The four of them were escorted inside the building. The only room they saw was a small, sterile open room with a desk built into the corner and polished wooden floors. It reminded Josh of a principal's office. It even had that smell of a principal's office. Paper and ink in equal measure, as well as the general human scents of a lived-in building. A place that was cleaned regularly, but was used.

Behind the desk, as if she was a secretary doing paperwork, was an older woman. She was thin, attractive in a severe way, with a single streak of gray in her red hair. That red was dulling with age, but it was still a striking color. Her eyes flipped up when they walked in, but she didn't say anything until they sat down at the table.

She looked like, well, like a secretary. Or perhaps the matron of an orphanage. A woman who might not be at the top of the food chain, but was high enough up that she could make trouble when she wanted to. You would never think just from looking at her that she was the head of the biggest crime family in the City. She dealt in everything from selling the services of illegal classes to smuggling illicit materials through the different districts without paying taxes.

As far as Josh knew, she didn't do anything truly heinous. Her family had shut down the burgeoning slave trade in the City, though that was before her time. She was the unofficial queen of the City's underworld in large part due to the fact that the City's legitimate authority, and perhaps even the Eight themselves, considered her better than any of the other alternatives that could arise in her place.

“Well,” Miriam Manganese said as she shut her book. She even sounded like the matron of an orphanage. She had that clipped, slightly unkind voice of a woman used to getting her way, even if she had to argue with stupid children first. “To what do I owe the pleasure of my least favorite niece?”

Mary smirked. “I can't come to see my first favorite aunt?” Mary was Miriam's only niece, and Miriam was Mary's only aunt. It was a familiar joke.

Miriam didn't seem interested in the old banter. “I've got a world quest blaring in my head about you, an official government notice with your boy's threat assessment, and rumors of ten thousand crimes he's committed cycling through the pigs. So no, you can't just come to see me on a whim.” She drew a long breath on a cigarette. “Start from the beginning.”

So, they did.

The story didn't take that long, all things considered, though Josh still appreciated Miriam having snacks and tea brought in. No one in this bloody City knew how to make tea except Miriam's staff.

Once they were done—with Mary and Josh telling most of the story, and Ruth only jumping in briefly to explain her father as best as she could—Miriam was sitting at the table with them, drinking her own tea.

“That,” she said at last, “is quite the story.”

Josh's heart fell. He put the tea cup down. “You don't believe us.”

“I didn't say that. It's just...” She pursed her lips. “You've made up stories before.”

He scowled and leaped to his feet. “Wot? When? Tell me one bloody time!”

“What's your name?”

He froze.

Darius and Ruth both looked at him in surprise. Mary just closed her eyes.

Miriam sipped at her tea. “You are not actually a very good liar, Mister Hundredborn,” she said calmly. “You never have been. Now, I believe that Operative Moore is trying to eliminate you to improve his daughter's position.” He nodded at Ruth. “I have met Jonah before. It sounds like one of his plans. However, everything else is... less reliable.”

Josh took a deep breath. “It's all true.”

“Really. So you just happened to find a bloodstone in the middle of the Jungle, well within reach of any monster who might try to devour it, and it just happened to have an extremely valuable class and role?”

“But—we are Crafters!” Ruth interjected. “You can see that! How else did we get the role?”

“I don't know,” Miriam admitted. “Perhaps it is related to his other secrets.” She eyed him over her teacup. “An old family cache, I presume?”

While that wasn't true—Josh had, of course, found the bloodstone by honest chance—it was getting a little too close to a secret he did indeed want to hide. He crossed his arms over his chest. “You know what? I don't give a flip. You want to think I buried a bloodstone out in the middle of the Jungle or whatever? Fine. But the dragon. What about the bloody dragon?”

Darius nodded. “An excellent point. Unless you are claiming that all four of us are lying about such a threat, you must believe us.”

Miriam cocked her head. “Why? You could all be lying. I don't trust any of you.”

“Oi!” Mary snapped.

Miriam didn't even blink. “You least of all, love. I can think of a hundred ways you could benefit from making me think a dragon was coming.”

“Are you going to send someone to the dungeon?” Josh asked.

“I have few resources outside the City.”

That was a no. He scowled and turned away, pacing.

“What about reporting it?” Ruth asking, sounding a little desperate. “You can at least pass it along to the proper authorities, and they can send someone to the dungeon!”

