Ronin found Shizuku and the others and let himself get pulled into the festival.
Three days burned off. When he came back to the port he already had the case in hand, the three cards chosen and seated.
He had entered the game through Battera's console. Breaking the deal was not on the table.
One card was Angel's Breath, for the girl Battera wanted saved. One was the Witch's Youth Potion, to put years back on Battera himself. The last had taken two days of argument with Shizuku, Neon, and Abachi before they settled on the Skull Glasses.
The only other cards that had genuinely interested him were Mad Doctor's Muscle Enhancer and the Pregnancy Stone.
Mad Doctor's Muscle Enhancer ran one bottle a day for a week and then the strength stuck. Seven crates. Ten bottles to a crate. Keep the cycle going and you could stack the boost ten times. For an Enhancer that was a rare piece of hardware. Ronin still preferred to grow the number himself. If he ever hit a wall, he might open a crate.
The Pregnancy Stone was simpler. Carry the three-kilogram rock for a month and the carrier got pregnant, man or woman. As a trap it was almost perfect. He had never seen a man pregnant. He wanted to know how the body would do it, and how the delivery would work.
That particular curiosity did not survive a vote. They took the Skull Glasses.
Put them on and objects went transparent. A scale on the frame set how deep the see-through ran. The only thing they could not punch through was a spell-card pouch from Masadora. Once you left Greed Island, nobody owned one of those pouches anyway. The glasses stopped being a game toy and became a tool that handed the wearer a new trick.
After they chose it, they made a rule. No one used the glasses on anyone in the group. Adjustable x-ray was also clothes.
Shizuku's trio did not leave. They waited at the port for Ronin to deliver what he had promised, then they would walk out together.
Battera had hired Ronin with real confidence. Confidence did not stop the old man from crying when the cards actually landed in his hands.
Ronin found Tsezguerra already in the castle. Battera had brought him in earlier than expected. The man was steady. Quiet. Once the cards were out of the game his contract was dead weight, and he did not look bitter about it. Curious, more than anything. Impressed.
"I went through the files Battera gave me," Tsezguerra said. He put his hand out first. "The game is hard. If I took a team in, I still would not bet on a clear inside a year or two. From what he told me, you have been inside about a year. That is something."
"Ronin. You're giving me too much. I got lucky."
Tsezguerra smiled like a man who had heard that line before and did not believe a word of it. He did not need a fight to take a measurement. A handshake was enough. The strength under it was not ordinary.
"Can I get a contact? If a job comes up that fits, we can watch each other's backs."
Ronin did not refuse. Tsezguerra was not a heavyweight. He was a veteran Hunter with decent pipelines. That had value later, or it did not. No reason to slam the door.
Tsezguerra did not follow Battera to the ward. Doctors packed the corridor. He said his goodbyes at the door and left the castle.
Ronin stayed long enough to watch him use Angel's Breath himself.
An angel's outline filled the room. One breath washed over the girl on the bed. She had been paralyzed for years, a mask on her face, kept at a livable weight by the best staff money could buy and nothing more. Her eyes opened.
Battera's face ran with tears. He said something no one outside the room could parse and went to the bed like the floor had dropped.
The girl looked at the old man and did not flinch from him. What sat in her eyes was worry for him.
Under the mask, very quiet: "You've worked so hard, love."
Standing in the hall, Ronin decided the world did contain love. The kind that did not care about the years between two people.
Battera took the Youth Potion.
Sixty-something folded back into his twenties. The girl was still thin. She was still beautiful. She took his arm. The young man who now looked like a magazine cover stopped in front of Ronin and bowed from the waist.
"Thank you."
Ronin thought bringing the cards back had been a clean choice.
When he stepped into the game again, a hundred billion jenny was already sitting in his account. Battera's payout. With it came a promise: whatever Ronin needed later, Battera would throw everything he had at it.
Ronin filed the promise and did not lean on it. Battera was a civilian. Whether their roads crossed again was a coin flip. They had bought what they needed from each other. An extra fifty billion on top of the posted prize was already more than fair. Treating it like a life debt would have been greedy.
"Let's go."
Magnet dropped him at the port. The four of them used a Transport Ticket, boarded, and left Greed Island for good.
The next day the island went into a short maintenance lock. Every player still inside woke in a hall.
Elena stood in front of them in her NPC skin, the Game Master who handled departures.
Two options. Walk out. Or wait for the patch and play the second run.
Most walked.
A thin slice stayed. When they loaded back in, the rules had new teeth and the item tables had grown.
In the castle, Dwun watched the servers come up and smiled.
They had not spent all those years inside the game just to sit on their hands.