As Prince had promised, sneaking past the troll had been easy-peasy. Even with its enhanced sense of smell, the monster was completely oblivious to her presence. And unlike the water elemental, the troll had no preternatural environment awareness and control to let it know something was wrong.

Though she knew the truth and that her stealth-singing had its limits, at that moment, Sophia felt invulnerable.

She had completely bypassed that tutorial challenge. And she was well on her way to do a repeat performance, taking that chain chest back to her companions. And this time, that troll would not even realize she was there and try to smash her into the ground. It was liberating.

But when she finally reached the chain chest, out in the open, unprotected and opened, she knew something was wrong. It sobered her up immediately. It should be impossible. And yet, someone got there before them. How was it even possible?

And yet, in her denial, she was considering that it might be a tutorial trick and prepared herself to close the chest and reopen it when she spotted something inside the chest: a single piece of paper or rather, a letter.

And so she started reading the letter in plain English.

----------------------------------------

Hello,

I don't know you and you don't know me. But we both have something the other wants, so I won't beat around the bush.

I was dying from an incurable disease, a prisoner of my own body, when the system abducted me for this bullshit tutorial. It granted me a special archetype as a temporary fix. But it's just another kind of prison. What I wanted from this magical chest was a cure for my multiple sclerosis, so I would finally get to live and be myself.

But for some reason, the chest denied me: I got something one of your teammates needs and they supposedly can help me get that cure, or so the system said. I'm going to wait for you on the next floor for the exchange. You will know where to find me. Don't keep me waiting. I don't have forever.

No hard feelings.

R.

----------------------------------------

'R? A bit over-the-top secretive, aren't you' Sophia could not help but think.

Anyway, whoever that person was, they must be extremely badass and stealthy to make it this far on their own. Maybe their primary archetype granted by the system was truly that crazy good. She could not help but wonder what it was. What she knew for sure was that it needed to be a lot more versatile than anything she encountered to date.

Then, there was no point sticking there feeling sorry for herself. And so, she folded the letter to put it in her pocket and made her way back to her team. But something was wrong. Cause she could hear the troll roaring and smashing crates only moments after she started moving.

Sophia was supremely stealthy but her team wasn't. And turned out they probably did not put enough distance for the troll's incredible sense of smell. And so it must have started searching in earnest. But she had trust in her team not to foolishly engage, spread, and regroup to a safer location. And yet, she felt the need to confirm it through the system.

Guys? I can hear the troll rampaging from there. Please tell me you ran away and where to find you.

And Michel's response was nearly instantaneous as if prepared in advance.

Discretion is the better side of valor. I got everyone moving from the moment the troll started looking a little too much in our direction. You will find us at the cargo hold entrance. I figured that if the troll kept chasing and smashing things, we could use a few toxic containers between us as a deterrent.

And again, though Michel did not want to be her second, that was an extremely good thinking on his part. They never got terrain advantage before and surely, even with its impossibly high regeneration, a deadly poisoned troll would be slightly less of a threat than it otherwise would. And if they were lucky, maybe there would be some acid.

But it also meant that Sophia had to hurry up, so she would not be caught in the troll rampage.

★☆★

For all its strength, stamina, and regeneration, the troll wasn't fast, or at least, not nearly fast enough.

His distant roars followed them as they left the cargo hold behind and rushed as fast as they could for the flight deck.

But Sophia knew the troll would give chase. It was a restless, stubborn monster. And if it somewhat found its way into the cargo hold, it should find its way out. And so the team was pushing themselves to the limit, to ensure the troll would not catch up with them before they found how to infiltrate that criminal organization and reach this floor exit.

But it was easier said than done.

To infiltrate the criminal organization, they would need to fight more gangsters to steal their spaceship, capture and keep one of them for questioning, and learn from their prisoner how to operate and drive the ship to their criminal headquarters.

And given how their last fight had ended, they felt like between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Of course, with the benefit of surprise and knowledge of the enemies, they were slightly more confident fighting those gunfighters aliens than that almost invincible troll. But they needed time to secure a win without suffering the same injuries as last time, and time was a luxury they did not have.

And so they settled on a simpler plan: taking them by surprise, using shock and awe to take down as many of them as possible before they could retaliate. Everyone would contribute in their own way to make that plan a success. But it would be Michel and her launching the opening salvo.

Michel would use his invisibility and crossbow and then give the signal to the rest of the team with his magic. And Sophia would rain death with her imbued arrows and distracted the enemies while the team would go on the second round of their surprise attack, from behind.

That plan was nothing to be proud of. But so long it did the job, it would be good enough.

Finding a spaceship with a decently small-sized crew wasn't hard: four instead of three. But it hardly compared to the medium-sized ones of twenty or so members.