“Perhaps,” Miriam said. That could mean she was genuinely considering it, or she had politely dismissed it out of hand. Josh didn't know her well enough to be sure which way she would fall.

“Fine,” he growled. “This was a waste of time. Thanks for the tea, we'll get out of your hair.” At that, the others took his signal and rose.

The exits were soon covered by guards.

Miriam hadn't moved.

“We'll bring you in alive,” she promised in a conversational tone. “That is a far better offer than you will receive from anyone else.”

“You don't want to do this,” Josh warned. “Just let us go, and we can let bygones be bygones, yeah?”

Miriam let out a long sigh. “Mister Hundredborn. Please do not try to intimidate me inside my own house.” She gave him an unimpressed look. “Especially when you are so obviously outmatched.”

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She was right, of course. There were two guards at each exit, so six total, plus Miriam herself. A quick scan told him that everyone was pushing the edge of level 24—except for Miriam herself, who was a level 26 Healer. Three reclaimers and a pampered rich girl couldn't overcome that level disparity. Especially when two of them had non-combat classes.

But Josh hadn't always had a non-combat class. He'd spent his entire life trying out every single combat class the human race knew about. He had fought on the front lines against monsters and worse. He had fought other humans before, and though he hated it more than anything, he had learned every trick and tactic for fighting when outnumbered.

First rule: There was no such thing as fighting dirty.

He threw his teacup at Miriam's face. She flinched, and the cup hit her head-on, shattering and splashing her with hot tea. She ground her teeth and glowed with a green light. Two of her guards immediately moved to cover her.

That was all right. He didn't think he could kill her even in the best of circumstances. He just wanted her distracted. While she was being covered by her guards, she wasn't paying attention to the rest of them.

Two guards charged at them, wielding knives. Guns were hard to get in the middle of the City, even for Miriam Manganese, and her first rule was always to avoid attracting attention. These were Rogues, high-leveled and ready for a fight. Rogues worked best from ambush, but they could hold their own in direct combat. They just had to be quick on their feet and not get hit.

Mary shot them both in the chest with the gun she had managed to smuggle past the guards outside. Really, they hadn't been given more than a cursory look-over. It was almost insulting.

Both men went down.. While Darius put up a shroud to discourage the ones guarding Miriam from doing anything, Josh and Ruth went for the last two.

They were low-level non-combat classes. But they had spent four days in the wilderness, expecting to be attacked by an assassin at any moment. They had prepared.

One of the men stabbed down with a knife, and Josh blocked with his wrist. The blade bounced off his wooden bracer, made using the Pierce-Resistant Armor blueprint that he had earned in the dungeon. Josh slashed with his sword, the Attack rune that Ruth had carved into the pommel glowing red. It wasn't much, but it was enough to pierce through the man's leather armor at the neck. He stumbled back, spluttering blood.

Ruth had conceded to wearing wooden armor like his own. Though she didn't have the same combat instincts he did, the armor covered her mistakes. It also helped that the guard was clearly trying not to kill her. He hesitated after every strike, as if worried that the System itself would kill him if he so much as touched her.

Ruth, however, did not hesitate.

Whatever else she was, Ruth wasn't shy about getting into fights. She hammered down with her new club, which was big enough to be mistaken for a small tree all on its own. She had carved her first rune-chain into it: A gravity reduction enchantment, allowing her to lift the heavy lump of wood. She had specifically not put a self-charging feature into it. She had to use mana to make the enchantment work.

That meant she could turn it off just by stopping the mana flow.

When she lifted the club up, it weighed a few kilograms. When she slammed it down, it weighed twenty times as much. It only took a few hard smacks before the guard was a crumpled heap on the ground.

Josh was surprised how well this fight was going, but he knew better than to get too greedy. Trying to go for Miriam would just get them killed. They had gotten lucky by responding with more fury than expected. That didn't mean they had won this fight, and even if they did, Miriam had dozens more men in shouting distance.

“Out the back!” he yelled to the others. There shouldn't be as many guards in that direction. “Quick as you can, let's go!”

The two guards protecting Miriam were pushing forward, forcing Darius to move his shroud to block them repeatedly. He grit his teeth as he put more mana into it. Josh knew that wouldn't last forever.

Miriam leaned down to lay hands and heal some of her men. She couldn't heal at range without a staff, so that was something.

“Darius!” Josh yelled as they all backpedaled. The Shrouder was still standing in the middle of the room, holding back the guards. “Let's go!”

