The Black Lung copper mine might have been choked with acidic monsters, but emerging back into the surface streets of the Iron Capital didn't feel much cleaner.

  The low, grey, industrial fog of the city stung Wanhan's eyes, a stark contrast to the pure, freezing dark of the mine shaft. They had been traveling for hours, and the adrenaline of the fight had long since faded.

  Now, there was only the cold, sharp reality of pain.

  Wanhan leaned heavily against a soot-stained stone wall, struggling to keep his feet under him. His left side was a roaring furnace of agony. Tiny’s alchemical paste was good, but it couldn't stop the internal hemorrhaging from a Level 24 Forward Thrust that had torn his body apart from the inside. Every shallow breath felt like inhaling ground glass. He didn't just feel weak; he felt empty, as if his soul was slowly draining out through the torn stitches.

  [Status: Extreme Blood Loss. All Physical Stats reduced by 90%]

  "Look at you," Tiny grunted, waddling up the filthy street with a bulky, heavy canvas sack slung over his shoulder. The dwarf adjusted his soot-stained goggles. "You're paler than the snow back in Oakhaven. If you collapse before we get paid, I am officially declaring bankruptcy."

  Mata was leading the way, weaving through the crowded, dirty street with a grace that made no sense for a blind person. She wore a heavy cloak to obscure the shape of her bone-white bow, but she still turned heads. Her blindfolded face was tilted toward the wind, and her delicate nose wrinkled in revulsion.

  "The air here tastes like ash," Mata hissed, stepping over a puddle of filthy runoff. "And the hearts of the people who built this city are even darker than their mines."

  The Mining Foreman's office was a massive, squat building of brutalist black iron, sitting right at the edge of the industrial district. It was designed to look efficient, cold, and utterly uncaring.

  Tiny marched up to the heavy oak doors, standing on his toes to reach the brass knocker.

  "Get in line, dirt-grubber!" a fat clerk yelled from behind a caged window.

  Tiny didn't get in line. He kicked the doors open.

  The office reeked of ink, expensive cigars, and stale power. A dozen low-level clerks sat at long desks, scratching at parchment with quills. At the far end of the room, sitting behind a monstrosity of an oak desk, was Foreman Grimsby.

  Grimsby was a mountain of a man, squeezed into a pinstriped suit that strained against his bulging, pale neck. He was a human, but he had the soul of a greedy kobold. He was currently yelling at a trembling messenger when the trio walked in.

  "Foreman Grimsby!" Tiny bellowed, his voice dropping into that terrifying, calm baritone that was too big for his tiny frame. "The nest is cleared. We've come to collect our silver."

  Grimsby stopped yelling, turning his greedy, pale-blue eyes to the dwarf. His eyes dragged over Tiny, over Mata, and finally landed on Wanhan. The foreman’s cruel mouth twisted into a smirk. He looked at the pale, sweating boy with an empty sleeve and blood-soaked bandages.

  Grimsby throw his head back and laughed—a dry, rasping sound.

  "Well, look at that," Grimsby sneered, throwing his cigar into a crystal ashtray. "You three backwater clowns actually made it out alive. I'm impressed."

  "The silver, Grimsby," Tiny growled, slamming his heavy hand on the edge of the man's desk. "One silver piece, up front, as advertised."

  Grimsby slowly opened a heavy iron strongbox on his desk. He reached inside, pulled out a stack of pristine, cream-colored contracts, and slammed them down.

  "The silver," Grimsby said, his smirk widening, "is for professionals. You three aren't mercenaries. You're a circus act. A crippled child, a blind elf, and a dwarf so short he probably needs a step-stool to empty his own chamber pot."

  Wanhan’s vision swam, but the insult to his friends cut through the fever. Spite, his oldest friend, flared up. He grabbed the heavy iron pommel of Fenrir, but Mata’s slender hand suddenly clamped down over his wrist. Don't, her posture said. Not yet.

  Tiny didn't get angry. He got cold. "We did the job. The nest is gone. If you want proof, your lower shafts aren't full of acidic monsters anymore."

  "I don't need proof, dirt-grubber," Grimsby leaned back in his chair, folding his fleshy hands over his stomach. "Because I have this." He pointed to a clause on the very first page of the contract Tiny had snatched off the bounty board. Tiny was a brilliant engineer, but he was also a greedy scammer—and scammers rarely bother to read the legal fine print.

  Grimsby smirked. "You signed a contract for extermination. Paragraph four, subsection B. Payment will only be rendered upon physical presentation of the Slag-Hound Queen’s head. You didn't clear the nest, dirt-grubber. You just cleared the hallway."

  Tiny froze. The dwarf’s jaw worked, but no words came out. He slowly looked up at the contract, squinting. Grimsby was a crook, but he was an official crook. The clause was real.

  Tiny had just fallen for his own trick. He had been so obsessed with the silver, he hadn't read the contract.

