Chapter 22: The Black Market
Karn opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling.
Eleven days. He had been in this world for eleven days. He lay there for a moment and tried to actually count what had happened in that time — the dungeon floors, the Dullahan, the Kracy swarm, the devils, the prince, Alice nearly taking out the guild hall — and found himself unable to connect any of it to the person who had woken up eleven days ago with no plan and a broken ship.
"Don't think too much about it," Zangika said. "Get ready. We have to leave by six."
"Why does Cersy need to meet at six in the morning? We could have left at a reasonable hour and still been on our way."
"There's probably a reason. Or there isn't. Either way — out of the spotlight is good for us."
"There's a saying," Karn said. "If something happens that would've otherwise not happened, it happens for a reason."
(He would regret saying this.)
"What does that even mean? That's not a saying. That's nothing."
"I may not be translating it well."
"Forget it and get dressed."
* * *
The Centre GateThe city at six in the morning was a different place. Fog sat low across the streets, the kind that softens everything — market stalls just beginning to set up, vendors arranging their goods in the mist, the whole scene slightly unreal and quiet in a way it never was by midday.
"That actually looks nice," Karn said.
Cersy was already at the centre gate when they arrived.
"Why is she dressed like that?" Zangika said immediately.
Karn looked. Cersy had brown hair, dark eyes, and was wearing a skirt with a top that had been cut and structured in a way that directed significant attention to her chest. (Boobs)Over it she had a coat — buttons undone at the top, the coat hanging open at precisely the angle that made the undoing purposeful.so attention be at (boobs)
Karn filed this information away with what he thought was professional composure.
"I'm going to enjoy this escort mission," he said, for no one's benefit.
Zangika was quiet for approximately three seconds.
"Every time you look at her chest," she said, "I will pinch you."
"What am I supposed to do — she's right there."
The carriage arrived. The moment it pulled up, Cersy buttoned her coat to the collar and spoke to the driver with complete professionalism. They climbed inside.
Cersy undid the top buttons again.
"She doesn't want to show it to just anyone," Zangika observed. "She covered up for the driver."
"So they're exclusive for me."
Pinch.
"Aah—" Karn caught himself. "Sorry. Nothing."
Cersy looked at him sideways.
The carriage rolled forward. Karn made a determined effort to look out the window. He made it approximately forty seconds before his eyes drifted back. Pinch. He made a sound. Cersy looked. He looked away. This cycle repeated three more times before Zangika took pity on him and stopped mentioning it every single instance and just pinched silently, which was somehow worse.
After a while, Cersy tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and, with a visible effort to sound casual, asked:
"How do I look?"
Her face was slightly pink.
Karn ran through his options at speed.
Option one: You look absolutely beautiful, especially your chest — magnificent. Zangika would kill him. Cersy would probably die of embarrassment. No.
Option two: You look okay. Technically Zangika-safe. Massive understatement. Cersy might take it badly.
Option three: You look gorgeous but you should probably button the coat. Zangika might be okay with it. Cersy might think he was a prude.
Option four: He didn't have one.
"What happened?" Cersy asked. "Do I not look good?"
Karn's mouth moved before his brain had finished voting.
"You look — okay — but your chest — they're magnificent."
Cersy blinked.
Karn heard it as it left his mouth. He attempted a correction.
"No — I didn't mean — what I meant was—" He was losing ground fast. "Just — let them hang out—"
(Slow motion.)
"Let them — what?" Zangika said.
Cersy had gone completely still. Then she pulled the coat shut with both hands and held it closed.
Pinch. Very deliberate.
"I didn't mean it like that," Karn said, rapidly. "I was thinking about something else and something else came out entirely. It was unintentional. I didn't—"
"I heard what you said," Zangika said. "They are magnificent. Let them out in the open. Who says that? In front of the person? In front of me?"
"It came out of my mouth without my permission."
"And now she's covered up," Zangika said. "She was showing them before and now she has covered them because you complimented them."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"It makes complete sense. You're creepy."
"I would never understand women."
Cersy, for her part, was doing a very good impression of someone absorbed in the view from the window. Her hands were still on the coat.
Her internal monologue was running at a significantly higher speed than her external composure suggested.
