Standing on the Moon Beast realm's lunar surface, Robert fired arrows at the shimmering white wolves. He figured out a new Space spell. A distant cousin of Distorted Space, this one created a region in front of him that changed the speed of objects passing through it. If something was going away from Robert, that object would be accelerated to twice it's velocity. And if it was something coming Robert's way, it would be slowed to half the velocity.

It made his arrows almost four times as deadly. Coupled with his Haste/Slow spell almost reaching the end of stage two, he could shoot the eyes of a pack of moon beasts before the howling, slavering monsters could reach him.

He engaged the Moon Fenrir but the monster held no surprise for him. Shoot, kite, teleport, shoot more. He tried not to use his main talent and instead used Blink to move around. The talent wasn't going anywhere while the spell needed training.

Robert stowed the Moon Fenrir's corpse in the liminal void where it wouldn't decay. Then he went onto his next farming spot.

They still raided the Bosstown Undead Revolution Dungeon on the cooldown. Everyone wanted to push toward their third star and the primal essence gains from that Dungeon were very good.

*

*

Fairy-Robert baptized this realm he found the "Billion Puma Jungle". It felt like a scene he read on an ancient novel about noobs. The jungle threw puma after puma at him. And they had every single affinity in the book. Shadow pumas, Fire pumas, Magma pumas, Water pumas, Metal pumas, and so on. All of them two-stars, with some three-stars in the mix.

The jungle was tridimensional and had no ground. Only more and more entangled tree limbs and branches and foliage to hide more pumas. The monsters seemed to never fall down the endless mass of trunks, always drifting and landing on another trunk or branch.

He had to go Last Starfighter with his Void Lance, firing eighteen-feet-wide beams to catch as many pumas as he could, going for crippling them instead of the straight kill. Trees fell left and right around him as the disintegration spared nothing in its path. Leaves and thin branches vanished while the others were stripped halfway as the beam lost potency.

He couldn't fly away because the Wind pumas, the Mist and Steam pumas, and the Gravity pumas all could give chase. At least down here, their landlubber cousins blocked each other's path. And the trees grew back to occupy the space he'd cleared with his overgrown void lances. Wounded pumas crowded the area around him, some of them slowly dying and others healing back because of the healers among them.

The attrition in this realm was intense. Robert thought about dragging some of these pumas to the void to earn more affinity orbs but he had to use his talent to dodge their attempts at an encirclement and to recharge his essence. If not for iRobert's accounting, he'd have lost count of how many pumas he killed. But he was in the high hundreds reaching a thousand.

His Mage Armor needed constant repairs. If not for the essence return on each kill, he'd have to abuse his talent to recharge. The pumas lived too short lives for any of his draining debuffs to make sense. It was a test of his sustained DPS. But he wondered how Amanda would fare in this place, having this much plant matter to manipulate. But she would need to contend with the Nature pumas for control over the trees.

The slaughter was worthwhile. Robert had already reached the point where he could ascend to the realm of three stars but he needed to take his time and gather more primal Ether. The pressure in his soul from overfull stars was steadily building up.

Robert used Purge Essence to clear his body of the essence poisoning and kept killing.

*

*

In her office at the second-to-top floor of the arcology, Titania Samson stared at her great-granddaughter. "You lost how many billions?" She asked, already knowing the answer.

Amanda kept her expression neutral and readied herself for the grilling.

"I didn't lose anything. Look, the board approved the sale of the bonds based on the assessment of the realm. We sold the bonds but now, with the rewards from the Minotaur Dungeon and other passages all appraised, we learned that the assessment was wildly off-mark. The bonds are trash now."

"And so are the shares, of which you hold the most. Honestly, your mismanagement is so egregious it might be criminal."

"All of it was voted by the board," Amanda protested.

The Samson matriarch kept sifting through the reports and meeting transcripts.

"How many bonds did you buy?" Titania asked.

The young woman suppressed a grin. "Zero. The board determined that it would be a conflict of interest if I bought any."