The hard part was for Michel and Sophia to rush into position and take cover for the surprise attack so the rest of the group could stab the aliens in the back, minimizing their potential loss.

And then, Sophia prepared herself and started speed shooting, aiming for the relatively unprotected aliens' faces and especially, their necks.

But the alien anatomy was different. And so, she knew beforehand that landing a critical hit on an arterial or vital organ was unlikely.

But her role was mainly to get the aliens' attention and only secondary, to inflict as much damage as she could with her lightning-imbued arrows.

And thanks to her speed shooting, Sophia made a perfect distraction: that boon was naturally flashy and each of her arrows was betraying her approximate position. So the lion's share of the retribution fire was concentrated on her instead of Michel. And also allowed the rest of the team to get closer unnoticed, using the spaceship hull as cover as they progressed.

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

In the end, through Michel and Sophia's joint effort, one of the gangsters was already down by the time Lono triggered the second phase of their surprise attack, stabbing one enemy in the back.

And then, surrounded and overwhelmed on two fronts, the two remaining enemies left standing were dealt with in short order.

Only the enemy that Lono had backstabbed and crippled had survived the encounter. But their backbone was so beyond repair that the lonely survivor probably wished they were dead, if anything, from the pain alone. They were screaming and they had every reason to do so: they just lost the lower half of their body. But that 'accident' also made them the perfect prisoner: it made them needy and unable to escape. So that prisoner's life now fully depended on them.

"We did it," Sophia said, disbelieving.

No one got hurt, except their prisoner, that's it. And even that outcome was truly favorable to them.

"Don't jinx us," Michel said, only half ironical. "We still need to get that poor mess to teach us how to fly that thing."

And of course, he was true. They had less than a couple of days to learn or that spaceship would become their coffin to the troll assaults. And so, Sophia had no choice but to go have a talk with their field surgeon.

"Hey, Moana! Do you think you can get them back in shape? We need them talkative so they can teach us how to operate that ship. The only thing they are going to do right now is try to pierce our eardrum with their screams."

"Sure," The healer replied sarcastically. "And with which painkillers do you suggest I do that? We have none. And even if we did, we know nothing of the alien biology. Unless you think them being drunk is better, I wouldn't know where to start."

That was unfortunate. They did not have nearly enough alcohol for that. And Sophia had no painkiller potion either. That time because of alchemists' bias and the lack of palliative care options. But it was one of the few things Apothecaries were doing better for cheaper than alchemists ever could. Unfortunately, they had no painkilling herbs or tinctures. And so they were at a dead end.

"You are right. Thanks." Sophia conceded.

She was thinking wildly about how to get them out of that conundrum. Surely there was another way to get the results they wanted, if without painkillers. There were so many potions for so many purposes.

And then that hit her: the berserker potion was purposefully reducing perception, especially the perception of pain of its consumers. And that potion was a seven-step potion using other potions as ingredients. Surely one of those potions was effective at dampening all perceptions, pain included.

They just needed to mind the dosage, so the alien would still be able to respond.

And so she started cramming through her alchemical recipes until she found it: The unnamed potion that served as an ingredient for the berserk potion and did the exact job she was looking for. Undiluted, even a drop of that nasty potion in any target bloodstream would turn them completely unresponsive for half an hour to any sensory stimulus, pain included.

It was actually so nasty that Sophia could not believe that potion did not get the full credit it deserved. If she soaked her arrows in it, she could render any target susceptible to poison unable to fight long enough to capture them alive. It did not affect their strength or mobility though. But how long could someone put up an effective fight while feeling nothing, including their own hands?

Still, the berserk potion was ridiculously pricey. And that 'numbing poison' was only slightly less ingredient-hungry. She could only brew so much of that particular potion before she ran out. But it would be an interesting option to consider while stocking up at the next resting area.

Anyway, she now had the angle she so desperately needed to keep everyone alive. And so she started working.

★☆★

Thankfully for Sophia, the berserk potion recipe provided her with an idea of the right dilution needed to get someone into fighting condition: about a third of the undiluted stuff. But she wanted her prisoner to be talkative, not feisty, and so she planned to reduce the dosage even further.

But it was good to have a baseline to improve on. She had too little of the numbing poison and too few ingredients to overindulge in experimentation and so she diluted a single drop of it into ninety-nine volumes of water to thoroughly test it and find the right dosage.

"Okay Prince," She called the tressym to explain to him her improvised protocol. "I'm going to feed the alien one drop of the diluted potion every ten seconds over the next five minutes. I need you to talk to them and report to me the moment they get responsive, so I can precisely calculate the right dosage they need. Got it?"

The tressym nodded and they got to work. And Sophia fed all thirty drops she had prepared to the alien. And then kept counting. Fed normally, the potion was slow and it could take up to twenty minutes for it to take effect. But then, its slowness started paying dividends as the duration kept around half an hour regardless of dosage.