He was a total weirdo. All black, no accessories, dressed like someone who had very deliberately opted out of being readable — and then he just said that. Magnificent. Out loud. In a carriage. She had worn this dress on instructions, borrowed it specifically, been told it would help her get information out of a person who kept themselves closed off, and in under an hour he had short-circuited the entire plan by being too direct to manage.
She had never done this kind of mission before. She wasn't sure she was built for it.
What did they even want to know about him?
The carriage went quiet for three hours.
* * *
Middle of Nowhere"Passengers. We're here."
Karn stepped out of the carriage and looked around. Flat grass in every direction. No buildings, no road markers, nothing distinguishing one patch of ground from any other.
"Where are we?"
"Middle of nowhere," Cersy said.
"What did she smoke this morning."
"The village we need to find is a black market," Cersy said.
"A black market."
"There's nothing here to see because it doesn't want to be seen. Come with me."
They walked. The grass was the same in every direction. After fifteen minutes Karn asked how much further. Cersy said just wait and see, in the specific voice of someone who was still annoyed about the carriage.
"She's angry," Zangika said.
"I know."
After another fifteen minutes, Cersy stopped and crouched down. She pulled a flat device from her bag — a palm-sized disc with a softly glowing stone inset at the centre. She set it on the ground and adjusted the stone's position with careful fingers.
"I can feel something from that," Zangika said quietly. "Power output, faint but consistent."
The device hummed. A pulse spread outward from it across the field in a slow circular wave.
"Stand here," Cersy said. "Right beside me."
Karn stepped next to her.
"Hold my hand."
"Weren't you just—"
"It's for the device. Just—"
The ground moved.
Not the ground — something under it. Something massive. The grass split apart and from beneath it an enormous head emerged — like a centipede, scaled to the size of a building, the first ten metres of its body visible and the rest still underground. It was half-solid and half-translucent, the back half of it visible only as a shimmer in the air. Its mandibles opened.
It swallowed both of them before either one could move.
Everything went dark for a moment.
Then light.
"WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU—"
"Don't panic," Zangika said. "Everything is working."
"We just got eaten—"
"No danger reading. At all. And—" She paused. "Look ahead."
"Where's Cersy? I can't—"
"Ahead. You idiot."
Karn looked forward. There was a door.
Not a dungeon door. Not a cave entrance. A normal-looking wooden door, standing freestanding in what appeared to be the interior of a very large hollow space. The walls curved gently — organic, chitinous, the surface of the inside of the centipede's body. But there was no wobbling, no sensation of movement, nothing to suggest the creature was anything other than a convenient architectural decision.
Cersy was standing in front of the door.
"Is that a door," Karn said.
"Yes," Cersy said. "I couldn't tell you before."
"Are we inside the centipede."
"Yes."
"And this is completely normal."
"For the black market? Yes." She pushed the door open.
* * *
The Market Inside the Beast"You seeing this?" Karn said.
"I'm seeing this," Zangika confirmed.
A market. A full, functioning market, running in both directions as far as the interior of the centipede allowed — which was considerably further than should have been anatomically possible. Stalls lined each side in a continuous row, each one lit by its own hanging lantern or glowing stone. The floor was smooth, the ceiling curved gently overhead, and the whole thing hummed with the quiet noise of commerce.
Vendors hawked mana stones in colours Karn hadn't seen in the dungeon — deep amber, black-veined white, a violet cluster that pulsed in a slow rhythm. Jewellery set with power crystals, the stones still warm. Weapon stalls with old swords hung on wooden racks beside newer ones, some of them visibly used, some of them visibly old enough that the steel had changed colour. Spell tomes stacked in piles with handwritten price cards. Talismans on strings. Sealed jars with things preserved in liquid. A stall with what appeared to be a careful arrangement of animal organs, each one labelled, the vendor weighing one in his hands for a customer.
At the entrance, two women in coordinated outfits — coordination being the most charitable description of the matching strips of fabric that counted as their clothing — stepped forward.
"Welcome, my lord, to the black market."
They had the specific manner of people who were very comfortable with the situation and found the new visitor's discomfort charming.