“Run!” Darius yelled over his shoulder, clearly intending to hold the line for them. “Hurry!”

Josh ground his teeth. “Oh, no you don't!” He ran up and pulled him back by the shoulder. “C'mon, we're all getting out of—”

One of Miriam's guards got up faster than he expected and sliced with his knife. He went straight for Josh's face, recognizing that he couldn't get through the armor with his Strength score. Josh instinctively shielded his face with his hand.

It happened so fast that Josh missed it. One second, the knife was flashing in front of him. The next, there was a spray of red, a cool feeling, and a sort of shocked numbness.

Then he saw his severed fingers land on the ground, and he started screaming.

Josh had been in many battles. He had been shot, stabbed, burned, frozen, electrocuted, crushed, and everything else in between. He had even lost a limb before. His whole arm, hacked off just below the elbow. It had taken a very high-level Healer to reattach it. He should be able to shrug off a few more fingers as nothing but another injury to ignore.

Maybe he could, given time. But right now? Right now it hurt.

He screamed, so loud that he couldn't even hear what Miriam was saying. Probably asking them to surrender. He screamed so loud that he didn't even hear the gunshots as Mary returned to scare the guards off again. He only finally started to stop screaming, finally reduced to nothing but pathetic sobs, when Ruth and Darius dragged him out of the building and into the cultivated forest.

Cultivated it might be, but it was still a forest. There was enough underbrush to hide them, at least for a moment. His friends dragged him behind some tall bushes, breaking line of sight with Miriam's compound. Somehow, he managed to get his voice under control, so that he didn't give away their position.

Darius wrapped his hand with the practiced ease of an experienced Mender. “You're going to be fine,” he said in a soothing tone. Well, as close as Darius ever got to sounding soothing. Clipped and professional would be more accurate. “Blood loss is minimal, and you retain a good amount of manual dexterity.”

Retain a good amount of manual dexterity. Which was a rather polite way of saying that he had lost three fingers.

Mary poked her head out of the bush they were hiding in. “They're going to find us soon. Aunt Miriam has Beastmasters with dogs. They can track us.”

“B-but, where do we go?” Ruth asked, sounding lost. It was a sharp contrast to how competent she had been in the fight just minutes ago. She even had a few drops of blood on her face from where she had bashed a man's head in. “My father owns the guards, and if we managed to get on the bad side of the biggest crime family in the City...”

“We'll go to the government,” Darius said as he finished the bandages. “It will be a long shot, but if we continue making a nuisance of ourselves—”

Josh took a deep, ragged breath. “No.”

Everyone stopped and stared at him. “No?” Darius asked. He pushed his glasses up. “If you think you have a better idea—”

“I do,” Josh said firmly. He ground his teeth, pushing past the dull, throbbing pain in his hand. “We go south, the opposite direction of Paul's outpost. We go over the Burn Line and into the Jungle.”

“Wot?” Mary asked. “Did you get your brains knocked out or something? Why would you want to do that?”

“There's nothing out there,” Darius added. “Surely you don't intend to personally fight the dragon.”

Josh shook his head. “Th-there are towns out there.” He hissed in pain, then rallied and continued. “Reclaimers, even people just trying to live their lives. All we need to do is find one and build our power.”

“So...” Ruth said slowly. “We are fighting the dragon ourselves?”

Again, he shook his head. “Once we're strong enough, people will listen to us. We can get reinforcements, even hire them, have them check out the dungeon with us. Even if we're not strong enough to handle the dragon by then, we can prove that it exists.”

Darius nodded. “Yes... yes, I can see that. There is nothing respected in this world more than strength. If we get enough people involved, even Operative Moore might be forced to withdraw his world quest.”

Mary twirled her gun in her hand. “Alright, this isn't the worst plan I've ever heard. Got some kinks to work out, but I like it!” She looked back the way they had come. “Still gotta get out of here though, don't we? Planning for the future is all well and good, but we can't have a go if we don't get and go.”

Josh stood, winced, and pushed past the pain. “We'll—God that hurts—we'll need to cross the river. Every river we can, dive into dumpsters, all that muck. Anything to throw off our scent.”

Ruth checked his hand, frowning. “I'm sorry I can't do anything. If I had a healing rune...”

Josh waved his free hand. “We'll talk later, yeah?” He heard dogs barking in the distance. “Now's the time for putting foot to floor.”