Clancy ran, wondering just how long it was that he’d been running. Behind him was a small army of carnivorous teddy bears, and blood thirsty plush-beasts.

Their faux fur mattered in ichor. Their beady eyes filled with malice.

He was currently on a job that involved finding the shut-off switch for an automated factory that made anomalous toys. Technically, the factory was only supposed to be partially automated.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned man-eating stuffed animals had done away with all the former personnel. Thus the necessity of the foundation’s intervention.

*****

At the moment, Clancy couldn’t help wondering just which “brilliant” mind had thought it wise to legalize the marketing of anomalous toys.

He was aware that his current perilous situation was likely coloring his reception of the idea of toys that came to life. However, seeing how things had gone wrong in this particular instance, he couldn’t help wondering if there weren’t thousands, if not tens of thousands, of similar smaller incidents happening in homes across the globe.

If such was the case, he found it hard to feel sympathy towards the victims of such events. He’d even go as far as to say that anyone stupid enough to buy an actual cursed toy for a child that they knew and cared about was more or less asking for whatever came of it.

After all, it wasn’t like people were living in the good old days when things like curses and enchantments were supposed to be imaginary.

A less than generous way of thinking about things yes, but again, most of that was probably being colored by Clancy’s current dark mood.

The last few days had been sort of rough at home, for some reason, putting Clancy in a funk that just couldn’t figure out how to shake.

And...He’d spent the last sixteen hours playing a game of high stakes hide-and-seek. Which honestly wasn’t that different from his usual routine.

Work as a freelance Prospero Foundation Field Agent was pretty much all a mixture of collection quests, escort quests, fetch quests, delivery quests, hide-and-seek, or tag.

An assortment of jobs whose similarity to those of your standard mmo adventurer's guild was strong enough that the foundation had long since used that point of familiarity for marketing employment opportunities to a younger demographic.

As such, the problems Clancy was facing was nothing new per se...it was just a matter of the job completion requirements being too fiddly. Fiddly and finicky to the point of making Clancy just about ready to swear off both this job and all other foundation work for the rest of his natural life.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

He wasn’t going to actually do that of course. Clancy was well aware that aside from his magic...and all the combat and survival experience he’d gotten instead getting any fond childhood memories... he really wasn’t qualified to do much of anything else.

And even if he was, if he had, had any other options for making ends meet, the mundane economy had been trashed by both the world wars and  numerous micro-wars.

Leading to a global economic depression that had lead to devaluation of most major currencies and an extreme scarcity for mundane work.

In this day and age, it was common knowledge that if you wanted to get anywhere in this world and make decent money, you wanted to at least be magic adjacent if you couldn’t be a caster yourself.

In any case he couldn’t quit, he and Anne’s expenses wouldn’t allow it. And even if he could, he’d already sunk so many years into this career that stubbornness would stop him from doing so willingly.

Which made his current situation all the worse.

The worst kind of jobs to get,  were those that seemed adamantly resistant to getting done, and those where the requesters were particular about how things went down. As if they were ordering a coffee instead of requesting the settlement of a high risk, high cost, life or death matter.

Right now, considering that the inside of the factory was already a war zone, blanketed in a low hanging chemical smog, the walls riddled with bullets from a failed police response, the floors awash in blood, viscera and various chemicals.

Clancy’s first thought was to cover the four corners of the building in wards of ruin and flame, and then demolish the whole factory.

A solution that would have settled the whole problem in less that five hours flat.

Granted this solution only came to Clancy during hour twelve of his skulk through the factory and even he knew that it was probably just a tad extreme, especially considering that the company likely still intended to make use of this factory. Still by this point in time, he yearned to go with that option.

Even if he accepted that this first option was off the table, he’ at least have liked to have been able to fight back against his would be murderers, but even that was barred from him.

The company that made the request to foundation didn’t want all its merchandise destroyed. Thus a good two-thirds of the request reward stipulated that Clancy do as little damage as possible. Sticking to hiding and running away till he could find and eliminate the main target, the culprit of the factory massacre and the one teddy that was responsible for the rest going rogue.

“Fuck this job sometimes...Right up the ass!…”

He ran, grumbling, keeping to shadows to keep himself out of sight. Casting spells of obscurity and sound muffling from fall under the attention of any errant evil glass eyes.

Eventually by hour twenty-six he found it, sitting by itself in an empty office. A teddy that had grown to real bear proportions and then some.

“Oh...so that’s where you were...You weren’t even on the fucking factory floor...Of course you weren’t…” grumbled Clancy.

It was always the last place you look, wasn’t it? Clancy had a good chuckle over it, before dropping the entirety of the floor above the beast down on top of its head.

He’d intended to just drop a ceiling tile on top the creature, using a gravity spell to make it land like an asteroid on top of the van-sized bear.

Unfortunately, all those hours of running and hiding without rest, and the blood loss from having take plush-beast’s attacks without destroying too many of them, had built up till he’d finally begun to get sloppy.

Seeing what he’d done, and with the rest of the plushies catching up and seeming surprising unfixed, by the so-called solution of killing the head troublemaker, Clancy finally lost his temper and started striking out wanton.

Throwing an hour long tantrum that wouldn’t end till half the factory was reduced to rubble and ash and torn up fluff.

Which lead to the factories defense systems, finally, activating themselves against his assault, since he was technically outsider. Versus the rampant the toys which though rampant and murderous were still considered part of the factory.

Clancy ended up facing a twenty-foot tall mechanical teddy bear, that wasn’t insane like all the rest, but was still a pain in the ass. Exhausted and just simply over this whole situation, he activated the mass-to-energy enchantments that Anne had put on the shiny extremely expensive shortsword that she’d made him. Jamming the weapon into the creature’s maw right before the spell went off, turning five pounds of enchanted steel into a blast of kinetic force and heat equalling that of a small nuclear device.

….Which, predictably enough, brought down the other half of the factory and ruined a fair portion of the lot that lay beyond.

Clancy knew he was giving up a fairly hefty part of the reward but by then he no longer cared. He’d make up the money like he always did.

Immediately going back to the Foundation’s Job Board and grabbing another, slightly more straightforward request, collecting monster parts or magical rocks or some such nonsense, till he felt that he could safely say that he’d done his part to make sure he and Anne’s account would stay in the black.