  Wanhan’s heart hammered, not from fear, but from the sickening reality of their situation. Grimsby wasn't just a crook—he was going to rob them, and he was using the law to do it.

  A heavy silence settled over the room. The clerks stopped scratching with their quills. The only sound was the low, thunderous thrum of the city’s industrial core.

  Foreman Grimsby grinned. "Now, if you three sideshow freaks are done wasting my valuable time, I believe the beggar’s alley is three streets down. Get out of my office."

  The thunderous thrum of the city seemed to fade, leaving only the sound of Grimsby’s smug, rasping breathing.

  Tiny stared at the contract, his shoulders slumping. For all his bluster, he had been beaten by a paragraph of fine print. The dwarf slowly reached up to adjust his goggles, a rare look of total defeat crossing his soot-stained face.

  "Let's go, kid," Tiny muttered, his voice hollow. "We've been played."

  Wanhan didn't move. He stood in the center of the plush office, swaying slightly as hot blood seeped through his fresh bandages. His vision was swimming, the edges of the room turning dark and fuzzy. But the fire in his chest burned hotter than the pain.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He had nearly been eaten alive in a pitch-black tunnel. He had torn his own stitches open. He was not walking away empty-handed.

  Wanhan reached over with his left hand, grabbed the heavy canvas sack Tiny had dropped, and hauled it up. With a violent, desperate swing, he slammed the sack directly into the center of Grimsby’s massive, polished oak desk.

  The impact knocked the crystal ashtray to the floor with a shattering crash.

  "Hey! Get that filth off my—" Grimsby started to yell, half-rising from his leather chair.

  He didn't finish the sentence.

  The canvas sack had soaked through with Slag-Hound blood. The moment it hit the desk, the highly acidic bile and copper-infused gore began to eat through the fabric. With a sickening hiss, a puddle of smoking, foul-smelling gray sludge spread across the wood, immediately burning through Grimsby's pristine, cream-colored contracts.

  "My ledgers!" Grimsby shrieked, scrambling backward as the acid began to eat a localized crater into his expensive desk. "Guards! Guards, get in here and gut these—"

  A blur of mottled green cloak swept across the room.

  Before the fat foreman could even draw a breath to yell again, Mata was standing directly on top of the ruined desk. Her boots hissed against the pooling acid, but she didn't care. In a fraction of a second, she had drawn her bone-white recurve bow, nocked a black-fletched arrow, and pulled the string flush against her cheek.

  The razor-sharp iron broadhead was resting exactly half an inch from the bridge of Grimsby’s sweaty nose.

  The entire office froze. A dozen clerks stopped scratching with their quills. Two heavily armored guards burst through the side door, but stopped dead in their tracks when they saw the blind elf standing over their boss.

  "I am blind, human," Mata whispered, her voice like crushed ice. "But I can hear the frantic, pathetic fluttering of your heart. I can smell the fear sweating out of your pores. Tell your men to sheathe their steel, or my fingers will slip."

  Grimsby swallowed hard. His pale eyes were crossed, staring at the arrowhead hovering between them. A single drop of sweat rolled down his fat cheek.

  "Stand... stand down," Grimsby choked out to the guards, raising his hands slowly.

  Mata didn't lower the bow. "You asked for the Queen's head. We did not find her. But we brought you forty pairs of ears. They are currently melting through your livelihood." She tilted her head slightly, the blood-stained canvas over her eyes facing him. "Give the dwarf his silver. Now."

  Grimsby’s trembling hand reached into his iron strongbox. He pulled out a single, gleaming silver piece and tossed it onto the one un-melted corner of the desk.

  Tiny snatched it with lightning speed, biting it once to check the purity, before dropping it into his coin pouch. The dwarf’s grin was back, stretching from ear to ear. "Pleasure doing business with you, Foreman Grimsby! If you ever need another nest cleared, you know where to find us."

  Mata gracefully stepped off the ruined desk, keeping her bow drawn until she was standing next to Wanhan. "Walk," she murmured to him.

  Wanhan turned, fighting the urge to collapse. The blue screen flickered back to life in his vision.

  [Quest Complete: The Black Lung Mine]

  [Reward Collected: 1 Silver Piece]

  [Debt Updated: 10 Gold, 4 Silver]

  They walked out of the office, leaving the foreman staring at the smoking, acidic crater in his desk.

  "You haven't seen the last of me, you freaks!" Grimsby's muffled scream echoed through the heavy oak doors as they hit the street. "I'll have you blacklisted from every guild in the Iron Capital!"

  "Let him try," Wanhan muttered, finally letting his back hit the outside wall of the building. His knees buckled, and he slid down into the cold mud of the street. The world was spinning fast now.

  "Hey, kid. Kid!" Tiny's voice sounded like it was coming from underwater. "Don't you dare die on me. I just got my first payment!"

  Wanhan’s eyes rolled back, and the smog-choked sky of the Capital faded to black.