"Why aren't they wearing more clothes?" Karn asked, not loudly.
A figure materialised beside him — short, around five-foot-two, impeccably groomed moustache, a slim walking stick tucked under one arm. He had the alert eyes of someone who had been managing chaotic situations for a long time and had come to find them calming.
"My lord — pay no attention to them. They're just—"
"It's alright," Karn said.
"They are — ah — slaves, technically, but I want to be clear that—"
"What?"
Karn looked at the two women. They looked back at him. Both of them were blushing in the specific way of people who were enjoying themselves. One of them waved.
"I would never mistreat a slave," the short man said, with genuine offence in his voice. "The empire has slave rights for a reason. These two are here because they want to be. Both of them are. I wouldn't have it any other way."
"There are slave rights here," Zangika noted, filing it away. "Interesting."
The short man introduced himself as Diddy, manager of the establishment, and proceeded to explain, with the fluency of someone who had given this speech many times, how the market worked.
The problem with a black market, he explained, was permanence. A fixed location was a liability — royal families could raid it, confiscate the goods, pocket the money, and call it enforcement of law. The market's founders had tried three fixed locations over the years. All three had been dismantled.
So they approached the Black Magic Tower for a solution. The tower's specialists — practitioners of magic the main tower considered ungovernable and therefore ignored — spent several months working the problem. The answer they came back with was the centipede.
The creature had been located, contracted, and expanded using spatial magic applied to its interior — the space inside it bore no relationship to the space outside it. The market lived inside the beast, which never stopped moving, which had no fixed address, which could not be raided because it was never in the same place twice. The device Cersy had used was a key — attuned to the centipede's own mana signature, it called the creature to the surface. Only those the market traded with had keys. Only those the beast recognised were taken in.
"It's been running for eleven years without a single incident," Diddy said, with the pride of a man describing his life's work. "Nobody gets hurt. Nobody gets found."
"That's actually impressive," Zangika said. "The spatial engineering alone would be—"
"Your name suits someone I've heard of," Karn said to Diddy.
Diddy laughed, visibly delighted. "I wouldn't dare accept such comparison, Sire. But—" He paused, looking Karn up and down with new attention. "May I ask what brings a noble of your standing to our market?"
He glanced around. Four people had materialised in the peripheral space — not threatening, just present. Noticing.
"Show him the card," Zangika said. "Tell him the truth."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
Karn pulled out his adventurer card. He explained briefly — passing through the area, not affiliated with any noble house, adventurer out of the city guild, here with the receptionist for guild business.
Diddy looked at the card. Then at Karn. Then at the card again.
The four people in the background bowed and quietly dispersed.
"I apologise for the misunderstanding, Lord Nexus," Diddy said. His tone had shifted — still professional, but without the appraising edge. "How can I be of service?"
"He seems more respectful after seeing the card than he was when he thought you were a noble," Zangika observed.
"I've lost Cersy. Can you help me find her first?"
Diddy nodded. "It happens sometimes when guests aren't holding hands at entry. That's what the instruction was for — it ensures the market registers both people as the same arrival. Separated entries occasionally get deposited in different sections." He gestured for Karn to follow. "Come with me."
As they walked, Karn clocked the stalls they passed — a section of magic tomes and handwritten spell records, an armourer with custom-fitted pieces on display, a mana jeweller with stones set in rings that glowed at different frequencies, a seller of what appeared to be rare creature components. The organ stall vendor caught his eye and held up a preserved heart in a jar with the enthusiasm of a man who believed everyone should be interested in this.
"The magic book section," Karn said as they passed it. "Can I—"
"Absolutely, whenever—"
"THERE you are."
Cersy had found them first. She appeared from a side passage, saw Karn, and immediately grabbed his wrist and started pulling.
"I told you to hold my hand — I said it clearly — and you just—"
"The centipede ate us before you could finish the sentence."
"That's why you hold the hand first — so it—" She stopped, started again. "Just come on. We have a meeting."
Karn glanced back at the magic book stall.
"Whatever you have — quickly," he said to the stall owner as Cersy pulled him past.
The owner grabbed fifteen books and stacked them across the counter at a speed that suggested he had prepared for exactly this kind of rushed transaction.