So, the alien should start feeling talkative somewhere between twenty to twenty-five minutes, and the exact moment, down to the precise second would decide the exact dosage they would use from now on until they finally ran out of the stuff. And then, they would have a first chat with the alien, its pain dampened to the maximum of what Sophia would allow:

It would only be a 10% margin from the infamous berserk potion, which was already known to let its consumers ignore most pain in the heat of the battle, but also make them oblivious to their surroundings with an extremely severe case of tunnel vision.

Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes and thirty seconds. Twenty-one minutes. Sophia was really happy they had come up with a primitive hourglass to count time as they survived the white hell of the seventh ring. It wasn't as precise as she wished it was. But thirty seconds was good enough. And she had enough of a sense of rhythm to divide it by three in her head and keep counting.

The alien stopped screaming in their half awake half asleep state at twenty-one minutes and forty seconds. And so Sophia wrote it down and kept observing. At twenty-two minutes and fifteen seconds, they started stirring, finally feeling good enough to regain control of their upper body.

And finally, before Prince could even report, at twenty-two minutes and thirty-five seconds, they started talking.

But the tressym only reported it fifteen seconds later when the alien talk became intelligible.

So the right dosage was somewhere between 15.5 and 17.0%. It was way under the 30% she had currently given the prisoner or the 33.3% of the berserk potion. For simplicity's sake, she would make it 1 drop of undiluted potion for 5 drops of water, hence half of the berserk potion ratio or 16.6%. And it was also close enough and well within the error margin for the 16.2% middle ground between her two observation values.

So the answer had been half of the berserk dosage all along. Who would have thought it could be so simple?

Unless she unknowingly reverse-engineered the berserk potion without knowing. Find the right dosage to get someone thinking normally through the pain and double it? It sounded like the sort of thing an idiot general would ask an army alchemist to get their soldiers to fight way past their limits.

But she pushed the wild thought away as it was finally time to talk to the prisoner.

"Prince! Can you please translate?" She asked out but did not wait for the winged cat to answer. "Hello. How are you feeling?"

The tressym translated without a fuss. And then the alien responded.

"They said it still hurt like hell. They also thanked you for whatever you did and asked why." Prince summarized while perfectly conveying the alien mistrust and disbelief.

"No beating around the bush:" Sophia said, "We are from a faraway place and got stranded on this station. We figured out that our only way out of this station was through your gang. So we want in. But our previous encounters with your friends have gone sour so we chose to hit first and talk later this time around. We are sorry for that."

This time the alien nodded and the tressym silently confirmed that their answer needed no translation.

"We also have encountered an angry troll working for you. And they want us dead."

Again, the alien nodded and said nothing.

"So here is the deal. The potion I made to help with the pain: only six liters would be enough to last you twenty years. But I don't have nearly enough ingredients to brew that much. Conversely, we desperately need to leave that station and talk to your boss. But we don't know how to use any of your technology and only Prince, my familiar, can talk your language."

This time, the alien talked and Sophia needed no translation to know it had been an insult. And yet, she patiently waited on Prince, reigning her temper.

"They called us soulless monsters." Prince translated before explaining further. "But soulless has a deeper meaning to his language and I think he called us that because we are lacking the psionic powers common to their species."

"Is that why we cannot use your guns?" Sophia asked. "Because the trigger uses psionic?"

Prince translated and once again the alien nodded.

"May I assume that, unlike these station architects, all your technology uses psionic?" She asked again.

The alien talked for longer this time and so did Prince afterwards.

"He said:

'Yes. We drove those soulless monsters to extinction ages ago and in time, so we would do the same to your kind. Only cockroaches like the troll you mentioned are good enough to keep around. If you are no better than that soulless beast, the cartel has no use for the likes of you. You have no soul to use our technology and no way to fulfill your side of the bargain. So, why should I sully my honor helping soulless monsters like you?'"

So that was how it was. That alien was a specist drunk on the superiority of their psionic exclusive honor-based culture. And they valued those things more than their lives. And yet, their previous prisoner had been a lot more talkative and amenable, even assuming they were already working for a different faction of their cartel. So, maybe that cartel was multicultural and they got the wrong pick this time around.

And so Sophia lost her temper and snapped:

"We beat you worthless piece of shit twice with weapons so primitive that you should cry in shame at your incompetence. And you are only breathing because we need that one psionic trick you build your entire civilization around and that we can't replicate."

She took a breath while Prince was busy translating before murderously staring down the crippled alien and concluded:

"So make your freaking choice and make it fast. The potion effect is gonna run out in twenty minutes. And there is going to be no mercy kill for you."

And then, she stormed out of the spaceship to vent her anger on something less fragile.