"Why the hell did the board approve these stupid executive bonuses?"

"I abstained on that vote," Amanda swore.

On the first board meeting after the delivery of all the twenty teleportation platforms (of which only the first two were installed), the board approved a juicy executive bonus for a job well done. They paid the CEO and every board member rather generously.

"Between the tanking bonds and the fluctuating stock price, the company has too many liabilities," Titania roared. "Don't even get me started with this teleportation platform scam you entered with that boy toy of yours!"

The Gurglock Ocean company was insolvent. It spent too much money building the mountaintop complex, draining all the startup capital. A round of funding with the bonds brought a lot of money because of the number of passages it had. The bonds sold like hotcakes but nobody noticed how far away the passages were.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

When they did, the investors demanded the teleportation platforms. Jack and Daniels spearheaded this and tried to put their patsy supplier up front. Then Amanda did her move and swapped that supplier for Robert, who made the platforms basically with no cost. His profit margins were in the high eighty percentile points, and that because he needed to give a chunk of his gross revenue to the Academy.

He also made enough academic credits to skip a year but that's another story.

Now, the company had a fancy hotel complex, a shielded passage leading to a shitty world (for normal Archs), and a secured creditor that was expected to receive billions for his products. With no source of revenue because nobody wanted to delve there. Especially not after Tyrone's report on his delve into the Minotaur Dungeon leaked (he didn't make it to the end).

Now, Amanda reported that the second Dungeon gave toy sets as rewards. The estimates about the other passages dropped faster than those balls Noah used to make enchantments in the Puffbloom Islands.

"But we might find a third Dungeon!" Amanda protested. "It might have something good."

Amanda handed a top secret folder to Titania. It had the reports Robert wrote into some of the passages he explored. Amanda was pretty sure he had explored them all but didn't include everything in the report. The surveying fees would be too much for the company. Amanda also had no idea whether Robert had only included the worst realms he explored. Not a single clue. Because Robert didn't say it. And she most definitely didn't ask. No. On the matter, her lips were sealed.

"No!" Titania said. "We are not installing the teleportation platforms inside that stormy planet. We are going to use them to connect our subsidiaries. The complex will remain with Samson and it will become a transportation hub."

"What about the Gurglock Ocean?" Amanda asked.

"We'll put it up for auction. I checked the building blueprints, we can isolate the passage from the rest of the complex and hand it over to the buyer with a fifty-year contract to share the building."

"Is the main branch buying the complex from us?" Amanda asked.

"At cost!" Titania bellowed.

"The board won't approve it. it will leave the company with nothing."

"To hell with the board! Why didn't you order Tyrone to brain those two sleazy idiots already?"

"Granny!" Amanda protested. She held onto that "no assassinations" policy very dearly. Camille, the animal shelter manager (she got promoted) was still alive, see?

"You have no choice, child. I'm taking my twenty-percent out of the hotel transfer costs."

"Still needs board approval."

"Very well!" Titania clapped her hands and Gerome opened a side door. A meeting table rose from the ground complete with chairs. Amanda was shocked to see that every member of the board but Titania's puppet was already waiting for the matriarch's summons.

Amanda couldn't believe. They came from the room that didn't have sound-proofing! Which meant they heard everything! Shocked, she missed most of the meeting. The company directors sat down and voted exactly as Titania wanted. It was the fastest meeting ever.

The parent company, Samson, "bought" back the hotel, slightly above cost. The Gurglock Ocean was put up for auction with the ATA, attached to a restrictive contract. Whoever bought that would have a door on the side of the building leading to the passage and the one teleportation platform that was installed, leading to the Minotaur Dungeon. They would also be subjected to a fifty-year mutual non-aggression contract.

The Gurglock Ocean company had to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy after the auction. It was shutting down. Amanda, as the acting CEO, got a Golden Parachute of 1.5 billion dollars to help guide the company through this dark times. The other board members got grief and as many dollars as the fucks Titania had for them.

