at once had his whole body convulsing, drenched in cold sweat.
"AHHH!" He couldn't hold it back. A raw, hoarse scream tore loose from his throat.
What came next was worse: a scorching wave of heat like being thrown into molten rock. As the old bones were destroyed, something burning and heavy was forced into the space left behind, and Orum felt his flesh sizzle, his veins seize and contract from the heat, and what moved through his body no longer felt like blood but like rivers of liquid iron, every nerve screaming at a pitch he hadn't known was possible.
Two kinds of torture at once, the cold obliteration of bones crushed to powder and the searing burn of flesh caught in the heat of a forge, came together and closed around him like a trap with no way out.
And then, just as his mind started to give, just as consciousness reached the absolute limit of what it could handle and began to let go, something strange happened. The pain crossed some threshold and flipped. A vast numbness folded in around him, sealing the worst of it off somewhere on the other side, like a door quietly closing.
In that moment Orum felt like his soul had floated loose, like a kite with its string cut, drifting higher and higher and further and further away. The body down below, still convulsing on the floor, felt like it belonged to someone else entirely.
If it hurts, just pretend it's happening to someone else. Then it doesn't hurt anymore. The thought surfaced from somewhere and became the one fixed point his mind could hold onto.
In the darkness of the room, Orum had collapsed flat on the wooden floor, and his body was swelling visibly, like something being inflated, like it might split open at any moment.
Beneath his skin, bone by bone, something hard as forged steel was rebuilding itself at a staggering pace, surging up from nothing and locking into place.
Throughout the whole process, every passing second felt like an earthquake inside him, his entire inner world tilted and disoriented.
When the very last vertebra finally settled into place, the crushing agony pulled back all at once, retreating fast like a tide going out.
The pressure transformed into a dense, solid weight he had never felt before. The burning settled into warm currents that spread outward through every bone in his body and radiated into his flesh, steady and nourishing.
His swollen body gradually contracted, returning to its usual proportions. The bone density throughout his entire frame had climbed another level.
"Huff... huff..."
Orum lay crumpled on the floor like a wet rag, pulling in ragged lungfuls of air. His body felt several times heavier than it had before, every bone like it had been cast from tempered steel.
After a while he finally pushed himself upright, got to his feet, and nearly went straight back down from the sudden shift in his own center of gravity.
Not weakness. The opposite. His weight had surged so dramatically that his body hadn't caught up yet with what it was carrying.
In the faint candlelight, Orum looked down at his palm.
On the surface, nothing looked different.
But underneath, everything had changed.
He could feel the mountain-dense weight of power packed into every bone in his body, and a wave of genuine, raw elation rose through him.
That's what I needed. Only a skeleton built like that could actually bear the kind of force a monster could put out.
He wiped the cold sweat off his forehead and turned his eyes back to the panel.
While the numbness still had some hold on him, he might as well push through and spend both accumulated Enhancement Points right now.
"Enhance Bugbear Tendons. Twice."
"AHHH!" Another scream ripped through the room, the kind you might expect from a man being actively murdered.
---
Several long minutes later, every bit of strength Orum had left gave out, and he dropped flat on his back onto the bed, unable to move so much as a finger.
Enhancing the Bugbear Tendons had been every bit as brutal as the skeleton, pushing him to the edge of what he could take.
At least it was over fast.
Better a short burst of hell than a slow, grinding misery. In one night he had effectively pushed through three monster organ upgrades at once, and one of the heaviest concerns sitting at the back of his mind had been cleared away.
After two enhancements, Orum could feel it all through his body: every limb now carried the strength of three bugbears packed into it. Add that to the single bugbear's worth of strength he had started with, and the total came to four.
Four bugbears. That kind of raw force was enough to snap an iron spear in half with his bare hands and then squeeze the pieces into a compact ball.
Paired with the Minotaur Troll Skeleton's terrifying defensive capability, he was genuinely dangerous now in every sense of the word.
He felt frighteningly powerful, and it wasn't wishful thinking.
Put him on a medieval battlefield, facing down a formation of thousands, and he was fairly confident he could carve straight through.
He lay facedown on the soft, dry mattress and let his mind wander through what came next.
Lila had slipped a note under his door saying she had already tracked down a sword master who taught something called Blade Dance. He could go check that out tomorrow.
The situation at the Black Gate had to have developed further. He needed to swing by the monitoring station and ask Scholar Hal what was new.