  Wanhan woke to the smell of roasted chicken and cheap ale.

  For a confusing second, he thought he was back in the Boar’s Trough, dozing in the alleyway after a long shift. But the mattress beneath him wasn't a pile of straw—it was stuffed with prickly horsehair, and the ceiling above him was made of rotting, water-damaged pine boards.

  "The coagulation rate of human blood is incredibly inefficient," a grating voice muttered nearby.

  Wanhan slowly turned his head. Tiny was sitting at a splintered wooden table, dismantling the firing mechanism of his scatter-crossbow. Pieces of oiled iron were spread out next to a platter of half-eaten chicken.

  "You were bleeding out right there in the mud," the dwarf complained, not looking up from his gears. "I had to carry your legs while the elf dragged your shoulders. We looked like grave robbers. Then I had to spend three copper pieces on a coagulant poultice from a back-alley apothecary just to keep my investment alive."

  Wanhan tested his body. The agonizing fire in his side had dulled to a deep, throbbing ache. He was bound in fresh, tight linen, and a foul-smelling gray paste had been applied over the torn stitches.

  "Where are we?" Wanhan rasped, his throat bone-dry.

  "The Rusty Anvil," Mata’s voice floated from the far corner of the room.

  The blind elf was not sitting on a chair. She was perched on the narrow windowsill, the heavy wooden shutters thrown wide open to the freezing, smog-choked night air. She had her knees pulled to her chest, her bone-white bow resting across her shins. She looked like a caged bird desperate for the sky.

  "I do not like stone boxes," Mata said softly, turning her covered eyes toward the open window. "The air inside is stagnant. It smells of dead things. Dead animals on the plate. Dead wood in the walls."

  Wanhan slowly pushed himself up into a sitting position, gritting his teeth as his side protested. He swung his legs over the edge of the cot. His heavy iron sword, Fenrir, was leaning against the wall right next to him.

  "Dead wood keeps you from freezing to death in a city," Wanhan pointed out, reaching for a cup of water on the floor.

  Mata’s pointed ears twitched. She turned her head toward him. "There is a difference between gathering deadfall to survive the winter, and bringing an iron axe to the Mother's roots for profit. The men who took my father’s life smelled of sap, iron, and greed. They were lumberers from the deep timber camps."

  Wanhan froze, the wooden cup stopping halfway to his lips.

  "You carry a strange scent, human," Mata continued, her voice dropping to a whisper that cut through the noise of the tavern below. "Beneath the blood and the tavern grease... I smell ancient pine. I smell sawdust baked into the leather of your boots."

  Tiny stopped tinkering with his crossbow. The dwarf looked between the tense elf and the pale, one-handed boy. He slowly rested his hand on the hilt of his throwing axe.

  Wanhan’s heart hammered a frantic rhythm against his ribs. His father had been a lumberer. His father’s boots were the very ones Wanhan was wearing now, handed down after the Silverback bear had ripped the man apart in the snow. If Mata realized he was the son of the men she was hunting, she would put a black-fletched arrow through his throat before Tiny could even blink.

  Wanhan took a slow sip of the water. He kept his voice perfectly, terrifyingly flat.

  "I lived in Oakhaven," Wanhan said. "It's a logging village on the edge of the Jagged Tooth pass. Everyone there chops wood. It’s how we survive the frost. If you're going to kill every peasant who swings an axe to stay warm, you'll run out of arrows."

  Mata stared at him—or at least, the blood-stained canvas covering her eyes remained fixed on his face for a long, suffocating moment.

  Finally, she turned back to the window. "I hunt the men who cut the Yggdrasil branch. Not firewood scavengers. See that you do not prove me wrong."

  The tension in the room slowly depressurized. Tiny let out a heavy breath and went back to oiling his springs.

  Wanhan set the cup down. His hand was shaking slightly. He blinked, and the familiar blue text of the system flickered into his vision.

  [Name: Wanhan]

  [Class: One-Hand Swordsman]

  [Status: Recovering (Debuffs slowly lifting)]

  [Skills:]

  Tree Cutter: Level 100 (MAX)

  Diner Dash: Level 24

  Forward Thrust: Level 22

  [Current Debt: 10 Gold, 4 Silver (30% APR)]

  He had survived his first day as a mercenary. He had leveled up his thrusting skill by spamming it in a life-or-death situation. But he had also nearly died twice, made an enemy of a powerful mining foreman, and was currently sharing a room with an elf who would kill him if she learned his family history.

  "Eat the chicken, kid," Tiny said, tossing a greasy drumstick onto Wanhan’s lap. "We only have seven coppers left after paying for the room and the poultice. Tomorrow, we need to find a training yard so you don't skewer your own liver again, and then we need a contract that actually pays gold."

  Wanhan picked up the meat with his left hand. He looked at his lopsided blade leaning against the wall.

  "Yeah," Wanhan muttered, taking a vicious bite. "Tomorrow, we train."