The proceeds would then pay the company's liabilities. First, the secured liabilities, e.g., Robert's teleportation platform invoice. Then the general liabilities, the bonds. And, if anything was left after that, it would pay the stockholders, with Amanda in the priority spot. The money would end before the bonds were paid.

Jack and Daniels looked like two dried lemons left in the desert sun for a week. They were the biggest proponents of the bonds, and had their people buy them. They also lost all the capital they invested in the company to buy their minority share.

As for Amanda, the bulk of her shares were bought with the Gurglock world itself. Her out-of-pocket investment was basically nothing.

They deliberated, drafted the meeting minutes, and publicized the decisions through the ATA. Gerome guided the board members out of the room.

"Well, that sucked," Titania drawled loudly.

*

*

Once the door closed and Gerome returned, she grinned and pointed a finger at Amanda. "You sly dog! I can't believe that you, of all people, would steal billions of dollars of people's hard-earned money!"

"I did nothing! I didn't lie on the reports, I didn't press for the bonds! The audit on my performance came out spotless!"

Titania mellowed. "I'm so proud of you!" She cooed. "My little innocent greedy angel! I'm going to frame that audit report!"

Amanda made a faint squeal. After all the stress of the past hour, she needed some validation.

"Robert and I got this as a Dungeon reward. I want you to have it," Amanda said as she produced the four-letter-brand brick set of them defending the city.

Titania got the toy box. "A Dungeon that gives out toys? Pathetic."

Amanda jumped to her feet. "Sorry, granny. If you didn't like it, maybe we can get some Tzekenite from another Dungeon!"

She reached for the box but Titania pulled it away, the bricks rattling inside the cardboard box.

"Don't you dare!" Titania clutched the box tightly to her chest. "My Prechyowwssssss." She hissed and glared.

Amanda's laughter rang in the huge room like bells.

"So, when can I expect a great-great-grandchild?" Titania ripped the proverbial band-aid in one go.

"Granny!" Amanda blushed, slinking back into the sofa.

"Oh, don't give me that! I bet he took you to that liminal void of yours where you need physical contact all the time. You must've spent months fucking like rabbits on heat in there!"

Actually, it was for years. But Amanda would rather be smote dead than to admit that.

"You spent a century with him!" Amanda rebutted, then noticed her blunder and clamped her mouth with both hands.

"And he didn't lay a finger on me!" Titania bellowed, indignant. "If he wasn't a Life Arch, I'd believe he was an eunuch! Even Gerome would ravage me like one of his French girls if he was stuck with me for a century inside a Dungeon!"

Gerome was impassible, his face unreadable. Never before did a man sunk that deep in his nothing box.

Amanda was slowly wheezing as her locked muscles struggled to breathe in.

"AWW, come on! I'm not that unfuckable, am I?" Titania shouted her question.

Amanda fainted. Legend said that Gerome developed an unique Earth affinity on the spot and petrified himself.

*

*

A week later, back in her room, Amanda reviewed the result of this passage fiasco.

Some organization nobody cared about bought the passage and was now tasked with keeping intruders out. The Gurglock Ocean was no longer Samson property and whatever happened there was not their problem, so long nobody blew up the building. Dun, dun, duuuuun.

Amanda lost some of her social capital because people would not believe in a company led by her. She didn't care about either. She still got the executive and Golden Parachute bonuses.

Samson got a full-fledged hotel and transportation hub within spitting distance of the Imperial Academy for pennies on the dollar.

Robert didn't get all of his invoice money. The Academy protested on the junior enterprise's behalf but the bankruptcy executor said it was all the money left, to the last penny. The Academy waived most of its junior enterprise participation on the profits, giving Robert the lion's share.

The bondholders gained fancy pieces of printed paper to hang on their walls as mementos of the defunct company.

Jack and Daniels were found dead in their bedrooms, hanged. The arcology police investigated and determined it was suicide.

Amanda slept with a clear consciousness. She was unemployed, just another Academy student.

No more marriage meetings.

No more board of directors meetings.

Which meant she was free to go on adventures with Robert!!!