And the full payment from the commission was still sitting uncollected. He had to find time to go see the Captain about that.
Lot on my plate. Orum murmured it quietly to himself.
A deep, settled sense of satisfaction spread through him from somewhere in his chest. He let his eyes drift shut and was asleep within seconds, heavy and dreamless.
He didn't notice that on the flower vase by the headboard, a small magical device was giving off a faint, barely perceptible glow.
---
Emerald Dragon Heart Inn.
In the lavish top-floor suite, every light had been put out. The velvet-draped bed was swallowed by the dark, its daytime elegance stripped away, replaced by something quieter and harder to name.
Seraphina sat half-reclined against the headboard, dressed in a silk sleep-robe. Her sharp, coldly beautiful features were half-lost in shadow, her breathing slow and even.
On her head sat an intricately crafted magical device shaped like a crown, its two slender sensor tips pressed snugly against both her temples, glowing with a faint, steady magical light.
This was a device built to cast an enter-dream spell.
By channeling magic through it, the user could pull a target into a shared dream space, turning what would ordinarily be one person's private dream into something both parties inhabited at once, like a tabletop game running inside a sleeping mind.
As the device's owner, Seraphina was the host of that game. She had elevated permissions. Within the dream, she could do as she pleased.
The target, dragged in without their knowledge or consent, would typically wake the next morning with most of the experience gone from memory, left only with the vague, unpleasant residue of a bad dream.
"One week... actually, if I'm going to do this properly, let's make it a full month."
Seraphina ran the tip of her tongue slowly across her lips, barely containing her eagerness, and pushed her magic into the device.
---
Tick, tock. Tick, tock.
Orum lay still with his eyes closed, aware of something wet dripping onto his face.
Had the roof of the Oak Inn sprung a leak?
He opened his eyes. His vision adjusted to the dimness around him, and the jolt hit immediately: this was absolutely not his room at the Oak Inn.
It was a cramped, low-ceilinged prison cell, dark and reeking of filth. A cold damp draft rolled through the space, carrying a smell that turned his stomach.
In one corner, pale bones were stacked in a loose pile. Iron spikes caked with dried blood lined the walls.
Orum tried to sit up and found his hands and feet had been locked down by something cold and hard.
Clank.
The harsh rattle of iron chains rang through the cell.
He looked down at thick chains clamped around his wrists and ankles, and then at his own bare skin, and his mind went completely blank for a moment.
What the hell is going on?
Did I get arrested somehow?
Tap, tap.
Clear, unhurried footsteps approached from the other side of the door.
Under Orum's stunned stare, a woman walked in. She wore a black interrogator's uniform, was golden-haired and green-eyed, and had the kind of figure that made the uniform look like a threat.
Her emerald eyes locked onto him with total contempt, like she was looking at something she had found on the bottom of her boot.
The golden-haired woman held a red-hot branding iron in one hand and a rune-carved collar in the other. Her voice was ice-cold and dripping with contempt.
"Pick one, pig."
For a second, Orum's mind went completely offline. He stared up at Seraphina, genuinely at a loss.
Seraphina, for her part, was starting to wonder if she had scared him into catatonia, whether she had maybe skipped too many steps in the setup.
Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.
Four fast, sharp snapping sounds, like bones breaking, rang out from his wrists and ankles. Every iron chain shattered at once. Iron shards flew in all directions.
"I get it now. This is a dream."
Orum looked at the stunned Seraphina in front of him, his eyes sharp and clear.
"Lucky me. I've had a lot of practice with lucid dreaming."
"In my own dream, I run the show."
He threw out one hand. All four chains shot upward like striking snakes and clamped around her wrists and ankles in a single motion, yanking tight.
"What?!" The color drained from Seraphina's face. She pulled hard, trying to wrench her hands free, and the chains bit into her skin, the pain sharp enough that she nearly cried out.
With Seraphina watching in horrified disbelief, Orum crushed the branding iron and the collar to powder without a second thought.
"Those props were way too low-effort."
"Think of it like ranked play. Nobody with any ambition stays in the lower tiers forever. You go all the way to the top, or what's the point? That's the only way anything stays interesting."
Weapon after weapon materialized out of the air around him, filling the space like a king's armory called into existence from nothing.
Seraphina shook in her chains, wide-eyed, on the verge of tears.
"This isn't possible... there's no way to log out..."