"One thousand silver," he said.
"What—"
Cersy pulled harder. Karn had not had time to negotiate and the books were already in his hands and the stall owner was looking at him with the expression of someone who knew he had the leverage. He paid the thousand silver, shoved the books and tomes into the void space before Cersy noticed, and let himself be dragged.
"Some space for your new books, sir?" called a vendor from the other side of the row.
"No," Karn said, without Cersy hearing it.
* * *
The End of the MarketThey reached the far end of the market — past the last vendor stall, past the last lantern, into a section that was quieter and lit differently. A door. A guard on each side.
"What business?" one of them said.
"Meeting with the boss," Cersy said.
The guards stepped aside.
The room beyond was plain compared to the market — a single large table, comfortable chairs, a light source that came from a suspended mana stone rather than a lantern. The boss was already there. Older, compact, the kind of person who has spent years in a business that requires them to be good at reading rooms quickly.
The conversation was short and direct.
The incident with Prince Edward had reached everywhere. The duke was deploying resources. The guild had its best squads investigating. There was significant pressure on anyone in the underground information network to either provide what they had or stay very quiet.
Cersy asked the obvious question first: had anyone placed a bounty on the prince through the black market? Any contract, any request for his removal?
"No record," the boss said. "I pulled everything when the news came through. Nothing. Whoever planned that — they didn't use us."
"But," he continued, "there was something else. Not a hit. Information purchasing. Someone was buying very detailed intelligence on Edward over a period of about six months — his daily schedule, his habits, his weapon type and fighting style, his bathing times, the windows when he was unarmed and unguarded. Full surveillance package."
Who? Cersy asked.
"Masked buyer. No name. Paid well and never argued price." He paused. "But there's a more interesting detail. The people who delivered that information to the buyer — the ones who had collected it — were all found dead at their lodgings within a short window. Not long after the delivery was made."
"Dead how?" Cersy asked.
"Messily," the boss said. "Body parts. Blood everywhere. Whoever did it had significant power and no interest in being quiet about the message."
Cersy was quiet for a moment.
"That's all I have for you," he said. "The fee—"
"Ten thousand silver," Zangika said. "That's the going rate for this tier of intelligence."
Cersy placed the payment on the table and they left.
* * *
"How do we get out?" Karn asked.
Cersy walked to a nondescript bar on the wall near the entrance door — a handle that looked like part of the structure rather than a mechanism. She pushed it.
The centipede stopped moving. The whole space stilled.
"Jump," Cersy said, and went through the door first.
From inside, the boss's voice — muffled now — started saying something about procedure and authorised exits. Karn stepped through.
Grass. Flat field. Afternoon sun. The centipede had already vanished below the surface — not sinking, simply gone, as if it had chosen to stop being visible.
They found a carriage on the road at the edge of the field and rode back toward the city in the long afternoon light.
* * *
The Carriage BackCersy recapped what they had learned — the absence of a bounty contract, the intelligence buying, the six-month timeline, the dead informants. She said Edward had fought four devils alone and that there was no indication of who the devils were or where they had come from. The guild and duke were both chasing nothing visible so far.
Karn listened. He said very little.
Zangika was quiet. Not her usual kind of quiet — the kind that means processing.
The dead informants bothered her. Someone had cleaned up behind the intelligence trail — methodically, violently, with what sounded like significant power applied without restraint. That was a message. Not to the duke. Not to the guild. To whoever was on the other end of that information chain.
She kept it to herself for now.
Cersy had her hand placed flat over her chest again — coat buttoned now, one hand resting there anyway as though she needed to keep track of it. She was looking out the window.
She had not been able to do it. The seduction angle, the information extraction, the whole plan her contact had outlined — she had gotten into the carriage with the right outfit and the right instructions and had come home with nothing except an extremely memorable comment about her chest and a man who genuinely seemed to have no idea what kind of impression he was making.
She didn't even know what she was supposed to find out. What could one person possibly want to know about a B-rank adventurer who had shown up three weeks ago and been causing minor chaos ever since?
She pressed her hand a little tighter and watched the grass go past.
The carriage rolled on. Neither of them said anything.
End of Chapter 22